annoying, and irrevocable mistake, counsels the Jew.

So you might as well make the best mistake you can. The young scholar cannot decide the best color for a new couch. Pick not the color you want to see, says the Jew, but the color you want to sit on. Little hope is given that the cake will be ready for the wedding. The party planners are beside themselves. An unfinished cake, says the Jew, is like a marriage in progress: tomorrow is always in the offing. A business deal goes sour when the main investor runs off with the owners spouse. A fly in the ointment is the proof in the pudding, says the Jew. A reader complains about the obscurity of a line of verse and seeks a Jews counsel. Obscurity is like the yeast in a cake. It is long-acting to ensure the dough rises in time. Vandals steal the pumps handles. You think this is bad, says the Jew. You should have seen the neighborhood before the vandals moved in. A miller notices that the grain is too coarse to sell and is advised to consult a Jew. Cohen still owes me fourteen dollars. A Jew writes a book in which he bears false witness against his friend, also a Jew. How could my friend turn against me? A Jew is asked for advice: When Jew does this to Jew it creates a problem: its harder to ascribe it to anti-Semitism. But not impossible. A high-handed literary critic dismisses the irony in a work. The writer turns to a Jew. The absence of irony in a work, says the Jew, is like a windowpane without a window: impossible to justify. Two parents both claim a child is theirs. A Jew is brought in to arbitrate. Dont try that ruse where you propose cutting the child in half, says one parent. We werent born yesterday, the other adds scornfully. Yesterdays ruse is like a jackhammer drilling in sand, says the Jew. The end result is still a hole in the ground. The scholar cannot understand an unusual diacritical mark over a word in the text he is studying and ponders it for several days before asking a Jew. It means nothing, says the Jew, blowing a speck of dust off the page.

[Dilemma]

ST. PAULS CURSE

From a May 24, 1943, memo to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, from Owen OMalley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile, in the collection of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. This September, the National Archives released more than a thousand pages of previously classified documents concerning the U.S. and British governments roles in covering up the Red Armys 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners. The bodies were found by Nazi forces in the spring of 1943.

ir, The men who were taken to Katyn are dead, and their death is a very serious loss to Poland. Nevertheless, unless the Russians are cleared of the presumption of guilt, the moral repercussions may well have more enduring results than the massacre itself; and this aspect of things deserves attention. We, who have access to all the available information, though we can draw no final conclusions on vital matters of fact, have a considerable body of circumstantial evidence at our disposal, and I think most of us are more than half convinced that a large number of Polish officers were indeed murdered by the Russian authorities, and that it is indeed their bodies (as well, maybe, as other bodies) that have now been unearthed. In handling the publicity side of the Katyn affair, we have been constrained by the urgent need for cordial relations with the Soviet government to appear to appraise the evidence with more hesitation and lenience than we would do in forming a common-sense judgment on events occurring in normal times or in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and healthy operation of our intellectual and moral judgments; we have been obliged to give undue prominence to the tactlessness or impulsiveness of Poles, to restrain the Poles from putting their case clearly before the public, to discourage any attempt by the public and the press to probe the ugly story to the bottom. In general, we have been obliged to deflect attention from possibilities that in the ordinary affairs of life would cry to high heaven for elucidation, and to withhold the full measure of solicitude that, in other circumstances, would be shown to acquaintances situated as a large number of Poles now are. We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre; and in view of the immense importance of an appearance of Allied unity and of the heroic resistance of Russia to
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Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right. This dislocation between our public attitude and our private feelings we may know to be deliberate and inevitable; but at the same time we may perhaps wonder whether by representing to others something less than the whole truth so far as we know it, and something less than the probabilities so far as they seem to us probable, we are not incurring a risk of whatnot to put a fine point on itmight darken our vision and take the edge off our moral sensibility. If so, how is this risk to be avoided? As the late Mr. Headlam-Morley said, What in the international sphere is morally indefensible generally turns out in the long run to have been politically inept. It is surely the case

GROUNDED FOR LIFE

From Gods Law: The Only Political Solution, by Charles R. Fuqua, an e-book published in April and aiming to show how the Bible can be applied to U.S. law. Fuqua, a former state legislator in Arkansas, was, as of press time, again seeking election.

[Jurisprudence]

he maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deuteronomy 21:21: Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall put away the evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear. This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure. Parents were required to take their children to a court of law and lay out their case before the proper judicial authority. I know of many cases of rebellious children; however, I cannot think of one where a parent had given up on a child to the point of taking that child to court and asking that the child be put to death. Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of the land, it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.

that many of the political troubles of neighboring countries and some of our own have in the past arisen because they and we were incapable of seeing this or unwilling to admit it. If, then, morals have become involved with international politics, if it be the case that a monstrous crime has been committed by a foreign governmentalbeit a friendly oneand that we, for however valid reasons, have been obliged to behave as if the deed was not theirs, may it not be that we now stand in danger of falling under St. Pauls curse on those who can see cruelty and burn not? If so, we ought maybe to ask ourselves how, consistently with the necessities of our relations with the Soviet government, the voice of our political conscience is to be kept up to concert pitch. It may be that the answer lies for the moment only in something to be done inside our own hearts and minds, where we are masters. Here, at any rate, we can make a compensatory contributiona reaffirmation of our allegiance to truth and justice and compassion. If we do this we shall at least be predisposing ourselves to the exercise of a right judgment on all those half-political, halfmoral questions that will confront us as the war pursues its course and draws to its end; and so, if the facts about the Katyn massacre turn out to be as most of us incline to think, shall we vindicate the spirit of these brave unlucky men and justify the living to the dead.

[Complaints]

COLLATERAL DAMAGE
From more than 8,000 letters to executives and directors of banks, posted last fall on the website Occupy the Boardroom and emailed to the addressees. A selection of 150 letters, The Trouble Is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street, was published in October by n+1 Books. to: charles h. noski, bank of america Hi Charles, My name is Matt. You dont know me, but Im a Bank of America customer. A few years ago my Countrywide mortgage was bought by Bank of America, and weve been together ever since. Currently, my home is underwater by about $150,000. Im working two jobs to keep my home, but over the past two years Ive tried (unsuccessfully) to do a loan modification. Three times Ive tried to do that.

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HARPERS MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2012