Politics & Power Quote by Mordecai Richler

Richler’s genius here is the way he makes grievance sound like civic hygiene. The line is built like a shrug, but it’s a sharpened one: a quick inventory of enemies (feminists, “the Jewish establishment,” Canadian nationalists) that reads like a satirist’s roll call of respectable outrage. By listing groups with very different claims to moral authority, he flattens them into the same category: institutions and movements that police boundaries, enforce orthodoxies, and punish heresy. The phrase “Jewish establishment” is especially loaded, implying not a people but a gatekeeping apparatus; he’s picking a fight with leadership and consensus, not identity.

“And why not?” is the pivot. It’s defensive and preemptive, a rhetorical throat-clear that refuses the posture of victimhood while still acknowledging the heat he attracts. The admission “I’ve had my pot shots at them” works as both confession and credential: he is not being “misunderstood”; he meant to provoke. That bluntness is part of the performance. It asserts a writer’s right to offend while also signaling that backlash is not censorship, it’s consequence.

In late-20th-century Canada, with multicultural nationalism hardening into a kind of official self-image, Richler’s combativeness reads like a refusal to let any community - including his own - become untouchable. “I’m fair game” is the bravado of someone who knows the social bargain of public speech: take swings, expect to be hit back. The subtext is less martyrdom than reciprocity, an argument for a literary arena where nobody gets sacred status and nobody gets to opt out of the fight.