Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

HOMELAND/HOME
In Memory Fields Holocaust survivor Shlomo Breznitz goes to The Oxford
English Dictionary to look up the word hope. He finds, he says,
“the wisdom of language, as a symbolic product of lengthy cumulative
experience”1: hope is “a piece of enclosed land, e. g., in the midst of
marshes or wasteland”; or “a small enclosed valley”; or “an inlet, small bay,
haven. ”2 The unabridged Webster’s Third New International Dictionary still
recognizes this old meaning: hope is “a piece of arable land surrounded by
waste, especially: one surrounded by a swamp or marsh”; “a broad upland
valley sometimes rounded and often with a stream running through it”; “a
small bay or inlet. ”3 In Hebrew, too, writes Breznitz, “the words for hope
and for a small enclosure derived from the same root.... ”4 (his ellipses).
For Italo Calvino in The Road to San Giovanni the first principle of reality
began in his home, which was synonymous with his homeland: “A general
explanation of the world and of history must first of all take into account
the way our house was situated, in an area once known as ‘French Point, ’
on the last slopes at the foot of San Pietro hill, as though at the border between
two continents. ”5One might conclude that it is hard to have hope
without land.
But even urban refuse can recognize its own. In A Stained White Radiance,
mystery writer James Lee Burke has his narrator-hero say: “We all
have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as
we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar
difference in their makeup. They’re the walking wounded, the ones
to whom a psychological injury was done that they will never be able to
define. . . ”6 These weary, wounded, marginal souls “save us from ourselves.
Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of
American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy
or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced