9/6/23

 Wednesday, September 6, 2023

In bed at 9:30, awake and up at 5:26, move to brr till 5:50.  Let Lilly out.  72°, high of 80°, cloudy, Wind S at 8 mph, 6-15/26.  DPs 63-70😰Sunrise 80°E at 6:21, sunset at 7:18, 12+56.

Semiannual visit to VA Gold Clinic.  Day of gratitude, day of dread. (Got my flu shot.)

Geri's superb sense of humor.  As usual, I hit the hay before Geri did last night.  I woke up this morning and there on the kitchen counter was my container of BarBQ Pringles, empty, with a Post-it note on the cap: 'The devil made me do it!'

Fintan O'Toole, Family histories.  In the current New York Review of Books, Fintan O'Toole, one of my favorite essayists, reviews two books revealing family histories in which the grandfathers of the authors were Nazis.  His essay is titled The Trouble with Ancestry and the books he reviews are Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets by Burkhard Bilger, a staff writer at The New Yorker,r and Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends by Linda Kinstler, a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley.  Bilger's maternal grandfather, Karl Gӧnner, was a longtime member of the Nazi party and served as schoolmaster and Nazi Party chief in a German occupied Alsatian village during the war.  Kinstler's paternal grandfather, Boris Kinstler,  was Latvian commando who willingly participated in the slaughter of Latvian Jews during the war.  The latter has direct responsibilty for the racist murder of thousands of innocents; the former did not, but knowingly supported the Nazi regime that did.  

Gӧnner's story was the more interesting of the two because, when he was tried for war crimes after the war, 17 local Alsatians testified on his behald and he was acquitted.  "Why, when Gönner was tried, did many of the villagers write letters to the court testifying to his benign rule? As the local priest put it, Gönner “had a good heart and was always ready to do good for the population.” He had prevented deportations, secured the release of prisoners, and attained benefits even for known anti-Nazis. In all, seventeen villagers testified on his behalf. . .  One of Gönner’s wartime pupils in Alsace, tracked down by Bilger, calls him “a Nazi, but a reasonable one.” "  It was O'Toole's conclusion about Gӧnner that struck me:

 [I]n some respects, Gönner’s personal reasonableness makes him not better but worse. It is clear from Bilger’s reconstruction of his life and personality that he was an equable, thoughtful, learned man who read his Schiller, listened to his Schubert, and treated people with courtesy and even kindness. It is also clear—contrary to the popular image of absolute obedience within the party—that he could in fact exercise a great deal of discretion in carrying out his orders. When a friend and fellow teacher was transferred for alleged disloyalty, Gönner protested to the National Socialist Teachers League that this was a “monstrosity.” How could a man who found a minor injustice against a friend so monstrous not be revolted by the vast crimes in which he was knowingly implicated? Though Bilger does not quite say so, his grandfather emerges as a case study in the capacity for compartmentalization that is arguably more destructive of morality than outright malignity. What lies inside the safe that Bilger cracks open in his eloquent storytelling is the very ordinary evil of carefully circumscribed compassion. (Emphases added by me.)

Isn't this the the moral/ethical challenge we all face every day?  Part of the problem of complicity in a cruel world?  Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society?  The problem re the Good Samaritan: Master, who is my brother?

God help us (if only . . .)  From Charles Blow's op-ed in the WaPo:  "Trump today is regarded favorably by 39.8 percent of the public, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average. That’s up 0.8 percentage points from Feb. 1, 2021. Biden’s personal favorability is at 41.2 percent.  Forty-six percent of registered voters would choose Trump for president, putting him in a tie with Biden, per the most recent Wall Street Journal poll. Trump won an electoral college victory in 2016 with 46.2 percent of the popular vote and narrowly lost one with 46.9 percent in 2020. The pro-Republican areas of the U.S. political map contain 235 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win . . . Trump’s probable path to actual victory is via a slender electoral vote majority, with less than a majority of the popular vote, quite possibly aided by a third-party drain on Biden’s votes. Trump might indeed arrive at his swearing-in on Jan. 20, 2025, having been convicted, still facing trial in other cases — or both. And he would owe his political survival to religious fundamentalists and right-wing nationalists, who would staff key positions in his government."