The other night, a cool but pleasant Sunday, Barnaby found himself struck in the afternoon by a numb wave either of caffeine overdose or profound melancholy, he couldn’t say which, and so he leaped up out of his easy chair—scattering dried sardines all over the floor—put his underpants back on, tied his shoes, and went out for a walk. After a brisk thirty or forty minutes of sweaty, twitching speed-walking, during which he muttered to himself about North Korea and the Congo and scratched more than was strictly necessary, Barnaby happened upon the Film Forum, on Houston Street, and noticed that a movie was beginning in only two minutes.

“A movie!” he said to himself. “Just the thing to calm my frazzled nerves, worn as they are by the strain in living in a sick, sick culture that teeters on the yawning precipice. One, please!”

“The line begins over there, fatso,” someone said in reply, and Barnaby sheepishly took his place. Two pretty, trashy blonde girls approached the ticket window.

“Are you playing Employee of the Month?” the slightly less trashy girl asked, naming a comedy—a vehicle for another trashy blonde girl with big bazooms—currently in wide release. The young man in the AC/DC t-shirt in the ticket window explained to this slightly less trashy girl that the Film Forum only plays independent films. The two girls walked out the door and had the following conversation:

Slightly less trashy girl: “Oh, yeah, I forgot. They only play independent films.”

Slightly more trashy girl: “What does that mean?”

Slightly less trashy girl: “It means they’re shitty.”

A bit shaken, but still manfully holding onto his faith in the transformative and cathartic power of art and, to a lesser extent, cinema, Barnaby approached the ticket window when his turn came and asked for one ticket to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; he handed over his money, and then his ticket, in turn, and walked into the darkened theater and found a seat on the aisle as the opening credits were beginning.

Buñuel’s movie about three empty, corrupt, hateful couples who have dinner together, commit adultery, smuggle cocaine, and dress ever so nicely, about people so vapid and so completely hostage to their various lusts that they do not—with the possible exception of the bishop—rise even to the dignity of hypocrisy, amounts to nothing so much as an enormous “fuck you!” to the sort of people—not exactly the sort of people, but more or less the sort of people—who attend foreign films at the Film Forum. It could not be much more direct if it had been a two-hour film of the director himself, sitting on a stool in front of a brick wall, and saying over and over, “Your culture is simultaneously disgusting and absurd; and please do not deceive yourself, gentle audience—I am talking to you!”

But did the accused and condemned audience protest? Mutter? Walk out? Certainly not—they behaved as they would have at any screening in that theater. That is, between a quarter and a third of them made a loud point of laughing whenever possible, to spread the news far and wide that they “got it,” and, when the end credits rolled and the lights came up, several men said, “Hm,” very emphatically, as if the director of the movie, not to mention two film critics from the New Yorker, were waiting in the wings, peering out nervously to see what each of these stalwart men had thought. And then, as they filed out, the audience discussed the previous occasions on which they had seen the movie, one older man remarking that he had seen it with Swedish subtitles, and one very pretty girl telling her somewhat less pretty friend that she had tried to listen to the French and not read the subtitles. Barnaby, for his part, stalked into the bathroom, took a loud piss, and then careened off down Varick Street, once again muttering to himself and scratching.

At first he muttered angrily, despairingly, and at length about the hopeless position of the artist in a bourgeois society: they cannot win, Barnaby declared, because the bourgeois audience possesses an absolutely insurmountable power of being infinitely unreflective. “You could walk right up to one of those moviegoers,” Barnaby railed angrily at a black SUV speeding down Varick Street and blaring out the Ying-Yang Twins, “deliver a long, impassioned, point-by-point indictment of all the basic premises of his life, and end by screaming at the top of your lungs that his mother was a dirty syphilitic whore, and he would grimace, look thoughtful, tap his nose and say, ‘Yes, I get it, but will it play in Peoria?’ Money, the sons of bitches! They eat, breathe, shit, fart, and make love in greenback American dollars!”

Later, when Barnaby got home and had calmed himself down with a nice tisane of verbena (just like Mme. Sénéchal tries to order in the Buñuel movie!), he realized that he had been confused. He had been yelling into the night about the position of the artist in bourgeois society, but after all, he had not been in a gallery, or a bookstore, or a political action meeting—he had been in a movie theater, and movies, whatever their pretensions or high intent, are collaborative efforts that cost millions and millions of dollars to make. They are all indissolubly entangled with the status quo—at best they may aspire to be windows looking out, but mere windows they remain, lodged solidly in the firmament. Buñuel is no Wat Tyler—he is, rather, a bourgeois moviegoer like the rest of them; and the audience was right to laugh and take no notice, because why should a group of dirty birds wallowing in the mud be upset when one of their very own number points out how dirty they are? On the contrary, taking amoral pleasure in the very hollowness of your privilege is the icing on the foie gras, so to speak, and Barnaby’s mistake was buying a ticket in the first place. He should have stayed on the sidewalk with a bottle of hooch.

On the one hand, Barnaby Sandwich believes that we will all face a terrible judgment someday for the modern methods of pig farming; on the other hand, bacon gives him an erection. When he feels more than usually torn between the twin horns of this dilemma, he takes his breakfast at the B & H Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue, where he can enjoy his feta omelette and pineapple juice safe from the alluring, satanic smell of frying meat.

Another thing about Barnaby is that he believes, in common with most great men, that conversation is disturbing to the digestion, and he therefore takes his meals alone; and when he takes his lonely meal at a counter, sitting cheek by jowl with an East Village tattooist—or slummer from Scarsdale, or tourist from Orkney, or whoever it might be—he wields a book to shield him from conversation. But sometimes his shield fails him.

On a recent Sunday, Barnaby was in B & H, halfway through his omelette, enjoying his regular Sunday morning fantasy of dressing down the President (“No, I don’t think you’re doing a swell job, you crackpot, incompetent son of a bitch, and let me tell you why!”), when he heard the words “Excuse me.” They seemed to have been spoken very nearby.

Barnaby continued eating.

“Pardon me,” the same voice said, in the broad, plum-edged accent of a man who has carefully read, re-read, and underlined his copy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

Barnaby cleared his throat, and wished that whoever was being addressed would answer this persistent, plummy fellow, so that their conversation could be begun, conducted, and finished, and leave Barnaby to continue his fantasy dressing down. (“Have you any conception how blasphemous, sir, is your grandiose want of humility? God chose you, sir? Repent, you crypto-fascist lizard! You murderous toad—repent!”)

“I say,” the voice reiterated, and now it was accompanied by a tap on Barnaby’s shoulder. Barnaby glanced to his left from the corner of his eye, without stopping chewing, or turning his head, and saw that he was being addressed by none other than Salman Rushdie, president emeritus of the PEN American Center and all around toast of the town. Salman did not seem to have touched his kasha varnishkes.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said Salman—a patent lie—“but I couldn’t help but notice the title of the book you’re reading, and I’ve always had a question.”

Barnaby glanced at the cover of the book he was not actually reading to remind himself of the title. It was Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, a collection of essays by Emmanuel Lévinas, a vertiginous mixture of the brilliant and obscure. Would Salman have a question about French phenomenology? A question about Lévinas’s bold contention that despite the many brave acts of many brave Christians, in toto the Holocaust had demonstrated the failure of Christianity in Europe? Or a question about the fundamental paradoxes and sublime mysteries of the concept of free will? No—of course not!

“In Jewish law,” said Mr. Rushdie, “is it true that you can get a divorce if one partner cheats?”

Something that has always perplexed Barnaby is how so many otherwise cosmopolitan men and women, who live in heavily Jewish New York City, never quite grasp the idea of the secular Jew. On 47th Street, a Jew in a beard, a hat, and a long black coat in the middle of August—he knows something about Jewish religious law! He can answer your questions! In B & H Dairy, on Second Avenue, hatless, and in a purple jumpsuit—and on Erev Yom Kippur, no less—Barnaby Sandwich cannot.

Nevertheless, Barnaby believes very strongly that even he, as a circumcised member of the tribe, albeit an assimilated one, is called to be a light unto the nations, and so when he is asked a question, however strange, even though he does not know the answer, he tries to come up with something.

“Uh, probably,” he said. “I guess so.” Mr. Rushdie stared at him hopefully for a moment, and then his face fell.

“No, no!” he said, punching himself in the stomach, and slapping his own cheeks, “that came out wrong! What I meant to say was, is it true that the woman can get a divorce if her husband can’t bring her to orgasm?”

Barnaby put down his book, removed his purple velvet handkerchief, mopped off his forehead, sighed, rubbed his eyes, and squeezed the bridge of his nose. He answered with his eyes closed.

“My understanding,” he muttered, “is that a Jewish man is mandated to ‘satisfy’ his wife, with a frequency inversely proportionate to the level of physical exertion of his employment; but what ‘satisfy’ means exactly, I don’t know, and how you would prove it is also . . . uh . . . I mean, no one’s going to go sit there and, uh, you know, so it comes down to a ‘he said, she said’ sort of a . . . except that, anyway, traditionally the woman has no recourse, which causes problems even today in the Orthodox community, because if a man won’t give a woman a bill of divorcement, then even though they’re separated, and divorced according to civil law, any subsequent relationship that she has will, uh . . . you know . . . but whether, uh . . .”

Barnaby trailed off; stopped dead; nodded his head firmly; picked up his book; and continued eating his omelette. So far as he is aware, Mr. Rushdie left without eating his kasha. And for the record, this is how Barnaby finishes his fantasy dressing down of the President: “And in sum, sir, I would pray for your sake that the Christian mercy you pretend to subscribe to does, in fact, exist, because I shudder to think of even a vile specimen such as yourself enduring the quantity and depth of suffering that any impartial cosmic justice would, according to your sins, be compelled to pour down upon you! Amen!”

Here’s to a peaceful 5767! L’Shana tova!