We Don't Need Lindy To Show Us Our President Is Bad

Over the last week I've been slowly reading through "The Plot Against America," savoring it, trying to capture every nuance of neurosis, every tidbit of childhood trauma, every sinister subtlety of anti-semitism. To speculate on what everyone else has speculated on, I can't say Roth tries very hard to draw a connection between the Lindbergh administration and the Bush administration. He doesn't, and it takes a rather too taut and rather too politicized climate of opinion to see the connection even implicitly.

I've also been re-reading Dan Oren's "Jews at Yale" -- a masterpiece in the truest sense of the word. And today I watched the 2001 movie version of Arthur Miller's "Focus," which fits better than "Plot" into some lazy political journalist's meta-narrative of 2004. Its portrayal of anti-semitism and tolerance as ideologies endlessly casting about for the great Indifferent Middle of public opinion is also an unwitting metaphor for the struggle against radical Islam. Its ending -- a Gentile who everyone believes to be a Jew at last gives up denying it; he realizes he is a Jew because he suffers what Jews suffer -- is actually a statement of hope: fascist hatred ultimately alienates its greatest potential constituency by tarring them as collaborators.