The gazillion Trumps

HuffPost ran an intriguing article the other day entitled "Trump’s Neo-Nazi And Jewish Backers Are Both Convinced He’s Secretly On Their Side." Specifically:

Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg, the founder of the Facebook group Rabbis for Trump, argues that Trump’s daughter’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism is proof enough that he harbors no ill-will toward Jews. “You’ve got two Trumps — The Trump that’s trying to get the vote, and the Trump in real life,” said Rosenberg, who renamed his group “Rabbi for Trump” after failing to attract support from other Jewish clergy members.

[Neo-Nazi Andrew] Anglin agrees that there are two Trumps, and he isn’t worried that Trump has Jewish supporters and family members. Trump, he said, is too savvy to openly announce his views on Jews, and only allowed his daughter to convert to Judaism to trick Jews into supporting him. “He couldn’t simply say it straight,” Anglin wrote. “That just wouldn’t fly in America.”

The notion that "there are two Trumps" is one I have seen expressed by a number of supporters. Here, for example, is former rival Ben Carson explaining his endorsement of Trump:

"There are two different Donald Trumps," Carson said at the billionaire's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. "There's the one you see on the stage and there's the one who is very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully. You can have a very good conversation with him. That's the Donald Trump that you're going to start seeing more and more of."

In a similar vein, Rush Limbaugh describes Trump's heresies as proof of his brilliance:

Will we finally now admit how brilliant Trump is? Can we all finally admit that he’s been setting these people up for years? He’s been out there praising the Clintons. He’s been fooling them. He’s been making the Clintons think he loves them, he supports them, he’s in their camp, he’s got them tamed, they’re not even thinking about Trump, even looking about Trump, and Trump is just icing them.

I could go on with further examples, but you get the idea. In my last post on Trump, written in December, I wrote that I didn't think he was going to win the nomination, but I also imagined that if he did I'd be half-expecting him to suddenly announce it was all one big joke. What I failed to grasp was the extent to which his supporters have embraced his aura of profound unseriousness, to the point that it's become their main rationalization for dismissing any areas of disagreement they have with him. If you like his border wall idea but don't like his past support for the Clintons, you say he wasn't serious about the latter but is serious about the former. If you have doubts about the border wall but like other things about him, you call it a "virtual wall," as Rep. Chris Collins did a couple of weeks ago.

Politicians have always found ways to attract disparate groups, like FDR being able to garner support from both blacks and segregationists. But I don't know that it's ever been accomplished by having the different groups assuming he's telling boldfaced lies for the things they're against and the unvarnished truth for the things they're for. I'm not sure if that makes his supporters incredibly cynical or incredibly naive--or some bizarre combination of the two.

The troll primary

For some reason I've been having the following fantasy lately:

Donald J. Trump sweeps the Republican primaries, easily collecting enough delegates to nab the nomination. The mainstream GOP press starts to panic. After a few stray comments by a couple of pundits and operatives hinting at the idea that the convention should ignore the results and pick a more conventional candidate, the right goes berserk. Erick Erickson accuses the RINO establishment of attempting a coup d'etat, and Michelle Bachmann says they're working in cahoots with ACORN and the IRS. After a few days of this, most mainstream Republicans start to make peace with the idea of a Trump nomination. They note that it's really not so bad: they won't have to worry about turning out "the base," and they're relieved to see that some polls show Trump trailing Hillary by only 10 percentage points, well within striking distance. The convention is set up in Cleveland. A slot of speakers is introduced including Rubio, Kasich, Jindal, and a host of other figures who had once bashed and ridiculed Trump, but who now tout Trump's business acumen and talk about how he's going to bring back greatness and to save America from the horrors of the Obama years and "the Clinton machine." Several days pass until finally Trump is introduced to speak. He walks triumphantly across the aisle, chin set, bird's nest on head, and he steps up to the podium. After a lengthy pause, he opens his mouth and speaks, in front of America and in front of the entire world:

"Fooled ya! This whole candidacy has been a joke, and you fell for it! I just did this to prove once and for all how dumb Republican voters are, and to destroy their chances of winning. Which I just have, ha ha ha! Of course Mexicans aren't rapists and Muslims didn't cheer on 9/11, but by giving me your support you just proved beyond any doubt you're all a bunch of racist, backwards lunatics who are so moronically predictable you'll believe someone who's totally faking it! What a sad, pathetic bunch of assholes you all are, and don't blame me: you brought this on yourself. And oh, one more thing: God bless America."

He steps to the side of the podium and makes an up-yours sign straight at the camera. He then turns around and walks back down the aisle, leaving everyone in stunned silence.

**********

Is this really as far-fetched as it sounds? Well, for the record, I don't think Trump is going to win the nomination--I don't even think he wants it--and in the unlikely event that he does win it, I doubt he'd have the balls to pull off something like the above scenario. But I do seriously believe there's a decent chance this hypothetical speech represents what he truly thinks about the GOP.

After all, his public persona as an unreconstructed wingnut basically goes back to 2011, the first time he flirted with a run for the Republican nomination--there's no record of him ever holding such views prior to that year. Some of this has already gotten a lot of press, such as his defense of single-payer health care or his donations to Democrats. Other past statements of his have been surprisingly overlooked, as when he praised President Obama to high heaven in 2009. Now, I'm well aware there are people who soured on Obama in the course of his first term. Still, it's really hard to reconcile these statements with the birther stuff he got into in 2011. Not only did Trump never sound this right-wing, he simply has no history of embracing lunatic conspiracy theories of any sort, and it's not as if the stuff he complains about now weren't part of Obama's agenda from the start.

I'm not saying his candidacy is necessarily some Borat-like social experiment to expose the GOP base's stupidity and bigotry. But I do strongly believe it's an act of some kind. I agree with those (like Nate Silver) who have described Trump as basically an Internet troll. (That's actually one of the reasons I think it's quite likely he will go third party in the end; it will enable him to milk this thing for as long as he can without having to worry about actually winning.)

Truth be told, I've had similar feelings about other figures on the right--Ann Coulter especially, though it's a style that goes back at least to Rush Limbaugh. I'm not saying any of those people are closet liberals, but they do very often give the impression that they’re engaged in some bizarre type of trolling. When Coulter says that women should be denied the right to vote, does she really mean it? Or is she simply reveling in the reaction this statement provokes among liberals and the media? Whatever the reason, I've never been able to bring myself to be actually outraged by anything Coulter says, because I get the sneaky feeling I'd be reacting exactly the way she wants me to. I'm reminded of something Roger Ebert once wrote about a Monty Python film: "This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we're being One-Upped if we allow ourselves to be offended." So whenever I hear someone react to a Coulter remark by exclaiming "That's terrible!" I'm almost tempted to roll my eyes and say, "Whatever." Coulter has another thing in common with Trump: she has never publicly apologized for anything, ever. Their consistent response to criticism is to double down on their controversial remarks.

This places him in a different category from demagogues of the past he's often been compared with, such as Charles Coughlin or George Wallace. If you've ever read any of Coughlin's monologues (I have), he sounds almost intellectual. And while Wallace was somewhat of an opportunist ("I will never be outniggered again"), I wouldn't describe him as trollish. True believers or not, these men were either extremists or pandering to extremists for political gain. People who think that's all what Trump is about are missing something, in my view.

The point isn't to make excuses for Trump, whose rhetoric is deeply dangerous regardless of his motives for engaging in it. The real lesson of his candidacy is what it says about a large segment of the Republican Party. It's like an experiment I read about years ago in which scientists designed a robotic honeybee that real honeybees ended up accepting as one of their own. The fact that it was fake didn't take away from the fact that it did a good enough impression of the real thing.

More on Trump's "authenticity"

Frank Rich is a good columnist who over the weekend engaged in a bit of silly contrarianism entitled "Donald Trump is saving our democracy." And no, he wasn't being sarcastic.

...for all the efforts to dismiss Trump as an entertainer, in truth it’s his opponents who are more likely to be playacting, reciting their politically correct and cautious lines by rote. The political market for improvisational candor is as large as it was after Vietnam and Watergate, and right now Trump pretty much has a monopoly on it.

Steve M. of Crooks and Liars wrote in response:

Candor? You can use a lot of words to characterize Trump's rhetoric in this campaign, but the one thing he's not giving us is candor -- certainly not about himself, and certainly not about the vast majority of the issues.... We know he's lying when he says he has a "foolproof plan" to beat ISIS. We know he's lying when he says he'll get Mexico to pay for a border fence. We know he's lying about his own net worth. We know he lied in the last debate about his efforts to establish casinos in Florida.

In my last post I marveled at how quick so many people are to attribute honesty to Trump, but it's especially striking coming from a liberal like Rich. It shows how deeply ingrained this way of thinking is in our culture--this habit of equating sincerity with a willingness to outrage. Commentators like Rich overlook the fact that some celebrities seem to have a pathological need to put themselves in the headlines, and that they achieve that goal by deliberately stoking outrage. It's a tactic that usually works very well, because outrage is to the media what a flame is to moths.

Why do so many people mistake this tactic for honesty? I think it comes from a sense most people have that if they were placed in front of a TV camera and were to speak aloud every thought that passed through their mind, they'd start offending people before long. I'm reminded of a bit from a Steven Wright routine:

"Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" Yes, you're ugly. See that woman in the jury? I'd really like to sleep with her.

One thing most people figure out sometime after their 6th birthday is that an essential part of functioning in the world is avoiding saying what you really think about other people. You learn not to tell someone you find them annoying and would like them to leave; you learn not to tell someone your assessment of their sexual attractiveness or how that colors your perception of them; you learn not to say you feel immediate anxiety at the sight of a young black man walking down the street; you learn not to say transgender people make you uncomfortable.

Since many people avoid saying these sorts of things out of fear of shame, embarrassment, and ostracization, they automatically assume that the only possible explanation for why someone might break these taboos is honesty and courage. They fail to understand the topsy-turvy world celebrities live in, where it can be remarkably easy to lose one's sense of shame when doing so can be the source of a lucrative career. And it's especially seductive to think of such celebrities as bold truth-tellers if the things they're saying happen to agree with your own private beliefs.

For the record, I do think there are aspects of our culture that have gone too far in trying to suppress feelings of prejudice on such matters as race, religion, and gender. We've made bigotry into such a supreme evil that many ordinary, well-meaning people feel they have to pretend no such feelings exist inside of them when it would probably be healthier if they got it out into the open. You can call this problem "political correctness" if you like. But confronting these feelings is only a good thing if your ultimate purpose is to grow past them. Most attacks on PC, including Trump's, are based on the idea that these feelings should be expressed because they reflect sound judgment and an accurate perception of the world--and, further, that we know that's true simply because they've been suppressed. Their taboo status is their justification.

The attack on "political correctness" began in the 1980s as a critique--and a largely legitimate one, in my view--of the stifling atmosphere on many college campuses in America. But it has since devolved into a rallying cry in defense of ignorant and reactionary beliefs. When someone says "I'm not politically correct," what they usually mean is that they're refusing to rethink their beliefs in the face of other people's negative reactions to them. It's a way of celebrating a primal and simplistic outlook and treating any challenges to it as censorship.

What PC originally referred to has hardly any relevance to a figure like Trump. His views aren't being shut down, and he isn't going to starve for having expressed them. And however entertaining his candidacy may be, I can't bring myself to call his taboo-breaking courageous, not when he's getting exactly the kinds of results he craves: he's the center of attention, he's riding high in the polls, he's generating all the headlines. It should be patently obvious that he's saying what he says because he knows what buttons to push. Bashing immigrants in a Republican primary doesn't take courage; defending immigrants would. Now that would be a true example of "political incorrectness"--except nobody uses the term that way. Instead, we use it only to describe the outrageous and offensive, and to wallow in the delusion that it automatically shows authenticity and courage.

Political correctness and sincerity

One thing I found interesting about the recent showdown between Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly is how he brought "political correctness" into the discussion:

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been challenged by so many people, and I don't frankly have time for total political correctness.

What I noticed was that he didn't actually bother to defend the behavior which Kelly complained about, namely his disparaging remarks about women. He wasn't so much making a bad argument as making no argument at all. He simply observed that his behavior is "not politically correct" and claimed that political correctness is a big problem in this country--as if to suggest that his behavior's taboo status was itself proof of its worthiness.

You could use this reasoning to defend any position at all. Hey, I think a man should beat his wife with a frying pan every night! You offended? Sorry, I'm not PC. I think black people are feeble-minded, Jews are cheap, and only the rich should be allowed to vote. Don't like what I'm saying? That's just because you're too PC.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this type of thing as simply another Donald Trump absurdity. On the contrary, it lies at the heart of most arguments attacking political correctness, and it's been a feature of these arguments for the last thirty years. Whenever you say something that offends someone, you say you're "not being PC" as if pointing that out automatically absolves you of responsibility for your remarks.

I mentioned the following anecdote a couple of years ago on this blog, but it bears repeating. I was once reading a blog discussion on a subject that had nothing to do with politics. One commenter referred to the author of some book as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the criticism but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC."

One of the assumptions underlying attacks on PC is that you're being more authentic, more truthful, than the other person. As a result, the anti-PC trend in our society has fostered an idea that civility and common courtesy are nothing more than strategies for hiding what people are really thinking.

This idea is reflected in the repeated claims I keep hearing--and not just from Trump admirers--that Trump is "speaking his mind" or engaging in "straight talk." This is a patent misunderstanding of Trump's whole public profile. It's obvious to anyone who bothers to pay attention that Trump's antics are pure theater. I literally have no idea what he really thinks about Mexicans or PMS or Obama's birthplace. It doesn't matter. He understands something which shock jocks began capitalizing on more than a generation ago, which is that outrage sells.

That's part of the whole allure of attacks on PC: they equate sincerity with a willingness to offend. The assumption is based on a fundamental fallacy. It's certainly true that professional politicians typically behave in a canned and artificial manner by avoiding saying anything that will offend their constituents. But it doesn't follow that going to the opposite extreme, acting rude and boorish in an erratic and unpredictable way, automatically implies authenticity.

Nobody argues that when Andy Kaufman did his Tony Clifton act, he was showing a truer version of himself. Yet that's just the sort of assumption people make whenever celebrities or politicians stray outside the boundaries of what is generally considered decent behavior. Trump may be a walking caricature, but like a lot of caricatures he throws some things about the real world into sharp relief.

The joys of being persecuted

In a piece on separating myth from reality in the history of anti-Irish bigotry, Megan McArdle writes:

As I read about these notices, I wondered: Why was I so glad to read that my ancestors had, in fact, faced nasty discrimination? It's a reaction that needs scrutiny.

This is something I was thinking about recently in light of all those stories on Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who posed as black and became an NAACP leader. It reminded me of the case of "Binjamin Wilkomirski," a man who published a memoir in the 1990s detailing his experiences as an Auschwitz survivor before it was discovered that the events he described never took place, he wasn't even Jewish, and he had a totally different name.

What fascinates me as a Jew and the grandson of Holocaust survivors is why people would want to engage in this kind of deception. Cases like these are as bizarre as they are uncommon, and surely mental illness is involved. But I also think they stem in part from the same tendency McArdle is alluding to, of taking pride in being the member of a historically persecuted group. Modern society has romanticized persecution to the point that everyone wants part of it, as when a billionaire last year claimed the wealthy in America today were being treated like the Jews during Kristallnacht. The statement was both silly and offensive, and it's hard to imagine anyone who actually lived in the 1930s making such a comment. Back then, being the victim of anti-Semitism or racism wasn't regarded as cool.

It brings to mind a Mark Twain quip: "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read." Nobody wants to be in a concentration camp or be lynched by the Klan or beaten by cops or harassed or discriminated against--but a lot of people, whether they admit it or not, wouldn't mind having those things on their résumé.

The challenge of old movies

Want to know how certifiable a movie fanatic I am? I actually keep an Excel spreadsheet noting every movie I see and the date on which I first see it. About a year ago, realizing I'd been keeping this list for literally half my life (since 1994, just before my 17th birthday), I attempted to identify the movies I'd seen during the first half. I got some help from Wikipedia, which has articles listing the films released every year (most of the major ones, at any rate). One thing I've determined is that I've seen well over a thousand films in my life--but perhaps three-fourths of them have been ones made within my lifetime, starting in the late 1970s.

This was a bit of a surprise to me, since I remember watching lots of old movies as a kid. But when I think about it, there are indeed an astonishing number of classics I still have not seen. And when I do get around to seeing them, the experience isn't always as satisfying as it's supposed to be. Part of the problem is a feeling of being intimidated by a movie's reputation. It's tricky trying to sit back and enjoy a Great Movie when I'm conscious of how I'm supposed to be feeling the weight of its Greatness at every moment. This is a big reason why I still have never watched Citizen Kane, and why I had the DVD to Lawrence of Arabia for a long time before I gathered up the courage to stick it in the drive.

The genre I find easiest to appreciate regardless of period is comedy. I was raised on classic comedy--the Marx Bros., Laurel & Hardy, Chaplin (who remains one of my favorite filmmakers to this day), Danny Kaye, the Three Stooges. I believe comedy is essentially timeless as long as it avoids topical humor, as these old movies generally did. Good 21st-century comedies like 40-Year-Old Virgin or Borat may be more profane than their predecessors, but the underlying principles of humor haven't changed. I can't say the same for dramas, westerns, romances, or horror films.

There are four basic challenges to becoming engaged in older movies. One I am not dealing with here is advancement in special effects and other technical matters. Everyone agrees movies have improved over time on that score. Instead, I wish to focus on those areas that pose significant and non-superficial barriers between modern viewers and even the best films of the past:

1. Changes in decency standards

While I find many of today's movies overly coarse, those made at the height of the Hays Commission had the opposite problem. They couldn't talk about sex in anything approaching a candid manner and were forced to employ ridiculous euphemisms, which can be hard for a modern viewer to adjust to. When I watched His Girl Friday, I had already seen the 1974 version of The Front Page with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, based on the same play. Being a big Matthau/Lemmon fan, I loved the '74 version, and while I enjoyed the older movie as well, I was conscious of its limited ability to depict certain plot points. This actually led to a couple of good lines, as when Hildy reports that a character got shot in the "classified ads." At other times I felt the movie suffered from the constraints, as when it presented Mollie Malloy as an old maid rather than (as in the original play) a prostitute. And I'm sorry, but I just can't have as much affection for a film that omits the play's hilarious closing line, "The son of a bitch stole my watch!"

Some old movies have an innocence that looks laughable today. I saw the Oscar-winning 1938 film Boys Town when Newt Gingrich hosted a showing of it on TNT in 1994. Gingrich felt people should watch this movie to learn how to help today's troubled youth. The movie tells the story of Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy) and his heroic efforts running an orphanage. His motto is that there's "no such thing as a bad boy." And indeed, most of the boys we see in the orphanage behave like perfect angels, except for one played by Mickey Rooney as a juvenile delinquent so terrible he actually smokes, plays cards, and acts sassy toward the grownups. (As a neighbor of mine at the time put it, "Sounds like the typical yeshiva bochur.") Despite these immeasurable crimes, Father Flanagan somehow manages to get through to him in the end and make him into a good kid, a message of great relevance for today's crack babies.

2. Changes in moral sensibilities

This category covers a lot of ground, but it's most notable with attitudes about race. Movies from the '30s and '40s are often shockingly racist, and when they are, I'm thrown right out of the picture. Duck Soup is one of my favorite comedies, but when Groucho utters the line--"My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that's why the darkies were born"--the movie for me just stops dead. (Few people today are aware that Groucho was actually referencing a hit song from the time titled "That's Why the Darkies Were Born" that was supposedly satirizing racism, but it still sounds pretty offensive to modern ears.) And that's just dialogue. The stereotyping of nonwhite characters in films from this period is so awful it leads to the sadly ironic fact that films from this period tend to be more watchable when they feature all-white casts.

3. Lack of freshness

It may not be fair, but movie ideas that were once highly original can come to seem banal if they get imitated enough. Hitchcock went to great lengths to keep the surprise ending to Psycho from getting leaked, but by today's standards it seems almost trite. (As Nicolas Cage declares in Adaptation, "The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personalities.") I recently saw Casablanca for the first time, but it feels like I've seen it my whole life. It was like deja vu as I watched, memories from my childhood of stuff I had seen that referenced the film coming to the surface of my mind: an episode of Moonlighting, a scene from one of the Naked Gun films, parts of When Harry Met Sally, you name it. There's also something surpassing strange about hearing lines like "Here's looking at you, kid," "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," uttered in earnest. While I did enjoy the movie, it was certainly not the same experience moviegoers in the '40s had. It was like viewing some grand antique.

4. Differences in filmmaking style

This section will be much longer than the previous ones because it deals with a characteristic of movies from the '30s and '40s that has always been obvious to me but which, for reasons that escape me, I have rarely seen discussed: they look and sound a great deal like plays. Watching a movie from today doesn't usually feel like seeing a group of actors up on a stage; it's more like looking into a window at a real-life scene. I don't just mean that the sets look more convincing, but even more that when the actors talk, they tend to sound a lot more like real people having a conversation. To show what I'm talking about, let's examine two clips, one from the 1939 version of Of Mice and Men, the other from the same scene in the '92 version:

Did you notice what I noticed? Not only is the first movie clearly being filmed on a stage, whereas the second is filmed in actual woods (or at least provides the illusion of it), the differences in acting style are striking. In the older movie, the actors deliver their lines loudly and in an almost sing-song manner; in the later film the actors speak practically under their breath, with minimal intonation. The acting in the first clip is more stylized, in the second more naturalistic. In short, the actors in the original film seem to be acting, whereas in the remake they're behaving. The second clip therefore has a more lifelike feel (despite the fact that it's the only one of the two to feature background music, a point to which I'll return shortly).

I am not cherry-picking here; this is something that has consistently stood out for me whenever I've watched movies from the '30s and '40s and compared them with later films. It is most noticeable in dramas, but it exists to varying degrees in all genres. And of course there are exceptions. Jimmy Stewart was always more naturalistic than Nicolas Cage has ever been, but in any of their films they are surrounded by actors whose style contrasts with theirs.

None of this should be surprising. When talkies were invented, movie actors naturally adopted the conventions of what had previously been the only dramatic art form involving speech. They imitated the way stage actors spoke because that was all they knew. Over time, as the technology improved and as film came more into its own as a respectable medium, the styles of stage and screen diverged and naturalism gradually became the norm on screen; I believe the transition was complete in American cinema by the early 1970s.

What do I think of the change? It depends. The two Of Mice and Men adaptations are similar overall, but as an admirer of Steinbeck's novel I always preferred the '92 version. I had an easier time connecting emotionally with characters who sounded like real people when they spoke. This standard of judging movies is surprisingly rare, from what I've seen; people just don't want to admit that the naturalism of modern film has advantages.

It also has disadvantages. Among other things, I believe it contributed to the disappearance of musicals in the 1970s. The musical is, after all, very much a genre of the stage, and to have today's movie characters burst into song can seem odd and inappropriate in a way that it never did in previous eras. Music is still important in today's movies, but most of it is in the background: the scores (one of the few non-naturalistic aspects of movies to have increased over time) and the video interludes (a form that gradually replaced musical numbers in the '60s and '70s, and which in my opinion is one of the most annoying features of modern cinema). If a modern movie character sings, usually there's a rationale within the story, such as if the character is a professional singer.

All of this has led to a looser definition of the word "musical," which nowadays often means simply "movie with lots of songs in it," even when there are no numbers. The Golden Globes, for example, have applied the term to films like Walk the Line which are only "musicals" by virtue of concert scenes, video interludes, and the like. When modern movies do feature traditional numbers, the effect is often curiously artificial.

A lot of people like to ignore this fact and pretend nothing's changed. There's not much acknowledgment that musicals didn't just happen to fall out of fashion (the way, say, westerns did), but that the whole underlying approach to filmmaking changed in a way that made the conventions of musicals seem out of place. In the olden days, making a film as a musical was such a normal and natural choice it could even be fairly peripheral to the film itself. For example, most of the Marx Bros. and Danny Kaye films, remembered primarily as comedies, happened also to be musicals. Today's movies don't have that freedom.

The resurgence of movie musicals following the success of Chicago happened in part, I think, because the 2002 film found a unique way to reconcile the conflicting conventions. In this film, a woman played by Renee Zelwegger dreams of one day becoming a vaudeville star, and most of the song-and-dance numbers are presented as fantasy sequences where she imagines herself and other people performing on stage. As a result, the distinction in this movie between a musical number and a music video is blurred to the point of irrelevance. One IMDB commenter suggested that the film was "ashamed to be a musical," but I'm not sure it would have been as successful if it had simply ignored the problem.

Alas, many of the movie musicals since then have done just that. When I first saw Dreamgirls, I noticed it wasn't until about thirty minutes into the film that a character starts singing on the street (as opposed to on a stage or in a studio). Up to that point, the movie had seemed like a low-key, serious drama, and I have to admit I found the sudden break in realism that late in the story rather jarring. I thought to myself, "Wait a second...this is a musical?!" I've had that sort of experience with at least a couple of today's musicals, but I've never had it with the musicals of old. They don't have anything to apologize for.

Conclusion

My point here isn't that modern movies are intrinsically "better" than older ones, or vice versa. I just think there needs to be more recognition of the effect that the evolving conventions have on different generations of moviegoers. For sure, younger people who consider older movies boring or incomprehensible are missing out on something. But people who celebrate the old stuff as some kind of gold standard that nothing today could match up to, and imply that anyone who disagrees is simply lacking in culture or taste, aren't exactly helping matters either. Speaking personally, as I continue to enrich my knowledge of films of the past, I've had the best experiences when I've understood the movies in the context of their time and was prepared to adjust as needed. Holding them in godlike esteem doesn't do the trick for me.

Ivory tower crusaders

According to Ron Paul, "Libertarians are incapable of being racist, because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups."

That remark reminds me of Pat Buchanan's response to charges of anti-Semitism: "I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish, the Apostles were Jewish, the first martyrs were Jewish.... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite."

Not only do these statements both demonstrate the No True Scotsman fallacy, they raise some intriguing points about how the concept of prejudice is commonly misunderstood.

Let's start with the claim that a true Christian cannot be an anti-Semite. Somehow I doubt that assertion would much impress the Jewish victims of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the numerous expulsions and pogroms and massacres committed in the name of Christ throughout the centuries. Presumably, Buchanan would respond that none of those attackers were "true" Christians. (I'm being charitable here, because I know there's a distinct possibility that he would defend the Crusades, as some on the right have.) It's a seductive argument because you can't possibly disprove it. Anytime a Christian assaults a Jew, you can either deny that person is a "true Christian" or deny that what that person did was anti-Semitic. It's one of those airtight defenses lawyers love.

It also shows a poor understanding of the historical roots of anti-Semitism. The simple fact is that most of the themes of modern-day anti-Semitism first emerged in a medieval Christian context. This happened not in spite of the fact that Christianity began as a rival Jewish sect, but in many ways because of it. Medieval Christians saw the continued existence of Judaism as an insult to their own faith which was supposed to have supplanted it. In theory this was a religious rather than racial prejudice, with the goal of converting Jews rather than killing them. And when it took on a racial character, as in 15th-century Spain, pointing out the Jewishness of the early Christians would probably not have swayed the persecutors.

Buchanan seems to be implicitly defining anti-Semitism as "the doctrine of hating all Jews who ever walked the face of the earth"--which is not how medieval Christians, even the Spanish, ever framed the issue--and then suggesting that this doctrine is logically incompatible with the theological claims of Christianity. And so it is--but only very mildly. The fact that his religion is founded upon worship of a long-deceased Jewish man does not automatically imply acceptance of the vast majority of Jews. History makes this all too clear. Centuries of persecution and bigotry can't be swept aside by one tiny, possible logical inconsistency.

That brings us to Ron Paul and his argument that libertarians can't be racist because racism is a form of collectivism, the opposite of libertarianism. If that's the case, then it's a funny coincidence how closely many of his policy views match those of the people he calls collectivist. As Stormfront founder Don Black said after endorsing his 2008 presidential bid, "We know that he's not a white nationalist...but on the issues, there's only one choice." What issues? Black mentions the Iraq War and immigration, but maybe there's just a few other things Paul has said that might appeal to white nationalists--say, his long-standing opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He insists he takes this position not because he harbors any animosity toward blacks (or "the blacks," as he phrases it in the earlier clip) but merely because he values freedom.

When you invade and violate the Constitution, you attack the personal liberties of the citizens of California and Maine, as well as the liberties of the people of South Carolina and Virginia. You cannot create new rights for one group by taking them away from another.

I am deeply concerned over the efforts of opposing groups to smear our effort with the false trappings of race hatred. We are interested solely in protecting the rights of states to manage their own internal affairs, which is a fundamental guarantee of the Constitution.

Actually, those aren't the words of Ron Paul. They're the words of Strom Thurmond during his 1948 segregationist campaign. (The first paragraph is from The Washington Post, Oct. 12, 1948, the second from The Baltimore Sun, Jul. 20, 1948--both obtained from my library's archive.) But if you read what Paul has actually said on the subject, you'll find that the above quote wouldn't sound at all out of place.

Of course Thurmond also once said, "there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." Admittedly it's hard to imagine a remark like that escaping Paul's lips (though not so hard to imagine it appearing in a newsletter under his name). And Paul does talk favorably, as Thurmond would not have, about creating a "color-blind society."

But Paul's argument about collectivism is doubly flawed, first because it conflates a philosophy of government with a philosophy of human differences (a person can, with perfect consistency, believe that blacks and whites should be treated equally under the law while also believing whites will naturally come out on top), second because it's exactly the sort of rationalization that white supremacists have used for centuries to justify keeping racist institutions alive. They also talked about states' rights; they also depicted civil-rights legislation as an assault on freedom; they also claimed their preferred policies would benefit blacks; and they also repudiated certain manifestations of bigotry. (Thurmond, for example, opposed the poll tax and distanced himself from the racist, anti-Semitic preacher Gerald L. K. Smith.) Even if Paul's motives are entirely honorable, rooted only in his fealty to federalist principles and not to prejudice, it doesn't change the fact that racism has a long history of coming cloaked in such principles.

Paul and Buchanan both think they can refute charges of bigotry simply by identifying themselves with a favored belief system and defining that belief system in logical opposition to the charges. Their use of this defense reveals a cartoonish understanding of bigotry, and the philosophical basis on which they reject that bigotry is hopelessly feeble. They are men living in ivory towers, too attached to the elegant simplicity of their logic to appreciate its real-world implications.

Anti-smurfite

Last month HuffPost ran an article about a newly published book by a French author which argues that the original Smurf cartoons were works of racist, anti-Semitic, and socialist propaganda. A few weeks later, an article in The Forward elaborated on this theory without mentioning either the HuffPost article or the French book. According to this theory, Gargamel looks like an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew, down to his hooked nose, and this suspicion is heightened by the fact that the goal of his nefarious plans is money. As the Forward article puts it, "All that Gargamel lacks is a yarmulke."

This theory isn't new. Back in 2007, JewOrNotJew.com did a half-joking piece on the matter, concluding that "someone out there is really bigoted--the creator of the cartoon or the creator of the theory. Probably a little of both really." I myself never noticed any of this as a kid, apart from wondering why Gargamel's cat, Azrael, had a Hebrew name.

I believe it is within the realm of possibility that the Smurfs' creator Peyo could have been an anti-Semite. But I'm hesitant to endorse this theory, not because it will spoil my childhood, but because it's all speculative. I know nothing about Peyo's life, and he isn't around to defend himself against these charges. (A son of his, however, has dismissed the accusations as "between the grotesque and the not serious.") None of the articles I've seen have provided any new information, just interpretations of what I already know.

Actually, let me qualify that a little. The HuffPost article did mention one fact that I admit was pretty damning with regard to another prejudice. Apparently the very first Smurf cartoon was called "The Black Smurf" and was about a disease that turns smurfs black, where they become dimwitted and say "nyap nyap." US publishers refused to print this cartoon, and later they made the infected smurfs purple. (I remember reading a strip concerning a green smurf that bites other smurfs to turn them green--but my memory could be failing me as to the exact color. I just assumed it was the smurf equivalent of vampires or zombies.) That does sound racist, and quite similar to things on our side of the pond from Disney and Warner Bros. (many of which, such as the black centaurs in Fantasia, have been censored).

As for Gargamel's alleged Jewishness, I have much the same reaction as JewOrNotJew.com: it makes me uncomfortable, but there's no conclusive evidence to prove this theory correct. Gargamel is never identified as a Jew. He doesn't have a Jewish-sounding name or speak any Yiddish. The evidence, such as it is, apparently escaped the notice of American producers of the Saturday morning cartoons (which I watched as a kid through a VCR, an invention of great use to observant Jews in the '80s). It's also possible that the element of anti-Semitic stereotyping was subconscious, rather than part of an agenda, on Peyo's part.

I'm reminded of when The Phantom Menace came out and some critics suggested that some of the alien creatures were thinly disguised racial and ethnic stereotypes. What provoked the most ire were the inaptly (or ineptly) named Gungans, especially Jar Jar, a flop-eared, blubbering creature whom Newsweek's David Ansen described as "a kind of intergalactic Stepin Fetchit." Getting only slightly less attention were the "Asian" Neimodians and the slaveowner Watto, a winged creature with a hooked beak, a strange accent, and more than a dollop of greed. Slate's Bruce Gottleib reacted indignantly to Richard Corliss's suggestion that Watto's accent was "Turkish":

Turkish? Even without the visual clue of the hooked nose, Watto's accent is clearly Yiddish, not Turkish. Or click "No"; listen again; and you tell me: Is Corliss crazy or am I?

Personally I don't think either writer is crazy, but I didn't pick up what Gottlieb was hearing in Watto's voice, even after downloading that sound clip. I'm no expert on Turkish accents, but Watto's accent did not strike me as Yiddish. And I should know, given that my maternal grandfather had one.

Part of the problem is that Lucas made a choice in the prequels to have some of his aliens speak English in made-up accents, rather than totally made-up languages like in the original trilogy. This wasn't a bad idea in the abstract. In an intergalactic society, I imagine there would be diverse accents and not just diverse languages. But I think that whenever people hear an accent they can't immediately identify, their instinct is to compare it to accents they know. JewOrNotJew.com dismisses the theory about Watto before you can say "smurfin' awesome":

If a character is designated as Jewish and is portrayed as loving money, having a big nose, being henpecked by women, whatever, that's a negative Jewish stereotype and the creator should be called to task.

But if a character has a big nose and loves money and the anti-defamation league or whoever says that makes him/her Jewish, well, that's not the creator of the character spreading negative stereotypes. That's the Jews themselves.

But then why did this same site suggest that Gargamel is "probably" the creation of a bigot? He has a big nose and loves money and is no more identified as a Jew than Watto is. Is it because Gargamel is a human on Earth while Watto is an alien in a galaxy far, far away? Or is it because whoever runs this site has a harder time ascribing anti-Semitic motives to George Lucas than to a mid-20th-century Belgian whose life story isn't well-known?

That's part of the way I look at it, I admit. I highly doubt Lucas is consciously racist or anti-Semitic. I think it's possible the echo of ethnic stereotypes could find its way into Star Wars, a potpourri of myths, legends, and old movies. There are elements of it in the original trilogy, though mostly too vague to seem offensive: Yoda seems modeled on an Asian master, the ewoks are rather like a stereotypical African or Amazonian tribe, and the Tusken Raiders bear a clear imprint of desert nomads on earth such as Bedouins. I'm sure Lucas would be the first to admit all this. But he has consistently gotten defensive at any suggestion of racial insensitivity on his part. He did so when the 1977 film came out and some critics complained about the all-white cast (except for James Earl Jones as the voice of Vader). He did so when critics of The Phantom Menace complained about Jar Jar and co.

While I'm not ready to let Lucas totally off the hook about Jar Jar, I never noticed the stuff about Watto until others pointed it out. And I ought to have enough Jewdar to pick it up, if it was there. I don't hope to convince anyone who did see it, however. There's a heavy amount of subjectivity in these interpretations, and yet you can't totally dismiss the idea of veiled racism in a children's fantasy, because it's a fact that there's a long tradition of it. All I can do is try to distinguish those who have ill intent from those who stumble into these images by accident.

A compendium of politically incorrect views

People talk about political correctness so often you'd think there'd be a simple, consistent definition of the concept. All we know for certain is that it's bad for something to be PC, and that individuals who violate PC standards are being unjustly persecuted. Or at least that's what everyone who invokes this phrase seems to think. But what does the phrase mean?

That's what I've set out to determine. I'm not looking in any dictionaries or on Wikipedia. Instead, I've collected a sampling of quotes from various sources that use this expression, and from them I've attempted to discern its larger meaning.

Let's start with Regnery's Politically Incorrect Guide series. Among the many PI truths you will learn from these books is that the Civil War was not about slavery, that the robber barons benefited the U.S. more than any government program ever did, that the medieval Islamic world didn't contribute greatly to science, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and that hunters are "America's real environmentalists."

Having been written by different people, the guides do not always jibe with one another. In a rare moment of factual correctness, Clint Johnson's Politically Incorrect Guide to the South lists rock 'n' roll as one of the great products of that region. But Jonathan Leaf's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties (whose author seems to have drifted into the PC debate a few decades too late) describes rock music as an artistic void with little talent.

In the view of some conservatives, PC is the cause of all our problems. According to Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams, "Political correctness is going to kill us. Political correctness led to 9/11, political correctness led to Barack Hussein Obama. Political correctness is a societal HIV." No one is immune to infection, not even, apparently, his own supporters. He wrote, in reply to one of several commenters at his site who criticized his controversial Lincoln letter, "you are crippled--mentally and emotionally--by political correctness."

Still, I suspect even Williams would be surprised at how the phrase has been used outside the United States. "It would be sad," wrote British journalist Peter Millar on the doomed libel suit of Holocaust "revisionist" David Irving, "if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable."

So now Holocaust denial is merely "not PC." It therefore shouldn't surprise us that other unsavory views have found their way into this category. Consider a notorious moment from Robert Novak's 1995 interview with Sen. Jesse Helms:

CALLER: Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I just think that you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you've done to help keep down the niggers.

NOVAK: Oh, dear.

HELMS: Whoops. [looks at camera] Well, thank you, I think.

[both laugh nervously]

NOVAK: That was the bad word. That was politically incorrect. Can you--we really don't condone that kind of language, do we?

HELMS: No, no, no.

NOVAK: Absolutely.

HELMS: No. My father didn't condone it. When I was a little boy, one of the worst spankings I ever got is when I used that word, and I don't think I've used it ever since.

NOVAK: And you had--

HELMS: Mark Twain used it.

NOVAK: And you had--you had--you had African Americans on your staff a long time ago, didn't you? As I remember.

HELMS: Oh yes. I hired several.

Notice that neither Novak nor Helms addressed the caller's stated views. Only his language seemed to put them on edge, his use of a "politically incorrect" word. Somehow I get the sense that young Helms would not have been spanked for wishing to "keep down the blacks."

But it isn't just conservatives who talk about PC. In his unflattering review of the live-action version of Mr. Magoo, Roger Ebert wrote:

There is one laugh in the movie. It comes after the action is over, in the form of a foolish, politically correct disclaimer stating that the film "is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight."

Though I haven't seen the movie, I agree that trying to avoid offending the nearsighted in a Mr. Magoo film is indeed an example of PC run amok. But I wasn't sure I followed Ebert's reasoning in another instance of his use of the phrase:

The beat goes on with Ron Howard's The Missing, a clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

This is interesting. In an age of revisionist Westerns like Dances with Wolves that paint a sympathetic portrait of Indians, Ebert thinks one in which they boil white men alive and sell white girls into slavery is PC because they don't behave quite as savagely as we might expect. Got it.

Then there is the 1991 New York Times review of the Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases, a handbook which the reviewer attributes to "the disease of political correctness." While some of the book's advice is arguably a little excessive--it instructs journalists to say homemaker instead of housewife, to avoid the noun Jew in favor of Jewish person, and never to describe a black person as "articulate"--it also includes things we take for granted now, such as the term Asian to replace Oriental. I even once saw a documentary in which a young skinhead was bashing a race he called Asians. When you have neo-Nazis nonchalantly saying Asian, I think it's safe to say it has advanced from PC terminology to common speech.

That's actually the case with a lot of the terms that were once derided as PC. Few people today blink at Native American, Latino, diversity, homophobia, substance abuse, and vegan--all of which appear as entries in 1992's tongue-in-cheek Official Politically Correct Dictionary alongside such items as sobriety-deprived for "drunk" and terminally inconvenienced for "dead."

The most striking use of the phrase "PC" I can remember came in a blog discussion I was reading some years ago. A commenter referred to a particular author as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the commenter's criticism but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC." The discussion had nothing to do with politics. To the commenter, "PC" simply meant being polite to avoid offending someone.

Based on all these examples, I am forced to draw the following conclusions about the phrase "PC":

1. It is absolutely meaningless.

The amount of things the "PC" label has been mockingly applied to is truly diverse. It can mean the often amusing excesses of the academic left, in particular the weird coinages. Or it can mean perfectly mainstream ideas such as the notion that the Civil War had something to do with slavery or that the Holocaust did in fact occur. It can mean trying to avoid offending the nearsighted, or it can mean neglecting to call someone you disagree with an idiot. Since there's no set standard for when sensitivity goes too far, the phrase is a free-for-all that usually says more about the person using it than it does about whatever the person is talking about.

2. It fosters the idea that sensitivity is a sin.

In practice, the phrase has become an excuse for boorish, inconsiderate behavior. People invoke it as a lazy way of trying to imply that no one has a right to be offended, without having to justify their position. It fosters the idea that words don't matter, that they can't harm anyone, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a joyless schoolmarm out to control everyone's speech.

3. It blurs the line between taboo language and taboo opinions.

Being un-PC sometimes refers to a questionable choice of words, even when no one objects to the point of view being expressed. At other times it refers to just the reverse--a controversial viewpoint expressed without any objectionable language. As a consequence of this ambiguity, the phrase distracts attention from the content of people's speech and makes all offending statements sound like mere violations of decorum. You can see that clearly in Helms and Novak's inadequate response to the racist caller.

4. Anyone who uses the phrase is, by definition, a hypocrite.

When people label a statement PC, they are effectively trying to shut down debate and eject the statement from the conversation by making it sound unworthy of serious discussion. Thus, the term does exactly what it is allegedly fighting against. This becomes particularly noticeable when those who claim to be battling PC propaganda are in fact promoting right-wing propaganda, but it is inherent in the phrase itself.

5. It is sometimes hard to resist using.

I've used it myself on occasion, and I no doubt will use it again. Let's face it, we live in a culture where lots of people take umbrage at things they shouldn't. The pushback against racism, sexism, and all the other isms has had a stifling effect on our discourse, down to the jokes we tell. But I realize that's a biased statement, and I can offer no precise standard for when it is or isn't justified to be offended. I just know it when I see it, whether or not that's okay with any of you cerebrally challenged hunks of processed animal carcasses.

Scheming, grasping liberals

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

It isn't news when Rush Limbaugh says something offensive, but it is intriguing when he shows an ironic lack of self-reflection.

He wondered, in the wake of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, if Jews were having second thoughts about their support for Obama. "To some people, 'banker' is a code word for Jewish," Limbaugh said, "and guess who Obama is assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there."

In other words, Limbaugh thinks Jews are automatically inclined to perceive an ethnic insult in criticisms of an institution or profession that anti-Semites identify as "Jewish."

Curious, then, that he doesn't apply the same logic to conservative assaults on Hollywood, which often sound quite similar to attacks by neo-Nazis and their ilk. To test the parallels, I collected a series of quotes from Limbaugh and from Stormfront, the Internet's leading white-supremacist website. Any occurrences of the word "Jew" in the latter, I either removed or replaced with the word "liberal." I then shuffled up the five quotes. Try to see if you can determine which are the Limbaugh ones and which the Stormfront ones. I myself would have been unable to do so.

1. "White people, too, are debasing their own culture with some of the rotgut that shows up on TV, some of the rotgut that shows up in Hollywood movies and so forth. Who's running all this? It's liberals! Liberals run Hollywood."

2. "McCarthyism is actually correctly accusing someone of communism, identifying a communist, right? That's what it was. People that hated McCarthy were the commies that were identified."

3. "Ted Turner marries Hanoi Jane Fonda, tries to go Hollywood, push Hollywood-type liberal politics and it just doesn't work."

4. "You recall, and there have been countless movies about this and books, all the liberals in Hollywood spent decades trying to convince the American public and countless congressional hearings, committees, that they weren't in bed with the communists.... now they're embracing communists as a badge of honor."

5. "Imus made the comment about a group, not an individual, just like NRA members are called gun nuts, paranoid whack jobs and other highly insulting terms by the liberal-controlled media."

(Here are the answers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

You get the point. If you have ever perused Stormfront (a lovely experience, I can tell you), you will find that a great deal of what is said there sounds remarkably, eerily similar to things said by Limbaugh, by other conservative talk-radio commentators, and by their millions of listeners. Both crowds attack liberals, socialists, and communists, usually treating the three categories as interchangeable. Both think Hollywood and the media are "run" by left-wing subversives. Both assail welfare, affirmative action, feminism, multiculturalism, gun control, global warming science, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Both consider themselves at war with "elites." Both embrace conspiracy theories, and both see President Obama as an anti-white radical.

Of course, there are also substantial differences between the dittoheads and the Goebbelheads. Limbaugh is strongly pro-Israel and supports the Iraq War, neither exactly a popular stance among white nationalists (who hate Bush almost as much as they hate Obama). He has never explicitly embraced biological racism; he rationalizes his attacks on blacks and other minorities by saying he is only against the way liberal institutions coddle them. I don't believe he is an anti-Semite, and I disagree with the ADL that his remarks about Obama and the banks were "borderline anti-Semitic." His argument was that Jews might perceive attacks on bankers as veiled bigotry because anti-Semites talk that way, not that the banking industry is actually "Jew-controlled."

I just find it fascinating that he would make such an inference, apparently blind to the fact that his very own career is built on a style of demagoguery closely resembling that of some intensely anti-Semitic groups. He spends day upon day vilifying and demonizing many of the same institutions and organizations as the white-power folks do--Hollywood, the media, the government, the ACLU, the Ivy Leaguers--only he doesn't go around describing his targets as Jewish or Zionist, even though many of them do in fact include a disproportionate number of Jews. But as soon as someone utters a word of complaint about the ways of Wall Street, in swoops Mr. Limbaugh to protect us Yids against the slander. It's nice to know someone cares.

Why ethnic labels matter

One time as I was waiting in the hall for a class, I began a conversation with a woman sitting nearby, and when she asked me what I was taking, I said, "Hebrew." She then inquired, without a hint of irony, "Why do you need to take Hebrew if you are a Hebrew?"

I was struck dumb. It wasn't just her ignorance of the fact that most American Jews are less than fluent in the Hebrew language, it was her referring to me as a "Hebrew." I hadn't encountered that nomenclature before, and if I'd ever expected to, it would have been from a small-town dweller in Alabama or some such place, not from a fellow student at U. of Maryland!

Was I offended? Not really. While I'm suspicious about the sorts of ideas that might accompany her terminological illiteracy, this use of the word "Hebrew" was once considered perfectly respectable--like, oh, back in the nineteenth century. As British historian Paul Johnson notes:

From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, 'Hebrew' was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to 'Jew' as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

A quick search on Google News, which has a mammoth historical archive of newspaper articles, turns up numerous instances of this usage between 1875 and 1915. For example, one 1913 article from The New York Times reports, "More than 500 Hebrews crowded Clinton Hall last night and took part in an enthusiastic meeting...in honor of Nahum Sokelew, the Zionist, and editor of the best-known Jewish newspaper in Russia." To this day there are statutes on the book that refer to things like "Orthodox Hebrew religious requirements." But in the common language this sort of phraseology sounds ignorant, if not anti-Semitic, to most people. That it once was standard usage has been all but forgotten.

If you keep up with current events, you may already have suspected where this post was leading. Two apparently coincidental news items recently have sparked a debate in the media and blogosphere about the use of outdated racial/ethnic terminology. In one, the census forms for 2010 included "Negro" as an option for racial identification, because some older blacks still prefer the term. In another, a 2008 quote by Sen. Harry Reid was uncovered in which he had stated that the country was ready for a black president, especially one who was "light-skinned" and spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

If Reid had said "black" instead of "Negro," would his statement still be objectionable? Depends who you ask. (I personally think no.) But most commentators agree that there's something exceedingly strange about hearing the word "Negro" used in earnest, and not in a historical context, by the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Unlike "Hebrew," which few if any individuals alive today remember as an accepted term for a Jewish person, "Negro" fell out of fashion only about 40 years ago. Martin Luther King used the word several times in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and Bobby Kennedy used it when he suggested--with considerable foresight, as it turns out--that the U.S. would elect a black president in the next 40 years. People of Reid's generation (b. 1939) had to expunge the word from their vocabulary when they were well into adulthood. Can younger people like me (b. 1977) understand what that's like? Why, yes we can. That's exactly what happened with the word "Oriental" when I was growing up.

Anyone should be able to understand why terms like these persist in the margins of society for decades after having been purged from mainstream discourse. Apart from the fact that old speech habits die hard, the changes usually seem a little arbitrary on the surface. Why is "Hebrew" more demeaning than "Jew"? Why is the Spanish word for "black" worse than the English word? Partly it may be their closeness to a slur ("Hebe," "nigger," etc.), but the real reason is probably that it is just a way of marking a shift in public attitude. Therefore, any person who continues using a linguistic casualty of this type gives the impression of not having fully absorbed the social developments that left it behind.

Arguing with fear

Sometimes movies that don't work are more interesting than those that do. One example that comes to mind is Just Cause (1995), which seemed to draw upon public feelings generated by the contemporaneous O.J. trial, as well as by the earlier Rodney King controversy. The movie is a mess, with a ludicrous ending that leaves the impression that the film supports, or at least condones, police brutality. And yet, the movie got me thinking about this issue in a way that has stayed with me far longer than many better films.

(Warning: What follows will contain plot spoilers.)

In the opening scenes, police detain a black man (Blair Underwood) in an interrogation room. There, they beat him until he confesses to the rape and murder of a little girl in the Everglades. The arresting officer is white, but the sheriff (Laurence Fishburne) is black.

In the next scene, several years have passed, and a Harvard law professor (Sean Connery) is railing against the death penalty at a public debate. He is called in to defend Underwood, who faces execution. His conversations with the charming, intelligent prisoner lead him to talk to another death row convict (Ed Harris, trying a little too hard to channel Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs) who, after some wrangling, takes responsibility for the murder and correctly reveals the location of the murder weapon, which Connery finds in the swamp. A new trial is granted, and Underwood is freed.

Connery discovers, too late, that Underwood really did commit the murder. He persuaded the already condemned Harris to make a false confession. In return, he offered to kill Harris's parents--which Harris wanted--once he was released.

It is at this point that the movie takes its leaping nosedive down the rabbit hole. What Underwood does next is what any newly acquitted killer would do: go after the family of the man who got him acquitted. We learn that Connery's wife was the prosecutor in an earlier trial when Underwood got castrated in jail, and he has plotted his revenge ever since. (Uh, huh.) He kidnaps Connery's young daughter and takes her to the Everglades. Connery and Fishburne confront him, where he is finally devoured by an alligator.

Oh, how I wish I were making this up. Oh, how I wish.

The movie seems to suggest that the police were right to beat a confession out of Underwood, since otherwise a horrible killer would have been let loose. As Fishburne explains earlier in the film, sometime before it jumps the alligator, "This is a case that hangs together by the thinnest of threads.... You come down here, you start pickin' at them threads now, it's liable to fall apart." Because Connery sticks his liberal nose into the cops' business, he ends up freeing a monster who then comes after him--poetic justice. The message is straight from the annals of Willie Horton: If you dare to fight for such radical notions as civil liberties and due process, a black man will come and rape your daughter.

As it stands, Just Cause falls into a long tradition of Hollywood movies stretching back to Dirty Harry and beyond, which show no respect for the legal and constitutional protections on criminal suspects. The attitude of these films is that you do what you gotta do to keep dangerous criminals off the street, even if it means breaking the law yourself. Never do these films stop to consider that these protections do far more to prevent the U.S. from becoming a draconian police state than they do to instigate the contrived, paranoid scenarios these films cook up.

I am not naive about crime in America. I grew up and still live in Baltimore, which has the second-highest homicide rate in the country. I've been a civilian patrol volunteer for the last ten years. I know firsthand how weak and ineffectual the police force and justice system around here usually are. But I have seen nothing to convince me that beating up suspects will make the world safer.

You can't have it both ways. If cops get to railroad a case whenever they're convinced a suspect is guilty, it will greatly increase the chances that innocent people will be framed--and abused. Is that worth the cost of making sure guilty people always get brought to justice?

The way people answer that question often falls on racial lines, because it's a matter of what people fear the most. Both whites and blacks are scared of street crime. But blacks also carry a fear of police brutality and discrimination that many whites fail to understand, because it is not something whites normally experience.

That's why most whites are perplexed by black people's unwillingness to acknowledge O.J. Simpson's obvious guilt. Because frame-ups have been a reality to blacks for so long, many of them simply do not trust our justice system. Once they hear that an investigator to the case once used the term "nigger," that is enough to throw the entire investigation into doubt.

This reaction is not logical. But neither is the perspective of whites who take comfort at the thought of police violating a suspect's civil rights. They aren't afraid they'll ever be that suspect; they're afraid of what the suspect will do to them if he gets set free--an outcome that, in fact, may directly result from such violations. In other words, both sides to this debate are capable of being irrational, and for the same reason: because they cannot argue with fear.

The twin straw men

Jimmy Carter has helped highlight some intriguing parallels between Israel-bashing and Obama-bashing. He stated recently that "an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity" toward President Obama is fueled by racism. Israel supporters have long made a similar argument about anti-Semitism in the type of Israel-bashing that, ironically, Carter has engaged in. For their part, Israel-bashers and Obama-bashers both like to invoke the straw-man argument that the bigotry charge is being used against all criticism of the subject in question.

Israel-bashing

Soon after the release of his book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, Carter asserted, "There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel." Of course that statement is demonstrably false, as a glance at the editorial page of any standard newspaper will reveal. Indeed, Carter's own critical pieces on Israel have been carried by major papers both before and after the publication of his controversial book.

That's where the straw man comes in: following some inflammatory, over-the-top attack on Israel, the bashers insist they're being vilified simply because they had the temerity to "criticize" the Israeli government, as if calling Israel an apartheid state falls in the same category as complaining about its bus routes.

It would be one thing if these commentators argued simply that there isn't enough debate about Israel, and that certain criticisms are unfairly labeled as anti-Semitic. Instead, they make the extraordinary claim that all criticism of Israel is treated this way. This claim has been repeated so many times it has become a sort of mantra in anti-Israel circles, despite the fact that it crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

What's striking is that virtually no one fits this description. Every U.S. president in the last four decades has attacked the building of Israeli settlements in the territories--the mainstream position in American discourse. Even the most fervent right-wing Zionists criticize Israel all the time, as their bitter reaction to the 2005 pullout from Gaza amply demonstrated. While there is basis for saying that many on the right are too quick to apply the "anti-Semite" label to people who deviate from the Likud party line, the mainstream in this country doesn't act that way, and even the rightists aren't vilifying all "criticism" of the Jewish state.

Most Israel supporters agree that there are certain types of assertions that cross the line from legitimate criticism to veiled anti-Semitism. Where that line falls exactly is a matter of debate. Irwin Cotler, commenting on the 2001 Durban conference, gives several examples of such assertions. These include calling for the destruction of Israel, attacking the legitimacy of the Jewish state, depicting Israel as the prime source of the world's evils, comparing the Israeli government with the Nazis, and singling out Israel for condemnation while ignoring or downplaying comparable or worse happenings in other countries. As Cotler observes,

For example - and apart from Durban - in December 2001, the contracting parties of the Geneva Convention convened for the first time to criticize Israel. This was the only time in 52 years that any nation was indicted. Similarly the UN Commission on Human Rights has singled out Israel for discriminatory indictment while granting the real human rights violators exculpatory immunity.

None of this is intended to suggest that Israel is above the law or is not accountable for any violations of international human rights and humanitarian law like any other state. Quite the contrary. But the problem is not that anyone should seek that Israel be above the law, but that Israel is being systematically denied equality before the law.

Convincing the average American that these sorts of criticisms are not merely unfair, but indicative of anti-Semitism, is tricky. It requires some knowledge of history and an understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has often been framed in a way that encourages Israel's perceived shortcomings to receive attention far out of proportion to their importance in world affairs. Adding to the problem is that Israel, since its inception, has been surrounded by enemy countries whose leaders have often expressed explicitly genocidal wishes against the Jews. The destruction of Israel isn't just a political goal, but a call to mass murder.

What's notable about Israel-bashing is that, unlike ordinary criticisms of a country's sins, it is usually directed, subtly or overtly, at Israel's legitimacy as a country. And since Israel was created as the world's only Jewish state, it is hard not to notice traditional anti-Jewish themes cropping up under the guise of "criticizing" Israel. Carter himself unwittingly proved this point when he claimed that "most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American organizations." Which organizations he had in mind, he did not say. As Deborah Lipstadt noted, most of the strongest public condemnations of his book came from Michael Kinsley, Ethan Bronner, Jeffrey Goldberg, Alan Dershowitz, Dennis Ross, and 14 members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors who resigned in protest. All are Jewish, but none represent a Jewish organization.

Obama-bashing

Bill O'Reilly recently lambasted two columns, one by Eugene Robinson and the other by Maureen Dowd, who believe, according to O'Reilly, that "if you criticize somebody [they like] and it's a person of color, then immediately you're a racist." In fact, neither column suggested anything of the kind.

They were both reactions to Joe Wilson (R-SC), who shouted "You lie!" during the President's health care address. Robinson's column discussed at length the open disrespect shown toward the President by Wilson and other Republican Congressmen at the speech before adding, "I suspect that Obama's race leads some of his critics to feel they have permission to deny him the legitimacy, stature and common courtesy that are any president's due. I can't prove this, however." Dowd argued that Wilson's former membership in a neo-Confederate group, his campaign to keep the Confederate Flag flying above the state Capitol, and his dismissing as a "smear" a black woman's truthful claim to be Strom Thurmond's illegitimate daughter, formed an ominous pattern that cast suspicion on his unprecedented departure from accepted standards of decorum in front of the nation's first black president.

That's where the straw man comes in: following some inflammatory, over-the-top attack on Obama, the bashers insist they're being vilified simply because they had the temerity to "criticize" the President, as if shouting him down as a liar while he's speaking falls in the same category as complaining about his tariff policy.

It would be one thing if these right-wingers argued simply that there isn't enough criticism of the President, and that certain criticisms are unfairly labeled as racist. Instead, they make the extraordinary claim that all criticism of Obama is treated this way. This claim has been repeated so many times it has become a sort of mantra in anti-Obama circles, despite the fact that it crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

What's striking is that virtually no one fits this description. Robinson, Dowd, and even Carter have all criticized Obama before. But you wouldn't know that from reading most of the right-wing sites, which, like O'Reilly, claim that these commentators apply the "racist" label to all who dare say anything negative about The One. A more recent Robinson column explains clearly when he feels attacks on Obama cross the line from legitimate criticism to veiled racism:

Of course it's possible to reject Obama's policies and philosophy without being racist. But there's a particularly nasty edge to the most vitriolic attacks -- a rejection not of Obama's programs but of his legitimacy as president. This denial of legitimacy is more pernicious than the abuse heaped upon George W. Bush by his critics (including me), and I can't find any explanation for it other than race.

I'm not talking about the majority of the citizens who went to town hall meetings to criticize Obama's plans for health-care reform or the majority of the "tea bag" demonstrators who complain that Obama is ushering in an era of big government. Those are, of course, legitimate points of view. Protest is part of our system. It's as American as apple pie.

I'm talking about the crazy "birthers." I'm talking about the nitwits who arrive at protest rallies bearing racially offensive caricatures -- Obama as a witch doctor, for example. I'm talking about the idiots who toss around words like "socialism" to make Obama seem alien and even dangerous -- who deny the fact that he, too, is as American as apple pie.

Of course one may legitimately disagree with Robinson. Obama is hardly the first president to be the subject of vitriolic attacks and kooky conspiracy theories. Robinson's point of contrast is with Bush, but I was thinking about Clinton, whose detractors called him a murderer, a rapist, and a drug addict and likened him to both Hitler and Stalin. On the other hand, no one threatened secession, or said he had a "deep-seated hatred of white people," or accused him of having been born outside the United States. Some of the attacks on Obama seem clearly to have racial (or xenophobic) overtones, but there are those on the left who see a racial motivation in less obvious examples such as Joe Wilson's outburst, which didn't happen when Clinton was in office but conceivably might have. Irrational hostility toward Obama may be rooted in racism, but it also may be rooted in the way Republicans tend to behave while out of power.

Conclusion: the parallels

Israel supporters and Obama supporters both believe that a significant amount of the hostility they receive is motivated by bigotry. Israel-bashers and Obama-bashers react by claiming that supporters are using the bigotry charge to silence all criticisms. This claim has become a sort of mantra among the bashers even though it falls apart under the least bit of scrutiny. In reality, even the staunchest Israel supporters criticize Israel, and even the staunchest Obama supporters criticize Obama. There is, however, basis for arguing that Israel supporters and Obama supporters sometimes try to suppress some criticisms by unfairly branding them as bigoted.

Nevertheless, what Israel supporters and Obama supporters are mainly reacting to are the more extreme, inflammatory attacks, particularly those that seek to undermine the legitimacy of Israel as a country, or the legitimacy of Obama as a president. Whether those sorts of attacks are in fact evidence of bigotry can be debated, and depends to some extent on one's understanding of the history of racism in the U.S. or of anti-Semitism in the world at large. But those who do see bigotry in these attacks should at least have their views described accurately rather than caricatured to make them easier to knock down.

^{(Hat tip to Rabbi Harry Maryles for the cartoon.)}

The line between cranks and scholars

What is it with some linguists and claiming a mysterious relationship between English and Hebrew? First there's Isaac Mozeson, the literature professor (I hesitate to use the term "linguist") who maintains that all English words can be traced to Hebrew. Then there's Ernest Klein, a rabbi/linguist who saw Semitic origins where other scholars didn't. I never expected John McWhorter of all people to enter the fray. But he does, in a recent book that features an eccentric theory about early Semitic influence on the language that would become English.

Superficial relationships
Even in my early childhood, I noticed resemblances between certain Hebrew words and their English counterparts: camel is gamal, wine is yayin, and earth is eretz. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Animal names often come from languages spoken in the region where the animal is found. Hence, moose comes from a Native American tongue, and camel comes from a Middle Eastern Semitic tongue that may or may not have been Hebrew, but was certainly related. Similarly, the ancients would have referred to wine using the term from the culture that first disseminated the drink, just as we today adopted the Japanese word sushi instead of inventing our own term using pure-English roots (e.g. "seafood roll"). As for eretz and "earth," that's probably just a coincidence.

That last statement, in my experience, often provokes the response, "I don't believe in coincidence." But it has nothing to do with coincidence in a cosmic sense. The Hawaiian word kahuna meaning "priest" sounds remarkably similar to the Hebrew word for priest, but unless you can devise a story about an ancient encounter between Semitic tribes and Polynesians, it is likely that the two languages just happened to hit upon the same combination of sound and meaning in this one instant. These things happen from time to time.

Isaac Mozeson
In his 1988 book The Word, Mozeson maintains not only that the English language (as well as all other languages) comes directly from Hebrew, "the language of Eden," but that this fact can be discerned by examining the roots of English words. According to Mozeson, "Hebrew vocabulary has as much affinity with English as it has with Arabic. More English words can be clearly linked to Biblical Hebrew than to Latin, Greek, or French."

As for the Indo-European theory of modern linguistics, Mozeson argues that it is nothing more than a racist plot by white Gentiles to segregate their languages from other cultures and undermine the eternal truth of the Torah. As Mozeson puts it, "The third son of Noah, Ham, is behind the generic term for African languages, and white gentiles in the linguistic community have no trouble with the evidence of a related Hamito-Semitic language family. Let the Blacks and Jews share the ghetto, whisper the professors, as long as Indo-European remains lily white." It never seems to occur to him what the "Indo" part of the theory signifies.

The book is filled with his unorthodox etymologies. "Sparrow," he claims, comes from the Hebrew tzipor ("bird"). The English word "lad" derives from the Hebrew yeled ("boy"). "Direction" comes from derekh ("path, way"). He even traces "samurai" to the Hebrew shomer ("guardian")--via Japanese, of course.

This is all quite clever. But I can't help thinking of the father in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding who insists that if you give him any English word, he can explain how it is derived from Greek. He shows how it's done with some easy examples, like arachnophobia. Then one of the kids says "kimono!" The father is stopped short for a moment, then he explains that it comes from the Greek word for winter, himona, and in winter you stay warm by wearing a robe--kimono!

If Mozeson considered other theories, he'd find his own wanting. For example, mainstream linguists trace the word direction to the Latin directus, which is the past participle of the verb dirigere, "to set straight." That word comes from a combination of dis- ("apart") and regere ("to guide"). Not exactly a plausible candidate for connecting with the Hebrew derekh. But Mozeson disregards the mass of historical and literary evidence, as well as the theories of systematic sound change between languages, used by mainstream linguists to establish cognates. Ironically, Mozeson's picture of language evolution makes the process seem far more random and haphazard than in mainstream linguistics.

Of course, his method could be used to "prove" that any language came from any other language. John McWhorter demonstrated this in his 2003 book Power of Babel. Not specifically in reference to Mozeson or any other crank linguist, McWhorter "proves" that Japanese comes from English, based on the following words:

sagaru: hang down (i.e. "sag")
namae: name
mono: thing, single entity
nai: not
mo: more
miru: see (hence, "mirror")
taberu: eat (hence, "table," where one eats)
atsui (ott-SOO-ee): hot
hito: man (i.e. "he")
yo: emphatic particle (i.e. "Yo!")
kuu: feed your face (i.e. "chew")
inki: dark-spirited or glum (hence, "inky")

I actually think Japanese shows a close relationship to Hebrew. In Hebrew, karati means "I read." And what people are more in need of learning self-defense than the guys with their noses in books?

Ernest Klein
Klein was a linguist and Orthodox rabbi best known for two works: an etymological dictionary of English, and one of Hebrew. He had a tendency to suggest Semitic origins for English words more often than other scholars did. Unlike Mozeson, however, he worked entirely within the framework of mainstream linguistics, and in fact his dictionaries are widely respected works of scholarship. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which has had considerable influence across the Internet, relies a great deal on Klein's research. One time I was reading a word-origin blog that traced the word traffic to the Arabic tafriq meaning "distribution." I immediately suspected--and quickly confirmed--that the blogger had gotten his information from the Online Etymology Dictionary and ultimately from Klein.

John McWhorter
In his earlier books on linguistics, McWhorter mainly attempted to explain the views of professional linguists before the general public. He does some of that in his latest book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, talking about the flaws in conventional conceptions of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as well as debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that a language's grammatical properties affect its speakers' thought processes). But he also proposes some theories he admits few linguists accept.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I will mention just one of the theories: He thinks that the Phoenicians, who spoke a language very similar to Hebrew, made their way to the area that is now Germany and Denmark and had such a profound effect on the languages spoken there that the entire Germanic subfamily (which includes modern German, Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages) was the result of Semitic-speaking adults struggling to learn an Indo-European tongue.

Linguists have long believed that Proto-Germanic underwent strong non-IE influence. For one thing, one-third of Proto-Germanic vocabulary cannot be traced to IE roots. McWhorter discusses several lines of evidence, including Proto-Germanic's substitution of fricatives for stop consonants (compare English's father with Latin's pater), its tendency to put verbs into the past tense by simply changing the vowel (e.g. drink/drank), and its extreme simplification of the IE case system.

McWhorter speculates on a possible connection between certain Germanic and Semitic roots, such as the English word fright compared with the Semitic root p-r-kh meaning "to fear." Particularly interesting is his attempt to connect the names of two Germanic deities, Phol and Balder, with the Phoenician god Baal. Also, an archeologist allegedly found the remains of a Phoenician cooking pot in the shallows of the North Sea.

McWhorter is quick to admit that none of this comes close to proving his case; he simply argues that his hypothesis is an intriguing possibility worthy of further investigation.

Final thought: the line between cranks and scholars
Etymology is far from an exact science. Look in any dictionary, and you will find scores of words with unknown origins. In those situations, even the professionals end up resorting to guesswork, some of it as crude and far-fetched as anything Isaac Mozeson could have dreamed up. The difference, I suppose, is that legitimate researchers try to gather up as many facts as they can, and acknowledge when the limits have been reached. Usually.