CHARLES JACOBS: THE TRUTH AS IT IS VS. HOW WE’D LIKE IT TO BE
This article was first published in The Jewish Advocate on August 18, 2011
It’s August, and on the Cape, there’s sun, sand and surf. Before downshifting to the worka day month of September, one wants mentally to coast, letting thoughts flow, unconnected – though shrinks swear that all our thoughts are somehow linked. I’ve been pondering “The Help,” a captivating summer film based on the book by that name, a story of a young, idealistic white woman in Mississippi of the ’60s who convinces the town’s black maids to tell her their stories of what it’s like serving in racist white households for a book she wants to write.
A key plotline is the racist revulsion the white women have to the idea that the black maids (who hug, kiss and feed their babies) use their houses’ toilets. The maids, forced to listen to whites express their disgust, are humiliated – but fear the consequences if they talk to the writer. When one servant is clubbed by police as she’s arrested on suspicion of theft, all the town’s maids decide to tell their life stories.
The movie works: Many in the audience applauded at the end. We felt moved, angered when witnessing blatant injustices; we rooted for the maid’s courage to rise up, cheered when it did and exulted when justice was done. But upon rethinking … “The Help” contains so many stick figures and so oversimplifies life that it verges on being a cartoon. The white ladies are caricatures, the writer’s New York Jewish editor, even worse. With exceptions so minor that they really don’t count, all the blacks are pure, good and innocent; and the whites, except for the intellectual writer, are racists or, at best, pitiable unthinking fools.
We know the truth’s been shaved to serve the plot. We know there also exist immoral blacks and decent whites, even in the context of the larger true story about Southern racial injustice. And we also know that courage, decency and truth don’t always solve human problems, though we’d love to think they did. So why do we allow a flawed movie with characters we don’t fully believe to inspire and make us feel good? Because, I think, we hunger for this film’s simple message, and we willingly suspend our disbelief. If done in the service of improving human conduct, a little molding of complex truths may not necessarily be a bad thing.
The fact is that humans – even brainy ones – yearn for simple explanations, and simple solutions to frightening problems. And maybe now more than ever, when not just the national debt, but much of our world seems to be spinning out of control, we hope hard that our favored tools – reason, courage, decency, truth – can heal the globe’s conflicts. Indeed, before “The Help” came on the screen, the theater’s previews contained no less than three “alien-horror” films with the same plotline: horrible, unknown forces are storming the planet and then some hero comes to save us in the nick of time. As the last election showed again, there’s always a market for “hope.”
But not all truth-altering fantasies succeed in being helpful. Last week, I saw a shocking revelation of deception by a New York Times staffer about his paper’s reporting 20 years ago of the riots in the Hasidic section of Crown Heights. Ari Goldman, a Times reporter at the events, writes in The Jewish Week of New York how he was phoning in direct reports from the scene of Jews being attacked by mobs of blacks screaming “Heil Hitler” and “Death to the Jews.” It was a pogrom, but the Times editors decided that was not the story they were going to tell. The paper, Goldman explains, has “frameworks” it imposes on raw facts, so that it can express “truths” it prefers. That framework, Goldman says, excluded the raw truth about anti-Semitism. The Times’ formula, he explains, insists there are always competing “narratives,” and each has to be given equal weight. (In “post modernism,” taught in all our universities, there is no “truth” – always put in quotes. Ask your college-aged children.) While Goldman “never saw – or heard of – any violence by Jews against blacks,” the Times “was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions.”
For Goldman, the most egregious example of forcing reality into the predetermined PC narrative was a Times report that treated the death of Gavin Cato, the 7-yearold boy killed in the car accident that spurred the riots, and the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, the Yeshiva student who was stabbed to death during the mayhem, as morally equivalent. This is instantly recognizable as the Times’ formula for reporting the Arab/Israeli conflict: Murders and accidents are morally equivalent in a tragic “cycle of violence.” Arab/Islamic Jew-hatred, if it appears at all, is a sad, but perhaps understandable consequence of a conflict over boundaries; it is never the cause of Arab violence. Why did Ari Goldman wait 20 years to tell the awful truth? He was being “loyal,” he says, to the paper. He was clearly fearful of the consequences to his career, of being blacklisted by the PC czars. I’m speechless.
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Two weeks ago, readers of The Advocate were given a preview of an up-and-coming Jewish “framewar” in the form of side-by-side columns by Leonard Fein and me. The news hook was the massacre in Norway committed by a psychopath who, among other things, claims to be driven by anti-jihadism. Fein used the tragedy to warn about what he wants us to think is a real and growing danger in the West of an irrational hatred of Muslims. “The swamp of Islamophobia,” he calls it. His column appeared just days before what seems like a campaign launched by the Anti-Defamation League against those (of us) who work to expose efforts by well-funded Saudis and others to radicalize the historically moderate American Muslim community. Like the “framers” at the Times, Fein and the ADL will see, hear and speak of no threat to Jews and the West posed by radical Islam. They are obsessed with favoring the “other” uber alles.
And so as we fold away our beach chairs, we’ll be preparing to deconstruct this post-modern truth-less “frame,” coming at us all from the swamp of Jewish denial. It’s been a short rest.
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