Mathias B. Freese

I’ve read Wakefield’s book twice, for I “grew up” in the Fifties. I purposely did so to refresh my memory of the times. In 1950 I was 10 and by 1960 I was 20, when I first saw La Dolce Vita. I can go many different ways with this blog but I will simply immerse myself into my associations and remembrances. In 1957 I went with Stan Edelman, both of us about 17,  to Greenwich Village. I recall that I picked up Finnegan’s Wake in a book store and was put off by the gibberish, it seemed to me, that ran for pages — who knew I was interrupting a dream? We roamed the village and I especially recall going into an artist’s quarters who had posted a sign at the door that he was having a showing of his photographs. To go upstairs, to have cheese and a cracker, to browse, sublimely innocent and feeling sublimely safe, reflects upon a time in which riding the subway and being invited into  an artist’s home was not unnatural. It is a very pleasant memory of a different time and sensibility.

When I was in the village we caught a performance by an eccentric monologist called Brother Theodore; he was strange, bizarre and ranted and raved about Quadrupedism if I recall correctly — that man should go on all fours. Much later, very much later I learned he had been ransomed from Dachau for about one dollar for giving up the rights to the family fortune which was in the millions. Years later he got the public’s attention with visits to David Letterman — imagine Lenny Bruce doing standup in a death camp and you have Brother Theodore. At 17 I imagined he represented the offbeat and eccentric part of the village. In 1957 he was way out there. It was a good day to see him — just on a lark, my first adolescent outing to Greenwich Village.

I was too young, naive and immature to haunt the streets and crooked byways of the village at a time in which psychoanalyis was the predominant treatment for artists and painters, when jazz was laying down its New York roots, Mailer was writing about the “white negro” and Salinger’s stories were avidly looked forward to in the New Yorker. I missed Ginsberg and Kerouac, the Beats and Leroi Jones, later Imamu Biraku, writing his poetry and plays. I was in a dream state, emerging from but not engaging my world. It was the period of Eisenhower, panty raids, the 1955 Chevrolet Impala, the astounding Studebaker Golden Hawk — priceless styling to my eyes; it was a period in which there was silent passing in hallways in high school (!) and a white stripe down the corridors that you could not cross over. Air raid sirens warned us to crawl beneath our wooden desks and protestors were arrested in Times Square for not taking cover in assigned shelters. All this was around me but I was not a participant. It was a period in which people refused to sign petitions lest they be thought of as agitators or Commies — it was the McCarthy period.

Conditioning and conformity were all about and I was saturated in it.  The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  spoke to that period. It wasn’t until the rapturous Sixties that I roused myself from slumber. Each one of us must know what it is to be asleep in life and then what it is to become aware. We are amazed at how we slumbered while fully awake, whatever that is. I went to a highly stratified high school, Jamaica High School, in fact. You knew your place in that school; we had tracks such as academic, commercial and general and in subtle and overt ways were reminded of that. Grades above all. The gifted were fawned over and coddled, principal and teacher pets.You just knew you were less or lesser than. I only recently discovered that Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Savage (he had another name, then)  were there between 1955 to 1958.

For me it was the golden age of cars — the DeSoto, the heavy beetle-like Hudson, the Nash Rambler, the wraparound windshields and fins, the 1954 Pontiac Bonneville that I drooled over,  the sleek and futuristic Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy; the Chrysler Imperial and the early Ford Thunderbird; the movies of the Fifties had the latent undercurrent of doom — “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Them!” — ants changed into monsters by A-bomb blasts, “The Forbidden Planet,” “Ivanhoe,” “Demetrius and the Gladiator,” “East of Eden,” “Giant,” “The Ten Commandments,” “It Came from Outer Space,” “The Searchers,” “The Unforgiven,” and so on. In movie houses at the time Duncan yo-yo contests were held;  maestros performed amazing feats with this ancient toy. Duncan was the best yo yo, Cheerio came in a close second. Jeans were called dungarees and crew cuts were in. If you saw a rare instance of a black man and a white woman on the street one gawked. Mother-of-pearl cufflinks were fashionable as well as charcoal gray suits ( the Windsor knot  was for ties)  and one always wore leather shoes — Regal or Florsheim, to wit – London Character if you had the bucks. I recall leather shoes for $18 in a shoe store window and I couldn’t afford them. We wore “sneakers,” then, either Converse or Keds. One resoled shoes and did not throw them out.Taps on the heels and tips prevented wear and made a melodious sound on pavement. Choices were limited, which as I look back, was a good thing: in reasonable doses, abstinence creates character.

As I recall, I sensed a kind of ennui, a kind of boring stasis was in the air. That is why Kennedy was met with such pleasure for he was one of the first “pop” presidents, although very much of the Fifties himself. The story goes that Mr. Clean was modeled after Eisenhower — I found him terminally dull. Sputnik in 1957 announced a new age and I recall seeing it in the afternoon skies after school with my friends.   At 4 p.m. I’d go into the house and see Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and envied the young people of my age who were not shy enough to have girlfriends and knew how to dance. On Saturdays I stayed in bed watching cowboy flics from the thirties — Buck Jones, Bob Steele, Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Ken and Kermit Maynard filled airspace on TV; The Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials held me enraptured — the Clay People, Emperor Ming, the Merciless. Films saturated my frontal lobes — forever.  Amid the constancy, conformity, regularity of that world the seeds of the Sixties were being sown. Ferment was in the Village, that was for sure; psychoanalysis was on its wane, giving way to the Primal Screams of the Sixties.

Wakefield was in his mid-twenties, living and working in the Village while I was emerging — he had 10 years on me. I awoke in the Sixties and acted out as well. So I was a transitional young man who could not or who was not aware enough to see the world about me; it takes a long time to grow up and we often end our years still immature, still yearning, still wishing, wanting and often still unaware of ourselves first, and of course, by definition, unaware of those close to us. No man goes to his grave fully aware. We couldn’t handle that. It is not valued. Not in this culture in any case.

Here in Las Vegas a secondary school teacher told her class that claims about the Holocaust were not so, the usual mouthings of someone out of control on primary levels of who she is. The whole discussion about deniers involves many layers of disquisition and analysis. In any case her inflammatory comments did not belong in the classroom. Word spread and the event hit the papers, here in Las Vegas, really a pretentious boonie town. I associate to Miss Kitty’s bar in “Gunsmoke,” all kinds of riff raff. When you read the local papers you get a stringent conservatism that is not quaint, but primal. Glen Beck is their man.

One thing led to another and the ADL and the school district got together to give a presentation to the students and staff. (Hey, how about reworking the curricula or courses for the staff? — not on your casino chip.) Needless to say, some students sided with the teacher who was transferred out of the school; her fate to be determined at a later date. They invited Stephen Nasser, a Holocaust survivor, who published his own book on his travails. I have met Mr.Nasser and I have read his book which was ghost-written. Mr.Nasser and I exchanged books; he never contacted me which I sense is because my book, in his eyes, is aberrant. In any case he gave me his business card which stated he was a Holocaust survivor and that phrase itself riled me. I had the sense that he was merchandising his book, himself and his memory; no doubt he means well and believes he is doing good deeds. Perhaps. He is a witness. For me he had turned it all into Shoah business.

I was unnerved and within a few weeks had written a short story for my book dealing with his approach and new venture in life. I truly believe he has no idea of what he is doing. I put the story away as it was heated, but fair, and I may go back to it again, given recent events. I came across a blurb which gave a website for the Las Vegas Review Journal’s video of Nasser’s school presentation. It did not give it all but enough for me to know exactly how he presented himself. A clue to all this is that upon our initial meeting months ago he gave me the exact number of lectures he had given on his life — perhaps a thousand or so; in that is all you need to know to extract a truth about him. He is not a teacher, he does not know, I believe, how to deal with young students.

Below is my letter to the editor of the newspaper about his talk:  see the video at: http://www.lvrj.com/holocaust

Recently, I viewed on your web site Stephen Nasser’s talk to students at the Northwest Technical Academy in response to Lori Sublette’s remarkable dense statements about the Holocaust. I have read Mr. Nasser’s book and I have met him in person, in fact, we exchanged books — I read his. At that time I was considerably put off by his “business card.” It read, in part, Holocaust Survivor. I could not find that title in the Directory of Occupational Titles. Unfortunately, Shoah business continues.

I have written intensely about survivors in my fiction and I have worked with a few survivors in my psychotherapy practice. Unwittingly the traumatizing experiences Mr. Nasser has endured have led him astray. What I found remarkably obtuse was that he asked students at the close of his remarks to say after him, “Never Again.” Does it all come down to this clumsy use of a trite and hackneyed phrase?

Indeed, my talk on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2007 at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona before survivors and their families as well as servicemen took a completely different tack [See "On the Holocaust," under pages]. Examining the Holocaust mandates more than showing slides of victims in boxcars; it is man’s nature that is on trial here. Apparently it is the species that creates willing executioners. Mr. Nasser had a chance to assist his audience in comprehending their own deficits, to look inwardly. Shoah business merchandises platitudes, capitalizing on the inherent horrors of the Holocaust. In the words of Holocaust scholar Robert Langer, we “sweeten” it. Quite unsettling to observe staff, speaker and opportunity squandered on sanitizing it. Nothing has changed. Curricula merrily goes on bereft of insight.

Holocaust denial has to be dealt with on a more profound level than evinced by this school district. (Indeed, a different kind of denial is in place.) The audience heard another talk on the Holocaust, a survivor came in to assuage their consciences, and everybody collectively colluded in making nice.

–As of this date, it has not been published, but you get a look at it.

Back Story: The particulars — Jane is studying to become a librarian, all of it done through distance learning, library-speak. She comes to this with degrees in liberal arts and teaching, a children’s author as well as a former journalist. Having grown up in a Mormon family she is what is now known as a “Jack Mormon,” divesting herself of what was a deleterious conditioning by this cult founded by a charlatan from upstate New York.  In my interactions with her now and then I see,  detect and sense, the inhibitions and self-imposed restrictions which are the traces of her “religious” upbringing. A reader of Darwin and a reveler in evolutionary biology, our morning conversations are often intense as we explore each other’s ethnic and religious background. This blog is a reponse to this morning’s “chat.”

As conditioned as she is with my own brand of secular — atheistic –Judaism, for I am immersed In Jewish gravy, ethnicisms, enjoying the cultural values, lore and wit of the Jewish mind. I share with her that as a student teacher many decades ago a group of us visited an elementary class in a Catholic parochial school as well as a class in a Hebrew school. What stood out to me was that in the Catholic school students were in a receiving mode, well-mannered, taking in; in the Hebrew school, which a few of my college students found “disorderly” the children were raising their hands, making sounds as they struggled to get the teacher’sattention. Their eyes had betrayed them.  I had experienced that same environment in Hebrew school — in short, I have no fear if I ask you a question, indeed, it is expected of me, although I could never bring it into awareness at the time, being shtooped with the latency period. The contrast to this one Catholic school was, to my mind now, the conformed acceptance of that which was conditioned and foretold, that to question was not as critical as to receive and take in.

Jane heard this and quoted a verse from John in which he says, to wit, go ahead and seek the truth and do not be afraid. What Jane liked about this was the air of freedom which said question — however, in her religious upbringing it was expected that you do not question. Imagine, Jane says, if Joseph Smith went to all the different religions and asked a pastor or priest if their religion is true – that the minister would shoot that down by saying, of course, it’s the truth; however, living with me, Jane went on to say that if she went to a rabbi and asked the same question about the validity and truth of Judaism, there would a variety of responses: 1) do you need an answer? 2) or, why are you asking? and the question itself would be accepted as appropriate as the rabbi might be vexed if an answer was given, for answers are doorstoppers of the mind.

Jane and I explored this further, my suggesting that it is highly unlikely if there have been many articles on librarianship that take on an analytical point of view. I suggested for her to take a mental ride with me: Imagine a documentary in which the camera establishes the opening shot of a library; that a close-up is made of the plaque that usually contains who the architect, construction company and citizens were that made it all happen for the communty. Finally the camera pans up to an inscription above the arched doorway. It reads: “Knowledge is death.”

I further queried Jane if that would keep people away; would some people feel annoyed by that? would librarians rush to get through the entrance or would some hold back? I suggested that we seek to become aware, but that most of us do not want that; we want to have our senses and pleasure principles sated — and why not? However, I imagined that upon entering this “strange” library, there were five books under glass, their pages opened to specific pages of note, and one had to pause here before going any further. I asked Jane what the five books might be: I offered a few titles — The Interpretation of Dreams, Origin of the Species, the Bible was definiely excluded — I might suggest the greatest play ever written — Oedipus Rex, and then I stopped. Jane was asked — you are asked — to supply the other two, the condition being that this work had to make you thoroughly aware, decondition your mind-set, shake you to your foundational roots. After this first challenge, I suggested to Jane that these brave new librarians might go ahead to one other glass case and here would rest the greatest of all works on awareness — I weakly suggested, The Flight of the Eagle,” Krishnamurti, but I was not sure. Only after this challenge is met would the librarian receive his degree.

Jane had opened our conversation with her observation that she noticed that people tend not to ask questions of the librarians as much but now went directly to the web for answers. She felt there was something similar to her own feelings as a child when she had the distinct feeling that to ask a question was to be shot down, or to vex the adult or annoy the authority figure at the time. Although she fully realizes that the librarian with the “answers” has no idea of what is being projected upon her or him, nevertheless, human beings live in, live out, in these projections. We are made up of projections — just try transference with your therapist. The point is that we place our hand above our eyes, for we dread the light more than we dread the dark, a good definition of humanity. I remember well as a kid walking into a movie theater on a very bright July day and having been blinded until my eyes adjusted to the interior darkness; I also recall the adverse effects of coming out of the darkness into the light of the summer day after the movie. I feel the dark into light is harsher. Perhaps the entrances to libraries should be enshrouded in black drapes and the inviting, more motherly, inscription might read: “Ignorance is bliss.”

Grossly speaking, generalizing, why does one become a librarian on more than superficial levels — job, salary, percs, order and regularity, constancy, job security? Is one participating in a greater good, that is, amassing knowledge, dispensing it, sharing insights, impacting on others — that is, is the librarian entering the occupation to condition or not to condition, to enslave with knowledge or to emancipate? For example, the library system that censors a book is revealing a reaction-formation, denying to others that which one finds of prurient interest. Recently, a library system in Virginia took The Diary of Ann Frank off the shelves because the newest and unexpurgated edition had Anne Frank speak of her vagina. Of course, the good libarians do not have this organ. And the old argument that they are protecting very young minds from “awareness” goes back to totems and taboos (See Freud).

The radical librarian does not salt and pepper his treasure trove. He neither conditions nor deconditions; this is not neutrality but the highest advocacy one can offer as a free human being. The radical librarian dwells in the soft light, fig-laden palm trees of the Question. Answers are anathema if doctrine and dogma, dicta. The free librarian is the caterer of a huge buffet. Isms are never served, religions kept off the tables. In that scary, sometimes shaky feeling we have when we enter, for rare moments our lives, the sacred arena of not knowing but willing to know, in Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country,” the librarian’s duty is just to simply pull the drapes aside.