I caught no small amount of flack over yesterday’s article titled The 51st State of Israel, in which I facetiously suggested that the best thing America can do to protect Israel would be to give it a slice of Utah and Nevada and grant it statehood. Some folks took it as a dead serious proposal, which gives you some idea of the health of irony in our present age. It isn’t quite dead yet, but its refuges are limited in number.
Under the fold: you might be a bigot if…
Anyone who points to Israel as the long pole in the circus tent of young Mister Bush’s foreign policy risks accusations of anti-Semitic bigotry. The easy and cheesy rebuttal to such accusations is “some of my best friends are Jewish,” but I’m not easy or cheesy enough to pull that ripcord. The truth be told, I don’t have a whole lot of friends period, and if any of them are Jewish, they’re going out of their way to hide it from me.
I don’t have any black friends either. I’ve had a lot of pleasant acquaintances with African Americans, starting with some of the guys I played high school football with and continuing into my Navy years, where I worked with some of the finest professionals in that line of business who happened to be, uh, negroes. But I don’t stay in touch with any of them.
My first real girlfriend was a dark haired lovely of mixed Chinese and Columbian blood. She dumped me over the phone on my 21st birthday. But as best I can tell, I didn’t let that turn me against Asians and Hispanics, because I’ve dated a number of Asian ladies since then and was briefly married to a woman whose aunt still lives in Spain. I tried to date this really cute looking gal of Iranian descent once, but she wouldn’t go out with me. White girl-wise, my first wife was a Dakota Norwegian, and I lived for a year with a woman of Finnish heritage. I kissed a black girl once when I was 23. We’d both been drinking.
In my way back years as a struggling actor in Chicago, I had a major crush on a trio of Polish sisters. Being a theatrical type, I had a lot of contact with homosexuals. Only in retrospect do I realize that was good training for my life as a naval officer, because I worked with a lot of homosexuals there too.
These days, my favorite editor and sometimes writing partner is a practicing Roman Catholic. I like to think I do a pretty good job of not holding that against her. I try not to be too bigoted against Catholic priests, but if I’m going to be in the same room with one, he has to keep his hands out where I can see them.
I despise Christians like Pat Robertson, and self-styled evangelical politicians like young Mister Bush can suck summer sausage in hell for all eternity as far as I’m concerned.
So I guess I’m a total bigot.
Wait, I just remembered. My two best friends are, in fact, minority members. One is a third generation Mexican and the other is half Croix Indian. But they’re both U.S. Navy veterans, and are both married to German-Irish girls, one of whom happens to be my sister. So that likely prejudices me in their favor.
Which makes me an even bigger bigot, I guess.
Yeah, I know, plenty of you won’t find this funny or insightful. All I ask is that when you comment on the crass and tasteless tone of this piece, please do me the favor of spelling your hyphenated obscenities correctly.
And please don’t throw racial or religious hatred into the discussion of America’s Middle East policy.
Make jokes, not war.
Or as the Jewish mom who used to live next door to my Catholic mom would say, “make nice.”
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
Don’t sweat the negative comments too much, especially those who took you seriously.
Think of the reaction Jonathan Swift had to his treatise A Modest Proposal.
Swift. Heck, Voltaire got run out of France!
Thanks for the perspective.
Hey, I’m part Irish. It was personal.
Now there would be a fine, gentlemanly discussion–the relative merits of Swift and Voltaire as satrists and champions of the enlightenment.
You’d likely have the advantage there.
Of course, the Hubers were being run out of Europe at about the same time Voltaire was being “given the option” of leaving France – though perhaps those weren’t your Hubers.
As was my 6G grandfather, Johannes Huber. (Not my family name, however.)
For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the diary, just coudln’t come up w/ an appropriately snarky comment.
And irony is well and truly dead…this article, by Joel Stein: Doped-up cyclers don’t bug me…, in the LAT [free reg req’d] caused a shitstorm and great angst among the local spandex wearing, wannabe, biking community…after the veritable swarm of irate LTE’s, and upon being politely informed of the humourous nature and intent of the article, they attacked the messenger…sad, really sad.
hey Jeff,
Sorry you took such stupid flack; I thought it was pretty funny.
There is, however, a most serious objection to your, umm, ‘proposal,’ namely that the “sparsely populated” lands of Nevada & Utah that you suggest are already contested terrain in the eyes of the UN as affirmed in Geneva by the UN’s Committee For The Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s 68th session , 20 February – 10 March 2006.
The Western Shoshone maintain that the Ruby Valley Treaty gives them sovereignty over the land that they have never relinquished. Hary Reid a few years ago made arrangements for a ‘payout’ — pennies to the dollar, natch — & the US Dept of Interior paid itself, putting the funds in trust. The US Supreme Court found this shell game to be sufficient to find that the Shoshone had indeed relinquished all claims to their land.
Besides fighting the test site plans & operations, they have also engaged in battles against gold mining (few know that there is a corporate gold rush on today) and grazing rights.
These folks were prominent in the battle that won a temporary postponement of the Divine Strake Test.
So, anyhoos …. know of any other “blank” spots on the map?
Boy, that gets to the heart of the matter–greater powers taking lands away from one group, giving them to another, on and on and on.
Oh for petes sake. Hard to believe anyone took that diary seriously but then again as I’ve said you write so beautifully and logically that I guess some people just didn’t get it.
But the good news is that it made you write this diary which gave me my first good laugh of the day. So to all those people who are apparently irony free and think anyone who looks crosswise at Israel is anti-Semitic, thank you.
I’m hoping to break the seal on this line of discussion because the strategy we’ve been using to back the Israel policy hasn’t been working for over a half century, and somebody needs to start talking about it without having to run into the bigotry wall.
It would be nice if discussions concerning Israel and it’s neighbors wouldn’t immediately devolve into the anti-Semitic rhetoric if you simply point out that neither side is completely right or wrong.
They can be difficult even without that. My wife, who grew up in a ‘my Israel, right or wrong’ household, finds it emotionally very painful to hear crticism — it’s a deep, deep emotional hit. Not that she doesn’t understand the injustice of the situation — it’s an inner battle between rational mind/empathy & a deeper emotional sense of cultural belonging. She finds it very painful just to watch the news. It took a while for us to realize that my, um, shall we say intensely expressed opinions, were basically playing out loud one voice in her personal inner struggle, and it led to a great deal of tension as we talked about events. Even self-awareness & talking about won’t make it just disappear.
(not sure I’m being horribly articulate here about this — still thinking about it)
…every chance I get, the problem is not with Israel, it’s with our Middle East policy.
I have two very close friends who are Israeli, and two of my lab members are Lebanese.
Neither pair is happy with their own country’s actions with respect to this conflict and what led up to it, but both are extremely angry with the U.S. response (or non-response response), which they both see as a strongly pro-Israeli reaction. That is, a certain kind of pro-Israeli response. My Israeli friends are firm in emphasizing that Israelis are not a uniform group of single perspective on these issues. However, discussions are so very difficult, as they tend to devolve into “whose side are you on” arguments.