The Eric Metaxas Show - Ruth Wisse (Encore continued)

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Ruth Wisse, a conservative and former professor at Harvard, continues sharing her fascinating life story which she's compiled in her new book, "Free As A Jew." (Encore Presentation)

The following program is pre-recorded. Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. Welcome back. I'm talking to the author of a brand new memoir. It's called Free as a Jew. Ruth Weiss, pronounced Weiss, but spelled WI-S-S-E. We're talking about many important things.

I want to talk to you about U-S-U-S-Yiddish, Yiddish, Yiddish, Yiddish literature, and a lot of other fun stuff. but I want to finish this conversation, at least this part of the conversation with you. So is it the – I'm just guessing here. It strikes me that the left in America has fallen in love with victimhood and that they don't like celebrating sometimes because it almost implies, well, then we haven't suffered enough. We want you to focus on our suffering as though something's gained by that. You're saying that's not how people learn.

It's not a good thing. But you see that narrative, surely, in – American life in the latter part of the 20th century, just kind of took over. And people, they want to wallow, they want to be victims, they want to remind you of how much they've suffered, because it gives them some kind of perverse status. Well, that may be true of some people, but you know what I saw when I was teaching at Harvard, actually, was something quite different, no less troubling, but very different. People didn't want to fight.

and what surprised me most about Harvard and all the 21 years that I taught there, I became involved in faculty meetings as I had never been before when I was at McGill. And I saw that there was, they refused to let ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, that had always been at the basis of higher education, there was always training,

of the best and the brightest young people during precisely the age when you have to go into the army. Right. That's the age. So there was, for 40 years, 40 years, right, the faculty of Harvard kept ROTCY off the campus. They did everything.

They kept changing the rationale for keeping it on campus, so it was not to allow it on campus. What is that about? What they were actually saying to these kids is forgive me, but this is the way I understood it. America is not worth defending. Of course, that's exactly what they're saying. It's worse than that. They were saying that America is bad. And they're saying that any kind of militarism, or I should say any kind of self-defense is militarism, is a step away from the quagmire of Vietnam and chest-thumping,

jingoism. I mean, that's where the left has been for a long time. It's, breaks my heart, but this is all through the culture, obviously not just at places like Harvard. Exactly. So I'm just locking into what you were saying before. It's not just that one wants to see oneself as the victim, is that one does not want to soldier. One does not want to carry the responsibility of protecting what you have built.

And here is one, if I may say, one lesson that the Jews should be bringing to the world. the more accomplished you are, the more you can create, the more you can achieve, the more it is necessary to protect what it is that you have done. If you do not have self-protection commensurate with your achievement, then you will be destroyed. That's just the way it is. And America does not seem to understand that profoundly enough because it's so much bigger, because it thinks that it's really, you know, what's an attack, even an attack in New York City. Okay, 3,000 people and so on. It's a blip.

What's Pearl Harbor? No, I mean, it's not like that at all. From within and from without, if you are creative, if you are a great country and a great nation, that's when you have to really dig in and know that you have to protect yourself intelligently and thoroughly. because, you know, I'm not making this up. This simply is the way the world functions, and we see how many players there are out there that are really not getting better from year to year.

They're not becoming more self-accountable from year to year. They're becoming more grievance-stricken, and they're the ones who are becoming more aggressive from year to year. Well, sure, and obviously they have this idea that they want to tear down. I mean, you see this effectively in banning the ROTC from campus at Harvard. They say, well, we don't want that kind of militarism, they would say, on campus. It's distasteful to us. As though their privileges at Harvard weren't being protected by people with guns all around the world.

But they seem with almost inconceivable intellectual sloppiness, to have those views. At what point at Harvard did this become for you, a tipping point where you said, I have to push against this, or I'm thinking differently. What did you see go on there? I know you saw the standards of honesty. I mean, there were things that happened there

that go beyond the issue of ROTC. Well, I would say that of all the things that troubled me, and let me just say that there are many things that were wonderful about being there. That should be said, too, the privilege of teaching at a great university and being surrounded by people who are serious scholars with wonderful students.

Let's not leave that unsaid. But that shocked me from the first day. And of all the things that distressed me, I would say that that remained my greatest distress. And, you know, I addressed it whenever I could and students knew, you know, I became an advisor to a unit that wanted to be for the, for ROTC, on campus and so forth. I mean, I, you know, I spoke whenever I could for this. And eventually, by the time the war against Rotsie was sort of over, I think when Obama came to office,

the Army didn't want to be there anymore. Yeah, you get to a point. Were you at the end of your time at Harvard demonized by the leftists on campus as a controversial figure? Well, I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't say demonized. I always thought the other way that because there were so few, you see, when I came, there were quite a number of strong conservatives on campus. and there were quite a number of people who would have shared these views and who were quite visible, visibly Christian, for example.

I can't think of any, but I know that must be the case. Yes, it was the case. I know it to be the case, but they all began to kind of retire or just withdraw in some way. And so what happened is to be one of the very few visible conservatives. You can't imagine how wonderful that was. Because obviously every student who really felt that way, I mean, for example, the students in the Republican Club, the students for stand-up comedy club,

they asked me to be their advisor. Wow. And it was such a privilege to get to meet all these feisty kids. Now, you wrote a book on humor, did you not? I did. Is it on specifically on Jewish humor or just on humor? Or is humor inherently Jewish? That's a question.

Humor is not inherently Jewish, but Jewish humor is very specific. Well, it's funny because when we're talking about, you know, speaking as a Christian who values the Bible, to me, the idea of freedom inevitably comes out of the Bible and out of the Jews. Period. Case closed. You know, I'm Greek, so we claim to have invented democracy. But let me just say, there's no question that, you know, Athens doesn't have that to do with Jerusalem, in my opinion. But humor is at its heart a kind of truth-telling. There's something about that.

Anyway, I know you wrote a book on that. I don't want to get off on that. Now, let me just ask you before we go to this break, you seem to think that people are beginning to see the end of this, the grievance industry, and that people are beginning to appreciate some of the things that you're talking about. Am I reading you right? Well, I hope so. Let me put it that way. And I always think that it is worth saying what you hope. In other words, stressing that you've got to be a happy warrior. And it's not that I'm pretending to know something that isn't really there. But yes, sometimes I feel it. People are always asking, are you a pessimist or an optimist. Well, by nature, you and I are optimists. We believe in truth. We'll be right back.

folks. I'm talking to Ruth Weiss. Don't go away. Hey folks, you wish you remembered names better and thought more clearly? Improve your memory with Vivalour memory support. Vivalor's founder prayed that God would show her the solution to memory loss when her mother had dementia. Divine encounters, faith, and her background as a pharmacist led Susan Gibson to create Vivalor memory support. Vivalor is a premium quality, all-natural supplement with five to 20 times more nutrients than any other memory supplement. It's won numerous awards and has three books independent written about it. Visit vivelor.com for testimonials about the life-changing improvements

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You've written this book, Free As a Jew. You have a background teaching at Harvard. You eventually became a conservative. You are pro-Israel. I think that needs to be said. Why is it? I get the impression that religious Jews, conservative Jews, are pro-Israel, liberal Jews tend almost to be pro-Palestinian or very worried about Israel

in the way that the Harvard faculty was worried about the ROTC. Well, I mean... Well, the connection you're making is exactly right, I think. Why is that? Well, I don't put it so much as pro-Israel. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how any decent human being could be anything but pro-Israel. The great question is, why did the Arab world,

why did the Arab League organize in 1945 against the state of Israel? You tell me. I have my theories. Well, I have many theories. I wrote a book about that too, actually, called Jews in Power, trying to explain anti-Semitism, which I define as the organization of politics against the Jews. And my sense is that you always have to look at the function of anti-Semitism.

Who does it serve and what purposes does it serve? And it seems very clear that the only glue of the Arab League in 1945 was common opposition to the state of Israel. And that's still in some profound and terrifying way. The only actual unifying element on a political. level within that terribly disparate and really fragmented and fractured world. So it plays a very important part among Arab and Muslim societies. And unfortunately, lately, it has been imported into the United States of America quite successfully and driven home here. So that for 25 years

after the Second World War, when liberalism was really powerful in this country, partly because one had defeated Nazism, partly because one was still very much united against communism. I mean, the country was really fighting the Cold War. Except for Lillian Hellman. Well, except for a whole, yes, a minority of people. Yes, is your bet, noir? I know, I just find it funny that there were these people that seem to be like, I think Stalin's okay. Come on. Give them a chance.

Yeah, but the liberalism was strong, and so everybody was for Israel in those days. Right. For 25 years, you can see. I recommend to everybody to see the movie Exodus or to read the book Exodus. You can't believe that was a bestseller in the 1950s. Leon Yuris. That's right. Well, there was a narrative again, and I grew up with that, and so it's really shocking to me to see the change.

I mean, I don't know if you know I wrote a book on Dieter, Bonhofer, German pastor who got involved in the plot to kill Hitler. And, you know, it is pretty astonishing to see the resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States. And, well, so you have a love for Israel. And what led you, I have to ask you, what led you to become a professor of Yiddish literature? Well, in the memoir, I actually, there was an incident which triggered it. You know, there's a triggering incident. I would have probably landed up there anyway, maybe,

but I had met this great Yiddish poet, Abraham Sutskavir, whose name you wouldn't know, but in Yiddish literature, and then, by the way, in world poetry, he's quite superb, one of the great poets of the 20th century. Anyway, I had organized a trip of his to Canada, speaking tour to Canada, and we became friends. And when he was on the point of leaving around then, he said, well, what are you going to be doing the rest of your life? Meaning that the job I had, working as a press officer for the Canadian Jewish Congress, was not good enough for me.

And what decade was this? This was in 1960, 1950, 1950, a long time ago. You were just a kid. Well, I was married already, and I was, I knew that I wanted to work, but I didn't know exactly at what. So I had found this job. I thought I would go into journalism, and this was a job in journalism that involved running his trip. And so I said, well, you know, I'm thinking of going back to graduate school and studying English literature, which had been my field of honors.

I had taken honors in English literature, and he said, well, why don't you specialize in Yiddish literature? And I laughed. I said, and what would I do, teach Shulamah? And of course he was, you know, I don't know which of us was more horrified. Because as the words came out of my mouth, I thought, is this you saying it? But I had, you know, Yiddish literature is very prominent in my family. And I knew a lot about Yiddish literature already. I'm sure most people listening to this program are not aware of the universe of Yiddish literature and theater.

but it was a whole world. It is. And in many ways, it's forgotten. But thanks to folks like you, obviously, it's not. And I only know a very little bit about it. But so what happened when you said this? So I said this. And then, of course, I immediately apologized.

And I said, what I mean is that there's no place to study Yiddish literature at an advanced level. And he said, oh, yes, there is. at Columbia University. You can take a PhD in Yiddish language, and he knew about it. Yeah. So he had kind of set this up, you know, to put this being on it, right? So you didn't move to New York at this point? I did.

For two years. In the 60s? Yes. In 1960, 61, I got my, I began to do my, I got my master's in comparative literature at Columbia, specializing in Yiddish literature. Wow. Who was that, there were some big names there at Columbia in the literature department. I'm just thinking, because that's so long ago.

Lionel Trilling. And Fred DuPee, and they were wonderful. And Richard Chase was my teacher, who was a wonderful teacher. Well, I have to say, I don't read Yiddish that I know of. But I did meet the granddaughter of Sholam Alakam. Sholam Alakum is, you know, thought of as sort of the Mark Twain of the Yiddish literature, her 19th century figure, but his granddaughter, did you ever meet her? Well, do you mean B. Kaufman?

Yeah. Yes. You did? I did. Yes. She only passed away a few years ago. I interviewed her when she was 94. She was still doing ballroom dancing.

And wearing very high heels. Yes. An amazing woman, but the granddaughter of Sholemah. Yes. Well, in fact, you know, why had I said that? Why I had said that? These things are interesting, you know. I had said, what would I do?

Teach Shalom Alehem. Now, why did I say that? I don't know. I didn't have the imagination because in all the years I had been at college, I had studied Russian literature, German literature, English literature, French literature. But because there had never been Jewish literature of any kind, it took me that minute to think, I hadn't imagined it until that minute. But of course, the minute I said that, I began to imagine it, well, why not?

Why shouldn't there be that? You know, why not introduce it into the university? And so eventually, that's what I did. It seemed, you see, the university was expanding in the 1960s anyway. It was a wonderful period of expansion. Asian studies was coming into the university, African American studies. It was opening up. So it was the most natural thing in the world to introduce Jewish studies,

which had never been there altogether, and Yiddish as a part of Jewish studies in Hebrew. So it was, you know, that was an age of, you have to be at the right place at the right time. Oh, sure. Yeah. So I'm trying to think besides Sholomalakum, I can think of I be singer. I can't think of anybody else really at the moment. Well, Sholamash used to be the biggest name. Uh-huh.

And one of the reasons that he was the biggest name, by the way, is because he wrote a trilogy about Jesus. Is that right? A trilogy? A whole trilogy. In Yiddish? No, no. Well, he wrote it in Yiddish, but it was immediately translated into English. Was it ever translated back into Yiddish? Well, it wouldn't have had to be, but it was a joke. I got you. I got you with that. Thank you. You did. But that's amazing. What's the last name there? What's the last name? Ash. Ash. Ash. Sholam Ash. Wow. And by the way, in Harvard Library, when I began to look up these things and, you know, of what was the holdings of the library. They had many more books by Sholamash than by any other Yiddish or Jewish author. Yes, because

they had dozens of copies of the prophet and of the apostle and of Mary, these books that are, yes. They're wonderful. By the way, they're pretty strong novels. I understand that Jesus was Jewish. I'm pretty sure he was part Jewish. Mary, of course, was Italian. We all know that. It's just... Are you going to keep going? It's to let... No. We, we, so you, you, you, You mentioned earlier Daniel Duranda, the novel. Did you want to talk about it? How's that related? When did you stumble onto that?

I guess you've studied literature in so many languages. I don't know. We're going to break. Okay, we'll be right back, folks. I'm speaking to the author of a brand new book, Free as a Jew, a memoir by Ruth Weiss. Don't go away. Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a secret about relief factor that the father, son, owners, Pete and Seth Talbot have never made a big deal about, but I think it is a big deal.

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It works. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to the author of a new book, Free As a Jew. Ruth Weiss is with me. Ruth, I'm just talking in 20 direct. at once, but you were friends, I'm amazed, with Leonard Cohen, Saul Bellow, and Isaac Bachevis singer. That's high cotton, as we say up here in New York. Kind of amazing. Well, yes. No? And once you get to know them, they're nothing special, right? No, no, no, they're very special,

each in his own way. I wasn't exactly a friend of Isaac Bachevis singers. I knew him and had occasion to interact with him. He's obviously much older. than you. Yes, but I was very friendly with Saul Bello at a certain point in his life. And with Leonard Cohn in the easiest way possible, we were at McGill at the same time. And we had the same teacher, Louis Dudec. And Louis Dudec was a poet himself. And he decided that he was going to begin a series called McGill Poets. And that the first poet that he was going to publish is Leonard Cohn, who's then a student of his at McGill. So he needed somebody to help him put out the book. And my mother had been in the business of promoting Yiddish books. So I knew all about what it was.

And by the way, I come from a family that owned the third largest publishing house in Vilna, Poland. So it's sort of in my blood. You've got it in your blood. Yeah. And so I love putting out his book. And so, you know, I just knew him the way one would know somebody in those years. Your book and you are praised by some big names, Norman Padoritz, and Cynthia Ozzyk. Is it Ozzyk or Ozzyk? Ozik, yeah. Ozick has some wonderful things to say about this new book. She's a huge name, of course, in the world of literature.

Sure. So she should be. Yeah, I want to talk to you more about the book because we're just talking and talking. But so in the book, does the book have, you know, a narrative arc? We were talking about that earlier or is it really just memories of all of these different things in your life? Well, it doesn't flit around. I would never accuse you of flitting around. Well, you know, I'm capable of it. But, no, I think that what came into view as I was writing,

was the fact that I had lived one of the most privileged, in the truest sense of the word, lives, of anyone, of, you know, as I said, to be born where I was born under those circumstances and to be able to come to Canada and to live in freedom and then to be able to come to Harvard to teach for 20 years and so on. And I haven't said anything about my family because I just don't want to. who I'm a little superstitious about saying too much about the happiness of my family life. But I have been more blessed there than anyone in the world. So to have all these personal blessings, and then the trajectory of my life of all those blessings was going in one direction, and the culture that I was a part of was moving in exactly the

opposite direction. And this began to be extremely troubling. What do you do in that case? So it needs me. You do what all the other smart Jews did, Norman Podoritz and on and not. You know, they found magazines. They discovered that, oh, I'm no longer a liberal. I'm now called a conservative because I've clung to these important ideas.

Exactly. Because I have clung to these important ideas. And because we want our country, because we want. because we want this precious country to remain as strong as it is, as vibrant as it is. It doesn't happen by chance. And one of the things that I found myself saying more than once at faculty meetings at Harvard is, listen, democracy is not biologically transmitted. And unless you train it, you know, unless you really train each new generation,

It doesn't work. So in a sense, I didn't write this memoir at all as a how-to or in any sense as an educational work. I didn't do it consciously. But it seems to me that in writing it, I was able to explain the discrepancy between how a private life can be so successful and how culture can go in such a wrong direction. Well, gosh, there's just, there is so much here. And by the way, you're singing my song, just what you said. I talk about all the time.

I've written a book called If You Can Keep It, Franklin's famous words to Mrs. Powell, about keeping the republic, that we have to teach these things. And in order to teach them, we have to celebrate them. We have to love them. And, you know, just your one mention of Harvard's dismissal of the idea of having ROTC on campus. That's really, that's the kind, that's an example of where we began to go wrong and began to say that having pride in America is overweening pride, as though by definition pride is hubris or something like that. And so you're saying, look, there's something beautiful about Israel.

We should love and celebrate Israel or something beautiful about America. We should love and celebrate America. And obviously those ideas in the academy have been gone and going for a long time, and you've lived through it. Yes. Yes, it's very sad. And the question really is whether we can reconstitute any of that. That's the question. And I think that's what we're trying to do. That's what we're trying to do by having this conversation. Well, when we come back, we don't have a lot of time. We've got to have you back, first of all, because there's just so much else to talk about. I want to touch on Daniel Duranda, America, all these things. Folks, please don't forget to go to my website,

Eric Mataxis.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Hurry up. because we will send you, for example, this interview, the video of this interview. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful place here. And you can watch us have the conversation. Please go to ercindexis.com. Sign up for that. We'll be right back.

Hear the latest reporting and analysis on the big stories of the day. On the daybreak insider podcast. It's top-notch reporting from SRN News, along with the sharpest insight from Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Sebastian Gorka and the voices of townhall.com. The Daybreak Insider Podcast. It's your first look at today's top stories. Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, and at Salem Podcast Network.com. Hey there, folks.

I'm talking to Ruth Weiss-W-I-S-S-E. What we're talking about in part is a loss of cultural confidence. In other words, when people in the West who have had all the benefits of the West and freedom and the wealth. They kind of become spoiled and then they begin to look for the dark side and before you know it, they don't know what they believe and they essentially open the door to foreign ideas, not foreign, ideas that are antithetical to everything that has given them the blessings. And so it seems to me in America, the left in particular, has lost cultural confidence. That's ultimately what it is. It's a mistrust of anything to do with God or

Israel or the Bible or freedom or America. Right. Well, it's interesting that the words that I've been using almost the same is moral confidence, that they lose moral confidence. And you were asking before about how, if I teach Yiddish literature, how I would have come to be giving talks and a series of lectures about Daniel Duranda, which is a book written by, I think, one of the greatest British writers, George Elliott. It is a book, however, about the Jews.

And it is one of the most astonishing, insightful, brilliant books imaginable. I think you can spend a lifetime on it the way one can with certain novels of Dostoevsky. So first of all, about this idea that people now have, you shouldn't appropriate something else. You shouldn't write about white people shouldn't write about blacks,

and nobody should write about Hispanics. I shouldn't wear a sombrero or get a tan or any of that stuff that I do. So think about this. Her last novel, this great writer, writes about the Jewish question, essentially. She's also writing about the woman's question, but she sees the connection between the woman's question and the Jewish question in England of her time. What is her problem?

Why does she turn to that? Well, it seems to me that what she was really worried about is what you were asking. what is happening to liberalism in England? How can one preserve liberalism in England as it is? And she saw that one of the keys to it is, what is going to be your relation to the Jews? If you cannot accept the Jews as Jews, then you cannot really be a great liberal.

And she saw how difficult it was for people to accept it. Yes, so there's this wonderful family that she creates in the novel, the Merrick family, which is so hospitable. They meet this Jewish girl, and they want to take her in. And the boy, if the family wants to marry her, the girls want to adopt her. They love her, they love her. And they say to her, you know, you wouldn't even have to be Christian. And she says something like, you wouldn't even have to be Jewish.

And she says, that's the first cruel thing that you have ever said to me. And so the book is really built around this idea of Britain, of England, how it can accept the Jewishness of the Jews. And guess what? It's about Zionism 20 years before the Zionist movement was created. Because at the end of the book, the Jew in the book, goes off to the land of Israel. What year was Daniel Duranda written?

I think in 1876. Okay. It's just amazing. And who was the Jewish Prime Minister? I can't remember anything now. Disraeli. Disraeli. I mean, it's so interesting.

We don't think typically what you do, but about Britain and the Jews and the Balfour Declaration coming out of that. We were talking about, we're talking about so much. Well, earlier we were talking about Sholomalakam, and we were talking about, I mentioned Bell Kaufman, his granddaughter, whom I met. reason I met her was because she was good friends with Joy Davidman Gresham who married C.S. Lewis. I don't know if you knew that. They were at Hunter College together in the 30s. And I was astonished. I was interviewing her about C.S. Lewis. But it's just fascinating to think about all these different connections. Didn't mean to get you off Daniel Duranda. But there's a great BBC version

of Daniel Duranda. People aren't ready for the book. yet. It only came about about 15 years ago, I think. Yeah, but it's a good book for our time if one can get into it because so much of it is valuable for our time. How can people remain

distinctively who they are and not be afraid of the most intense kind of interaction with others, especially in the world of ideas, but knowing that you're part of the same wonderful democratic polity and being able to really live as

yourself under those circumstances and not feel that you have to appropriate the other or that you have to be afraid of trying to empathize to the greatest degree with the other. Is it too, is it simplistic to say that these ideas with regard to cultural appropriation and cancel culture, that it's basically cultural Marxism, that it's left to the point of Marxism? Well, yes, I think Marxism has been so watered down, but part of it is that I think people think that internationalism must be better than nationalism. Well, of course, it's the opposite. And it depends what kind of nationalism we're talking about, national socialist nationalism or a healthy kind of nationalism. Right. Well, you had Yoram Hazani on one of your programs, if I'm not

mistaken, which is his idea that healthy nationalism is what we're always hopingfully talking about. But I mean, white nationalism, like when you talked about, you know, what are the Jewish, what are the English going to do with the Jews? That comes to the issue of what kind of nationalism. Are we going to have a liberal open nationalism that's still nationalism, that still celebrates a certain body of ideas? Exactly.

Or are we going to be tribal ethnic nationalists, which is what happens if you kick the Jews out. But right now we don't even have a conversation about what kind of nationalists. are we talking about? It's just all derided as ethnic nationalism, as white nationalism, and globalism is touted as some great idea. What I would just say, it's simply not. Well, American nationalism, I would hope, American patriotism and American nationalism is a very, very healthy phenomenon. And the more one knows about America, I think, really, the roots of America. and what I discovered only when I came to this country, the Federalist papers, enough to keep you going for a lifetime.

Genius itself. Well, Ruth Weiss, I'm happy to say that I'd love to have you back soon because I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. Congratulations on this book. It is Free as a Jew, a personal memoir of National Self-Liberation. Free as a Jew by Ruth Weiss-W-I-S-E. Thank you. Thank you so much. I mean,

I can talk to me and he smiled. Walk with me. Come one more, one more mile. Now for once in your... You know, I hate to interrupt folks, but it's my program. I know. And I can interrupt if I want to. So here's the issue.

We're both on vacation right now. We are. So we're not really here. Yeah. We've just... Well, we want to give you the illusion that we're here. But we're not really here. And we're not even together, so...

No, and I'm not talking right now. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm certainly not talking. But I want to give you the illusion that I'm talking, and that's why you hear the sound of my voice. It's all very convincing, isn't it? It sure is. Well, Albin, now that we're on vacation, we should probably, I don't know, encourage the folks with some silly fun. I mean, here's what's not silly. No. God is on his throne, and apart from him, you can do nothing.

Or Bubkis, as it says in the original Aramaic, you can do Bubkis apart from God. you got to understand that you should worry about what he thinks and you should understand that if you've got problems, he's the solution. That's the serious part of this segment. But the fun part of the segment will be coming up any second. You ready? Go. Go. Go. Go to go. Go we have to share that might be amusing to people listening. They're driving their cars, they're walking their dogs, and they're listening to thinking, yeah, go ahead, amuse me. Go ahead, funny man. I'm going to ask you a quick question. Okay. What famous person, okay, when he or she turned 50 said, and I'm paraphrasing because I didn't find the exact quote, but they said this, 50, wow, I can't

believe my wife, my life is one third over. Who said that? Already, already. Already. Already. I have to help you read this already already 50 wow I can't believe my life is one third over already okay who said that yeah that's kind of funny because nobody lives 150 yeah okay Mark Twain Oscar Wilde Barbara Streisand Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger okay we know it's not Mark Twain because in the 19th century men in particular and nobody really but but especially men they didn't talk about their age like oh I'm 50 like you know We have a kind of contemporary obsession with youth, which is unhealthy and stupid. But in the 19th century, Mark Twain wouldn't have said that.

Same thing with Oscar Wilde. They just didn't think that way. Nobody would have said, oh, 50. They just didn't do that. Okay. Barbara Streisand, she could have said it. Clint Eastwood, I think he's too much of a man's man to worry about his age. That's a good point.

I just don't see him kind of worrying about his age. And he will reach 150. He's like 92 right now. Right. And then the last one is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Barbara Streisand, I don't think she's witty enough to say that. I'm going to go with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he would say, 50, wow, I can't believe my life is once you had over already. That's exactly how he said it.

You're very good. And it was, there was Arnold Schwarzenegger? Yeah, it was. He asked some other, I looked these up. He has some other very funny quotes. He said, money doesn't make you happy. I now have $50 million, but I was just as happy when I had $1,000. 48 million dollars you know what that's a good point it is so two million dollars it means nothing and

he said i think that gay marriage should be be between a man and a woman wait i don't believe he said that i found that he said that i'm brainy quotes gay marriage should be between a man and a woman for life yeah uh what a great idea i never thought of that um well we um have we amused you folks do we amuse you what are we your clowns uh no no no no you said it You said it. You said you're funny. That's a good fellow's reference. Don't watch that movie.

It's way too violent. Do we have time for Boils My Potato really quickly? Oh, no, no, no. How about the origin of the word lunacy and lunatic? Let's leave people thinking about this. We've just got seconds. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, because we're living in lunatic times,

but you know the word about, you know, when people say they howled at the moon, that's very close because in the middle English, the old French, it's a Latin, it comes from the Latin, but it basically means moon-struck. So when you're howling, at the moon, it's because you're a lunar, lunar, right? Tick.

Lunatic, yes, to be a lunatic, to be loony comes from, well, they used to believe that the moon caused madness, but people still talk about the full moon having a weird effect on people. I don't know what that's all about, but here's the bottom line. I'm a word guy, I'm a writer. The word lunatic comes from lunar, so moon madness. unfortunately for you folks we're at a time I apologize it won't happen again