Word: arendt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...presentation of Holocaust there was a lot of banality quite different from the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt described in her controversial 1963 book on Adolf Eichmann. The commercials, for example, were ridiculous and outrageous intrusions. Viewers drawn back into the most painful darknesses of the century would suddenly, repeatedly, find themselves jolted into clusters of ads that seemed almost deliberately designed to offend: the viewer's mind was forced to make the transit from Auschwitz to Bottoms Up pantyhose-one for those women who want the fanny rounded, the other for those who want it smooth...
...attempt to bolster the argument of some psychologists that "onlies" tend to do better in life than those folks distracted by sibling rivalries. The compendium is impressive. Among the artists and poets, actors and statesmen, comics and scientists who were only children: Ann-Margret, Ansel Adams, Hannah Arendt, Charles Baudelaire, Willy Brandt, Arthur Burns, Richard Daley, Indira Gandhi, Elvis Presley, Richard Pryor, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Renata Tebaldi, Queen Victoria, Mary Wells, Jonathan Winters, Edmund Wilson. The trouble is, one could easily draw up at least as impressive a litany of luminaries who had brothers and sisters...
...HANNAH ARENDT...
...find enough people who ?convinced of the righteousness of their cause?will maim or murder under orders from an absolute authority. The torture subculture provides these people with a kind of identity. It is also a dramatic and telling proof of what Historian and Social Critic Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." The most inhumane cruelty of man to man can become routine if it is surrounded and buffered by an apparatus of normality...
Anyway, Cockburn is suited to these times because he understands what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." The wild-eyed potential generalissimos of Thompson's day have given way to the faceless bureaucrats, unknown corporate executives and "liberal" intellectuals who really make the rules. His weekly columns written with Ridgeway--an Institute for PolicyStudiesradical--under the heading of Surplus Value (economic issues) and The Greasy Pole (presidential politics), are generally thoughtful and serious pieces. Cockburn saves his true Private Eye spirit for the Press Clips. Also featured are "Dear Dr. Pressclips; Helpful Hints for Harried Hacks" (where Marshall Frady...