Monday 30 July 2012

On milieu and refuge: sketch, 7



I will return to the subject of Israel soon. As I suggested in the first two posts, we are all hovering creatures it's just that Jewish populations are never assured they can hover over the same place for long. Living with a packed suitcase is a metaphor, but, like all metaphors, it refers to a mental condition. One lifetime in one place ought to be assurance enough, but even three are not. One rarely gets four.

There are those who have seen Jews as a form of pest, a kind of locust alighting on a field only to strip it bare. There are those who have seen them as poisoners of wells. Interestingly, when the last post in this series appeared  as a link on my Facebook page I had an immediate email from a new Friend who must have taken umbrage at my piece on Israel because she immediately posted a link to an article headed Arafat Came Offering Peace, Got Poison.

Because poison is what you get from Jews, those poisonous hovering people.

Or if they don't poison you they kill you and harvest your organs.

Or if they fail to do that, they murder your babies by bayoneting them.

Or they sacrifice Christian or other children and bake their blood into matzos.

Or if they don't do that they demand pounds of flesh, or organise innocent Christian children into gangs of thieves.

Or if they don't do that they form secret societies to take over the world.

Or if they don't do that they steal your money, charge you exorbitant interest, run the American president, run international finance, run the international press.

They are, it is generally added, cowards who get other people to fight their wars for them then stab them in the back.

Or, being journalists,  they doorstep you at a party and ask if you've enjoyed it, like bloody concentration camp guards.

They are parasites battening down on hard-working honest people. They defile whatever they touch. They themselves are the defilement. There is, after all, something disgusting about them. Sexy, clever, but disgusting.

Do you remember how there was something of the night about Michael Howard? Guess what it was!


Shall I go on? 

Do I need to go on?

*

No, of course I need not go on because everyone knows this and everybody says, well of course, that's all nonsense and no-one amongst us believes such things. And I believe them when they say it, of course I do, because they mean it. But someone must believe all this because it's not hard to find on the internet or - parts of it - even in the daily press at times among the most intelligent, wise, kindly people.

And it is only about the Jews they say it, about nobody else. And it always is about the Jews they say it, nobody else.

Some might argue this is paranoid. I suggest they put in some appropriate search term and read around a bit. As for me, I am just one generation away from the last great purge which was supposed to be final. It isn't a fairy tale. He don't make it up, you know.

*

Let's get this out of the way and continue to hover. I myself hover in all kinds of other ways, as I imagine most artists do. As I said at the beginning, I had no Jewish upbringing at all and am, by full immersion baptism, at least formally, what Peter Porter once called, a residual Christian,  which is to say I was so by conviction but am not so convinced now. In real life I hover between atheism, agnosticism and a fuzzy kind of mysticism that I pretend not to take seriously.  I cannot fully identify with Jewish life as normally lived. I am not even particularly attracted by it.

But in the context of the accusations above I claim my Jewishness.  Above all, in that context. As, under Nazi or Fascist laws, it would be claimed of me. Because it's the blood, you know. The poison is in the blood and it would be the basest dishonesty to disown the blood. 

*

Not yet finished with the hovering, or the milieu and the refuge of the title.



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