David Ades: In Response to the Accusation that I am Part of a Vast Jewish Conspiracy to Control the World

 

If I could stop wrestling with entropy

 

long enough to consider this notion

raised over and over the years

like a scaffold, like a hangman’s noose

and dangled before me with its dark promise

I might shudder

 

I might shake at the well of hostility it invokes,

the unshaken spell

of certain historical narratives,

cocoons from which the faithful

never emerge.

 

I might flip over the idea of flippant

 

say that I am too busy arguing

with my opinionated tribe

those members I don’t agree with (not mentioning names)

or those I want to bring back into the fold:

the lost tribe of Dylan

 

or the lost tribe of the born-again-Christian side of my family

and its even more lost children

who can’t remember what they don’t know

and probably have no interest

in knowing.

 

I might venture irony

 

mention how important it is

to manage my financial estate and related affairs:

the shared portfolio, investment properties,

superannuation trust – and to hobnob

with my friends on Wall Street

 

or in Hollywood or those in the Knesset,

all those who

can do me favors

whenever called upon,

who can provide protectsia.

 

I might cast some caustic lines

 

something about being absorbed

studying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

or The Merchant of Venice or drinking

the blood of children or poisoning wells,

something conforming

 

to stereotype, something reinforcing the accusation

made solely on the fact

of my being Jewish

without reference to any other facts

of temperament, conduct, history.

 

If I am conspiring to control the world

 

I’m making a poor job of it: the wrestle with entropy

has worn me out with the daily encroachment

of children’s toys, paperwork,

random objects and outstanding tasks

colonizing my energy

 

so that I begin and end each day

recognizing control

as illusion

and all responses to such accusations

as irrelevant

---

 

Copyright 2017 David Ades

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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an anti-semitic fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The forgery was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world’s economies. Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the U.S. in the 1920s. The Nazis sometimes used the Protocols to stir up propaganda against the Jews; it was assigned by some German teachers, as if factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London in 1921. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by some proponents as a genuine document. [source: Wikipedia]