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.
Another Age of Discovery
Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance” — about lessons we can draw from the period 1450 to 1550, known as the Age of Discovery. It was when the world made a series of great leaps forward, propelled by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Copernicus and Columbus, that produced the Renaissance and reshaped science, education, manufacturing, communications, politics and geopolitics.
.. “Gutenberg’s printing press provided the trigger,” Goldin told me by email, “by flipping knowledge production and exchange from tight scarcity to radical abundance. Before that, the Catholic Churches monopolized knowledge, with their handwritten Latin manuscripts locked up in monasteries. The Gutenberg press democratized information, and provided the incentive to be literate.
.. Savonarola was amongst the first to tap into the information revolution of the time, and while others produced long sermons and treatises, Savonarola disseminated short pamphlets, in what may be thought of as the equivalent of political tweets.”
A Week for All Time
They will remember, a century from now, who stood up to the tyrant Donald Trump and who found it expedient to throw out the most basic American values — the “Vichy Republicans,” as the historian Ken Burns called them in his Stanford commencement speech.
The shrug from Mitch McConnell, the twisted explanation of Paul Ryan, who said Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, but he’s ours — party before country. As well, the duck-and-hide Republicans, so quick to whip out their pocket copy of the Constitution, now nowhere to be seen when the foundation of that same document is under assault by the man carrying their banner.
.. but it’s just a role
.. the time when the man leading the party of Lincoln suggested that a sitting president was a traitor, somehow sympathetic to Islamic nihilists who slaughter innocent Americans. Trump implied it. Then he banned a newspaper for its headline about it.
.. “Man up,” wrote the Republican strategist Rick Wilson. “Show courage. Say what’s in your hearts; he’s insane. He’s poison. He’s doomed. He’s killing the party.”
..Seal this week. Put it in a time capsule. Teach it. History will remember. But come November, will we?
Donald Trump Responds to Orlando Attack by Exploiting Fear, Not Easing It
In his apocalyptic speech on Monday warning that terrorism could wipe out the United States — “There will be nothing, absolutely nothing, left,” he said — Mr. Trump substituted Muslim immigrants for the wolf pack. A single gunman carried out the Orlando massacre, he said. “Can you imagine what they’ll do in large groups, which we’re allowing now to come here?”
.. Mr. Trump appears wholly focused on the idea that America has reached an existential moment and that only he can save the country, a classic tactic of demagogy.
.. historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recalled that the “aroused demagogic fear” after Pearl Harbor had led to the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II — something Mr. Trump has said that, while he hated the idea, he might have supported at the time.