Christmas greetings

    I couldn't possibly ignore the kindness that informs
    all of Mike's post.

    The thing is: I'm genuinely, truly, bewildered by this whole
    brouhaha.

    My initial crack was - obviously - a tail tweeze for those
    sanctimonious idiots who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge
    that for the greater number of us in the Western world this is
    a Christian - or postChristian - occasion. The implication is
    that just as YOU are upset when I invoke MY personal myths -
    babies in mangers & stars & shepherds & lowing cattle -
    so shall I be upset when you invoke YOURS - a people girding
    themselves for the march out of bondage, & so on. Ludicrous.
    This is what Libby meant by the 'crybaby culture of hurt feelings':
    the squeamish dilution of all the traditional associations into bland
    'Happy Holidays' - lest someone feel 'excluded'. As Basil Fawlty
    reminded us: 'Don't mention the war.' The practice has not YET
    reached Europe in any significant degree & is still regarded here as
    - sniff, sniff - 'typical American correctness.'

    What is my offence? To have used the word 'yid'? It was the
    customary, ironic usage between myself & Maxie Glatt (eventually
    Sir Max), the Jew who maintained his orthodoxy even in Dachau
    (prewar, admittedly) & who taught me all I know about the modern
    understanding of addiction.

    I'm really dumbfounded by this implicit accusation of anti-Semitism.
    Damn it to hell, I've spent all my professional life promulgating
    the insights of one of the greatest Jews of modern times; was
    personally selected by his daughter for training - 4 years in the very
    house where he died; & was accepted, I think, as an equal, as an
    honorary Jew, by the brilliant, hilarious, warm-hearted men
    & women who made up such a large battalion of that whole
    psychoanalytic movement.

    Or was it 'wog'? That would have come as a surprise to the late,
    gorgeous Roushan Jahan from Islamabad who - many years ago now -
    first introduced me to the Nancy Mitford joke: 'Wogs begin at Calais.'
    We need not go into the occasion - anyone could be listening - suffice
    it to say it was during quite a prolonged & very cherished period
    of my life. And, of course, there have been several wogs since then.

    I wonder. Actually. Could this be an intercontinental problem?
    From where we are sitting on this side of the world, racist tensions
    are really only in the forefront of peoples' minds in those towns
    where immigrant numbers have expanded too suddenly.
    I'm not being funny when I say that here in Ireland far & away
    the most virulent prejudice is againt America & Americans.
    There is a deep resentment - cultivated & fertilised by the very
    'liberals', the bien-pensants, the teachers, the broadcasters,
    the journalists who, in some other environment one might at least
    hope to take a more measured, enlightened view. I spend a great
    deal of time & argumentative effort trying to counter it.

    For me, the GIs came as allies. You never get over that. A huge
    part of my enjoyment in life I derived from Americans. The
    identification & empathy goes too deep. You can imagine, then,
    how galling it is to be accused of callousness, coarseness, vulgarity,
    bad taste (oh my God) by the very people one has been trying
    so valiantly to defend.

    But no, I don't take back one single word. If my words offend,
    as Sonny points out, tough. It's a hard old world & I'm a hard
    old man (as my patients will confirm.) Out here in the front room
    with the grownups we like a bit of rough & are not forever on the
    lookout to take offence. Only the professional victims, the self-
    proclaimed & self-obsessed sensitives, the creeps, above all of course
    'the educated', could possibly mistake me for something I'm not.

    PS - And, incidentally, what the hell do you mean, Mike,
    'kick first?' (I surely don't warrant an actual death wish?)

    Scottie B.

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Received on Wed Dec 25 03:39:20 2002