GONE BUT NOT GONE

Alice Miller is dead.

You may not know much about her, but she played her part in getting Us all to the point We’re at now.

She was a psychologist, German born, and in her 87 years she lived through the era of the Third Reich.

In 1981 she published a book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child” (it had originally been entitled “Prisoners of Childhood”). Among her other titles were “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence” and “Thou Shalt Not Be Unaware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child”.

They came at a very interesting time. Nationally, the radical feminist agenda (which became the stream of feminism that organized itself along the lines of revolutionary cadres and ‘went to Washington’) was looking for ever-expanding ways to ‘deconstruct’ social and cultural mores and the institutions that supported them, in order to extend their zero-sum game of making room for ‘women’ (thereby conducting political hostilities not only against ‘men’ but against the culture and civilization that ‘dead white European males’ had – over the course of two and half millennia – managed to put together in the teeth of humanity’s dark and bloody foibles).

And standing smack dab in the revolution’s giddy but gimlet-eyed path was the Family – with its distribution of labor organized around the raising of children and the transmission of such culture as Western humanity and its American variant had managed to achieve. Oh, and to prepare them for adulthood by helping children to master their powers and achieve – the word was better known then – Maturity.

The Family was – even more than ‘religion’ – a target: it represented Cultural Authority, and the responsibilities that it imposed cramped the style of ‘women’ who should be free to go out and have fun having a job and making guy-money. (Which dampdream, in the event, was undercut over the years as the ‘industrial base’ that provided the cash was undermined in another ‘success’ of the conflicting and incoherent radical feminist programme – but I digress.)

Since the 1960s and even before that, the increasing corps of ‘child experts’ and ‘child psychologists’ had been urging American parents to forego ‘authority’ and be more ‘therapists’ to their kids.* Parents’ authority over their families was to be considered more in ‘contractual’ terms – with the kids as parties to the contract (if not actually ‘consumers' of their parents’ services).

The objective for parents was no longer to make sure that – to the extent it is ever possible – kids could be raised to be ‘good’ and not ‘bad’, but rather that the the kids be ‘happy’ and not ‘unhappy’.

Nor do I hold any brief for making kids genuinely unhappy. But the task of mastering one’s human impulses – given the stunningly wide moral range of human impulses, and some of them dark if not also bloody – means that you have to learn to say No to some of those impulses, and in the beginning that some older human with the authority to do so says No to you.

Otherwise, you wind up reaching the age of legal majority unable to say No to yourself in a lot of instances where you really should – for your own as well as everybody else’s good . And when THAT happens, then the government police-power has to step in and be a ‘parent’ – perhaps a Nanny – to you, and then you wind up with an unripe and immature Citizenry in need of a Parent – which is hell and gone from the Constitutional and Founding vision. Although perhaps that is now becoming clear to Us.

Unless you are a financier and are making bets with other folks’ money and getting paid a sinfully huge salary to do so … but again, let me not digress.

Perhaps understandably, but also stunningly, her core assumptions were shaped by … the Holocaust.

This might not be as ground-breaking as it seems. In her seminal feminist tract of 1963, Betty Friedan had compared being a ‘housewife’ to being imprisoned at Dachau – a repugnantly ignorant (and insensitive as well as un-informed) piece of agitprop trumpeting that never received the opprobrium it so richly deserved.

Miller, speaking now on the basis of expertise comprised of the fact that she had been alive during the era and read some stuff, asserted in the accents of seasoned scholarship that “I have not been able to find a single [death-camp official at any level] who did not have a strict and rigid upbringing”.

The ‘logic’ of that assertion thus being that if you had a strict and rigid upbringing then you were automatically prepped to be an official of the death-camp regime.

Which is a chunk of Swiss cheese from hell, rationally and logically speaking. Thus that the death-camp regime – if not also the Holocaust itself (she wasn’t really interested in pursuing the thought) was the result of a strict familial upbringing. And therefore (if you want to keep up the polite pretense of her logicality) that strict familial upbringing guaranteed more Holocausts, as well as kept millions of children in the status of death-camp inmates. Indeed, Hitler himself had grown up in a 19th century, semi-rural Austrian family of strict up-bringing.**

It shouldn’t have taken a college student with more than an Intro course in Critical Thinking to see through the gaping holes in the whole thing.

But it was a revolution and anybody who struck the rightand Correct ‘note’ was bound to be welcomed aboard and – as the media like to say – ‘hailed’.

Both Hitler and Rudolf Hoess (SS commandant of Auschwitz) had been “trained to be obedient so successfully and at such an early age that the training never lost its effectiveness”. So then: simply learning “obedience” was going to lead to Hitler and the death-camps (and the morally frakkulent adults such as the SS camp command staffs). You can see where Miller was offering nothing less than authoritative catnip to the cadres.

That the West – and surely the Church – had always taught that ‘loyalty’ and ‘obedience’ are only as good as the Cause to which you give your loyalty and obedience … this did not detain Miller or the cadres. Indeed, such facts would ‘obstruct’ the Right Order of the Revolution and were therefore un-Correct. And was even “backlash” (although how a teaching that pre-existed the revolutionary agenda by millennia could be labeled as nothing more than a “backlash” response … well, go figure).

And so training kids to be “obedient” was erased, and the parental authority necessary to achieve that along with it. Marvelous.

"The Holocaust would have been impossible without this sort of upbringing”, she said. Of course, the Holocaust wouldalso not have been possible if those future-death-camp staffers were not fed as children, so perhaps feeding kids is complicit in the Holocaust as well. But that would have been, in the 1980s in America, thinking too much. Perhaps it still is.

But not to mire herself in the past, she also asserted that “60% of German terrorists in recent years have been the children of Protestant ministers”. So ‘religion’ as well as "obedience" are also causes of the Holocaust and of ‘terrorism’ [as it was defined in the 1970s and early 1980s in Europe]. The catnip is being mixed with industrial-grade alcohol and the cadres can party-hearty with a revolutionary abandon! Wheeeee!

Ach.

So, as Hunter notes, in Miller’s view and in her phrasing, “the traditional middle-class family can be characterized as ‘the prototype of a totalitarian regime’”. You can see where a liberty-loving, red-blooded American Beltway literally leaped to the empowering assistance of ‘governance feminism’ in the late 1980s and the 1990s (especially once Bill and Hilary presided sensitively and responsively in the White House). It wasn’t for the votes, dear Citizens; it was for liberty and to prevent another Holocaust. ***

Good frakking grief.

Miller channeled Freud: the trouble was with ‘pedagogy’ – with child-rearing by authoritative adults itself. There is, she said, a power-struggle between children and adults, and given their powerlessness, the kids would always lose. This tied right in with Identity Politics and its demand that the previously ‘silenced’ be given a voice, while simultaneously undermining Family and any pesky concepts of Maturity. It was all political; the personal was political; the personal – I would add – was ONLY political.

That was the Flattening and lethal substrate of the whole revolution: it was anti-Family, anti-Constitutional, and – not to put too fine a point on it – crushingly anti-human. In 1984 We were heading toward “1984”, and not simply from the Right.

As with so many of these whackulous ideas of those days, they were denied a deserved spot in the corner of scholarly thought reserved for ideological and academic eccentricities because they were taken up by the media. And in this case the ‘elite’ media: PBS ran a documentary miniseries hosted by one John Bradshaw entitled “The Family”. Its core question: How could Hitler happen?

And you know what the answer was.

The rules of ‘obedience’ and ‘submission’ to authority held sway, intoned Bradshaw, in “96 percent of American families” (appreciate here that ‘scientific’ statistical evidence) and so it wasn’t just a “German” problem. Any times parents exerted authority, they were yielding to being “authoritarian” ... and brewing another Holocaust.

All I will say here is that the children of those mid-1980s are now walking around as fully-accredited adults. And, by status if not competence, as Citizens.

Hunter notes – and not at all irrelevantly – that Bradshaw and others went on to set up a brisk cottage-industry in Self-Help and 12-Step type stuff for parents and for former children who now had to re-parent and self-parent themselves.

America!

And that’s where We are now, isn’t it?

NOTES

*For an extended discussion of Miller and the era, see James Davison Hunter’s “The Death of Character” at pages 95-7, though the whole book is worth a read. Perhaps if you still have a job and it gives a paid vacation and you can afford to go to a beach and lie around for a week or two this summer. And can afford the book in the first place (my copy is a $17 paperback).

**I can’t resist: if strict family upbringing results in ‘Hitler’, and such an outrageous method of child-rearing is almost universal in Western culture and has been for some centuries, then shouldn’t we ‘logically’ have had innumerable Hitlers rather than just the one? Of course, the quick Correct response is that the West is indeed bethumped by many Hitlers, and they are called ‘men’ – after which the congregation may cheeribly retire to the buffet table for Chardonnay and salad. Ah, those were the days, my friend!

***I won’t go into it here, but kindly note the deployment of ‘the Holocaust card’ in all of this; that trope had migrated from foreign affairs and – doubtless because its success there made such an impression upon them – been taken up by the cadres of revolution in Our domestic politics. Oy.

FALCONS ARE PREDATORS

Mike Whitney has a jaw-dropping report over on Atlantic Free Press (“Operation FALCON and the Looming Police State”, (http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1055/81/).

It’s one of those put-things-together pieces that enables us to suddenly climb above the Fog of Daily Events and clearly perceive a pattern threaded in among the boom-buzz.

In this case: since 2005 the government has been ‘coordinating’ local and State as well as federal police agencies, and these armadas of cops have been conducting ‘sweeps’ named Operation Falcon (I and II have already been held).

Whitney leads off his piece with a quotation from Hitler’s justification of the Night of the Long Knives in June, 1934: his sudden round-up of S.A. leaders without warrants and executing them without trial or any judicial process whatsoever. It was an ‘emergency’, Hitler said matter-of-factly, and no good leader can stand by when his people are threatened by such evil. Ja.

Once again, the treacherous Alberto Gonzales – this time assisted by the Director of the US Marshal’s Office, one Ben Reyna – is behind this. The Marshal’s Office is a shrewd pick: a 2nd-tier ‘law enforcement’ agency, but with a national writ: it isn’t as loaded with baggage and claimed-turf as are the FBI, DEA, and others, yet it can operate nationwide to implement the plan.

The plan, actually, is even more classically Hitlerian than the quotation and the round-up context suggests. Whitney is right to focus on the very early 1930s when considering historical precedents to our present situation here; most Americans – those who are still even modestly familiar with the Second World War era at all – are familiar with the period 1939-1945, the span of the War itself in Europe. But it was in the very early 1930s that Hitler began his quick march through German society and government. The task was to subvert and control the government and the people as quickly as possible without at the same time frightening them with the full vision of what he had in store for them and the country.

The overall strategy he called “Gleichschaltung”, the ‘coordination’ of all institutions of the German nation and State so as to operate more ‘efficiently’ with the central (and Nazi) government in Berlin. We often forget that in January 1933 all that Hitler took over was the Chancellorship of a democratic, constitutional Republic, and one whose individual states (Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, and so forth) were still kind of independent of the government in Berlin, and had become especially so since the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918. Hitler’s immediate problem was to bring all of the still-powerful State governments under the control of the national government in Berlin.

Thus universities and schools, the media, the unions, even the churches would be ‘coordinated’ with the government in Berlin and thus with the Nazi plan and vision. So while the States were put under increasing pressure to cede authority to Berlin, they were also undermined by the Nazis’ going directly to the various institutions and in yet another end-run going directly to the people (das Volk) themselves.

But first the police. Before anything else, the police agencies had to be ‘coordinated’ throughout the country. Goring and later Himmler held the post of head of the Prussian police, and authority over the police agencies of the several German States was quickly transferred to them in order to meet the ongoing ‘emergency’ of German existence more efficiently. Who could say no to that?

From Hollywood, we picture Germany in that time as run by the Gestapo in long leather coats and wide-brimmed fedoras, and by the S.S. in their black uniforms and boots. But there weren’t that many of either, really (Hitler never managed to achieve the proportional saturation of police agents to citizens that Stalin and the postwar Communist satellites achieved); much of Hitler’s police work was done by local guys just doing their job, their mothers and wives and kids happy that Pappi wasn’t on the Eastern Front. Just local kids doing their bit. And once the police were ‘coordinated’, then Goebbels went right to work making them ‘heroes’, and would any good German disobey such heroes?

Whitney’s report on the FALCON initiative, therefore, is a huge and terrible piece of news. Taken in conjunction – as Whitney notes – with the Military Commissions Act, the Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Acts, the Warner Defense Authorization Act, and I would add the effort to secure control of all of the U.S. Attorneys (to ‘coordinate’ against troublesome citizens a-n-d to prevent prosecutions of Bushista pals) this FALCON initiative is revealed as the implementation of the actual, hand-on, boots-on-the-ground, operational control of the police throughout the nation – down to the local level. How excited the local and State officers are about all this is a greatly interesting question. And an urgent one. Far earlier than any of our troops who might one day be deployed domestically, the cops may find themselves in the position of being ordered to do things to American citizens … and unlike the troops, cops are naturally set up to work in and among the citizenry, and to arrest folks, and lock them up, and even shoot them if the occasion arises.

The justification of 'efficiency' and the minimization that it's 'just more efficient' and 'just the next logical step' have to be dismissed forthwith. Democracy, and certainly this one, is precisely designed not to be efficient. The checks-and-balances are there precisely to keep a too-great momentum from building up. They serve as baffles in a tanker: to keep the fluid from building up an inertial momentum that enables it to overturn the whole rig. It may be a tad 'inefficient' for the freee flow of the fluid, but that - for the sake of survival - is precisely the point: the fluid, which is the reason the tanker is built, can destroy the tanker if it's not prevented by those 'inefficient' but utterly life-saving baffles. Bush's 'war', and the 'war on crime' that has led to the Krime state, both lubricate - from Right and from Left - the slide toward the utter efficiency (in theory, anyway) of totalitarian and military government. And history shows that by the time such a theory is proven to be a deadly pipedream, death and destruction are almost always triumphant.

It is an open question whether all of this represents an abstract course that any central government would – upon reflection - have to devise and follow in order to perfect its control of a democratically divided nation, or whether the Bush government (very possibly with the help of those eerily Central-European, World-War-Two-besotted neocons) is actually running Hitler’s gameplan here and now. And all this time we’ve been mocking the truly mockable neocons for ‘doing’ Churchill; when all the while they’ve really been channeling Hitler. You can’t leave History alone for a minute, folks! You cain’t never tell where in tarnation that sum-bee’s gonna head off to next! Stonewall Jackson and Hitler – courtesy of the Fundamentalist Southrons and the Hapsburgian neocons.

And don’t look so surprised. Since 1945 we’ve taken a whole bunch of stuff from Hitler: rockets and ballistic missiles, jets, blitzkrieg (now known more cockily as Shock & Awe), the whole concept of Air-Land Warfare, and even the damned shape of the helmets. Before the present sad exigencies occasioned by the problems on our own eastern front, it was the dream of every Army and Marine troop commander to instill into his unit the remarkable spirit and initiative instituted throughout the enlisted, NCO, and junior-officer ranks of the Wehrmacht; not – of course – that you’d ever say it straight out at an American Legion rubber-chicken banquet.

And Whitney blesses us with the news that the neocon American Enterprise Institute is already proposing to Congress that in the event of a ‘major catastrophic emergency’ it be permitted to the Executive to APPOINT persons to Congress. But of course! And we could call it the Kongress-tag, or the Reichskongress, or – why complicate things? – the Reichstag.

After what Congress has supinely and treacherously allowed over the course of the Twelve Years, would we get good odds from any bookie on this possibility?

The FALCON sweeps were announced in media articles that all seemed suspiciously the same, glorifying the program. Even more suspiciously, he reports, most of those articles have now disappeared from Google. And how does anything ever disappear from Google? Have you ever tried to get inaccurate stuff about yourself erased from Google? Google, like the SS and the Gestapo, never ever destroys a file.

And of course, the FALCON ‘emergencies’ were aimed at those handy horribles: sex offenders. Who could argue with swooping down like flocks of predator-birds to sweep up sex-offenders? Soccer moms are down with that; and we might recall in those numerous film clips of Berlin parades after 1934, there were a lot of very proper looking ladies – flowered hats, tasteful gloves and accessories, who had mastered the intricacies of holding a handbag and not exposing one’s underarm (the horror!) while yet delivering an enthusiastic Nazi straight-arm salute. Ever resourceful! Of course, the best solution for the problem is to get oneself and one’s hubby invited to the private reception, where one can dispense with the raucous salute and simply burble one’s name to Power over a flute of champagne. Ach ja. Sehr tastevoll.

In an earlier Post on this site (“When Crime Goes Bad”) it had been proposed that we are now faced with a new and very dangerous phenomenon: the purposeful use of ‘Crime’ to stampede and manipulate The People into accepting the increasing – perhaps defining - police power of the central government. A society thus governed by the (impossible) goal of eliminating ‘Crime’, a society thus wracked by wave after wave of ‘crimes’ and ‘criminals’ whose significance is purely virtual, virtually created overnight, a society thus addled and beset by such an endless cycle of ‘emergencies of Crime’ is a society beset by Krime. And a government that deploys ‘Crime’ primarily for the purposes of extending its police power and controlling the citizenry through fear and anxiety is the National Krime State.

I also think that for the purposes of this Krime State sex-offenders play the role of the homosexuals and the Jews in the early years of the Third Reich: their ‘crimes’, and even their very presence among das Volk – walking among them and participating in society, constituted an ‘emergency’ for which the police power had to be expanded and the police to be allowed to do things that would not under normal circumstances be tolerated.

Who remembers ‘sex offenses’ before 15-20 years ago? Was there ever a time when sexual assaults were legal? Was there ever a time when sex with children was considered a good thing, consensual or otherwise? No. And yet suddenly, in the huge betrayals of the hugely wasted 1990s, there are ‘sex offenders’ and ‘sex offenses’, uttered in the same tones that were once reserved for ‘communists’ and ‘witches’. And – far more ominously, and far more relevant to what we are facing now – the police power of the States and of the central government was expanded to deal with the emergency.

The question has been posed more than once on this site: can it be any surprise that having watched the successful invention and deployment of the ‘sex offender’ in the 1990s (and in Clinton’s Administration), in 2001 the Incumbency felt like it could invent Saddam as a world-threatening dictator and literally create out of whole cloth his imminently deployable weapons of mass destruction? It’s not hard to imagine that on the basis of watching Our sorry performance in the sex-offender mania, then selling pre-emptive war on Saddam would be a slam-dunk and a cake-walk and that the war’s creators in Washington would be greeted as liberators BY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. And so they were. Until they lost. Americans are nothing if not practical, and there’s nothing more practical than losing interest in a losing cause. Especially when the losing cause starts to demonstrate a distinct ability to generate unpleasant consequences.

The sex-offender mania is only just beginning to demonstrate its consequences, the ones that weren’t printed up in the brochure: perversion of our system of laws and of Law itself; perversion of our law enforcement; perversion of scientific, medical, and psychological expertise in the service of extending and sustaining the mania; perversion even of our political structures as Congress found it impossible as well as unpleasant to make any attempt to infuse reason and proportion into such discussion as was allowed; perversion of our Constitutional ethos as police powers and prosecutorial authority were engorged by legislators and law-makers at all levels who were eager to avoid looking like obstructors of the ‘justice’ or being tarred as ‘supporters’ of perversion. The hot ironies!

And how similar then was the sorry, supine, infamous and treacherous truckling to the Unitarium after 2001, when ‘Islamofascist totalitarians’ became the ‘sex offenders’ of American foreign affairs, and it was lazily decidered to just go swoop-and-scoop those raghead pervs and toss their asses in the hoosegow after a nice perp-walk and Register ‘em all. Yah. That works. Maybe make’em wear tee-shirts and have to use colored license-plates. Maybe even wear a colored triangle on their clothing – no, wait, that’s not an Islamic thing … that’s … ach ja.

History and Consequences are coming back. In fact, they’re here. Adapting themselves to current American praxis, they may not stop to knock when they come through the front door.

DEMONS AND MONSTERS

In “The New York Review of Books” J.M. Coetzee reviews Norman Mailer’s imaginative biography of Hitler, “The Castle in the Forest” (www.nybooks.com/articles/19851).

Coetzee quickly raises the question: Is it possible that some humans are born evil? Or if not at birth, then when do certain individuals ‘turn’ evil? How?

These are philosophical questions, and as such they are far too rare these days in the West. That’s so because the current and only acceptable mode of our societal discourse is not at all equipped to handle such complex and fundamental inquiry. Keep it ‘simple’ and keep it on the surface: this has been the gameplan of the revolutionaries of the Left as it has been of the manipulators from the Right. Keep it simple and on the surface, and let those acceptable emotions (shock, outrage, in-your-face, etc.) roll!

The natural ‘subject’ of the National Crime State is ‘the victim’, and the ‘natural’ and now obligatory discourse of ‘the victim’ is comprised solely of retelling the cause of the pain (with or without proof) and then limning one’s feelings about what has happened to one. On the basis of this discourse, huge chunks of the foundational supports of Western, Constitutional, democratic society and culture have been ripped away; rescuing people from the Horror can be rather destructive work, as we now know from the Iraq adventure.

In response to such questions as the nature of evil in the world and the source of individuals’ bad acts, a mere recitation of one’s own alleged experiences of being badded-against and one’s consequent feelings about it are very largely ineffectual. But in reality one must, like the sturdy sea-dogs of the Age of Sail, engage the threat resolutely and efficiently and – one hopes – victoriously; so one has to face ‘evil’ and come to grips with it: where it comes from, how it works, how best to deal with it. But then, ‘sturdy sea-dogs’ are not what the National Security State, or the National Nanny State, or the National Imperial State, or the National Corporate State, or the National Crime State really want: those ‘states’ want obedient, stable, steady and unquestioning herbivores, ungulants that will eagerly swallow whatever their shepherds see fit to push their way.

And of course, if it’s hard enough to figure out what to do with any individual’s evil(s), what do we do with a government’s ‘bad’ acts? It seems that governments have arrogated to themselves in the moral realm the prerogative they enjoy in the economic realm: just as they control the money so they can’t be held to the usual budgetary responsibilities that individual citizens are, so too they can’t be held to the same moral standards that individuals are. And it seems that a lot of citizens are no longer well-prepared to perceive or to explain (even to themselves) just what it is that is wrong with that gambit.

But judging the morality or immorality, the ‘good’ or the ‘evil’ that a government does, is hard enough; courage of a special sort is required to speak Truth to Power. What happens if your culture no longer accepts that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are acceptable categories of judgment? Or that ‘judgment’ is not an acceptable activity? Or that such abstractions as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – let alone ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ – don’t really exist anyway? What happens then to the already-quivering flame of Courage? And if there is no Courage to defend it, what happens to Truth? And if there is no Courage to oppose it, what will limit Power’s voracious, predatory hunt to find whom it may devour?

These are all great questions, says Coetzee, but not ones that biographers are happy to face: after all, how much can we really ‘know’ about another human being? Which is a very modest and wise question to pose. But in the long and multifarious rush to raise up an enemy or a ‘perp’ about whom we may enjoy ‘simple and pure clarity’, haven’t both Left and Right, secularist and fundamentalist, immodestly barreled right on through the flashing roadblocks? What did one need to know about ‘men’ except that they were all rapists, only that some haven’t been found out yet. What did one need to know about Muslims or Iraqis, except that they were … well, it turns out they weren’t so simply and purely construed after all. We simplified our own picture of them, but – perversely – they actually didn’t take the trouble to conform to the picture we had in our collective mind. Imagine our surprise when we actually came into their presence and …

This false ‘simplicity’, this ‘clarity’has not been achieved by the long twilight struggle of sustained effort to understand enough so as to formulate the most useful questions, and then to start the process of answering the questions. It has been achieved by the childish gambit of sweeping the troublesome pieces of the board, conceptually, and then – addict-like – surfing the ‘high’ that such a skipping-homework tactic temporarily provides.

The media, ‘journalists’, ‘the press’ have pandered to this as business and bottom-line concerns: they have turned The People into audiences and into ‘consumers’ who have to be kept happy. And this is a genuine, if untrumpeted, disaster for Us and for the Republic. And, as stated in several of the recent “Moyers” Posts here, the media started to slide in the decades of the Democrats’ desperate and blank-check pandering to the Identities and the Advocacies, resulting in ‘advocacy journalism’, which is the erection of professional imbecility into a plan: the role of the media in the Republic is not to make the case for this or that still-unsettled agenda (let alone a dozen serially); it is to report the facts and the truth as very best the reporter can discern them, and let the People deliberate. But such is not the method of revolutions, and the media had their fun surfing those waves, abandoning Truth and the Republic for fun ‘on the cutting edge’ of ‘elite’ thought.

Yet even a decade before all that, as Glenn Garvin points out in the March 2007 issue of “Reason”, Herbert Matthews of “The New York Times” declared that a reporter’s “passion” was as important as his objectivity, and on that basis, romanticized an almost powerless and isolated young Fidel Castro into a public-relations sensation back there in the very late 1950s. It is a sign of Matthews’ Bushian stubbornness (or would we want to say his manliness and persistence?) that up until his death in 1977 Matthews insisted that Castro wasn’t a Communist and that he was bringing only good to the Cuban people, even after Castro admitted candidly that he most certainly was a Communist and had lashed his steadfastly blood-thirsty regime to Moscow.

Mailer isn’t actually doing a biography here, in the accepted sense of the word. He is doing a sort of ‘imaginative’ biography; to him, the ‘truth’ reached poetically has never been inferior to the ‘truth’ reached through the observation and determination of this or that fact. Artistic license in the service of truth is a verrry potent but also potentially explosive mix: only people who really know what they’re doing should be doing it. In order to achieve a ‘truthful’ result, you have to be dedicated and long-practiced – indeed a participant in – the stream of Truth that like the jetstream itself barrels along Up there, invisible to the earthbound and the horizontally-confined. Otherwise, there is a very strong tendency to simply use ‘poetic license’ as an excuse for whatever you want to do, rather than in order to describe whatever it is that you somehow sense that Truth is doing.

And once you’ve yawed off down that path, there’s no telling where you’ll end up: if you want to be seen as a winner and so claim Unitary authority to declare major hostilities ended – say – but you really don’t know what the Truth of the hostilities might be … you could wind up spending a long long time trying to force Truth into the little box you’ve made for it, the one you want it to fit in, and wind up just making a box for yourself. Or – if you’re big enough – a whole bunch of boxes for the little people who tried to follow your path to ‘truth’ because you told them to.

Hitler, Coetzee thinks Mailer is going for, was deeply attracted to the ‘great man theory of history’. That theory – which may seem alien, and is perhaps unknown, to many nowadays – presumed that the real ‘history’, the great deeds that set the course of large events, was made by this or that ‘great man’, not by the majority, the common people, the ordinary and mediocre people, just trudging through their days. Whether Hitler was weak and trying to compensate by identifying with a ‘Great Theory’ (which would make him a sorta ‘great man’ by osmosis) or whether he was somehow ‘evil’ and his so-called ‘great’-ness was merely the morally demented power of someone serving true evil … who can tell? We can ask the same questions about the neocons, so recently seen trying to pose in Great Man (and that goes for the woman among them) poses for “Vanity Fair”. Are they cocky weaklings or evil servants of the demimonde?

But much to our enrichment, Coetzee brings up “two drifters on the fringes”: Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Stavrogin in Tolstoy’s “The Possessed”. In each of these two characters his respective author was trying to come to grips with those human beings “who think they can take a shortcut to great-man status by divorcing goodness from greatness and committing what they fancy to be great crimes”.

How long has it been since Americans even realized that these were the stakes and possible moves in the game? What generations of Americans can look at the sentence and even discern the issues, let alone work toward an answer? Is there a difference between ‘good’ and ‘great’? What would make ‘good’ distinct from and different from ‘great’? What would the ‘long way’ around to ‘great-man status’ be? Is it possible to “shortcut” the way? Or ‘a’ way – is there more than one way to take the shortcut? If you can be ‘great’ even if you commit a crime … what does that say about the desirability of ‘greatness’? Can you be ‘good’ even if you commit a crime? If your intentions are ‘good’? Is that even possible? Or if there’s more to you than the part of you that commits the crime? Is that possible? Even if it’s possible, is it important enough to matter? To whom?

Closely related to that gravid binary, is the Romantic conception of ‘genius’ as being a free agent, indentured neither to ‘good’ nor to ‘evil’, but existing in a realm beyond good and evil. Does such a realm exist? Can anything exist free of the ‘judgment’ of good or evil? Can any human being exist ‘there’, wherever one is free of the judgment of being ‘good’ or ‘evil’, or at least of having one’s acts thus adjudged? If all it takes to ‘achieve’ the status of ‘moral genius’ or ‘moral superman’ is to commit a crime so great that it will prove its perpetrator to be above such mediocre matters as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ … then what is the value of being such a genius or superman? Is submission to the judgment of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ a sign of mediocrity? Is the ability to function beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil’ a sign of greatness and genius? If not in a person, could it be in a government? Can governments even ‘be’ immoral? ‘Evil’? ‘Good’? Or can only people be? Why?

There was a time when the questions could as least be raised, and searching for an answer – even a provisional one – was considered a worthwhile investment of one’s time and effort. If such is no longer the case, how did it come about thus? Is it a desirable state of affairs that it has come to this? If it isn’t, how might we try to recover what has been lost?

Coetzee notes that “Hitler was obsessed with his place in history”. More tellingly, Hitler tells Speer “For me there are two possibilities: to succeed with my plans entirely, or to fail. If I succeed I will be one of the greatest men in history – if I fail, I will be condemned, rejected, damned.” I think that here we can see a hugely dangerous and toxic synergy brewing: A) Rather than focusing on the substantive challenge of mastering his own self in the present Moment in Time that he inhabited, Hitler escapes such ‘presence’ to himself by investing his energies in the (largely irrelevant) matter of how he would be judged in the (ephemeral) opinion of future generations. B) In order to prove his ‘greatness’ he sets himself a problem that is admittedly ‘great’, the better to ‘prove’ his own greatness. C) He effectively avoids the actual and classically hard work of working through the ‘great’ problem he has thus set himself – that of climbing the Ladder of Perfection toward Goodness and Greatness – by not only cutting out Goodness but by embracing the far more quick-burning and accessible primality in the human (and his own) personality: crime and evil can be just as legitimate a demonstration of ‘greatness’ as any achievement of morality and ‘Goodness’.

Thus you get to remain a moral adolescent while claiming the mantle of a long-struggling adult whose maturity has been achieved through the hard, sustained soul-work of years. This is a gambit that is hardly unique to Hitler (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy saw it, and they weren’t the first); it is also a gambit that quite obviously did not die with Hitler. It is a gambit to which American culture is particularly susceptible. As we are now beginning to realize. It is deeply similar to the immature and unripe fundamentalist psyche; it is hell and gone from the patient and persistent soul-shaping that has always been the ideal of the Kathlik vision.

And in a display of adolescent-mentation masquerading as adult strength, Hitler insists to Speer that A) there are only two possibilities and B) those are that either he utterly succeeds or he utterly fails. There is no nuance, no middle-ground, no room for the long, slow, torturous Climb that is humanity’s effort at its best. Instead there is the either-or, white-black, yes-no oversimplification that is indicative of maturational incompletion and unripeness; predictable in an adolescent, of concern in a chronologically older person; downright dangerous in chronologically older persons who have rigidly retained that incompletion and who have yet (American culture – business, military, political – enables them) attained great power: socially, financially, militarily, politically.

Hitler, Coetzee observes, surfs the Romantic notion that ‘genius’ raises one above the common herd, freeing someone thus gifted from the constraints of ‘ordinary’ life. Of course, it is one thing – and a desiderandum – to so shape one’s spirit that it can more easily respond to the invitations of Grace; like a sea captain who keeps his hull clean of barnacles, his rigging and sail in good order, and carefully steers so as to take full advantage of the wind. But – and here Romanticism ceased to work for our good – it is very much another thing to presume that a person who might thus enjoy a more vivid and palpable sense of Life’s fundamental Vitality – “Grace” as them Kathliks would say – is thereby free of all the moral restraints which classically define humanity at its best.

‘Classical’ and ‘perennial’ don’t mean ‘ordinary’ and ‘ordinary’ is not the same as ‘mediocre’ (another mistake the adolescent Boomers made when free-love was considered ‘cutting edge’ and they were young enough to make that hay while that sun was shining; but then, let’s not forget the teen generation of the 1920s). The Flatness of the postmodern world-view is now pervasive in our culture and our education through the awefull synergistic workings of the past four decades of Theory and the strategic pressures of the National Consumer State and the National Security State and the National Crime State.

Hannah Arendt famously described a phenomenon she called “the banality of evil”. Eichmann was or was not ‘ordinary’, but he was certainly a moral mediocrity: issues of Good and Evil did not seem to make an impression upon him or affect him; we might posit that he had found his ‘god’ – for all practical purposes – in an ‘organization’, and all that was then required was for him to stay within the lines set down by the organization and seek – as best he might – to advance along the course set down by the lines. So far so … typical; large numbers of human beings in complicated (not to say ‘advanced’) civilizations have instinctively sought this option as newborn creatures instinctively seek the mother’s teat. That the organization to which he attached himself was the Nazi extermination apparatus was already an issue beyond his imagination, a complication not necessary to introduce into his simplified, clarified life-plan. He would be reliable, constant, loyal – and that was more than many people could ever claim as employees and functionaries.

And therein lay the “banality”, I think. It was not Evil that was banal, nor the particular evils that he himself organized. It was Eichmann himself who was banal, morally banal. As his Fuhrer sought to avoid his own feared personal insufficiencies by seeking ‘greatness’ in ‘great things’, Eichmann sought to do so, and to impose some shape on his life and perhaps his own self, by seeking Order in a highly-organized, highly-circumscribed vision of what was and was not necessary in life; what was and was not necessary to ‘full’ humanity, human-ness, adulthood, manhood. Huge swaths of what we would call ‘human-ness’ were walled off and away in the service of a ‘life’ that he could manage. Perhaps also a ‘self’ that he could manage. Once therein ensconced, ‘the job’ – the ‘mission’ – was all that mattered. If he did that well, he would be happy enough.

That was the stuff of his banality, the locus of his mediocrity: his vision of human-hood and of his own self and (of course therefore) of other humans. The grasping of this point over the decades has been somewhat blunted by its contextual connection to the Holocaust. Otherwise it might more widely have been grasped, and early on, that many, many people in our civilization have chosen – functionally at least, although perhaps larded with religiosity or humanist sentimentality – this path, this vision, this shape for their life and their self. “Just doing my job” is surely one of the paving blocks to a certain hell, for oneself – ultimately – even as for others upon whom one’s action impose it. Indeed, “just focused on the mission” is a comment we are encouraged to hear when voiced by our soldiery. Yet as far back as the Nuremberg Principles it was clearly stated – and by a senior American jurist – that individual soldiers are indeed responsible for judging the essential legality of their orders, their ‘mission’. Even today this is being played out before our eyes in this country in the Watada court-martial case.

But if this banality is ever a threat in a highly organized and institutionalized civilization – and in a military without a doubt, then how much more toxic is this infection to a citizenry whose ‘immune system’ of a well-formed and well-informed mind and heart and character is largely compromised? What happens then?

We cannot afford mediocrity in this matter, even as we cannot afford the type of faux-‘greatness’ that refuses all harness, all trellising … and runs wild. Them Kathliks was always aware that wildness, in no matter how ‘good’ or ‘great’ a cause, was certain to bring disaster, to soul and to body, to mind and to spirit. The fetishization of wildness – stretching back in the Modern period to the Romantics and up into the Boomers and their ‘free love’ – has led to a pervasive and fundamental moral mediocrity as toxic as the Fundamentalist ‘greatness’ rantings so eerily similar to the floundering young failed artist in Vienna a century ago. And into such a vacuum far worse demons will most surely be drawn in to take up a late-ostrogothic residence in what is left of the life of the Republic. We may yet find ourselves mostly skipping the Caesars and going straight from Cicero to the edge of the Dark Ages.

It is Marxism, Coetzee notes, that doubts the ability of any individual human to impose his will on History. But then Stalin came along and changed all that, efficiently sawing off Communism’s ‘head’ and replacing it with his own; his cult of personality remains with us today in the North Korean polity, and bears a close familiar resemblance to the fundamentalistic attraction to the person of the Incumbent (is the President, in the fundy vision, like the Pope in the Kathlik vision: the designated representative of God on earth?).

Because, Coetzee sees, “the verdict of history, in Stalin’s eyes, pivoted on who wrote the history books”. Nor is that an insight that originated with Stalin, or died with him. Many individuals and – woe to us – nations, have figured that such a gambit would ensure their success, regardless of their actual record “on the ground”. Indeed, the Incumbency in those now distant salad-days of 2002 and early 2003 (as distant now as 1938 was to Berlin of 1944), asserted with prideful confidence that it ‘made’ history, and the rest of the world – ordinary and mediocre – would just have to deal with that (and accept its assigned place in the scheme of things).

“Hitler disdained manual labor because he thought it incompatible with his status”. Hitler’s status was the one he had assigned himself, as ‘genius’. One thinks of a certain more recent silver-spooned but unripe scion who disdained not only manual labor but any sort of self-exertion, any effort at self-extension whatsoever, seeking instead to surf a diaphanous wave of boozy bonhomie and of the appearance of character and competence. If you’re born rich, then you’ll write the history book, and anyway, there’s no such thing as Truth anyway, or Character, or Virtue (he had only to listen to ‘cutting edge’ Left and Democratic and Advocacy theory to pick up that particularly convenient bit of wisdom). And one could always draw into one’s life such ‘brains’ as were required: they could be hired by the family money or they might seek admission to one’s inner circle the better to admire one’s rump-ish gestalt. Hey, whatever.

Coetzee then follows that thought through (in a way Hitler himself probably never did, not being given to introspection – and perhaps wisely so). Hitler, realizing by his early twenties that he would not easily be a success as an artist, opposed socialism because he himself, raised in the status-conscious world of the Austrian and German middle-classes, feared “being sucked into a lumpen proletariat of workless rural migrants streaming into” his world.

But this also ties into Chris Hedges’ concerns about American Fundamentalists: not really ready for the hard field-work of ripening, they have declared themselves ‘saved’ (‘maturity’ being as incorrect and repugnant to their world-view as it is to the revolutionaries of the Left). On the basis of this (self-declared) ‘status’ they already seek to ‘leave behind’ all of those of whatever economic class who do not truckle to their vivid, violent, faux-‘vital’ religious illuminations. And as if that weren’t problem enough for us today, any significant economic downturn – and it is hardly inconceivable – will further threaten their self-image and their sense of status and place in this materialist American society, the Flatness of which is not effectively expanded by their signature adolescently violent fantasies that are passed off – even to themselves - as a ‘religion’ capable of ‘saving’ them a-n-d (shades of the Puritans and the Calvinists!) rewarding them in this life. The ‘ugly American’ whose face was shown to the so-called ‘developing world’ half-a-century ago is now showing its face to its fellow citizens, and if the economy tanks, then ‘ugly’ is going to be the least of the problems the fundamentalistics will pose for our society and our polity.

And on top of it all, Hitler – seeking somehow to define himself and preserve his self-image and status – determined that he would succeed “at all costs”. This phrase is also one that did not die with him. We’ve heard it not so much from the unripe macho-boyos (it’s a tad too grammatically taxing) but from the equally unripe but far-better read neocons. “At all costs” is a mind-set far too dangerous to be set loose among the give-and-take of a democracy, too antithetical to the patient, never-fully-achieved slog up the Ladder of Perfection that is the Kathlik ideal. No wonder that it has flourished as the evil-twin of the already-morally dubious Revolutionaries of the Identities, reinforcing images of imperial decisiveness and resolve and the total-dedication of the committed religious fundamentalist.

And yet, finally, as interesting and confounding as Hitler’s psyche is, the man himself would have remained only an unripe and feral oddling, never affecting the lives of more than a few equally unbalanced, certainly far-weaker personalities. But then the German economy – which had been doing a splendid turn in the mid-‘20s – tanked utterly in the Great Depression. The widespread economic destruction of most of the German middle-class, the bourgeoisie, the burghers, the well-to-do farmers, the craftspeople and the steadily-employed industrial workers … the vacuum created by the loss of the middle class and its ethos, sucked Hitler up and into the center of German politics, and with that turn of the wind – canny sea-captain – he cooperated to the fullest extent of his energy, nor did he deny himself the Romantic, great-man advantages of being freed from any concern for morality or the rights of others or loyalty or humility or subjection to any law or Law. After all, he would write the history books that would last for the next thousand years.

He lasted just twelve years, once he got into power. History will never forget him. But the question for Us today is: have we? Already?