No Equivocation, Ever

A morning to wake and work in a hotel room.  Flights’ not till two.  It seems a remarkable amount of time without meetings, available for working, when stared at it the day before.  But one call and then another after returning from the breakfast up on the club lounge and most of my “work” time had evaporated.  And with one, two and now three people calling it won’t long till I start to be late. 

Why do I so religiously pile into Starbucks at these airports?  On the way down I got a chicken Caesar roll in Beijing on the way down and a mala roll in Shenzhen upon arrival.  There is something opioid about coffee and American homogeneity, lubricated with earnest cool, lubricated with American soft power.  I don’t have a relationship with anywhere else in this airport besides the lounge.  And their food and beverages suck.

On the plane, I should be drafting emails that I can send when I’m back on line, or dutifully reviewing some company collateral.  Instead I’m reading history and I find myself getting increasingly angry.  I want to punch the seat in front of me.  My book, “A Writer at War” by Vasily Grossman.   He has traced the ignoble retreat from Hitler’s not-so-surprising attack of Russia at the war’s outset, to the turning point in the battle of Stalingrad, and on the unstoppable march of the Red Army back toward Berlin.  But along the way we pay a visit to Grossman’s parent’s home.  His mom, like nearly every other Jewish person in the town of Berdychiv, was murdered.  We begin to get a sense of what has happened in German occupied territories as the Soviets move through.  And it all comes to an Inferno-like apex when he reaches Treblinka and makes accessible the unspeakable insanity of one race, mechanized, to destroy another. 

Anger, as this all had contemporary relevance.  Imagining shouting matches with Donald and his cabinet in my mind, considering the unpardonable tolerance for Nazism on the part of the President.  There can be no equivocation when one reads Grossman on Treblinka.  This is the slide of humanity to its darkest place, institutionalized, rationalized, normalized.  There can be no ground given Donald Trump here.  None.  We ought to turn Grossman’s Treblinka into a Fox News special for him to consider.  Nazism: no excuses, ever.  No equivocation, ever.  Evil. 

Friday, 09/08/17