Society

I was in New Jersey in a supermarket looking for cheese and I couldn’t find it.

A man came out of the back, white coat, and hair swept back. He would have fitted right in with the Sopranos.

I asked him where the cheese was and he showed me, except what he showed me was the soft cheese. I said no, I was looking for hard cheese and he said “You mean cheddar and shit like that?”

The thing is he wasn’t swearing, he was just talking.

A man is mad, to a lesser or greater degree, when he doesn’t know what his own motivations are.

I don’t know what Hitler said about his motivations – whether he talked about it secretly with a few people who were in the know.

But I think Hitler’s motivation is pretty clear. Yet strangely, it seems it is not widely understood.

Historians talk about how Hitler targeted the Jews because he believed they were parasites. He read about eugenics and he communicated with people who specialised in racial profiling.

He talked about the need to conquer one’s own conscience so that one would be able to carry out the unpalatable but necessary job of getting rid of the Jews.

In fact the truth about his motivation is that he didn’t see conscience as something to be overcome. He revelled doing away with his conscience.

Getting rid of his conscience was an easy trick for him and it allowed him free rein to do what he wanted to do, which was to bring down unspeakable horror on people.

That is it, pure and simple, the beginning and the end. To me it is clear as the old adage, ‘follow the money’.

He chose the Jews because they kept going on about conscience and humility. They were a good candidate, but if not the Jews then some others – gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals.

As to whether Hitler was a little shit from his childhood, a little shit in the playground – or whether he was sent mad by war, I do not know. But by the time he was a developed adult he was a monster.

Can you imagine what it must have been like for a guard in one of the camps during World War II, caught in that horror? Unlike the prisoners, whose consciences were clear, the guards had to weave fantastical stories to enable themselves to live with the burden of guilt.

Of course, there were some sadists among the guards – perhaps more than a few. But other guards – what a trick Hitler played on them.

We are not fooled. When we think of labour-saving devices, we think not only of the benefits alone but also of the cost of the benefits. We think of the extra hours we have to work to pay for the labour-saving device. We know the hidden cost of labour-saving devices.

We think of the cost of upkeep, because most devices require some upkeep. And we think of the cost of replacing the device, because all devices have a limited life.

And we think of the stress and the pain and the tedium associated with getting the money to pay for the device. And we think of the precious time we have lost in getting to the point of being able to hand over the money to pay for the device.

And then we do it anyway.

But this calculation, this weighing in the balance,is not equal across the board. A rich man can buy a labour-saving device and not give a thought to the cost of it or of the upkeep. For him, labour-saving devices are what they seem. The only real cost to him is the sleepless nights wondering whether the poor are going to come knocking at his door to make him pay for being rich.

There’s a readable article in Slavery in the North. Here’s the first couple of sentences:

African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant’s Coffee House of New York.

And there is an article in The Conversation about the removal of the statue at the centre of the Charlottesville controversy.

The meeting of white supremacists in Charlottesville was originally held under the pretext of demonstrating against plans to remove the statue. The Charlottesville city council voted in February for it to be removed from the recently renamed Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park). The decision came as part of a movement to challenge the ubiquity of Confederate symbols in the South.

On 15th August, Politico published a transcript of President Trump’s address on infrastructure given at a news conference at Trump Tower, and the interview with reporters that followed it. Among other things, the reporters asked about Charlottesville.

I read the transcript and I noted how Trump was at pains to be even handed, to criticise everyone who behaved badly, irrespective of labels. And then I think back to one of his rallies when he talked to the crowd following a disturbance and lamented how in days gone by the offender would have been taken around the back and shown a little discipline. I think he made a fist when he was talking, but my memory may be playing tricks with me.

So I understand his point, that we can’t airbrush people out of history (well you could in Stalinist Russia, but that’s another story), and we can’t remove the heroes of yesterday without sanitising our view of ourselves.

Well, yes, maybe. But society is a fluid thing. It moves on, and this event of renaming the park and taking down the statue is exactly that – moving on.

Trump makes the point that the protesters from the Right had a permit to be there and the anti-protest protesters from the Left did not. And he dislikes ‘fake’ bleeding-heart liberals, and he has made no secret of that.

But somewhere in the narrative of being even handed and getting beyond the rhetoric to the truth of the matter, he fails to condemn a group that wants to use (and uses) violence to subvert freedom and inclusiveness. And he is OK with that. He will tell you he did condemn them the day before – and he did. But when he goes back to being ‘even handed’ as though it is a badge of honour to see all sides in all situations, my feeling is that he is being supremely disingenuous and knows exactly to which choir he is preaching.