How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

There are people, lots of people, who act as if they’re Jesus’s Christmas present and resent anyone who dares to disagree. You don’t have to look too far to find them. The number of people and institutions destroyed by Bernard Madoff gets bigger by the day; the economy has tanked as a result of unrestrained greed on Wall Street and an unrestrained desire on Main Street to get something—especially a house—for what looked to a sap like nothing.

Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor whose attempt to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat is being reported on the radio as I write this paragraph, is practically a poster boy for the attitude that I’m trying to describe. “I’ve got this thing,” he said—the FBI has him on tape—“and it’s fucking golden. And, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not going to do it.”

Governor Blagojevich is just following the advice of so many “be as rich as you want” gurus. He’s thinking outside the usual governmental envelope, and is hardly the only guy in contemporary America who’s trying to monetize the resources at his disposal. The merchandise might not be typical, but his attitude is hardly unusual: as a society, as a culture, we seem to have lost sight of the difference between getting our due and getting our way. At one level or another, whether it’s got to do with basic manners, corporate greed, or good old-fashioned political corruption, this confusion seems to lie at the root of the all too common “because I could” justification for harmful and stupid things popularized by Bill Clinton.

“Because I could” is “fuck you” in disguise. We might think that we’re self-actualizing, when we are really self-centered and mean, with so powerful a sense of entitlement to whatever we think should be ours—whether it’s something we already have or something we want—that there’s no room for anyone to get in our way. We want it, we’re going to get it; and if it’s at someone else’s expense, who cares? Just as long as they’re somebody else. We’ve been in a moral coma for too long now, one that sounds as if it could have been inspired by the old vernacular translation of per ardua ad astra, the motto of the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Latin means “through hardships to the stars,” but the whole country knew that it really meant, “Fuck you, Jack, I’m fireproof.”

“Consequences are for other people.” Anybody might have said so; a shmuck is someone who really believes it, and usually does so unconsciously.

This is a book about how to keep yourself from believing that you’re somebody special. It’s about how not to be a shmuck.

ONE

What’s a Shmuck?

I

MY MOTHER NEVER told me anything about shmek, as more than one shmuck is called in Yiddish. She never uttered the word in my presence, not in English and certainly not in Yiddish, and might never have said it in her life. It wouldn’t have been ladylike; it wouldn’t even have been polite. Although most people who speak English are now familiar with the word, those who don’t know any Yiddish are often unaware of its literal meaning. English has borrowed shmuck’s extended meanings of “jerk, fool, metaphorical asshole and inconsiderate idiot who has no idea of the effect that he has on others” directly from Yiddish, but has left the original meaning, the one that generated all these other associations, so far behind that English-speakers are often shocked to discover that shmuck is one of the “dirtiest” words in Yiddish, the sort of thing that could make your mother try to wash your mouth out with soap, even if you’re fifty years old when you say it. If you think of the power that fuck used to have in polite conversation, how it could convey both emphasis and offense, you’ll have some idea of the force that shmuck still retains in Yiddish.

Its primary meaning in Yiddish is “penis,” but just as prick, dick, pecker, whang, and pork-sword frequently reach beyond simple anatomy and into the realm of character analysis, so does shmuck. Unlike any of these English terms, though, or even such straightforward designations as tallywhacker or man-meat, shmuck started out as something cute and funny rather than big and potentially bothersome. It has its roots in the nursery, in little boys’ discovery of themselves and the world around them, and began not as shmuck, the dirty word, but as shmekele—“shmucklet”—something much smaller than a shmuck, not as fully developed, and much more socially acceptable; a peashooter instead of a pistol.

Shmekele itself seems to have started out as shtekele, “little stick,” the euphemism used by toddlers and their baby-talking parents for a little boy’s penis. Shtekele is a diminutive form of the now obsolete shtok, which means “stick” or “club,” and must also have referred to a full-grown male member (compare the difference between a big, thick cigar and its diminutive, cigarette); if a shtok is a walking stick, the shtekl, in this usage, becomes something of a candy cane.

It isn’t entirely a matter of size, though. Somebody must have noticed that the little stick wasn’t always as rigid as a stick is supposed to be—technically speaking, only the infantile erection is a shtekele—so the well-known shm prefix was substituted for the first few consonants, as if to say, “Shtekele, shmekele! Just look at it now. We know it’s not really a cute little stick, so why don’t we call it a shmute little shmick.”

The shm prefix is one of the great Yiddish contributions to the English language. It can take anything, no matter how frightening, and make it innocuous, unthreatening, unimportant—quite a significant trick for victims of constant persecution. If you can’t defeat an enemy or deal with a threat, the least you can do is to turn it into a joke: