An evening of sobering art

[jducoeur]

[Happy birthday to new_man!]

Tonight was dominated by art that provokes reflection.

First, we watched Tuesday's episode of the Colbert Report, with musical guest Paul Simon. His performance was An American Tune -- IMO his most beautiful and sobering song. There's something about it that can always bring a tear to my eye: a quiet solemnity that reflects both the ideals of the country and the difficulty of living up to those ideals, while still getting on with life. It's a fine song for the times.


And then -- well, I'm always far behind in my comic book reading, so I only just got around to reading Judenhass, a short graphic novel from Dave Sim.

Sim has been a mixed bag for many years, veering between eccentric brilliance and pedantic lunacy. You never quite know which you're going to get -- often, you get both in the same issue. This is one of the former. As with much of his best work, it is a fairly quick read, but drives its point home with ruthless efficiency. Judenhass is German for "Jew Hatred", and the book is best described in his own words:

Jewish remembrance of the Shoah, distilled to its essence of "Never Again" implies the self-preservation of the life of not only each individual Jew wherever he or she lives, but of all of God's chosen people wherever their collective continued existence is threatened -- as that collective continued existence of the European Jew was very much threatened in Europe in the 1930's and 1940's.

And is, to me, significantly different from non-Jews saying "Never Again" from behind the sheltering and disingenuous facade of:

"How could this have happened?"

Implying as it does that the Shoah had been a genuinely unthinkable act without precedent in non-Jewish society... as if the Shoah had been a one-in-a-million happenstance which could only have happened in Germany and only under the Nazi regime, whereas I believe the historical record of non-Jewish culture and its tolerance for and embracing of Jew hatred shows, instead, that the Shoah was very much...

Inevitable

This is followed by the meat of the book, in which he allows western culture to concisely damn itself through a mix of quotes and bloodless facts that trace Judenhass over the centuries. Oh, there are some Nazis in the quotes -- but mostly he cites the great and good: Martin Luther, Voltaire, Mark Twain and a host of politicians down the ages. And behind the faces of those quoted are the images of the Shoah, traced with cruel precision from the photographs.

The result is chilling and sobering, lending a lot of support to his argument of inevitability, driving home that there was nothing radically different here, merely the conclusion of a long chain of reasoning that wound its way around our civilization.

*Not* a fun read in any way, but a salutary reminder that tragedy is born out of many little hatreds and callouses that finally weave themselves together...

Comments

[tpau]

may i borrow that?

[jducoeur]

Sure -- I'll set it aside, before it gets buried in the Out pile...

[tpau]

with the economist issue. that i really need to go pick up... or something...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, comics writer Peter David and his wife, Kathleen, were in the audience for that particular Colbert Report.

[jducoeur]

And reports that there was a Colbert/Simon duet of The Sounds of Silence that did *not* make it into the episode. *Hrmph* -- I'd love to hear that...

[dervishspin.livejournal.com]

There is a book by Derek Jensen called The Culture of Make Believe.

It is along a similar line, tracing the history of hatred, but not limited to hatred of Judaism; our cultural insistence of hatred of the Other. The deeply ingrained hatred of a set of people is not unique to Judaism, but it does seem to be unique to our Western Culture. We are cultural amnesiacs in this regard, especially in the US, with living victims of the Holocaust still among us.

This book questions the validity of civilization itself. It's brilliant. I don't think I can bring myself to read it more than once though.

[mermaidlady]

I've heard "American Tune" almost my entire life (my dad raised me as a huge Paul Simon fan). Every time, over the years, I've heard the song, especially "We come in the age's most uncertain hour" I've thought how true it was. And it's been true for over 3 decades. One of his finest songs and never fails to make me feel both weepy & hopeful.

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

People forget history so easily. We don't teach the parts that are embarrassing in school. I bet most people escape from not only high school, but also college, without learning about things like interning the Japanese americans during WW II, for example.

I think we turned a corner in the right direction with this recent election, but I don't really have a hard time imagining something similar happening to Arabs here or in Western Europe. And we don't worry about guarding against it because the holocaust was an isolated insanity.

I got a dual major in college, one of which was in German. We had to take a German history class as part of the degree requirements, taught by an American professor. He didn't cover WW II and the holocaust at all. Simply wrote "1939-1945: Barbarism" on the board and moved on. (And yes, the man was a terrible professor in other ways too. If you saw the first Ghostbusters movie, the guy from the EPA was him to a T. He even looked like him. Made the movie for me).

Interestingly the native German perspective was quite different. My german teacher in high school had served in the German Army (mostly on the Eastern front) before coming to the US after the war. He didn't talk a lot about it, but I remember him saying once that he and his family had heard rumors about what was going on with the Jews, but they weren't near any of the places it was actually happening, and they didn't believe that it could be anything but exaggerated rumor, until they saw evidence later. He was a decent person, and he just couldn't comprehend that so many people could do such horrible things.

That's why we need to be vigilant - it's easy for the people who would be most likely to rise up and say "No" to just not believe it's happening if they don't pay attention, because it's something they'd never consider doing.