America’s New Normal
Americans were ignorant of a reality that East Europeans had come to know intimately.
.. Thus, even today, we tend to see the world around us as natural. The roads we take to work and back home; the schools we attend and lessons we learn; the institutions that shape our lives and the lives of friends and families we may take for granted: All of this, for Americans, reflects the natural order of things.
.. There was a time, he writes, when people would have called the police upon seeing a dead body in the street; soon there are so many corpses that they pretend not to see them.
.. when the quarter’s inhabitants are trucked out, never to return, the others grow accustomed to the sight. What do they see? That nothing could be more natural.
.. History teaches us that what was unnatural yesterday becomes natural today.
.. Political language, George Orwell observed in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” is devised “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
.. Much has been said about the ways in which Trump’s rhetoric has shattered the norms of political discourse in our country. Yet, among his accomplishments, Trump has made Orwell, one of the 20th century’s most sober and lucid observers, appear naïve. It is no longer that language deceives, but that it no longer matters.
.. ethics is, in the end, little more than seeing the world clearly and finding clear words to convey what one sees. Such an ethics allows us to see that we most often prefer not to see, makes us hear what most often we prefer not to hear.