I am too depressed to drink wine. If you know me at all, you should be alarmed. Don’t worry. I will force myself to have a glass so I don’t sink further into the abyss. I’m not sure if I’ve actually been depressed before. The symptoms are lethargy, sleeplessness, and a general lack of hope, correct? I went to sweep the deck and porch today and my back hurt immediately. My back doesn’t hurt! I’m not a back hurter! A hurt backer! I can lift my weight in kitty litter!
I’m working to build a group of like-minded folks, women for now, to serve as a kind of clearinghouse for other coalitions. Once a month, we’ll gather to share what good activism or community building we’ve seen, heard of, or been involved in. This coalescing, as I call it, is meant to buoy us and to stave off further depression, but it’s also to knit together a strong fabric of resistance in case things get much worse.
I didn’t think this would happen. I believed Kamala would win. I knocked on doors. Everyone I talked to said they either were or already had voted for her and Walz. I traveled to Florida. To other parts of Arizona. I saw the Tiktoks and the rallies. From my narrow perspective, I had no doubt sanity would prevail.
I do this often though. I believe based on some evidence, but not enough evidence. I didn’t know how fully the right wing media bubble had encircled Republicans. I didn’t know how little corporate media cared until after the election that Trump was 100% OK with Project 2025. I had hoped my fellow countrymen were good, thoughtful people. I was wrong.
I wrote a short essay for Torrey House Press who has a blog called “A Thing with Feathers,” referring to the Emily Dickinson poem, “Hope is a Thing with Feathers.” Hope does lift us up. But it also threatens to drop us to the ground, where we bash our skulls against the rocks.
The whole poem goes like this:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
I’ve been stuck on that last line for about 30 years. Although I majored in poetry, I am not always good at paraphrasing. But it finally came to me. At least I came to know what I think the ending means. It means hope is not a goddamn pet. It does its work but its work isn’t light and fluffy. Its cold, strange, and endless. It asks nothing of us, which means it is not our friend. Beware, endless optimism. Election night will fly right on by.
I’ve known the vast swath of problems that Kamala was up against.–For the past 9 years, we’ve worked to try to lift Arizona education from raking next to last in per-pupil funding. We tried to raise teacher salaries. We tried to stop vouchers. But because my kids go to public school and because I know so many teachers, I thought we were doing all right, even against the odds. But that was hope. Our education system wasn’t broken until the right tried to tell it was broken (aka No Child Left Behind) and then they began to defund schools, advocate for school choice, invent voucher systems so the public schools were starved. They fulfilled their prophecy and now kids in public schools do suffer. Not that home schooled kids or private school students do better. We’ll never know because they’re absolved from testing.
Whether because they don’t know how to research, have no critical analysis skills, or a just plain incurious, the billionaires (Musk, Theil, Mellon, the last Koch bro,) who worked to elect Trump repeated lies and obscured facts. From “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” to “Trump doesn’t even know anything about Project 2025” to “Tariffs are great” and “let’s deport 15 million people” (many of whom grow our food, slaughter our animals for meat, and who pay taxes yet receive few benefits from those taxes), they thought Trump was joking or we were lying or he would’t really do that. Or they just weren’t curious enough to find out if he meant it. Or worse, they didn’t care. Or much worse, they are looking forward to finally getting revenge on those of us who aren’t miserable, incurious, or disgruntled with our lives.
I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Adolf Eichmann facilitated the deportation of Jews, originally organizing their emigration, lastly, organizing their transportation to concentration and death camps. Arendt writes about the spectacle of the trial. By contextualizing its performative aspects, Arendt’s underpins one of the arguments of the essay. Empty people will perform their roles until their roles define them. Eichmann, not a scholar or a business success, did not have much going for him. He didn’t have strong beliefs. He wasn’t curious. He wanted to rise up. He found a ladder called Nazism that allowed him to believe in something. He didn’t care what that belief was, necessarily. The apparatus of the system filled him up. It’s not quite a tale of how ordinary men become killers of six million Jews. It’s a tale of how an ordinary man thought people should see him as extraordinary. “Well, the misfortunes were ordinary. Since he “had not exactly been the most hard-working” pupil—or, one may add, the most gifted—his father had taken him first from high school and then from vocational school, long before graduation,” Arendt writes. He would perform extraordinary acts until the acts defined him.
When he joined the Nazi party, his fortune and his status as an ‘ordinary’ man would soon change. “Actually, things had taken a turn for the worse somewhat earlier. At the end of 1932, he was unexpectedly transferred from Linz to Salzburg, very much against his inclinations: “I lost all joy in my work, I no longer liked to sell, to make calls.” From such sudden losses of Arbeitsfreude Eichmann was to suffer throughout his life. The worst of them, he explained to Captain Less, occurred when he was told of the Führer’s order (always officially called, to indicate its preëminence among his orders, the Führer Order) for the “physical extermination of the Jews,” in which he was to play such an important role. This, too, came unexpectedly; he himself had “never thought of such a thing, such a solution through violence,” and he described his reaction in almost the same words: “I lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out.” An ordinary job with an ordinary firing. But the rub is, that his testimony doesn’t comport with his history. He claims he was glad for the firing, for it led him to his significant position in the Nazi apparatus. But Arendt doesn’t buy it. “A similar blowing out must have occurred in 1932 in Salzburg, and from his own account it is clear that he cannot have been very much surprised when he was fired, though one need not believe his testimony that he had been “very happy” about his dismissal.”
Disgruntled people blame other people for their gruntling. There has been an evacuation of intelligence–public school decimation, drugs, and mind-numbing technology (smart phones are another opiate of the masses). By de-emphasizing the importance of intelligence, which here I mean only curiosity and a bit of common sense, the right wing media can play fast and loose with facts because no one cares about them. Why look up whether this or that fact is true if you can watch a very talented person stack fifteen milk crates high to see if they can stand upon them? (Reader. They cannot.) Passively observing videos of pranks gone awry, does not help people find “arbeitsfreude.” (Nice raveling, Ms. Arendt. Arbeit macht frei). It doesn’t even help you get arbeit at all. Being underemployed or employed as a cashier at two jobs will make someone disgruntled. And who are you going to blame. The people who aren’t complaining. The people with joy. The people with hope.
It’s not as if he was driven enough, or really smart enough, to engineer an entire program of genocide. His ideology didn’t come before the Nazi party. “”But bragging is a common vice. A more specific, and also a more decisive, flaw in Eichmann’s character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.” He talked big, claiming he himself killed five million Jews. “Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing. It was sheer rodomontade when he told men working under him during the last days of the war, “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews [or “enemies of the Reich,” as he always claimed to have said] on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” He did not jump, and if he had anything on his conscience, it was not murder but, as it turned out, the fact that he once had slapped the face of Dr. Löwenherz, head of the Jewish Community in Vienna, who later became one of his favorite Jews.” He also claimed he wasn’t an anti-semite! Can we add lack of self-awareness, a propensity for bragging, and a habit of dissembling to the disorders of our dear electorate?
They supplied it. They supplied all the tools. The trains. The stamps. The urgency. Arendt, “Rather, “it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision,” he said in court, adding, “it happened so quickly and suddenly.” He had no time and less desire to be properly informed; he did not even know the Party program, and he had not read (as he never did read) “Mein Kampf.” Kaltenbrunner had said to him, Why not join the S.S.? And he had replied, Why not? That was how it had happened, and that was about all there was to it.
Of course, that was not all there was to it. What Eichmann failed to tell the presiding judge in cross-examination was that he had been an ambitious young man who was fed up with his job as travelling salesman even before the Vacuum Oil Company became fed up with him, and that from a humdrum life without significance or consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it; namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, in the eyes of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well—could start from scratch and make a career. And if he did not always like what he had to do (for example, dispatching people to their death by the trainload instead of forcing them to emigrate);”
So much stems from boredom, disgruntlement, and lack of curiosity. “The aggressions of the regime, which had at first been directed primarily against “anti-Fascists”—Communists, Socialists, left-wing intellectuals, and Jews in prominent positions—had not yet shifted entirely to the persecution of the Jews qua Jews.” Holding a loaded gun and spinning in circles until something provokes you to shoot someone in particular. No real basis for antisemitism. The target is convenient. The interest in one’s own ‘suffering’ is the root cause and the only theoretical underpinning.
Eichmann wasn’t the only disgruntled German. The ‘they’ of the tools. The trains. The stamps. here are thousands of disgruntled complainers who created a system where they could accuse an entire group of people of taking their chance for success away. They called them elitists. Possibly because they could speak and they could read. ““Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language.” The real point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. (Was it these clichés that the psychiatrists thought so “normal” and “desirable”?”
“the longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think; that is, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”
We had no idea that people in our country could not tell right from wrong. We were fools. Arendt writes about Eichmann’s trial. “And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”
“et Eichmann’s case is different from the case of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel sure that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. Eighty million Germans had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s nature.
Not only is Arendt’s article about the banality of evil or Eichmann’s self-deception and his displacement of responsibility. But even those of us who try for curiosity, empathy, and knowledge are prone to self-deception too. We are fools too. We believed that people were mostly good. We believed that people wanted an education. We believed in innate curiosity. We, like the Jews, don’t believe things will get that bad. “They lived in a fool’s paradise, in which, for a few years, even Streicher spoke of a “legal solution” of the Jewish problem. It took the organized pogroms of November, 1938—the so-called Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, when seventy-five hundred Jewish shop-windows were broken, all synagogues went up in flames, and twenty thousand Jewish men were taken off to concentration camps—to expel them from it.”
How do you balance hope with reality? Remember, that bird doesn’t need you to feed it. Hope is persistent. So should our coalescing and community building be. So should our self-analysis be. It’s hard to keep our egos in check. I’m done with Arendt for a bit. I’m going to see if a glass of wine makes me feel better, while remembering that feeling better isn’t the only work to be done.
Nicole Walker 