Deregulation and Decompensation

Here’s something that occurred to me the other day. What do today’s paranoid manic-depressives do for a personal conspiracy theory? The paranoid of yesteryear had the phone company at his or her disposal, but with the break up of large carriers and the proliferation of the cellular companies, the “phone company” doesn’t carry the paranoid punch that it used to. Sprint, Cingular, Verizon – sure, they’re big, and have a lots of customers, but nothing to build a conspiracy theory around. Same with the internet service providers. It simply doesn’t ring true to complain that “My ISP is spying on me.” Doesn’t really mean anything.

Granted, there are all kinds of other options for conspiracy nuts, witness the suddenly ubiquitous 9/11 conspiracy people. But that’s really a passing thing, kind of a Kennedy assassination lite. And, in any case, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 and the like are at bottom something very different, more the stuff of way-out, usually extreme left, political theories than bona fide psychosis. The old fashioned telephone company paranoid was, so to speak, in it for himself in a way that a political conpiracy theorist never can be .

A distant relative of mine had such an intense fixation on the phone company, made such a fuss about it, that the company finally assigned a specific operator, “Operator 23" if memory serves, to whom her frequent calls were automatically transferred. Some years later, when the calls had slowed a bit, an unassuming middle aged woman walked into a shoe store in the Bronx. Overhearing a familiar, piercing voice talking to a customer, a cold surge went down her back. Alarmed, she quickly turned to another member of the sales staff and asked whether "that is Mrs. Benjamin.” Fate had brought Rosemary Benjamin together with her long-time nemesis, Operator 23.

This amusing little vignette cannot happen today because, even if Rosemary Benjamin could be recreated, Operator 23 could not. For one thing, the shoe store would have to be in New Dehli (I didn’t say that, did I?). But more to the point, and here’s the irony of it, the phone companies are much smaller today and there are so many of them, but the relationships we form with them are so much less personal, or at least they seem that way.

Maybe I’m remembering the old phone company paranoid fantasies more fondly than they deserve. Rosemary probably had nothing like a personal relationship with her phone company, but somehow it felt that way to her. For whatever reason, that cannot happen in the post-industrial 21st Century and I think we’re all a little poorer for it.

Generous Offers Rejected

Yesterday evening, my synagogue hosted a book event featuring Jeffrey Goldberg, currently a reporter for the New Yorker magazine. Goldberg’s recently released book, “Prisoners, A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide,” recounts, among other things, several relationships the author forged during his service in an Israeli prison housing a variety of Palestinians guilty of serious and mundane crimes, some apparently more political, some decidedly violent. There is a feel-good element to this story, although Goldberg was very honest in his recognition that the balance of power in these relationships was decidedly uneven. As such, as rewarding, or at least, interesting as these friendships may have been for Goldberg, they strike me as more symptomatic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than part of any prescription for that conflict’s resolution.

Goldberg seemed to acknowledge this during his talk. At one point he stated that ultimately politics, and not personal contacts of this sort, is where the solution to the conflict will have to happen. Politics is the forum in which each side to this or any other major dispute is forced to examine its own assumptions and make the painful (really painful) compromises that will lead to an agreement, if not a complete meeting of minds. In the case of the Israelis – our side -- that means recognizing, as the new Israeli historians have shown, that we have held the upper hand for a long time in a power relationship that has proven destructive to both sides. It is the renunciation of that upper hand that will be our great sacrifice if there is ever to be peace. Zionism’s unmistakable presumption of entitlement, its attachment to our collective mentality of victimization, are the values undergirding our stubborn retention of the upper hand in this uneven relationship. It’s not just about giving up the land. Peace is also about finally freeing ourselves from these comfortable, but anachronistic, operating principles. But in order to do that, there is also going to have to be a national reckoning that there is blame to go around and that some of the really bad stuff the Palestinians have done, and continue to do is the predictable residue of policies marginalization imposed by a succession of rulers, including us.

Individual gestures (jailer to prisoner) do not involve this element of institutional reckoning prerequisite to true peaceful coexistence. At the end of the day, whether the gesture is accepted or not, the original power relationship remains. Our adversaries, havee made some extraordinarily bad decisions in response to some of our best offers, but generosity isn’t part of the equation. It’s all about redemption, which in our case means giving up the upper hand and accepting the idea that peace is an obligation, not merely an option. In more concrete terms, that means coming to understand that another people has at least as much right to the land as we do.