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A.J. DiCintio Almost immediately after reading Alice Walker’s piece in The Guardian (“Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave”), I began thinking about how an elderly Jewish-Italian gentleman who struck up a conversation with me in front of the Great Synagogue of Rome would react to the political attitudes the novelist reveals as she argues for candidate Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.
First, however, I should explain a little of what he talked about that day in unmistakable New Yorkese. (This citizen of Rome, it turns out, had learned English over the years visiting friends north of the city many call New Yawk.)
The surprising accent aside, the content and tone of his delightful monologue transported me to the neighborhood where I grew up amid expressions of pride in one’s religion, nationality, and ethnicity, the last, in this case, evident in a brief discourse upon Jews as builders of the pyramids and the Colosseum.
I should admit that his claim about this prodigious building sent me wondering if I might be witnessing that noble and ancient art form we might call benevolent exaggeration. However, later I realized the amiable gentleman could well have his construction history correct, at least regarding things Roman.
After all, the Colosseum was completed in 80 A.D., more than a century after an emigration from Israel established the community of Roman Jews, beginning a two millennia plus residence that explains why to this day many of their traditions and certainly their names differ from those of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.
Consider, for example, the Seder dish Minestra di Riso per Pesach, Passover Soup with Chicken Meatballs and Rice. (It’s the rice that is vietato in an observant Ashkenazi home during Passover).
Then, there’s the name of Rome’s Chief Rabbi, Dr. Riccardo Di Segni.
But to return to my main purpose. I recalled that gentleman because at one point, with a nod and his feet firmly planted on the ground, he let me know that Jews still face a danger regarding their very existence, a reality with which I associate the notion that Never Again requires more than never forgetting. It means ever being honest about human nature and thus ever being prepared and ever being vigilant to combat human depravity.
So, how might that gentle man, who reacts to life as all of us should — with the priceless wisdom acquired and passed down by hundreds of generations — react to Walker’s politics?
Most likely with the exclamation pazzo!
Of course, the truth is that all who respond in the same way admit to pazzo, crazy, meshuggina, loco, etc. as simply general terms to describe the complex madness that underlies Leftist “thinking,” a madness characterized by an insatiable love of power or a perverse love of being ruled; a mindless denial of the reality called human nature; an intransigent sentimentalism; a chronically nagging neurotic guilt; and foolish metaphysical assertions purported to be derived from physical reality.
All that said, it’s time for examples that shine light upon Walker’s state of mind:
True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions ... I [do not] agree with everything Obama stands for…[because] there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
What is that except an example of pompous, shallow Leftist nonsense spewed with the clarity of the noonday sun. Think of it; Walker leaves not a doubt she refuses to bring suffering even upon an Al-Qaeda terrorist plotting the murder of innocents, including children doing what children do at play or in school.
Yes, Alice Walker’s pacifism (which, in 1942, Orwell labeled as being “objectively pro-Fascist”) demands she also forbear inflicting suffering upon a Hitler, Stalin, Mao, et al. or their murderous minions.
What of the consequences? Well, fortunately, there are always others who take up the fight against evil, thereby insuring that Alice and her sisters may continue pursuing the Good by sipping tea, munching crudités, and bemoaning the primitive, misogynistic superficiality of classic art from Oedipus to MacBeth to Crime and Punishment, receiving guidance in their literary efforts, as in all things, from their inner Goddess of the Three Directions.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba … a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss.
Isn’t there a gross omission here? Well, it must be the ceaseless consumption of tea, raw veggies, and the effete talk of Eliot’s insipid rooms where “the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo” that prevents Walker from letting us know how her mature attitude regards a murderous, human rights hating devil of a dictator.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don’t understand what is going on.
We will grasp the astonishing irony of this incredibly anti-intellectual, simplistic mini rant that ascribes a moral superiority to the Palestinian cause in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if we recall the entirety of Israel’s history since 1948, a task that brings to light Walker’s failure to include as part of “what [has been] going on” Arafat; Hamas; Syria; Hezbollah; terrorist bombers of weddings, pizza shops, and marketplaces; Iran; Ahmadinejad; and religious leaders who imbue the youngest of children with hate.
But how can Walker find time to state the whole truth when she is maniacally consumed with sipping tea and “Talking of Michelangelo” with her kindred spirits, the entire gaggle a reincarnation of e. e. cummings’ Cambridge Ladies, “who do not care, above Cambridge [or Israel] if … the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.”
The foregoing represents just some of the madness Walker finally ends by exhorting her “brave” sisters as follows: “And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Perhaps congregants of the Leftist Church get that last sentence, but put me down as swearing I don’t. However, like my friend of the brief encounter in Rome, I do know pazzia when I see it.
Moreover, I know to beware it with a meticulous vigilance, whether exhibited in an individual or a society, because Melville’s Ishmael was entirely correct when he observed that “Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”
Copyright by A.J. DiCintio Copyright © MichNews.com. All Rights Reserved.
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