Archive for October, 2005
The Comfort of the Villain
Spencer Dew
10/6/05, Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School
With the death of Simon Wiesenthal on September 20, the Holocaust has slipped further into the past. As survivors pass on, memories of the event recede, and the event itself risks, as Wiesenthal warned, the threat of “trivialization.”
Wiesenthal’s prophetic role was to remind the world of the human faces behind the incomprehensible tragedy and horror of the death camps, testifying to his own time as a prisoner, and devoting his life to hunting down fugitive Nazis.
The guards and administrators, police and politicians, inventors and implementers: They were all real people, humans like those they slaughtered, people with families and values who nonetheless perpetrated atrocities, who complied with a deranged, utterly antihuman system.
But antihuman is not inhuman. This is a lasting lesson of Wiesenthal’s example, and it provides an essential antidote to the fact that the idea of the Nazi has been subsumed into, and transformed by, our collective cultural image bank.
Hollywood has long been intent on turning the Nazi into a cipher, taking the inconceivable evil wrought by humans against humans and explaining it away by a process of melodramatic villainization. History gives way to mythology.
The “mythological” Nazi makes a good film villain for three reasons. First, there is the seductive aesthetics of fascism — the Third Reich as melodramatic spectacle, with polished boots and silver skulls on collars, a mix of fetish accessories and mythic grandeur. Second, there is the iconic scale of World War II, and the dual association of blitzkrieg and global war with the mechanized, hyper-bureaucratic annihilation of a country’s own citizens. Third, Nazis are readily depicted as bestial others thinly concealed behind façades of chandeliers and champagne. When angered, they abandon even the rudiments of warped English, and curse and scream in a guttural, violent tongue.
This braiding of traits makes for an instantly dynamic character, a mythological stereotype that appears not to be stereotyped; the “Nazi” is cold, remote, sophisticated, mad, almost cultish in its death-obsession. Indeed, replete with occult associations, the Nazi has replaced Satan as the villain par excellence, moving from the historical to the fictional, from human reality to inhuman monstrosity. There is great comfort in the distance produced by this move, in the message that the Nazi is not at all like us.
“Nazi” thus becomes a rhetorical trope, something inhuman and therefore placating, a sign not of our confrontation with history, but our avoidance of it, our denial. And the denial of history makes way for history’s repetition.
It is in political polemic that the term “Nazi” has suffered the grossest trivialization, having become an epithet for Right and Left alike — a means for slandering one’s enemy with unspeakable associations, and reframing political debates in terms of nonnegotiable distance. “Nazi” provides venomously effective caricature encapsulated in a single word. Misleading, misguided, overused, and therefore ultimately meaningless: This shorthand “Nazi” offers all the pre-packaged ease of the film version.
The mythology of the Nazi-as-demon is thus evoked, and with it a satisfyingly clear framework of ultimate evil, the necessity of its eradication, and the certainty of (eventual) victory. “Nazi” as a device for rousing the audience of a given polemic thus echoes rhetorical tactics practiced by historical Nazis. Such techniques elicit immediate emotional response and resist examination.
But examination is precisely the task to be preserved, and the call of “never forget” is also, always, a call never to sublimate, never to distort, never to take the tremendum and reduce it to a political slogan, an idol, an action figure, or an advertisement.
Never forgetting means a refusal to allow ourselves to be numbed to the unending agony of history, and to keep the wound open, inexplicable, excruciating. It is resistance to the descent into trivialization, and the determination to face the horrors of the past as horrors, rather than fashioning them into more comfortable stories, images, or tropes.
Spencer Dew is a Ph.D. student in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
The “city” of Louisiana
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, see the video at http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002353.html
SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…”
Well there’s your problem right there.
If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government’s response to a crisis, this was it.
The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.
But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”
Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the “I-Me” switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet’s meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural… and government-made.
But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, “we are not satisfied,” with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which “we” he thinks he’s speaking for on this point. Perhaps it’s the administration, although we still don’t know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, ‘I’ll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die’?
I don’t know which ‘we’ Mr. Bush meant.
For many of this country’s citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to ’08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — “New Orleans.”
For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick “I’m not satisfied with my government’s response.” Instead of hiding behind phrases like “no one could have foreseen,” had he only remembered Winston Churchill’s quote from the 1930’s. “The responsibility,” of government, Churchill told the British Parliament “for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence.”
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.
As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government’s credibility.
Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.
The "city" of Louisiana
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, see the video at http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002353.html
SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…”
Well there’s your problem right there.
If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government’s response to a crisis, this was it.
The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.
But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”
Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the “I-Me” switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet’s meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural… and government-made.
But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, “we are not satisfied,” with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which “we” he thinks he’s speaking for on this point. Perhaps it’s the administration, although we still don’t know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, ‘I’ll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die’?
I don’t know which ‘we’ Mr. Bush meant.
For many of this country’s citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to ’08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — “New Orleans.”
For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick “I’m not satisfied with my government’s response.” Instead of hiding behind phrases like “no one could have foreseen,” had he only remembered Winston Churchill’s quote from the 1930’s. “The responsibility,” of government, Churchill told the British Parliament “for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence.”
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.
As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government’s credibility.
Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.
Ma Hamatzav? (Was' Up?) 