The Arrogance of Ignorance

Years ago — like twenty or more — I read about a survey given to Harvard students. It was about a range of common knowledge kinds of questions. My favorite question/response: What is Chernobyl? The answer came back just as you might have expected: Cher’s first name. Now let’s give credit to this student for pulling a creative, maybe even obvious, answer out of his/her derriere. Still, I recall thinking at the time that this did not bode well for the future of higher education, the United States of America, or the human race more generally. Alas, my bingo card filled up, having been right on all counts.

Fast forward a little bit, to the halcyon days of the Trump administration, when diehard supporters would show up at this rallies bearing signs and wearing t-shirts that bragged: I’d rather be Russian than a democrat. Now I don’t think it’s kind to take candy from a baby, but it sure would have been tempting to ask if they knew where Russia was. Pick a continent, even. But like I said, I wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone. So let’s stick with some facts: these folks would rather be citizens of a repressive police state run by a homicidal megalomaniac, a nation that assassinates its own citizens at home and abroad, if they dare challenge the government; a nation that has one of the lowest life expectancy rates for men, especially, because really, who wants to live long in a country where your alternative to being poor, undereducated, and underemployed, is being drafted into the war against Ukraine so you can die a miserable death, or survive, and live with a hideous injury. All for the glory of Putin. And a very, very, puny pension for your wife.

But let’s not limit idiocy to one side of the ideological aisle. Right wingers in America are prone to fabricating a reality of their choosing, but they are not alone. Slavery was good vocational training, say some elected officials from the Neanderthal right in America. Or it wasn’t a thing at all. I stopped following the arguments when the lies got too complicated to follow. But I digress. As I said, idiocy, and pride in it, is not the sole domain of fools on the right. Or as the song goes, more kindly than I’d ascribe to either side here, “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…”

On to the “clowns” to the left of me, though they are deadly serious in their righteous arrogance about being wrong. And I do mean deadly serious. These are not folks who take criticism kindly. Which, by the way, is true of all extremists. Criticism really irks them, like you’re messing with their mojo, or something. But what it really is is this: when you have no honest argument, and you rely instead on lies, distortions and name calling, it really, really pisses you off when folks point that out. True on both right and left. And don’t get me started on how neither group has a sense of humor. Think of how much less death and suffering there’d be in the world if these fools could learn to laugh at themselves. Don’t hold your breath. Laughter and fundamentalism go together about as well as Donald Trump and marital fidelity.

So, to the left side of the crazy aisle. Sadly, this side has a kind of righteous rage that makes the right sometimes look kind of tame. Or maybe it’s that they like to use cool props, like wrapping their faces in checkered keffiyehs, the sign of true revolutionaries, you know the ones who only drink cold brew from woke coffee shops. Or recently discovered farm to table food, as if the rest of us had no idea that food grew on farms. Or only eat vegan and put almond milk in their coffee, because cows are bad for the earth, no matter the volume of water used to grow almonds. Also, super big on dividing us into boxes. The way it seems to go is: All white people bad. All non-white people sinless saints.

Now if you actually live in the world, you know this is an especially stinky form of horseshit, but America leads the world lately in people willing to be told how catastrophically awful they are, and always have been, by people they don’t know, have never met, and who could themselves be shitty human beings, but for the good fortune of having been put in the sinless box.

Never mind the hideous things people of color have done to each other all over the world since the dawn of time. And in the present moment. You can check slave labor to build soccer stadiums in Qatar, if you want a very recent example, or go back a bit farther to the Arab militias, the Janjaweed, who raped, pillaged, plundered, and slaughtered their way through Darfur. Or the Arab slave traders, working in league with African tribes, who captured and sold to white Christian slave traders from Europe, their tribal rivals.

There is a very long list of things white Europeans have done that are heinous and deserve condemnation, everything from colonialism in the New World, to forced conversions there, to the Crusades, the Inquisitions, autos-da-fe, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, and so on.

But this childish notion of all white people bad, all people of color good is a fantasy of intersectionality and solidarity that leads directly to the hilarity of signs like Queers for Palestine, something no actual queer person in Palestine would be crazy enough to display, for fear of arrest, torture, death, or all three.

When it comes to the Middle East — but only when it involves Israel — righteous stupidity is on raging display. The horrific events of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas terrorists brutally, mercilessly, and gleefully slaughtered men, women, children, babies, elderly and whole families, are ones seared with agony into the hearts and souls of decent human beings everywhere. But for a subset of humanity, October 7th was a cause for celebration, a joyous occasion marking the triumph of resistance.

Kind of interesting to think about what kind of courage it takes to slaughter unarmed civilians, children in their beds, babies in their cribs, etc. But this is not about courage. This is about the noble people of the oppressed non-white world taking it to the oppressors, the white Jews of Israel. And of the rest of the world. Because if Israel gets a cold, pneumonia spreads among all Jews.

I can’t and will never want to explain the heinous thing that resides inside the bodies and brains of those who celebrate human atrocity. I’m not interested in parsing the Jew hatred they mask behind their verbal diarrhea of ‘resistance’ ‘liberation’ ‘justified military action’ and other things that offend the minds and hearts of those among us who know that words matter. And have meaning. And because they do, the left-wing haters abuse them, intentionally. It is the mirror image of right wingers pretending gun ownership and use makes us more free. In this instance, the left lobs words like grenades, intending for them to explode among global opinion makers, tik tokers, and others for whom language is just a thing to distort. Another thing to lie about.

Which is how you get the keffiyeh crowds on college campuses and elsewhere screaming about a “genocide” in Gaza. Not sure how you get to that from a 1967 population in Gaza of 350,000, that is now 2.3 million. I wasn’t a math major, but that’s a pretty hefty growth rate. Which makes the accusation of genocide by Israel either a grotesque lie, or the most unsuccessful genocide in history. However, if you want to find a successful genocide, look at the Holocaust. The global population of world Jewry has yet to recover even to its pre-Holocaust level, and likely never will.

I don’t mean to hurt the feelings of angry, self-righteous, solidarity minded, coddled, comfortable, arrogant imbeciles on campuses across America and in the streets and on the campuses of Europe. I mean if you really are determined to call what is factually, objectively, and truthfully not a genocide a genocide, who am I to stand in your way?

If you get the world you seem to desperately want, that infamous river to sea thing, good luck with that. Your pronouns won’t be honored, your pansexual identity not acknowledged, your queerness mocked — or worse — your piercings sneered at, your ignorance indulged (but only for the cause, of course), and your demands for equality looked at as the rantings of unhinged infidels. Oh, and your attachment to freedom of speech? Just try that one on the streets of Gaza, or Palestine, or Damascus, or Cairo, or…

Finally, in a sea of awfulness, of bloodthirstiness. and of metastasizing Jew hatred, I want to share two final thoughts. To the young black woman filmed on her college quad scrawling her chalk declaration “From the River to the Sea” without knowing which River, or which Sea, oh my goodness, a whole bunch of folks have failed you. And to her and to everyone else, if your entire agenda is about hate, destruction, and vilification, you are a discredit not only to the people you claim to advocate for, but to the entire human race.