Of Soda Bread and Sacrilege -- Growing Up with Irish Catholics in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
This Supersedes the Version of this Essay posted a few minutes ago
NOTE: THIS SUPERSEDES THE IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING VERION OF THIS ESSAY POSTED A FEW MINUTES AGO.
By
David Gottfried
Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the slaves to Heaven of the German, Prussian, Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades, reeking of the Church, of the barracks, of cabbage junkerdom, and above all, the Philistine.
- Karl Marx on the Paris Commune
I grew-up in a section of Brooklyn, New York known as Bay Ridge. Demographers generally refer to this sort of community as a "white enclave," a section of a city still white and -- as is suggested by the arguably raciest term "enclave" -- still nice. (Sort of makes one think of the lyrics to "Edelweiss," from The Sound of Music, which went something like "small and nice, clean and white...")
In any event, Bay Ridge was an enclave of sorts long before students of urban studies talked about white flight and our crumbling urban centers. It was an enclave against the Twentieth Century: This neighborhood, seemingly innocuously tucked into the Southwest Corner of Brooklyn, was, notwithstanding all the Jews and liberals and proponents of social change in the borough of Brooklyn and the City of New York, against all things Jewish and liberal and progressive.
In 1964, while New York State gave three-quarters of its votes to Lyndon Johnson, Bay Ridge followed the passions of the Deep South and drunk itself into a tizzy over Barry Goldwater, giving him well over 60 percent of the vote. On a more personal note, my best friend, who was black, was repeatedly beaten-up for the simple reason that he was black. (The one refreshing aspect of their old-fashioned sort of bigotry was their honesty: They did not pretend, deny or equivocate. They flatly said that they hated you because you were black, or that they wished that Hitler had killed more Jews.) I, of course, was repeatedly attacked for being Jewish. The superintendent of my Grandmother's apartment building had a picture of Adolf Hitler in his living room. Bay Ridge High School, an all girls high school, had an "Aryan club," for middle class girls, with a fascist bent, who thought they could be debutantes. When school desegregation was implemented in New York City, the headline of a Bay Ridge newspaper screamed, "The Niggers are Coming."
Given all of the hatred at the hands of the Christians, one might think that the Jews gave one another some solace. If they did, I never knew about it.
My most enduring recollections of the Jewish community surround the behavior of my co-religionists during the High Holidays. During this time -- the most sacred days on the Jewish calendar, my teachers all piously intoned -- all the Jews in the neighborhood showed-up for religious services. Jews who for the past twelve months could not be found -- who had, with cunning and guile or perhaps just the flagging interest of others, been able to elude the grasp and call of tradition -- suddenly materialized at the door to the Synagogue.
Most of these Jews, however, were not clamoring for a seat by the Eastern Wall (The Eastern Wall is the front of the Synagogue -- all temples in the Occident are built facing East, toward Jerusalem.) No, such a holy spot would impede the primary occupation of the day: The money show.
To me, the whole affair was a money show, an event in which you showed-off your money, talked about your money, not by citing bank balances line by line -- although their zeal to flaunt their wealth was so intense it made it seem as if all they really wanted to do was hand-out Xerox copies of their securities and brokerage statements -- but by not so subtle references to homes, apartments, beautiful cars, furniture, jewelry and the like; talked about your professional and academic advances -- which, for the most part, are all reducible to liquid assets (Law and Medicine and the Ivy League is business); and tried to get other people jealous about your money.
And jealous my family was. First, we did not live in the right place. I lived, alone with my Mother, in a moderately decrepit apartment building.
The building was all wrong for Jews. It was on Fourth Avenue; an aging boulevard with stately, shabby homes a quarter of a mile from Lower New York Bay. The building had the comical quality of so many lower middle class buildings constructed in the 1920's: It had all sorts of adornments and embellishments -- indeed, even its name aspired to grandeur; it was called castel court -- but it was all for naught: No matter how many Rococo flourishes which graced the building it was and would always be a hovel for laborers, miserable gray clerks, fish wives, and all sorts of sorry, lonely, sexless people coughed up from the neighborhood's prolific and bewitching Catholic Churches which, through sacred sorcery and mischief, sucked-up the hordes of the unwashed and ignorant, spoiled their sex, their love and their life, and then told them that they were unwashed and ignorant not because of an unjust economic system but because the Jews were inherently evil.
The Jews, by contrast, lived on Shore Road, which hugged the curves of New York Bay like a tightly fitting mini skirt. The buildings were no less sexy. They had none of the silly false elegance of the older homes on Fourth Avenue. They were new, sleek, geometric cubes, self-consciously and proudly posing on key elevations of terrain, like pert nipples on rolling breasts.
My fellow Jews treated me with contempt because I was impoverished -- and fatherless, forlorn and forgotten. But life was not any better with the goyim: The Christians, with inimitable stupidity, envied me for what they reasoned must surely be enormous quantities of cash and gold bullion -- since I was Jewish, they reasoned that I had to be rich. No, I never did think that humanity was an especially welcome addition to the planet.
My ostracism gave rise to a certain academic insecurity.
(I wrote this years ago. Upon re-reading it, I think the stuff about grades sounds positively nuts. It’s obvious that I had an inordinate, extravagant and unwarranted fear of not doing well academically. This is probably a case of what doctors call referred or displaced pain: When the real source of the pain is truly excruciating, the pain is deflected to other organs. When appendicitis is too much to bear, pain is sometimes felt in other organs. When one is too upset about a relative’s death to be conscious of it, one will complain of the death of one’s car.)
I felt besieged, academically, by the Jews in Math and Science and by the Christians in English, Art and all things fancy shmancy -- pretty English and Park Avenue accents just seem inherently less Jewish and more blond.
Although the reader might think that this author has a high measure of intelligence, and certainly no failure of verbal agility and acumen, I never thought this was the case when I was young. No, when I was young I would not dare to piece together the strings of alliterations that ran through my head, never dared to show the shining, stellar IQ score sizzling on the far right end of the bell-shaped curve. In my childhood, my English teachers consistently gave me my lowest grades.
Although English, in adolescence, is a topic relatively more receptive to deviation -- in Math there is, usually, just one right answer; in English, introspection, individuality and idiosyncrasy are usually welcome -- it is, perhaps, the most conformist of subjects in elementary school.
In elementary school, English is taught along with handwriting and, as such, is taught with the same love of independence that pervades the teaching of the curly cues on capital letters. It was a discipline devoted to neatness, tidiness and prettiness.
It was the girlish discipline and the least Jewish of disciplines -- how could a language whose first major book was the "King James Bible," a title and a name which reeks of Christianity, reeks of it like glazed ham and mashed potatoes with Iced Tea, ever welcome a people so far from the Island Kingdom -- and it refused to let this Jewish boy enter its special world.
No, I was never neat enough and could never take to grammar, a subject that seemed to be the special preserve of upper middle class Irish girls with frilly dresses and upturned noses. Their subjects and verbs always agreed like good little boys and girls at a Catholic nursery school; punctuation smartly sculpted their phrases like the ironing and starching which pressed their uniforms into shape; and they even knew what a semicolon -- that exotic piece of punctuation which seems to be a graphic of love and life and sex (The upper part of the semicolon seems to say stop, while the underside, the sexy underbelly, curves and says "come this way") -- was and knew how to use it (And since discovering its meaning, I could never stop using it.)
And one could not challenge the Irish Girls' claim that they were the pretty princesses of the English language. Who could know English better than an Irish woman, who, by virtue of being Irish, had to endure the English for centuries -- we Jews had only been in the English speaking world since we emigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century -- and, by virtue of being women, had the requisite measure of conformity and attentiveness to detail to craft only the prettiest of phrases.
And so our fair-haired Irish girls glided around the classroom glibly singing out the answers to the questions in our Easy English grammar book -- a book with drawings of sleek smiling figures, who were always shown gracefully ice-skating around some cumbersome monument while chirping about the parts of speech like happy little birdbrains and who always seemed to smirk at me, telling me that I was just too awkward and klutzy to speak English properly.
But in math my path was also blocked. Math and Science were naturally more Jewish than Christian -- these subjects represented logic, and Christians represented the height of illogic, with their tradition of Eastern Bunnies and Easter pogroms, massacres and mistletoe. Math and Science were also more male -- for all the reasons commonly given, these subjects connoted ability, strength, effectiveness and logic.
But I felt handicapped in Math and Science because I was fatherless. Every smart Jewish boy seemed to have a Jewish Father who helped him synthesize all sorts of brilliant and terrifying chemicals. They were always devising great and brilliant experiments, tinkering in their basements with their daddies, learning about physics and electronics and medicine, heirs to Spinoza and Einstein and all things Jewish, bright and powerful.
For example, I remember, quite distinctly, my "friend" Michael Saks telling me, when we were about 11, that he knew how to make an atom bomb, that the process was really quite simple, and that he would soon pass his knowledge on to the State of Israel -- which would honor him, for his Jewish noggin and for being a special and devoted son of Israel. (He would be a loved son twice, by his Father and by Israel.) When I expressed surprise at his ingenuity, he quickly told me that it was "nothing," simply a very reasonable application of Einstein's theory of relativity, which he had read about and easily comprehended. Indeed, the construction of nuclear weapons was, he assured me, such a simple chore that even his nine year-old brother Stephen, he proudly noted, could make atom bombs.
Of course, if I doubted the genius of Michael and Stephen Saks, I could not dare challenge the scientific acumen of my Synagogue's esteemed Lidofsky family. Bart Lidofsky's father was a nuclear physicist at Columbia University. This, in and of itself, exuded grandeur. He was a Jew, teaching in one of the most exalted schools in the goyishce kingdom, and he taught a subject which was all about atom bombs and as such was at the very pinnacle of scientific genius. I had little doubt that the Lidofskys knew all about the construction of nuclear weapons and expected, any day, to see newspaper headlines exclaim that Lidofsky and his sons made some new and improved atom bombs which they had, as dutiful Jews, given to the state of Israel. The synagogue would surely love them, giving them a seat on the dais for the Sunday breakfast, where they would stuff themselves with lox and bagels and cream cheese while all the old men of the temple rose to express their gratitude for the construction of such good strong bombs.
I always tried to nudge my way into the limelight, but I was blocked. The Hebrew School honored the boys whose fathers were prominent in the synagogue; it had no time for Fatherless boys because, very obviously, those boys had no pull -- no daddy making contributions to the Synagogue or ostentatiously praying at Saturday morning services to make his love of all things Jewish incontestable.
And so when one of the old men of the temple presented a model of the solar system to us little brats, and asked us to identify the planets, I was not given the opportunity to speak. The old man chuckled, or maybe guffawed, at my request. He said that of course this was a task for Michael Saks, who was surely a very bright boy, a very good boy, and was a very real boy because he had a Father.
Under these circumstances, I reasoned that I simply had to try harder. First, I decided to level the playing field in War and History.
All Jewish boys had to know their history and their wars -- as Jews we had to know it because history was, in large measure, the saga of people killing Jews and as boys we were expected to be interested in it because of what we all assumed was the natural male affinity for blood and gore.
Of course, plenty of goyische boys knew their wars and played with toy tanks and planes. However, we Jews had to know the history with real scholarly detail.
Most Jewish boys in my neighborhood knew more about world history by the time they reached the tender age of nine than most American yuppies know at the time they are graduated from college, which, incidentally, isn't saying much given the sorry state of American education and the especially abysmal record of instruction in the field of history.
In any event, we young Jewish boys were raised on a series of books which discussed, with exciting narratives, and pictures when appropriate, the major wars of Europe within the past two hundred years. There was a book for each war. (This seemed very logical to me. Indeed, when I was about four years of age it seemed perfectly reasonable that there should be one world war per century. Accordingly, I assumed that the Second World War was fought in the Second Century. When I asked my baby-sitter how long it was since that war had ravaged Europe, I was annoyed when she said twenty years -- I reasoned that it had to have been many more years since it had been fought because the Second Century seemed far in the distant past. I asked her the question again. She said twenty years again. I continued repeating the question, and she continued repeating her sorry answer until she broke down in tears: She was a Jewish refugee from Europe with the concentration tattoos branded onto her arm.)
We Jewish boys generally started with the book of WW1 and then progressed to WW11. If we were bright, or aspired to being bright -- and this of course was all of us because, as Jews, we had to be bright -- we went back, back into the ugly history of Europe which fascinated us and terrified us -- which was always a source of terror because we Jews were the perpetual objects of Europe's murderous desires and which fascinated us because terror is fascinating, horror pictures are fascinating, and Christian European terror was so especially fascinating because it was so majestic: The murderers always held their heads high, purporting to be great and kind and good; they were rich, cruel kings and queens and Tzars and Popes, always flush with gold and silver, who had the gall to say that the Jews had all the money; they said they ruled with divine right, and proclaimed thousand year Reichs, as they threw babies into ovens -- and then they tell us that the Jews are hypocritical.
First, we just went back a few years, to the Franco-Prussian War. As we went further back in history, things got deadlier and more exciting. Of course, in real terms they did not get deadlier -- nothing can beat the Second World War in carnage. But the general level of spookiness mounts as you go back in time. Far back in time, the guys weren't wearing suits and practicing diplomacy. Back in the middle ages, the history books are peopled with guys who have the macho stance of a brawler, the histrionics of a furiously fashionable queen and wear capes like Dracula. Further back in time, Christianity is more pronounced, and this faith -- which to me was nothing but a sinister cult whose primary aim was the extermination of Jews (When I was seven, and first heard the term "Christmas Eve," I thought it was an abbreviation of "Christmas Evil") -- was to me, in and of itself, spooky.
But my study of history and war was for nothing. I still could not get anywhere in Bay Ridge: The goyim hated me because they were convinced that I was a rich Jew, and I was too poor to "fit-in" with the very fashionable, affluent Jews.
Accordingly, when I was ten or eleven, I reasoned that it would be a good idea to destroy Bay Ridge. It was 1968, and the smell of guns and love were in the air. Everything was collapsing and it did not seem too much to ask that Bay Ridge die too. Columbia, that citadel of conservative scholarship, was, within months of Dean Grayson Kirk's haughty pronouncement that students' rights were about as significant as strawberries, seething with the rage of students gone red -- redder than all the red of all the strawberry fields of their brilliant hallucinogenic imaginations -- red over Vietnam, red over their tight-assed American civilization, red with love (or envy) of the blacks in Harlem, red over insufficient sex, red because the straight guys were tired of being called queer for not wanting to fight in Vietnam, and red because the gay guys couldn't fight for gay rights, and still could not admit that they were gay, and so got sucked into the larger quasi-socialist swirl as a substitute for sexual revolution.
And how those students looked! They were madness and deviation made legitimate, proudly, joyously defacing and defiling all things great and good and proud in American Culture; rampaging through the streets with passion and love and hate and long, streaming, beautiful hair; they were redolent rage, lighting a Molotov cocktail, making such a starry night; and yes the prose was purple -- purple with superlatives, used with abandon; purple with hate, holy and hot; and purple with all the passion and love of the Beatles' silly love songs which didn't seem silly at the time.
Along with the students all sorts of other angry hordes besieged America: Blacks, everywhere -- filled with ferocious rage, blood-hungry for vengeance -- were breathing hot and heavy, ready to fuck America up the ass. And if America's blacks couldn't break the back of the Empire, then there was the big black world all around America -- the heat of the jungles of the third world seemed not only to incubate malaria and yellow fever but also seemed to breathe life into all sorts of psychic germs, multiplying communists and radicals and all sorts of revolutionaries who teamed through the streets of Saigon and other faded outposts of colonial decline with furious, febrile abandon.
But the dispossessed had their friends in white America. Odd as it may seem, some of the most contented people in the world, largely upper middle class professional people situated on the Eastern and Western seaboards of the United States, were getting the radical bug: They were Jews, making up for all the ass-kissing they did back in the days when the Jews were confined to the tenements of the Lower East Side; they were homosexuals, who by virtue of being homosexual had to be angry and found, in radicalism, an outlet for their anger; they were artists and writers, who hated the increasingly dominant position of science and technology and had to prove to Amerika that they could throw a rock through the window of an ROTC office just as well as any good ole boy could throw a rock at a queer; and they were having the time of their life.
It was all a very beautiful sight and I could not wait to see Bay Ridge bombed and blitzed. I wanted every single scrap of boring, conservative propriety, inhibition and prohibition put on the rack. Since the Catholics hated abortion, I decided to go to Our Lady Of Angels Catholic Church and paint, in the largest, reddest letters, "Abortion on Demand." When my sixth grade teacher unlawfully read the King James Bible in class -- she even dared to read portions of the New Testament -- I followed my role models at the College level and refused to rise during assembly, refused to say the pledge of allegiance, and left school after lunch, proudly telling the school nurse, who telephoned my home to inquire as to why I was absent, that "I did it in protest."
But these were frail little flickering’s of dissent which could not amount to much. And what seemed like a heroic endeavor to a sixth grader who considered his appreciation for the Monkey’s weekly television program and Nehru shirts a sign of his receptivity to the counterculture, the Avant garde and all things progressive, radical, and, most importantly, cool -- as in real cool, man -- seemed like paltry juvenile pranks to a fourteen year old in 1971, when the zenith of radicalism had long since past and the counterculture as it existed on prime time television seemed to be sanitized silly stuff geared to the passions of pre-pubescent school girls, stuff like David Cassidy and his cutesy saccharine songs.
And so, when I was fourteen, when my radicalism was no longer informed by television and its simplifications, and the Monkees had been rudely shoved aside by the Rolling Stones in my pantheon of rock and roll heroes, I decided that I must devise new and better ways to destroy Bay Ridge.
I concluded that a form of block-busting would be a fine way to inflict harm. Block-busting, of course, is a term used to refer to a process in which realtors would fill whites with fear that blacks would move into their neighborhood, buy homes from whites at very low prices, sell the homes to blacks at dramatically inflated prices, and make enormous profits while damaging everyone around them. My version of blockbusting was not so selfish. I was like a Kamikaze pilot; in my zeal to destroy America, I didn't care what happened to me.
I decided to buy homes and sell them to everything and everybody Bay Ridge detested. Several homes would be sold to militant black radicals with handsome arsenals of weapons. Other homes could be sold to militant male homosexuals. Other homes could be sold to homosexuals with a proclivity to hot pants, mini skirts and eye shadow. And of course there would be rambling homes with lots of barking dogs and their big bull dyke mommas.
I wanted the Black Panthers -- my heroes, my saviors, I didn't care how much they hated me so long as they were ready to kill the people I lived with -- to come charging down the main thoroughfares of Bay Ridge, blitzkrieging with bombs, bullets and barricades. I wanted all the old, red-faced dogs and mules of my neighborhood -- and other assorted clumps of bigoted protoplasm which are supposed to be human -- to be driven into ditches, sprayed with bullets and left to die
Of course, I did not have the capital to acquire real estate to distribute to the wretches of society. That would have to wait.
But there were plenty of things I could do. First, many simple acts of violence could be committed each and every day -- and I am proud to say that for a couple of years I did indeed do my good deeds of violence, every day, with religious regularity.
For example, I routinely threw bricks off of buildings onto passing cars. My favorite targets were, of course, station wagons -- those ugly, fuel inefficient, corpulent beasts which represented daddy, mommy, sally and dick and a dog named Spot and were boorish and vulgar manifestations of Americana and all that it signified. On other occasions, I simply walked for miles ripping-off the radio antennas of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of cars. I stole bicycles, started fires, and preyed, each and every day, that the Viet Cong would capture Bob Hope and cut his balls off on national television.
I needed allies but there were none to found. So I dreamed-up allies in the form of Asians. I always loved Chinese food (In those days, poor Brooklyn boys knew of no other types of Oriental cuisine -- Lobster Cantonese was infinitely exotic and anything more elaborate would be more than a tender, Western, Jewish stomach could tolerate), and thought that the Orientals -- with their love of intellectual attainment, refinement and good taste -- were so unlike the ignorant Irish and Italians and were much like the Jews.
But, unlike the Jews who were insidiously shifting to the political right, the Orient seemed like one vast and gallant red menace. China was called Red China, and in its transmittal of Communism to countless nations, it seemed like some diabolical nuclear device, emanating, radiating forces of turbulence and perversion.
And so I looked upon the Chinese as role models. If I followed them and watched them closely, I too could be a Communist spy, a genius with a special facility for Math and Science and all things deadly, a connoisseur of the finest wanton soups and egg rolls, and a real cool guy.
My attraction for the Chinese blossomed into true love when I was hospitalized, for several weeks, for a severe automobile accident. When I was drunk on Demerol, I asked my Chinese doctor where he was from, and he grinned and told me -- proudly, defiantly and in a manner that suggested that he was about to recite Communist slogans or march around the room hailing Chairman Mao -- that he was from Peking. In case the significance of the municipality was lost on my innocent, and what he may have thought were ignorant, American ears, he said, with special emphasis, that he was from Communist China. I dreamed that he was my new friend, my long lost Brother, and that we would sort of fall in Love and go back to China or Vietnam -- or wherever Chairman Mao wanted us -- to make love and holy revolution.
But I really didn't have the chance to collaborate with Chinese Communists, blow up weapons depots, or devise bombs to destroy Fort Hamilton, the local United States military base. So I engaged in a poor substitute for radical action but a substitute nonetheless. I worked for Reform Democratic clubs.
The reform Democratic clubs were the liberal, anti-war clubs which sprouted-up throughout New York in the Spring of 1968 like all the flowers which eluded us through the long winter of the escalation of the Vietnam War. I worked for Eugene Mc Carthy, when he ran for President in 1968, and the campaigns of assorted benevolent gray-haired men who preached an end to the war and seemed in sync with the temper of the radical college campuses which is where I, at the ages of 10 and 12, wanted to be.
I fought the mainstream, pro-War Democrats, and those hideous things called Republicans, with a vengeance. I never missed an opportunity to shout "warmonger" whenever I passed the headquarters of any opposing political groups. I defaced their signs, ripped up their literature, and even ran up to a campaign car -- which blared with its bullhorn that t0he good people of Bay Ridge should vote for James Buckley, the conservative candidate for the United States Senate -- and proceeded to bang on the windows, rip-off the campaign signs, and take-off the hub caps, merrily proving to the assembled crowd of Neanderthal Catholic macho assholes that this pussy faggot intellectual communist had the requisite rage to be just as macho, aggressive and belligerent as any drunken Irish thug when the right occasion arose.
Sometimes, I simply attacked people on the most personal level, which is probably the most effective way to attack people because more than war and peace and the issues of the day the political hacks were consumed and possessed by their standing and stature in the community. And so whenever I saw Anne Giovanni, one of the leaders of the pro-War Democrats of Bay Ridge, I reminded her that she was quite disgustingly obese by screaming, in the loudest of voices, that "Anne Giovanni has a big fat fanny."
Anne Giovanni of course makes me remember that Bella Abzug was not the first woman in New York Politics to enliven its visual aesthetics with a millinery imagination. Anne Giovanni might not have had a single substantive idea in her head, but her head was dressed up fine, crowned by a big, broad high diadem of a hat that seemed as wide as the flying saucer-like head gear of the Vietnamese Peasants we were napalming and as exalted and elegant as anything that Bette Davis might wear on the Late Late Show. And so when the candidates in New York City's 1969 mayoral race made an appearance at our Synagogue, and Anne Giovanni arrived late, the crowds parted for her, and with her hat leading the way she surged to the front of the ballroom, and managed to place her resplendently fat fanny, smiling and wiggling at us in a sequined dress, on a seat in the very first row.
This really was the stuff and meat and potatoes of politics, fannies and smiles and big broad hats that one wore like a coat of arms. And every candidate had a look that communicated his politics better than the content of his ideas, which most of the people never really listened to anyways. One did not have to understand a word of English to know that Goldwater was a conservative. One only needed to take in the pugnacious grating of his nasty mouth coupled with the strict severity of his black framed glasses to know that this guy meant business. We all knew that Buckley was an old school elitist conservative because, no matter how much of a macho man he purported to be, he spoke with the bitchy feminine sarcasm of society ladies in "The Women," or "My Man Godfrey" or any number of satires of the effete Pre-Roosevelt aristocracy. (And the fact that so many liberals today sound like aloof ladies -- think of Michael Dukakis commending Belgian endive to Iowa farmers -- makes them no threat to the leisure class and may account for liberalism's success among relatively affluent professionals.) We knew that Lyndon Johnson was a bit of a liberal, in the old new deal sense of the term, because although he was gruff and mean and fat and ornery, he was also as amicably disheveled as Jed Clampett on the Beverly Hillbillies, aware of where he came from, proud of his rural roots, and ready to be generous with the unfortunate.
But of course there was a new liberalism, that did not quite know how to define itself, which was stalking the land. Its sources were as diverse as the gallantry of Dr. Kildare, a striking young doctor in a sudsy television drama; John Lennon's undying profession of faith and devotion in the thrilling chords of "Any Time At All;" and the wry, ironical comedy on the "Doby Gilis Show." It had neither the blue collar, industrial liberalism of “The Honeymooners” nor the vestigial strains of populist liberalism which made itself known on "Green Acres." This new liberalism was sleek and stunning, and although it was elegant, it had none of the effeteness of rock ribbed Conservative Republicanism so masterfully exemplified by "The Millionaire and his Wife” on “Gilligan's Island.”
This liberalism, imagined in the personas of Paul Newman and other fearless leading men, had to find issue in the political arena, and finally, in the 1960's, politicians were produced to pick up the torch.
These politicians were as exquisitely groomed as Ken dolls. Their hair glistened as brightly as a carton of Tropicana Orange Juice. They spoke with all the confidence of a physician on Medical Center declaiming that "We must operate now."
They were the Kennedys. They came running at you, John, Bobby and Ted, in quick succession, with all the gusto of a bunch of football players running out of the locker room to claim the field. They smiled with the incessant intensity of acrobats on the Ed Sullivan show, juggling swords and candelabras and ballerinas while dressed in red tights. Whenever there was an election, they were at the center of the storm. Whenever there was a camera, their glowing faces provided the illumination to take a picture. Whenever a black man was in distress, they were a more handsome, mod substitute for Abraham Lincoln. Whenever a woman was truly alone and despondent, she could find an outlet for her mangled romantic emotions by patiently stuffing thousands of envelopes with Kennedy campaign literature.
The psychosexual aura of the Kennedys lifted the hems on skirts, accelerated the pace of the Nation's rock and roll and made America confront the specter of something heretofore unknown: The Sexy Irishman.
Before the advent of Kennedyism, the Irish contribution to America consisted chiefly in giving Protestants the satisfaction of knowing that there were some people more sexless, awkward in the bedroom, and dour than they were. The Italians might have had Sal Mineo. The Jews had John Garfield. And the Irish had the rasping voice of Al Smith, witty, garrulous but more congruous with drooling men impotent from drink than anything remotely sexual.
The sexlessness of the Irish was apparent in everything, in Irish soda bread, which was as dry as a ninety year old woman's vagina; in the juvenile fetishistic celebration of things like the color green, which seemed to evince a stupid giddy enthusiasm specific only to children or virgins; and in their premature aging, in which their giddy enthusiasm quickly faded into a brittle, brooding alcoholic depression.
But the Kennedys defied the rules and the archetypes of American culture. They did not speak in brogues like silly, fey, eunuchoidal leprechauns; they spoke with a clipped, concise Boston accent, which, in its urbanity, seemed vaguely English and hence as profoundly sexual as the Beatles or James Bond. They did not wear gowns like priests, or clomp around like longshoreman; they strode into stadiums like Roman emperors in a Hollywood epic. They wives were not dowdy, pasty, women, with pinched noses, whose ideal of a woman was a bitter, mannish, Mother Superior who whipped all the boys and girls in the parochial school.
Their woman was a dream, a vision, a heavenly gleam of angel dust called Jackie. Her voice wafted in the air as gently as the snow flakes that made Washington an Ice Palace on the day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. Her gait in her gowns had the glory of all the queens of England. She threw out the Soda Bread and brought in the fancy French everything and Irish Catholicism was never the same.
And the Irish Catholics of Bay Ridge were proud. Although they may have voted for Goldwater, that did not stop them from voting from Robert Kennedy when he ran for the Senate in New York that same year, 1964.
The Cult of Kennedyism was at its zenith from the moment John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas until Teddy profaned the Holy of Holies of Hyanissport with the Scandal of Chappaquiddick. The killing of Jack Kennedy made the Kennedys a special species of Jesus. Whereas the first Jesus was Jewish, John Kennedy managed to be a Christian Jesus. But if John Kennedy was too cool to be a Jesus, Bobby certainly took on the role manfully: He bore the pain of his Brother's crucifixion like a cross he carried to Golgotha. He professed to love the poor and the oppressed and little children just like a perfect Jesus would. And he exuded a melancholy that seemed to tell us that he knew he was fated to ascend to the cross and die for our sins.
Of course, from the time Robert Kennedy died, until the time Teddy defamed the family name at Chappaquiddick, I thoroughly expected the Catholic Church, anytime soon, to declare that Bobby was now Saint Bobby, or Jesus's first lieutenant, or to modify the liturgy to insert special prayers for the Kennedys. Many of my friends said that it was nothing but common knowledge, simple common knowledge, that the perfect form of American Government would have been a twenty four year reign of Kennedys: Jack Kennedy from 1960 to 1968; Robert Kennedy from 1968 until 1976, and Edward Kennedy from 1976 until 1984. At the 1968 Democratic Convention, when it seemed clear that the pro and anti war factions of the Democratic Party would never resolve their differences, the logical solution seemed to be the nomination of Edward Kennedy who, with his aura of religiosity and splendor, easily transcended such petty political issues as war and peace.
My classmates believed that the goodness of Kennedy was something that one accepted and cherished as readily as one loved Christmas, or Good Humor Ice cream, or the New York Yankees.
But, in the end, Bay Ridge could not forget its racism and its Catholicism was not the Christianity of St. John the Assisi; it was the aristocratic and Aryan Catholicism of the Nazi-Vatican Concordat.
It was 1972. I was campaigning, in Bay Ridge, for George Mc Govern with one of Robert Kennedy’s children, sweet Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. A vicious woman screamed at her, saying that her Father, who had been assassinated four years before, was a nigger-lover who had deserved to get shot.