Accidental Blogger

My immediate reaction to Jesse's piece on the killings in Tucson was to write a story about cow dung. While Wikipedia doesn't acknowledge it, I could swear that my Wren & Martin grammar & composition textbook in high school listed parabola as a figure of speech. There was no reaction to my parable, a counter to pleas against rushing to judgment and rounding up the usual suspects. Call me daft, but it was my way of saying: why not call a spade a spade? As readers of this blog may surmise, I shy away from saying what I suspect a thousand other people will say in a given situation. Preaching to the choir is not my style. My mind wanders where it will. Parabola appeals to me, hyperbole too on occasion, but I try not to indulge in ellipsis, the apparent mode among blog commenters.

While ruminating about the killings, mention of possible political motivations reminded me of "The Fixer". I remember reading the book when it came out in the sixties and not much else. What remains with me is the film version, with Alan Bates, playing the fixer, vehemently protesting his innocence, insisting frantically that he is apolitical. Yakov Bok, Bernard Malamud's uneducated eponymous handyman, is surely innocent of Aristotle's dictum that man is by nature a political animal. As the novel progresses, Bok is driven to hallucinatory madness by the degrading anti-Semitism of Tsarist Russia until we read, on the last page, "One thing I've learnt, he thought, there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed. Afterwards he thought, Where there's no fight for it there is no freedom. What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it. Death to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty!" Malamud doesn't clarify whether he is referring to men or Jews – I read both. We cheer for Bok as we cannot for Loughner, and Spinoza, despite his incendiary rhetoric, is still revered.

Politics was the sole link in my mind between Bok and Loughner and I was embarrassed at the tenuousness of the connection I had made. The thought would have died there had not Sarah Palin declaimed, the very next day, that "journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible." If that weren't enough to roil the waters, Alan Dershowitz, never one to miss an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, proclaimed that "There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim." There is a distinction to be made, he maintains, between blood guilt and blood libel. In his hasty defense of Palin he fails to recognize that while her rhetoric may have been directed at the political man and not the mad man, it is significant that Loughner, a recipient, is both. I cannot believe that 'blood libel' and 'blood guilt' have entered common parlance to such an extent that Palin didn't have to go burrowing in Aryan lore for words of provocation. They have now.

Blood guilt and blood libel of course are indistinguishable in "The Fixer". The terrorized Yakov Bok would not have cared for Dershowitz' niceties. The novel is a fictionalized retelling of the case against Menahem Mendel Beilis.  A Russian Leo Frank if you will, Beilis was falsely accused (the libel) of the ritual murder (the guilt) of a Christian boy. Happily, Beilis was acquitted; prudently, he left for Palestine, then lived out his days in the US. The fictional Bok is less fortunate and faces execution at the end of the book. Malamud, in describing his protagonist's despair, writes, "What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt." I admire Malamud's forthrightness. I wish I could believe that Palin is as punctilious as Dershowitz affects to be.

What are we - a nation of lawyers who insist on calling a spade an alleged perpetrator? Are ruminants called to account when they unburden themselves?