9/19/23

 Tuesday, September 19, 2023

In bed at 10:40 and up at 6:40. 59°, high of 66°, cloudy, 60% chance of rain, AQi=22, wind S at 9 mph, 4-13/21,  The sun rose at 6:35 and will set at 6:54, 12+19.  It was a dark and dreary morning . . .

It's their job.  There is a report in this morning's WaPo on the new movie "The Zone of Interest" by director Jonathan Glazer.  The film depicts the lives of Nazi commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss, his wife and children.  They lived in a 'dream house' with a beautiful garden that abutted the wall on the other side of which was the death camp. Glazer said he wanted to depict the Nazi's running Auschwitz as mere mercenaries: "They're doing it because it's their job.  It's a career path for them. . . This is a movie about how anyone can be evil."  Glazer's statement remined me of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's lines from The Gulag Archipelago: 

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil. 

and

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I don't usually read the readers' comments following newspaper articles but I do I guess that I may learn something from them, and I did with this article.  One reader commented:

While the following may not be quite on the same level as Rudolf Höss, consider:

1) The tobacco company CEOs, executives, propagandists, and advertising personnel who have promoted death and illness...because it's their job.

2) The petroleum industry folks who have sewn lies about climate change and damaged, perhaps irreparably, our planet...because it's their job.

3) The Sackler family and similar folks in various pharmaceutical industries who have promoted addictions and death and who conspire to keep the average person from getting affordable drugs...because it's their job.

4) The thousands of CEOs, executives, and workers in the American food industry who promote ultra-processed junk that sickens and kills millions of Americans...because it's their job.

5) The many politicians who deny necessary medical and social services to their constituents...because it's their job, it keeps them in power, and it helps them rake in money.

And so on, and so on. 

The article and this reader's comment remind me of the ubiquitous problem of moral complicity in modern life and call to mind my own complicities, notably in all the killling that we engaged in, directly and indirectly, in Vietnam.  We did it because it was our job.  We were Marines, first to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean. . . In the snow of far-off Northern lands and in sunny tropic scenes, you will find us always on the job  the United States Marines. Of course we were told we were 'doing our duty' and 'defending freedom' and "helping a young, struggling domocracy" but it was all 'happy horseshit,' the term we used to describe the propaganda we heard from Washington and Saigon, in Stars and Stripes, and on Armed Forces Radio.  And LBJ's and Robert McNamara's happy horseship was followed by Nixon's and Kissinger's - Peace with Honor.  We operated under the delusion that if we just killed, maimed, burned, and poisoned enough of the Vietnamese, they would give up and our government, supported by its corporate capitalist owners, could dictate what kind of government the Vietnamese would have, whether they wanted it or not.  So we all 'did our bit' to contribute to the killing, maiming, burning, and poisoning, while Brown & Root, McDonald Douglas, and Dow Chemical reaped the profits.   What are we to think of our complicity now? 

Covid-19.  A year ago today I received my 3rd covid vaccination, shortly after Joe Biden stated 'the pandemic is over' even though hundreds of people were dying each day, mostly old, mostly unvaccinated, mostly with underlying morbidities.  Now I'm waiting to schedule my 7th, the monovalent one designed to reduce hospitalizations and deaths from the most common variant currently.   I received my 2nd bivalent booster in April.

L'amour existe is a 19 minute French documentary from 1961 that I watched today on OVID.  It's a depressing view of the suburbs of Paris.  One part of the film is about the class distinctions in French society, including these stats:  Keystrokes struck by a typist in one years: 15 million, Shortage of playing fields and sports grounds, 75%, Shortage of kindergartens, 99%, High schools in all towns along the Seine, 9, in Paris, 29,  Working classs children attending university, 3%, Attending the University of Paris, 1.5%, Working class children in medical school, 0.9%, In liberal arts, 0,2%, Theaters in the Paris suburbs, O, Concert halls, 0, etc.  I wondered what the stats would be in modern America.

Then I watched another French documentary only 10 minutes long, made in 1962, one year later, about life in Paris, titled "Paris, a Winter's Day,"  The opening quote: 'Nothing is more beautfiul than Paris, if not the memory of Paris.'  Described by OVID as "a love letter to living in Paris, even on a bitterly cold winter's day," but neither film paints a very pretty picture of life in and around Paris.