Word: evil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...U.A.W. negotiated a deal they pretended was efficient: in exchange for labor peace, GM pays workers for a full day but allows them to leave early if they have finished their daily quota. GM and the U.A.W. also like to pretend that painful strikes are a necessary evil in building a world-class car company. But the pain of this strike will be mild by comparison if the company fails to resolve its deeper problems...
Remember Harry and Louise, the whiny yuppies who bad-mouthed Clinton's health-care bill to death? Well, meet their evil twins, Anne and John Paulk, the poster couple for the notion that homosexuality can be stopped if only heterosexuality is embraced. Once gay and unbelieving, Anne and John accepted Christ and then each other: one cured homosexual married one saved lesbian. There's a Jack for every Jill in the land of the Christian right...
Hitler and the holocaust remain the 20th century baseline for the discussion of evil, the ne plus ultra. But as Ron Rosenbaum writes in his restlessly probing and deeply intelligent book Explaining Hitler (Random House; 444 pages; $30), Hitler has escaped intellectual capture. The old tabloid survival myth (HITLER ALIVE IN ARGENTINA!) perversely comes true in the realm of our historical deliberations. "The search for Hitler," says Rosenbaum, "has apprehended not one coherent, consensus image of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers, competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of competing visions...
What Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil has engendered an astonishing banality of explanation. A 1991 installment of television's Unsolved Mysteries focused on three "Diabolic Minds"--those of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer, it seems, "had a stern father and was unable to establish a healthy relationship to his mother." Auschwitz resulted, you see, from the child Adolf's low self-esteem. A 1981 book published in Germany suggested in all seriousness that when Hitler was a youth, a billy goat took a bite out of his penis. Hence his subsequent career...
...impossible to think about civilization, responsibility, human possibility, evil--or, of course, God--without confronting Hitler. In this brilliantly skeptical inventory of the world's Hitler-thinking, Rosenbaum analyzes not only the multiple Hitler theories but also the agendas and fantasies that the theorizers bring to their subject. His book may be useful to the surprising number of people--Flat-Earthers of the moral realm--who, even now, refuse to believe in the existence of evil. To them, admitting evil's reality seems to empower the irrational in an intolerable way, to give it a certain vulgar, primitive mystification...