RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/lubbers-crackers-obsquatulators-americas-poor-white-trash/

Since Trump’s election the centre of gravity in the Republican Party has moved in the direction of the lower-middle and working classes. As ballots in the November 6 midterms are cast and tallied, a guide to the lineage of the lubbers, hicks, crackers and absquatulators who may well decide it.

On a Hudson Valley day in 1993, during a course I was running, I alluded to class in America and was politely contradicted by a student: “Ours is a classless society”—this was at Vassar, one of the Seven Sisters, Jacqueline Kennedy’s college. I mentioned the Winthrops, Adamses, Cabots, Lodges, Quincys and Thayers, New England names so far up the class ladder that they wouldn’t be caught dead in the social pages, but she was a scholarship girl from out west and hadn’t heard of them. Some of the others were related to them.

The American underclass goes back further than any of those names, to the late 1500s. Nancy Isenberg has written what claims to be the first book exclusively devoted to it. There are countless histories of the American working class and of poverty in America, but this book is about “white trash”. The category is folded in with, if not entirely co-extensive with, the poorest white urban and rural populations in the South (the term is not generally applied in the North or the West). It requires a set of descriptors all to be present, and Isenberg never delineates these clearly: bottom-class Anglo-Saxons, poorly or averagely educated, with few resources, in a stable mode of being (they are not becoming anything), fixed or transient, rural and urban-peripheral, careless in demeanour and manners.

The early British colonial settlements in America, particularly in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas but also in New England, were largely developed by the use of unfree white labour—indentured servants (classed as chattels, movable goods and property, their contracts saleable and inheritable) and transported convicts (vast numbers; for an upbeat novelistic account read Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders: Moll, a criminal, and her criminal mother, were at separate times dumped in Virginia). This was an underclass seen as expendable human waste. It grew rapidly with inbound accretions through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was early viewed as a permanent breed: “waste people” was a common term for them, unwanted and unsalvage­able. In each era the American mainstream distanced itself from its white trash, to whom were attached memorable labels: “lubbers”, “clay-eaters”, “crackers”, “rubbish”, “rednecks”.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/the-revolutionary-conservatism-of-the-jews/

Nothing is more conservative as a practical matter than Jewish observance. Scripture, and commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries are preserved in a living colloquy among the generations. Communities that adopt specific customs are obligated to preserve them. The reading of the Pentateuch in an annual cycle recreates its revelation at Mt. Sinai: It must be heard and not merely read to evoke the experience of hearing it for the first time. Yet all of this arch-conservative practice with its punctilious attention to the slightest details of the past is there to bring to life a revolutionary event, the irruption of the Creator God into human history. Nothing is more revolutionary than Judaism. The revolutionary-conservative character of the United States of America cannot be understood except by reference to this phenomenon in Judaism.

What passes for Jewish conservativsm has been an abject failure. A group of conservative Jewish funders styling themselves “The Jewish Leadership Conference”today are holding a conference in New York City to promote “Jewish conservatism,” including a few of my friends. I won’t attend; the effort remains immired in the neo-conservative swamp against which I have inveighed these past twenty years. Its lead speaker is the former Russian refusenik and Israeli political leader Nathan Sharansky, whom I admire unreservedly a human being, but question as a political thinker. Ten years ago I excoriated Sharansky’s claim that democracy provided a universal antitode to the world’s ills, in a book review entitled, “Nathan Sharansky’s Mistaken Identity.” The other poster-boy for this conference is the late Charles Krauthammer, whose watchword was “democratic realism.”

Sharansky and Krauthammer, both men of high intelligence and good will, helped persuade President George W. Bush to undertake his crusade for world democracy, and thus bring the United States close to financial and strategic ruin. Their influence has been baleful despite their best intentions, and it is a measure of the political immaturity of American Jews that the best we can to by way of conservatism is to advertise the errors that nearly ruined us in our generation. Forcing majority rule on Iraq put a sectarian Shia government in power, allied to its co-sectarians in Iran, vastly expanding Iran’s power in the region, and putting Israel at risk. Of all the stupid and self-destructive things that Jews have done with the best of intentions, the Bush Freedom Agenda promoted by Krauthammer and Sharansky produced the clearest and most urgent threat to Jewish survival. With Sharansky and Krauthammer on the marquee, the “Jewish Conservatism” conference also features Hillary Clinton supporter Bill Kristol. Clearly we have a congnitive dissonance here.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181017-the-bosnians-who-speak-medieval-spanish

On our way to Sarajevo’s Ashkenazi Synagogue for the Friday evening Shabbat (Sabbath) service, my friend Paula Goldman and I walked down cobblestone streets through the Baščaršija, the old Ottoman area of the city, passing mosques, shops and a madrasa (Islamic school). It was the year 2000, and the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina still bore the scars of the Balkans War. A Nato tank rolled by as we crossed the Miljacka river.

As we entered the second floor of the salmon-coloured stone building with its four onion-shaped domes, light flooded through doors set with stained glass images of the Star of David and into the synagogue. We took our seats among the congregation as cantor David Kamhi took his place in front of the ark that held the Torah (a scroll containing the Five Books of Moses). Soon, the synagogue filled with the harmonies of prayer. Paula and I looked at each other strangely when we heard ‘Adonaj es mi pastor. No mankare de nada’ (The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want) from Psalm 23 recited in what we thought was Spanish. After the service, I asked Blanka Kamhi, the cantor’s wife, why the congregation was praying in Spanish.

“That wasn’t Spanish,” she responded. “We were praying in Ladino.”

Like many Bosnian Jews, Kamhi and his wife are descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by the Edict of Expulsion in 1492. During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews who did not voluntarily convert to Catholicism were expelled from the country, killed or forcibly converted. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire invited the displaced Sephardic Jews to settle in the Balkans, where they were permitted to maintain their religion and customs. Many chose to move to the Ottoman Empire, while others moved to North Africa, the Netherlands and the Americas.