Joe Bageant: Carpooling with Adolf Eichmann

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Carpooling with Adolf Eichmann: Dark mutterings from the sidelines
on Prozac cookies and our disturbing sort of sanity
by Joe Bageant
May 23, 2005

Any culture that spends as much money as we do on ugly cars, fast food and liposuction cannot possibly be sane. Certainly we are not paying attention to cause and effect. Then I consider those Australian aborigines who ritualistically smash their cranks with a heavy rock and conclude that we Eurotrash hog thieves have come at least a little way in the last few hundred years. Despite the aboriginals’ eco-friendly grasp of nature and the planet, we have an edge when it comes to male puberty. There is a certain element of national sanity in a country that grasps the post-pubescent male advantages of football over a heavy rock. Unfortunately, our national sanity is of the thoroughly dangerous sort -- the Third Reich sort. Remember that even Adolf Eichmann was determined to be completely sane by a panel of medical experts. At least as sane as you and me and if you would like to be excluded from this comparison, you may be excused. Like the other good Nazis, ole Eich would have easily made a respected member of American society today, probably as a Republican judicial nominee. He would have fit quite well into a nation of Americans going about its daily business caring for and protecting the homeland’s security and profitability. Eichmann slept well at nights, the same as most of us, unaffected in appetite. He would have made a good carpooler, telling us all about the kids and grandkids as we commute the monotonous asphalt strips to and from our jobs, creating the paper work and the information product, the plastics and the commerce of the fatherland, that great sprawling circuit board one sees from airplanes. Like Eichmann, we are efficient, productive, and most terribly of all, untroubled by guilt. Oblivious as gravestones. Sane....
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Bageant0523.htm

[Vitruvius]

1. In the'60s, I met an old man who knew Eichmann when they were both kids --

he was a family friend of my undergraduate thesis advisor.

Eichmann was a none-too-bright, incurious, and somewhat lazy child with big ideas about himself, including a Dubya-sized sense of entitlement. He went to college to study to be an engineer, flunked out, and became a not-so-good electrician with a well-earned reputation of being sloppy and slow. When the Nazis came in, opportunities opened up for none-too-bright individuals with no scruples and good ass-licking skills, and Eichmann hopped aboard. He rose rapidly and got to wear a spiffy uniform with shiny leather boots. He liked that. He sat behind a big desk. He liked that. People saluted him. He liked that. He was willing to sell his soul to get that and keep it.

And he did.


P.S: With the Rethugs in power, there are lots of opportunities with none-too-bright individuals with big ideas about themselves, no scruples, and good ass-licking skills.