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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 413
III. “Tell [Them] a Story”: Productive Misreading
Huh-uh. The story, Detective Lands-
man, is telling us. Just like it has done
from the beginning. We’re part of the
story. You. Me.
—
Chabon,
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(2007: 365)
A story, in other words, has to be told to invest the “tactics of
sacrifice” with ideological significance that fits the psychological
needs of a people. To conservative Americans such as Cashdollar,
the Federal Representative sent by the US government to “sort
things out,” their job is to “tell a story”
—
“fulfilling what was already
written,” for stories are what people want in order to make sense of
the barrenness of their existence. To ensure that the manifest destiny
of the US be fulfilled and “the divinely inspired mission of the
president of America” (339) be achieved, American officials like
Cashdollar find it imperative that the US should exercise her
sovereignty by “Holding the strings. Setting the agenda” (375),
including collaborating with radical fundamentalist groups such as
the Verbovers and launching a terrorist attack against their joint
enemy. So, to ensure the US can continue to set the agenda of world
politics, Cashdollaor must feed the Zionist fundamentalists and the
rest of the world certain stories. The stories Zionists want to read,
and the stories they end up telling themselves, are those that help
them act out their fear and shame while en route to homecoming
and redemption. To understand this, we need to turn to Jacqueline
Rose (2007), who in
The Question of Zion
offers a perceptive
diagnosis of Zionism as a collective defense mechanism that
eventually turns aggressive, as Zionists resort to preemptive
measures of aggression and violence to screen out their collective
shame and fear.
This is precisely the mechanism, with tactics of defense
translated into tactics of offense or “sacrifice,” that the Jewish