Eichmann’s evil, Arendt argued, controversially, resulted from “banal” factors like careerism, a lack of imagination, and an inability to “think from the standpoint of someone else.” When the Third Reich’s culture told Eichmann that killing Jews was okay, his dependence on rigid rules and recycled language made him unable to resist the regime’s ideological distortions or even (she claimed) fully grasp what he was doing. Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and hanged in May 1962. His thoughtlessness, Arendt believed, was summed up in the “grotesque silliness” of his final words. Trapped in linguistic conventions, Eichmann reproduced the clichés of funeral oratory – forgetting, seemingly, that the funeral was his own.
Soundbites replacing thought
Mr. Hicks’s cartoon was thoughtless in ways similar to what Arendt diagnosed in Eichmann. It was the product less of deliberate wickedness than of bondage to clichés and conventionality, knee-jerk partisanship, opportunism, and a failure to consider matters from other points of view. The cartoon expresses a syndrome of unthinking political activism familiar among today’s culture warriors. Politics, of course, has always trafficked in soundbites that encapsulate sweeping narratives and demands for social redress – Manifest Destiny,” “Land, Bread, and Peace,” “Germany Awake!” – but such truncations have become the essence of culture war.
As the sociologist James Davison Hunter put it in his 1991 book Culture Wars, “each side struggles to monopolize the symbols of legitimacy,” while simultaneously casting opponents as extremists “marginal to the mainstream of American life.” In the culture war struggle, language is not just politicized but flattened into tendentious friend-enemy oppositions that require no exegesis. Names like “Moral Majority” or “People for the American Way” suggest a landscape starkly divided into saints and sinners, true Americans and anti-Americans. Each camp self-righteously excommunicates the other from the American project via aphorisms and mottos and dark insinuations whose cumulative effect, for a great many people, is to function not as shorthand for thought, but as its replacement. This superficial sloganeering fosters the neglect of critical thinking which, Arendt argued in a famous simile, enables evil to spread “like a fungus on the surface.”
Proof of the thoughtlessness of Hicks’s cartoon lies in its very incoherence. For example, if its purpose is antisemitic, then the implication of Jewish perfidy in the foreground (mask mandates as a Jewish plot?) clashes bizarrely with the reminder of Jewish victimhood in the background. On the other hand, if Hicks means, as I think he does, that the Democratic governor is acting like a Nazi and Kansans are the new Jews, then Governor Kelly should be emblazoned with a swastika, not the Star of David. The mask, as the emblem of oppression, should be on those forced onto the train, not on Kelly as the agent of allegedly despotic state power.
The cartoon bungles its symbolism in other ways as well. Wearing the Star of David was enforced on a Jewish minority in order to stigmatize and persecute; masks, however, are meant to be worn by everyone for the purpose of protection. Masks have no discriminatory intent.
The cartoon’s caption invites further confusion. The Trumpian moniker “Lockdown Laura” flatly misrepresents an order that, in the state government’s own words, “doesn’t change where you can go or what you can do.” It is as though a whole jumble of slogans and oversimplifications – Jews as ultimate victims, Nazis as ultimate oppressors, “big government” Democrats, liberty-loving Republicans, “tyranny” as a go-to tag for any government you don’t like, has landed on the page, less as an argument than as an ensemble that invites the viewer to just be – angry. Any way you read it, the cartoon makes little sense; in his rush to indict Governor Kelly, Hicks simply could not have been thinking about what he was doing.
Making Auschwitz possible
The cartoon has, however, an inadvertent value. It displays how seductive thoughtless culture-war political activism can become – indeed, mostly is – and it reminds us that knowing about the Holocaust is very different from thinking about it. The Holocaust reduced to a set of ready-to-hand clichés and deployable symbols with which to bash your political rivals is no cautionary tale able to prevent a second Auschwitz but something closer to the opposite: the very retreat from reality into empty and trivialized “truths” that helped make Auschwitz possible.
Hicks’s initial defence of the cartoon fared no better. “Political editorial cartoons,” he wrote, “are gross over-caricatures designed to provoke debate… fodder for the marketplace of ideas.” The cartoon, he claimed, intended to highlight Governor Kelly’s “governmental overreach,” her “absconding with… tax refunds” and “disastrous statewide shutdown that torpedoed businesses and schools.”
A caricature exaggerates features of reality; but it should not falsify reality. If only Adolf Hitler had confined his malfeasance to mask mandates! Hicks’s defence is another barrage of clichés: “the marketplace of ideas,” “torpedoed businesses,” provoking “debate,” the repeated charge of “governmental overreach.” What debate is being provoked? Whether a mask order that counties are permitted to opt out of (as Anderson County did) resembles genocide? Whether Laura Kelly is Heinrich Himmler in embryo? Whether it’s a pandemic or a plandemic? Plainly there is something potentially draconian about a government order that tells citizens what to wear or when to cover their face. And just as plainly, Governor Kelly’s mask order does not amount to nascent totalitarianism. The only way to tell the difference is to think about what is going on.
This is the kind of spine-chilling thoughtlessness that Arendt witnessed in 1961. (Recent research has indicated that Eichmann was in fact a vicious ideologue. But the revelation does not impair Arendt’s argument about the perils of thoughtlessness – there were many such officials, even if Eichmann himself was not one of them.) Hicks’ own choice of Holocaust imagery invites the Eichmann comparison. As does his characterization of his critics as “liberal Marxist parasites,” language far closer to Nazism than anything from Governor Kelly’s pen.
Hicks rethinks
Having charged Hicks, let me now speak in his defence. In a statement two days later, on July 5, Hicks apologized for the cartoon, which he removed. “After some heartfelt and educational conversations with Jewish leaders in the U.S. and abroad,” he wrote, “I can acknowledge the imagery in my recent editorial cartoon… was deeply hurtful to members of a culture who’ve been dealt plenty of hurt throughout history.” It is worth pointing out that no such statement was made by Eichmann, who went to the gallows proclaiming himself a sacrificial victim who had only been following orders.
Hicks’s statement also indicated a reconsideration of the cynical motives behind the cartoon. “Facebook is a cesspool,” he initially wrote in an email defending his work, “and I only participate to develop readership.” Those readers, Hicks added, are “my narcissistic flea circus – I make them jump and give them free rein to attack me.” His apology veered from such rabble-rousing back to the merits of an honest public sphere. “I appreciate the patience and understanding of those who convinced me to [remove the cartoon], and their commitment to civil discourse as a means of resolution rather than mob noise,” he wrote.
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Eliah Bures | Radio Free (2020-08-10T18:40:51+00:00) Dangerous thoughtlessness of a coronavirus political cartoon. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/10/dangerous-thoughtlessness-of-a-coronavirus-political-cartoon/
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