Heil Kitty!

Last night I finished the book "Gag Rule," by Lewis Lapham (limited preview at Google Books). I quite enjoyed it- terrific prose, makes a convincing case for his position, everything I want in a good piece of rhetoric. I do want to go through it again, because there were several passages that I thought were powerful and wanted to share here. However, I just came across a piece at Sadly, No! that drew my attention to a recurrent theme that I'm really tired of. (I mentioned yesterday that this past year had exhausted me- I'm probably going to end up doing a bit of elaborating on that in days to come.) And yes, Lapham commits the same exhausting blunder, which is why I bring it up. (In fairness to the author, I think he draws some meaningful and insightful parallels; it is unwarranted in this case to describe it as a blunder. It's just that coming across four or five references to Nazis, etc., in a day is tiresome.) Why is it that if a speaker or writer wants to demonize an opponent, the first characterization that springs to mind is Nazis and Fascism? On one hand, the answer is simple: to our current mindset, they are the worst of the worst, evil incarnate, Moloch manifest. I'm not going to argue with this; what I want to point out is the tiresome hyperbole here. I have from time to time described a rock outcrop as "an orgasmic experience." This is an intentionally jokey, hyperbolic, and relatively rare choice of words- maybe once every few years in conversations with friends who understand and enjoy my fascination with rocks and the earth. But what if I started describing everything I liked or enjoyed as "an orgasmic experience," or "better than sex?" At what point would my audience decide "that guy must be terrible in bed?" Or "he must really not enjoy sex." My trivialing of the metaphor would trivialize the thing itself.And that is exactly my point. We have so minimized the extremity of Hitler's Germany that it has become a punch line rather than an apt analogy or metaphor. I'm tired of conservatives referring to liberals as Nazis; I'm tired of liberals referring to conservatives as fascists; I'm tired of teenagers whose parents are worried about them referring to Mom and Dad as "the Gestapo." (From Sadly, No!)

There are reasons to remember Nazi Germany; this kind of hyperbole, oddly enough, only causes people to forget the lessons they should remember, and makes our continuing efforts to fully understand the human capacity for "evil" more difficult
So no more Nazi references this year. 'K?