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."