The American Monomania

I spent all day yesterday trying to talk to people about the video of the 3 Ivy college presidents saying that calling for a genocide of Jews is not against their code of conduct. And the tenor of the discussions showed me that people honestly don’t understand what’s going on.

Every person I spoke with kept asking, “But why do they hate Jews? Why do they like Palestinians more?”

The question shows that people don’t understand America. America is like one of my older colleagues who is very upset that VCRs were removed from the classrooms a decade ago and she can no longer show her video tapes in class. Whenever we go to lunch as a group, it doesn’t matter what we are talking about, she’ll find an opportunity to kvetch about her video tapes.

“These budget cuts are ridiculous!” we say.

“Yes!” she responds. “We spent all the money on fancy new equipment, and now there’s no money. If we’d stayed with the VCRs, like I always said, we wouldn’t have this problem now.”

“The election in Argentina was really something!” one of us exclaims.

“I used to show this great video about Argentina in class,” the older colleague replies didactically, “and now I can’t because there’s no VCR.”

This is a harmless, if tedious, eccentricity, and we sometimes mention all sorts of topics just to see how she’ll manage to bring them back to the subject of video tapes. And she does it effortlessly every time.

Americans are like that. They have a favorite idée fixe, and no matter what you bring up, they always refer it back to their unscratcheable itch. Nobody cares about Israel or Palestine. They are stand-ins for this American monomania. Those college presidents weren’t talking about Israel. They were deep in their version of my colleague’s VCR fixation.

People who are from here already know what I’m talking about but folks from elsewhere are still confused. The great American monomania is the race question. Yes, in Israel, Jews and Palestinians look the same. But as I said, nobody cares about Israel. In the US, Jews are white and anti-Jews are not. And you can’t side with white people over non-white people. In yesterday’s video, Elise Stefanik was asking the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn to side with whites against non-whites. And you can’t do that. It brings back America’s biggest intolerable affect, its biggest sacred wound.

I’m not from here, so I think Americans should get over it. My ancestors in Ukraine were bought, owned and sold, and I have no words to convey how over it I am. It’s a curious fact that means absolutely nothing to me. But… telling people to get over their foundational traumas is a waste of time. I deeply love and admire Americans and I very much hope they’ll calm down already. A lot is being thrown away over this unnecessary fixation. But it will take as long as it will take.

In the meantime, I think I’ll call my VCR colleague and ask her to lunch. After all, there are worse obsessions to have than hers.