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March 31, 2006

"But he had a tremendous singing voice."

While I was taking a break from the Judiciary Committee censure resolution hearings this morning, I found a curious brush war had broken out across the blogosphere.

At AmericaBlog, John Aravosis recounted the story this way:

Nine months ago I wrote a post that got a good amount of attention, it was about the fear of money that some people have on the left. I think it's time for the next installment.

Last night I attended the Radio and Television Correspondents Association annual dinner in Washington, DC. I got invited by a radio-industry friend who had bought a few tables. It's a biggest-of-the-year kind of gala where anyone who's anyone in journalism and politics attends, from Senators to national TV anchors. The president is usually the invited guest, but as Bush was in Mexico, Cheney attended.

I knew, because of past experience with some reading this blog, that when I got back home and posted photos of the event a minority of my readers, but a very vocal minority, would be upset. Why? Because I'd be wearing a tuxedo at a party with famous people.

Da-da-da-dum.

The reaction was quick and furious, and rather vicious. [ . . . ]

There is something seriously wrong here.

I have a good friend in liberal politics who always worked too much. We're talking until midnight every evening. He was working on AIDS policy, civil rights, education, poverty, all the good stuff. But he refused to ever take time to smell the roses, let alone sleep. I remember telling him once "what's the point in fighting for a world you never plan to live in?" I'd ask the same of those who are the first to criticize any time I flower an orchid or visit New York. If you love this country and this world so much, why do you so hate anyone who tries to enjoy it?

That Aravosis went immediately to money (and class) as an explanation for the reaction he got says a lot--more than I wanted to know, really--about the demons he might be dealing with. It was kind of fun to read about him getting ready for the Dinner--fretting about his tux, and so forth. But I'm happy to set that issue aside. Last I looked, the comments on these threads at his site were numbering in the thousands, and several other blogs have posted about it, so those who want to chew on that are getting their chance.

And for the record, I've long said that if you're going to fight the good fight, it'd damn well better be fun. My idea of fun usually doesn't involve tuxedos (at least not on me), it's true, but the principle still applies.

I'm more taken with a somewhat narrower part of this--one that began life as almost a throwaway in his original post-Dinner post, but which probably was what lit the fuse. He posted a photo of himself and Katherine Harris, smiling for the camera:

Yes, me and Katherine Harris. Interestingly, she was very nice, and a friend who knows her quite well says Harris is the nicest, NICEST person you will ever know. Doesn't mean we like her politically, but it amazes me how "nice" so many of the most strident Republicans are in person.

At Hullabaloo, tristero comes close to framing the problem in a way I find more convincing and useful: not about money (or at least it shouldn't be), not about being likable, not about posing for pictures with political enemies (although he keeps coming back to the "kicking Harris in the shins" theme, so draw your own conclusions). It was more about the odd naiveté of Aravosis, a little shocked at meeting a political enemy and finding her capable of charming social behavior.

Why should that be surprising? Even Dick Cheney, we're told, can be a pleasant enough fellow in his off-time, and that's not hard to believe; if, for example, you know you can shoot your friend in the face with a shotgun and make him apologize for it, then yes, I suppose the world probably would strike you as a pretty good place and that probably would show itself in your demeanor from time to time.

Tristero points out--correctly, I think--that at that level of political play even monsters have the ability to switch the pleasantness on and off, simply as a tactical matter, or they never would have made it that far. As Jack Napier once said regarding one of his own political/business rivals:

Now you fellas have said some pretty mean things--some of which were true under that fiend Boss Grissom. He was a thief, and a terrorist. On the other hand, he had a tremendous singing voice.

That's the standard exculpatory expression, really: dreadful at his job, but lovely singing voice.)

The discussion takes an interesting--and probably useful--turn when Aravosis later posts, with not much added comment, another writer discussing Hanna Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: Notes on the Banality of Evil.

Arendt concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of exercising the kind of judgement that would have made his victims' suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him. Eichmann failed to exercise his capacity of thinking, of having an internal dialogue with himself, which would have permitted self-awareness of the evil nature of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to use self-reflection as a basis for judgement, the faculty that would have required Eichmann to exercise his imagination so as to contemplate the nature of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his victims.

And now, I think, we're down to cases:

We want our villains to be Darth Vader (in the first film, when he was morally unalloyed): We want them purely evil, not partly so, not even mostly so. It removes troublesome ambiguities about our own motives and actions, and it ennobles us and our struggle against them.

And when it turns out they're not Darth Vader--when it turns out that they're to some extent ordinary people who've simply submitted to the bureaucratic impulse in the extreme, incapable of distinguishing routine filing from horrific crime--when it turns out, for example that they have the knack for charming talk at a formal dinner on in a green room--we risk a feeling of moral vertigo. It makes our own fight against them less certain. It also makes our moral distance from them less comfortably removed; what if it really would only take a nudge to make us like them?

Faced with that possibility, it's less surprising that Aravosis got a truckload of angry comments from the true believers in his community.

Posted by Nothstine at March 31, 2006 02:31 PM