Tonight I made myself a make-do meal at a friend's house, where I'm staying mostly alone, during an extended visit to Washington DC.
But that make-do meal became tinged -- almost became metaphoric -- because of the book I'm reading, The Kindly Ones, the somewhat controversial faux memoir of a Nazi middle-bureaucracy functionary.
Littell, the author, writes as Max Aue, a mid-level SS officer in WWII, who has escaped prosecution and is at the end of his life. He has no regrets, no confessions, just observances of how banal, trivial, bureaucratic, day-to-day decisions can (and will) lead to a societal reality that is impossible to break, and must simply be lived within. It cannot be resisted, but can only be vanquished.
I'm only 1/4 into the 900-page novel, but already, as I've lived through the bureaucratic deposition of the initial extermination of Jews in Poland, and then the abortive march toward Moscow, I'm confronting the horror of how seemingly necessary, how "of course" the steps to evil can be. No single act, just a sequence of small acts that participate in (and produce) horror.
And then I got up, and went to the kitchen to make a make-do dinner.
I got a maxi-tortilla (the last one in the 12x12 plastic bag) from the fridge. I got the last of the deli turkey (meat-specific plastic wrap, within a slide-seal plastic bag, within a storebrand plastic bag, refrigerated), which I then put onto the tortilla.
Then, I got an individually-wrapped "sharp cheddar" slice of pasteurized processed cheese food (Kraft!), and broke it up upon the turkey. I then rolled it upon the counter, making a tube of sufficient nutrition.
And then I saw the trash.
Plastic, upon plastic, upon plastic. I knew that in my hand, I was holding material that might, if undisturbed by sunlight, last 10,000 to 100,000 years. If it eventually joined the Continent-sized Plastic Soup in the Pacific (or the Atlantic), then the plastic would break down a bit more rapidly, over a few years or decades, into increasingly plankton-sized particles that would damage ocean life for a hundred years.
And I realized that the bureaucracy of evil and of waste were the same -- each thoughtless, it-must-be-so, of course we can't object because it's intrinsic to the fabric of how we live, how we survive, how we think of ourselves.
Unconscious, thoughtless, unanalyzed actions almost inevitably lead to fundamental errors, I think.
In this house, there is almost no means to recycle.
I ended up throwing away plastic inside of plastic inside of plastic into the trash, a plastic bag that contained so much more plastic.
And I knew that all over the country, and even the world, that same thing was happening without the least thought. It's just trash. To be disposed of.
"It's trash, I'll make it go away" is so very easy to think.
My good dear friend, who has generously opened his house to me, doesn't think of himself as being complicit in an evil. He's a great guy.
For him and his life, singly-wrapped cheese is sensible. Driving to the store just about every day is a ritual he enjoys.
He doesn't think of it as being complicit in evil.
Should he? As someone paying close attention to environmental collapse, I want him to.
But he has a life to live, kids to deal with, a tenuous job and a mortgage. I live by his rules when I visit, naturally.
But this juxtaposition of complicity has raised all sorts of questions.
Is this a full Godwin? I don't think so.
In this case, I'm not comparing us to Hitler. Rather, to those who knew what was going on, but for whom it was normalized.
And unfortunately, the victims are us; we're all complicit in our own holocaust.
We, my friends, must shift radically, and convince our friends, if we are to change the trajectory of where we're aiming.
I've already changed my own trajectory. I'll be talking with my buddy in a couple of days.
We all need to talk with each other, and do a gut-check on whether we're driving ourselves to the gas chambers.