Amnesia is perhaps the only blessing of the rapid-fire news cycle. These are, after all, dark and trying times, and, as one headline horror falls upon the last, they each wash away prior outrages rather than piling up to be faintly recalled in year-end news roundups… Or not at all if they fell in the last month of the last year. Thus, in the mounting rubble of absurdity (Andrew Tate’s self-own), barbarity (Russia’s continued shelling of Ukrainian civilians), tragedy (the death of Pele), and the latest farce on the floor of the US Congress, we have consigned George Santos’s fictions to sweet oblivion.
That would normally be a good thing. The representative-elect or representative (he does not seem to be clear on which it is) from New York’s 3rd Congressional District is just the kind of clown worth forgetting. He is the 118th Congress’s Madison Cawthorn (remember him?); a right-wing extremist court-jester apparently incapable of telling the truth even when there is no reason to lie.
To be sure, the exposure of Santos’ fibs has been delightfully entertaining. One rarely has the opportunity to see people as unpleasant as him (Santos is an anti-choice misogynist who denies the reality of police brutality… at least he says that he is) get their public comeuppance, so it has been a joy to see him get smacked down and slink quietly into Congress this week. Compulsive liars make such great theatre; yet, there is a dark, bitter kernel to the Congressman-elect’s prevarications that we should not let the rapid-fire high comedy of American politics obscure.
A little over a week ago, The Forward revealed that, among all of his lies, Santos had claimed in campaign materials to be a “proud American Jew” and the grandchild of Ukrainian Holocaust survivors. The reasons for the lie – to burnish his appeal, perhaps, to Jewish voters in Long Island, to borrow tragedy in order to fill out an otherwise unlikeable public persona or, more likely, just for the sake of the lie itself – are not really that important. Lying about one’s family background is almost a Great American Tradition, going back at least to Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, and doubtless much further.
How many Americans, after all, claim to be descended from Indigenous aristocracy? Okay, maybe Edward Norton really is, but even Sen. Elizabeth Warren repeated the lie (one still common among white American elites who can legitimately trace their ancestry back to the Puritan Great Migration of the 17th century) that her ancestor was a Cherokee princess. And it is difficult to forget the fraudulent claims made by such luminaries of deceit as Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal. The latter has even become something of a verb, as in “damn, he really Dolezaled, didn’t he?”
What is important in Santos’ pathetic performance of ethnocultural appropriation, which he attempted to walk back by claiming that he meant to say that he was “Jew-ish,” is that acrid taste of truth at the heart of the confection of lies. That is, what it says about what he, and people like him (Redhats, Republicans, right-wingers, and varied and sundry white, Christian Americans) believe about Jews. Indeed, if he demonstrated anything it is that Jews are, and remain, the most despised of all people in America.
Think about it: The only way that Santos could have thought that he could get away with this particular lie is if he thought that no one could contradict him; if, for example, Jews aren’t really a thing, except as an abstract category in his campaign’s polling numbers. The imagined non-existence of Jews as a real community, with a real history, and identity freed-up the word “Jew” from what it signifies, and allowed the congressman-elect to use it as a floating signifier any way he wanted.
We have seen this kind of thing before, of course. In the aftermath of the ethnic cleaning of Indigenous Americans from the eastern part of the continent in the 17th and 18th centuries and their subsequent genocide in the 19th century at the edge of a cavalry sabre and the writ of the Federal legislation that crowded Indigenous people into reservations and residential schools, “Indian” became an American cultural tchotschke for white people to play with.
“Redskins,” “Braves,” “Blackhawks,” not to mention “Indians” became sports-team monikers evoking mythical, savage ferocity. Indigenous place-names came to mark upscale white suburbs in regions where the people who once gave those places names were exterminated by smallpox centuries ago; the Wampanoag sachem Wamsutta gave his name to a brand of luxury bedsheets. And white people appropriated the image of the Indigenous body itself for TV test patterns, public service announcements about littering, and motorcycle logos.
At the same time, it became fashionable to claim to actually be indigenous; not just as a drop in the bloodline, but as a living exemplar of a lost people. From Archibald Stansfeld Belaney (Grey Owl) to Maria Louise Cruz (Sacheen Littlefeather), the appropriation of Indigenous identity and the subsequent public cosplay – not merely as a weekend jape, but as a way of life – became possible, and even forgivable. Both Belaney and Cruz, in fact, still have (mostly white) admirers willing to promote all kinds of apologia.
The thing is, all of this appropriation was possible, in the minds of the appropriators, only because Indigenous people had ceased to exist as a reality. The Wampanoag, Mohawks, Cheyenne, Apache, and all the others had, according to this reasoning, vacated ownership of their cultural property by, you know, dying out, and released it into the public domain. That they hadn’t, and that we are today facing an accounting for cultural appropriation, doesn’t matter; the mere fact of the appropriation elided those people whose heritages had been appropriated. It was an act of erasure and cultural genocide that at once revealed the appropriators’ beliefs about Indigenous life, and denied the very possibility of an Indigenous reality.
The American right, in the form of Christian nationalism, neototaliltarianism, and the Republican Party, has been doing this to American Jews for years. For them, we exist solely in the realm of metaphor and analogy, a floating signifier to be affixed to whatever sign will render them the greatest profit. Evangelical Christofascists have warped our traditional literature to advance their beliefs and agendas, conservative politicians wave antisemitism as a talisman as they empower antisemites and endanger actual American Jews. In 2018, then-Vice President Mike Pence “honored” the memory of Jews gunned down by a terrorist in Pittsburgh by asking an Evangelical “rabbi” – really, a Christian pastor in Jewish cosplay – to offer a prayer for the victims.
The fake Jews, the mythical Jews, “the Jew” as a sign without substance, “the Jew” whose allegiance is to the State of Israel, and whose true home is in the Holy Land, can only make sense to them if American Jews are not real. George Santos’s lies, and the unwillingness of the Republican Party leadership, now embroiled in its own theatre of the absurd, to offer even the mildest rebuke, reminds us how insecure we are.
Hannah Arendt reminds us that it is a feature of totalitarianism to promote fictions over reality because the former allow totalitarians to shape the universe to their ends with the expectation that they will have the absolute power to retcon lies as fact. Emmanuel Levinas adds that speech is not mere verbiage, but an enactment. Both were Jewish philosophers who witnessed the Shoah. To illegitimately claim to be a Jew, even to later demur and claim only to be “Jew-ish,” and to allow it to pass unchallenged, is both a portent of what the neototalitarian right has in store for us and the enactment of a rhetorical genocide.
There is a virtue in listening to what comes from the mouths of fools and, in this case, recognizing it as the threat that it is. Never forget.