Chutzpah and Violence

Violence, Emmanuel Levinas tells us, is to act as if we were alone in acting. Paul Wolfowitz’s attempt to gain exoneration for his ethical lapse seems to me an example of such violence. Accused of an ethical violation by arranging for a pay and promotion package for Shaha Ali Riza, his companion and a bank employee when Wolfowitz became president of the World Bank in 2005, Wolfowitz then acknowledged an error in judgement (a euphemism for ‘whoops, I fucked up and I got caught!). Now I read that he demands exoneration for his misdeeds before he submits his resignation. He want to be cleared for what he has admitted doing! Jews have a word for this: chutzpah. Brazen, unembarrassed, shameless effrontery. He acknowledges mistakes and then demands that he be declared innocent of them. Sure I’m guilty, he says, but so what? And the Bush administration seems prepared to back this violence. But what else would one expect from an administration which pursues an illegal, immoral war which everyone would prefer ended but which Bush et al. insist must go on. What else expect from an administration in which the Vice President shoots his friend and then goes home for a drink, and from a President who plays golf while New Orleans floods.

I keep promising myself not to write about politics here; Thoreau said that reading the newspaper once is important, but after that, this reading is engagement in gossip. The Rabbis say that to participate in lashan hara is one of those sins which keep one in Gehinnom.

But perhaps it is not the news I am studying anymore, but the absurd.