an item, no. 64

His universe spins in all directions. A morally corrupt and economically unstable people gear up for war. Insanity-medicated average workers plug properly into news and protect fear, paused like a beach horizon—few loving memories broadcast on closed circuit television. The crowd screamed, Sad is the day—they realize this lore she died of and the many things they fear.

 

something about "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," by Hannah Arendt

Adolf Eichmann played a leading role in the deportation of Jews from Germany and a significant role in the logistical implementation of the Nazis' "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." After Israel's Mossad captured Eichmann in 1960 in Buenos Aires, the state of Israel tried him in Jerusalem for collaborating in the persecution of the Jewish civilian population. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962.

Hannah Arendt, a political theorist, reported on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. Her writing was revised and enlarged for a book published in 1964. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt draws out insights big and small as she dissects the trial and shares historical research. It is a fascinating blend of reporting, insightful meditation, and history.

The book's title captures the theme that emerged from the trial, according to Arendt. Eichmann came off as fairly average: an obedient, law-abiding, rule-following joiner, with no trace of mental illness and no real hatred for Jews. But he could not think for himself. Furthermore, he had no career plan and came to his position in the regime almost by accident; and, there, he found he had a knack for logistical planning. And when the regime's plan to expel the Jews changed into a plan to exterminate them, Eichmann accepted the change and the given rationale that doing so was the most humane option.

Arendt closes the last chapter by describing how Eichmann, after walking readily to his execution, offered a clichéd string of last words. This was wholly in character for him. "It was as though in those last moments he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."

Arendt is reluctant to call the whole episode a show trial, but aspects seem to beg the description in Arendt's telling. Eichmann, who played an important role in the most horrific event of the century, stood in for the whole German Reich, and the execution was largely an act of vengeance.

For various reasons, including her descriptions of how some Jews helped implement Nazi policies against fellow Jews, Arendt came under heavy criticism after the book's publication. She addressed the criticism in a postscript added in a subsequent edition. She ends the postscript by stating that the trial did fulfill "the demands of justice."

Notes:

• Hannah Arendt is a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
• Favorite sentence: "So Eichmann's opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many, and as the months and the years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all." 
• I suspect Arendt cleverly sought to satisfy her most vicious critic with the cliché about "the demands of justice." 

 

something about "The Good Fight" by Harry Reid

Harry Reid was the Republican Party's biggest Democratic villain before he retired and Nancy Pelosi took the honor. In The Good Fight, Reid shares his life's story, including his battles with the George W. Bush Administration over Social Security and war in Iraq.

Reid was born and raised in a Nevada mining ghost town called Searchlight, a place where the leading industry was prostitution. "I don't exaggerate. There was a local law that said you could not have a house of prostitution or a place that served alcohol within so many feet of a school. Once, when it was determined that one of the clubs was in violation of this law, they moved the school." His parents were a tough, booze-bleeding pair, and his boyhood home had no indoor toilet, hot water, or telephone. Reid emerged a scrapper from true poverty in Searchlight.

His assessments of his influences produces my favorite passage; Reid remembers Willie Martello, a "whoremonger," lecturing him about honesty, and pairs that with his parents' ways:

... They never taught me things about basic honesty—maybe that's why I had to learn about it from the whoremonger.

But this lesson my mother did teach me, and it's the most important thing I've ever learned: She taught me to have confidence when sometimes I had no business having confidence. She taught me that no one was better than me, even if it wasn't true. She taught me that I could handle anything that the world could throw at me, whatever it might be.

Reid worked as a policeman to pay his way through law school. He faced down crime lords as the head of the Nevada Gaming Commission and eventually was elected Senator and served as Majority Leader in Washington, DC. The Good Fight shifts coherently back and forth in time between Reid's tough-it-out rise and those hard-fought, highly consequential battles of the 2000s. Quite an enjoyable read about a one-of-a-kind in modern political history.


Notes:

• “Who I am now, and what I am doing now, began in that town, with those people, in those mines.”

• The book's full title is The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington. Reid had writing assistance from Mark Warren, whose resume highlight is his tenure as Executive Editor of Esquire magazine. Warren, a Texan, also worked on or directed several state- and national-level political campaigns in the 1980s.

an opinion of Judge Alcee L. Hastings, 5 January 1989

 "I don't think judges need to be timid people."

 

something about "Bel-Ami" by Guy de Maupassant

Bel-Ami, by Guy de Maupassant, is a great read. It is about a young man, Georges, a merciless social climber in Paris circa 1885 (the year of the book's publication). Early in the book, Georges sets his sights on Madeleine, the crafty wife of his supervisor, Forestier. Forestier grows deathly ill, and Georges comes to support Madeleine in the final hours before her husband's death. Moments after Forestier dies, Georges asks Madeleine to join him out on the balcony; there, he makes his move.

"I want you to listen to what I'm going to say and try to understand me. Above all, don't be angry if I talk about such things at a moment like this, but I shall be leaving the day after tomorrow, and when you come back to Paris, it may perhaps be too late. So here goes. As you know, I'm only a poor devil with no money at all who's still making his way. But I've got determination, I think some intelligence, and I've made a start—a good start. With a successful man, you know what you're getting; with someone just beginning, you never know where he'll finish up. That may be a bad thing or it may be a good thing. Anyway, I told you one day in your home that my dearest dream would have been to marry a wife like you. And I want to say that again now. Don't try to answer me. Let me go on. I'm not making you a proposal. That would be an odious thing to do at this time and place. I'm only anxious that you shouldn't fail to know that a word from you can make me a happy man, that you can make me either your friend, your brother if you like, or else even your husband, as you will—that my heart and whole body are all yours. I don't want you to answer me now; I don't want to talk about it any more, here. When we meet again in Paris, you'll let me know what you've decided. Until then, not a word. You agree?"

He had spoken without looking at her, as if he were scattering the words in the darkness in front of him. And she seemed not to have heard him as she, too, stood motionless, staring vaguely ahead at the vast landscape under the pale light of the moon.

For many minutes they remained side by side, elbow to elbow, thinking in silence. Then she murmured: "It's a little cold," and, turning round, went back to the bed. He followed her.

As he came near, he recognized that Forestier really was beginning to smell and he moved his chair away because he would not have been unable to stand the stench for long.

That scene made an impression on me. Georges is motivated by a ravenous hunger for status, but his relationships with powerful women are complicated by his feeling of real affection toward them. That affection is never better expressed in Bel-Ami than in this scene. But the timing is obviously horrific and undermines the connection the reader wants to feel with Georges.


Note: Georges does not experience change or get redeemed. That adds to the book's novelty.

something about the Leave It to Beaver episode, "Wally's Election"

In the Leave It to Beaver episode, "Wally's Election," a reluctant Wally Cleaver is nominated to run for sophomore class president against the oafish school bully, Lumpy Rutherford. Wally's and Lumpy's fathers, Ward and Fred, respectively, push their sons to campaign aggressively. The fathers are motivated, it turns out, by their own selfish ambitions. The episode's moral comes during Ward's confession to his sons in the final act.

Ward Cleaver: Oh, I guess its just all part of being a father, Beaver. Your boy makes the football team and you visualize him scoring touchdowns all over the place. He gets an A in mathematics, and you see him as an atomic scientist landing on the moon. Maybe you even picture him marrying the banker's daughter.

Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver: Gee, dad. I thought only kids had goofy dreams like that.

Ward: No, Beaver. Nope. Parents have their share, too. You see, as you grow older, you come to realize that some of the ambitions and dreams you had are just not going to come true. So, you begin to dream through your children.

Wally Cleaver: You mean Mr. Rutherford dreams through Lumpy?

Ward: Of course he does. I don't guess there's a father around anywhere who doesn't want things to be a little better for his children than they were for him.

When actor Hugh Beaumont, as Ward, says, "you come to realize that some of the ambitions and dreams you had are just not going to come true," Beaumont's delivery includes a slight, magnificent quiver. It is an efficient but effective line read—not a surprise from the ultimate and classic TV dad-actor.


Note: "Wally's Election" was the 19th episode of season 3 of the famous American TV series, Leave It to Beaver. It aired 6 February 1960.

about how I should drive more (update of a previous post)

The 7:45 morning bus always arrives early, the 8:05 late. Someone plays her phone audio out loud on the ride. I get off at King Street metro station and wait for the yellow line to Greenbelt. After Pentagon station, the train surges out of Virginia across the Potomac—my favorite part of the commute. Looking out to see dulled light glancing off hard bridges, rough, sectarian waters, and wildly uneven expectations. I see the mild winter morning sinking the bots in their cars moving from A to B. I think of how every day I take the subway to and from work, but each time I ride, I feel like it takes me farther and farther from home.

At Len'fant Plaza station I crowd off the yellow line to catch the next train west to Capitol South. And, there, young blood marches to Congress for another day of legislating and messaging. They moved from somewhere in the top of their class down into the tunnels beneath this pyramid where they scratch walls and people, where they keep tradition alive, where everyone else can lick heels.

something about "The Government Inspector" by Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol's play, "The Government Inspector," satirizes political corruption in Imperial Russia. Russia is incurably corrupt, so while the play, published in 1836 (and revised in 1842), is presumably set in the mid-19th century, it remains relevant—and not just in Russia. In the play, small-town corrupt local officials receive news that a high-ranking, undercover inspector general will investigate the town's corruption problem. The locals mistake a pathetic, lowly civil servant, Khlestakov, for the inspector. Khlestakov and his servant take full advantage.

I read a version that included stage adaptation notes written by director Michael Langham. Langham's introduction emphasizes, among other things, that the corrupt mayor, rather than Khlestakov, is the central figure. I appreciate book editions that include notes like this. Sure enough, the mayor has the best lines. I found the work a quality read.


Notes: It is understood that corruption threatens all nations. Populist movements are perhaps most susceptible.

about zealots

Think of someone you love, whose love for you is such a given that you sometimes take them for granted.

Imagine that person far away, the hostage of a violent zealot. Imagine your loved one, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forced to their knees. Imagine that person positioned before a high-definition camera in the desert. Imagine, dressed head to toe in black, the zealot crowding in the picture with a highly polished knife.

The zealot speaks to the camera, his hand on your loved one's shoulder, telling you there is no choice. He tells you that forces beyond all three of you have forced this moment. The zealot tells you that your loved one will die, and that, although he will slit your loved one's throat, he did not choose to.

Imagine the zealot puts the knife to the throat of your beloved and cuts through the skin, tears into the muscles, saws through the tendons, and hits bone. Imagine your loved one gurgling, blood urging out. That's how they die.

something about "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics" by David Axelrod

David Axelrod emerged on the national political scene as Barack Obama's invaluable strategist during the 2008 campaign. After the campaign, Axelrod stayed on as Obama's senior advisor for half of the first term. He returned to the campaign trail for Obama in 2012. While these events, covered in Axelrod's memoir, Believer, are momentous, I enjoyed the beginning of Axelrod's story most of all.

When he was a child, the future strategist, born in New York City, witnessed a John F. Kennedy campaign speech. Axelrod cites that moment as a formative experience. He had caught and internalized the political optimism of the day. He recalls the experience with undiminished sincerity.

I also enjoyed his brief recount of Chicago's modern political history. This memoir also offers a little of the guilty pleasure of gossipy criticism, such as when Axelrod criticizes Elizabeth Edwards for micromanaging the 2004 presidential campaign of her husband, John.

Axelrod went to college in Chicago, then started as a journalist investigating Chicago politics and corruption. He had his own column in a city paper by age 18. Axelrod was friends with Obama long before they campaigned together, both having built careers out of Chicago politics.
 
Axelrod keeps the narrative moving. He could have written a whole book on just the first week in the White House, with the whole country groaning under the weight of the the financial crisis. But Axelrod gives those monumental days only the standard highlight reel. His writing is crisp, clever, and often funny. His forty-year career goes by too fast at times. He is an underrated and undervalued figure in our national politics. His enduring belief in the promise of America is precious.

about "This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral (Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!) in America's Gilded Capital" by Mark Leibovich

 

Mark Leibovich wallows in the networking and social maneuverings in This Town—which is, of course, Washington, DC. He kids DC's political players about the unseemly side of their work but never condemns them. Leibovich paints an absurd picture and sort of shrugs it off. His easygoing prose makes a shrug seem like the natural reaction. This Town delivers the goods for political junkies—especially if you tracked national politics from 2007 to 2013. Hearing how embedded Washington correspondents are is discomfiting. But if disillusion has already set in, the disappointment in This Town lands softly.

something about "On Her Trail" by John Dickerson

Nancy Dickerson was the first female national political television reporter. In the 1960s, she became a household name while covering the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Nancy created space in media and popular culture that was expanded by Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, Megyn Kelly--generations of intelligent, powerful women.

Nancy's son, John Dickerson, wrote On Her Trail, a book about his mother, who died in 1997, and his relationship with her. This book is a wonderful read that is three-fifths traditional biography and two-fifths memoir.

Although the telling is done with love, John does not mythologize his mother. Quite the opposite. Their relationship was rocky until John got a foothold in the Washington press corp and Nancy reluctantly reached retirement. Although she has passed, the relationship lives on. In telling her story, John checks her along the way, calling out her shortcomings (and his), which has the effect of humanizing the both of them.

The advertising copy calls On Her Trail "part remembrance, part discovery"; that description is accurate. John Dickerson shares memories, but much of the book comes out of his research into his mother's personal records. He discovered in her early journals a playful young woman that rarely surfaced after she relocated to DC and broke into journalism. John's writing is clean and personal, touching on the themes of ambition, dreams, beginnings, choices, family, love, and regret.


Note: John Dickerson, also a successful journalist, was a great host on CBS' "Face the Nation" and now co-hosts the network's morning show.

something about Nathanael West's novella, "A Cool Million"

With A Cool Million, Nathanael West mocks and perverts the Horatio Alger myth. The novella unravels the sad story of Lemuel Pitkin, a poor 17-year-old kid from rural New England. When creditors threaten to foreclose on his family home, young Pitkin seeks the advice of the local banker, Shagpoke Whipple, an opportunistic former president of the United States. At Whipple's urging, Pitkin heads out into the world to make his way. But the world thoroughly abuses and victimizes Pitkin: he is robbed, arrested, and beaten; he loses limbs and teeth; even his naive sweetheart is raped and prostituted. Pitkin learns nothing for his trouble and soon dies a humiliated failure. As if that was not enough, Pitkin's death is exploited by Shagpoke Whipple in his political comeback as head of the National Revolutionary Party.

Whipple, embarking on his second act, attributes his initial downfall to conspiring outsiders:

I blame Wall Street and the Jewish international bankers. They loaded me up with a lot of European and South American bonds, then they forced me to the wall. It was Wall Street working hand in hand with the Communists that caused my downfall. The bankers broke me, and the Communists circulated lying rumors about my bank in Doc Slack's barber shop. I was the victim of an un-American conspiracy.

At his nationalist rallies, Whipple evokes Pitkin's story to stoke popular fear and animosity toward immigrants, intellectuals, international capitalists, and political opponents.
 
With this conclusion, West suggests that belief in the Horatio Alger myth inevitably leads to a second myth that explains the failure of the first. The second myth, the Lemuel Pitkin myth, reinforces in the minds of the struggling, embittered white population the idea that they have been cheated out of the American dream by un-American and international forces. The two myths inform a reactionary movement of hostility, fear, and dangerous nationalism.


Note: Can a perception of the past serve as a vision for the future?

(posts) a drawing of Coolidge

about a post-truth, post-fact age and rhetoric

People are trying to win the argument, not eliminate facts.

about being dull

 
A knifeman forces an 84-year-old priest to his knees at the altar and slits his throat. Why is it that this horrific episode did nothing for the imagination? Is it because it is situated within the shapeless war on terror instead of the short rash of violence wrought during the early Norwegian black metal scene?

(posts) the video for "Blindspot" by Today Is The Day

something about "Democracy in America" by Alexis de Tocqueville

In 1831, the French government sent Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont to study the American prison system and American society in general to inform political developments in France. Tocqueville saw virtue in an aristocracy and was skeptical of the egalitarianism preached in the United States.

Tocqueville published his findings, De La Démocratie en Amérique, in two parts (1835 and 1840). His commentary, translated today as Democracy in America, is a staggering read. It is at least as insightful as any other wide-scope religious, political, and economic study of American culture (which are all prone to hasty generalizations) produced before or since. Given the fact that Tocqueville spent only nine months in the United States, this is an especially remarkable achievement. 

another opinion

This week USA Today published an opinion by the Heritage Foundation's John Malcolm supporting the presidential authority behind Executive Order 13769 ("Executive Order Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States"), the so-called "travel ban." President Trump may have the authority, but Malcolm's argument in support is flawed. He writes, "Presidential authority to protect our homeland should not be second-guessed by courts based on some hidden intent divined from tweets and statements made by surrogates in the heat of a presidential campaign." First, Malcolm's attempt to attribute to surrogates Trump's Muslim ban campaign rhetoric is wrong. In December 2015, during the campaign, candidate Trump said at a rally, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” Second, and worse still, Malcolm tries to nullify the intent behind campaign promises. Of course candidates make false promises, but we still have to pretend the promises are true.


Notes:

• At issue is the scope of presidential power over the border. The Supreme Court has allowed parts of President Trump's travel ban to go into effect and will hear oral arguments on the case this fall.
• The "he did not mean it" argument was once part of the legal defense.
• Every previous President made an empty promise.

Source: "Travel ban is president's authority," USA Today, July 5, 2017

about Megyn Kelly's cold, hard stare

Megyn Kelly and NBC faced a lot of criticism last week ahead of their decision to air a piece on controversial conspiracist Alex Jones during Kelly's new Sunday night show. Why give Jones a platform for his odious views? The guy claims the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged or faked to undermine private gun ownership rights.

But after the interview aired, media critics grudgingly formed a consensus that the segment was a success. The Washington Post piece "Facing Alex Jones, NBC's Megyn Kelly manages to avoid a worst-case outcome" is typical:

Rather than let Jones run away with it, "Sunday Night" let him show himself to be an impertinent, ill-informed, foulmouthed, possibly deranged egomaniac with a forehead constantly beaded in sweat. It showed viewers how Infowars grew and sustains itself by peddling right-wing merchandise and Jones-endorsed dietary supplements. It looked briefly back at Jones's early days as just another cable-access kook in Austin, and revealed the flimsy, almost nonexistent definition of "research" (articles he and his staff find online) that sets the Infowars agenda.

... Good night and good luck, in a "Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly" kind of world, has been replaced with the cold, hard stare. Which, as it happens, remains Kelly's surest and perhaps only journalistic asset.

This piece withholds journalistic credit from Kelly, arguing that Alex Jones revealed himself to be a sweaty, crackpot buffoon. The Post just gives Kelly credit for her icy stare. She deserves more. Jones counterattacked with accusations of media liberal bias. But Kelly refused to engage on Jones's terms. A lot of other journalists would have been baited. By remaining on the offensive, Kelly allowed her righteous narrative to prevail. And Jones, as the Post points out, looked crazy--with a lot of help from Kelly.