Momus and the Jews

2. i see france as an upright haughty country, i think it suffers from the problems
of brutishness as much as england.

3. the neville headlines on the backpages would be a daily occurence in italy

4. blair out graffiti is noticeable by its absence, i agree. i attribute this to wearyness
and disillusionment with possibility, (and the fact that we have our supposed good guy in power)

5. the thing about schneider was very british. prurient/salacious redtop coverage, either/or playing out in ink. depressing

that france that is more like america than britain?

I have broad sympathy for Momus's vision of Britain (although the claim that Jewish broadcasters are telling us to enjoy life because they feel responsible for imported "Jewish ideolology" is provocative silliness). But living in France now as I do, I do think Momus's take on the French borders on fantasy.

I like the idea that the Jews are making amends for giving us silly commandments about graven idols by teaching us to cook. But Suzy tells me that Rick Stein is not a Jew, so I'll have to settle for the theory that people who went to public school and are the uncle of Radio 1 DJs (Judge Jules, apparently) are feeling guilty and making amends by teaching us to cook.

How about we teach you a few other things, like Yiddish? Here's a good start: Momus, you are a schmuck.

:)

Yes, but the Israelis didn't give us the Ten Commandments, and the monotheistic tradition didn't give us Freud. But there is something that links Moses and Freud. If only I were allowed to name it, I might be able to think.

haha! More lemon juice, less yapping.

I really wish I could reply to this (what are you saying? "Oh you silly Hebrews with your ten commandments and your penis envies"? That's, er, kind of a reductive view innit?), but I have to get to my job. (at a bank! No, not the Jewish one that controls everything, sorry.)

PS: I demand you find some way to make up for bagpipes and that last Supergrass album

(I'm sorry, I'll stop now)

It wasn't so much the idea of Jews 'making amends' as the idea that, if Judeo-Christianity is a kind of guilt-machine devised by Jews, who better than Jews to dismantle it? Who better than the people who told us not to eat shrimp to tell us how to cook it? And what wine to drink with it?

How about Mollie Katzen, treasured by hippie chefs everywhere?

(cue Jess calling me an adolescent for continually hating on Da Christian Posse)

I'd like to see the British Isles donning a hair shirt. Perhaps Christo could do it, and Mel Gibson could film it as 'The Passion of The Christo', with a lot of gratuitous flagellation to the Home Counties.

I don't know who invented it, but it was big in 12th century Canterbury:

'Before his murder the monks had been divided in their loyalty to Thomas Becket, but after his martyrdom for the church, they proclaimed him a saint. Their esteem for him was heightened when under his Archbishop's robes they found him to be wearing a Benedictine monks' hair shirt, evidence that he beat himself as penances and the sight of thousands of vermin infesting his garments, showing his true piety at denouncing any pleasures of the flesh... In 1174 Henry II came to Canterbury to pay penance for causing Becket's death, so as to avert the wrath of heaven. At St. Dunstan's church he stripped down to a hair shirt, drenched with the wet weather, and walked barefoot to the Cathedral. At the tomb he knelt and wept, he was then whipped by monastic rod and knelt there in prayer until morning.'

...however, owing to your fear of dialogue with people whose views are unlike your own, you'll never know for sure!

m-m-momus and the jews

(/ elton john voice)

I really don't intend to re-invent the wheel here, so I'll just point to a couple of much bigger Don Quixotes than me:

Benjamin Barber

Kenneth Keniston

This is a silly level of argument to be stuck on. I really think you're just being obtuse and wasting time. Try doing me the honour of actually making an argument that -- despite the success and dominance of Microsoft, McDonald's, the English language, Hollywood etc worldwide -- we have no reason to fear a reduction in cultural diversity. If you can't formulate that argument, stop this petty sniping.

Yet, I've had this nagging thought that it feeds in so readily with (what you might call) the counter-conspiracy theories going around. The kind which prompted the ICA to hold a talk entitled 'Are the opponents of anti-semitism the new McCarthyites'?

I feel sometimes that Momus could be asked to defend anything and he'd do it so eloquently that it would sound persuasive. This time he appears to have been set the task of defending the Jewish conspiracy theory. This is not a reductivist reading of the piece. I'm not gong to bother quoting more chunks of it. I'm bothered for many reasons, not least because I've risen to the bait.

cultural diversity perpetuates itself, Nick! Honestly.

Monopoly perpetuates itself. Have you heard the buzzword 'synergies' at all? That's what owners call the savings that result when they buy two vast companies, fire half the staff and merge the operations. Companies are getting bigger and bigger, and fewer and fewer right now. You may have noticed this in the music industry. Ever larger companies taking ever smaller risks, with their ownership concentrated in ever fewer hands. Meanwhile governments like Blair's and Bush's continue to slacken ownership restrictions, giving more power to people like Murdoch. No alarm bells ringing, at all? You're okay on 4AD, right? They'll always let you make risky records, just like Mute, right? Oh, but Mute is owned by EMI now... And all those artists Daniel Millar said he'd never drop, EMI will.

Cultural diversity, at the end of the day, relies wholly on individual diversity, which cannot ever be in peril because individuals are the irreducible constant!

If I may say so, that's very American of you. The individual, of course! Why didn't I think of that! There may be no cinema where I can see a film produced in my home land, but at least I can watch American films in an individual way...

It's not the McDonaldses, the cinemas, the Wal-Marts that matter: it's what people do in them, which will always be entirely individual.

So I've got the McDonald's and I'm eating the American-style crud which is all they have there, but I'm doing it my way? That's a tremendous consolation for the disappearance of two little restaurants on the corner. (My local McDonald's, by the way, occupies a building built by communists, part of a socialist state which no longer exists. One less alternative system, one less way of thinking about and living life, to trouble us.)

This is going to be a bit jumbled, as I'm tired, but ...

I've come to the conclusion, that ceteris paribus, if I didn't know the writer any better, I'd be worried about a man cloaking some serious anti-semitism and reductive generalisations in his thought-provoking devil's advocacy.

Momus - to me, you make beautifully explained generalisations which manage to leave far too much unexplained.

So how does this fit in with any of us here who may risk generalising in other ways about other national or ethnic groups ? You habitually make sweeping statements comparing (f/ex) the Japanese positively with the British/Americans, but invariably fail to even acknowledge anything that may run contrary to your arguments: viz: lauding the sheer femininity to be sensed by staying in France and Japan - which I too see, I love both countries - but pretending to ignore both countries' inherent masculinity and intolerance in terms of, f/ex, a nationalism and a sexism that I feel doesn't exist in, say, London, a place Momus appears to despise with all his soul.

*thinks what's down on the corner of Randolph and Bristol, notes it's Memphis and Mitae Ramen, both of which are popular standalone non-franchise spots*

the problem now, j0hn (& ned & others), is that yr gonna have to fight the argument on two fronts: 1. mcmonoculture isn't really stamping out/squashing/refusing much of anything and 2. even if it is, it don't matter. (if you reduce yr argument to "diversity appears to those who seek it", then cue momus "well, there's a lot less of it now than when i last looked around").

other question that i'm a little suprised didn't spin off something gareth said way upthread: the invisibility of judaism in britain

I will say, to bring a chink of light into my argument, that it's strange how Germany and Britain have switched places in the last 20 years. In the 80s Germany felt like an American colony, with all the military bases, endless dubbed American gunk on TV, and David Hasselhof claiming to have singlehandedly undermined communism with his MOR songs. Now it's Britain which feels like the 51st state. Proof, I suppose, that 'difference' can return with surprising speed. There can be post-American diversity, just as there can be post-Microsoft computing.

You always seem to bring up France. This seems ironic, because France really is obsessed with preserving a monoculture, it just happens to be an officially-approved version of its own. It is hard to think of a more ridiculous body than the Academie Francaise, save maybe those uber-creationists who still believe in a geocentric universe.

the problem is that for you it's this idea of the "monoculture" that's most present and bothersome, and by extension any expression of "difference" is valued to the extend that any other aspects become downgraded and blurred, which is to say, momus, round 1421

can you elaborate on this?

You're right that it's the monoculture -- my own culture and its pretensions to neutrality and inevitability and universality -- which infuriates me the most. If there's one thing I'd like people to acknowledge, it's that our culture is not 'freedom' or 'the international community' or 'unity' or whatever pretentiously bland and universalist titles we give it. Our culture has a colour, a texture, a smell, a shape, quirks, neuroses, a history. It is not 'for all humanity'. We are not 'ahead'.

I don't understand what you mean about 1421.

also why don't you just decide for yourself if killing and eating dogs is wrong?

I wasn't viscerally revolted when I saw it. I was interested in my own ambivalence. I wanted to say 'It's a racist cliche that Chinese eat dogs. It slurs them.' But that PC stance was clearly absurd and reductive, a refusal to accept their difference. They do eat dogs in Canton... and cats. To say that what they actually do is a slur is itself a slur. It implies that they are only honourable to the extent that they are inoffensive to us and our local values. We eat cows, but not dogs. Imagine an Indian, told by another that Scots eat cows, replying: 'Don't bandy racist stereotypes around, Scots are not savages you know! They've come on a bit since their cow-eating days. These days they are just like us.'

"I saw it most clearly in France "

can you elaborate on this?

France has a clear sense of its difference from American culture. It is totally unapologetic about its cultural protectionism, and I'm sympathetic to that stance. I linked from the word 'France' to an EC website laying out the case for protection of the film and AV industries. I have cable TV and 90% of the channels are unwatchable rubbish filled with dubbed products of the American AV industries all basically touting the same view of life, the same idea of what a 'woman' is, the same idea of what 'comedy' is, what 'night' looks like, what 'pop music' sounds like, etc etc... except one, Arte, the French-German public network, which is entirely government-funded and which works on a different principle: with 'Thema' nights all devoted to depth coverage of one particular issue. The other day it was 'Russian women', for instance. Three hours of documentaries about Russian women. Great stuff, and possible only because of cultural protectionism.

I'm not sure French-style cultural protectionism is really the answer though. They take a very dirigiste, top-down approach to something that is essentially bottom-up. Banning the use of English words in the civil service and inventing French equivalents, for example, is neither good nor practical (and ignores the fact that when the French adopt an English word, they usually put their own twist on it and use it in different ways to Anglo-Saxons). It also means you somehow have to define what your "culture" in order to protect it. Does French culture now also include rai music (or even the hijab) in the same way that it includes folk music from Brittany or Basque berets? The slips and slides of culture are so hard to define in any institutionalised way. As "Pulp Fiction" pointed out, even McDonalds in France is not the same as it is in the U.S.

An awful lot of crap gets subsidised in France as well. Shedloads of dire middlebrow films that never make it out of France; a million dismal, poorly thought-out "experimental" theatre pieces etc. etc. My girlfriend works at Radio France Internationale and the waste there is phenomenal. I'm sympathetic to the aim of "protecting" culture, but I'm not sure the French method is the way forward. I don't know what the answer is, though.

the russian women thing was very interesting indeed, some docs were better than others. but last night it was some stupid show on sons of musicians making music, like aretha franklin's kid or something. they interviewed the editor of 'rolling stone'--it was dumb.

she always has the coolest dresses