Model Minority

From Portnoy to Epstein

I have thoughts

(Photo by Thomas Petit-Roche)

“But to be bad, Mother, that is the real struggle: to be bad and to enjoy it! That is what makes men of us boys … I too am moral to the bursting point … Can’t smoke, hardly drink, no drugs. don’t borrow money, or play cards, can’t tell a lie without beginning to sweat as though I am passing over the equator.”

Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

Am I the only one who searched for “rabbi” in the Epstein files? Well, anyway I did and discovered the psychopath and pedophile was sending checks to one of his — very likely — victims to pay for lessons with a female rabbi. The email is dated December 2016. It’s $180 per session by the way. A similar request was also made a year later.

What a nice man to help a young person striving for deeper religious knowledge! May his memory be a blessing.

And then there’s this email from a rabbi asking Epstein to buy raffle tickets to support … Jewish inmates. They came to the right guy. And such a worthy cause!

In Portnoy’s Complaint, Alexander Portnoy is the mama’s boy of all time. In a long kvetch to his analyst, Dr. Speilvogel, we learn about one humiliation after another in the family’s goal to mold the perfect assimilated immigrant Jew — a “little Einstein” who plays the piano, is president of the International Relations club, and most importantly not focused on that sex-stuff like the low-lifes outside of their small closed community.

Let’s just say I know the people populating Philip Roth’s novel — which my parents’ as I recall hid on their bookshelf. It’s not just my tribe — the East Coast Assimilateds — who were trying to comply to the “model minority” myth. In fact I first heard about the aforementioned term from an Asian friend who had his own Tiger Mom tales to relate to me.

The whole schmear was part of mine and other recent immigrants culture code: straight As on your report card (OR ELSE!), premed, prelaw, or some impossible hard science major in college (OR ELSE!), and don’t eat too many french fries (OR ELSE!). And key and most revealing: no or limited dating until after graduate school and not until you have a decent pay check and can take care of yourself and future family.

In fact, I grew up with jokes (?) like this: In Jewish tradition, the fetus is not considered viable until after it graduates from law school.

I’ve known more than a few guys who were full members of this cult and lived a monk-like existence until they could make their first million or two. Seriously. As one Asian friend told me: if you see a guy in his ethnicity driving a Cadillac it meant he had really made it — like he must be a billionaire — because otherwise the no show-off code of the model minority rules meant you were forced to tool around town as a bachelor in a beat up Honda Civic.

Obviously, something has to give in this pressure cooker these poor schmucks lived in. Would it shock you to learn that sex was one of the rules they break with a vengeance? Portnoy had his long bathroom breaks, his relationships with various animal products, and premarital relations with … non-Jews and occasional prostitutes! That’s heady stuff for its time.

Outside of the true monks — I’ve known a few — there were friends and associates of mine from various ethnicities who fit into the Portnoy model of a kind of joylessness in most pursuits except when it came to sex, which they liked but still thought was dirty and had to be conducted secretively. I will give Alexander Portnoy a little credit for trying to evolve and realizing that it’s OK to enjoy “goyische” pursuits like sweating in a Turkish bath or wearing a flannel shirt walking in the woods or romanticizing about woman in their summer dresses. I know, I know.

I remember one upwardly mobile immigrant friend was stunned to learn I liked going on hikes — he thought it was a pointless activity!

If you read the Epstein emails, you pretty quickly see he didn’t enjoy much either. His enjoyment was being around powerful people, particularly scientists. Interestingly, those physicists and scientists he cultivated — gave them money that is— noticed that, um, he didn’t really know what he was talking about, like he wasn’t excited about these brainy topics.

He just liked to feel important by being listened to by important people.

And that brings us to the following: the model minority is focused on outdoing his typically lower middle-class parents and gain the status and power they never had. (And boy, do I know about that.)

So Portnoy’s gray-suited dad Seymour spent his days at an insurance company collecting life insurance premiums from forgetful customers and the rest of the time complaining about his constipation. (The real-life Philip Roth’s dad also worked for a large, impersonal insurance company.) Epstein’s first generation immigrant father — also named Seymour — was employed in New York City’s Parks department.

By the time young Epstein left (or possibly fired from) the investment banking firm Bear Stearns, he was renting office space in the late 1980s and paying $25,000 per month. That’s quite a journey from his parents’ house in a solidly middle class section of Brooklyn to fancy digs on Madison Avenue.

So how does one go from a model minority to a sleazy Kash Patel or Alina Habba and then ultimately an Epstein?

Obviously Epstein is a psychopath with no empathy and amazing levels of narcissism, and unlike the fictional Portnoy and others real-world Portnoys, no sense of guilt or shame in his sleazy pursuits.

In a recent The New York Times investigation, we learn that Epstein made money the old fashioned way: he stole it. The Times article goes into detail about his early scheming and con-man level lies. In the 1990s he was notably involved in a $460 million Ponzi scheme with a partner, Steven Hoffenberg, who ended up serving jail time for their grift. Mysteriously, Epstein escaped sentencing.

He’s not the model minority.

One clue about his possible motivations is that spooky smirk Epstein always wears. In every picture I’ve seen he has a crooked smile that seems to suggest I know something you don’t know.

And obviously he did!

It appears to this middle-class kid who had similar pressures that Epstein felt oppressed by the rules he had to follow to please parents and achieve the status denied them. Fictional Portnoy’s reaction was to punch up in hilarious take-downs of rabbis, wind bags, God, and other big shots. In the novel, Portnoy is also described as smirking and sniggering at his parents’ strange middle class rules and customs. And who can blame him when he has to deal with advice like ‘don’t eat that or you’ll get cancer!”

And Epstein? It looks like his smirk is a pathological response to the same hated rules and morality. He’s telling his parents and the world he grew up in that the hedge fund billionaires, wealthy business people, politicians, physicists, and Prince Fuckin’ Andrew are not really better than him!

He’s smirking because he’s taken their money, blackmailed them, and shown them to be just like himself— pleasure-less geeks whose only joy is having power to sexually exploit and humiliate young women and girls.

We can only hope his ghoulish enablers and co-conspirators and pals spend the rest of their lives in prison.