Things People Say and Other Reflections on This Time and Place

By Manfred Wolf

Manfred Wolf, a longtime bold, original thinker, returns with a new collection of fearless, entertaining and often contrarian essays on a multitude of subjects. From the personal to the political, from “the righteousness mob” to the ramifications of giving advice, from our current cultural divide to the constantly evolving landscape of the way we speak now—Wolf examines each topic with his fierce, unique perspective, going beyond the easy clichés of conventional wisdom, whether it comes from the Left or the Right. Few readers will find their minds completely unchanged by these compelling and appealing explorations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663251039

Manfred Wolf

Manfred Wolf is a university professor, columnist, translator, and freelance writer. He is the author of Almost a Foreign Country: A Personal Geography in Columns and Aphorisms, Survival in Paradise: Sketches from a Refugee Life in Curacao, and Muslims in Europe: Notes, Comments, Questions. He lives in San Francisco.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-5102-2 (sc)

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iUniverse rev. date:  04/21/2023

Contents

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Acknowledgments

Self-Published?

Foreword: This Time, This Place, These Thoughts

Things People Say

A Few Words About Words

Looking Back

Across the Years

The Sadness of the Expats

A Rescuer in World War Two

Publishing a Wartime Memoir

The Ever-Present Past

Notes on the Nineteen Fifties

The Dating Game Then and Now

Going on a Dinner Date in the Fifties

An Age of Conformity

Sixty-Eight Years Ago

The Way We Weren’t

Going to The Village

Continuities

In Search of Timberland

A Strange Ambivalence

Qualified Love Song to America

My Two Lives

The Tone of Our Time

Doing Something About It—a Fable

Contradictions in Our Culture

Fashion in Ideas

How the Effect Finds its Cause

How the Effect Finds its Cause, Part Two

How the Effect Finds its Cause, Part Three

Winners and Losers

Google, Logic and Free Speech

Ambivalence About Appearance

The Appeal of Conspiracy Theories

On Reinventing Oneself

On Reinventing Oneself, Part Two

Another Day and Still No Paparazzi! (Consider Yourself Lucky)

What Do You Really Want?

Bernie Madoff and the Problem of Evil

Thoughts on the Two-Tiered Society

Ever-Changing Culture Heroes

What’s Behind the Denial of Free Speech on Campuses?

Advice to My Grandson About Going to College

Scenes from an Academic Novel

Far More Than Farce

What We Mean When We Say I Love You: Conversation, Communication, Culture

What We Mean When We Say I Love You

In Defense of Necessary Vagueness

The Libido for the Simple

On Being Understood

Words and Deeds: Appearance and Reality

Hair-Splitting—or Brilliance?

The Arguments Couples Have

Annoying Advice and Problematic Criticism

Have You Had a Compliment Today?

How to Give a Talk

Conversational Styles and More

On Human Misunderstanding

On Political Correctness

Thoughts About Twitter

What, If Anything, Does this Poem Say?

The Personal Impersonal

Writers, Writing and Creative Writing

The Cultural Issues are Always with Us

A Great Divide

A Great Divide

Who is the Forgotten Man?

A Holocaust Survivor Voices his Fears

The Superego and the Id

What is the Deep State?

Three Right-Wingers

Three Right-Wingers, Part Two

Portrait of Rush Limbaugh

President Obama: The Professor and the Madman

Amnesty and the Enduring Question of Immigration

Another Note on Immigration

Both Sides in the Immigration Debate are Right

The Righteousness Mob

The Righteousness Mob, Part Two

The Righteousness Mob, Part Three

The Righteousness Mob, Part Four

A Great Divide, Continued

A Great Divide, Part Three

Gains and Losses in a Time of Tumult

What Outsiders May Not See in American Politics

Muslims in Europe Revisited

The Minister and the Media

European Muslims Look at the West

Is it a Religion of Peace?

Another Look at Multiculturalism

Scattered Thoughts, Opinions, Musings, Aphorisms and Would-Be Tweets

Afterword: Meditation on this Time, this Place

Acknowledgments

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M any of the essays in this collection appeared first in the West Portal Monthly , and I’m grateful to Glenn Gullmes, the editor, for encouraging me, publishing me, and keeping his small but important paper going under often difficult circumstances.

My writing of columns started before the West Portal Monthly, and my interest in the genre began many decades before I had a regular slot, when I fell under the spell of a number of Dutch columnists, notably Godfried Bomans, Simon Carmiggelt, Renate Rubinstein, and Kees van Kooten. Their blend of story, humor and commentary inspires me to this day. To tell Americans about them I’ve given talks on the form at any number of conventions, including sessions of the Modern Language Association, the Dutch Studies Conference at Berkeley, and colloquia at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco.

Some pieces in the present collection were reprinted in the newsletter Fromm Focus, and I wish to thank the ever-kind and helpful Scott Moules for working closely with me to ensure that they had as much visibility as they did. Readers at the Fromm Institute, some of them former students of mine, responded warmly and took the time to comment.

One essay, The Sadness of the Expats, first appeared in Dutch: the magazine. I’m pleased to have contributed to that publication. I am grateful too to the Op Ed editors of the Sacramento Bee for occasionally publishing my contributions, here represented by A Holocaust Survivor Voices His Fears. I was pleased, too, to have my article What’s Behind the Denial of Free Speech on Campuses? in the Mercury News, and I am further pleased to have been featured with What We Mean When We Say ‘I Love You’ on the highly regarded philosophy and language studies blog of the Scandinavian scholar Lars Herzberg. I am also delighted to have appeared a number of times as featured writer on Vernon Miles Kerr’s popular blog. Vernon is a much appreciated friend and former student at San Francisco State, where I taught most of my adult life.

A few pieces with a distinctly political bent appeared in Dutch versions in an Amsterdam-based on-line magazine, Veren of Lood. I am grateful for the encouragement of Frits Bosch and Pim Alexander.

Some of my readers have passed my work on to others, e.g., Linda Wertheim, Randy Cook, Herbert Lewis and Tina Martin, and I want to tell them (again) that they could pay no greater compliment to any writer, who after all wants nothing more than to be read and quoted. Tina Martin was reminded of my Righteousness Mob series during some heated political battles at local community meetings, and all four encouraged my contrarian or eccentric ways, which, after all, I was and am especially fond of.

Similarly, I’m touched by people I know less well who took the time to write me, or seek clarification, or recount an experience of their own. Though limited by a small circulation, I’ve been blessed with readers in different parts of the world, of whom I prize greatly Marie-France Plessard in Paris, Mark Shackleton and Andrew Chesterman in Helsinki, Sheila Gogol in Amsterdam, Susan Ellis in Texas, and, as ever, Elizabeth Davis in El Cerrito.

While I continue to feel that the greatest compliment you can give a writer is to read him or her, I’m even grateful to those who read in order to disagree. Especially among academics there is a tendency to quickly look for the holes in an argument and then grandly dismiss the whole thing. Though annoying, this still takes effort, which I appreciate.

I am especially grateful to the handful of readers who understood my reasoning in the series How the Effect Finds Its Cause. Marjorie Young and Merete Mazzarella and a very few others understood something that several historians I know did not—that I wasn’t impugning the sincerity of the people I wrote about, nor saying that they did not feel what they did. Few people grasped the argument I made, and while these pieces are not written in the Dutch column mode, this series is unquestionably the most original writing and thinking I’ve produced.

Finally, I want to express limitless appreciation to my editorial assistant, adviser, friend, and literary consultant, Yael Abel, whose help and unfailing encouragement made all my recent books possible.

Self-Published?

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W hen I first started writing, decades ago, the embarrassing question I often got was, Published or unpublished?

Nowadays, a similar question can be equally unsettling. This one—though more innocently worded—is Who’s your publisher?—meaning, of course, Do you have a real publisher?

Still a painful question, but the answer is no longer simple.

The so-called vanity presses have given way to the more sophisticated print-on-demand publishers. No longer do authors end up with a thousand copies of privately—and expensively—printed copies in their basement, copies they’ll never sell.

By contrast, the print-on-demand presses produce books that are actually bought and frequently read. And unlike traditionally published books, they’re never out of print. Thanks to a whole lot of fairly new technology these print-on-demand outfits charge authors relatively little and do reasonably good work.

Authors control their own editing, and can spend as much or as little time on it as they want. They’re in command of how many copies are printed and, as in commercial publishing, the more book are sold, the more they earn. Some self-published books make a profit, and some, very few, are a big hit.

So in view of these advantages of self-publishing why would any writer want to go to Random House, or Simon and Schuster, or Penguin? Especially since the wait for those houses to read a manuscript, make a decision, and go through the editing process, can be dauntingly long.

But of course every single one of us would rather have a traditional publisher!

For starters, a commercial publisher may arrange author interviews and schedule events. And a traditionally published book is more likely to be reviewed (though there are no guarantees!).

Infinitely more important than the promise of these arrangements is the psychological factor. If a publisher wants you, you’ve arrived as an author, even if your book does poorly. You’re a writer now, that’s settled. If you self-publish, that means you want to be a writer. The difference is huge.

That said, there is another side.

Once you accept that your more fortunate colleagues will see you as someone who claims authorship, without having fully earned it, once you get over that stigma and have learned to care more deeply about what you’ve written than whether you’re a writer, you may actually appreciate that you have readers and are being read. Whatever anger, resentment or bitterness you carry, some of the freedom of self-publication can be bracing.

Besides, attitudes toward self-publication may actually be changing.

Some years ago, a self-published book made big news by being reviewed in The New York Times. Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised—about the great made-for-TV shows that revolutionized the medium and changed the genre of serial drama for television, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and many more. Other magazines also did stories on Sepinwall’s book, while a blogger, Suw Charman-Anderson, wrote glowingly that the barriers between publishing and self-publishing were falling away, the best self-published work being comparable to the best traditionally published work.

Heartening words to someone like me, though I don’t take them literally.

I’ve been on both sides of the publishing fence, have had real publishers as well as self-published. A recent book, self-published, earned solid reviews. To publicize this memoir of my family’s flight from Europe during World War Two and my subsequent life as an adolescent on the Caribbean island of Curacao, I arranged my own events—at synagogues, neighborhood groups, book stores and universities. Interest in the Holocaust continues to be huge, but on virtually any subject there are communities of interest.

Would a traditional publisher have made more and better arrangements? Maybe. But my book has made a modest profit, and most important, continues to be read. Perhaps a genuine publisher could have accomplished bestsellerdom. Perhaps, but doubtful.

So, authors, take heart. Especially in the age of Amazon—which doesn’t distinguish between self-published and commercially published books—we all have a fighting chance of being read.

And isn’t that what it’s about for any writer?

2019

Foreword

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This Time, This Place, These Thoughts

I n 2008 I published a book of personal essays, Almost a Foreign Country: A Personal Geography in Columns and Aphorisms . Though written for a variety of publications, my essays pursued several distinct themes, which centered around my reactions to America—a country I had come to at seventeen, a Dutch-speaking refugee who spent some of the World War Two years on a Caribbean island. In my book, I commented on the manners and styles of friends, intimates, students, and acquaintances, who for me illustrated the American way of talking, thinking and being.

I thought the essays were quirky but not controversial, except perhaps for their ironical attitude about the country in which I had arrived as a student. But that detachment was made up for by a fondness for the good-natured people who lived here. Still, during several radio interviews about my book, I gathered from audiences responding to my talks that they were particularly struck—or annoyed—by my caustic comments about grief counselors. Why was I so down on that profession? These were people trying to do good under difficult circumstances; didn’t I see that?

Yes, I see that, but to me, they were the symptoms of a peculiarly American phenomenon. Feeling genuinely sorry for people, you want them to suffer less, and you want their unhappiness gone as quickly as possible, so you outsource the task of making it happen to professionals. The sufferer, or even the onlooker, won’t have to think about any of it very much, but can be expeditiously transported, by an efficient formula for engaging with a set of words and phrases that purport to deal with pain, to a speedy closure. I explained to my audiences that I cast no aspersions on the profession but felt these health practitioners embodied our inability to deal with pain and grief, and symbolized our unwillingness to confront, perceive, feel, or genuinely look at whatever horror may have befallen others or ourselves. We were transmuting emotion into verbiage and numbness. And we encouraged the victim to feel less, not by greater insight, or acceptance, or by growth, but by a kind of maneuver into jargon or sentimentality, a desire to leave the experience all too quickly in exchange for a quick remedy.

What I sensed in our culture is that a buoyant American optimism and sentimentality had linked up with the all-prevailing psychological language of the day, itself a mix of relatively new psychology with American good cheer. The school shooting barely over, someone will intone to let the healing begin. Sentimentality takes the place of sentiment. The culture makes a great show of feelings but handles them badly. Genuine emotion is hard to deal with, sometimes even hard to feel, but in its psychologized form becomes malleable because upbeat endings are ever at the ready. The grief counselor will say that it’s okay to cry, or that you should give yourself permission to talk about it, or that grief will make you stronger, or to just let the feelings out, or that we all feel guilt, sometimes about things we haven’t done, etc. This is good, useful advice, but it can never take the place of looking at the tragedy, of feeling the event, of seeing its genuine consequences. Nor should it substitute for what can be done to avert these crises, be they mass shootings or other calamities.

This avoidance of looking at things directly has a corollary in American conversations, wonderfully satirized by a New Yorker cartoon in the aftermath of the Vietnam War when thousands of Vietnamese people fled their country on cramped boats. Isn’t that awful, someone asks another at a party, about those boat people? Oh, shrieks the other person. Do you sail?

Not hearing some things is, of course, what we all do from time to time, but it has become embedded in our culture. And for some, it’s almost a form of politeness. You look away from what’s disagreeable. But such instincts, however kind and gentle, serve dishonesty and sentimentality. I remember first noticing this odd American habit shortly after having arrived here, and noticing too that it was frequently accompanied by a broad, well-meaning smile.

Our American penchant for sentimentality shows itself in any number of bromides that seemed to me silly, although I was a fond admirer of my new country. Yet I found them preferable to the sayings of the caustic Dutch colonial culture I had left behind. I’d much rather hear a pleasant but bland Have a nice day than one of several Dutch sayings to the effect that you better be yourself because that’s weird enough, which is what my Dutch teachers in our Dutch colony in the Caribbean offered, as I told in my 2014 memoir, Survival in Paradise: Sketches from a Refugee Life in Curacao. And I preferred the rather woozy American affirmations that you can be anything you want or that all is for the best to the grim Dutch saying "Het komt nooit meer goed, It’ll never be well again."

But I also knew, almost instinctively, that sentimentality comes with a price, which became clear to me a few decades after I arrived here. Sentimentality was spawning political correctness, which arose out of a wish to set things right by putting them in a sunny light. It started harmlessly enough, as a euphemism that would make the thing itself easier to accept by sweetening the word. A kind and generous impulse led us to say challenged for retarded or differently abled for backward. It made all parties involved feel better, and made it easier to be hopeful about the condition itself and do something about it; but when political correctness expanded its scope from mere language into the realm of situation, and became a matter of seeing certain realities in only one permissible way, rendering it impossible to ask or answer certain questions, then it became a barrier to thought and honesty, and furthered the habit of non-listening or selective listening. Certain ways of seeing the world became inadmissible and on the verge of being illegal. Take for instance Michael Bloomberg’s infamous quote about crime, that 95% of it was committed by men and minorities. The first part of his remark can be analyzed and answered, the second part cannot. It is taboo.

Being forbidden to think in certain terms ensures that many things cannot be noticed. Whereas we always used to hear that this or that culture excels in such and such, that the French are famous for their cuisine, or that the English are not, we can barely say or notice these matters now; otherwise we would be allowed to observe that Jews earn disproportionately many Nobel Prizes, or that Black Americans have a history of excelling in American music far beyond any other group. Why not also add another way in which this small minority contributes to our society, namely its incalculable contribution to athletics? Wouldn’t it make sense to value every culture for its strengths and achievements? Why squander our genuine diversity by making all cultural heritages alike? There is no need to suppress achievements simply because doing so risks highlighting weaknesses.

Has it ever occurred to those who disparage the concept of a meritocracy as racist or code for discrimination that the NBA and the NFL are the perfect and purest examples of a meritocracy? The athletes who reach that pinnacle can be justly proud of their achievements, and what is racist is only to say that they should have been physicists or CEOs of large corporations. To minimize the achievements of Black athletes is indeed to look down on their accomplishments in hard work, skill, and grace under pressure. When we see a superb ballet dancer, we do not wish her or him to have become a medical researcher. Do we so privilege the mind over the body that we scorn the achievements of the latter?

I do not for a moment believe that Blacks are inherently more violent than other groups, but to attribute the endless urban gang and drug wars only to poverty and discrimination is willfully to misread, i.e.., to distort, in the very best tradition of political correctness, what may indeed have more genuine causes—and all one has to do is listen to the grieving parents of Black-on-Black victims to learn and re-learn that.

In establishing all these forbidden ways to speak and think, in the invention of this new orthodoxy of what’s politically correct and what’s not, a laudable American desire for righteousness has become a straitjacket that stifles realities, which are then pronounced not to exist. Not only did it create the language of possibility without ensuring any substantial reality behind its soothing words, it became an orthodoxy that closed off thought. Like so much in American culture, it grew out of wishful thinking but wilted in the light of actuality. In the process, false praise was bestowed on false achievements. And it promoted an inflated way of speaking that was faithful to neither speaker nor listener: It must have taken such courage for you to speak to us, gushes the interviewer. Well, probably not.

In our time, the habit of selective listening, of non-listening, non-hearing, non-seeing, or self-selective hearing has contributed to the large chasm between Right and Left. The Right is delusional, or conspiratorial, or distortive, as when Obama’s super-politeness in the Middle East during his important trip to Cairo in 2009 quickly became Obama apologizing for America. His moderately progressive policies were bringing socialism to the U.S. Worse, his desire—as the more insane members of the Tea Party maintained—to pass a healthcare bill made him Hitler’s twin. The Right is fond of its delusions and conspiracy theories, and many quickly saw in Obama’s middle name, Hussein, proof that he was a Muslim in disguise.

But far beyond Obama, the Right sees threats everywhere, largely emanating from the Left. It is convinced that the Left wants to take its guns away, along with any remaining freedoms. It sees in clumsy but necessary laws like rent control an infringement of American liberty, and perceives in measures against our enormous wealth gap an attack against individualism. It experiences the Left as a mortal enemy, ever-threatening, ever-privileged, ever anti-American, and ever-hypocritical. They love the public schools but send their kids to private schools.

On the other hand, the Left’s specialty is looking away, seeing nothing but what it wants to. It has the habit of self-delusion and avoidance. Political correctness serves it well, because it helps erase unpleasant realities. It will pay the greatest attention to the victims of police brutality but blithely ignore the virtual battlefield casualties of gang warfare on the streets of Chicago or elsewhere. Don’t those Black lives matter? Only the Left’s favorite villains and victims are recognized. If Blacks have been discriminated against, then Black crime cannot be viewed as anything other than the sufferings of victimhood. If the Left favors decriminalizing border crossings, then it cannot, will not, see, or even admit that, yes, it does favor open borders. If a contradiction occurs, it’s simply not perceived or recognized, or ever spoken of, for, above all, the Left wants not to be on the wrong side of history.

I reserve my ire for the Left because not only am I, by temperament and history, a person of the Left, but also because I see the Left as more influential than the Right. Liberals are the taste-makers and trend-setters, they have introduced and articulated fashionable new ideas, and so their progressivism has cultural clout. Whether it’s political correctness, or service animals, or the LGBTQ movement, these are all Left ideas, often well-meant, creating good will on one side, resentment on the other, but not likely to go away anytime soon. They are highly influential and affect many strata of society. Those who say, Yes, but Trump was elected, don’t understand. Sure he was, but it proves the point, because 2016 was, among other things, a backlash against these fashionable ideas, which paradoxically retained their power and influence, and continue to this day to shape the culture and set its tone.

When the Right says it disapproves of the direction of the country, it often means just that cultural drift, and so the Left enables the Right by giving it a clear, conspicuous enemy to set itself against. The Right runs against it and ridicules it, finds it an absurdly alien—and hypocritical—culture where the snowflakes are in control, the ones who thought that, as Right-wing radio hosts used to scowl, Osama bin Laden needs therapy. The cultural power of the Left is fodder for the Right. A fairly small matter like gender self-identified bathrooms came to represent the folly of the Left in the Right’s eyes. That, coupled with the usual hypocritical lectures from the Left, whose privilege protects them from real hardship and who dismiss the Right’s stupidity, or their racism, or the ignorance of people living in the fly-over states. This is the sort of thing that made Trump voters say he speaks for them, since he tells it like it is. He is perceived as being on their side. The Left is unable to see that the culture it has created is obnoxious to the Right. It has taken its own political correctness literally, swallowed it fatally, and given birth to a monster.

The liberals I’ve criticized have recently been joined by the young Leftists of the Woke generation. They are largely characterized by their dismissal of other, usually older, liberals as being too tepid, by their fanaticism, and by their enormous capacity for abject self-abnegation toward those victims even more oppressed than college students. Their self-righteousness knows no bounds. They reserve for themselves the right to be safe. The word safe itself has grown in dimension and power. It used to mean secure, free from threat, but now has grown to include comfortable and even stress-free. Though the Woke people are fierce in their condemnation of others, they are harshly intolerant of those who make them uncomfortable. My suspicion is that they are looked at askance by the people they champion, e,g., the adherents of Black Lives Matter.

They view themselves as social justice warriors, but to be Woke is mainly to know that you are virtuous and others not. Some of their activism seeks the pleasure of calling out others. And since many of their battles take place on social media, or on camera, where after all statues are toppled and reputations assailed, the rare exception to fanaticism in this crowd is in the game of making a reputation for himself. My four columns The Righteousness Mob describe the phenomenon in some detail. Sometimes they appear to be the reincarnation of protestors of the Sixties, but it would be hard to imagine even a fire-brand like Mario Savio at Berkeley dispensing with ordinary everyday democratic thinking to such an extent. After all, Savio led the Free Speech movement, and Woke people do not appear to believe in free speech.

The reader will notice that, whether implied or stated, I attribute many motivations— e.g., of the Woke people, or of the self-declared college student victims, or of the rioters, or of those denouncing transgressions—to posturing, pandering and pretending, that I see them as obeying the dictates of a new fashion; but note that to follow fashion does not necessarily make us insincere or inauthentic. It means rather that we embrace almost unconsciously the major explanations of our immediate time and place. We self-diagnose our troubles and create our understanding of them from the way these are now generally perceived by the trend-setters of our time. A set of four columns, How the Effect Finds its Cause, is devoted to this pattern. What I admit to is not cynicism or dismissiveness, but an abiding respect for the power of what others around us think.

I also have an abiding fear of those great changes of mood, those sweeps of hysteria and emotion, that from time to time overcome humankind. Perhaps because I’m a Holocaust survivor, I’ve always loathed the cluelessly happy conversion of those who last year had a friend they this year hate—a horror at how people can be so suddenly turned into enemies by