TWO FROM EMPHASIS ADDED

Rob Salkowitz has popped out another couple of thought provoking essays recently, and I'm too busy with my studies to do any thought provoking of my own (I've got to re-read Uncle Vanya tonight--I get to play the title character for some scene work in class, which is pretty darned cool), so I'm channelling Emphasis Added here at Real Art this evening.

First off, Rob takes a few pot shots at Bush's "Ownership Society" nonsense, as I did a couple of days ago, but from a somewhat less macroeconomic point of view:

The On-your-Ownership Society

Why would anyone want to work for someone else when they could get these great advantages by being self-employed? Because it’s cold out here, that’s why.

No one pays for my health care, no one guarantees my salary every month. If I don’t get work on my own, I don’t get paid. If I don’t collect from recalcitrant clients, I don’t get paid. If someone decides to screw me over because I’m small and powerless, I don’t get paid. Fortunately, I’m fairly good at what I do and this hasn’t been a problem lately, but in the early part of my career (and still, for many smart and well-qualified colleagues), being the master and commander of one’s own craft more often resembles sailing on the crest of a tsunami than being the cruise director of the Love Boat.

And

It’s a fact of human nature that, if fed a steady stream of Horatio Alger stories about hard work and entrepreneurship, most people will eventually look in the mirror and see the next Donald Trump. It’s also a fact of human nature – and a fortunate one – that there’s only one Donald Trump and precious few like him. Like roulette, freedom and ownership in the capitalist sense produce a few big winners and lots and lots of frustrated losers.

In the business world, this is tolerable since it has many other benefits for economic growth and innovation. Business also has mechanisms for spreading risk and replacing unproductive parts. At the individual level, people don’t have that option. If you make a bad economic decision, you can’t take a “one-time charge against earnings” and absorb a stock-price hit. If age, disease or circumstance reduce your ability to compete in the workforce, you can’t outsource the unprofitable unit.

Click here for the more on why it's a bad idea for everybody to try to be a capitalist.

This next essay isn't really extending on anything I've posted here recently, but it's good reading that chills me to the bone if I think about it too much:

Vergiss Nicht

…is the inscription posted on the gates to Dachau, the former Nazi concentration camp (now historical site) outside of Munich. It means “Never Forget,” and since the world today is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s a good time to remember a few things about the Holocaust and the circumstances that brought it about.

And

Because the majority of the Nazis’ victims were Jews, it is natural to view Nazism as fundamentally anti-Semitic. This is true, of course, but it also confuses the issue. Unlike, say, the Russian Cossacks or the perpetrators of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, the Nazis’ problem with Jews was not primarily religious. It was partly racist, based on now-discredited theories of eugenics and biological explanations for cultural differences between human populations. Hitler clearly thought he was “purifying the herd” and pulling out the weeds so flowers could grow. But, critically, Hitler’s hatred of Jews was also specifically ideological.

And what was it he didn’t like? Hitler, the Austrian immigrant who became a zealous German patriot and acutely felt the humiliation of Germany’s defeat in World War I, rooted himself in nationalism. The aggrandizement of the German state and the German volk was the center of his political program. Nothing gets nationalists more pissed off than cosmopolitans – those educated, mostly urban elites who perceive greater commonality with others similarly situated elsewhere in the world than they do with the people and traditions of their own country.

Following World War I, cosmopolitanism was all the rage in Germany, and it was, often for good reason, intimately associated with avant gard art, left-wing politics, and transgressive sexual behavior. Then as now, this enraged conservatives, who saw the ideas and traditions at the root of their social and economic power threatened by “corrupt and decadent” tendencies emanating from the cities. Then as now, a disproportionate number of the writers, political agitators, “outrageous” entertainers, policy wonks and know-it-alls were Jews: assimilated Jews who felt comfortable enough in German society to flamboyantly step over lines held sacred by the God-fearing folks out in the hinterlands.

Click here for the rest.

Does any of this seem familiar? I won't be coy: conservatives in 21st century America are toying with Pandora's box. Fanning the fires of hyper-patriotism while blaming liberal cultured urbanites for national weakness is exactly what the Nazis were doing in order to solidify their political power in 1930s Germany. So, too, with American conservatives today. People believe our country could never go the way of Nazi Germany, but Germans then were human beings just like we are, no better, no worse. Things might not end up that way here. But, then, they might.

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