This morning my Canadian friend Norm Sibum posted some thoughts on these sad, sick times of ours — but be not afraid of a drag-down; his thinking was healthy and his own time, a narrow, a.m. time, bare of the dreary.
Atop his I cast some related thoughts. The former, you can read here. (I'll add, recommended.) What followed from me, well, that follows, right after this public service reminder.
Addressing Sibum ...
I know you [as a poet] have resisted centering on the once-unimaginable scum of everyday politics and the multitudinous morons who drive it. For me it's a cross to bear if not with pleasure than fascination; it's just my thing, this Sturm und Drang of our cretinous times.
If nothing else, this miserably engrossing era has answered a question with which I unsuccessfully struggled for years: How and why civilized Germany 1932, primitive Germany 1933?
A simplistic formulation for sure; a Melvillean refinement: "From Hell's heart it stabs at thee" — if not, it sure as hell does me.
I formally studied the history of Nazi Germany, preceded and trailed by loads of independent reading — both, in search of an answer. I pretty much got nothin'.
The facts and narratives, yes, they're easy. But I wanted (needed) the guts of the thing; the hideous metamorphosis as seen from the streets and lived every day, the emotionally violent turmoil of it all.
And then came Trump and MAGA and the nation's lethal little acceptances of their utter madness. Last, society's Big and Ugliest Bang, an American majority voting in support of the madness — something not even our 1930s Teutonic predecessors "accomplished."
And there it was. The Answer — accessible only by living it.
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