The advice-to-young-people racket is utterly shameless. Even William Burroughs gave in to the temptation, proving that the best advice-to-young-people may be to ignore all advice-to-young-people. Unless, of course, it comes from The Stranger, Seattle’s ornery, Pulitzer-prize-winning alternative weekly, whose annual back-to-school issue confronts incoming freshpeople with all manner of weird, ironic, and occasionally even useful advice on life, love, and… oh yes, sex.

This year, they decided to go for broke and include religion, and who else would they turn to but the Accidental Theologist? — who obligingly came up with ten questions for “young people” to ask if they’re trying to choose a religion:

There’s a back story to this post.  I was asked to write it yesterday by Seattle’s alternative paper The Stranger.  Specifically, they asked for some “historical perspective” to singer Macklemore’s perverse twist on wardrobe malfunction onstage last Friday night, when he decided it’d be cool to perform in what’s sold in variety stores as a “Sheik/Fagin mask,” huge hook nose and all.

When the shit hit the fan, the Seattle-born Macklemore said his get-up was merely a “witch mask” and there was nothing anti-Semitic about it.  This morning, Tuesday, he finally issued an apology: “I had no idea,” he said.  And later this morning, despite huge numbers of comments on its coverage, The Stranger decided that “this story is over.”

I disagree, so am posting what I wrote right here:

———

For years I thought of myself as a wandering Jew. I moved not just between cities but between continents — London to Jerusalem to New York to Seattle. It was as though I fit the stereotype of the “rootless cosmopolitan.” Yet while I now seem to have become rooted after all, or at least as rooted as anyone whose houseboat floats on forty feet of water can be, I still can’t help thinking of rootless cosmopolitanism – anti-Semitic code for shiftless, untrustworthy, disloyal Jewishness — as a rather attractive existential state of being. And I still romanticize the idea of the wandering Jew, even though I know it began as an anti-Semitic legend in Christian Rome.

The story goes that a Jewish cobbler wouldn’t allow Christ to rest on his stoop during the trek to Golgotha, for which Christ condemned him to wander the world for eternity, with no rest. The Crusaders brought the legend back to England in the 12th century, where it was embroidered and expanded, and where this particular wandering Jew was born several centuries later. I’d be the only Jew in a Catholic convent school whose nuns referred to me as “the Hebrew girl” — with a certain pause before the word Hebrew, as though to emphasize that they were using a delicate euphemism. At least they refrained from telling me that I’d killed Christ (or given him no rest). Instead, they told me I was going to limbo, which seemed to be a kind of mezzanine between heaven and hell. To their horror, I kind of liked the idea of limbo.

This was only a few years after the end of World War Two. No, I’m not going to bring the six million in here; I have no desire to contribute to the obscenity of invoking their memory in support of current argument. My point is that despite its anti-Nazi stance, England was still deeply anti-Semitic. Which is not surprising given that it was where the “blood libel” first burst into murderous flame.

The blood libel was a medieval urban legend about Jews ritually slaughtering Christian boys and draining their blood to mix into Passover matzos (I kid you not). It spread like wildfire. Thousands of Jews were burned alive and otherwise massacred (and several boys declared saints) until Jews were expelled completely from British shores in 1290, to be allowed back only in 1655. In the light of which, Queen Isabella of Spain’s much better-known expulsion of Spain’s Jews in 1492, followed by that of all Spain’s Muslims thirty years later, seems pretty par for the course.

The two most infamous Jews in all of literature were created by Englishmen strong and true: Shylock in the 16^th century and Fagin in the 19^th. Both were portrayed as hunch-backed, lecherous-lipped, greedy-eyed, and of course, flamboyantly hook-nosed (a word that is inherently prejudicial — in Arab countries, it’s known as an eagle’s nose, and has traditionally been considered a sign of nobility). But neither Fagin nor Shylock were new creations. They were personifications of cartoon stereotypes that had become widespread with printing. The Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer didn’t invent the style, but it did help propagate it so widely that it still features on hysterically anti-Semitic websites from the USA to Poland to Yemen. It appeared in Egyptian schoolbooks and newspapers for years. And it turned up with an ironic twist in Denmark in 2006 with the publication of cartoons caricaturing Muhammad and all Muslims as terrorists, all with the “Sheik/Fagin nose” sold so amusingly as a mask at party stores. One Semite apparently looks pretty much like another.

Mild-mannered Seattle might seem a sweet respite from all this. Yet it was in Seattle that I first heard someone say “he Jewed me down” — quite blithely, with no self-consciousness, as though it were perfectly normal. Here that someone tried to make me her token Jew (“Wow, I’ve never had a Jewish friend before,” she said, and she didn’t after either). Here that a former Catholic schoolboy who didn’t realize I was Jewish (“that’s Jewish, you don’t look funny” went the old music-hall joke) assumed that I’d join him in changing the words of the carol “Joy to the world” to “Fuck all the Jews.” Here that I get a finger-pointing “you people” or “you Jews” as I’m held responsible for the actions of an Israeli government I criticize far more bitterly than those to whom the accusatory fingers belong. And it’s here, in the comments on The Stranger’s coverage of the Macklemore affair, that I find all the usual anti-Semitic code words: “touchy,” “thin-skinned,” and that old standby “pushy.”

Seattle is a young city, almost an ahistorical one compared to Jerusalem, and this ahistorical sense has allowed me to find calm writerly perspective on what happened halfway round the world in the Middle East of fifteen hundred, two thousand, even three thousand years ago. I’m immensely grateful for that. But could an absence of historical awareness just be another way of saying innocence? Or should that be ignorance?

When the subject of literary fraud came up in conversation not long ago, for instance, I mentioned the most infamous example of all – “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” And was stunned to realize that nobody had heard of this screed, which first surfaced in Russia in 1903. Purportedly the record of a meeting of leading Jews plotting to take over the world, it’s a classic demonstration of the ornate convolutions performed by the paranoid-conspiratorial mind, and has thus proved remarkably resilient to all evidence that it’s a fiction. Hitler made much use of it, of course, and America’s own tainted automotive titan Henry Ford had half a million copies printed and distributed in the 1920s. You can still find the full text on anti-Semitic websites, while print versions, complete with the usual hook-nosed illustrations, continue to sell steadily in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Perhaps Seattle is a bit less innocent after Macklemore’s now infamous twist on the idea of wardrobe malfunction. Or perhaps not. I opt to believe him when he says that he had no idea of the anti-Semitic stereotype, and can understand his initial defensiveness — nobody likes to have their unconscious biases paraded in public. But as he now acknowledges, it’s precisely this no-idea-ness that’s the problem. And that may be true for Seattle as well as for him.

We pride ourselves here on being progressive and tolerant. That’s part of our civic image. But tolerance is an ambiguous ideal. You only need to tolerate what – or whom — you don’t really accept. Stereotypes are inherent in the idea of tolerance, and until we can get beyond them, our proud progressiveness runs the risk of being… well,  just another mask.

Hallmark card lovers, avert your eyes.

This piece by the transcendentally gifted Rebecca Brown is in the Valentine’s Day issue of The Stranger.  It’s called “Make Clean Our Heart Within Us,” and it makes me laugh and makes me want to cry and kind of blows me away.

Bleach it. Scrub it. Sandblast or power-wash it, hose it down. Dip it in lye.

Please, be my guest.

Nothing I have tried has worked: It’s crusty, brown, and scabbed. A lump. It has been bit into, chewed up, gnawed on, spat ou—no—wait—not “out.” It can’t get out. It’s stuck inside. Beneath “‘dem bones” and skin and other stuff.

Tear open the skin, dig in and grab and break ‘dem bones and yank. Do it by hand.

Or leave it in and nuke it. I don’t care. I gave up that malarkey long ago.

It’s weirdly shaped. Like an octopus with not enough arms and also twisted with osteoporosis. Or a plastic child’s toy such as a baby shoe, doll, or action figure melted in the sun in that top part of the back of the car, made slowly soft and droopy, and burning, hot—it hurts to touch—until after the sun has gone away and it cools to a hardened blob.

One often thinks of it as red, but maybe it’s not if the blood’s seeped out. Maybe it’s kind of pinkish, even white in some places, almost translucent, as pretty as a pearl, almost. Except for what it is.

Did it look worse when beating? Like a gelatinous clod of something from a grade B horror movie (such as the mushrooms then the people, in Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People [1963], directed by Ishiro Honda, who also did the Godzilla movies, in which, after a storm at sea, a boat washes up on a mysterious island. Shipwrecked together are a wealthy playboy, a professor-psychologist, a famous sexy female singer, an ingenue, a couple of others, and of course the skipper of the ship and his loyal sailor, just like on Gilligan’s Island which debuted on American television the following year. Who giveth unto whom? Who taketh what?), pulsating, throbbing, burbling, its slick or dull or smooth or shiny but certainly pokeable surface expanding and collapsing, expanding and collapsing like miner’s lung or heaving cow or great pink scarlet bubble of Bazooka Joe bubble gum some rowdy kid is just about to pop.

St. Catherine traded hers with God.

I remember seeing a picture of it. She’s standing on the ground and He is hovering in the air a bit above her. He’s on a tasteful little throw rug of a cloud. Her hand is up and out to him. Can I see something red in it? A thing to be got rid of? Or to keep? A thing of want. His hovering hand is open, too, and heading down toward her, but I can’t see if his hand is full or empty. Her hand is white and His is very, very white! As pure and clean and pure and cold as snow.

Has he just given His to her? Does she give hers to Him? Did one or the other do it first? Or did they do it simultaneously? Who opened whom? Each other or themselves? There must have been a lot of blood. What happened to the blood? What happens when the traded heart does not fit in the other’s waiting hole?

Whose great idea was this, anyway?

If it was His, was he just—uh—uh—ribbing her? Not ever thinking she would take Him up on it and—uh—uh—do it literally. But then when she said Yes, she wanted, Yes she would, Oh please, and started clawing at her chest, whatever else was He supposed to do?

Or did she simply stick her hand inside and pull? Like those amazing Filipino healers? They don’t use anesthetics! Tools! Or anything! They rearrange or take the bad things out of you, a secret done with just their hands, and with some poor pathetic miserable fuck who’s desperate with belief. They also only do it to someone else, not to themselves the way St. Catherine did. Though, of course, St. Catherine was not a Filipina, but Italian, from Sienna. I went there to her church one time and saw her mummified head. (It looked like a giant raisin.) The rest of her body is somewhere else. Rome, maybe? I don’t know where the heart is.

Or if there was a tool involved, what tools would they have had back then in Italy? A knife, a sword, a saw? A pair of tongs? Did someone else, not Him, give her a hand? (“Give her a hand…?” Hmmm… Don’t go there.) Was someone passing by who saw her clawing at herself and crying, crying, crying inconsolably because she couldn’t, she just could not do it, could not get it right, she could not break herself, so then did someone (angel? Or Samaritan?) appear to help and if so, was this then a miracle?

Or had she asked a friend to help?  Though of whom could one ask a thing like that?

What’s too unclean to be made clean must be removed alone. For superpower Him, this would be easy. But not for her. No, not for her. She had to work at it.  This took her long.  This took her years.  This took her life.

Pull the muscle and meat away like pulling the fat from the rib of a pig.  Now, yank it out.  Now give it to Him.  It may be good, what’s given back, but by the time it does you’re halfway dead.

My hands were never white like hers.  And the other’s more than mere unclean;  it’s fucking filthy.

To try would render filthier.

At least that’s my excuse.

If this whets your appetite, as it were, for more of Rebecca Brown, check out two of my favorite books of hers:   ‘American Romances‘ and for the very brave (you have been warned!)  ‘The Dogs‘.

Being a hermit‘s a cakewalk when you open your door and get presented with something like this:

Yup, I’m a certified genius, the certifier being The Stranger, Seattle’s famous (make that infamous) alternative weekly.  The cake is sweet notice that they’ve given me a 2011 Stranger Genius Award.   Which is way cooler than I have words for.

Now all I have to do is live up to it and produce, um, a work of genius.  I’m thinking the chocolate might help…

There’s been a ton of punditry about what the Tunisia and Egypt revolutions mean for America, and you can bet there’ll be several tons more.  But I suspect its biggest effect is yet to register, and that is psychological.  Because these two revolutions – achieved through determinedly non-violent action – constitute a radical, positive challenge to the politically manipulated atmosphere of fear and paranoia about Islam.   In fact, as New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it, 2/11 may be the perfect antidote to 9/11.

Too optimistic?  I think not.  There’s a very good chance that we’re due for a major paradigm shift here in the United States — one that seemed unimaginable just a few weeks ago (and one even a congressman like Peter King, head of the HUAC-like committee due to start ‘examining’ the supposed radicalization of American Muslims (“are you now or have you ever been an American Muslim?”), might have to take into account).

What’s happening all over the Middle East challenges the crude stereotypes of “Arabs = riots.”  Of “Islam = terrorism.”  And above all, of Islam as somehow fundamentally anti-democratic.

These stereotypes run deep.  Think of the scenes shown in the American media from the first week of the Egypt uprising.   A close-up of 200 people prostrated in prayer, excluding the tens of thousands who stood behind them, not praying.   A protestor holding a poster of Mubarak with horns and a Star of David drawn on his forehead – the only one of its kind, it turned out, in the whole square.  Or a few days later,  the replay after replay of Molotov cocktails – “flames lead” being the mantra of TV news – reinforcing the image of rioting Muslims out of control, “the Arab street.”  It was exactly the image Mubarak was aiming for.

Thus the pumping up of the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat by both the Mubarak regime and conservative western pundits, as though the Egyptian protesters were extraordinarily dumb and naïve.  As though they were not highly aware of  how the 1979 Iran revolution was hijacked and perverted.  As though they couldn’t see the fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia or the Hamas regime in Gaza.   As though the Brotherhood itself were unanimously stuck in the 1950s mindset of ideologue Sayyid Qutb.  As though the only way to be Muslim was to be a radical fundamentalist.

Thus the surprise in the west at the sophistication of the Tahriris, when “the Arab street” turned out to include doctors and lawyers and women and IT executives (you could practically hear the astonishment:  “you mean there’s Muslim Google executives?”).

Thus the continually stated fear, stoked by the regime and by conservative pundits, that the protestors would shift from nonviolence to violence – that the nonviolence was merely a cover for some assumed innate propensity to violence.

Thus the slowness to realize that the old anti-West sloganism had been superseded, and that this wasn’t about resentment of the west;  in fact that it was about the very things President Obama had talked about in his speech right there in Cairo in June 2009 – about democracy and freedom.

In short, what we heard and saw in those first few days was the modern version of Orientalism:   The idea that the ‘Orient’ – that is, the Middle East (it should come as no surprise here that the geography is as weird as the idea itself) — is an inherently violent, primitive, medieval kind of place.  Or as right-wing Israeli politicians have been endlessly repeating for decades, “a bad neighborhood.”   And that the responsibility of ‘enlightened’ westerners and despotic leaders alike was to keep these benighted people under control.

But as the uprising went on into the second week, something began to change. Nobody at the blog of Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, for example, which one would have thought the first to support any kind of uprising, even bothered to comment on it at first.  When they began to, it was with their usual weary stance of pseudo-sophisticated cynicism.   But by the day after Mubarak unleashed his goons in Tahrir Square, when the protestors’ response was to turn out in larger numbers than ever, even The Stranger gave in to excited support.   How not, when millions of people stood up to repression and dictatorship in the full knowledge of what they faced if they failed – arrest, torture, and death?   Would you have such courage?  Such determination?

So here’s what I saw here in the States:   more and more Americans abandoning their unconscious Orientalism in favor of stunned admiration.

And that’s the beginning of something new, the very thing Obama declared twenty months ago in Cairo:  respect.

Finally.