other-bashing, Levinas, Buber

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

     I would like to thank Terry for this comment. My response to all this
stuff is  I am  depressed. Next week there will be a very great deal 
for this list to discuss reguarding future Pynchonalia, in which I will be 
involved. But this list needs to break out of the state we've been in. 
Between then and now---please--- a little spiritual healing. 

I'm going to re-read I and Thou, becuase I trust most of that work,
and I'm going to look at a few pieces by Levinas, the underlined passages 
I keep going back to for solace. 

     We have to find a way out of this Eubonics-trap. C'mon folks, we read
Pynchon, we must be good at treading through the labrynith! 

Now, what did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?
Remembering that my father and his brother match this description 
perfectly, and both were standing in Northolt in 1944?

E.A. Weinstein




     INTELLIGENT Other-bashing? Oh, c'mon. If it was intelligent--whatever this
means--then it would be a version of Same, wouldn't it? And then it wouldn't
really be bashing. Or you could say it wouldn't really be humor. This tedious
discussion about the racism of eubonics jokes has me more impatient than any
moment in the past two years. 

     Maybe it's just in part because my campus is presently in a fit of self-
righteousness because the student paper published a stupid letter a couple of
weeks ago that took a couple of swipes at Jews. Now everybody in anxious to
weigh in with their anti-semetic credentials, in the process making the ususal
disingenuous distinctions between censorship and responsible journalism.

     I do think there's such a thing as responsible net-working. But I'd be
hard-pressed to say what it is, especially when humor is involved. As a few
people have suggested, humor is too anarchic and sharp to be disciplined
according to careful distinctions between, say, a lampoon and an attack, or
between invoking the "major themes" of prejudice against a group as opposed
to its minor themes. The attempt to make such distinctions just seems foolish 
to me.

     It's also foolish not to admit that Africian-Americans enjoy a special
dispensation in this regard, or are officially mandated in this position. If
so, then fine. Americans understand why. But I think that this discussion
originating from one person's merely transmitting an innocuous bit of humor
about eubonics ought to realize that exempting this one group from the vulnera-
bilies and provocations of humor only re-victimizes them all over again (and
opens up a space for black comedians--as if alone among all other groups--to
have a field day, if not a profession). 

     I wonder what our response would be if anybody created a comic eubonics
verbal construct comparable to the infamous Piss-Christ, also of much current
interest? Or are we to imagine that such a construct would be impossible, not
because it couldn't be imagined but because it shouldn't be? And this on the
part of a group of people who profess to admire Gravity's Rainbow!?

                          I be upset,
                            Terry
  

Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk