There's clearly something to what Garance is saying here though to be fair the afflication seems to me to be generalized among male writer/intellectual types rather than Jewish men per se. Still, the main psychological point remains that there's a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics.
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But You're Only a Toy
21 Oct 2007 10:14 pm
Comments (53)
I guess that would explain your being a warhawk.
The rest of us Jewish male intellectual types were busy reading Paul Krugman and others who, apparently unlike you, were confident enough of our sexuality to be against the war.
Yes, I don't think we can blame the Hebrew people for Glenn Reynolds.
There are a large number of American men who seem to derive their masculine self-worth from the projection of American military power overseas, viewed from the safety of their computer screen. If Jews are overrepresented in this clique, I suspect it's because they're overrepresented in academia and journalism.
Umberto Eco wrote a nice little paper a few years back that seems to explain these men pretty well.
Isn't Garance the supporter of Hillary who, among the top three Democratic candidates, is the most supportive of keeping troops in Iraq so that they may engage in risky acts of physical violence? What does she have to complain about then?
Garrance's strikes me as a staggeringly dumb point, made even more ridiculous if one looks at the ethnic/religious composition of hawks throughout American history. I suppose, if one tries to be fair, that she's extrapolating from the NPod neocon creation story: little Norm got beat up on the playground; little Norm grew up into big Norm, the weirdo progressive intellectual; big Norm snapped and turned into an aggressive warmonger to prove to the world, and himself, that he'll never be a victim again. And, in the Garrance telling of this story, Npod is a archetype for all the aggressive Jewish intellectuals she knows. Again, that's my most charitable reading of what otherwise is even crazier nonsense.
And, I would add, the takeaway point Matt suggests doesn't really seem to be Garance's point at all. Matt's is far more refined.
I think she was mainly complaining about Jewish men and reinforcing an old stereotype, the stuff about Iraq was just a tabula rasa for her projections.
When I asked her if she wanted to know why I tried not to date Jewish women, or what happened to sex after marrying a Jewish woman, she deleted my comment.
Stereotypes and gay bashing are pretty disgusting, especially coming from enlightened elites like Franke-Rute.
Imagine how tough it must be for these little clowns to appear butcher than Ann Coulter.
Shorter Garance: American Jews have no balls.
Shorter Matt: That's also true of nerdy men in general.
Judah Maccabee would be so proud.
When I asked her if she wanted to know why I tried not to date Jewish women, or what happened to sex after marrying a Jewish woman, she deleted my comment.
Errmmmm.... OK, I'll bite... Why don't you date Jewish women? I'm not trying to light a flame war, but that is a helluva loaded remark you made, and I'm curious.
As for the rest, marriage is notoriously hard on one's sex life among us non-Jews, too. There may be a joke or two about that....
That's an incredibly interesting reading, Juan.
The whole premise is that banging your chest and your keyboard to play "let's him and you fight" is a poor substitute for balls.
But if all you've got going, I guess I should grow some sympathy.
I have to make this anonymous because I fear getting flamed and I say this as the most semitophilic gentile you will ever meet, but...you're out of your mind if you don't think this is much more pronounced among Jewish men.
There's a whole "thing" among certain bookish Jewish men: with the talk about nuking Iran and, also, an extra amount of "hey, I'd do her" type stuff. At least half the men I'm friends with are Jewish and none of them is like this at all, but I almost never meet a bookish man who can slip into frat-boyese who isn't Jewish.
And I'd like to clarify one thing: Glenn Reynolds is a frat boy moron. What Garance is describing, I think, is interesting, intellectual men who inexplicably slip into frat boyese.
It's not like Glenn Reynolds waxes rhapsodic about Flaubert...and then drops a heh-indeedy about some grotesque act of torture. He's all heh-indeedy about grotesque acts of torture all the time
If we really dig down here, maybe the real issue here is that Jewish men who are inwardly frat boy idiots are socialized to act like cultured adults most of the time.
May I say that I am now officially very tired of reading about Jewish issues.
Could we go a day or two without referencing them just to see what it's like?
I think you need to visit a different echo chamber, Garuda.
When I asked her if she wanted to know why I tried not to date Jewish women, or what happened to sex after marrying a Jewish woman, she deleted my comment.
Errmmmm.... OK, I'll bite... Why don't you date Jewish women? I'm not trying to light a flame war, but that is a helluva loaded remark you made, and I'm curious.
I do. But Jewish women complain that Jewish men do not date Jewish women, presumably because Jewish men erroneously see Jewish women as overbearing, nagging, and not a whole lot of fun in bed. I think Jewish men complain that Jewish women don't date Jewish men too. Like TheGarance, lots of Jewish women want to settle down with a nice Jewish boy, but they want to go out with some hot studly goyishe bad boy.
There is a joke that sum up the feelings that Jewish men supposedly have about Jewish women.
Have you heard the one about how you stop a Jewish woman from having sex? You marry her.
Rebecca Honig Friedman feels the above joke is misogynistic which of course it can't be since the claim of the joke is that non-Jewish women are better in bed after marriage. I could see it being called self-loathing, much like TheGarance's remark. But she seems to address many of the issues on both sides.
I know most Jewish fathers agree: our daughters will not grow into JAPs. But supposedly JAP is also a dirty word we're not supposed to mention, even when we discover we married one.
Anyway, it's a whole megillah. Lots of meshuggenah involved from both sexes.
Garance,
How do you explain the armchair-bound state of contemporary Jewish hawks in contrast with the zeal of early Zionists to take up arms? Men like Vladimir Jabotinsky (a former journalist, no less) were originally bookish, no? It's possible to imagine Jabotinsky spilling coffee on himself in Vienna and getting winded after short bike rides, but then he takes up arms during the First World War and becomes a warrior. Why no similar transformation among today's Jewish hawks?
It's not as if one doesn't find manly Jews in Israel, and sometimes as refugees from the former Soviet Union; for that matter, 70 years ago, tough Jews were easy to find here in America: boxers, gangsters, football players. What is it about Jews or about America that makes American Jews so physically soft today? Whatever it is about America hasn't softened other white ethnics nearly as much.
70 years ago, tough Jews were easy to find here in America: boxers, gangsters, football players. What is it about Jews or about America that makes American Jews so physically soft today?
Harvard. 70 years ago American Jews weren't allowed in. Now they can be as soft as Kennebunkport/Greenwich Wasps.
Thank you, Ivy League.
Wait a second, I'm both personally wussy and politically pacifist.
Though I did once go to jail for a night for accidentally hitting a man in the face wit a plastic travel-bottle of shampoo.
So I guess I'm still OK to be pacifist. :-)
What is it about Jews or about America that makes American Jews so physically soft today? Whatever it is about America hasn't softened other white ethnics nearly as much.
This is the kind of effed-up talk that really isn't constructive. This is not about one ethnicity being "physically soft" and another being tougher. It's about bookish people getting all Ted Nugent about the Middle East. It's more common, I believe, among bookish Jewish men, but please don't go down the road of calling Jewish men "physically soft." To me, that's just offensive, not to mention stupid.
The context helps, Garance, though I wish it had been included in the text of the original post. Which, I should add, still reads as almost shockingly reductive. I genuinely don't mean to offend; I'm a fan. But I'm still kinda stunned by what you wrote. And, not to pick nits, but what you link to as "'the' historical Zionist critique of the" exile is actually just "a" critique. Elevevating it to singular status suggests that there's something like a consensus about the critique's validity. And that's just not so. As with all things Jewish, there are plenty of arguments to go around (see, I can trade in stereotypes also). Perhaps more important than that is this: where's the established link, other than in your theory, between that critique of Zionism and aggressiveness among Jewish men living in the diaspora?
I think those famous Zionists Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Joel Beinin, Tony Kushner, Harold Pinter, etc... might disagree with this premise altogether.
That's real intellctualism/bookishness, not the National Review/Weekly Standard cartoon variety, anyway.
"I think those famous Zionists Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Joel Beinin, Tony Kushner, Harold Pinter, etc... might disagree with this premise altogether."
Bringing up that lot raises a different question: why do lefty intellectual Jews like Chomsky, Zinn, and Pinter hate America so much, when it has treated Jews better than any other country on earth?
Well, not being Jewish, and being a computer nerd, and yet having done time for armed bank robbery and potential terrorism, while still not having had a fist fight since 1968 (and I lost that one, too), perhaps I can weigh in.
I suspect that while some of this has to do with overcompensating for not being an "alpha male", the overcompensation itself doesn't necessarily translate immediately into war mongering. I think that depends on one's previous intellectual conditioning or predisposition.
I spent time in Federal prison where "alpha" and "beta" has some real physical meaning. But in the joint there is also something called "heart". Some small guys were respected because it was known that if you messed with them, they would never stop trying to take you apart no matter how bad you hurt them. They would be left alone.
It reminds me of a scene in a Chuck Norris movie, where he's trying to teach a young black kid karate. His character is a professional karate champion. He tells the kid that it's a matter of "attitude." The kid wants to spar for real, so they go at it, and Chuck pops the kid in the stomach and doubles him over. The kid is totally wasted. Chuck kneels down and tells him again that it's all about "attitude."
In other words, it's more mental and genetic predisposition than physical. So you can be an intellectual and be aggressive or you can be an athlete and not be aggressive.
Human behavior is on a Bell Curve and covers an incredibly wide range of behavior. Evolution presumably has selected for certain traits being bound together. I doubt that intellectualism and excessive aggression are bound together normally. But that doesn't mean you can't be intellectual and excessively aggressive.
There's also the difference between "aggression" in an interpersonal sense, and "aggressive" in the sense of projecting your character and your personality. As Bruce Lee used to say, you can be "aggressive" without being the "aggressor". You can project your ego out towards someone else without necessarily wishing them harm even if you're defending yourself physically against them. This is the essence of martial arts - being able to control and use the fear and aggression that you have natively in you effectively and not letting it control you.
However, the bottom line is that humans operate on a primate hierarchy system. It's genetically wired, and there's nothing to be done about it but understand it and try to control it. Martial arts offers that kind of training. Proper military training attempts to establish that kind of control and spiritual discipline, although the emphasis in modern times is mostly on obeying orders and the like.
I think the aggressiveness one sees in neocons is really not related to simple theories of "I was beat up by black kids when I was young", or "my Jewish mother made me unmanly." I think it has to do much more with issues of tribal identity and a propensity to believe in statism as a solution to all things. It's definitely based on fear, but that fear is wider based than simple personal experience. It's the basic fear that most primates operate under.
As I've said many times before elsewhere, humans operate on the following basis: "If you're right, I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm dead - and that can't be allowed. So I'm right and you're wrong - and I'll kill you to prove it if I have to."
This attitude is pervasive in humans to one degree or another. It arises in all situations. But in alpha males it is greater by definition. And the greater your tribal identity, the stronger it is, especially with regard to those outside your tribal identity.
This is why those who actually are "outside" the usual social categories, such as anarchists like Chomsky, are much less prone to be war mongers. Which is not to say that anarchism hasn't produced a lot of people willing to engage in violence. But it is not the violence of the alpha male or the wannabe alpha male, it's the violence of those who are outside of the primate hierarchy and thus unalterably opposed to it, because they are bound by their intellectual rectitude to their beliefs, and their alienation from the primate hierarchy, which is both freeing in some sense and limiting in others. There is also the factor that the more alienated you are from a system, the more you can justify violence against the system. Whether than violence is justified logically or an effective approach is another issue.
So for Jews with a special attachment to their ethnicity or religion, and an increased level of either alpha male traits or alpha male envy, it's not surprising that war mongering surfaces - especially when they adhere to a "war philosophy" like Strauss's.
Matt's second point - "that there's a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics" - is unclear to me. Is he saying that the equating is incorrect, or is he saying that those who do the advocating are equating that with their own personal characteristics?
If it is the latter, well, it would easy to demonstrate that it isn't true (when it isn't true.) Just dump them in Federal prison or some other physical situation and see how long they last. In other words, it will obviously be a farce in many case, at least.
If it's the former, that the equating is incorrect, then he is correct. Because advocating violence by others demonstrates the opposite - that one has no courage and strength. So one shouldn't assume that advocating violence by others demonstrates anything at all with regard to the personal characteristics of the one advocating.
Here's one other point. Just because you don't get into fist fights with people doesn't mean you aren't dangerous. Some people are brawlers. Some people are assassins. The two aren't the same.
I won't get into a fist fight with you because I'd probably lose. I'd rather put a bullet in your head from 500 yards with a sniper rifle or blow you up with an IED. It's much more intelligent. As they say, "I'm not a chimp! Use a tool!"
That's why I appreciate the martial art of ninjutsu. The philosophy there is: if you have an enemy, make him her friend, so you don't have to fight him. But if circumstances will make him your enemy anyway, make him your friend - then poison him to diminish the threat.
One could make a pretty good foreign policy out of that concept that would eliminate most wars.
(Historical note: Not that the ninjas ever managed to do that effectively in their own case - which is why they ended up being mostly wiped out. But not entirely wiped out. Like the Jewish Diaspora, which was the best thing that ever happened to Judaism, had they the wit to see it, the ninja martial art is now world wide and will never die out.)
The previous post strikes me as the single finest monument to late-night crazy that I've ever seen. And I say that with all due respect to the author, who may be a ninja. But is not Jewish.
A Jewish ninja?
Now that would make a good movie.
Stupids, where did I say anything about "Jewish ninjas"?
I contributed some basic facts about human psychology that were relevant to the post concerning whether Jewish intellectuals are war mongers.
Frankly, I probably should not have wasted my valuable time, since who really gives a shit whether some Jewish woman doesn't understand basic male - or even human - psychology, even of her own ethnicity? Or that our resident Jewish blogger doesn't understand it either? Big surprise.
Was this supposed to be some kind of Jewish in-joke? Should we call Don Rickles to explain it to me?
If you morons are incapable of reasoning at even a basic level, bow out of posting, please. I'm trying to contribute to some understanding here. Although I don't know why, as there seems to be less than a one percent chance that anyone reading this blog has the intellectual sophistication of Don Rickles...they certainly don't have any better attitude...
This is all bullshit, fellas. Stereotype/psychobabble nonsense. There's nothing Jewish about being an intellectual nor there's any "remarkable tendency" "among male writer/intellectual types". There are real structural reasons for some specifically American "intellectuals" to do war-mongering that they do. There's a lot of money in it.
Too bad the peace industry pays its pundits so poorly, eh?
At this stage, Jewishness and frat-boy-ness and hawkishness are all mainly elaborate forms of role-playing. The ostentatious displays of Yiddishisms, the trotting out of "I'd hit that", or the more sad and ridiculous things like "A Gathering of Eagles" are all instances of inauthentic self-fashioning. Same with evangelical Christianity in the Republican presidential campaign. The post-9/11 era has turned foreign policy into the new form of identity politics.
This is, sort of, the flip-side of the "chickenhawk" scenario in blogging. Insofar as if someone says "Let's go to war with Bermuda! They hate our freedoms and are loaded with nukes!" then sooner or later someone will show up to ask "Why haven't you volunteered to paradrop over Bermuda? Obviously your ideas are all wrong."
However, nobody sitting at a keyboard suffers from promoting ideas that will get other people killed. There is nothing macho about it. Nor is there anything cowardly about it. It has nothing to do with courage at all. If someone thinks it has something to do with courage, that person doesn't know what courage is.
I've never been close friends with a practicing Jewish male, but I've had 3 close Jewish male friends. (One was a Unitarian, one was into Tantric sex, and one was just a normal agnostic.) All had a PhD. All were heterosexual. None were particularly macho. All were liberal. None were "more liberal than thou" or even talked about politics much beyond despising NixonFordReaganBush and whatever war for the survival of Democracy we were fighting at the time.
Maybe this nebbish-warrior thing is an East Coast rite of passage.
It does seem that one has to strain statistically to make the original point here work. It is true that there are some academic intellectual types who are hawkish to the point of comedy. But I don't see any indication that academic intellectual types are more likely to be hawkish to the point of comedy than, say red-neck former high school football players. Maybe it just seems funnier and so stands out more when the intellectuals act this way.
And it is true that there are more war mongering articles writen by academic intellectual types than by red-neck former high school football players, but I assume no explanation for the lack of significance of this is needed.
Similarly, while jews tend to be disproportionately represented among the academic intellectual community compared with overall population, and not surprisingly when jews look for militaristic heroes abroad they look to Israel, it is not clear that there is any real statistical difference here. One finds jews across the spectrum as far as attitudes towards war, and Likud style politics.
So it is hard to see any significant claim about personally non-aggressive jews, or bookish people in general, that is not at root facile.
I don't know if being nebishy is likely to make anyone more hawkish by proxy, but I do think that what has happened in a very mixed country like the U.S. is that people of various ethnicities fall into roles, so that it's absolutely no illusion that say, Jews are disproportionately intellectuals, or some other group might be disproportionately entertainers, or another disproportionately blue collar workers or cops or whatnot. We get very offended at the thought of it, because it is a somewhat negative consequence of mixing (and on balance, I'm way more in favor of mixing than not), but just because something offends us, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
If you live in a society that is homogenous, people like you have to take up all the social niches, they are the athletes, the intellectuals, the artists and entertainers, the doctors, the people on welfare, the slackers, the shopkeepers, and the financiers. Not saying that's good or bad, but it's just different from how things tend to function in many parts of the U.S. I dunno, Jews, not having had their own country until very recently, in historical terms, have spent much more time being in niches, and that's probably still part of their cultural identity. Must still feel new to see Jewish cops, soldiers, delinquents etc, in great numbers.
As I pointed out at Garance's, Asian men in America have a stereotype very similar to that of Jewish men - nerdy, non-Alpha with women, lousy at sports, and overall just not very masculine - yet that doesn't seem to have translated into politicial hawkishness.
Surely this is a good time to revisit Calvin Trillin's great poem "Richard Perle: Whose fault is he?":
Consider kids who bullied Richard Perle--
Those kids who said Perle threw just like a girl,
Those kids who poked poor Perle to show how soft
A mamma's boy could be, those kids who oft-
Times pushed poor Richard down and could be heard
Addressing him as Sissy, Wimp or Nerd.
Those kids have got a lot to answer for,
'Cause Richard Perle now wants to start a war.
The message his demeanor gets across:
He'll show those playground bullies who's the boss.
He still looks soft, but when he writes or talks
There is no tougher dude among the hawks.
And he's got planes and ships and tanks and guns--
All manned, of course, by other people's sons.
I know there's plenty of evidence of bribes Perle received from various arms manufacturers, but is there any evidence that he was bullied as a child?
After he wrote the poem, Trillin was contacted by people who knew Perle as a child. They confirmed that Perle had indeed been bullied. Poets have a way of getting to the heart of a subject.
Richard Steven Hack,
I was into Ninjitsu too, when I was 14. It was a fad in the 1980's -- there was even a network TV series about ninjas called "The Master". I don't know how popular ninjitsu is today. A couple of soi-disant ninjas competed in the earliest UFC competitions in the mid-1990's, when they were bare knuckle. They got beaten, brutally. Maybe they needed poison to compete.
BTW, Garance isn't Jewish, as far as I know. I think she's mainly German ethnically.
Sorry, RSH, I really thought you were kidding. And I was bowing gracefully before your humor stylings. If you were serious, though, um, I'll just, er, back away politely if it's all the same to you.
in case anybody still cares about the thread: all of this could be seen in context of the 100+ yr old image of the strong/tough Jew--here's a recent academic study which turns out to have a web discussion site:
(if you prefer things less academic, just read, say, Bellow...it's all in there)
Actually, I am Jewish.
and I am not getting laid.
jews are more against the war than the general public (which eviscerates any generalizations people are making on this subject)
Monkeys beating their chest, pretending to be silverbacks is as old as creation.
Course when real silverbacks enter the camp the little monkeys high tail it up the trees.
My observation is that Jews as a group have more problems with their alpha ego than others....probably due to their embrace of their victimhood history. In general I would say that all people who secretly see themselves as inferior or weak compensate as voyeurs of violence.
The tough neos and Israelis?...well, sooner or later a sivlerback is gonna come along and those tree branches are gonna be very crowded with little neo monkeys.
"The tough neos and Israelis?" Areb you equating neo conservatives with Israeli citizens or just 'tough' Israelis?
And now the final question in this final round in the World Series of
QUIEN ES MAS MACHO
Quien is mas macho?
Tucker Carlson
or
Bill Kristol
Glenn Greenwald has been all over this argument (taking support for war as a sign of personal courage, especially by those who lack the masculine virtues that they revere), for instance, here, here, and here.
"The tough neos and Israelis?" Areb you equating neo conservatives with Israeli citizens or just 'tough' Israelis?
Posted by Gary C. | October 22, 2007 5:49 PM
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am talking about the loud mouth neos and US Israelis who are so eager for US boys and girls to fight wars for their agendas and for US taxpayers to pay for it.
I don't know anything about average Israelis, I assunme Israel has just as many shriveled monkey penis cases as we do in the US.
and I am not getting laid.
Try it without the cheap shots and gratuitous insults towards men and Jews and better luck next time.
Actually, I am Jewish.
Grin. The biography on your site talks at some length about your ethnic German origins. In conjunction with above, said biography is therefore either (1) deceptive or (2) based in the conceit that the Jewish people does not, in fact, exist. Which is, well, deceptive.
(Putting aside the other logical possibility that (3) you were so enamoured of Jewish doctrine that you converted and joined said people out of your great enthusiasm for nebbishy overcompensating hawkery and other stereotyped psychobabble. But, then, what are the chances?)
JMS | October 22, 2007 9:49 AM: We get very offended at the thought of it, because it is a somewhat negative consequence of mixing (and on balance, I'm way more in favor of mixing than not), but just because something offends us, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
But perhaps in fact it doesn't exist. What does exist is a bunch of stereotypes in your head and every time one of them gets confirmed it gets reinforced, that's all.
Plus, in the case of Jewish stereotypes, there's still some residual antisemitism (not to mention philosemitism, which is pretty much the same thing) around which causes people to be labeled as Jews when they really aren't.
For example, Howard Zinn is identified as a Jew earlier in this thread. Does he consider himself Jewish in any meaningful sense? I have no idea, but I doubt it.
Garuda:
May I say that I am now officially very tired of reading about Jewish issues.
No, it's interesting. As the football/lacrosse playing-type goy, who happens to be a chickenhawk, I didn't really know many Jews growing up, but became friends with some in college. And it turned out my mind and personality were pretty much like Larry David's, which I don't know if that's stereotypically Jewish, but its seems his sense of humor sort of is. And I don't have no balls, but merely long balls.*
Also always liked Woody Allen films where others in my social milieu did not necessarily.
The infatuation with torture, noncombatants, etc, is all fratboyish. Perhaps many chickenhawks are anti-bully? Anti-dictator? Perhaps many of the Likudniks are overcompensating for decades of bullying, i.e., pogroms, Holocaust, etc.?
The Irish were bullied pretty bad by the British and they turned psychotic. (See The Departed).
the problem I have with some of the pacifist left (Jewish and non-Jewish) is that they couldn't write something like the following b/c it puts Bush in a good light:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/19/AR2007101902276.html?nav=rss_opinions/outlook?nav=slate
-------
*See the latest Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yeah, too much information...
Comments closed November 04, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
I dunno.
It sometimes crosses my mind when spending time with certain friends that there seems to be an inverse relationship between the intensity of their sexual deviance and the extent to which they scan as traditionally masculine, and that this is particularly true for those gay men who continue to suffer from being in the closet. Thankfully, such men today make up just a fraction of the gay population, but you can still find them, intense sexual addicts who are prone to wide stances and the Congressional page program.
Not that all gay men are perverts. This is just a kind of version of Garance's point, writ small, and restricted to a tiny percent of America.
In fact, in an update, I don't know why I mentioned this in the context of gays at all.
Hm.
Posted by Joel | October 21, 2007 10:55 PM