Israel and the Krebbs factor

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/11/10

Bringing Bill Clinton to the podium to support his tax decision further delegitimatizes Obama’s Presidency. It makes him look like a child. Like more of a child; the adulthood aspect was never that convincing. And that anyone would consider Clinton to be a father figure is absolutely spooky. This is not the party of Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy. This is the party of Maynard G. Krebbs. In fact, that could explain everything; the Pelosi House, the Barney Frank initiatives, the irresponsible and unconstitutional spending in the trillions and the delusional foreign policy. Forget Marx and Keynes, Jefferson and Hamilton. As the prescient Aldous Huxley said, the eye of the camera had come to control us, to make us its willful zombies. It’s could all be from the mind of the 1950s TV beatnik Maynard G. Krebbs, sidekick and antithesis to the blond and happy Dobie Gillis, who enchanted an entire generation in its formative years.

Bill is again at the podium and not letting go. Coming on top of the incredulous Hillaryland no-fault diplomacy and the incongruous commission to reduce the deficit, it further diminishes America. A 50-year debt reduction program? We will need a five or seven generational thing. It is purely Krebbsian.

But a failing Presidency, a failing political system and a failing America can awaken new life in the world at large. Not in Europe, where the self-imposed warehousing by the EU has so far successfully kept them from killing one another, but to those just being born to the world again like China and Israel.

Israel especially. Much as vast China gave the impression that it was about to hatch 30 years ago, the tiny jewel heart that is Israel does today. It goes still unnoticed here as the press looks to the new millennium with the eyes of the last. And just as the twisted sisters of the enlightenment like Gore Vidal condemned China for daring to challenge the territorial imperative of America 30 years ago, so Israel is attacked daily today by its own, here and abroad. Especially in the editorial pages of the New York Times, marginal – by Obama’s recent declaration – as they might be.

Nothing to be afraid of though; no heavy weights around anymore like Arthur Koestler, Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Kenneth Burke, Hannah Arendt and so many others. No one in influence today can even remember Dostoyevsky or Willa Cather or Aldous Huxley. But they will remember “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” and “Leave it to Beaver” and “Gilligan’s Island” and The Doors and Herman’s Hermits and Bono and Mick Jagger and Princess Summerfall Winterspring. It is the dominant paradigm of the dominating post-war generation. And if Israel can survive Rome, Germany, Russia and the Golem, it will surely survive the current antagonism and rising anti-Semitism of the post-war generation.