I have no mouth and I must scream

Joe,

I'm finding your blog quite interesting, and the more I read it, the more I want to comment about it. I'm an American now living in Australia, which is about as far away from it all as it's possible to get without living in Tasmania.

As for whether there are poor Jews, let me assure you there are. I'm not Jewish, but my only child is. My ex-wife was Jewish, although not religious, and in Judaism, the heritage passes through the mother. (That's because when those crafty old Jews of Talmudic times wrote the laws, they knew there was no guarantee that the husband was REALLY the father, but the mother was definitely known.) So I have a foot in both camps, being an American mongrel myself. I've hung out with Jews in college, spent a summer on a kibbutz (it's MY Holy Land too!) and had lotsa Jewish friends in America and Australia.

They DO skew rich. That's because their culture stresses education and getting ahead financially, rather than drinking, fighting and fucking. They ARE down with the "pray" thing. But there are other Jews like my pothead ex-sister in law who was always one step ahead of the debt collectors because she was more into being stoned than doing productive work. And my ex's uncle and aunt, who were factory workers in New York before they retired to North Miami Beach and lived on their Social Security cheques in a stuffy flat on 187th Avenue. The kibbutzniks were socialist farmers -- you woulda loved 'em, share and share alike -- but they were still schmiels trying to scratch a living from dry dirt in the desert. My current wife's a Greatful Deadhead, and she hung with a lot of Jewish 'heads who were poor dirty hippies like the rest of the tribe. The guy who's the sparkplug of our anti-nuclear group here in Australia is a red-headed Jew who has to Dumpster-dive for food and rent out half his flat to meet expenses, mainly because he's so devoted to the cause that he only works half-time.

So mate, whenever you mention Jews, you'll get reflexive anti-Semites crawling out of the woodwork. Usually they don't know any real Jews, just the ones in their imagination. I can't say I love 'em -- my millionaire ex-mother-in-law could outspend me 10 to 1 on lawyers in divorce court, and she's a bitch -- but they're more complex than people expect.

One more thing, Joe. I was reading your essay about the screaming man inside you. While living in the U.S. during the previous horrid five years, I was reminded of the title of a Harlan Ellison short story titled "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!"

Anyway, do you ever listen to Mike Malloy on the radio? He used to be part of Air America Radio before they fired him for being too incendiary. He's now on something called the Nova M radio network, which consists of about three stations that broadcast his stuff. He's screaming too.

Malloy likes to talk about "the Bush crime family" and his trademark line is "Have I told you tonight how much I hate these people?" Yeah, he's just a radio ranter, as you are a blog ranter, and I am a tick on the hide of your blog ranting. But it's always good to find a voice that affirms our screaming. Bucks up the courage, like having other people around you in a mob when you want to riot, or when penguins jump off their ice floe hoping that the fur seal will snatch someone else beside them.

Listening to Malloy bolstered my and my wife's resolve to get the hell out of the U.S. We're whitebread libruls of the type you know too well, and we realised that showing up at token marching exhibitions amounted to nothing, but we weren't ready to take the next step of burning shit down. At least with Malloy, we knew we weren't alone. Check him out. He's screaming as loud as you. You can find him online and download podcasts. That's what we do here. Like listening to a train crash off in the distance.

Rick

Near Elsternwick, Australia, where you can see all the guys in black coats, fur hats and side curls on Saturday night

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I hear ya Rick!

I got a lot of mail telling me there are indeed poor Jews. Well of course there are! When did I ever say there are no poor Jews? Hell, with a couple of exceptions, I'd call most of the Jews in my town are mostly working class and some are quite poor. I simply referred to the many upscale urban Jews I deal with as a writer and editor. Big deal. Upscale WASPS are much the same.

And like you said, when you are down in the trenches of social activism, you'll find a helluva lot of beautiful broke idealist Jews.

I used to think Jews wore the hell out of the Holocaust thing, made an industry out of it even. Then, years later I realized that Jews and Southerners are a lot alike in that way. They both carry dark stuff in their culture that is passed along as an undercurrent for generations. Along with Native Americans, Southerners are the only Americans to suffer defeat in a war and subsequent occupation (in addition, the Indians suffered genocide). Regardless of the cruel wrong headedness of the defeated Southerners, we still carry some of the inner cultural results of that defeat and the massive wrongness of that cause within us. I know that's where I get my dark moodiness, my grim inner stubbornness, but also my belief in changing myself to escape those things.

Jews are much the same in my mind. Successful or not, their own dark experiences run deep as cultural undercurrents. So does the tendency to make a buck on it, whether it is the Holocaust industry or the selling of the idealized historical antebellum and Confederate experience to tourists and Southerners themselves. So does the tendency to aggregate politically, whether it is the Southern Christian conservative political blocs or the Jewish voting bloc. In the overview we see Southern Bible Belt conservatives destroying the Constitution and we see the knee-jerk Jewish American vote, Gods self-proclaimed chosen people -- both knowingly and unknowingly -- giving the thumbs up to the murder of Palestinians, thereby fanning the flames of hate and revenge and escalating the death dealing on both sides, each blaming the other.

Southern Christian heritage instinctively seeks to destroy the rights and lives of "the other" that once defeated us physically, and has since then kept the ingrained dark religio-cultural ambitions to which we are prone in check politically. The Jewish religious heritage of the "chosen people," for all its depth, is prone to smugness and the lust for domination the same as Muslim religious heritage and evangelical Christian heritage. I've experienced the God of Southern charismatic Christianity, and have been pierced to the heart by the experience they call god. I have also, through the expanded consciousness of LSD and plain old suffering, occasionally experienced the higher universal principles, laws if you will, that govern the universe and all living and nonliving manifestation. And I think I can safely say that it does not bother to choose people for exception to its laws; it does not prefer man in particular over any other species (in fact it is above preferring), and it is in no way affected by man's petty choices. At least that was my take on higher consciousness.

If that is true, and it has so marked my life that for me personally, it will remain true forever, then man had better wise up. Get in touch with higher intelligence -- his own. But I doubt that he will. It carries too much bad news for his petty self-delusions as to his importance. So we fuck away our life arguing about poor Jews, rich Jews, which Bronze Age god of "the book" has the biggest penis, and whether the recent Democratic victory will summons the ghost of FDR.

Anyway, at this late age I finally came to understand that many, if not most of the things we must overcome within ourselves, come wrapped as cultural heritage and history, ethnic group, kin, clan, social and religious identity. Having an identifiable culture and history is a wonderful thing. But it is only the wrapping paper we come in. Not the meaning of one's life.

What the hell.

It's five thirty in the morning and the coffee is finished brewing.

Thanks for writing.

In art and labor,

Joe