Friday, November 19, 2010

A prescient people

This originally appeared on another blog long ago. Thank you to the proprietor of the other blog for not giving me grief about reposting it here.

The opening words of Alan Wolfe, "The Great Jewish-American Synthesis," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2005:
Ever since the first Jew arrived on American shores 350 years ago, one question has persistently been asked but never definitively answered. Should Jews accommodate themselves to the culture of the United States...?
Maybe they used the Bible code. Wolfe fails to address this possibility.

Fantasies

Last weekend, I went to a musical venuviality called the Stained Glass Coffeehouse. They should be ashamed of themselves for serving coffee in insufficiently clean vessels, but at least they're providing full disclosure. Not my problem, since I don't drink coffee. (Personal revelation! personal revelation!, this is turning into a downright blog!)

But that's not why I'm writing this, and the stained glasses aren't why I went there. I went there because Claudia Schmidt was performing. She pointed out, correctly, that what doesn't kill you only makes you wish you were dead, but that's not why I'm writing this either. Schmidt has a fantasy about some screaming pundit at some point in the screamage saying "I don’t know" and walking out. That isn't my fantasy (yikes!, this really is becoming a genuine blog). Mine is that someday when some pundits are screaming at or discussing with one another, one of them will say, "Well, you've raised a good point. I may need to rethink some of this."

Yeah, right, whatever.

And one more thing. In the first paragraph, I wrote "They should be ashamed of themselves for serving coffee in insufficiently clean vessels, but at least they're providing full disclosure." So before the comma, I'm telling them they should be ashamed of themselves; after the comma, I'm praising them for being shameless. I acknowledge this now in order to forestall the derisory comments.