new old more book profile blog rings host

prev doomed to repeat it next
2001-05-26 | 7:54 p.m.

I'm on the board of directors of a small San Francisco publishing house. I don't do anything particularly directorial except go to board meetings and try to appear intelligent in spite of myself. A while back I agreed to sell books at a lecture given by one of their/our authors, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, so on Thursday I drove up to the air force base with a box of books and a cash box. Now you would think that this would not be a particularly stressful assignment---and you would be right---but nonetheless I got myself pretty riled up and worried before I ever got there.

Anything having to do with the military makes me nervous. As I once told a recruiter who made joining the army sound like a Club Med vacation, "I've seen Private Benjamin. I know the army doesn't like people like me." (This guy was outrageous. He even told me that if I went in as an officer, I wouldn't have to make my own bed.) I was told to get there early, but I was late. As soon as I unpacked the books, people wanted to buy them, but I was supposed to count them first, so I got a little frantic about that.

But it all turned out fine. I sold all the books I had. The people who bought them were all pleasant and personable and interested. They did not come across as scary right-wing hawks, if they were, though during the question-and-answer period after the lecture, one guy asked the speaker if she thought the U.S. ought to intervene in other places where human rights were being violated today, namely Afghanistan, etc. (She said yes.) Well I'm the first to admit I'm an uninformed bonehead. (Actually, that's a lie. I HATE to admit that I don't know stuff, but it's hard to lie about it to yourself.) But I didn't know that Afghanistan was still on the conservative hot spots list. I mean they used to talk about it a lot in the '80s, because of the Russians, but the only things I've heard about Afghanistan lately have been about the Taliban and the oppression of women (remember that e-mail petition that got that Brandeis student in such hot water?). Was it possible that this fellow was sincerely worried about real human rights abuses, like the oppression of women in Afghanistan? Perhaps.

A young rabbi, who had been an air force chaplain himself, got up and talked about the air force's Core Values: "Integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do." No other military branch in the world, he said, values personal integrity before service, and his implication was that a Holocaust cannot take place when these values are upheld in this order. I think he must be right, but whether the military really does things that way, I couldn't say.

One big shot, I can't remember which one, made reference to "the six million Jews and others" who were killed by the Nazis, and I leaned forward in my seat. Would he mention homosexuals? Is there ever any compassionate discussion of homosexuality in a military setting? Gypsies, Catholics, the mentally ill? But he didn't go any further. One young airman I spoke with at some length was, to use the vernacular, a total flamer. I wondered how he was finding his tour of duty.

There was also a group of eighth-graders there from a Lutheran school, but only one of them even picked up a book. As they were filing out of the room, a dull-eyed girl glanced down at the cover of one of the books and said, with the faintest hint of a sneer, "Is that her?" as if amazed to think that a woman in her seventies could ever have been a young girl. I know that about two percent of teenagers are worthwhile, just like the general population, but on the whole I find them hard to stomach, especially in groups. I have always felt this way, even as a teenager. I suppose their profound self-absorption and ignorance offend me because those are precisely the things I hate about myself. But they did manage to stay quiet during the lecture.

The lecture itself, though delivered matter-of-factly, inevitably made me cry. Especially when she talked about things that happened to her after the war. She said she didn't tell her children about her experiences during the war (in a Jewish ghetto in Poland and then at Auschwitz) until they were 18, because she didn't want them to grow up afraid of a German with a gun under the bed. Just recently she visited Germany and Poland and encountered persistent bigotry. So when people complain about "the Holocaust industry," just tell them to remember that there are still lots of people who haven't learned one damn thing from the past. Let's face it, according to the pollsters there are plenty of people who don't even know what country Adolf Hitler was from, or even who he was. So all the complainers can just piss off.

And to my to-do list, I will add the following: Try to be more informed about human rights abuses around the world. Get involved and do your best to help. Remember that the people who are getting fucked over and killed are really hoping that the rest of us will pay attention.

prev archive next
0 comments

if you're not reading mawm you're not reading me
random