Laurie Penny: “Stressful day. Whenever I feel shy, scared or am travelling alone, I put on this hat. It is the Cap of Fortitude.” pic.twitter.com/4ZrY8PrR
Einstein is no longer a Jew, according to Timmothy Lee
There’s a Facebook post circulating at my school, based on an old urban legend about Einstein. It’s some asinine dialogue between a young Einstein and a strawman atheist. Now, Einstein believed in God, but the story itself is false. I won’t burden everybody by quoting it; a moment of Google-fu will bear me out. However. The post currently circulating is not only ignorant theism (which pisses me off quite enough), it is casually, ignorantly antisemitic, asserting that Einstein was a Christian. It seems to me that to deny the ethnic and cultural heritage of a German Jew who managed to get out ahead of Hitler’s rise to power while simultaneously appropriating that man’s accomplishments to lend an air of respectability to one’s own argument is emblematic of contemporary American antisemitism: we don’t know and don’t care and we’ll work to forget all about it when we’re not using the legacy or current existence of non-American antisemitism to justify our own ends, such as they are.
I realize that the Jews are apparently the most popular religious group among young Americans, and Israel currently enjoys a privileged position in the American empire (not actually sure that using one people as a club against another isn’t racist against both, but fine). This situation is far preferable to violence against Jews (which still happens, in this country and in most others where there are Jews). It’s preferable to open discrimination. But posts like this one partake of a long and ugly tradition, and when I see people “liking” this shit I do panic a bit, because they don’t even realize what they’re doing.
[Edit: My use of “popular” in the second paragraph is ambiguous and misleading; mea culpa. I was thinking of the surveys that find many Americans regard Judaism favorably, not of actual rates of adherence.]
Decadence
0.
1. /noun/ a state of consummation
and of surfeit. lose the
concatenation in the tumult.
be alive, forget. use the powers
you’ve been given. exploit
someone. 2. there are two responses
to decadence: submit or destroy.
the two are not
so different that one can
be told from the other, although
for political reasons one
pretends. i am perhaps
a bit of a fascist too, sir,
my aristocratic airs flowing
and honor, probity the perfume
i wear. 3. does one not admire
my force, caught in this web?
i am not one to give in.
i lead the half-lives of the elements
out of my own decay. 4. don’t name,
don’t touch, don’t
delay. we are creatures,
surely as the leering dawn or
troglodyte summer. an
honorable man: that chains himself
by words, that thoughtful,
recklessly assiduous seeker of lies,
drowning Liberty’s aching self
in a bathtub of moral gin.
5. come here. i am alone, and
i wish to tempt myself so that
i may resist, for no God, for no
Reason, but that i am i amid
what need not be pain. 6. i, a
wound, wounded, making nothing
but distinction of my ancient
habits. words that cut, the
imposition of self, the line between.
i am a reaction, breathing. what
is there but resistance, after me,
the formless swarm? i do not speak
except to harm. i have to see,
and we see only where there is conflict. 7.
wanting you is like being attacked.
i raise my mirror shield, and
make my name, millennia shouting
the lie that i become.
i become. 8. the way i talk. like
\ dislike, i am punctilious,
pedantry my parlance, unperspicuous,
perspicacious, pertinacious. find
ways to live. this way is mine.
i guard it now, afraid
to stumble any further down it, and
so: four, two, three, who? 9. men,
companions, sighted, seeing war
and an end, the fools, their victory
will kill them all. they ride to me.
it spills up over them. they bring
immortality
10.
—Alberic van der Kloort, 1926, trans. from the Dutch by Mirabel Reyes, 1929.
