The Marching Morons

In a speech at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on Dec. 12, 1900, Mark Twain introduced Winston Churchill to Andrew Carnegie and that crowd, by asking why they should want to listen to a man who had just committed war crimes against the Boers — as Twain’s own country had just done in the Philippines.

Twain introduced Churchill, genially, to the most powerful men in the United States as a war criminal, and accused his own country of doing the same things. Then Twain sat down to see how Churchill liked it.

Churchill, Carnegie and that crowd laughed it off, because their accuser was, after all, just a humorist.

Which brings us up to 1969, when I escaped the Vietnam War by luck of the draw: My draft number was 323. Once I saw that, on page 3 of a newspaper, I felt not only relief, but saw how smart Richard Nixon was: He’d just bought me off with a high draft number.

No need for me, or half of the young men in my age cohort, to protest anymore — if we thought only about ourselves. Millions of young men bought off — if we thought only about ourselves.

That’s been the Republican mantra to this day: Just think about yourself. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Just think about yourself.

Which brings us up to today.

I’m Jewish. Not according to what I believe, or to Rabbinical law, which is matrilineal. But I’d be Jewish enough for Hitler.

My Mom was raised as a Polish Roman Catholic, in Cleveland. She was the first member of her family to go to college, the University of Chicago, where she met a professor, my Father. He was an atheist, as I am, but Jewish by ethnicity, if Jewish is an ethnicity, which it is not.

My Opa — my Dad’s Dad — told me about some of the prejudice and prohibitions to which he’d been subjected in the United States. Jews were not allowed to … well, let me quote Julius (Groucho) Marx, who was denied entry to a country club. He sent the club committee a letter, saying, “My son is only half Jewish. Can he go into the wading pool?”

Not long after World War II my parents married, and my Mom’s father — I can say this now because everyone involved, except me, is dead — my Cleveland Grandpa did not speak to his daughter for 15 years. Because she had married, in his eyes, a Jew.

I never liked that Grandpa. I can’t remember him ever saying a word to me. I did like Grandma Stella, my Mom’s mom. She was sweet. In all my memories of her, she has flour on her arms up to her elbows, cooking up a storm for her grandkids.

For the record: I play saxophones and clarinets. I’m a jazz man who never made it, because I’m not as good as the real cats. I lived on the edge of Harlem for two years while I studied woodwinds with Joe Allard at the Manhattan School of Music. I’ve played with some wonderful jazz musicians, but that’s not my point. My point is that is I am the last white guy in the world you could accuse, truly, of being racist. I lived on an Indian reservation for six years, for Pete’s sake, and loved it, and keep in touch with my students, 40 years later.

So if you want to accuse me of being antisemitic because I hate Benjamin Netanyahu and his sleazy government, and the genocide Netanyahu and his aiders and abettors and State  are conducting in daylight, go ahead: Call me antisemitic.

But when you do it, please bear in mind that you are a moron, and don’t know bupkis.

If you think I am antisemitic for criticizing what Israel has become, under Netanyahu, and that I deplore mass murder — genocide conducted in light of day — if you think that makes me antisemitic, then where will you march next?

(“ The Marching Morons ” is a science fiction story by Cyril M. Kornbluth, published in Galaxy magazine in April 1951. It is out of copyright, and available online from the Gutenberg Project, at the link above. Kornbluth died in 1958. He was 35 years old.)