Riffs: Your Tax Dollars at Work

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This just in: The results of a decades-long field study, conducted by sociologists from UC Berkeley, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Haplesston VoTech, show that ordinary human beings in all walks of life fuck up with alarming frequency.
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Raspberries Redux

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Okay, okay. In the interest of full disclosure (if not by popular demand), here is the gag in its entirety:

Levi Johnston, Joe the Plumber, and Roland Burris walk into a bar. Bartender goes, "Wait! Don't tell me! Hootie and the Blowfish! Am I right?"

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(RAG, eat your heart out.)
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Raspberries: Needs No Punchline

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Levi Johnston, Joe the Plumber, and Roland Burris walk into a bar...
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Reflections: I Got a Million of 'Em!

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In the post, Apostolic activity comes out of an abundance of contemplation (8/7/09) at Disputations, Tom explores the crucial role played by contemplation in the apostolic life of a good Dominican.

In the comment section, Disputations regular, Brandon, shares the following:

As one who is attempting to determine (discern) what role the apostolic pillar should play in my life, let me just say that I feel very much like the guy in the balloon stuck in the tree from reading this post. I suppose that makes you a good Dominican.

Tom follows with a comment that reveals to the uninitiated the punch line of the joke to which Brandon has alluded:

For those wondering, the guy in the balloon stuck in the tree asks a passerby where he is, the passerby says, "You're in a tree," and the guy says, "What you've said is true, and of no use to me at all. You must be a Dominican."

That’s funny, I thought…I’ve heard that joke before. Maybe it was told around a campfire at Camp Michi-Lu-Ca, deep in the nighttime forest of darkest Michigan back in the day?

But in the version I remember, it goes something like this:

There’s this guy dangling up in a tree. The guy’s been carried up into the clouds by this bag of hot air, see? But finally the fuel’s all gone, and the fire goes out, and the guy’s bag just collapses. Down he comes. Now he’s snagged up in this tree. Can’t go back up. Doesn’t know how to get down. But, actually, he don’t know where the hell he is, get it?
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Now along comes this guy’s got both feet on the ground. So, the guy in the tree goes, “Yo, buddy! Can you tell me where I’m at?” The guy on the ground sizes up the situation for a minute. Then he says, “If you have to ask, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” But the dude dangling from the collapsed balloon goes, “C’mon, pal. Be a guy!” So the pedestrian fellow says, “Okay, then—you’re up a tree.”
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Now the fallen aerialist looks around and he goes, “Hmm. It would seem that what you say is true, but I can’t use it. It sounds kinda protestanty to me!”
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The man on the ground smiles up at the treed balloonist. “Well, then, enjoy the view,” he says. And he goes on his way.
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Readings: Some Essentialist Humor

One of the books I’m currently reading is Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by my old friend, Rebecca Goldstein. It’s a good read, and I recommend it. But I’m not going to write a review of it here, but rather share something that I got a kick out of, from the chapter entitled “Identity Crisis”.

Goldstein does an excellent and very engrossing job of putting both Spinoza the man and Spinoza the philosopher in the larger context of the Spinoza the Jew. Although we know him as a native of Amsterdam, Goldstein shows how and why it is not incidental that Spinoza was a Sephardic Jew—a descendent of those Jews who were expelled from the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition, and who settled in Amsterdam, even then a liberal city.

There were also, however, “secret Jews,” called Marranos, who had remained in Portugal or Spain, ostensibly having been converted to Christianity, but practicing an increasingly heterodox form of Judaism behind closed doors and shutters. It was, in part, this double life that gave rise to the “identity crisis” of the chapter’s title.

Goldstein writes:

The continued inquisitorial persecution of conversos had added yet a new dimension to the mystery of personal identity, merging it with the mystery of Jewish identity. What is it to be Jewish? Is it a matter of creed, of culture, of family or blood—or, as we would now put it, of genes? Having once been Jewish, can one then cease to be Jewish? Or is a Jew essentially a Jew, no matter what religion he might practice or even think himself to be a member of? (Betraying Spinoza, p.126)

I think that is enough to set up my purpose in writing this piece, which is to share the following--perhaps the truest answer to the questions posed above:

A Sephardic friend tells me his grandfather used to tell him a joke that perhaps goes back to Marrano times. A Jew has undergone a conversion process, in the course of which the priest has put his hands on the Jew’s head and repeated several times, “You were a Jew, now you’re Christian, you were a Jew, now you’re Christian.” A few weeks pass and the priest comes on a Friday to see how his converso is getting on. The priest finds, to his shock and dismay, that the New Christian is not eating fish for his Friday night dinner, as he ought to be as a good Catholic, but rather a roasted chicken. The Jew, ordered to account for himself, explains that he had simply put his hand on the chicken’s head and repeated several times, “You were a chicken, now you’re fish, you were a chicken, now you’re fish. (Ibid. P.127)

I love it!

Hmm. I wonder if Woody Allen knows that one?