As you may have noticed, our friend Robert Thomas and your faithful servant have had a bit of a dustup on our respective blogs. It had to do with his characterization of a new film about Hanna Arendt, a lady who made a name for herself by writing a book whose thesis was that Adolf Eichmann, the master logistics type of the Holocaust, who was instrumental in killing millions of people, was not so much evil as he was a banal bureaucrat, who aside from killing millions was a pretty boring sort of fellow. What we should have done was to characterize the Arendt book and film with a hearty “Horsepuckey!” and let it go at that. But we faced the problem that these days many people, especially the younger ones may not know Eichmann from Eisenhower, so we felt we had to say something substantive to make it clear to our readership that Arendt may be something less than wonderful. These days, you gotta do cultural missionary work like that regularly.*
So we did write about it instead, and thereby we precipitated and exchange with Thomas that is on line now, and that you should read for yourself if you have nothing better to do with your time. Or you can take our suggestion to heart, call the Arendt propaganda “Horsepuckey!” and in your spare time go barbeque some hamburgers in the back yard which — it seems to us — will be time better spent. But if you want to know what the fuss is about from a third party that has no dog in Kanner-Thomas contretemps, read an article by Sol Stern in the monthly magazine COMMENTARY of September 2013, at p. 43, entitled The Lies of Hannah Arendt. The title should give you the idea.
Further your affiant sayeth naught.
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* You think we’re kidding? Then get this: the other day we spoke with a brilliant, accomplished young woman, a magna cum laude college graduate, who blandly informed us that she never heard of the movie My Fair Lady, or of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion on which it was based, or, come to think of it, of Shaw himself. None of which has anything to do with eminent domain either, but is stuff that should enlighten you as to the sort of society in which you live.