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    “Gone With the Wind,” Begone

    by

    First published in THE GAMBIER JOURNAL, Volume 4, No. 5, May 1985.

     

    It moves sour critics to cries of ‘film classic!’ It makes otherwise mature adults dream, with respect, of the old Hollywood. Four and a half decades after its first showing, it still attracts millions of viewers, none of whom is heard to emit event the politest complaint.

    Has no one noticed the elaborate silliness of Gone With the Wind?

    The silliness goes beyond the main characters—although, to be sure, they partake of it. It goes beyond Melanie’s idiotic benevolence, somehow confused with Christianity. It goes beyond Ashley’s despairing gentility—despite which, we are expected to believe, he commanded soldiers during four years of war. It goes beyond Rhett Butler’s heart-of-gold cynicism, with which he would seduce his beloved the better to redeem her. It even goes beyond the silliness of Scarlett O’Hara, whose name might be considered a pun on the Biblical Scarlet Whore of Babylon, were we to credit Miss Mitchell with acerb wit she displays nowhere else.

    While still in a relatively generous mood, let us credit Miss Mitchell and/or the scriptwriters with giving the title a dual meaning. “Wind” means the war, of course, particularly General Sherman’s incendiary expedition therein. It must mean rhetoric, too; if nothing else, the film exposes the silliness of Confederate orotundities. Judging from the antics at “Tara,” the old South had “gone with the wind” years before the rebels brought their case to Fort Sumter. Regrettably, the film wants us to admire not only admirable courage in a “lost cause” but the sham elegance of a “civilization”—so Miss Mitchell calls it—apparently compounded of little more than chattel slavery and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Worse, this anti-rhetorical film has an rhetorical afflatus of its own.

    For Hollywood substituted visual for verbal inflation, offering rather too much of something for everyone. We get, at first, grand photography of trivial persons—the O’Hara’s and the Wilkes’s—minor Dickens characters with Southern accents. We then see these persons impelled into a brutal context, also grandly photographed—which may distract us from their continued triviality. Spectacular improbabilities ensue. Finally, we see them during Reconstruction, repelling trashy whites and uppity blacks with the short sword of Scarlett’s petty Machiavellianism. (“If I have to lie, cheat, steal, or kill, I’ll never go hungry again!” she explains to God, Who has seen far more engaging purposes served by similarly dubious means). The photography remains grand.

    We are, I suspect, intended to learn something from this epic melodrama. The film’s makers conceive of illusion as a verbal phenomenon. Each character loves someone who doesn’t return that love, or who cannot return it openly, because words obscure passions, not only for the hearer but for the speaker. Even the self-styled realists, Rhett and Scarlett, manage to confuse each other in the end, with nothing but words.

    Done well, this might illuminate something. But Hollywood merely replaced deceptive words with deceptive images. The film is a big truck, a vehicle for carrying ‘scenes’; the ‘scenes’ are receptacles for ‘drama,’ that is, an effort to arouse sentiments. The film-makers load their truck with more and more drama, more and more scenes, and keep the tank filled with theatrical gas. Disasters multiply with each reel, and the last thirty minutes veritably teem with deaths, delusions, and broken hearts.

    I once watched the film with a woman of sense who endured it all until the Butler daughter died in a riding accident. “Everything happens to these people,” the lady murmured. One might say the same of Job and his family, but that plot had God, not Miss Mitchell, for its author, which tends to enhance its significance. With Miss Mitchell and the film-makers taking turns at the wheel, the rip only ends when their overloaded rig breaks down—prefigured by the horse that drops dead under Scarlett’s lash and symbolized perfectly by Scarlett herself, microcosm within the macrocosm, collapsed on the stairs, sobbing for the lost Rhett but truly in love only with her real estate. Love of land, of a thing that seems real and lasting, replaces love of unstable humans; love for something photographable overrides love of man, that verbal animal who cannot be captured whole in a picture. It is a Hollywood morality play, that is to say a contradiction in terms insofar as one can say that such a thing has terms.

    When Scarlett gets up to declaim, “Tomorrow is another day,” one may take it as a threat to film a sequel. And indeed, as the European philosophical tradition may consist of a series of footnotes to Plato, the Hollywood cinematic tradition may consist of a series of sequels to Gone With the Wind. André Malraux called the techniques of mass ‘culture’ “the arts of satiation”; a photograph, a representation of the surface of things, more nearly satiates us than words do because it shows the appetites what they want instead of trying to tell them about it. Words have a tendency to evoke reason (the Greek word for ‘word,’ logos, also means reason), or faith (“the Word”). Hollywood will not have them. At best, it can only celebrate the earth, beautiful but dumb.

    Israel on America’s Mind

    by

    Noam Chomsky: The Fatal Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Boston: South End Press.

    Sam B. Girgus: The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

    Peter Grose: Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

    The review was originally published in Chronicles of Culture. Vol. 9, No. 12, December 1985. Republished with permission.

     

    Most of the nations know all too clearly what they believe about Jews. Americans are less sure. This beneficial uncertainty inheres in the two major lines of thought that shape American souls: Christianity and modern political philosophy. Peter Grose writes that the Puritans “identified with the people of the Old Testament”; until 1787, Harvard College (which then promoted an identifiable morality) required its students to learn Hebrew. But a bit further south, in the name of Christianity, Peter Stuyvesant unsuccessfully tried to expel from Manhattan 23 newly-arrived Brazilian Jews. In general, “the early American was fixed in his belief that [for refusing to worship the Christ] the Jew had forfeited his full rights in Christian society.” Among the ‘moderns,’ Thomas Jefferson unhesitatingly extended his principle of religious toleration to Jews while privately lamenting, “among them ethics are so little understood.” John Adams endorsed the aspirations of Jews to return to Israel but imagined they might “possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians.” Among both Christians and ‘moderns,’ this desire to convert Jews was strong, exhibiting that mixture of esteem and hostility any proselytizer feels for potential proselytes.

    America’s contemporary ‘Left’ has not escaped ambivalence toward Jews and the Jewish state. Grose, Girgus, and Chomsky represent, respectively, the liberal, left-liberal, and leftist ideologies prevalent in late twentieth-century academia. Each writer illustrates the situation of world Jewry today not only by what he sees but by what he makes of what he sees.

    As the sort of liberal found on the Council of Foreign Relations and the New York Times, Grose presents the most accurate and least colorful of the three pictures. Although titled Israel in the Mind of America, his book is primarily a political history of Zionism in America between the First World War and the Israeli founding. As might e expected, during this period political Zionism—the desire for a Jewish state in Palestine—enjoyed the support of nowhere near the majority of American Jews, much less American Gentiles. American Jews wanted the right to settle peacefully in Palestine, but then as now not many wanted to exercise that right; as for Jewish sovereignty in the region, even fewer insisted on that. Ethnic, social, political, and religious divisions within American Jewry assured continued political incoherence. Typically, well-established “uptown” Jews of German origin preferred quiet, behind-the-scenes lobbying; they regarded Judaism as a religion without national/political content. Newly-arrived “downtown” Jews of Russian origin preferred political activism; to them, Judaism included nationality, if not national sovereignty.

    Louis Brandeis attempted to overcome these divisions by uniting Jews behind a particular form of Zionism. He added some of “downtown’s” political energy to the elitism of “uptown” in an effort to make Zionism a Jewish version of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Progressivism.’ This Zionism for middle-class liberals declined when World Zionist Organization leader Chaim Weizmann attacked it as still insufficiently political, too much a reflection of the American pragmatism that wants to ‘make the desert bloom’ without much caring who rules the desert. But Brandeisian Zionism lasted, albeit in different for. Brandeis and his allies left the Zionist movement and involved themselves in the Democratic Party politics that led, tortuously, to American support for the Jewish state in Palestine.

    The path proved tortuous in part because the State Department remained anti-Zionist up to and beyond Israeli independence, for motives ranging from anti-Semitism to timidity. (A young diplomat in Germany, George F. Kennan, best exemplified the latter when he advised against U. S. protest over Nazi anti-Semitism, “saying it would be an ineffective interference in another country’s internal affairs”—a refrain he would sing more than once in his long career. Kennan would later oppose Israeli independence out of fear of a Mideast war.) Unfortunately, the complacency of Americans, including American Jews, also added to the tortuousness of the path. The saddening fact is that only the Holocaust rallied American Jews to Zionism. As late as 1944, most Americans did not credit reports of mass extermination in Europe. Felix Frankfurter explained this most tellingly: “I do not have the strength to believe it.”

    Quiet diplomacy and behind-the-scenes lobbying could not work without public pressure, and this finally came through the energy of Rabbi Hillel Kook (better known at the time by his nom de guerre, Peter Bergson), who was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. Given his own ideology, Grose cannot help but undervalue the Jabotinsky branch, Zionism’s right wing; he is better on Silver, a brilliant political organizer who disdained courteous relations with Gentile politicians and, for that matter, with many fellow-Jews. Rudeness was what the circumstances required. Silver’s one blind spot was his failure to see and respond quickly to the disaster engulfing Jews in Europe. Nonetheless, “under Silver’s leadership, aroused and appalled by the ‘news from Europe,’ America’s Jews changed.” They learned to use the American political system. Congress and President Truman saw this and acted accordingly; political pressure caused such basically decent Americans to act with the vigor mere decency often lacks. While the major fight came ‘on the ground’ in Palestine itself, American support for Israel was indispensable, and it has endured for nearly four decades.

    Noam Chomsky condemns that support as one imperialism rewarding another. Had he written a generation earlier, he would not have done so, because initially the principal international ally of Israel, then firmly under the control of democratic-socialist Labour Zionists, was the Soviet Union, followed (after the 1956 Suez Canal War) by France. But in 1967, after crushing the massing Arab armies in the Six-Day War, Israel chose the United States as its main ally and arms supplier. That was enough for the American Left, which decided to back the Palestinian Arabs. Grose admires Israel but deplores Jabotinsky and his “zealot” follower, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; Chomsky, an anti-Communist left-winger, believes all Israeli governments infamous in their domination of ‘the Palestinians.’ In his view, Begin’s Likud Party descends from fascism, the Labour Party from Bolshevism. America’s “critical supporters” of Israel remind him of American Stalinists of the 1930s and 1940s. “[T]hose who exercise real power in the U. S.”—evidently, large business corporations and the CIA—find Israel a useful ally, he claims. He does not base this claim on any talk with oil company executives. Such criticism of Israel as heard, for example, during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon in response to terrorist attacks is merely an instance of “feigned criticism” that has “made an impressive contribution to indoctrination in the democratic societies.”

    Chomsky’s rhetorical legerdemain doesn’t end with that. Anyone who rejects Palestinian Arab claims—”rights,” in Chomsky’s vocabulary—to a state west of the Jordan River is a “racist.” Security concerns? He dismisses them by citing Israeli military prowess and by saying that the phrase, “a Palestinian state on the West Bank would be a dagger poised at the heart of Israel,” was “borrowed from Hitler, who used it with reference to Czechoslovakia.” With equal sobriety, he praises what he calls an “international consensus” held by Arabs, Soviet-bloc oligarchs, and oil-blackmailed West Europeans, for a return to Israel’s 1967 borders. Although he makes much of national self-determination, he cannot claim that the “consensus” in question arose without undo interference from other countries or native despots.

    Chomsky concedes that “Israel has been and remains a vibrant democracy on the western model for its Jewish citizens,” although his comments on news-media “indoctrination” must dilute his joy at such vibrancy. He also concedes that PLO terrorism is “surely to be condemned,” although it “hardly matched” that of the Israelis in Lebanon. He goes so far as to compare the PLO to the Zionists of the 1940s, without noting how ominous that must be in the blood-red light of his own polemic. Not only does he fail to explain how two ‘Zionisms’ could ever share the same territory peacefully, but he fails to show why two such regimes would be better than one. Governments generally are a bad lot, in Chomsky’s opinion, and those who attempt to defend them are “modern state-worshippers.” If states are so bad, why demand one for Palestinian Arabs? Would the PLO’s compaction of Islam and Marxism ever yield some for of anarcho-syndicalism that Chomsky might favor?

    The title of his concluding chapter, “The Road to Armageddon,” suggests a certain pessimism about all this. Israel “drift[s] towards internal social, moral, and political degeneration”—that is, towards the Bible. Israeli “Khomeinism” swells daily, as rabbis quote from “the genocidal texts” of the Torah. Chomsky expresses disgust at Israeli political scientist Mordechai Nisan who, in Chomsky’s words, would “put aside” the “Western Enlightenment” as a “heresy” against the Torah. Chomsky does not cite the Biblical texts in question, but presumably he refers to such teachings as the laws of warfare in Deuteronomy 20. While these are scarcely humanitarian in the modern, “Enlightenment” sense, they are not racist. Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites may be “utterly destroy[ed]” if they occupy the cities “the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance” (that is, cities located in the Biblical land of Israel) and if they refuse to make peace. This must be done “in order that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God.” Sin, not race, is the issue.

    Against this Biblical teaching, Chomsky praises the modern doctrine of “human rights, equal rights,” whereby Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs “have essentially equal rights within the territory of the former Palestine.” While the Enlightenment derives rights from what all men are, the God of the Bible judges men by what He wants them to do: live according to His regime, His “way.” The egalitarianism and toleration of the Enlightenment quells religious warfare by denying that religion is worth fighting for. But if it also tends toward denying that anything at all is worth fighting for, or living for, except comfortable self-preservation. Its reductionist materialism tends to undermine the foundations of its own doctrine of “human rights,” except as that may be defined in the least ‘righteous’ terms. This can do Chomsky’s formidable self-righteousness no good. Evidently, there are at least two roads to this Armageddon without revelation, and one of them passes very close to nihilism on the way.

    Sam B. Girgus describes the journey of certain Jewish writers in America whereby “Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America.” “America” is a compound idea consisting of “freedom, democracy, equality, and republicanism”; “in turn, Jewish writers, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea.” The two-sided metamorphosis amounts to a “new covenant,” one with rather less divine authority than the old one but welcome to a scattered and persecuted nation. The question one asks such writers must be, ‘Emancipation for what?” Unfortunately, Girgus can discover only the most general answers: “moral elevation” in “a competitive and brutal world,” egalitarianism, “consciousness.” His ideological hero is Brandeis, which explains some of the muddle; mixing in sexual ‘liberation,’ feminism, and ‘identity’-assertion obscures matters still more. For example, Girgus actually can countenance Norman Mailer’s puerile inflations of Marilyn Monroe and Gary Gilmore; “thus, Gary joins Marilyn as an important force in Mailer’s conception of the continuing powers of the American myth.”

    Occasionally, such misplaced reverence can help a reader discover something no one else has seen. While E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel hardly amounts to “a major work of contemporary literature,” Girgus does persuasively contend that most critics, across the political spectrum, failed to see past the novel’s treatment of the Rosenberg spy case. Like its Biblical counterpart, The Book of Daniel tells “the story of Jews in a foreign land.” But Doctorow’s Jewish martyrs “let their belief… become a new kind of orthodoxy that inflates their importance, disguises their vulnerability, and encourages a sort of moral myopia, which confuses immediate self-interest, personal status, and convenience with universal truth and justice.” To put it more harshly than Girgus does, Doctorow’s Rosenbergs are not true martyrs at all. Their son, Daniel, achieves a “fusion” of Jewishness and Americanness, finding an equilibrium in responsibility—as a father, and before the law. Because they require authority, neither fatherhood nor law comport easily with liberty and equality as (mis)interpreted in contemporary American politics. Girgus sees this and worries. In his postscript he finds both power and danger in Jewish “moral authority.” “Jews embody patriarchy,” and patriarchy is resented, according to Ellen Willis, one of the scholarly hens of feminism that peck Girgus’s deferential skull.

    However much one may deride his male feminism, a sort of out-of-wedlock uxuriousness, Girgus does uncover something important here. Radicalized or unqualified liberty and equality want no authority but mean nothing without it. That is, after an individual achieves liberty and equality, he has nothing left to do but defend them, and if he knows of nothing beyond them he may doubt them worth defending. Liberty and equality resent but need some authority. Brandeis and the other pragmatist-progressive intellectuals tried to solve this problem with the doctrine of pluralism. It proved unstable. Insofar as pluralism is coherent it is no longer pluralist, and insofar as it is pluralist it cannot cohere. America’s ‘Left,’ whether pluralist, Marxist, or merely indignant, cannot decide what it thinks of Jews because it cannot decide what it thinks of authority and liberty. In less abstract language, it cannot decide what it thinks of God and His relation to His most (as academics say) problematic creature. Or it decides, with Marx, not to think, not to ask.