I think there is much truth to the idea that when you deal with a Nazi, an unregenerate Nazi, reasoning, persuasion, common sense and pleading count for nothing. After all the movies you and I have seen, all the documentaries about the Holocaust over the decades you realize that the Nazi mind is unrecoverable, for it is forever lethally conditioned. That man can be psychologically eviscerated and be implanted by the state’s doctrine and dogma has been seen throughout world history. Men voluntary at times choose to be slaves, for freedom is frightening and one has to be responsible –and accountable. Fromm called it “escape from freedom.”
In Schindler’s List there is an indelible moment in which a Jewish woman architect tells the Commandant that with his permission she could erect a better structure in the camp. With that he pulls out his Luger and kills her. In Auschwitz there was a saying: “Here there is no why.” And so the proper construction of the building was irrelevant, for the real task was to work each person to death. The architect, a reasoning individual, could not grasp that. No reasonable human being can. Implicit in this was that no Jew could improve anything a German had constructed.
So Recently a 100-year old Nazi died while under home arrest; he was involved in one of the most significant massacres of civilians during World War II in Italy. Until he died he found nothing wrong with his participation in the massacre for he was following orders from Hitler, the banal cliché that came out of World War II. Men of this ilk just need to die off. And a big kerfuffle was made about his funeral and where he was to be buried, all the factions on both sides fighting over his internment. [Drop his corpse in the alligator pond at a local zoo, for that would be fitting.]
And recently I have been reading about the Tea Party and its adamantine resistance to anything governmental, as if the Articles of Confederation was the best kind of government. It was not. And the pundits have offered all kinds of interpretations of the Taliban thinking of the Tea Party. Most of these clowns come from the old Southern confederate states, especially Texas. I am of a different mind about these people who often deny evolution, climate change, same-sex marriage, the age of the planet, and abortion. I don’t believe that reason works with these people, for they have the same mental rigidity of the Nazis as well as the Taliban.
They are nihilists. In that is the political doctrine that all governing institutions must be done away with. I contend that the species is made up of these kind of minds and states of being, this malignant mentation. And like Nazis and like the Taliban they must be dealt with by force if need be. In a sense the Tea Party is a kind of terrorist party. I see them as terrorists. To savage rationality and reason is to crucify civilization upon a cross of insanity.
Not since that horrible year of 1968 in which we lost Martin L. King and Robert Kennedy, had the cop riot in the Chicago Democratic convention and riots in some of our cities in which I and others felt that the country was coming apart did I experience such demoralizing disarray as the two week shut down of the country and the defunding debacle. And the chief Taliban was Ted Cruz. I’ve seen his like before in the guise of McCarthy, that megalomaniac alcoholic who set about destroying lives with his charges about Communists lurking in our government. I am old enough to remember the fear of communists, the blacklist and all that.
As a side note, Jane told me she was feeling out of sorts or disoriented, for a miasma of a kind had enveloped her. And since we watch a lot of news we both concluded that what was happening out there, in Washington, DC, had entered our home and had poisoned the atmosphere. It was as if we were experiencing PTSD. At moments it is helpful to shut down the media, turn off the smartphones and experience sheer silence, that experience which Americans dread. We are living in and experiencing shabby times.
A few words about oily Cruz — observe his body language, that lanky yet clumsy presentation of self, that smarmy innocence he gives off while presenting the most horrid of propositions; he is a greasy Elmer Gantry; his laissez-faire nonchalance which conceals a viper and the thinking of a nihilist, a Taliban. I am amused how often his Harvard degree and his brilliance is cited by others as if in awe. Goebbels had a PH.D. I an underwhelmed by degrees — Bush from Yale; O’Reilly from Harvard; the racist Woodrow Wilson and so on. Most of world history was the actions of people without a college degree. I am underwhelmed by Cruz’s education, for I heard recently his father, who is a pastor, I believe, alluded to his son in term of “end times,” you know that apocryphal nonsense of the rapture and all that evangelical Christian crap.
So here is a father who believes his son will be handy and about for the apocalypse; what a childhood Cruz has had! That is the “education” that has to be examined. Of course, all this came in a week in which Supreme Court Justice Scalia seriously spoke of an alive devil who was wily. I can now see him operating a rack with a woman accused of lust, while he comes under his frock.
Cruz will not change; he will be around until his term ends in several years. He needs to be taken on at each corner, for his is the block bully; he needs to be stymied, outwitted by those who didn’t go to Harvard and Yale. He is a Taliban within our government. He needs to be isolated and shunned until he can be excised. The greater threat and calamity are those tens of thousands of supporters who are the dregs each country has in it, the forces of darkness. The Tea Party is the historical eruption not only in our country but in others of those primal and ignorant expressions of retrograde thinking, again something that must be met with force and not only with reasoning. I have little faith in reason when I deal with human beings. We are driven by nether forces that we are mostly not in contact with and if we were in contact, we’d most likely run like hell from ourselves. However, reason is all we have that separates us from the wolves at the door. Cruz would cannibalize his young to prove a point, the mind of a self-immolator.
So Jane and I were despairing this past week as we once again saw the reoccurrence of witches in Salem.
