Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

If there was was one bright spot at the Mouse Circus this weekend, it was Christiane Amanpour, who had baited her audience in with a promises a "Political Smackdown" (heavy sigh, "The Old Adventures of New Christiane") between WWF-candidate Linda McMahon and actual-non-cartoon-character Richard Blumenthal.

Happily what it really amounted to was Amanpour running a few minutes of interviews she had done, which was followed by extended reportage from North Korea (where the occasion of the Dropping of the Political Balls of the Son of the Dear Leader [The Littlest Kim] was apparently cause for a massive parade. Talk about performance anxiety...), which was followed by a longish interview with former Pakistan strong man/president Pervez Musharraf.

Granted, to mollify her expecting-a-smackdown-audience Amanpour made him wear a huge turban, called him "The Beast of Islamabad" and hit him over the head with a folding chair, but still, C+ for effort.

Elsewhere, the same, old shadow-puppet rituals played themselves out in the same, old sour-tasting ways.

Karl "For some reason still not in prison" Rove manifested himself on “Fox News as a "master strategist" and hectoring the President for doing stuff that dishonors the office and is "beyond the pale"...

Jokeline (having just completed a trip though a narrow band of suburban archipelagos) and the Magic Dolphin Lady (having apparently just completed a weekend of deep meditation with a copy of "Kings Row" and a crate of box-wine) showed up on "Meet the Press" to maunder on about "Real Americans"...

The usual, slung onto America's plates cold and flat and fuck-you-eat-it-style.

And so, instead of wasting one more minute today recapitulating this week's ritual sacrifice of real public discourse to the gods of Beltway Wisdom, a little bait-and-switch of my own that came powerfully to mind as I watched Karl Rove wag his finger at me lecture me on morality and public duty.

This excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer:

"So you wait, and you wait..."

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.

The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ Liberal Scum/Kenyan Usurper/Commie Traitor collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.