Posted on 11/14/2019 5:33:08 AM PST by relictele
The default, knee-jerk response to any political or cultural disagreement these days is to declare the situation analogous to WWII Germany and to liken one’s antagonist to Nazi figures of varying rank from brownshirted street thugs up to and including Hitler himself.
It’s lazy because it’s common and common because it’s lazy. In most cases it reflects the shallow, minimum-effort, will-this-be-on-the-test approach of the so-called educational system in which a Rachel Carson and her fatuous book will receive a semester’s worth of attention and strange, cult-like worship while Mozart, Newton, van Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur, Watt, and Bohr may never be mentioned, let alone studied, by risible ‘graduates.’
At the risk of referencing the Third Reich despite the above disclaimer, one chronicle that has famously endured is The Banality Of Evil, Hannah Arendt’s chronicle of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
Her thoughts as expressed in that book and in the years that followed are, despite the different contexts and details, an accurate and therefore chilling description of the machinations of elected and appointed (read: permanent) government in the United States from the 1990s to the present.
It was said of Soviet-era Pravda that nobody read it because some people knew what in advance what it would say and the rest knew it was a pack of lies. Persons living behind the Iron Curtain reacted to their privations and oppression by becoming corrosively cynical. They assume that the person speaking, writing or reading to them has an agenda or is trying to trick them into saying or doing the wrong thing.
If we take Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator from those times and places to the United States in 2019, we see a similar set of circumstances unfolding despite oaths of allegiance to founding documents and fundamental civil liberties.
A regular aspect of The Cold War was the shorthand contrast between the Warsaw Pact and the West. They were glum, grey and grim. We were sunny, optimistic and in Technicolor. But we have been forced to adopt many of their coping mechanisms. A weary gallows humor is our daily demeanor as corporate media conduct a round-the-clock propaganda campaign to tell us that up is down and to incite one moral panic after another.
At one point RCA owned radio stations, conducted broadcasts, manufactured radios (hence the R initial), and owned record companies. Many, including the FCC, rightly pointed out that this end-to-end arrangement was not only anticompetitive in a business sense but also in an ideological or cultural sense. The barriers to entry were comprehensive. These barriers were eventually razed through government intervention (it must be said) and market forces.
Yet today we see corporations that own multiple TV stations (broadcast, cable, streaming), own the transmission lines (cable, satellite, internet, fiber), own mobile device cellular providers, own production studios and/or own web sites, newspapers, magazines etc.
In the Information Age the stovepipe control and distribution of content is as bad as the days of RCA but the FCC, despite its dubious charter and frequent examples of scope creep, is nowhere to be found. Like so many other alphabet agencies it has descended into the inevitable patronage parking lot with slots occasionally swapped out due to political fortunes. Similarly, the FTC and others ostensibly enforcing antitrust laws or policies have completely downed tools despite the obvious and insidious monopolies created in plain sight.
That’s a long way of saying that media are, by and large, no better than party-issued publications of 20th Century authoritarian states as well as those of the 21st Century. We mock 24-hour political broadcasts in North Korea or state-run TV in China but how else can ‘cable news’ in the US be described? They have a veneer of commercial enterprise but may as well change their logos to the familiar donkey or elephant. The ridiculous to-and-fro about MSNBC or Fox News becomes even more ridiculous when you consider that every station’s rundown (sequence of stories and time spent on each) is identical every single day. They are to government hegemony what MGM, Venetian and Bellagio are to Las Vegas: physically separate entities but united in preserving the status quo.
Which brings us back to the impeachment circus and Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s quotes include the following:
‘The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.’
‘I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.’
This may be a long way of plowing the same ground but in the current scenario we have all the elements identified by Arendt decades ago.
Bureaucrats believe in more of a divine right than George III ever did. People, places, events are merely fodder for this file or that database. To suggest rightly that they are a useless lot concerned solely with their own preservation brings howls of protest at the utterance of such a truism.
Federal bureaucracy is an especially odious, intentionally complex system of relays in which the baton is passed so often for so long that observers and objectors simply give up out of frustration. There is always a convenient justification for agency A handing off to agency B via agency C because agency D says so. Functionaries and cogs. Dehumanized. Which makes it easy for them to dehumanize others.
In the Russia Collusion hoax the infinite bureaucratic loop was employed: investigators obtained FISA warrants fraudulently because certain stories were appearing in the media. But the stories themselves were leaks from the investigators based on a fraudulent report! The points of origin and conclusion could never be identified – intentionally so. Nancy Pelosi herself explained/endorsed this political/media shell game in an unintentionally candid press conference in 2017.
The Schiff-led farce of yesterday is even more banal but even more evil. At least Russia/Mueller could claim an action-reaction dynamic, however fictional it may be. Here we have all reaction and absolutely no action thus rendering the reactions moot. The most dramatic scare quote the cables could muster yesterday was ‘alarming.’ Alarming? We’re alarmed when our connecting flight runs late. We’re alarmed when the gas bill triples in a month. Alarm is a common human emotion. You might even call it banal. But alarm or causing alarm isn’t a high crime or misdemeanor. It isn’t a crime at all.
Bureaucrats are never short of hot air but even they couldn’t pump life into the lead balloon labeled ‘Ukraine.’ Even the most vociferous Trump opponent cannot, despite unlimited air time and petabytes of storage, clearly and concisely state the particular offenses he is supposedly guilty of as they grope for a catchphrase they believe will have emotional resonance. The most lopsided mayor’s court in the nation would laugh a prosecution out of the room in which the charges shifted arbitrarily from DUI to robbery to assault.
The wide-angle view of any Congressional hearing room reveals that it is less a formal proceeding and more a bizarre human circus with photographers (completely surplus to requirements in the HD video era) crawling around on all fours between tables. Any gesture or movement of head generates a distracting flurry of camera shutters. A pointed finger is the inevitable trophy photo that accompanies a news article.
Schiff is the most visible part of Arendt’s fungus. A purse-lipped, supercilious coat holder making a meal of his newfound prominence. As the hearings were suspended or adjourned Schiff remained in his seat under TV studio-style box lighting, literally posing for photographs by turning his head this way and that, looking out over the room etc. It is the worst and most dangerous sort of artifice because it would immediately be portrayed as candid and real.
Arendt’s description of Eichmann can be applied to Schiff without changing a word: ‘What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.’
Corporate stovepipe media are providing the safeguards for the unthinking Schiff. The inability – or refusal – to empathize with victims is a reliable sign of sociopathology and even psychopathology.
A cabal of the self-proclaimed best and brightest have convinced themselves that the ends justify the means. One remake after another with no need for Hollywood's involvement. They are dangerous by themselves but even more dangerous when they convince the weak-minded multitudes to facilitate tyranny by foolishly accepting and amplifying anodyne phraseology: socialism, fairness, rights, equality, reparations, tolerance, acceptance. The preferred term for pundits to volley back and forth yesterday was ‘patriot.’ The mind boggles.
And so here is evil. Banal in the extreme but evil in the extreme nevertheless.
Aside from that, wondering what famous historical figures might have thought about an issue is seldom more that projection and riding on the power and reputation of others to push forth our own ideas.
I couldn't get past the premise of this piece.
Ah ... got it. Thanks.
You write a pretty good column. Are you someone we would know?
Excellent.
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