The Easterbrook Affair.

There has been a lot of discussion of this in the blogosphere today. Here is a reply I left for Dave Winer on Don Park's weblog:

Dave Winer says (and I am posting this here because I think he will see it here and maybe respond):

"We think we're good people, we are good people, but we have this embarassment (to put it mildly) of having been exterminated in a holocaust and then the double embarassment that some of the stereotypes are true, there are greedy Jewish bastards, and in a sense they do run the world (as do WASPs, and Germans and Italians, Koreans and Japanese, even Arabs run the world if you look at it from the right angle). So some of what the Jew haters say is true, enough so that we can't really argue about it without getting unreasonable, which is something a good Jew doesn't want to do. We're more likely to see your point, in our hearts, even though it's painful to admit it."

See, there's something there that bothers me. In fact *none* of what the Jew haters say is true, and it's a damned shame that even Jews are apt to get fooled by the rhetorical trick. There are bad people in the world, some of whom happen to be Jews and some of whom happen to be Catholic and some of whom happen to be Korean. But those people would be wretched excuses for human beings no matter what they claimed to be or appeared to be, if for example they were Wiccans or Buddhists or Belgian they would still be (to use Dave's term) greedy bastards. This is the oldest trick in the bigot's book: "You know how *those people* are ..."

I don't know whether Easterbrook had "that train of thought" going on before the movie was released. I don't know whether the man is an anti-Semite. He may have been under the illusion that he was saying something good, by way of being ironic, and got so full of himself that he didn't see that his irony would come across as sarcasm or as a threat. But the classic "reasonable man" would have foreseen the reaction.

Here's my personal (very personal) take on this affair. We all carry our past, and we deal with it whether we want to or not. I was raised a white Catholic in segregated East Texas in the 1940's and 1950's. The irony in my case is that I have a great-great-grandmother who was a Seminole, so the matter of racial identity was always a problem for me, and a great gift as it turned out. This made me a hated minority (religiously - read up on who the Klan used to string up and burn out: blacks, Jews, and Catholics, in that order), a person of mixed race (not made known to the world until much later), and an ostensible member of a "superior" group. Oh, yeah - we were poor, too - no friends in high places, no notion that we had intelligence and ambition. There were plenty of messages about race and religion and worth and primacy that were poured into my young ears, eyes, and soul. It took me until young adulthood to figure out that, while my ancestors were brave, pioneering, and independent-minded, and they provided me with some very important values about honesty and integrity and hard work, they were also tragically, horribly wrong about some very important things. Their progress, such as it was, came at the expense and through the suffering of other human beings.

The trick for my generation is to remember and act on the right values, and to work to eliminate the wrong ones in what we pass on to our children. It's hard. It's a long road. And it's a road marked by mistakes (in my case) some of which have surely been as offensive as Easterbrook's, even if they offended fewer people at the time. I have a great many reasons to strive to do better, not the least of which is hope for mercy in the next life. A lot of white southern people my age and older share these reasons and motivation.

I hope Easterbrook survives this and becomes better for it. In fact, I hope we all become better for it.

11:04:33 PM