By Their Fruits

It somehow figures that I would have to stumble across this gem in the bowels of J.M. Coetzee's outstanding review of Norman Mailer's new book, but I find it strangely analogous to the current breed of lapdog demagoguery.

Of the aspects of Hitler's Vienna period on which the historically minded novelist might build, I mention three. First, despite at times being hungry and even desperate, Hitler disdained manual labor. Second, he hated Vienna. Third, in this phase of his life he can legitimately be called an artist and intellectual, albeit an undistinguished one.

Hitler disdained manual labor because he thought it incompatible with his status—a tenuous status, considering his defective education and the fact that his parents were born peasants— as a member of the lower middle class. His hostility to socialism grew out of a well-founded anxiety about being sucked into a lumpen(ragged) proletariat of workless rural migrants streaming to the capital from all quarters of the empire.

He disliked Vienna because in Vienna for the first time he was made to realize that, as an ethnic German, he belonged to a minority—albeit a powerful one—in a multiethnic state. On the streets he had to rub shoulders with, and even compete with, people who spoke unintelligible languages, dressed differently, smelled strange: Slovenians, Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Jews. A xenophobia that was at first suspicious and defensive, a provincial youth's mistrust of foreigners, hardened to become intolerant, aggressive, and finally genocidal.

Hitler may not have been much of an artist (he always had trouble with the human figure—a telling weakness), but there is no denying that, at least in his early years, he was an intellectual of sorts. He read incessantly (though only what he liked), he was interested in ideas (though only in ideas that fitted his preconceptions) and believed in their power, he involved himself in the arts (though his tastes were unshakably provincial and prematurely conservative).

....

All in all, the adventures of Adolf Hitler in the realm of ideas provide a cautionary tale against letting an impressionable young person loose to pursue his or her education in a state of total freedom. For seven years Hitler lived in a great European city in a time of ferment from which emerged some of the most exciting, most revolutionary thought of the new century. With an unerring eye he picked out not the best but the worst of the ideas around him. Because he was never a student, with lectures to attend and reading lists to follow and fellow students to argue with and assignments to complete and examinations to sit, the half-baked ideas he made his own were never properly challenged. The people he associated with were as ill-educated, volatile, and undisciplined as himself. No one in his circle had the intellectual command to put his chosen authorities in their place as what they were: disreputable and even comical mountebanks. [emphasis mine]

Normally a society can tolerate, even look benignly upon, a layer of autodidacts and cranks on the fringes of its intellectual institutions. What is singular about the career of Hitler is that through a confluence of events in which luck played some part, he was able not only to spread his nonsensical philosophy among his German countrymen but to put it into practice across Europe, with consequences known to all.

Sound like anyone you know? Cherry-picked affirmations, hopelessly cobbled together to be squinted at by the intellectually (and physically) lazy, the sort of people who can swim in a fountain of all sorts of wondrous ideas to explore and compare, and merely come up with the shiniest penny, the cheapest form of philosophizing. That these cluttered bozos run the country, even from the shadows and armpits of its infrastructure and institutions, would cause alarm in any other civilized country, but cannot muster much more than a nod of scant recognition here.

I assume it will take some sort of catalyzing event to grant the remaining sentient beings the will and organization to once and for all rid ourselves of the likes of Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D'Souza, people who make one wish that Gutenberg had thought better about his invention. Not being able to imagine the specifics of such an event does not mitigate its importance, the vitality of casting sloppy thinkers and shitty writers such as those two, and the rest of the wingnut welfare industry (and that's precisely what it is) into the pit of permanent unemployment.

When useless assholes like Billy Kristol and Rich Lowry -- as well as their "centrist" enablers like Bobo Brooks and Civility Broder -- are cleaning my gutters and washing my cars, then the universe will be set aright. Till then, they're not much better in terms of intellectual probity than the inbred paper-hanger who combed Vienna's back benches in search of dark self-actualization, instead of seeing what was laid right out before him for exactly what it was.