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Denial among most popular of bad habits
JONATHAN S. TOBIN
Connecticut Jewish Ledger
At one of my first jobs after college, a veteran employee took me aside and expounded on her philosophy of dealing with mistakes when confronted by management. "Deny, deny, deny," she said.
Though I didn't agree then (or now) that such a policy was either ethical or practical, I learned that denial is a major factor in the conduct of politics as well as civil discourse. One major instance of mass denial is going on here in the state of Connecticut and elsewhere. On the one hand, Richard Blumenthal, our Attorney General, is continuing to garner headlines and praise for his dogged pursuit of the tobacco industry. He is out to get them for unfair trade practices because their product kills people and supposedly costs the state money because of all the health care the victims require. Blumenthal is aiming to further restrict tobacco advertising and to collect money from these merchants of death for the state.
As someone who is allergic to tobacco smoke and deplores smoking as a vile anti-social habit, I'm not joining our popular AG's cheering section. The fact is, the early deaths suffered by many smokers saves the state more money in benefits they don't collect than it costs us in health care. And tobacco makes the state an enormous amount of money in tax revenues.
But what I want to know is why few seem to make a connection between the state's attack on the tobacco companies and its simultaneous promotion of a fraudulent, harmful scheme of its own: the lottery. Blumenthal might ponder the state's promotion of its Powerball and lotto games - especially at a time when so many around the nation went mad with lust for last week's Powerball jackpot, which ended up at more than $290 million. Can there be any doubt that any product, whose marketing promised so much while the actual chances of winning its benefits are so infinitesimal, would be subjected to prosecution were its owner anyone but the state itself? Can there be any doubt as to the harmful effects on families, especially the poor, of the gambling addiction promoted by our state governments? We are truly all living in a state of denial when no one notices that our state pursues criminal and civil remedies against the purveyors of one type of social pathology while at the same time profiting from it - then feeds off other addictions.
Yet the major instance of denial recently was undoubtedly the fuss kicked up about the instances of Holocaust denial by leaders and the official press of the Palestinian Authority. As reported at length by numerous Israeli sources as well as by an article in The New York Times on July 24, this trend has finally caught the notice of prominent American Jewish organizations and Holocaust scholars. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations sent a letter to Arafat complaining about it. Even the State Department told the PA, "It's got to stop." But Hanan Ashrawi, the PA Minister for Higher Education and Research, who was the face of the intifada on American TV, denies the denial.
The logic - and the allure - of the peace process is that acts of reconciliation, mutual concessions, and the work-a-day contacts of living together without violence will increase mutual respect and drain the Israeli-Arab relationship of the rhetoric of hatred. Optimists may say that the process has just begun, but the drive to de-legitimize Israel and the Jews on the part of Palestinian Arabs is undiminished.
Many of our leaders and the U.S. State Department prefer to dream on and pretend all is well. Deny. Deny. Deny.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
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