At my center

In another context I was reminded of this, from J.D. Salinger's "Zooey" (copied from Wikiquote):

Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again — all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and — I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.
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I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.


The passage guided me for years. I hope it still does.

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Labels

In truth, without the capitalization, we are all pretty much conservative republican liberal democrats. With the capital letters - the labels - we sort out our remaining differences and begin a process of oversimplification that may be necessary - because discourse can only bear so much nuance - but also damaging - because oversimplification begins a road to deception.

I was reminded of this in a historical context as I read Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" and Peter Fritzsche's "Life and Death in the Third Reich." Goldberg makes a convincing case that the term "Fascism" has its origins as much in the left as in the right. That's fine, but if it's just a book about the history of a word, it should have been only a magazine article. The important question is whether ideas from the left led to Fascism as much as ideas from the right. Not sure he answers this.

I come across a similar dichotomy in "Life and Death." (It may be similar, or it may arise merely from the fact that I happen to have both books out from the St. Louis County Public Library at the same time.) That is, Fritzsche makes a good case that the Germans bought into Nazism wholesale and willingly, not grudgingly and not at the point of a gun. OK. But to me, the interesting question is whether National Socialism inevitably would have arisen sooner or later; or whether the Nazis breathed life into something that, without their skill in the manipulation of the masses, never would have come to pass. Do we just slap the "Nazi" label on something that was already there?

Or worse: was the Holocaust the manifestation of something always there. Would the Germans have got to this, sooner or later. And to jam this together with the first book: was Fascism also something that led inevitably to the Holocaust.

I think the answer is no to these last questions, but I also think that vigilance includes asking them. The biggest thing we have to avoid - bigger than another Cold War, bigger than another Pearl Harbor or 9/11, bigger even than civil war - is another Holocaust. And what makes these books worth reading and these questions worth asking, is to sift the evidence and make sure that if there is something there that might lead us again down that path, we identify and crush it. It won't just be a label.
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