I’m confident that Anna Breslaw’s “Breaking Bad Karma: How the cancer victim at the center of the AMC series justifies my skepticism of Holocaust survivors” is the worst thing that Tablet has ever published. I’m not an avid Tablet reader, but unless the magazine invites David Irving to write a personal essay with a ballet criticism hook, Breslaw wins the race to the bottom. Her piece combines bad history, bad ethics, and bad TV criticism in one nauseating little package.
Breslaw opens with a passage so glibly offensive that I’m amazed Tablet, a Jewish magazine, thought it was publishable:
Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror — visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you’re not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit.”
I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race — conniving, indestructible, taking and taking.
Breslaw insinuates that the Holocaust debased future generations of Jews because only the worst people survived the genocide. She has no idea what she’s talking about. The history of the Holocaust is clear on this point: Almost everyone sent to a concentration camp died there, and those who lived typically survived because of dumb luck, not virtue or vice.
After an intro worthy of Storm Front, Breslaw segues into some completely incoherent TV criticism. When an author complains that the Holocaust upped the number of Judenscheisse (literally “Jew shit”), it seems almost beside the point to complain about her interpretation of an AMC show. But, as regular readers know, I really love “Breaking Bad”, so I couldn’t let this pass without comment.
Breslaw’s crackpot theory is that chemistry teacher Walter White breaks bad when he agrees to cancer treatments:
But the words “I’ll do it” represent the game-changer that stymies and eludes so many critics. Walt doesn’t change by degrees: He changes at the very moment he accepts the loss of dignity that he so wanted to avoid, and so begins the second, cursed life that he would not have chosen for himself. Later, of course, it emerges just how sociopathically important dignity and pride have become to Walt. The rituals, routines, and various institutional, dehumanizing elements of chemo left their mark, their mundanity the primary reason why Walt “breaks bad” with the level of intent displayed in later seasons of the show.
Walter breaks bad because he’s convinced he’s dying. Like many patients with terminal diagnoses, Walt lets himself to do some things that he’s never gotten around to. In his case, it’s not spending more time with his kids, or going to Disneyland. Walt has always wanted to live the heroic life that fits with his sense of himself as a scientific genius.
When we meet Walt, he’s an embittered high school teacher who’s seething because he’s got to moonlight at a car wash to pay for an unplanned pregnancy and a disabled son by a wife he married because he knocked her up when she was his student. Walt’s ego and abrasiveness cost him the chance to get rich in high tech with his buddies from grad school. Everything in his life feels anticlimactic. Then he gets the diagnosis.
Walt’s idea of dying with dignity was setting his family up for life with the profits from his meth operation. He has a remarkable survival instinct insofar as he’s willing to kill to keep his business going, but he’s a total fatalist when it comes to his cancer.
To give you some idea of how inept a TV critic Breslaw is: Walt starts cooking before tells his family he has cancer. He doesn’t agree to treatment until a couple episodes later. He only agrees get his loved ones off his back so that he can keep cooking.
This turns out to be another example of how Walt’s arrogance gets him into trouble. He’s so sure that the doctors can’t do anything for him that he’s prepared to foreclose on his entire future, because he’s confident that he’ll die before he has to face any consequences. Turns out, he’s wrong. The cancer goes into remission, and he’s trapped in a life of crime.
Breslaw’s essay is a disgrace on every level.
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