Christmas in Bethlehem
Morrison, Micah
statistics that lump together black and white single-parent homes. Although 25 percent of the nation's families are now headed by single women, fully one-third of these are concentrated in the 12...
...A security net, extending far into the surrounding countryside, has been thrown over Bethlehem, for this is the West Bank, occupied territory, Judea, and the Israelis want no trouble...
...Like Moslem...
...After endless security checks conducted by soldiers and monks, I find myself in a superb position directly behind a marble pillar...
...We entered the mosque, took off our shoes, and ascended the cool stone stairs...
...There is Oswald 20 Spengler, whose Decline of the West is back in print and available for a hearty weekend of joyous reading...
...Israeli security men guarding the dignitaries make kabbalistic signs to each other and talk into their lapels...
...My favorite nonfiction authors come in disparate shapes and sizes...
...It sells for $1600 and "will probably go to Saudi Arabia...
...And I am glad, a hundred times glad, that I saw Bethlehem, though at the time it seemed that that sight had swept away forever every pleasant fancy & every cherished memory that ever the City of Nativity had stored away in my mind & heart...
...The next step is the second coming of Jesus Christ...
...And by having children with them the men establish a claim on the shelter which women control...
...Yet for Bashir and others in the small but growing born-again movement, religion comes before politics and nationalism...
...19 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 become too cheerful...
...Many Moslems, especially the younger, more radical generation, resent the Christian leadership...
...A string of colored lights comes crashing down...
...It is more real than ever...
...He met a Baptist preacher, he felt a "hunger and a thirst for God," he spoke in tongues, was baptized, and experienced "the revival of the power of God in my life...
...And now that the greasy monks, & the noisy mob, & the leprous beggars are gone, & all the harsh, cold hardness of real stone & unsentimental glare of sunlight are banished from the vision, don't you realize again, as in other years, that Jesus was born there, & that the angels did sing in the still air above, & that the wondering shepherds did hold their breath & listen as the mysterious music floated by...
...More important, however, is the rate at which blacks are completely failing to form families...
...Church bells ring...
...She no longer has to share all her children with a single father...
...When he paused I heard the choir outside but as he held the long notes the powerful strange language pushed away all the sounds of the world beyond the prayer hall-filled the mosque with a song full, it seemed, of longing...
...The police are carting away those who have The choir in Manger Square had stopped singing the bouncy dance tune, and now a high, lilting carol floated up to the prayer hall...
...But 28 percent of black single-parent homes are headed by a mother who has never married...
...Micah Morrison CHRISTMAS IN BETHLEHEM Not all it's cracked up to be...
...Here I sing," Suleiman said, taking a book from the shelf...
...Bethlehem at Christmastide is an inviting target for terrorism...
...When I am asked to recommend an author, I always mention Marcel Proust first, second, and third...
...They manufacture their holy items in Bethlehem and export to Europe, America, and the Middle East...
...He has stayed alive-and in office-for more than a dozen years, testimony that his views threaten 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 neither the PLO, other Arab terrorists, King Hussein, nor the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem...
...The best novel I've read in the last ten years or so (not that I've read very many) is A House for Mr Biswas by V.S...
...No, wait," I said, and showed them that it was only a tape recorder...
...In a world without stability or assets," he wrote, "AFDC [becomes] a vital resource that puts women and motherhood at the center of things...
...Inner-city men respect women who have this resource...
...I have managed, however, to wangle a rare pass into the Church of Saint Catherine for Midnight Mass, and I am determined to go...
...Defeated, I beat a retreat back to Manger Square to watch the proceedings on the closed-circuit screen...
...The memory mellows and takes "to itself again the soft, unreal semblance that Poetry & Tradition give to things they hallow...
...A bomb blast in the packed square, the stabbing of a soldier, a surface-to-surface missile launched from the desert and sent crashing into the city would instantly command world attention, demonstrating Israeli inability to maintain order in the territories and protect the thousands of Christian visitors who come to the holy places every year...
...I thank him and leave...
...government officials, dignitaries, clergymen, and the press have been welcomed...
...Somewhere, somebody is saying something in Latin...
...couldn't get through it and still haven't...
...most midnight, and all the pilgrims remaining in Manger Square are full of Christmas cheer...
...The choirs have surrendered Manger Square to the drunks, and in the chill night air I hear bellowing and yelping and the sound of police whistles and smashing bottles...
...I show you...
...The bus depot is not far from my apartment on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, and as I walked home I saw a Hasidic Jew in frock coat and fur hat approaching...
...The first thing to be recognized about the disintegration of the family, then, is that it is bound to create poverty...
...Because of my Christian faith, I believe in what God is doing through the Jews...
...The picture mellows with distance, Twain wrote of Bethlehem months after he had visited the town...
...Well, I hope by this time you've gotten the drift...
...Not surprisingly, he traced the disintegration of black families to America's ill-conceived "family allowance"-Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC...
...I thought the whole thing was done with tape players and timers, and besides, he looked like a bum...
...Come...
...Greek Catholic, Syrian Catholic, Maronite, Franciscan, Lutheran, Baptist, and Anglican services are in progress all over town...
...Although 25 percent of the nation's families are now headed by single women, fully one-third of these are concentrated in the 12 percent of the population that is black...
...No good...
...The local mosque is right next door to the municipal offices...
...Proust may be great, but you have to have a sense of priorities...
...I wandered about and somehow ended up beside the mosque...
...After a few moments I understood: "Trinity no good...
...Business is not so good this year, says George Freij, the mayor's son...
...Our loyalties are to our national cause and our motherland...
...Looming in my thoughts was a scenario in which the Moslem lures the infidel-I knew all about the Prophet's problems with the Jews, and so of course did Suleiman-inside the mosque to kill him, but I decided that if Suleiman tried to murder me I would make a dash for a window and start screaming...
...Instead, it only shifted its center of gravity to a new female-dominated structure built around a woman who has a string of children with various men...
...Father, Son, and Holy Ghost no good...
...The AFDC grant, Harris pointed out, serves as a kind of dowry-a "nest egg" a woman inherits when she becomes pregnant...
...Soldiers watch from rooftops, patrol the alleys and the market...
...Mayor Freij pays no attention to the muezzin...
...I told him it was past midnight and thus all the regular buses had stopped, but since it was Christmas he might be able to find transport into town at the bus depot up the street...
...What an insight...
...The Latin Patriarch has been greeted and escorted to the Church of the Nativity...
...I'd find life awfully unfulfilling if I hadn't come across A Theory of Justice along the way...
...A Christian Arab (Greek Orthodox), a prosperous manufacturer, retailer, and exporter of mother-of-pearl and olive wood religious gimcracks (crucifixes, prayerclasped hands, nativity scenes, reliefs of the Dome of the Rock, boxes for holding the Koran), Mayor Freij brings the pragmatism of a salesman to his political pronouncements: They manage to appease everybody...
...A great white screen hangs on the wall of the police station: Midnight Mass at the Church of Saint Catherine, next to the Basilica of the Nativity, will be relayed on to the screen-and around the world-by closed-circuit television...
...The family becomes "matrilocal" and "matrilinear...
...Three policemen bolt past me, chasing a half-naked drunk brandishing a broken bottle...
...As Harris pointed out, the welfare matriarchy has not entailed a complete disintegration of the black family...
...Seriously...
...It is the afternoon of December 24 and I am talking with Bethlehem's Mayor Elias Freij in his office overlooking Manger Square...
...He asked me if I was a Christian and, hesitating a moment, I said, "No, a Jew...
...El...
...Never heard of it...
...holiday carols blast from loudspeakers...
...You may know the book as Remembrance of Things Past...
...Mayor Freij might enjoy international recognition as a moderate, but Bashir notes that he by no means speaks for the majority in the West Bank, which is 85-percent Sunni Moslem...
...He invokes all the proper moderate code words"withdrawal from occupied territory," "recognition of Palestinian rights," "peace with security," "mutual coexistence"-and I dutifully write them down...
...The great contribution of the nuclear family has been its efficiency in yoking men and women together to the task of raising children...
...The inevitable cups of strong black coffee are served...
...Then Suleiman sang, his voice strong, close, sad...
...He waves to me...
...Naipaul...
...His beliefs as a born-again Christian completely overshadow his political views as a Palestinian Arab...
...0...
...They have been continually circling through the town and crossing Manger Square for most of the latter part of the afternoon...
...I'm joking about Proust and all the other guys who've written books that supposedly thoughtful peo ple tout, fools buy, and nobody reads...
...The floor was covered with thick oriental rugs...
...I am growing tired of Bethlehem...
...There are no differences between our communities...
...One-half of all black females now have a baby before they turn 20, and one-quarter have two...
...Jew good," Suleiman said...
...FRED BARNES Proust...
...He stared hard at me, then smiled...
...We were in the mosque's minaret...
...I will make you a recording," I said, and this made Suleiman very happy...
...there have been attempts in the past...
...We go to his home and drink tea and he tells me how ten years ago "an awakening from the Lord" stirred in his heart...
...This is the biggest day of the year for Bethlehem," he says, smiling and spreading his hands...
...he exclaimed, thrusting three fingers heavenward...
...Many eyes followed us...
...Christmas," he said, "what is Christmas...
...Marvin Harris, perhaps the country's most widely published popular anthropologist, examined the disintegration of the black family in his 1981 book, America Now...
...As for Proust, all I can say is that life on this planet is a fleeting experience...
...It was furnished with a straight-backed chair, a microphone on a stand, a simple amplifier, and a shelf with several books...
...Suleiman put a hand to his ear, con centrating...
...The evening hilarity was well under way...
...It was late by the time I left Bashir and climbed the steep hill back to Manger Square...
...Strings of colored lights and gay pennants dangle above the swirling, restless crowd...
...Proust...
...Mayor Freij surveys his kingdom from the balcony of his office...
...He has been good for Bethlehem: It is the least troubled of West Bank cities...
...I try to keep Proust at the ready, always in an accessible place in my bookshelf...
...Mayor Freij has earned the ambiguous appellation "leading Palestinian moderate" by skillfully walking the tightrope stretched between the rhetoric of Palestinian nationalism and the realities of life under Israeli administration...
...I've got a two-volume set of Remembrance of Things Azst, but I plan to leave it in my basement, where it is mildewing gracefully...
...I ask him about relations between Moslems and Christians in Bethlehem...
...I too am glad I saw Bethlehem, but that night I had been wandering the City of the Nativity for too long and I was feeling tired and Jewish (a stranger amid the celebrants) and so I left, walked past the checkpoints, glanced back at the drunks swaying through Manger Square and the faithful gathered in front of the white screen, and climbed aboard one of the special buses that ferry visitors between Bethlehem and Jerusalem...
...With dusk, the day grows chilly, the winter sky is pale behind the crescent moon atop the minaret...
...A House for Mr...
...He blames it on "the general Mideast situation...
...The hall was empty except for three children finishing their prayers...
...I didn't believe him...
...Three books I do recommend, however...
...As...
...He looked at them and said, "Christmas...
...Suleiman and I were thoroughly enjoying our theological discussion, carried on in broken English, Arabic, and Hebrew amidst the Christian revelry...
...He nodded and shook one finger at me...
...I do...
...His set speech over, plump and dignified Mayor Freij relaxes...
...Although 17 percent of white children are in single-parent homes, all but 2 percent of these are the result of divorce or death of a parent...
...They import mother-of-pearl from Australia, the Solomon Islands, the Far East...
...Now I sing Koran," Suleiman said...
...The desires of individual men and women do not "naturally" work in its favor...
...The Moslempopulated refugee camps in the bounds of the Bethlehem municipality are breeding grounds for political and Islamic fanaticism...
...An old man collapses and is carried out on a stretcher...
...It cannot be said often enough that reforming welfare would be the single most positive way to begin lifting black Americans out of poverty...
...What can be done to stem the tide of family disintegration...
...Come...
...I liked the little room and left it unwillingly...
...The Freij family has a big store in the New Tourist Shopping Center, an arcade lining the southern side of Manger Square, and I go there to buy a few postcards and talk...
...shown in [one] study of a black Midwestern ghetto neighborhood, AFDC women have a surprisingly large circle of relatives based on ties built up by their sequential liaisons," wrote Harris...
...What is rarely observed, however, is that black divorce rates were always about double the white rate, and have remained almost twice as high as white rates have soared...
...There are long lines at all the checkpoints and one by one everybody entering the area walks into a wooden booth, is expertly and politely frisked, then allowed to pass...
...A small percentage of these teenage mothers are married...
...It was warm and had a comfortable air, tall windows, and a very high ceiling...
...Although the family has been with us since the beginning of human evolution, it remains a relatively fragile biological institution...
...I abandoned the murder plot and concluded that if he attempted to molest me I would bash him over the head and make a barefoot break for the front door...
...Listening in on a furious but friendly political argument between two Arabs and an Israeli outside the Freij store, I meet a born-again Christian Arab...
...And so, as Marvin Harris concluded: "Despite all the crafty scheming that has gone into the design of AFDC, the program has succeeded best in achieving exactly what it was designed to prevent: the formation of mother-centered families living on the dole...
...Besotted screams, laughter, and music rose from the town's center...
...Mayor Freij is talking politics...
...Wide black script flowed across the ornately bordered, fading yellow pages...
...But life is unfair...
...He opened the door and showed me a tiny room painted in a warm yellow...
...No eat pig...
...I mean, what would life be like without A La Recherche du Temps Perrlu...
...Suddenly the cry of a muezzin calling the Moslem faithful to prayer splits the day...
...I even took Ulysses on my honeymoon...
...I pulled a tape recorder out of my knapsack and Suleiman started in alarm-was it an instrument of evil I held, a bomb or a gun, was I a Jewish terrorist...
...He muttered something to the children and they backed away toward the door...
...As for the failure in family formation-particularly among blacksthe welfare system is the obvious target...
...Un Amour de Swann, La Prisonniere-it's not important which volume I seize...
...Despite efforts to keep Bethlehem dry, many of the Micah Morrison is The American Spectator's Israel correspondent...
...Any Proust will do...
...I agreed...
...One group is led by bagpipers, another follows drummers and baton twirlers...
...We sat cross-legged on the rug, the Koran open before us...
...I stared at him a moment, then pointed south toward Bethlehem, the noise of Manger Square still ringing in my ears...
...for several decades the city has had a growing Moslem majority...
...Changing the divorce laws to favor paternal custody is a first priority...
...I couldn't get through Guerrillas, which is supposed to be one of Naipaul's better books, and A Bend in the River was good but left me a little cold...
...Bethlehem is the Christmas capital of the whole world...
...On the other side of Manger Square, against the gray blank stone wall of the Church of the Nativity, wooden stands have been erected for this year's visiting choirs, among them groups from the United States, South Korea, Fiji, Germany, and France...
...Then Suleiman sang, his voice strong, close, sad...
...It was his turn to be unbelieving...
...Other journalists and guests are waiting...
...they vie with each other for their favors...
...He stood up...
...Proust...
...Biswas is a story, in conventional narrative form, about emigrants from India who live in Trinidad...
...He feeds me another West Bank placebo: "We are all one people, all Palestinian Arabs...
...They bowed to Suleiman and came over to stand near us...
...young people filling Manger Square are drinking beer and wine...
...I went home and watched Midnight Mass on television, falling asleep on the couch and waking to the hum of static and a cold December dawn...
...A tiny Christmas tree twinkles on the table beside him...
...He said "trouble, trouble" and kept shaking three fingers in front of my face...
...Christmas," I said, "you know-the holiday of the Christians...
...Soldiers man checkpoints at all entrances to the square...
...For a woman, this can be a very positive strategy...
...One God...
...He locked the door and we continued up the stairs to the main hall...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...A spark of pleasure flickers in his careful eyes...
...Inebriated bagpipers stumble through the night...
...What a loss it was to mankind when Spengler passed on to his higher reward...
...I'll call him Bashir, an Arabic name which could be translated as "evangelist...
...It is the one novel with enough intellectual depth and emotional resonance to satisfy one's need for literary sustenance...
...He told me his name was Suleiman and that he was the muezzin, the singer in the minaret...
...It has also freed black men of the age-old problem of having to take on the responsibility of a family in order to produce offspring...
...In addition, the various paternities give welfare mothers a wide net of potential economic support...
...Divorce rates among whites have soared in recent years...
...I peered out a narrow window at the crowd whirling in a mad dance below...
...The mayor glances at the door...
...There are also "a few fanatics" who think the Christians are as bad in a religious sense as the Jews (in other words, the Israelis) are in a political sense...
...We began to talk...
...I feint forward and back, left and right, and finally realize I will make no further progress through this staunch, packed, sweaty mass of Christian soldiers...
...The pain we feel in witnessing this retrogression is only a measure of the degree to which we have become human...
...Without cultural reinforcement-or with wrongheaded social intervention-our biological drives can quickly carry us back to the earlier mother-and-herchildren mammalian family...
...He stopped on a landing and unlocked a wooden door...
...I asked, What did he think about Christmas, about all the festivities in his town...
...Exports to the Arab world travel by way of Israel's open bridges with Jordan...
...It is a must read, a classic...
...The mayor has not faced an election in almost ten years, and many observers doubt that he would win a new contest...
...Bashir says there are "hidden frictions" between Moslems and the ruling Christian minority in Bethlehem...
...No matter...
...Christian Arab organizations parade past a reviewing stand in an annual show of strength and solidarity...
...His calling them back to the Promised Land is a fulfillment of the prophecies...
...The muezzin is still singing as I come down the steps of the municipal office building...
...In a few minutes, Bethlehem was behind me...
...Besides, it takes a few swipes at the foibles of the press...
...And finally there is John Rawls...
...Of course, you can't spend your whole life reading novels...
...He told me he was a fine singer, better than the singers in Jerusalem...
...he needs a pseudonym because his views are not popular among Palestinian nationalists...
...What AFDC has accomplished, then, is to free lower-class women from the age-old female problem of having to find a husband before she can have children...
...Naturally, it's painful at times to have to reach past Ulysses Morte dArthur, and The Faerie Queen, each of which I read at least once a year...
...He believes that an independent Palestinian state will never rise in the West Bank...
...Family disintegration undoes the original com promise on which the evolution of our species has been built...
...The Freijs are an internationally attuned lot...
...I asked...
...Misty figures move across the closed-circuit screen but only a Jesuit could figure out what is going on...
...Each of us, in his own wary way, wanted to trust the other...
...I was pointing at black, silent hills...
...Over half of black marriages now result in divorce-and this doesn't include the shifting common-law marriages that have become characteristic of lower-class black culture...
...These kinship ties give AFDC women additional security and influence and people to turn to in case of emergencies...
...He gave up his job as a teacher and dedicated himself to spreading the fundamentalist Word...
...Church bells peal in the distance and the air fills with the clamor of bells and skirling bagpipes and thudding drums, and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" booming from loudspeakers, and the final fading notes of the muezzin...
...As long as both men and women can run off from their responsibilities without sacrificing anything, high divorce rates will continue...
...Thus, to say that people are becoming "impoverished" because they have broken up their families (or are failing to form them) is about as profound as saying that people have trouble picking things up after they have cut off their thumbs...
...At sixteen [welfare daughters] can get pregnant and apply for AFDC on their own, adding their own child's stipend to the family's income and perpetuating the female-centered dynasty of their mothers and grandmothers...
...He says their business is almost evenly split between Moslem and Christian customers...
...Excuse me," he said in Hebrew, "are the buses into the center of town still running...
...A skinny, shabbily dressed Arab on a stool guarded the door, allowing Moslems in to pray and turning away the curious...
...It's tough going for the first 100 pages, but anyone who sticks with it is richly rewarded...
...The choir in Manger Square had stopped singing the bouncy dance tune and now a high, lilting carol floated up to the prayer hall...
...So I just stretch out my arm and grab Proust...
...George Freij shows me a mother-ofpearl Koran holder decorated with scenes of Jerusalem...
...The children returned...
...There is Herbert Marcuse, whose many writings have explained so forcefully how it is that making people prosperous and secure and happy is really just another form of oppression-and cruel oppression at that...
...BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS Once again, eminentoes thump for literary gifts at Holiday time...
...Looking up, I see a soldier climbing a loudspeaker pole, trying to coax a sloshed blond giant down from his perch...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
