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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes:
From Levy to Obama
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 4/2/08

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka set a new flood of briefs into SCOTUS – Supreme Court of the United States – which is the standard to this day. The amicus curiae – friend of the court petition – puts any and all manner of pleadings of experts and advocates before SCOTUS, including the now-famous blue-eye/brown-eye experiments. These experimental findings of psychologists were instrumental in the Court declaring separate-but-equal educational settings to be intrinsically unequal.
 
To the end of replicating the historical amicus experiment, my black history professor played the nasty teacher in a short version of the process, as the one who tormented the chosen ‘brown’ eyed children, subjecting them to insult, yet with no power to physically injure them.  Dr. Levy was one of two tag-team teachers in this class, the first offered in the Oklahoma college system for black history, to which I was enrolled as a white among a  balanced mix of races. Dr. Levy’s tale of teacher’s torment stuck tight inside my mind’s moral corner all these nearly forty years.

For Shalhope and Levy were as contrasting as Abbott and Costello, or Burns and Allen, or Laurel and Hardy – but not in humorous ways. Shalhope was taciturn and tall; Levy shorter and roundish, though not fat, and a talker extraordinaire. A double Jewish teaching team, it fell to Levy to tell his tale of often wondering why Germans were able to commit the atrocities of the Holocaust. He’d earlier learned so much that was and still is so little appreciated: Germany was the land of Jewish refuge for centuries, the residue of that truth being the rise of Yiddish – a language derived from blending German with Hebrew. And Germany was a civil land for centuries, full of civilized people. How could they go crazy, commit mad acts of moral indifference?
 
As a Ph.D., Dr. Levy appreciated the humanities and letters and those learned worlds, and had to ‘learn’ the answer to his everlasting wonder by engaging primary schoolchildren as their tormentor for a brief repeat of that revealing psychological experiment.  In his role he could not be contested; no appeal was available to the young charges for the duration of the test, as the brown-eyes were treated like outcasts, even as the same classroom gave honorable and kindly treatment to blue-eyed children.
 
The results were as could be predicted – FOR THE CHILDREN: Those blue-eyed subjects given encouragement and validation soared in testing results, those in the ‘brown’ group produced the predicted lower test scores. But unexpected was Dr. Levy’s tale to us in that solemnly quiet classroom: He’d come to ENJOY BEING THE BULLY, in those short hours of that timid experiment. Truly enjoyed to his toes the joy of abusing another human being, a wee tiny elementary school cadre of helpless subjects of the experiment.
 
Dr. Levy, a Jew, admitted to this class of young charges of his internal rage suddenly revealing itself to him, a man of letters and learning and Jewish civility. HOW CAN THIS BE? And he had finally, after years of self-examination, arrived at the answer: NO ACCOUNTABILITY. For the duration of his psycho-torture of children, they could not appeal his abuse. And mind you, he had no real ‘nazi’ powers of whipping, raping, beating or murdering. Just nasty looks, dissing remarks, cold posture to children reaching desperately for some encouragement. Yet that wee tiny taste of a smidgen of a hint of a trace of ‘absolute power’ as a bully invaded his soul and scared the holy shit out of him.
 
He, a Jew, had tasted the power of nazi abuse of helpless recipients of his darker angel. One ten-millionth of what the Nazis’ power granted them, yet it consumed him in that elementary classroom.  Which he revealed to us as mere collegians. Yet that tale has always stuck with me, knowing that a ‘victim’ group can be just as nasty, just as nazi, if given a chance. And ironically, as I later learned on studying modern German history, it was the Nazis who perfected the victim-game: post-Versailles treaty abuse of Germans by France, for ‘causing’ the war of 1914, crippled the German economy and society, making them feel like ‘victims’ so deeply and publicly, that even their conquerers ultimately began to reconsider.
 
But it was too late – the ‘victims’ made new victims, confident that they were justified for past abuse, and the cycle got a new beginning. So today with the victims which comprise Barack Obama’s church – and so many others – and the various ‘denominations’ of victimology in the body politic.
 
Dr. Jeremiah Wright – not a ‘doctor’ like Levy and Shalhope had earned, you can bet the farm on that one – got a regular Sunday-sermon dose of Levy’s nasty license. He could rant and rave and tell untruths and libelous, scabrous slanders, with the audience either nodding and clapping, or being at best indifferent. With Barack sitting under this light of rage and glowing with satisfaction, or hearing about it, with also a considerable indifference. And inaction for years.
 
It felt good, didn’t it, Dr. Wright! No accountability, for years – not from church membership, not from the rising star seeking to be a political tsar. As Dr. Levy found his few hours of unaccountable joy at ‘getting even’ for his own childhood at bullies’ hands, Dr. Wright did his Wright-Stuff [isn’t everyone using this play on words?] and had the pleasure of the schoolroom brown-eye tormentor. For years and years and years and years…


It’s a tasty sandwich, this unaccountable rage diet. It feels SO GOOD, so satisfying, so glorifying.  At the time.  Neither Wright nor Levy were or are in danger of committing a “Schindler’s List” of abuses. The American political climate is billions of miles away from that sui generis setting that gave rise to civilized Germans – many with Ph.D. parchments in the humanities – behaving so monstrously.
 
But to borrow from Mark Twain: though history doesn’t repeat itself, sometime it SURE DO RHYME.  And this music is ugly, and mindful, if not as loud as the Holocaust. Has Dr. Wright found his inner demons singing the bully’s chorus to him, and listened, and learned, as Levy did, those many years ago?
 
Does Barack Obama, and the entire leftwing community, understand Levy’s lesson? Can other inner voices be heard by people on the left, who can only tell us if they hear it? We have no way to know what Levy thought, what were his feelings of rage and joyous bullying expression, but for his self-examination and self-revelation to a classroom of notetaking, would-be liberals [yep, that was me at the time, sadly admitted].
 
Has Barack Obama noted this same nasty voice in his own soul? Levy felt it, knew its evil, fought it, and admitted it to his class. It struck a chord with me for decades: UNACCOUNTABLE BULLIES ARE THE CAUSE OF EVIL.
 
And these bullies are usually mini-me runts by a factor of a million compared to Hitler. But the rage of Hitler began small, in Austria, as a frustrated painter and would-be architect found the ‘perfect storm’ of post-war disruption and wounded German national pride to express his Levy-style inner demons in a manner that seemed unprecedented. [Stalin actually had him bested by far, but little history on that one is taught by Levy’s brethren and sistren in academia – if a tree falls in the forest…]
 
Obama needs to learn a few things – starting with the actual sequence of Founders’ Philadelphia proceedings, as errantly expressed in the opening of his speech in Philadelphia – and understand his own Levy lessons. There is nothing more self-righteous than a victim; once, the feminist righteousness led a bunch of feminazis to embrace Lorena Bobbitt, to the horror of only one ‘sister’ at the time, Naomi Wolf.
 
She knew Levy’s Lesson: victimhood does not justify bullyness.  Dr. Wright has been unaccountable for a lifetime – until his pending retirement.  A long, satisfying life of enjoying regularly that which Levy ‘enjoyed’ only briefly, reinforced his psychology, and pathology, at the hand of those who watched, sitting in unprotesting acceptance, and thereby ‘empowering’ his Levy psychology.
 
Barack Obama knows many things, but clearly is yet to learn what Levy taught that two dozen black-history students forty years ago this fall. Nor has the left learned it either. The ‘teaching moment’ got past him, the opportunity squandered.  That friendly petition to SCOTUS, the amicus curiae, showed how psychology can render new law. Someone needed to give an amicus brief to Dr. Wright – that petitioner could have been Barack.  But his ‘judgment’ failed him in a test more vital than his pre-Senate opinion on the Gulf War.
 
This is a gulf he could have helped bridge – not just when a controversy this spring of ’08, but in the earlier springs and autumns and winters of Wright’s discontent [and diss-content] and wild remonstrations as a pulpit-empowered bully.  It’s clear that Barack, and Wright, and tons of others “just don’t get it” and even perhaps might revive that once highly popular T-shirt slogan: IT’S A BLACK THING.
 
No, it’s a Levy Thing. Brown eyes have no more moral resistance to unaccountable bully-power than do those with blue eyes. A lesson still to be learned by liberals of all eye colors and all state-colors and all philosophical leanings.  Including South Chicago political pontificators. ExileStreet

copyright 2008 Steve Finefrock

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