The USA network ran the film, "Schindler's List" last night with no commercial interruptions. This was a rather civilized way to have a portrayal of one of the most uncivilized periods in the world's history. You just can't have a scene where a child hides in the pit of an outhouse to save his life followed by a commercial for KAYAK dot com. I think they sell hotel rooms. A bit incongruous. Not a good fit.
I'm a fan of history, particularly more recent history because it more directly affects us all. There are people whom you can talk to about The Holocaust and WWII, though, soon they'll all be gone by the natural attrition of life. But, while they are here, they have been living history of an awful, recent time in our history. There are plenty of assholes about who deny The Holocaust ever happened at all despite overwhelming evidence and first-hand accounts and these are often the same sort of assholes who know that the founding fathers intended the second amendment to be justification for civil war in the event of a black president. See where I'm going with this? Revisionist historians are assholes. If you give them a chance, they will revise our futures. The words of gods or presidents from 200 or 2000 years ago- no matter how well intended- don't really matter.
This is why, as silly as they sound, the teabaggers really piss me off. There's some evil afoot here. Most of life is about money and there is billions of dollars at stake here every day. Being republican is just another way of being reasonably legal about going about the business of making money and the Tea Party is just a twist on the business model of that. I hope. Right?
I wanna believe that these politicians are as comically stupid as the blowhards in the threads are. The thing is, they might not be. They may be as cold hearted and fucking dying to spill blood as your average Kentucky security guard who thinks he protects the president, perhaps because he might or might not have been a Marine- the president's own, as they like to say.
In other words: a impotent idiot who probably just drinks too much and hates being short and is easily led by politicians out to make buck. The thing is there are tens of thousands of these assholes out there and even though most are probably as harmless as the rent-a-cop, one or two might not be.
In Nazi Germany, most people weren't Nazi's. They just went along with Hitler and the Nazi's because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. They weren't coming from a good financial place after The Great War and I bet they were game for anything. Though Hitler was pretty upfront about his disdain for the Jewish people, he was not upfront about his plans to annihilate them. Intelligent Germans might have seen that coming but, he gave them the right mix of plausible deniability plus the knowledge that, there but for the grace go I... He made it easy to ignore what people didn't want to see anyway.
Most people that is. The Nazi's had a knack for attracting the best and brightest of the depraved crowd. Those are the types you need to commit genocide. You can't get the average citizen to do the dirty work. Besides, you need them to go along with the dirty work. Complicity is the mother of politics.
We can laugh at the Tea Party and chuckle at how they are bringing down the GOP. Sheesh- Glenn Beck?! Rand Paul?! Alan Fucking West?! Gomert?! Ted Cruz?! Where the fuck did they get these guys? They are idiots! Anyone can see that.
No. Too many people cannot see that. Too many people want more. Too many people are willing to accept worse. They laughed at Hitler. They let him be Chancellor as sort of an appeasement... The rest is history. You just never know, do you? That's why we remember. That's why we should try to remember so our future isn't forgotten.
No comments:
Post a Comment