Uberfremdung

 

History does not repeat itself; but it  often rhymes.

--Attributed to Mark Twain (among others)

Watching the debate, like most people I know, I could only focus on the mouth agape, frozen faced, tongue tied Joe Biden, and hardly noticed Donald Trump, who was, after all, just saying what Donald Trump always says. It was like that classic psychology demonstration where the professor puts a glass bowl on the table in the front of the room and then an outraged student appears and begins a shouting, remonstration and the professor attempts to calm this explosion in the front of the classroom, but meanwhile another student slips in and runs off with the glass bowl and the professor turns to the class and asks, "What happened to the bowl?" And usually not more than one or two out of fifty can say. Everyone else was focusing attention elsewhere.

The power of distraction.

So that was me and the debate, but somewhere in there, I managed to notice the thief who would steal the bowl: Donald Trump launched into his diatribe about all those horrible, no good, very bad illegals crossing our Southern border: insane asylum escapees, escaped convicts, rapists, murderers every last one of them.

Obadiah Youngblood

That got no attention from the moderators asking the questions, and certainly Joe Biden was in no shape to respond: Wait, the fact is immigrants, even those, especially those awaiting hearings, commit crimes at a vanishingly low level. Yes, there is that occasional horrific crime committed by an immigrant here illegally, but that is the exception that proves the rule.

Christopher Isherwood

Reading "Weimar Germany" by Eric Weitz, you hear Hitler, among many others, used the word "Uberfremdung" to signify the poisoning of the pure Aryan blood of the German folk by Jews, Poles, Slavs and other undesirables. All those "races" who had slipped across German borders and contaminated, poisoned and otherwise defiled German blood, pure German women in particular.

The Real Sally Bowles

Trump does not vilify Jews; he seems to exempt them. And he is careful not to vilify Blacks--although he doesn't have to, because his white supremacist cant is satisfactory to the Confederate and Mountain states so he doesn't have to get too explicit about who exactly is poisoning America's pure white blood.

Obadiah Youngblood

Reading about the 20 year Weimar Republic is so fraught with headlines which have been written about today, it is downright spooky. 

I've now imbibed "Weimar Germany" (Eric Weitz),  "Before the Deluge" (Otto Friedrich), "In the Garden of Beasts" (Eric Larson), "Good-by Berlin," (Christopher Isherwood, on which "Cabaret" was based), "Weimar Culture" (Peter Gay) and the excellent, mesmerizing "Babylon Berlin" now in season 4, available only on MHz-Choice, a $7 subscription worth every penny. 

These descriptions of Germany between 1919 and 1939 are a mirror to today's America. We recognize the characters, the types, the arguments. The language may be German but it sounds American.

One of Eric Weitz's observations is that the Nazis were not just street thugs, although there were plenty of that type, but they came from the universities and industry and the professions. J.D. Vance's story would have been tucked seamlessly into any of these books.

Reading Vance's book, "Hillbilly Elegy" it is abundantly clear Vance came from one of those Appalachian families which wasn't a family at all, with an absent father, a mother constantly disappearing off with her latest boyfriend, and the children left to the care of grandparents who served some parental functions but had their own limitations. The first time Vance got anything like a family was when he joined the U.S. Marines, which he seems to forget is a part of the federal government. So he owes his only true family experience to the most socialistic entity in America: The federally funded Unites States military.

The pathos of his going home on a leave with enough money (Marine money) in his pocket to take out his siblings and grandparents to Chilis for dinner is supreme. It's the first time in his life he could be proud. He had made enough money to treat his family to dinner at Chilis. You had to feel for this guy, but then he turns around and rants about how the federal government is nothing but an unmitigated evil.

Obadiah Youngblood 

And this is true of so many of the Nazis during the rise of the Third Reich: the most meaningful experience of their lives was in the military. 

And there is a difference between Trump and the pullulating Nazis of the Weimar: Trump sneers at the suckers and losers who had nothing better to do than join the Army ("Join the Army if you fail") and he dismissed John McCain as a loser because he was captured by the Vietnamese. "I like the guys who were not captured," Trump famously remarked.

And no, American folk are not enduring the deprivations of the early years of the Weimar--hyperinflation--but that doesn't mean they don't harbor resentments. 

So despite evidence that the federal government saved them from COVID--with vaccines developed by scientists using science (which the right denigrates) and rescued America from another great Depression, by spending money on Americans, American businesses and schoolchildren, President Biden and the federal government get no thanks at all. 

Americans will still send Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz back to Congress.

Hitler, it must be remembered was sentenced to 5 years for treason in jail for his part in the Beer Hall Putsch, an insurrection. The judge was sympathetic, so he did not get life in prison. But he served only 9 months, owing to a sympathetic judiciary. 

And now we have Trump's Supreme Court saying if Trump is re elected, nothing he does can result in jail time. He really can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not fear punishment--as long as he claims that shooting was an official act, even if he shoots Joe Biden or Jamie Raskin or Melania's latest lover. 

Oh, I don't need to duck for cover,

For shooting Melania's lover,

For me the law does not have to budge,

Because I know the judge.