Last night, for the umpteenth time, I noted (with great appreciation) Overnite's excellent sig line:
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag carrying a cross" (Sinclair Lewis)
But for the first time, I did more than mentally applaud overnite and Lewis. This time I actually reflected on the reality that statement describes. (Spring Break starts today, so for a change I can afford to spend a little time in idle contemplation.) I've tried to organize my thoughts into something vaguely coherent, below the fold, and I invite additional perspectives.
The first concrete thing that came to mind was an unpleasant moment from my past: the moment I found out for sure that my then-husband was having an affair. People had been telling me for months that it was obvious. But until that moment, it wasn't obvious to me.
Yeah, denial; I'm quite familiar with the word. But I want to go beyond that facile label and examine what was really going on in my perceptions and how it relates to overnite's sig line.
My denial was the product of my perception of what kind of people have affairs, and my belief that such slime and sleaze could never touch my marriage. I knew a lot less about the subject then than I do now, and I somehow saw strayers as being fundamentally flawed. Flawed in a way that my husband -- this man I had been in love with since before I was old enough to [legally] drink, this guy whose laughter could light up a room and who had been so scornful of Bill Clinton's pecadilloes -- could not possibly be. I knew him inside and out, could catalogue his flaws in my sleep, and sexual infidelity was not one of them.
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Looking back, I see that it was not a dramatic, hidden evil side that led him to that choice, not any specific "Cheater" gene that distinguished him from those lacking such a gene. It was just one more manifestation of several of his very commonplace, everyday flaws with which I was already intimately familiar: His tendency to seek escape rather than resolution in the face of conflict. His need for validation from someone else to make up for the holes gouged in his self-esteem by an egotistical father who never saw a big enough picture to recognize the damage he was doing to his children's psyches. His propensity to value fun over responsibility -- a manifestation of his reluctance to grow up and be like said father.
[NB: I am not seeking to excuse my own very substantial role in the destruction of my marriage; it just isn't relevant to this discussion.]
In short, my denial resulted from what I will call the Bogeyman Fallacy: I did not recognize that something as familiar, as comfortable, as seemingly unchanging as my marriage could contain the seeds of something as destructive, as ugly, as unthinkable to me as a decision on my husband's part to choose another woman over me to meet his sexual and emotional needs.
I saw such a decision as part of a different reality than the one in which my marriage resided. Affairs were the bogeyman; they were horror stories that happened to other people -- people whose marriages, whose reality, were not like my own. A bogeyman affair was not something that could touch my familiar reality. It was not something that was actually already in the making at a time when I thought I was safe in the permanence of my relationship with my husband.
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The Bogeyman Fallacy is why Lewis's statement is so powerfully true. We see the rantings of Hitler in the old newsreels, in a foreign place, a foreign time, a different nation with a different history than our own. Those of us in the reality-based sector of the blogosphere know better than to think that means "It could never happen here," but those who are more tradition-bound, less reality-based, do not share our passion for observation and analysis.
To them, fascism is a bogeyman, an unthinkable form of evil completely extrinsic to our wholesome American reality of baseball, apple pie, hot dogs, the Stars and Stripes, the Fourth of July, and the Bible. Whatever Hitler was ranting about to the throngs in those old newsreels that hypnotized the Germans into following him into Hell, it had nothing to do with the things WE believe in. If anyone ever came spouting that evil nonsense at US, we would scornfully dismiss them, send them back into the den of iniquity they crawled out of.
The key point that the less reality-based -- who are themselves exactly the conduits through which fascism is most able to snake its way into the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave -- fail to realize is that the symbols manipulated by Hitler to inspire his followers were every bit as wholesome and meaningful and beautiful to the Germans of that time as the traditional "patriotic" American symbols are to contemporary Americans.
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They don't see that to those who cheered Hitler, what he was spewing did not sound like the Holocaust, the incarnation of hatred, the elevation of torture, mutilation and murder to a heroic quest for purity. It sounded very much like what "True Patriots" always sound like:
"Our time-honored, beautiful reality -- our history, our traditions, our values -- are being threatened by [insert convenient enemy here]; we must do whatever it takes to save our Fatherland American Dream/freedom/City on the Hill from the annihilation They are seeking to rain down upon it. They are different from us. They hate us for what we are. They are innately demonic. They must be stopped."
To them, Hitler was a demented, evil man who killed and tortured innocent Jews in the service of a militaristic Fatherland that sought world domination, while George W. Bush is a Christian patriot who took extraordinary heroic measures to save our country from an extraordinarily dangerous enemy (and who, btw, would be fun to have a beer with). They don't realize that if we translated Hitler's warmongering, torture-justifying words into English, and substituted "Al-Qaeda" or "Islamo-terrorists" for "Juden," we would hear precisely the words we heard from Bush for seven years.
They don't see the resemblance between Gitmo and Bergen-Belsen because, just as my image of my ex-husband was not compatible with my bogeyman conception of sexual infidelity, their image of America is not compatible with their conception of what the concentration camps were all about. (No, I am not saying that Gitmo actually reaches the same level of horror achieved by the German concentration camps, but the resemblance, both in what happened there and in the political justifications given for the existence of the facilities, is much stronger than many Americans are willing to see.)
They don't see that once we are willing to sacrifice our principles, our basic human values, in service of the goal of protecting ourselves, the line has been crossed. It is not crossed when the six-millionth member of the "enemy race" is exterminated, but when the first one is denied access to justice or tortured in the name of the homeland.
When they look in the mirror as Americans during a proto-fascist era, they don't see the proto-fascist image that is looking back at them, because it doesn't look like the bogeyman image of fascism that they have seen all their lives in the newsreels and the history books.
They believe they are safe from the Bogeyman. But we know better.
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And that is why, every moment of every day, whatever mistakes and missteps and errors of judgment and downright wrong choices the Obama Administration may make, I am immeasurably grateful for its existence.
I am grateful because the administration itself has different values from those espoused by the previous administration. While the Obama administration arguably has not completely reversed course from the inexorable march toward total fascism that characterized the previous administration, it is indisputable that it has at least taken a couple of steps back from the precipice on which we were standing a few months ago.
But perhaps more importantly, I am grateful because by choosing Obama, the American electorate declared at least a partial rejection of the values and rhetoric that were in ascendancy in the Cheney Bush administration. When I was contemplating leaving the country if McCain won, it wasn't only because I feared what he would do, but also because I would have felt such despair that the voters had chosen to allow him to do it.
Having a President who actually dared to deliver a holiday video message in Farsi to citizens of the "Islamo-terrorist" part of the world is such a welcome relief, as well as a paradigm shift. Can you imagine Hitler sending a message in Yiddish to European Jews, wishing them a joyous Purim?
UPDATE: H/t to livjack for this video. This is, indeed, "how it happens":