http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5285
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3341
Today the leisure suit of the mid-to-late 1970s is rightly ridiculed. Many things were askew in those years of economic “malaise” and high interest rates. Most importantly for whites, the 1960s http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4311 had settled into a prolonged assault on the cultural image of whites.
Needless to say, Hollywood was an enthusiastic participant in this assault. An interesting example is the movie Caddyshack, starring Chevy Chase. http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4617 is doubtless a trivial movie, but it has been heralded as one of the funniest movies of all time, and it continues to be shown endlessly in TV reruns.
Although the point is presumably lost on the vast majority of its audience, the real narrative of the movie is the Jew-as-outsider “comically” assaulting the WASP-as-insider. The setting of Caddyshack is apt, for the private country club represented one of the last bastions of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5301 privilege.Jewish resentment over WASP snobbery against upwardly mobile Jews continues to rankle among Jews. For example, Jacob Heilbrunn emphasizes this resentment as a key motivator for the neocons who have been so influential in the current Bush administration. The early neocons attempted “to overturn the old order in America …. There were the fancy clubs, the legal and financial firms that saw Jews as interlopers who would soil their proud escutcheons and were to be kept at bay. Smarting with unsurpassed social resentment, the young Jews viewed themselves as liberators, proclaiming a new faith” (p. 28). The same could be said of Jews in Hollywood, doubtless including Harold Ramis, the director and a co-screenwriter of Caddyshack.
The tension in Caddyshack revolved around the way the uncouth Jew played by Rodney Dangerfield upset the elite country club’s leader, played by Ted Knight, creator of the Ted Baxter buffoon from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In Caddyshack, he reprised the role of a “vain, pompous, dim-witted” WASP. As Judge Smails, Knight was always an easy target.
Accompanying Judge Smalis are other representatives of the WASP elite: Episcopal Bishop Pickering and a medical doctor known as “Dr. Beeper.” In addition to humiliating Judge Smails on the links, Dangerfield’s character continued to do so in the dining hall of Bushwood Country Club, loudly passing gas and vulgarly insulting the judge’s wife.
When the film moves to a sailing competition, the ethnic warfare becomes explicit. Dangerfield commands a massive cruiser that outclasses and destroys the judge’s more modest craft, tellingly christened “The Flying WASP.” The boat is destroyed when Dangerfield drops his anchor through its deck. “Hey, you scratched my anchor,” is his cry.
The film ends by making the statement that the gentile characters represented by the judge, bishop, and doctor are both bumblers and hypocrites, thus undeserving of their status. The judge, for instance, cheats in the final golf match and also bribes his caddie to remain silent.
When the sequel Caddyshack II appeared 1988, acerbic comedian Jackie Mason took Dangerfield’s role (Mason, like his father and three brothers, is an ordained rabbi and sounds like a Yiddish speaking refugee from an Eastern European shtetl). From the beginning, a clear binary is established: good Jews/bad WASPs. This begins when Mason’s daughter is mocked by the outrageously WASPy coed “Miffy” with whom she is playing golf.
When Mason first appears, he is the wealthy boss of a multicultural crew of laborers—mostly Mexicans and blacks. Showing sympathy for the plight of his Mexican workers, he deliberately loses at a game of cards. In contrast, when he meets a white male iron worker high up in the girders of his new building, he tells him “Take chances, I’m insured.”
When Mason comes down from the building we see the animosity directed at majority American culture. Two local WASP activists wish to preserve a decrepit shack they call The Armstrong Estate, an important part of their history. Mason, on the other hand, indicates that their worthless era has passed, and commands one of his workers to level the shack with a bulldozer. The symbolism is clear: WASPs are being dispossessed by a multicultural crew led by a Jew.
The action in the club house is similar, with the diminutive Mason warily confronting standard issue WASPs. Displaying the common Jewish trait that all gentiles are pretty much the same, Mason takes in a roomful of dozing WASPs and utters “Take a look at this place. This is what the world would have looked like if the Germans had won.”
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com/authors/Connelly-ReelWASPs.html#WASPs