Hello from Paris!
I feel very chattery today. Maybe because it’s only January 31 and there are already signs of spring. Which is both welcome and troubling, and probably delusional on the part of those things I saw emerging yesterday at the park— snowdrops? jonquils? tulips? All bulby things look alike to me before they actually bloom. I hope they survive. It probably won’t snow here, but it may well frost before February is done and dusted.
One place it probably isn’t going to snow either is wherever in China they are holding the upcoming Winter Olympics. Apparently they are relying on hundreds of snow cannons to deliver the goods, themselves energy-squandering, and global warming inducing, contributing to the eventual demise of said Games. Nice work!
In the U.S., meanwhile, one school board in Tennessee decided to ban Maus, a graphic “novel” by Art Spiegelman illustrating interviews with his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and camp survivor. (And one of the very few books that we brought from New York to France.)
The McMinn County School Board cited its “inappropriate language” for eighth-graders and the inclusion of an illustration of a nude woman. They didn’t seem as troubled by the inappropriateness of slaughtering six million Jews, and assorted undesirables including the disabled, Roma, free masons, lesbians.
Gwen C. Katz thinks they will probably replace it with something like John Boyne's "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” which, to summarize her thread (you should read the whole thing), completely eliminates the Jewish perspective in favor of narration by a good-hearted, innocent German boy, a proxy for all the readers who do not want to be made uncomfortable. In Maus, “by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.”
Moreover, Boyne transforms the specific historical atrocity of the Holocaust into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice in which bad things happen but only abstractly, so when someone's dad disappears, “He's just...gone. How? Who knows.” It’s also pure fiction. So “However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren't real and they didn't really die.”
No harm, no foul, let’s forget about it.
The Allies did, after all. The good Brits, good French, good Americans. We allowed Auschwitz to keep exterminating Jews for 8 more months after an Allied plane took photos of it. Why not? The Red Army will get there eventually. And did, on January 27, 1945, which we now mark as Holocaust Memorial day.
I wish I knew their names, that I could list each person who was killed—they were Jews, or Poles or… but also themselves.
I think we should also name each person who was responsible directly or indirectly for killing them. Each who was also a member of a group, probably several, but also a particular self. Who perhaps preferred boiled potatoes to mashed, paused to stare when a bird sang or ignored it. Was sometimes good. Sometimes bad. Lashed out. Consoled. It is important to remember they were humans. Like us. Like the victims, too, though they also lose their humanity once we assign them that word, victim, which blunts the truth. Erases their specificity. Dehumanizes them again.
That’s the double-edged sword of language. Especially of identity and its politics which draws straight lines when there should be squiggles, simplifies when it should complicate. Because even as “identity” allows us to transform a bunch of people from a random assortment of individuals into a far stronger group, it blurs, it obscures, it lies in part, because it usually pauses in the middle where a sameness is imposed on individuals, just like difference. Identity can only be true when it gets far, far broader. And we see each other as mere humans.
That’s one of the horrors of the Holocaust —not just that so many people were killed, and how horribly— but that we humans did it. To each other. Cannibals so hungry for flesh we devour our own. And then of course lie about it. See Monument to a Polish Man Who Offered Water to Jews in Treblinka Sparks Controversy: The monument, erected near the Treblinka train station, is part of a trend by Polish authorities to distort history.
Censorship Americans don’t care about
In Afghanistan…
In Wales, cops drag an older disabled lesbian to jail, accuse her of hate crimes, and search her house because somebody doesn’t like her stickers…
Some of the offending stickers. (Euphoria says Ireland but it’s Wales)
In Scotland, cops “interview” a woman because of her tweets. “We need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind making your statement.”
That’s it for this week. Share. Don’t share. Make some tea. Pour yourself a drink.
Disgruntledly yours,