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Caldwell and Shulevitz

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from: Judith Shulevitz

Say It With Boredom

Posted Friday, Nov. 20, 1998, at 2:54 PM ET

Dear Chris,

The Sioux ghost-dance shirt raises an interesting question. Art stolen by the Nazis doesn't seem like the most apt analogy here, since ghost-dance shirts are not works of art. These shirts--whose wearers believed themselves to be impervious to bullets, and found out too late they were not--came out of a weird, desperate, last-ditch, 19th-century Sioux religious cult whose central idea was that dancing obsessively would bring the dancers inside some sort of magical circle and drive the whites away. The shirt is more a religious and historical artifact than a commodity, and as such, I believe, subject to different principles of ownership than, say, real estate or works of art. The case is similar to that of the Jewish religious artifacts plundered by the Nazis and brought to Prague--they planned to house them in a museum of the Jewish race which would open once they'd annihilated all the living Jews. (Ironically, the museum project wound up saving Jewish lives, since the Nazis hired Jews to catalogue the objects as they came in, and didn't manage to ship all its employees to the camps in time.)

What to do with those artifacts is one of the big questions in Jewish circles. The Jews want them back; the Czechs want to keep them. I wish I knew the latest on how it's being resolved, but this Breakfast Table format doesn't give you a lot of time for research. My off-the-top-of-the-head take is, I can't see any reason for the Czechs getting to keep them, so I think they should go to the Jews. It's true that the principle of ownership is racial (euphemistic me, I'd rather say "ethnic") rather than individual, but what can you do? All the original owners were murdered--just as the wearers of the ghost-dance shirts were.

The most amusing part of reading the papers today was watching reporters go through contortions to make-without-making the point my colleague David Plotz felt free to make forcefully in his dispatch last night (I never stop being the Slate publicist, do I? Sorry): That Ken Starr's strategy was to slay 'em with total, abject, mind-numbing boredom. The Washington Post: Starr was professorial rather than prosecutorial, his speech slowly delivered "in a faintly nasal voice." The Wall Street Journal: "A gray figure at the witness table, Mr. Starr took most of two hours to read his 58-page prepared statement, even after it had been released to the press Wednesday night and widely published in papers today." The New York Times: "His dignified demeanor, which sometimes bordered on the pedantic." "His long-awaited testimony lacked the electric impact of star witnesses at past Congressional hearings."

He seemed to be trying to revive the notion that he is a man possessed of a sense of impartiality (though as James Carville would surely say, That dog won't hunt!) through that riskiest of rhetorical choices, tedium. It's as though he actually thought: If I turn my stint before the cameras into the drowsiest show on earth, then they'll see that in it for the truth, not the glory. But as Caryn James observed (yes, even Caryn James is livelier than Starr), "What yesterday's largely uneventful day proved is that Joe Friday's days as a television hero have passed."

Well, Chris, as they say on the talk shows, it's been a pleasure.

Best,

Judith

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415
from: Judith Shulevitz

Say It With Boredom

Posted Friday, Nov. 20, 1998, at 2:54 PM ET
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Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. Judith Shulevitz is the New York editor of Slate.
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