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vulgar morality: Blogging for the relationship between morality and freedom

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] " valign="top" style="padding-top:7" width="60%">Updated: 1/3/2009; 1:14:58 PM.

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Sunday, December 21, 2008

SIT BACK, RELAX, BLAME THE JEWS: As everyone who follows the news knows, the world today is pretty much wall-to-wall crises. How many crises are there? Here's a metric I invented myself: if I woke up early tomorrow morning and worked continuously until all the messes in the world were cleaned up, it would take long after my head grew bigger than the biggest of the Galapagos Islands. That's not a pretty sight, and would constitute the most horrible crisis of all, particularly for me.

Some crises just seem to keep going, year after year. For example, Muslims are always outraged, and Arabs are even more outraged, and since not all Muslims are Arabs and not all Arabs are Muslims, you can see how this becomes a really thorny and complex problem.

Other crises show a degree of old-fashioned American innovation and ingenuity. We have been agonizing for weeks over how many billions of tax dollars to give the CEO of General Motors, cutting out the middleman, otherwise known as the car buyer. It's a brilliant solution to the unpleasantness of the market system, but how much is just right? A big problem.

I believe the reason we have so many crises is that we look at the world the wrong way. We see thousands of years of history, and hundreds of cultures, and endless numbers of grievances and counter-grievances, and we get confused into thinking every crisis needs its own incredibly complicated solution. Which means a lot of reading and reflecting and maybe even adding up twelve-digit numbers on Excel spreadsheets. Start down this path, and your head is well on the way to becoming tortoise habitat.

Plus, since many of the crises appear strangely linked to our actions, we would have to change our behavior to resolve them. Not only would your ordinary American become as outraged as any Muslim over such a demand, I'm pretty sure it's forbidden somewhere in the Declaration of Independence.

Instead of all this fuss and trouble, I propose the revival of a more traditional approach to dealing with insoluble problems. First, combine them all into a single, gigantic crisis. That means we only require one solution for this universal crisis. Simple and elegant.

Such a critical mass of misery can only result from a Machiavellian conspiracy, conducted by a cabal of evil geniuses. But which geniuses, exactly? At first I considered the Da Vinci Code crowd -- but the movie was so boring I deducted 50 points from their genius quotient (though I added a few to the evil side). Anyway, a bunch of priests in cassocks and chasubles present a most unsatisfactory target of our fear and loathing. For a universal crisis, we need universal bad guys.

Once the problem is posed in this way, the answer becomes apparent.

It's the Jews. Who else? The world has blamed them for everything from the dawn of time -- and only since that practice abated slightly, for some reason, after the Holocaust, have problems and crises multiplied in every field of activity and every corner of the earth, without end or solution in sight. Let's go back to basics: the Jews are the cause of, and solution to, all our problems.

Consider those Muslims and Arabs who trouble the news incessantly. Who are they upset at? Israel. They are not alone: college professors, who know so much more than we do, blame Israel for a lot of the horrors on TV. They want to "disinvest." Now, those who seek needlessly elaborate solutions ask why disinvest in Israel, rather than, say, in Zimbabwe or Russia or Venezuela. To which we answer: what are we trying to do here, quantum mechanics? Keep it simple, please.

Not all the world's problems can be blamed on Israel. About 37 percent (a scientific number I just made up) are the fault of the neocons. And we know who they are.

How about the economic crisis? That one is almost too easy. The Jews have been blamed for every recession since the Black Death, why stop now?

Even problems touching on personal taste can be safely assigned to the Jews. For example, I find most movies today either bizarre, boring, or both (see Da Vinci Code, above). Could it be that I'm becoming a cranky old coot? Of course not. We know who controls Hollywood. And, in a diabolically clever way, they use those weird movies to undermine my morale, so they can . . . [I'll fill this in later, when I think of something].

Or take the greatest crisis -- nay, tragedy -- of my life: the Washington Nationals, who inaugurated a beautiful new stadium by losing 102 games. Now, we fans probably held unreasonable expectations, and the ballplayers lacked talent, and the coaches made crappy field decisions: but why blame the victims, when you can find a scapegoat? The Nationals' owner, Ted Lerner, is described in wikipedia as a "Jewish entrepeneur." Need I say more?

So relax, people. No crisis will again demand our courage or brainpower. Nothing will ever be our fault -- better yet, nothing will ever be our responsibility! No matter how bad things get, it will be the best of all possible worlds, so long as we can say, many times many ways, "It's the Jews."

4:16:11 PM comment []

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