Just like their yearning for fast food and easily available abundance — so Americans fell into a trap and elected a president void of content two years ago. Now they are trying to recuperate.
I’ve got fabulous advice for you, fellow Israelis: Every time you feel like you are in a position of slight inferiority, and lack of confidence threatens to take over every part of your body, please turn on the American channel Home Shopping Network or watch the programs of Dr. Phil or Oprah Winfrey for several minutes — believe me, no drug compares to the feeling of the lofty vanity you’re going to sense after watching this farce.
It’s just a refined pleasure to watch Winfrey interviewing another stammering farmer from Texas, who decided to undergo a sex reassignment surgery while he was cheating on his wife with the dog. All of the sudden, Oprah surprises the farmer in the studio with an unexpected visit by his black neighbor Latisha, and it turns out that under her coat, she is actually his lost son James. And then the father and his son unite in a hot hug amid great excitement, with the background of roaring applause of the American public, carried away in the outburst of tears, standing on their feet and clapping.
Many are the articles that the journalists of Israel write about the deteriorating Israeli society, slowly becoming addicted to the insipid, to the fast, to the shallow. They fervently protest against the culture of nothing gaining control over every inch of our Jewish brain. However, our situation, as opposed to the hollow Americans is like a comparison of a summit meeting in the Weitzman Institute between Albert Einstein, S. Y. Agnon* and Rambam** to a meeting in a local Kentucky Fried Chicken between Paris Hilton, a house shoe and Homer Simpson.
The Americans have never surprised me. They are very funny, and watching them is like watching a circus show — but they do not surprise. The era of the 60s and the 70s was when the last of the real Americans disappeared from the world — those patriots imbued with ideals, who fought Nixon’s capitalist bulldozers aggressively in order to get out of Vietnam. They vacated their space to a sated, fatty, superficial people who, instead of releasing their belts and energetically striking any illness in society, release the belt because their bellies are exploding with mountains of fat, both physical and mental, wrapping the gray cells of their brains in layers of shallowness.
The American people have never been the par excellence example of in-depth thinking for the long term. Present in front of him the new creation from Martha Stewart’s kitchen and he will hurry to make a call to order. Because he is like this. Addicted to instant enjoyments, to sparkling temptations — and afterwards, when he gets the Visa bill, he doesn’t understand why he is on the threshold of bankruptcy.
Stomach Malfunction that Lasts for Two Years
World research proves that America is putting on weight, which is an amazing metaphor for her social situation. Americans want all of everything: a buffet crammed full of delicacies that are juicy for the eye; and they want it as fast as possible, including all the extras and also a chain of coupons for the next visit. And no, I don’t mean the known overeating at the McDonalds — I mean the election of President Obama. The Yankee herd surged to the polls, blind and inflamed, licking his salivating lips and was already thinking about the main course in the shape of the black bonbon filling up their stomachs. Millions of calories of charisma, the right look, sizzling demagogy, the direct sex-appeal to their grumbling bellies.
And during the election campaign they did not know satiation. Give me some more of the chef’s special of the year 2009. Pack it for me, and as much as possible! Oprah Winfrey and all the movie stars distributed the recipes to the people dying for this addictive taste in glamour promos on YouTube, and the Americans swallowed it with avidity. And now? The Americans behold results of their unrestricted gorging. The stomach malfunction they experience now is the result of “hungry eyes.”
And now they are begging for painkillers, lying on a bed in Internal Ward G, gasping out to the local priest, and they do not understand how come it happened. Hadn’t the Department of Health and Human Services approved this treat, which all flowed to take a bite out of it. How has it turned out that he is leading them now to the key of the abyss? And currently, after two years of suffering, they are not joking with the doctors, they are throwing up on them — vomiting all the blindness that overcame them during the election of 2008. They wanted “fast food” — they need now to digest the price.
And in the last moment, before going downhill to the local cemetery becomes faster than usual, the American people have woken up to the bitterest reality, when the acidic gastric juices are threatening to burn their digestive systems, and are calling out for help. Obama is indeed a candy for the eyes, but a poison for the body. He has only caused American society to deteriorate, and instead of transferring the American people to the sterile recovery room, he has casted them into the emergency unit.
No American saw the fine print on the candy wrapper. But I took out a looking glass and had previously revealed two years ago a “continuing economic crisis, bankruptcy, collapse of the education system, a boggy mire in Iraq and in Afghanistan, a slowing down in economic growth,” and more.
What America has done yesterday, pushing the power of Obama aside, is the equivalent of ordering a huge crane for rescue workers and firefighters to hitch the plump, grunting, heavy American body with straps to a forklift platform, to put an oxygen mask on his face and try to release him from the dark and smelly room where he was staying all alone for two years, on the 28th floor of a skyscraper. And here, the sunlight bursts forth. Here is a light breeze invading his dusky dwelling, here is the face of a brave fireman Tommy, smiling to him with shining teeth and stretching his hand out to help.
American citizens, you proved that the time has come to take yourselves into your hands and to start the Obama diet. And I promise you, in two years, you’ll be looking completely different. Lightweight, well-built and above all — you’ll start a new life.
Translator’s Notes:
* A Nobel Prize laureate writer and one of the central figures of modern Hebrew fiction.
** A preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars of the Middle Ages.
The writer’s contempt for America, while demanding blind support for whatever policies Israel pursues is repulsive. I certainly hope the rest of Israel isn’t of the same opinion, though that government’s support and manipulation of the American Religious Right (who believe all Jews are going straight to Hell when they die) for short term political gain doesn’t give me much hope that this is the case.