Civil Commotion

Today is the 75^th-anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death-factory at Auschwitz, in 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed.

Gas chamber

As someone born just a decade after the end of World War II, and raised among people for whom its turmoils were a vivid personal memory, it can be difficult at times to imagine a world in which a lot of people do not know the story of the death camps. Even so, World War II is receding in popular memory and, as it does, so does memory of Adolf Hitler’s rise in 1930s Germany — and the ability to recognize the many parallels with contemporary events.

Hitler did not create a murderous, totalitarian state overnight and, in fact, he enjoyed vast popular support. Humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I, many Germans believed that he was making Germany great again. They turned a blind eye to Kristallnacht, to the systematic disappearances of Hitler’s enemies, gleefully joined in the demonization of Jews, and believed that identification papers and the Gestapo were a small price to pay when set next to the rigorous work of restoring national greatness.

As Hannah Arendt documented in Eichmann in Jerusalem, many Germans were able to rationalize even the death camps as necessary when they were exposed; “the Jews were dirty and wouldn’t follow orders,” they would say. Similarly, a post-War collection of interviews with ordinary German citizens, published as They Thought They Were Free, revealed they thought that the ascent of Hitler and the war years were the best, most forward-looking, most promising years of their lives.

All of which is why this tweet by Donald Trump, just yesterday, ought to make sane people nauseous.

YET?!   There is no understanding that tweet as anything but a threat of violence, as an urging to his supporters to go ‘get’ Schiff. In a sane world, such a bald presidential threat of violence against a Congressman would be the end of a presidency. But now, like 1930s Germany, is not a sane and normal time.

Yep — out of excuses. There is no longer even a slim rationale for GOP Senators to hide from their plain duty. Now, it’s all about character.

A column in the Baltimore Sun says exactly what I’ve been thinking the past few days.

It’s fair for some conservative writers, like Charlie Sykes and Matt Lewis, to characterize the Republicans as dupes and stooges or parroting the Kremlin line. But at some point, we must face what it means for Republicans to know the truth but to advance Kremlin lies anyway, even when doing so slowly burns down the republic.

At some point soon, we must stop calling them dupes, and start calling them the enemy.

Ive watched the Senate trial almost since its opening minutes, and have been dumbfounded at how often, and casually, Republican Senators hasten to the cameras and repeat long-debunked lies and egregious misrepresentations of fact. It is not believable that they don’t know they’re lying. REPEAT: It is not believable that they don’t know they’re lying. They do know they’re lying, and they are lying for the purpose of protecting a corrupt president.

There is a point at which ordinary partisanship becomes Treason and, Yes, the Republicans are now aping Trump and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Honestly, I don’t “get” drag-queen story hour. When John was young we took him to the library often, and made sure he knew all the librarians and thought of them as his friends — but I strongly doubt that we would have taken him to drag-queen story hour. It’s just … I don’t know what. “Weird” isn’t exactly the right word, but that’s the sense of it.

But drag-queens are part of the tax-paying public that makes libraries possible, and have the same right everybody else has to reserve and use the library’s public meeting rooms, and the parents who take their children to drag-queen story hour are exercising GOP-approved discretion to raise their children as they think best, so why is the Missouri GOP threatening librarians with jail if they permit such events?

Public libraries that display “age-inappropriate material” could lose state funding and even see their librarians fined or jailed, under a bill proposed by a Missouri lawmaker.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Ben Baker, a southwest Missouri Republican, said Thursday that the “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act” did not target books but was drafted in reaction to Drag Queen Story Hours being held across the state.

Like I said, I don’t “get” it and probably wouldn’t have taken John when he was young — but I do understand that this sort of censorship is exactly why libraries are important and must be protected. I hope Missouri lawmakers don’t humiliate themselves by passing this law and setting-up years of court fights they will inevitably lose.

This is as good a précis of the difference between science and religion as you’re likely to ever encounter.

When an engineer grabs his computation pad and begins to analyze a problem, whether it needs a dozen pages or 100-pages, every single line has a documented pedigree — a long train of observations, tests, hypotheses, more tests, public analyses — from Pythagoras’ meditations on right triangles to Einstein’s speculations on the photoelectric effect.

Your neighborhood Holy Man can’t even prove that Our Invisible Friend is real. This is why science and engineering went from Isaac Newton’s encounter with the apple to the moon in ~ 350-years, and religion has nothing to show for itself but Niagaras of bloodshed.