THE BANALITY OF EVIL

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/2/09)

James Reeb and I shared a room in the barracks at Fort Richardson, Alaska. We were attached to Special Troops, he eventually becoming First Sergeant and I Sgt/Maj. Intending to become ministers, we argued theology.

I didn't see Jim again until we met in Selma, Alabama, for the march with Martin Luther King, Jr., twenty years later. He was a social worker in a Boston slum, and I the pastor of a church in a pricey Chicago suburb. We spoke briefly.

As he walked away with his friends after breakfast, a gang of unwashed, unkempt thugs set upon them and struck Jim's head with a lead pipe. Untreated by the local authorities, he later died. The thugs were acquitted to cheers.

Hustled off by the police to jail, then a bus station, I was told to get out of town if I didn't want the same thing to happen to me. I can still see their eyes, the thugs, the police, and the crowd, the blank, soulless eyes of death, Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil."

Now, the Republican "yuck, yuck" crowd is playing the racist card as a joke, the "I was only kidding" cruelty of cowards. Chip Saltsman, RNC chairman wannabe, parodied Barack Obama as "Barack the Magic Negro." Republican establishment types tepidly condemned the parody as "inappropriate" and "bad taste." W. Somerset Maugham wrote that the Philistines have replaced the rack with a wise crack. The lead pipe has become a wise crack in the "banality of evil."

THE REPUBLICAN DEATH INSTINCT

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D (12/23/08)

The history of the Republican Party exemplifies Sigmund Freud's concept of the death instinct. The recent attempt by the Republican senators to break the United Auto Workers is one more notch in their attempt to make themselves a permanent minority of disaffected whites.

Oddly enough, well-to-do and wealthy white Republicans who ought to be the heart and core of the establishment are gradually marginalizing themselves. Most African Americans left the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, during the Roosevelt Administration, becoming Democrats; however, that shift had the possibility of reversal until the Republican's infamous Southern Strategy in which they lured southern Democrats into the Republican fold. The message was a preference for whites.

Having lost black Americans, they set out to lose Hispanic Americans, first by Governor Pete Wilson's anti-Hispanic program in California. Having lost California, they set about with a completely jingoistic, irrational program of alienating every other Hispanic American, even families that have been here for generations. Along the line, with their nativism they also alienated most of the Asian-Americans.

Now, they're setting out to alienate the working people of America by trying to destroy the labor unions, chiefly one of the strongest, the UAW.

They've sought salvation in a phony coalition with the Fundamentalists who advocate a religiosity rooted in the Know-Nothings of the 1850's. The Fundamentalist's desire for a restrictive theocracy will alienate even those not already alienated.

Soon they'll be like my aunt Emily who often wondered if anyone were saved other than herself.