Ok, it's the Spirit of the Time
So Gunn tries to show more love for kd than me, including a link to Hermann Goering, on war. Which sent me off looking for selected excerpts from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem -- you can follow the logic here, yes? -- which search brought me to Reid Collins on Banality of Evil:
If Adolf Eichmann's "absence of critical thinking" led Hannah Arendt to her famed conclusions about the "banality of evil," then John Muhammad and his sidekick Malvo provide supporting evidence. Their leisurely death-sweep of America demonstrates a lack of focus more difficult to deal with than any hard-etched ideology. Barring some further evidence of deeply rooted intent, some formed philosophy, their casual commitment to homicide also represents far more of what has happened to America than the hard-core beliefs of, say, an al-Qaeda. It may be that they have no hard-core beliefs, that they are members of a vast militia floating on the social scene, whose anonymity makes them as dangerous as they are ubiquitous.It was this formlessness, plus a generous dose of cupidity on the part of authorities, that made them so difficult to catch. Instructive is the swiftness with which the "task force" of federal state and local officers attached themselves to one eyewitness who gave them the celebrated "white box truck." Another witness would later help them morph the box truck into a "white van." A growing class of "profilers" imprinted the belief that the perpetrator was a white male, acting alone, an angered loser in search of recognition. This made it simple for two black men to drive unmolested from slaying scenes in a dark blue sedan, perhaps inconvenienced only by the long lines of traffic produced by police roadblocks scanning the public highways for a white-truck-van.
And it had to be made simple for them to do this, because you know those people ain't none too bright.
Not quite what I was looking for.
It was as though in those last minutes he [Eichmann] was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
That was the one. I don't think Collins got the point, but he would probably say the same about me.
Oddly, M.W. Guzy at TomPaine.com uses almost the same title ("The Banality Of Evil") for a piece on the same topic (the snipers).
I still haven't looked up zeitgeist. Good thing, that.
Comments
How your brain does this sort of thing when you've likely barely had a single cup of coffee is completely beyond me.
She says, looking at her third cup rather hopelessly.
Posted by: Heather | November 21, 2002 9:16 AM
my definition of Zeitgeist is, the direction everybody else is going/looking/thinking/feeling while i'm busy going the other way. and you can use that one, i took german all four years of high school.
apropos of this, or maybe apropos of nothing, i have a confession to make, and here is as good a place as any. while it seemed everybody and their uncle was making The Snipers (not my caps) into the blessed Boogeymen, the sum of all fears, etc., here i was...get ready to write me off...here i was, hoping they'd hurry up and come over to the west coast and shoot me too, because i was so sick and tired of all these people turning fear into our new national pastime. the big thing here in my town, lately, is "ooooh! home invasions!", which the paranoid cynic in me wonders whether it's just another "scary black people under the bed" fantasy the police are foisting on the whitey-bourgeoisie in order to make them ignore how many people of color are getting shot by the cops lately, hmmmmmmmmm.....
there. i said it. i'll wait out front for the crazy truck. oh wait...budget cuts. i'll have to go and admit myself. luckily, the local loony bin is just across the street from my office.
Posted by: fertile_jim | November 21, 2002 11:31 AM
Hitler had only one big ball,
Goering had two and they were small!
Himmler had something sim'ler,
and poor old Geobbels had no balls at all!
Sorry, I did try and resist all day. Really, I did.
Posted by: Heather | November 21, 2002 6:05 PM
Heather, your restraint is admirable.
And I do not understand the mysteries of my pre-coffee thought processes. Or pre-coffee syntax and spelling.
Jim, I think the U.S. is going for the "care of the community" approach to mental health issues these days. Which translates roughly to, "sucks to be you, try not to threaten any cops, they don't know how the non-lethal weapons work."
Posted by: Aaron | November 21, 2002 7:55 PM
It's a good thing I'm too busy working on site design to see that offhand comment, Aaron, or I might have to write a big long rant about mental health care in the U.S.
I swear, it's a talent of yours.
Posted by: VASpider | November 21, 2002 9:20 PM
Oh, VA, you mean how like frinstance it ain't available unless you're actively bleeding? Or perhaps I am misreading things, and they think putting your name on a list and never calling back is treatment? Also, how postpartum women have no real needs that a little time and condecension won't cure? Like that?
Perhaps we should have a small rant together. Defintinely time to start up minoritiesandwimmin.com so poor Aaron can have his comments section back.
Posted by: garrity | November 22, 2002 6:05 AM
Garrity, I don't know about the rest of you, but I only visit this site for the comments.
VASpider, one day I'll learn to control my dangerous mutant powers, I swear.
Posted by: Aaron | November 22, 2002 6:44 AM
garrity. I love you. Thanks for the nod towards postpartum depression (which, in many cases, is just PTSD dressed up to sound all unimportant and female). Post Partum depression sounds so...temporary. And it doesn't really mention the trauma that is so frequently present in the hospital birthing experience.
I might just have to go off on a rant of my own. First, breakfast. Then, nature hike. Then, coffee with my favorite Austin Blogger. Then, vigil at the capitol...TONIGHT I RANT. hahahhahaha
Yikes. It's going to be a busy day. I better go eat something.
Posted by: drublood | November 22, 2002 9:14 AM
Dru, I'll try to pop over to your place the evening and lay down my two cents' worth. My experience on that score was absolutely unacceptable -- and I'm an educated, priveleged white girl, with medical-pro parents and a mental-health-pro hubby, who has reasonably good training in how to interface with the system and to assert her needs. I flatly don't know how a lot of moms survive the experience at all.
I was devastated when that poor woman was sentenced to death in Texas. Sad enough that she was ignored until such a terrible thing happened; worse that she will die for it.
Posted by: garrity | November 22, 2002 10:50 AM
My rant isn't really woman-based. It's mental-health based, period.
But I'm just sick and tired after hearing about my sister's latest go-round. Too sick to even rant.
I suppose I could distract myself working on layout.
Yes, that's it.
Time to brew the coffee.
Posted by: VASpider | November 22, 2002 11:32 AM
Kay. Coffee and some therapeutic site-work later:
Last time my sister went to see her doc to get her medication adjusted because it was screwing with her system, she was rediagnosed, and her medication was changed.
He just wrote her a prescription and handed it to her after scoffing at half the things she said.
Talking to my father in the car afterward, she said, "I think he thinks I'm bipolar."
Dad looked down at the receipt and said, "You mean here where it says diagnosis: bipolar? And did you see he changed your medication?"
"No, I can't read his handwriting. I thought it was just a refill. He didn't tell me he rediagnosed me from depression to bipolar, and he didn't tell me he changed my medication."
It's not like she's a minor or anything. No. He just decided it wasn't important to tell her he'd changed her diagnosis and one of her umpteen thousand medications.
Never MIND the fact that the new prescription had interaction warnings with other medications in her file, nah, that's not important, either.
Nope. Just my youngest sister's life and mental health, the thing he's supposed to be guarding.
I guess he was on the way to the golf course or something.
Posted by: VASpider | November 22, 2002 5:34 PM
Oh, OUTRAGE . . . .
It is so fucking terrifying to have serious health issues hanging around, yourself or anyone close to you, mental of physical, because even the closest watchdogging often isn't enough.
VA, eat his face. He can join the parade of faceless assholes who've been involved in my mother's case over the last six years. I ate the neurosurgeon's face my own self, I did.
(Didn't help, but it was absolutely morally necessary that there be SOME kind of consequence, if only a smallish, pissed-off Italian chick threatening him at the top of her lungs.)
And I hear malpractice suits are simply *ruining* our medical system. Tragedy.
Posted by: garrity | November 24, 2002 12:52 PM
Really, garrity, what I need to do is convince my parents that they need to send Kate to a different doctor. If it weren't for their insurance, my sister wouldn't be getting really any appreciable care at all. She certainly wouldn't be able to afford the multiple medications that she needs to be able to function.
My sister would be dead by now -- I am certain of it, and she's said as much -- were it not for the fact that she's gotten at least a little help. I'm thankful that she's gotten as much as she has, because if she were in my situation at her age, she wouldn't really have anything approaching the level of support that she has. She'd have to go for dual diagnosis to get something set up via Medicare, and even though she could do that -- bipolar, anxiety, all kinds of stuff -- the process of going through that is so degrading (I've been through it by proxy with others) that she would suffer for the process itself.
Which is really, really fucking backwards, when you think about it.
Posted by: VASpider | November 25, 2002 1:55 PM