My complaint about Reb. Pauker

The theme of this letter is not "The Rabbi Jed Pauker-ization of our political and spiritual lives will grant the most wicked cult leaders I've ever seen the keys to the kingdom by next weekend." By now, you've already heard countless arguments running in that vein and are probably pretty sick of them. The theme of this letter is "Jed's helpers fight more for the negative destruction of opposing ideologies than for the positive promotion of their own." I would like to start by discussing Jed's epigrams, mainly because they scare me. The thing I'm the most frightened about is that Jed's inclinations will have consequences -- very serious consequences. And we ought to begin doing something about that.

Whenever someone tells him not to hammer a few more nails into the coffin of freedom, Jed gets all teary-eyed. My, my; how sad. My heart bleeds for him, it really does.

I have not forgotten that he neglects the impact that selfishness has on the soul. I have not forgotten that the doom-and-gloom, it's-too-late crowd always plays right into the hands of grungy loan sharks. And I cannot forget that I recently overheard a couple of negligent misogynists say that he understands the difference between civilization and savagery. Here, again, we encounter the blurred thinking that is characteristic of this Jed-induced era of slogans and propaganda. His argument that he could do a gentler and fairer job of running the world than anyone else is hopelessly flawed and completely circuitous. Jed's premise (that university professors must conform their theses and conclusions to his haughty-to-the-core prejudices if they want to publish papers and advance their careers) is his morality disguised as pretended neutrality. Jed uses this disguised morality to support his proposed social programs, thereby making his argument self-refuting.

In a recent essay, he stated that he defends the real needs of the working class. Since the arguments he made in the rest of his essay are based in part on that assumption, he should be aware that it just isn't true. Not only that, but the space remaining in this letter will not suffice even to enumerate the ways in which he has tried to distract people from serious analysis of the situation. I hate to say this, but Jed's latest manifesto, like all the ones that preceded it, is a consummate anthology of disastrously bad writing teeming with misquotations and inaccuracies, an odyssey of anecdotes that are occasionally entertaining, but certainly not informative. Who could have guessed that Jed would damn this nation and this world to Hell? To put it another way, where do filthy crude batty-types like him come from, and what are we going to do with them? We should be able to look into our own souls for the answer. If we do, I suspect we'll find that I have a tendency to report the more sensational things that he is up to, the more shocking things, things like how he wants to erode constitutional principles that have shaped our society and remain at the core of our freedom and liberty. And I realize the difficulty that the average person has in coming to grips with that, but I need your help if I'm ever to make efforts directed towards broad, long-term social change. "But I'm only one person," you might protest. "What difference can I make?" The answer is: a lot more than you think. You see, the poisonous wine of scapegoatism had been distilled long before Jed entered the scene. Jed is merely the agent decanting the poisonous fluid from its bottle into the jug that is world humanity.

Jed commonly appoints ineffective people to important positions. He then ensures that these people stay in those positions, because that makes it easy for Jed to reap a harvest of death. Please don't ask me to make anti-intellectualism socially acceptable. I simply can't do that. I can undoubtedly suggest how he ought to behave. Ultimately, however, the burden of acting with moral rectitude lies with Jed himself. Now that you've heard what I've had to say, I want you to think about it. And I want you to join me and subject Rabbi Jed Pauker's zingers to the rigorous scrutiny they warrant.

Fr. Toby Pauker

 

 

Courtesy of counter.bloke.com