Paying Attention

I began writing this essay on Thursday, November 7th. Oceans of words have since poured in about the election and what happens next or, more properly, what we who lost last Tuesday should be doing next. The constant flood of opinion seems to fall into two categories. There are those who say we should pick ourselves up, dust off our egos, and get to work immediately to resist the coming oppression. This is the Do Something response. Then there are those who caution that we must give ourselves time to mourn and feel whatever it is we are feeling. This is the Grieve First response. Both reactions are legitimate and understandable and both will be a necessary part of the resistance going forward. But Doing, the old barn raising pioneer style, and Feeling, our current more familiar self-preoccupied modality, are only partial responses to the current situation.  There is also Thinking and its correlate Learning. Americans are poorly educated and notoriously ahistorical. There is so much we need to learn about democracy. How it has been known to sicken and die, how to nurse it back to health and infuse it with new life. 

Photo by Rabie Madaci on Unsplash

In an amazing incidence of serendipity, I was invited by a friend on election day mid-afternoon to sift through her late husband’s library of books on American intellectual history and take home whatever spoke to me. It was appealing to have something to do before hunkering down in front of Rachel Maddow for the duration, the nail biting long haul. It was in this private collection that I discovered Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny. I had not read it when it came out in 2017 during the first Trump administration. But there it was, a tiny thing, 4.5”☓ 6.5”, 126 pages long. Almost a pamphlet in the tradition of Thomas Paine. You can carry On Tyranny in your back pocket and read it on a park bench. The subtitle of the book is “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” Snyder, a Yale professor of mid-century Central and Eastern European history, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, identifies twenty markers of encroaching totalitarianism and illustrates them with very straightforward descriptions of how they played out under Stalin and Hitler. You can read this book in an hour or two and you will learn a great deal without ever feeling overwhelmed by content or patronized by a dumbing down of complex issues. Each of the twenty brief sections is written from the point of view of personal  agency….This is what you should watch out for and this is what you should consider doing in the face of discoveries of mounting assaults on freedom. There are things you can do.

In lesson #4 “Take Responsibility for the Face of the World,” Snyder talks about signs and symbols that degrade the public square. 

“In 1933….the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In the euphoria of victory, Nazis tried to organize a boycott of Jewish shops. This was not very successful at first. But the practice of marking one firm as “Jewish” and another as “Aryan” with paint on the windows or walls did affect the way Germans felt about household economics. A shop marked “Jewish” had no future. It became an object of covetous plans….envy transformed ethics…..The wish that Jews might disappear, perhaps suppressed at first, rose as it was leavened by greed.”

I did not know that. I did not know that identifying businesses as owned by Jews was carried out by private citizens and that they were often motivated by a desire to help themselves to the spoils. I needed that awful knowledge, as painful as it was. I learned something that helped me understand. The dark Berlin streets were illuminated by a new awareness. I reminded myself of the centrality of greed as an engine of social violence and degradation. This makes me want to know more about the effect of increasing income inequality on the 2024 election of billionaire demagogues who prey on the fear of working people who can no longer afford groceries. Money in politics is a perennial subject. I want to know how it bleeds into all the other areas of inquiry. How has uncontrolled immigration affected the labor market? How will poor women feed the children they are forced to give birth to?  There is so much to learn but you have to start somewhere. You have to withdraw from the racket of polarization and gossip posing as political analysis and try to figure out what is actually happening in America. 

This is not easy to do when you are almost 80 years old and the country you grew up in has vanished without a trace. I don’t recognize the America we are living in. I share no traits in common with the President-elect. I do not privilege the capacity for rage and vengeance and mockery in leadership. I don’t understand it but my lifelong habit of study may, just may, stand me in good stead. And this will be my first act of defiance. Instead of wallowing in the garbage that is served up every day in place of the hard and joyous work of learning, I will engage in the much-maligned and largely atrophied practices of reading and thinking in private. Totalitarianism, Snyder writes citing Hannah Arendt, occurs when there is no longer any distinction between public life and private life. When the buffoon in charge thinks he can tell us what to think.

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