Memoirous

We’ve imbued our political parties with morals. For example, Republicans care about life. Thus, they will appoint pro life judges. Democrats care about human rights. Thus, they’ll be better at foreign policy—saying NO to Russia. Bviously this is simplified. Also obviously I have no right to write about Hannah Arendt . A brilliant thinker. This weekend I watched the movie Hannah Arendt . I knew about her peripherally like in the sense she was one of the people (émergie who fled Nazi Germany) who helped ferment The New School where my daughter went. Once I saw the movie I was able to sort her into—Oh you thought that up, that line of thinking, about the question of evil. The movie released in 2012, Hannah Arendt died in 1975. Some of her books are: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Revised ed.; New York: Schocken, 2004. The Human Condition (1958) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). (Rev. ed. New Y...

I love the work of Russell Freedman, who writes  for the YA audience non-fiction, historical essays using photographs as a foundation for his work. He has been awarded the Newbery Medal, three Newbery Honors, the Sibert Medal, and well the list goes on. In 2016 he published We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement that Defied Hitler . Basically it is the story of how the millennials of that time stood up to their government. Can you imagine? These were mostly middle-class, sheltered college students. The ones comedian Ck Louis claims cannot stop looking at their cell phones long enough to have a conversation. Brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl and young father of three Christoph Probst were initially arrested but then the dragnet fanned out and others were caught and convicted. Yet it is these three who are most easily identified with the movement. Certainly they paid with their lives. They put out altogether 5 or 6 pamphlets—...

In light of last week (Sean Spicer claiming Hitler had never gassed his own people) I had to take a few days to process this. I had to sort of what bothered me the most. But, first let’s look at what he said: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/us/politics/sean-spicer-hitler-gas-holocaust-center.html But first of all: This was an unforced error—he didn’t have to say anything. He was talking off the top of his head, comparing Assad to Hitler. All of this was Spicer’s attempt to defend Trump’s aggressive retaliation (59 or 60 missiles, the number I wasn’t able to nail down) on Shayrat Airfield because of an earlier chemical attack authorized by Assad. This is despicable. Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, Kurds. Poison gas was used in both WWI and WWII. From all appearances it appears to be a horrible way to die. Nevertheless, Sean Spicer sought to invoke a comparison to Hitler when discussing the US response. And here is where he got tripped up. I’m still not sure...

I’ve wanted to write about Pussy Riot for a long time. Actually I’ve just wanted to write the words Pussy Riot. And maybe a long time just means lately. Outside loving the name of this feminista-punk-activist band, I know very little about them or the controversy they caused when they stormed an orthodox church in Moscow. Anti-Putin feminist punks on trial in Moscow Which caused me to think about how our society ingests, devours its female artist. Think Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston just lately. Which led me to thinking about artists in Weimar Germany. The fourteen years of the Weimar era were marked by crazy explosive intellectual and creative productivity. Found this at Wiki: Kirkus Reviews remarked upon how much Weimar art was political: fiercely experimental, iconoclastic and left-leaning, spiritually hostile to big business and bourgeois society and at daggers drawn with Prussian militarism and authoritarianism. Not surprisingly, the old autocratic Germa...