Jared Kushner: Time to Step Up and Show Dad the Difference Between Right and Wrong
I don’t think Kushner convinced too many people, most certainly not his own family, who are royally pissed at his attempt to use the murder of their relatives to score political points for a deranged Cheeto-colored mental patient who looks like he puts his hair on with a defective soft-serve machine every morning. “I have a different take-away from my Grandparents’ experience in the war,” Marc Kushner, a New York City-based architect and first cousin, wrote in a Facebook post Thursday morning. “It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate.”
Agreed. And I would also add it’s our responsibility to recognize certain alarming signs when we see them, and to call them by their right names. Which is why I was found myself up at 3 a.m. the other night, reading this excellent piece by George Saunders in The New Yorker about Trump’s followers; Saunders being one of the few journalists who seems to have actually turned his eye away from the candidate and onto those who are so inflamed by him. (If you’re going to read one thing about Trump this week, let it be this.)
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However, between Trump’s followers and the rank-and-file members of the Nazi Party, there’s not a fingernail clipping’s worth of difference. A great disservice has been done to the world over the years in our “Other-ing” of the Nazis: that they were somehow uniquely cruel, unimaginably evil, irreplicable and inhuman. But they were anything but. The early(ish) members of the Nazi parties, the people you see changing and heil-ing in all those black-and-white newsreels in 1932, were people very much like those in this Saunders piece: angry, frustrated, feeling that they had somehow been cheated out of what was theirs by right. Wishing to return to an imaginary time before the war, before Versailles, before the emancipation of women and the entry of minorities and immigrants into public life, before cosmopolitanism, before compassion, before, before, before.
Because there is no measurable distinction between the 70-year-old man slapping at and ridiculing at a 17-year-old girl in this article and, say, the passerby in 1938 Vienna jeering at a sobbing Jewish woman as she is made to scrub shit from the streets with her toothbrush. And if you had been there, and taken one of those jeerers aside (as Saunders does) and asked them if minority groups deserve this treatment, no doubt they would have grown thoughtful, as these Trump supporters did, and said, no, of course not, at least, not those people; obviously there are exceptions, but most of them, well…
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