I have recently re-read Victor Klemperer’s “I Will Bear Witness” and found it to be as relevant now as when I first read it years ago. If you are unfamiliar with the two-volume work, allow me to recommend it. Klemperer was a Professor of Philology in Dresden during World War Two. Though Protestant by conversion, he nevertheless had the poor taste to continue to permit his Jewish parents’ blood to course his veins. This during a time when “Blut und Boden” was the gold standard for what passed for culture in Germany.

Klemperer was quite a writer. He ends his first volume with:

"Hitler, the Barnum of Hell, as a proper circus director is always out for the never before seen, thus instead of the seven lean years he has given us eight. This eighth could no longer be called lean, but a skeleton, since the mountains of corpses in the East were stinking to high heaven."

This of course refers to Hitler’s infamous Russian Campaign.

As I closed the book, I felt uneasy. Truth be told, there is not a whole lot in the course of the book to feel easy about; whenever I see a movie or read a book on the events leading up to the Holocaust I feel a sickening sense of impotence. I want to grab the main characters and scream at them to either grab a meat cleaver and pay the new Chancellor a visit, or sell the family jewels and leave.
There was something disturbingly familiar about the methods the Nazis used to impose their ideology on an otherwise sane and cultured race of people. From the first laws imposing limits on property holdings and the “Jew Taxes” right up to the deportations to the East, there was scarcely a day when some incremental step that eroded basic liberty was not implemented. The effect (to me) was similar to watching salami disappear; it happened slice by thin slice. It was almost as if the Nazis feared that the ordinary German citizen might not tolerate the intended ends, and so chose to inoculate them in tiny doses.
Of course, these events have been written about and filmed to the point where we seem to have become anesthetized to them. It is only when we place these historical vignettes as a template over current events that the uneasiness truly sets in, and they become viscerally real.
I draw your attention to the Patriot Act. I consider most of its panic-driven components a direct assault on our Constitution. I blame our representatives (of both parties) for allowing this abomination to become law. If we continue down this road, terrorists will not have to fly into our buildings to bring us to our knees; we will have done their work for them.

A quote from Patrick Henry that bears restating:

“What will you do when evil men take office? When evil men take office, the whole gang will be in collusion! They will keep the people in utter ignorance and steal their liberty by ambuscade!”

As Americans we love to complain. Our government, we whine, is unresponsive to our needs. Politicians, we moan, are cynical millionaires who are interested solely in perpetuating their power. These complaints from an electorate that can barely turn out half its citizens to pull a lever on Election Day. An electorate that has only a vague idea of who actually represents them in Congress, or what specific rights their Constitution guarantees to them. An electorate that tolerates statements such as the following, as reported in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, said on Friday that "it is impossible" to have all Americans covered by health insurance, but he predicted that Congress would take incremental steps to expand coverage this year.
"It is impossible to get everybody covered," Dr. Frist said at a meeting with journalists. "It's impossible to get to 100 percent."

Impossible? He must mean undesirable, right? Dr. Frist is a Republican. His party believes that it is not the responsibility of government to provide services such as health care, social security, and welfare. If I’m wrong here, please correct me Bill.

Any one with half a brain and a calculator should be able to figure out that it is precisely because forty-three million Americans are uninsured that we are in a health care crisis in the first place. But we learned all that during the debate on the subject during the Nineties didn’t we? We learned that because we all paid close attention to the dialog and our own research, and not to the ads on TV.
Guess not. Had we paid attention we would not have shot ourselves in the foot and flatly rejected the idea of universal coverage.
I would suggest to Dr. Frist that a country that was capable of a Manhattan Project and Doolittle’s Raid on Tokyo can, and indeed should, institute a similar effort to end this embarrassing and immoral problem. Unless of course he finds it ideologically undesirable to do so. Whaddya say, Bill?

Now we’re having fun! Let’s stay with this newspaper thing for a bit!

Here’s another gem, again from the New York Times. This time the regressive right-winger of record is Vice President Dick Cheney. The subject is foreign policy. Dick is responding to John Kerry’s recent allegation that a significant number of foreign leaders find our current President less than adequate. Let’s listen in:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — …Mr. Cheney went on to describe President Bush as a leader of vision and determination.
"These are not times for leaders who shift with the political winds, saying one thing one day and another the next," Mr. Cheney said.

While Cheney’s entire statement is rife with belly laughs, let’s ignore the “vision and determination” thing (stupid people are often the most determined) and examine the last sentence.
Most intelligent people do in fact change their minds on a frequent basis. I have found that they often say one thing one day and another the next. That is due, Dick, to the fact that input and events are usually in a constant state of flux.
Any leader of government or industry who can think on his feet, examine himself objectively, respond appropriately and rapidly to changing events, and communicate effectively in his native language, belongs in office. Monosyllabic ideologues do not.

Thank you, my Gantseh Megillah family for your indulgence. I’ll be scanning the back pages of the papers for more fodder! ‘Til next time…