Newsweek: Episcopalians are Assimilating?

Thanks to this article in Newsweek, "Family Feud: Who cares about the arcane battles of Episcopal Church?" we will be walking around all day now scratching our head, trying to reorient totally our thinking about the Jews and Gentiles in America.

See, we were taught that the epitome of assimilation for a Jewish immigrant or his descendant was to attain membership in the Episcopalian Church - the essence of goyishness, if you pardon my Yiddish.

Of course, the story went, this was a bad thing to do if you were a Jew because it meant that part of our tribe was now gone and assimilated into the protoplasm of American Christianity.

Whoa. Lisa Miller informs us today that indeed it is the Episcopalians who are in danger of assimilating into the larger cauldron of the American soup and themselves dwindling due to, what other term could we use, due to assimilation.

This does not compute.

Jews can assimilate by becoming Episcopalians.

Episcopalians cannot assimilate and disappear.

This does not compute.

Here is how Miller brilliantly puts it, knowing full well the irony of the facts:

...After years of dominance, Episcopalians have become a minority religion in America. There are just 2.4 million Episcopalians in the United States, down from 3.5 million in 2001—a 31 percent falloff. (The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Anglican Communion, a worldwide church that has 80 million members.) By comparison, there are 8 million nondenominational Christians (a low estimate), up from 2.5 million—an explosion of 220 percent over the same period. Thanks to the Great Awakenings and the waves of immigration over the past hundred years there are exponentially more Roman Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists in America than Episcopalians. There are also—surprisingly—more Mormons, more Pentecostals, and slightly more Jews. (This last is especially interesting because at the height of 20th-century anti-Semitism, American Jews who wanted access to the highest levels of status and power would sometimes become Episcopalian. One wonders whether they would have done so had they known that they were switching from one shrinking minority religion to another.) According to the latest data from the American Religious Identification Survey, more people belong to cults and emerging religions than to the Episcopal Church...more...

Bloomberg: Why Rich People are Nasty Rotten SOBs

We've posted quite a bit recently about several ultra-wealthy personalities who by-and-large have been described as having rude, nasty personalities.

A writer over at Bloomberg has given this general coincidence of wealth and rudeness some thought and come to the conclusion that it is not an accident.

Want to Be Rich? It’s About Being Rude to People: Matthew Lynn
...If you want to make a lot of money, just try being rude to people.

Hold on, that doesn’t make sense, you may say. Surely the way to get on in life is to be as polite as possible. A soft cloud of charm can carry even the lamest executive all the way to the boardroom. Tell everyone you meet they are fantastic, listen to their ridiculous suggestions, buy them a drink as they launch into a tedious anecdote, and they will think you are great. The way to the top is to be courteous, you say.

No less an authority than Dale Carnegie in his self-help classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” makes the point emphatically. Rule No. 1 for making people like you: Become genuinely interested in them. Rule No. 2: Smile.

Rich and Rude

New research has turned that wisdom upside down. The richer people are, the ruder they are, according to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Keltner and co-researcher Michael Kraus videotaped 100 undergraduate students who didn’t know each other, and studied their body language during one-minute gaps in conversation.

The results were clear: Students from a higher socio- economic background were more likely to be rude during the silence. They would doodle, fidget or start grooming themselves. Less-privileged students made far more effort to engage with the other person, making “I’m interested” signals such as laughing or raising eyebrows.

In short, the richer people were a lot ruder, while the poor were a lot more polite.

The psychologists viewed the results as basic animal behavior. The higher up the food chain you are, the fitter and stronger you are. The wealthier animals are signaling that they don’t need anyone. The poorer animals are ingratiating themselves because they need help.

No Reliance

“It is the experience of wealth that leads individuals to become disengaged,” Keltner says.

There is much truth to that. The richer you are, the less reliant you are on other people. It doesn’t matter much what others think of you, since you are unlikely to be asking them for a favor any time soon.

And yet while the rich may be rude because they are wealthy, it is just as likely to be the other way around. Just as plausibly, they are wealthy because they are rude.

Carnegie and other self-help writers have missed the point the last few decades. Getting ahead in life isn’t about making people like you. It is about getting them to serve your interests.

Success depends, more than anything, on an inner ruthlessness. As anyone who has spent much time with chief executives will know, they are mostly an unpleasant bunch.

They bully, cajole, threaten and fume. There are very few examples of them flattering or charming their way to the top. They are more likely to be shouting and raging at people, demanding the impossible, and casting old friends and colleagues aside the moment they become an inconvenience. The accumulation of wealth requires an ability to crush rivals, stamp on employees, and sweep aside all opposition. Charm doesn’t come into it.

As your bank or hedge fund slides toward insolvency, just carry on barking at your secretary, snubbing waitresses, and blanking old friends who nod at you in the elevator. Everyone will assume you are still loaded -- and will hold off pulling the plug on you for a few more days at least.

Neo-Con-Jew Dennis Prager is Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World

Dennis Prager is a reactionary neo-conservative Jewish radio personality. OK with me.

Everyone in this country deserves an equal opportunity to make a living.

Or do they?

According to Keith Olbermann, Prager said in a speech at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis that "equality" is not an American value.

I won't stoop so low as to even try to explain how wrong Prager is on this issue.

So, let me simply add another award for Mr. Prager.

We declare him this blog's, "Worst Jew in the World."

Sarah Palin - a pit bull with lipstick

This is what a pitbull with lipstick looks like. Hey, don't blame me. The visualization came directly from the bizarre candidate and hockey mom Sarah Palin. She cracked the joke in a nationally televised political speech to America. Blame her.