What are the emotional motivations that make a minority of the human population (= the overwhelmingly Republican, disproportionately white, and largely male portion of US citizens) believe in the AQ-Saddam connection, the motivations that US Blacks, non-US citizens, and (broadly defined) lefty US citizens do not have?
At 11:13 AM -0400 9/19/03, Jon Johanning wrote:
>We are all mixtures of rational and irrational beings. Even the most
>logical of us can think of areas in our lives where we make very
>stupid mistakes because we are so emotionally committed to an idea
>that we can't think straight about it. I certainly can in my life.
The belief in the AQ-Saddam connection found in the USA is a mirror image of the belief in Jewish power as the mover of the Empire that Peter Davis found in Iraq.
***** This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030915&s=davis
Ignited Iraq by PETER DAVIS [from the September 15, 2003 issue]
. . . Rasim Mansour, the theater director who had scored his first success playing Macbeth, maintained that Desire Under the Elms achieved a fuller meaning because O'Neill wrote the play about a Jewish family destroyed by its corrupt, aggressive patriarch. I pointed out that the families in the play are the Cabots and Putnams, venerable New England names, anything but Jewish. Rasim held his ground. "No," he said, "this shows what O'Neill thought of Jews and it is also our opinion as Arabs." I reminded Rasim that his other American playwright hero, Arthur Miller, is Jewish. "Yes, it's possible," he said, "but Miller knows the American soul. I'm not against Jews but against some of the Jewish ideas."
What might those be?
You can imagine my surprise when Rasim said the Jewish ideas he doesn't like have to do with money. "Thanks to Israel the American movie industry is great and rich, and movies are mostly in the hands of Jews," he said. "Hollywood is very advanced technically, but I admire the Italian movies more because they have real ideas. Titanic is all the Americans can do well. Spielberg is a Jew and he gives his money to Israel. He's the model for American movies, and he's a good model but he bears Jewish ideals. Why didn't American movies find a place for Orson Welles to work? He only got to make Citizen Kane and afterward he was banned because he didn't adopt the ideas of the Jews." (Somehow it didn't seem worth pointing out that the original screenplay for Citizen Kane was written by a Jew, Herman Mankiewicz.) "Yes," he went on, "it's true the blacklist happened to some Jews as well, but eventually Hollywood adopted Jewish ideas, the main one of which is to run after what is profitable."
I asked whether, as a creative person himself, he admires other artistic Jews besides Arthur Miller. "Oh yes," he said, one of my favorite poets is a Jew." He paused, and I wondered who this educated and well-read man was going to name. "Ezra Pound," he said. For the first and only time in Iraq I found myself yelling, "no, ezra pound was not a jew! in fact, he hated jews so much he made broadcasts for our enemy during world war ii and was arrested for treason afterward. he was not a jew, rasim, please!"
Rasim remained admirably calm. "No, no," he said benignly, "Ezra Pound was a Jew." He smiled. "And a very talented one, too." It occurred to me that when Rasim was having his triumph as Macbeth, perhaps Macduff, just for one performance, could have used a real sword. Rasim is not an Iraqi everyman but neither is he atypical. A high level of culture and education exists in Iraq, along with a persistent strain of tribal superstition, and sometimes these can both be found in the same person. . . . *****
"Research" like the following ASA-funded study doesn't help the matter, with regard to the belief in the power of "Jewish ideas":
***** RELIGION HELPS SHAPE WEALTH OF AMERICANS, STUDY FINDS
COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new national study shows that religious affiliation plays a powerful role in how much wealth Americans accumulate, with Jews amassing the most wealth and conservative Protestants the least.
Mainline Protestants and Catholics fall in between and are about average with the rest of the population in terms of overall wealth.
Moreover, people who attend religious services regularly build more wealth than those who don't, the study found.
The effect of religion is robust, even after taking into account inheritances, levels of education and other factors affecting wealth that may be associated with particular religious denominations, said Lisa Keister, author of the study and associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
"Religion is an important factor in wealth accumulation, a factor that hasn't received a lot of attention," Keister said.
"The results suggest people draw on the tools they learn from religion to develop strategies for saving, investing and spending, and those tools may be different in various faiths."
The study is published in the September issue of the journal Social Forces. . . .
Overall, the median net worth of Jewish people in the survey was $150,890, more than three times the median for the entire sample ($48,200). The median net worth for conservative Protestants (which included Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, among others) was $26,200, or about half the overall average. The median net worth of mainstream Protestants (including Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Unitarians and others) and Catholics were similar to each other and about the average for the whole sample.
While some may say that the results confirm religious stereotypes, such as the contention that Jewish people are greedy and acquisitive, Keister strongly disagrees.
"What I'm finding is that families have a powerful influence on how people learn to save, and religion is often an important part of family life," Keister said. "The things children are taught in Jewish homes are very different than those that are taught in conservative Protestant homes." . . .
The study was partially funded by the American Sociological Association.
#
Contact: Lisa Keister, (614) 688-8685; Keister.7 at sociology.osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1 at osu.edu
<http://www.acs.ohio-state.edu/researchnews/archive/relgwlth.htm> *****
If "Jews" in the Keister study have a higher median net worth than those classified into other faiths and denominations, it's probably because in the category of "Jews" few Blacks and recent immigrants fall.
It's also odd to look to Jews as a prime example of the impact of religion on wealth accumulation. Among races and ethnic groups in the United States, Jews are decidedly the most secular. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>