Omar Swartz

As a child growing up in a Jewish community in West Los Angeles, California, in the 1970s, I did not have the literary or critical vocabulary that I have since acquired. I suppose this is obvious; with education comes, or should come, a critical vocabulary, a sense of the contingency and impermanence of all things, a healthy suspicion of what today passes for political or social truth. People are not born with the sophistication needed to navigate self-consciously the modalities of power/knowledge and their affects on day-to-day life. The world is as it is presented to us, predigested and stripped of complexity, like a Disney animated film or theme park. Words such as “alienation,” “reification,” and “identification” would have made little sense to me as an adolescent. Likewise, the ideas contained in the writings of Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Fredrick Nietzsche, and Richard Rorty, as well as others in the critical tradition, would have been uninteresting or incomprehensible for a young boy who whittled away much of his adolescence playing “Asteroids” and “Pac Man” at the local convenience store before coming home to watch “Happy Days” or “Three’s Company” on television.

Similar to most adolescents in this country, I was oblivious to politics and history, caught up as I was in the twin pincers of the mass media and popular entertainment, on the one hand, and base fear and depression on the other. The mass media filled my needs—or purported to do so—providing me with a sense of shallow purpose, self-fulfillment through consumption and identification with hollow and often fictional cultural figures, so that the fear and depression that I felt—poverty, nuclear war, lack of a future—became manageable. I was an angry, frustrated adolescent, prone to substance abuse and petty vandalism, filled with a potential I knew not how to utilize, feeling somehow that the rules of social life in this country were rigged in the favor of others—the so-called social elites, wealthy and privileged citizens whose children I mingled with at my synagogue. Many decades later, I still feel, in many respects, similar to the way I felt as a child—fearful and depressed, prone these days not to marijuana and alcohol but to dependency on anti-depressants; furthermore, I am increasingly more disdainful of property rights and the legal order it supports. Try as I might, I have not escaped the profound sense of fear, doubt, and insecurity that dogged my youth like a disease and threatens now to dog my child; for how long I can shield him I cannot say. It is a dis/ease that I am describing, one leaving few sections of society untouched. I knew early on in my life that something was wrong with U.S. culture, could feel it in my body and in my mind, and could see it all around me, although I could not talk about it or understand what I was feeling. Simply, I was mystified; numb but not numb enough to escape the pain of membership in U.S. society. My pain was and continues to be profound and influences everything I do. Similar to Nietzsche, whose writings I value higher than all others, my joys in life are snatched from, and against, the culture that deadens our sense of decency and contentment, our connections with life. To experience what, for lack of a better term, I call spiritual or existential peace, I have to invent new values and goals for myself, as against myself, as against my culture and upbringing. Foucault, Marx, Nietzsche, and Rorty have all been indispensable for this task. They have been, and continue to be, therapeutic.

I was, however, literate, even as a young child, seeped in Jewish narratives, immersed in Jewish culture which is, to a large extent, a logocentric culture. Growing up, I loved to hear stories, to read stories, and, much later, to write them—stories of struggle, justice, hope, and perseverance against persecution and otherness. These stories and the single-minded determination to assume within myself the world’s pain and, thus, to dissolve it, are expressed throughout my writing and have their roots in the literature and culture of my youth. Simply, my passion for social justice is Jewish; not in any provincial sense or essentialist sense, but in the sense of a people reared in the rich experience of suffering and who have transformed that suffering into an affirmation and ethic of life and intellectual engagement.

One Jewish chestnut concerned stories of the good people of Chelm, a fictional community in Eastern Europe where many of the paradoxes, ironies, and psychosis of Jewish culture were showcased and engaged. The good people of Chelm were silly and foolish, but they were seldom irreverent. As a member of a culture and a people who experienced two millennia of exile and tragedy, the antics and foibles of the residents of Chelm helped me to appreciate that the line separating madness and saintliness is difficult to discern. There was something liberating in this observation, something that would later draw me to the writings of Foucault and Nietzsche, in particular. Neither of these two thinkers were Jewish, but both articulated what I consider, half-seriously, to be an important Jewish sentiment: madness is curative and instructive. It is, by some measure, a degree of health, as when Jack Kerouac famously expressed in a celebrated passage from his 1957 novel On The Road that “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, made to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Aww!”

By madness I do not mean anger such as the anger of a frustrated adolescent—the anger that festers and blisters, consuming a great deal of who I was as a child, scarring me as an adult, estranging me from the nation of my birth and the fairytale belief that all will be okay in the end as the prince and princess live happily ever after. After all, my older self can now ask, why should we care if the royalty are happy, that the priests are celibate and devoted to God, or that the republic is as grand and more powerful than the ancient Roman Imperium. I am not servile enough for such indecencies, such self-deprivation—that, itself, is corruptible madness, lunacy or insanity. Rather, I mean to evoke the type of madness that derives from liminality—the ability to perceive the limits of the world and our lives as being human imposed and contingent and to challenge those limits as slaves challenge their chains. It is to realize that freedom itself is also a form of bondage no less contemptible than religious dogma. Freedom is not a thing, but an opportunity. Freedom from what? Freedom for what? Some things cost too much, others are undervalued.

Faced with intractable social problems, the sages of Chelm one day decided that going to war was the best solution. With festive flag waving and great patriotic fervor they decreed war on a neighboring village and ordered their young men to march off with clubs and pitchforks to attack folks they were told insulted their honor, threatening their “way of life.” The soldiers fought bravely: they fell and were much eulogized at home. Nevertheless, the campaign failed and Chelm was defeated. The sage who first recommended war had early on been banished. But after the final defeat, he was invited back once again and was honored with a crown. Despite all—the dead, the wounded, the permanently maimed, the bankruptcy of the treasury—he remained optimistic. Unveiling a new statue of himself, this leader spoke about Chelm and its influence on the world: “We do not wish to conquer the world,” he assured his audience, “but our wisdom is spreading throughout it just the same. The future is bright. The chances are good that someday the whole world will be one great Chelm.” I can imagine him smiling as he said this, with suit and tie, hair meticulously combed, looking respectable and businessman-like, staring straightforwardly at the camera—“trust me . . . be patient . . . history is on our side.” Does this sound familiar to us post-9/11 Americans? Are we paying attention to our nation’s political rhetoric, to the farcical absurdities of our national leaders? We are denizens of Chelm, mad and saintly at the same time, and tragically unable to differentiate between the two. Someday, I fear, along with my colleague and friend Phil Wander, the whole world may be run by fools who think that war, instead of being a problem that poses a threat to life on the planet, might be considered a short, even a long term solution to fears brought on by domestic tensions at home and foreign challenges abroad. Is this crazy? Unfortunately, many people think not. Others, however, point out that the emperor has no clothes, that he is naked and, perhaps, a sex pervert and murderer, a slander of life, that behind the glitter of the court are mounds of rotten, stinking, corpses and children of corpses. We should ask ourselves—are we such children? Were our parents already dead before we were conceived? How can the future live if the past was already dead before it became the past?

Sergie Kovalyov, a Russian dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, wrote a public letter to then President Yeltsin, in 1996, on Yeltsin’s decision to go to war in Chechnya—a war which, ten years later, still exists. A totalitarian order, he wrote, “is defending itself by its typical means: manufacturing a crisis, misleading the people, and subverting civic values.” Ten years later the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is following a similar course in his cruel effort to beat the Chechnians into a submission that will never hold—submission is like youth, one quickly outgrows it, even if we are young for a thousand years. Condoned by the United States who is now Russia’s ally in the misnamed “war on terror,” the smoldering conflict in Chechnya has spread to Afghanistan and Iraq. It threatens Iran, Syria, and North Korea. It may one day threaten China and, perhaps, even Russia herself. The fire threatens to consume with no end. Just the other day, President George W. Bush (again!) announced that we fight against a beast of an enemy who cannot be reasoned with, cannot be bargained with, and has to be defeated utterly by military means. He compared his war on terror on moral grounds with the Second World War and the fight against fascism. The enemy hates us, hates our freedoms, Bush asserts, hates everything for which we stand. We will win, he says, because we are good, they are evil, and god is on our side. Unlike the Second World War, however, Bush’s war is a war without boundaries and, as many fear, potentially without end.

Wait a minute. Did I just write the above? Did Bush really say no negotiation? No compromise? No boundaries? No end? This is madness! Not the liminal type of madness that helps us to see the limits of our thoughts, the value of breaking our chains, and of questioning the new ones. Rather, it is the madness of the chains itself, the madness of prisons, of police, of warfare, of darkness—the madness exemplified in much of the policies of the Republican and Democratic officials in our country. Thanks to Bush, life in this country—and increasingly throughout much of the rest of the world—now resembles a science fiction novel where awesome technology and unbridled power creates worlds or universes of uncontrollable conflagration. Within the din of fear and consumption I can easily imagine people, such as Kovalyov, raising his voice again to speak truth to power, to warn us, to beg for our attention and concern. Surely they have. Who has ears to hear them?

With my writing I add my voice to this coalition of dissent and ask, with all seriousness: could this be the beginning of a new Rainbow Coalition of political inclusion and hope? Do I herald a new Jessie Jackson, a new Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X, a new Che Guevara, a new hero of any sort? Are we, as a people, that desperate for salvation? Shall I say it, do I dare speak it—do I not secretly wish for a new messiah? I am, after all, Jewish ethnically, and, as many familiar with Jewish culture are aware, Jewish mothers, particularly in more orthodox traditions, secretly wish to birth the messiah. I am a writer; am I not also a mother? And what about my son? Messiah, or not, he, along with his generation of other children, represents hope, no matter how human and frail or unbelievable that hope may be. Are these children not arrows shot by the longing of the present into the future, although most of us do not recognize that we are archers? Did not Nietzsche teach us how to shoot well? All bows, however, are not equal—they must be well crafted. That takes art, patience and a longing for targets. People who understand this cannot easily digest television.

Such is the dream of every writer, Jewish or not, to set into action a stream of events through the articulation of a vision. Perhaps I am an unrepentive rhetorician, a scholar who takes too seriously the calling of my craft. Call me naive, but I believe in the power of language to help right to wrongs of this world. Did I study law for nothing? I am a Jew, after all, and a denizen of Chelm, the land of law and order. Did I not reject the law as worse than the human-all-too-human, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche? The only difference between myself and many other denizens of this great land is that, through years of struggle and strife, I have found my voice; rather, I have constructed my voice out of the echoes of past orators who have spoken out against oppression against injustice, against selfishness and greed. With my voice I say: Mr. Bush, you are defending the “New World Order” pronounced by your father, the first President Bush, by typical means. You have manufactured a crisis. You are subverting civic values. You are killing our sons and daughters, depleting our nation’s wealth, and bringing untold suffering on many of the peoples of the world. Shame on you! Shame on us! Perhaps we are not “totalitarian” in the sense that Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia was totalitarian. Perhaps, like Putin’s Russia, we are different from the horrors of our collective pasts. Is our ugliness only skin deep? I hope so, but I am not so sure. Perhaps I should just call what you do Mr. Bush “unconscionable war crimes.” Most Americans call it “business as usual.” They reelected you in 2004. We are denizens of Chelm; we deserve what we get. My maternal grandfather, Otto Forster, was a young man when he escaped Nazi Germany to settle in New York in the mid 1930s. With the exception of his sister who also left Germany to settle in Switzerland, everyone else in his family perished in the holocaust. He died of a heart attack in 1961, before I was born, the victim of cigarettes and Coca-Cola. The only story about my grandfather from his years growing up in Germany that I have been told is that he one day witnessed some Nazis beating an old Jewish man on a train. All the passengers averted their eyes; this was none of their business (“better him them me” they thought)—or, Heil Hitler, the Jew had it coming to him anyways. Otto was scared. He pulled up his collar, looked away, and passed as a German for the time being, his heart pounding, wondering if the next station was Chelm.

In New York, Otto met my grandmother, Rose Shapiro. Her family had fled the pogroms of czarist Russia at the turn of the century. Thus, they missed the Russian Revolution. I wonder if they, like many Jews, would have supported the revolution if they had stayed in Russia, inspired by the belief that a new era of peace and solidarity was around the corner—so close one could almost feel it; so glorious that one was even prepared to die for it. (“The world is full of dead martyrs,” an old shopkeeper once told me, as if death were an argument against the justice of any cause—as if no cause could be just or no revolution successful. To him I retort with the words of Edward Abbey: “All revolutions, they say, have failed so far. All the more reason, then, to try again.”). In those days, Jews were proud of what they considered the Jewish roots of socialism, as I continue to be. Yet, as much as I daydream of my great-grand parents fighting on behalf of the Russian Revolution to root out religion, royalty, and inequality, I am certain that, like Emma Goldman they would probably have come to condemn it. I will never know because my grandmother’s family was “safe” in New York City, slaving way in garment factories, getting beat up by police during strikes for better working conditions (“we want bread and roses” she learned to chant as a young girl). My grandmother, who lived to be 93, was no communist, although it was not incredible to her that I idealistically longed to be one. Jews once talked about those things, felt those things passionately; they were part of the intellectual culture that, for a period of time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, animated the Jewish spirit. It was in such an environment that Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and scores of other influential Jewish intellectuals were raised.

My grandmother had eight brothers and sisters, so I grew up with a rich extended family, most of whom belonged to a generation of people for whom war was a horrifying and ongoing reality, a force shaping the lives of individuals, families, communities, and nation-states. For them, war was a global problem; recall that the Russian Revolution came on the heels of the First World War. War, for my parent’s generation, first generation Americans, and for mine (I was born in 1967), was and continues to be a horrifying and ongoing reality—first Korea, then Vietnam and Iraq, with hundreds of smaller but no less catastrophic consequences across the globe—particularly in Central and South America. War is a global problem. Counting the various colonial slaughters or “conflicts,” war in what I refer to as in the “western sense” had been a reality for nearly four hundred years. We are denizens of Chelm; further, fleeing Chelm is no solution: some places you cannot leave, just as there are some homes you cannot find. Therefore, I write in the hope of birthing the messiah and abolishing Auschwitz.

Omar Swartz is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver.