Zero Tux Given
During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and spent years living in the Polish forest and fighting the Nazis) expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?” He wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised by last night’s Al Smith Catholic charity dinner. The annual event usually features a night of good humor led by the presidential candidates from each party. It used to be a nice tradition. This year, for obvious reasons, Kamala Harris declined to attend (she sent a video instead). But the show went on. All the wealthy power-players got dressed up in their tuxes, went to the dinner, and giggled or groaned at the jokes of a treacherous, felonious, Putin-loving monster, who repeatedly tried to overthrow an election, led a violent insurrection on our Capitol, and is described by his own top general as “fascist to the core.” The evening’s hosts and attendees went on with their version of the norms even though the keynote speaker had blown up America’s. The event was a metaphor for the way so much of our society—from power-hungry billionaires to both-sidesing journalists—has normalized a unique threat to our democracy. If my dad had been around to see this pathetic dinner theater, he would have looked over at me and said, “You thought it couldn’t happen here? This is exactly what it look likes.”
+ NYT: Trump Among New York’s Elites at a Charity Dinner: It Got Awkward. Yeah, when you sell-out your democracy for a fancy dinner, things can definitely get awkward.
+ Don’t want to hear criticism of a conservative Catholic charity event from a Norcal liberal Jew? Fair enough. Here’s an editorial from the National Catholic Reporter: “The record on Trump’s part is extensive, but besmirched by actions such as inciting an insurrection, paying off a porn star for her silence and placing children in cages at the border and separating them from their parents … The real scandal is that the good Catholic cardinal of the great city of New York would not have the courage to say, this year, that the current Republican candidate is a walking example of so much the Catholic Church finds repugnant in today’s politics that he would suspend the normal invitations.”
+ While we’re on the topic of things my dad warned about… In 2015, during the early days of the Trump campaign, he said, “You know, this guy sounds a lot like Hitler vhen I vas a kid. Everyone laughed at him too.” Cut to Anne Applebaum today in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. “This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often … Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the ‘enemies of the people,’ implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights … In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them.” Is Anne Applebaum arguing that we’re headed for another Holocaust. No. Neither was my dad. But when people who have stared fascism in the face tell you exactly what you’re looking at, it pays to listen. And it sure as hell isn’t something to yuck it up about at a black tie dinner.
