The discounting point about the grossly misunderstood French resistance is right there: “occupation.” The French had plenty of their own homegrown fascists, the fascist- friendly, opportunists, etc. who made hay once the Nazis came to town. But the Vichy government was only formed because France was invaded by a foreign nation.

Not us. We are doing this to ourselves.

It is much easier to galvanize the incurious and apolitical against a foreign invader than it is against their cousin who spent too long on the QAnon boards, or against the co-worker who you’ve always meant to ask to hang out after hours, or your best friend whose husband is an ICE officer.

Our American fascists understand this implicitly. That’s why their pitch isn’t, “We know José and Claudia have been your neighbors for over 20 years, your children have grown up together, but they’re the problem so we’re going to send masked men without a warrant to put them in cuffs, then a van, then a camp somewhere, and leave their kids to figure out how to pay rent.”

No.

The pitch is “We’ve been invaded. It’s an infestation, a blight on our otherwise healthy (white) country, and anyone who pushes back is infected, broken, deformed.”

(“It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled – to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”)

Here’s a tip: if one side has to couch their argument in platitudes, euphemism and bad metaphor, then you’re probably headed towards a motte-and-bailey fallacy in which you might agree to a “soft” position: “Girls’ sports should be for girls,” only to discover you’ve actually co-signed on to something much more reactionary: “Trans-Women are predators; competitive, strenuous sports diminish women’s fertility; so we should ban those sports for girls who should only want to be demure mothers.”

You think I’m joking? From the Heritage Project :

“The current Title IX regime as applies to sports (and elsewhere) is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman — one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented towards the goods of family and motherhood. […] Women also benefit from activities that build health […] grace, confidence, […] and beauty. Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports.”

Voila.

Right, French.

The French were invaded by a foreign army, not by immigrants, or decadent monsters, or Satanists who look pretty old for sipping immortality juice from children’s brains. (Explaining the tenets of QAnon has replaced explaining “How Twilight ended,” as my favorite relaxation technique.)

So, no, our resistance efforts can’t resemble Paris in the 1940s. If anything, the more accurate historical context for our resistance to our homegrown fascism would be Germany. Which is worrying because… how that all worked out.

I can tell you a couple things that I’ve gleaned from the Nazi-era diaries I’ve read.

Many times a diarist will write something along the lines of “These clowns are so incompetent, and their leader is such a buffoon, this can’t possibly go on.” Sound familiar? How about, “Every day is so disturbing, there’s so much violence. Someone will step in soon.” Or that calm clarity that it’s about the economy, and the moment everyone starts losing money, or when oil is X dollars a barrel, they’ll knock it off. On October 28, legendary newsman William Shirer wrote in his Berlin diary,

“I hear in business circles that severe rationing of clothing will begin next month. The truth is that, having no cotton and almost no wool, the German people must get along with what clothing they have until the end of the war.”

He wrote that in 1939. Eventually the Germans would wear shoes and suits made of pulp. The war and the regime would go on.

I hear worrying echoes of the same sentiments these days, even from scholars I respect: the President has mouldy soup for brains and “the wheels are coming off the wagon.” This gives hopeful people the idea that all we have to do is wait for the President to die, and our nightmare will be over.

Let me put this in a whole separate paragraph, and in italics and in bold so I can accurately convey how much I do not agree that we’re free and clear as soon as Donald Jessica Trump dies, or after the Midterms, for that matter. While the future remains unwritten, I believe this is the beginning. Not the end.

Yet these diary entries are written by the people who, while waiting idly in the bleachers, are at least still watching the game.

What about everyone who isn’t? What about people’s diaries of the times that would be about the fish they caught the other day, what their mother-in-law did this time, questions about if the boss even noticed.

Well, now we come to my point. Those people? They were stupid.

Just like everyone who doesn’t know that California has eight concentration camps running right now, with another planned in El Centro.

I don’t mean ignorant. I don’t mean foolish. I mean stupid.

It’s not my definition, it belongs to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He was the best of what we know as the German resistance. A Lutheran pastor, he spoke out against the Nazis from the beginning. He’d been to the American South. He’d been to Harlem, gave a sermon in its Abyssinian Baptist Church. As the Nazis came to power, he took to the radio and warned of a growing idolatrous cult. He was part of a resistance that was rooted in the church, speaking out about the beginnings of the Nazi death machine.

This is truncated, but the death camps began as a secretive euthanasia program in which the mentally ill, elderly, physically disabled, the unhoused, addicts — all communities which faith leaders regularly interact with, especially those with strong commitments to justice and service. When people began to go missing from asylums, sanatoriums, hospitals, jails, eventually people started noticing. Especially families who got letters about their loved ones being moved for vague reasons, quickly followed by even more vague death notices. The Protestant church, already staunchly positioned against the Nazi Reich, not only spoke out but used theirs pulpits, conveying not only their horror, but an unflinching moral clarity that revealed just how sinister all that innuendo and cliche would be.

Bonhoeffer would be executed in 1945, a month before the end of the German war, after being tried with no evidence, no defense, and no witnessess, for participating in a failed assassination plot against Hitler. Early on in his incarceration however, Bonhoeffer wrote extensive letters. One of these included his idea that stupid was far more dangerous than evil.

The theory is that evil, in its chaos, and nihilism, “always contains within itself the seeds of its own subversion.” Think Hitler, “in a ditch, covered in petrol and on fire.” Think Mussolini, hanging from a pole, again covered in flammables.

Stupidity, on the other hand, can go on forever, as indeed it has. But, let’s not confuse things. Working off this excellent video by philosopher Jonny Thomson, we’re not talking about foolishness — like when you watch yourself lock your keys inside your car, or spend over a decade thinking the name of the 80s yachtpop act was one man named Holland Oates.

Neither are we talking about ignorance, as in, ‘I don’t know the name of the group who sings the song, “You Make My Dreams Come True," I should ask someone.’ Ignorance can be addressed.

The stupidity we’re talking about, Bonhoeffer’s idea of it, is comprised of three elements:

• Outsourcing critical thinking by trusting an authority figure of any quality to ascertain the validity, morality, likelihood, etc of a context. For example, trusting and believing everything your guru, priest, favorite TikToker, parent or writer says. Asking your AI assistant if you should change your business model or leave your wife.

• Conformity. If your beliefs remain unchallenged by knowledgeable and accurate sources, and if you isolate yourself from any one who disagrees with you, what you believe, what you think, quickly devolves and flattens. In groupthink, belief becomes identity, group cohesion, and any debate becomes an attack on who you are. It becomes a fight for your life.

• Willful Ignorance is a different thing than “I don’t know who sings this song.” It’s, “I don’t know who sings this song, and I don’t want to know.”

I should drop the bit. This is what I really mean:

“I don’t know what’s happening with ICE deportations, and I don’t want to know.”

“I don’t know why the US won’t provide evidence that the 200+ dead people were in fact 'narco-terrorists,’ and I don’t want to know.”

“I don’t know how the President’s finances were entangled with Jeffery Epstein, and I don’t want to know.”

Or, as I read this morning from James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,”

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

Baldwin was writing of not only his literal brother, but of the brotherhood of the Black American experience, part of which is those hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives.

Do you know how many Black deaths in the past twenty years constitute a death by lynching? Do you want to know?

Perhaps, like me, you are navigating choppy waters with friends and loved ones over who is paying attention, and who isn’t. Who is doing anything, and who is doing nothing.

Remember the difference between evil and stupid, and remember how much more dangerous the stupid are. Evil is rare, maybe extraordinary. Perhaps here is where I would complicate Arendt. What she saw in Eichmann, the brain numbing cliches, the refusal to step out of party lines, or think about what it was all for: what happens when the trains arrive? To me, this is Bonhoeffer’s stupidity.

Stupidity sits beside Evil. On the other side, Cynicism, making a profit off of the guileless and gormless, selling courses on How to Make Friends and Rape Sluts, asking for a donation to Save the Children.

There’s a bit from British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, in which two SS officers are awaiting the Russians. One notices that their uniform caps “actually have little pictures of skulls on them.” This prompts him to wonder… “Are we the baddies?”

I know that some might see the pictures of an old man being forced into the snow in his undergarments, of children packed into a cage eating mouldy bread, of masked men fist bumping while they march tax payers into a concentration camp in the middle of Los Angeles, of the blood soaked front seat of Renée Good, and see “justice.” I know that some have never and never will see any of these images, even if they looked right at them; that’s what it means to be willfully blind.

I can only look at us and wonder, “Are we the baddies?”

I want to know.

Here, at what I believe is the beginning of the end, or at best the end of the beginning, I’m begging you:

Don’t be stupid.

Scholtz-Klink, head of the Women’s League under the Nazi Reich, the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, was often called the “Reich Mother-in-Chief.” She had six children, buried one husband, divorced another (a fact she avoided as much as possible) but the third stuck. In public, she wore her Nazi uniform, and off the clock a tradition dirndl, always with classic Teutonic braided hair. She had the ear of over 30 million women in her home country, and more than another 20 million as the Reich claimed more territory.

She told women how many children they should have (as many as possible) how they should behave and dress (with a “cheerful and confident attitude toward life”). Were she around today, she would almost certainly advise which vaccines to give your babies, if any. She was the model of dutiful, gentle femininity to millions of women. Even as she spread the good word, she was careful never to step out of line. What women had to offer the Reich, Scholtz-Klink assured members of the NS-Frauenschaft, she called them “my women,” was first and foremost, babies.

“The National Socialist movement sees the man and the woman as equal bearers of Germany’s future. It asks, however, for more than in the past: that each should first completely accomplish the tasks that are appropriate to his or her nature,” Scholtz-Klink said her in 1936 speech, “To Be German is to be Strong:” “The woman, besides caring for her own children, should first care for those who need her help as mothers of the nation.”

In her book, “Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics,” Claudia Koontz described Scholtz-Klink as a sort of tepid distraction for middle class women disinterested in politics. Perhaps they were disturbed by the street violence of Hitler’s thugs in uniform, the SA, colloquially known as Brown Shirts, but not particularly moved by increasing pogroms against their Jewish neighbors. “[…] She outlined dull administrative details and told women vaguely to sacrifice. […] Frauenwerk projects emphasized the kind of charitable, community-oriented actives that had always attracted wives and mothers.” Who could find a problem with bake sales?

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Through this work, Scholtz-Klink proclaimed, “We have given back honor to the housewife, which she had lost during the Marxist era.” This is the same message as was argued at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA event aimed at young women: motherhood must be saved, not from a legal system that throws women who miscarry in jail, or a health care system whose maternal mortality rate has jumped 27%, but from feminism which demands women kowtow to “careerism.” As MAHA influencer Alex Clark put it, “We’re done pretending that a cubicle is more empowering than a countertop.”

The cynicism of the women-lead crusade against feminism, in which college-educated, unmarried women denigrate both college and careerism, and “traditional gender role wives” who bring in the bacon with wildly profitable brand deals and their own business ventures to boot, has a fecund past in America.

It was there in Phyllis Schlafly’s masterful politicking around blocking the Equal Rights Amendment. She insisted her primary occupation was a mother, even as she went to law school and sent baked bread and quiches to lobby Congressmen. The cognitive dissonance echoes from pearly white smiles. Here again, we see where Scholtz-Klink precedes us.

The “Women’s Führer” survived the war, and remained unrepentant not only of her Nazi past, but of the Nazis as a whole. “How could I have known? We had our duties. You must remember the other side,” she insisted to Koontz over tea. “In the Depression, we sponsored a national labor service that took teenagers off the streets and taught them patriotism.” It was the same national labor service, the Hitler Youth, that inculcated boys and young men to “die laughing,” for the Führer. So much for family first. This tortured reasoning is akin to Security of Homeland Security Kristi Noem describing ICE’s primary job as “going out on the street to help protect families” while they separate 2,600 children from their parents. 2,600 so far.

What else do Traditional Gender Role wives and mothers have in common with the work of the Women’s Führer? As much as young German women were told that motherhood was their highest calling, Germany couldn’t actually afford to have women stay home. As the country floundered through the tail end of particularly brutal Depression era stagnation, with an economy inflated by boondoggle public works, young German women were urged to work, often in heavy industrial factories. “Eugenic policies […] and the shift to a wartime economy exploded the hypocrisy about a Nazi commitment to ‘strong’ families’ and motherhood revival,” explains Koontz. “Despite propaganda about ‘more feminine women’, the new priorities made it clear that docility was the only trait that counted in women. Concerns for keeping mothers in their homes lasted only as long as economic necessity made it advantageous.”

How many average income American households do you know that flourish on only one income? Let’s say you know one. What happens if Grandpa falls down the stairs, broke his hip and really shouldn’t live alone any more? What if one of the kids breaks their wrist at the same time the dentist announces it’s time for braces?

The economic reality of American women staying at home (and this conversation is almost always about white women) is revealed by the perniciousness of Multi-Level Marketing schemes, otherwise known as Network Marketing, or Direct Sales. Over thirteen million, again mostly white, American women participate in the $36 billion dollar industry. As Dr. Krista Marie Frederico put it in her 2020 doctoral thesis, “She Works Hard For No Money: Understanding Women’s Participation in Multi-Level Marketing Organizations,” these predatory pyramid schemes reflect:

The contradictory expectations faced in motherhood: the cultural ideals of “stay-at-home” motherhood, but also the need and desire of many women to generate an income and have career fulfillment, all in a neoliberal context of minimal governmental supports for families (e.g., paid parental leave and low cost child care) and protections against victimization by predatory organizations (e.g., punitive action against deceptive practices by MLMs). To straddle the cultural contradictions within motherhood, these MLM selling women intentionally brought paid work into the home, but then often endeavored to separate their paid work from their household work […]

MLMs offer women already caught up in a grift a bait and switch. What they are offered is an “opportunity” to make money to pad out the family budget without sacrificing family time. What she gets instead is an endless check list of leads to follow, a downline to build, a product to hawk. The conversation quickly goes from “Hey Mama, make money in your spare time!” to “How can you expect your business to work for you if you won’t work your business?” Whether it’s failing as a mother, or failing in her “business,” it will always be her fault.

One thing the Nazis and the White Christian Nationalists have in common is that they are trying to sell American women something that doesn’t and hasn’t ever coexisted with any recognizable version of freedom: a pure culture that lives in accordance with a god-given natural order. A hierarchy in which woman obeys man, man obeys nation, nation obeys God. There is only one approved way to be a woman in this worldview: to submit. As Koontz described this natalist nostalgia, “At the heart of this vision lay a dream of a strong man and a gentle woman, cooperating under the stern guidance of an orderly state.”

And what of those who didn’t figure in this fantasy? “Of course, we never intended that so many Jews would disappear,” was Gertrud Scholtz-Klink’s response when pestered with questions about the ideology she brought into homes across the Reich. “I don’t know how to say it,” she said about the yellow stars of David her Jewish neighbors were forced to wear before they were ultimately “disappeared.” “There were so many. I felt my aesthetic sensibility was wounded.”

The primary motivation of the Nazi party was the eradication of the Jewish people, not the subjugation of women, but it was women like Scholtz-Klink who used the niceties of the domestic sphere to create a permission structure for the ideological project of the Holocaust to play out on the edges of polite society. The first concentration camp, Dachau, offered tours to teachers, reporters, and locals. All very polite. Explains Koontz:

Never had she over-stepped her bounds. Always she had followed the law. Never did she admit to pondering the ramifications of anything. She translated orders from above into obedience from below. […] Adhering to the ideology subscribed to by millions of Germans, she follows the paths trodden by women for centuries. No matter what, she did not doubt, but tried always to make nice. Women’s history during the Third Reich lacks the extravagant insanity of Hitler’s megalomania; often it is ordinary. But there, at the grassroots of daily life, in a social world populated by women, we begin to discover how war and genocide happened by asking who made it happen.

Not even one year into the second Trump Administration, more than half of the Heritage Foundation prescription for America’s ills, Project 2025, has been enacted. According to the President, we no longer have a Department of Education. “Wokeness” and “DEI,” in the workforce have been addressed in part as 300,000 Black women have lost their jobs.

The eyes of the hard right now turn to America’s demographics. Buoyed by white Christian nationalist fears of the Great Replacement theory, the solution to more children in American families is not to be found in subsidized childcare, expanding healthcare across the board, or promoting adoption and fostering amongst couples both gay and straight.

On the contrary. “The answer to the problem of loneliness and demographic decline must begin with marriage,” the Heritage Foundation, memo states. And what is attacking marriage? Pro-natalists like Vice President J.D. Vance, Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and CEO’s like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (both named, along with Steve Bannon, in recently released pages of the Epstein files), would likely all cosign on the DC-based think tank’s diagnosis of “free love, pornography, careerism, the Pill, abortion, same-sex relations, and no-fault divorce.”

This list covers the basic mores of reality in the modern world. Women have jobs, sometimes outside the house. Gay people exist. Domestic abuse continues to be difficult to prove in court and no-fault divorce, the basis for “irreconcilable differences,” allows those who suffer domestic abuse to escape their abusers. 1 in 3 American women, 29%, and 1 in 10 American men, 10%, “have experienced rape, physical abuse and/or stalking” by their partners. Requiring Americans, women particularly, to prove that they deserve to leave their marriages, reveals a fundamentalism within the modern “Republican” party, akin to the theocracies they only hate because they aren’t white or Christian. On September 8th, President Trump speaking at The Museum of the Bible began complaining about crime rates in Washington D.C. after he called in the National Guard. “Things that take place in the home they call crime,” he said. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime scene.”

The Reich Mother-in-Chief often told her followers, “Be brave, be German, be pure.” She may as well told them, Be sure. Doubt could have stymied her entire project. What good could come if a mother ever wondered to herself, How is it that I am supposed to protect my children at all costs, and yet also teach them to march smiling into artillery fire? Probably the same good as the woman who asks herself, If this country is so great, why can’t I afford fruit? Why does my tap water run brown now? How long can I afford to stay in the hospital?

Such questions can bring reality to the forefront and reality is painful. As “recovered tradwife” Lauren Southern put it, “My brain was breaking between two worlds, because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” Yet we know the full Descartes quotation is “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.” I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. Our humanity comes not from adherence to a myth of natural order, not from obedience to any authority figure, but from being curious and asking questions. It’s thinking that makes us human.

Maybe it was something akin to these questions that prompted Virginia Woolf to describe the phantom who haunted her life as “The Angel in the House,” a benevolent, charming figure of doom who urged her, “Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.”

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.

Male fascists use democratic systems and forums to dismantle democracy in the public sphere. They use “politics” to convince other men.

Female fascists use the empowerment and freedom feminism afforded them to dismantle it.

Female fascists, all the while insisting they have no use for feminism because they have no use for politics, convince other women to think the same. As if motherhood isn’t political. As if pregnancy isn’t political.

Yet all lives are political, and some lives are more political than others.

As Audre Lorde reminded readers, it is white women especially who in prioritizing keeping things nice and civil rather just and open, who “face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. […] For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools.” Women of color are precluded from such choices by the “natural order.”

Secretary of the newly nicknamed Department of War, Pete Hegseth recently reiterated his church’s stance on one vote per household; that is, repealing the 19th amendment and taking away women’s right to vote. “All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote. If he, and the thousands of Americans who agree with him, get their way, women won’t have to chose whether or not politics are for them. We won’t have a choice.

After his horrific assassination in Utah I watched a clip from Turning Points USA in which Charlie Kirk, whose online following has swelled since his murder, take a question from a 14 year-old girl. She has braces, a floral dress. She wants his advice about going to college to study “political journalism,” I imagine because he embodied the new media landscape. Kirk, who dropped out of community college after one semester and got his start in the MAGA media world by creating a list of American Professors he considered dangerous and worthy of “monitoring”, responded:

“Interestingly, I think there is an argument to be made to bring back the MRS degree. […] and just be clear that’s why you’re going to college. Right, don’t lie to yourself. Don’t ‘I’m going I’m studying sociology.’ No. You’re not. We know why you’re here. And that’s okay, actually. And that’s a really good reason to go to college, actually. Especially an SEC school. Like, you will find a husband if you have the intent to […] Like, it’s just going to happen, okay? But I always laugh because — and by the way we should bring back the celebration of the MRS degree, which…No, serious, I mean, if you think about it. Like, I say college is a scam, but if you’re going to find your life partner, like, that’s actually a really good reason to go to college. You have a bunch of people that are single, you know, they’re at the prime of their, you know, let’s just say attractiveness. The dating pool is robust as you’ll ever find. They all live together over a 4-year period. You don’t get much better than that. It doesn’t get better after college there. And so youth, you could go learn some stuff. That’s fine. I guess. Or whatever. Just don’t listen to your professors. But um, that’s actually the reason why a lot of women went to college in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And it worked for a while. Marriage rates have plummeted since then so…”

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The political theorist would one day be best known for the definitive, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” and coining the term, “The Banality of Evil,” but at the time, she was a 26 year-old woman with work to do.

“Indifference was no longer possible in 1933. It was impossible even before that,” she said in a 1964 interview. “I read the newspapers with suspense. I had opinions. By 1931 I was firmly convinced the Nazis would come to power. And I was constantly arguing with others over these issues.”

On February 27, 1933 the Reichstag burned, and Arendt, previously “unpolitical,” felt compelled to resist what she already believed inevitable.

Tasked with collecting proof of the many anti-semitic actions and statements made outside of the official works of government and the Nazi party, thus less likely to make international headlines, Arendt began daily visits to the Prussian State Library. The world needed to know what was happening to Jews in the streets, the village squares, in the universities and cafés of Germany.

She was picked up by the secret police, and interrogated for eight days while men broke into her apartment looking for enough evidence to put her in “protective custody.” One notebook filled with endless pages of code looked promising, until someone figured out it was actually Ancient Greek. And people wonder what good a philosophy degree is.

When Arendt was released, she hastily fled Germany for Czechoslovakia on foot, then on to France. She thought she would be safer, there. On May 15, 1940 her Parisian neighbors looked on as she reported to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a venue of the 1924 Olympics, to eventually be moved with her fellow “enemy aliens” to a camp in Gurs. Two years later, 13,152 of Arendt’s fellow Jews would wait five interminable days in the same venue usually used for bike races and boxing matches, to be shipped to Auschwitz. 400 survived.

There is a meme floating around that reads, “If you were ever curious what you would have done if you lived in 1930s Germany…You’re doing it.”

You have no doubt heard the myriad comparisons between the Trump Administration’s enactment of Project 2025 and the early rise of the Third Reich. The dehumanizing language aimed at immigrants, the fixation on transgender citizens. A lesser known similarity might be that the Nazis were also flamboyantly inept, with a lazy and self-obsessed leader dead set on pitting subordinates against each other. The parallels are clear. Yet we should not expect the future to play out precisely like the past. I say this because I suspect we are awaiting for what those history nerds amongst us will know as a Reichstag moment. That is, an extraordinary event with a clear before and after, The BC/AD changeover of democracy to fascism.

But even the Reichstag fire, which burned the house of elected parliament in Berlin, wasn’t THE Reichstag event in pre-WW2 Germany. As M. Gessen, one of the worryingly few must-read writers responding to and explaining this moment we are in, wrote in their fearfully prescient 2020 book, Surviving Autocracy, “Even the original Reichstag Fire was not the Reichstag Fire of our imagination — a singular event that changed the course of history once and for all. The Reichstag burned five years before the Anschluss, six years before the start of the Second World War. Those years were filled with events big and small, each a step that made the darkest view possible.”

I know that as I am writing this, 56,579 people have been rounded up by, in the best case scenario, unidentified masked agents of I.C.E — soon to have a budget which exceeds that of some countries’ militaries. Judicial warrants and badge numbers have been sparse. Ditto Due Process. As White House Deputy Stephen Miller pushes to meet a daily quota of 3000 kidnappings a day, those picking up my fellow Angelenos may be bounty hunters, retired officers, volunteers, or some other, as yet unknown type of police. Secret, if you will.

This is what some people were doing in 1930s Germany: Sitting by the lake. Making a note to pick up milk on the way home. Reading about the new concentration camp. Dachau was initially not for racial and ethnic prisoners, but for those who had voted for the other political parties, trouble-causing artists, and those considered “asocial” or “work-shy,” (often addicts and the unhoused) amongst others. The government was so confident, Dachau was built within the borders where “the Nazis readily granted tours of the camp to government functionaries, teachers, and students.” They did not sell merch like they are at “Alligator Alcatraz”, but I bet Goebbles would have loved the idea. (In the mischegos of the camp closing, “the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald.”)

They told busy citizens that places like Dachau had to be built to handle all these threats to social safety, the economy, our neighborhoods. Something had to be done about the crime, after all. Some believed them. Most didn’t even notice.

I’ve successfully Debbie Downer-ed a number of meals that were supposed to be for lightening the general mood. Inevitably comes the questions, “How bad is this going to get? Are you thinking about leaving?” And without fail someone will chime in, “As people with privilege we need to stay and fight to make it better.” Naturally we all solemnly nod in agreement, writing checks we hope never to have to cash.

The problem with “we need to stay and fight” is that by the time the BC/AD switch happens, it will be too late. It will be too late, but it will feel like it hasn’t even started yet — because we’re expecting fascism, in part because that word has been thrown around a lot. Fascism isn’t the Marines being deployed to stand around LA, bored but for the photo opportunities. Fascism in practice is corpses and blood in the streets, political violence on a personal scale, per capita.

Authoritarianism, conversely, is ignorable. How do I know this? Because I’ve been to Istanbul and enjoyed every moment. Yet Turkey is ruled by a corrupt authoritarian. Same with Budapest in Hungary. It’s easy to look the other way when all you want to do is get your hairline touched up, or have a lovely holiday. It can be even easier when you’re not on holiday, merely trying to get the kids out the door on time or finish that project for your crummy boss.

Yes, authoritarianism can slide into fascism, but there is a lot of money to be made if you can keep the street thugs merely standing back and standing by. According to The New Yorker’s recent report by David D. Kirkpatrick, President Trump has netted somewhere around $3.4 Billion dollars from this whole situation. Neither Erdogan, Orbán, or Trump fancy ending up in a ditch covered in petrol or hanging from a gas station sign. Fascism burns out. Authoritarianism lingers. It infects.

Once the rot sets in… Well, think of Turkey. Russia. El Salvador. Hungary. What at first seems unsustainable, over a disconcertingly short amount of time turns out to be entirely sustainable as long as the right people are able to profit, and everyone else — well, those who can stay out of prison, or a gulag, or a camp — has a job to report to, errands to run, families to focus on. Private life goes on. But only for some.

And this brings me to “We have to stay and fight.”

Once that authoritarian rot sets in, the conversation about who has to stay and use their privilege and resources to stop what’s happening, is in fact over. When democracy is lost, and there’s a number of barometers by which to judge that sliding scale, the moral thing to do is leave, take your assets with you, and help as many without the means to do the same get out. To live as an immigrant. Unless you’re ready to take your Andor cosplay to the next level…? Not likely, is it? As American historian Heather Cox Richardson put it, at that point “the only two options are apathy or violence.”

Hannah Arendt coined the term, “The Banality of Evil,” in her reporting of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “Butcher of Budapest,” for The New Yorker. That reporting, which later became a book still in print around the world, still prompts passionate debate.

Arendt argued that not only Germany, but all of Europe suffered a cataclysmic collapse of morality. Easy enough to swallow. What makes Arendt controversial in some circles is that she argued that in a society quickly devolving into a death cult in which resistance was most often futile, the moral collapse not only happened amongst the Nazis, but amongst their victims and ‘bystanders’ as well. This is how children end up reporting their parents to the Gestapo. True evil sticks around like dog shit — even the most glancing brush with it might as well be a head to toe smearing. No one, even innocents, gets away clean.

History is what happens while you’re busy getting on with your life, and by the time most of us look up to clock what is happening, it’s entirely possible that the time in which we can stop these people will have passed. By some estimations, we have less than 400 days.

I’m telling you that the time when you put normal life on hold as much as possible and focus your attention on saving the Republic? It’s now. Right now. Do not wait for something to be set on fire — America is already burning.

If this window to save the Republic closes, protest and action will be at best ineffectual, at worst dangerous. I cannot blame the instinct to stay, and try to live “non-politically” within the confines of your private life. To exist as a neutral presence, neither condoning or condemning the messiness, the eagerness, of politics. Being political is to care, and caring is cringe.

But I urge you to interrogate the idea of neutrality. Perhaps we can borrow a framework from Ibram X. Kenji’s definition of racism: “I think to be racist is to support policies that are leading to inequality or injustice. And there are two ways to support policies that are leading to inequity or injustice: by your actions, or inaction.” Racism, in other words, comes from supporting policies which inflict racist existences (“inequality or injustice”). In this light, neutrality comes from supporting policies that result in neutral existences.

Small concessions here, bitter compromise there, keeping one’s head down does not result in a politically neutral situation. If we slip any further down the authoritarian scale, our resources and our silence —because anything less than compliant silence will eventually become too dangerous— will be corrupted, metastasized into support. Every cent you own, your tax dollars, every email you send as if it’s a normal day, every brunch and evening stroll will, however inadvertently, support the downfall of our Republic.

In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt, who eventually escaped from the camp in Gurs wrote “Nothing proved easier to destroy than the private morality of people who thought nothing of safeguarding their own private lives.”

She also said of the work in the library that got her rounded up by the Nazi secret police, “I had instant satisfaction. I thought, at least I have done something. At least I’m not ‘innocent.’ Nobody shall say that of me!”

***

I’m watching “The Sorrow and the Pity” for the first time. The 1969 Marcel Ophuls documentary covers one French town’s experiences during the Nazi invasion and occupation, and delves into the various modes of collaboration and resistance the townspeople chose. Their reasons. Excuses.

Only about fifteen minutes in to the four hour, two part film, it cuts from interviews with local French farmers and politicians to a Nazi propaganda “newsreel” about the the fall of France:

French soldiers with their hands up, crowds shuffling into Prisoner of War camps. The focus moves to Black faces — soldiers called up from French colonies in Senegal, Mauritania, and Niger.

The camera holds tight on these soldiers, their teeth out of line, some cheeks marked with ritual scarification, dark eyes that focus on nothing in the midst of the turmoil. The soldiers start to dance.

One man hits what looks like a water or gas can as a makeshift drum, and they form a circle, moving, smiling, singing. They sing. You see the beat they’ve got, the way they move comfortably even in heavy woolen jackets.

Snide Nazi narration: “In the words of Chamberlain, ‘We together with our allies, are the guardians of civilization. Together we fight medieval barbarism.’ These are the guardians of civilization.”

The shot cuts to a basic military formation of Nazi soldiers marching in perfect order, with perfect haircuts and perfect uniforms, and perfect blood lines. Even high ranking Nazi officers were not “Aryan.” Was the main guy blonde? Towering? Strong? No, he was a stumpy brunette with a drug problem who developed a tremor in his hand which he failed to hide.

Over this eerie orderliness, the sarcastic narrator again: “These are the barbarians.”

***

The intro of Sir Mix-A -Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” in which a white woman marvels that anyone could find a Black woman attractive, since they’re just so… So… They’re “just so… Black!”

***

The old Nazis, with their fantasy of racial purity, their myth of Aryan perfection, that those dancing had no culture, no education, no humanity.

“Aryan,” comes from Sanskrit which most westerners confuse as meaning “noble” as in “dignified” or “moral,” but actually means “noble” as in “aristocratic” or just “rich” and was the name of a people in North India.

***

I sit in a nice hotel room, clean and dry, watching a four hour WWII documentary and miss the turgid, damp Bywater guest house I was lucky enough to enjoy for a short while.

***

Taylor Townsend, 29 years-old from Smyrna, Georgia, just won her match at the US Open this week. Instead of shaking her hand at the net, traditional at the end of a match, her opponent “told [Townsend she has] no class, no education, and to see what happens when [they] get outside the U.S.”

Incandescently talented and victorious, Townsend was told she wasn’t civilized. That she’d acted like a barbarian.

***

When I was in New Orleans for “The 10,” my college roommate, the poet, professor, and local, E.Gross, made an off-hand comment that stuck with me. Most times when you’re watching a movie or a show about something you’ve known, lived, it’s the mistakes that hurt you. “Treme” was different, they told me. They said that the ADR’ed dialogue in the background of a police station scene would be discussing the death of someone you knew.

***

“The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator of a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus — namely, it’s authenticity — is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is really jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.”

- “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin

***

I watched “Treme,” when I was in New Orleans. And Ken Burns’ “Jazz.” I raided the buffet at Dizzy’s and danced to mourn Dr. John and Leah Chase. We didn’t yet know about Art Neville. I put money in the basket for Jon Boutté and insisted other tourists do the same. I ate mudbugs and beignets. Paid homage to the pink palace on Elysian Fields, across from where I bought the morning after pill. The best thing I can do to keep New Orleans, is to leave it to New Orleans.

***

“Basin street/ is the street / where all the dark and light folk meet.”

“That’s how culture gets made in this country. That’s how we do. We’re a creole nation, whether you like it or not.”

- Treme, Season Four, Episode Three “Dippermouth Blues”

Click here to support WWOZ.

I write about Los Angeles with an outsider’s eye because I am not

from here, and I can dish on Los Angeles because I’m a wallflower at the

invite-only party. I am a very good example of a certain species of person

wholly of Los Angeles but not from Los Angeles: I am a kid from

the First (non-famous) Marriage. My father is the actor Tom Hanks;

my mother was his first wife, Susan Dillingham.

I was giving an interview and the reporter asked me if I would tell them an example of being “a wallflower at the invite-only party.” Would I tell them some stories of the parties I’ve been to and who else was there? I demurred, but if I had told them a story, it probably would have been this one:

I was walking through 2009 Brooklyn when I got a text from my friend and co-worker at the Huffinton Post, Patrick: “Who the fuck is Topaz517* and what is her fucking issue with you?!”

There was no part of this text that I could decipher.

“There’s an article about famous people’s kids at HuffPo on Gawker and someone is talking mad shit about you in the comments!”

The moment had finally come — Gawker, the equally beloved and loathed media blog, had turned its baleful eye in my direction, as I had known it eventually would. I pulled up the piece on… Could it have been my Blackberry? Jesus.

“Well Born and Well Kept at the Huffinton Post,” was benign by Gawker standards — the brief section about me was… fine!

Despite the hubub around her, Hanks seems to have been generally well regarded within HuffPo for keeping a level head.

See? Fine! Nice, even! I’ll take it!

But, someone named Topaz517 in the comments was not having it. “Liz Hanks is the worst!!!” I remember it starting. As I read, a montage immediately started playing in my head of all the times I’ve aimed for funny and ended up being cutting, or the one time I went to a Gawker party and got so nervous I started cleaning the bar area which quickly became bar tending. It was a cavalcade of cringe, all too ready remind me of the idiotic things I’ve done or said.

But in a twist that I thought was very generous, the piece’s writer, Ryan Tate chimed in, and to my recollection said something along the lines of — “Everyone I spoke to for this story was happy to spill on HP staffers and their foibles, but I heard nothing particularly heinous about her. Don’t know what to tell you!”

Topaz517 was not having it, though. Topaz517 themself had personally encountered my horribleness at a dinner party with “literary luminaries, Oscar winners, geniuses” and could report that at this dinner party, I yammered on and on, because I clearly believed I was their equal. Worst of all, she reported, “Daddy Hanks looked on, so proud.” Topaz517 had sat through a dinner with me, hating me and everything I’d said.

I assumed it would take me less than ten minutes to figure out who this was. I was correct!

What dinner party had I been to in the past year which included my father, but also someone not a usual member of my parents’ friend group? (I was fairly certain Marty Short was not spending his time dragging me in the comments.)

Ah, yes. A couple of months before, Nora Ephron had invited me to a dinner party my dad would be attending, with yes, other Oscar winners, and several literary luminaries.“Book deals should be celebrated,” she asserted. She’d been reading me since high school, and had recommended me for all my early jobs. I had just sold my first book. (Not “The 10.” That’s a whole other story.)

The dinner also included a producer and his Wife, who are not part of my parent’s social circle. I’m not even sure that they were usually part of Nora’s, but they were there. He was funnier than I expected, she didn’t talk much. Nora toasted me, and someone asked, “What’s the book about?” I was a 20something who had been working on a four-hour news cycle for two years and had the beginnings of an ulcer and a publisher had bought my book. I probably was an incandescently happy monster about it.

On a sweating sidewalk in Brooklyn, I looked at Topaz517’s other comments on Gawker, and quickly found the other websites she used the same username on. They were all on stories about the producer. It took me about two minutes to confirm that Topaz517 was in fact, the Wife.

I e-mailed the whole story to my dad and Nora, who called me instantly.

“I read your e-mail but walk me through it,” Nora said by way of a greeting. When I was done, I asked, “It’s her, right?”

“Of course it is!”

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, “Just tell everyone! Same as me!”

I don’t know if Nora told the other dinner party guests about Topaz517, or how easily I was able to unmask her, but I took her advice seriously, relishing in every retelling. The story was delicious on my lips.

These days, though, not so much.

These days, I wonder: how many times has Topaz517 has been called “The Wife of” to her face? Been introduced that way? Asked would she mind telling who else was at the party?

(*Not the real username because I don’t remember it!*)

“The 10” is about my mother, myself, and a trip we took together in 1996 to drive from Sacramento, California to Palatka, Florida, a small town in the center of the state where multiple generations of my matrilineal family are from. In 2019 I moved into a van and recreated that road trip in an attempt to understand my mother and what happened to her, but also to try to see clearly the landscapes interstate 10 covers, namely the Southwest and the Deep South. Maybe if I could understand some part of America, I could understand us.

In celebration of the imminent arrival of my book, and to offer somewhat what of a sneak peak at how I wrote this book (all in all, a nine year process) here are ten books that influenced “The 10,” offered in geographical order, moving west to east.

1. Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest by Dan Flores

When people from Los Angeles say they’re going to the “desert” they either mean they are going to Palm Springs to drink by a pool, or they are going to Joshua Tree to do hallucinogens. “The Desert” is of course much, much bigger than this — spanning multiple states and actually more than one desert — and it’s growing. The Great Basin deserts will eventually stretch all the way from inner Mexico, through the western U.S. and into Canada. The immense scale of the desert(s), the diversity of cultures there (hundreds of Native dialects, for example) and the scope of the genocide that took place in the Southwest was all news to me. “Horizontal Yellow,” was where I started the assault on just how ignorant I was. As someone who does much better in cloudy, cold places, I was sure that there was nothing in Arizona, New Mexico or west Texas for me. I was extremely wrong. The author of this readable academic text was also kind enough to meet me for coffee, and told me some funny stories about Coyote. I owe him, and this book, quite a lot.

2. Georgia O’Keeffe by Georgia O’Keeffe

This collection of paintings and notes from Georgia herself sort of reminds me of the 10th anniversary edition of Calvin and Hobbes that featured commentary by Bill Watterson. On the one hand it’s fascinating to hear from the maker themselves, just to see what sort of vocabulary they have, what approach they have to talking about their own work. On the other, it’s so weird because no way Bill Watterson or Georgia were real people, real people can’t make anything THIS GOOD. And yet I knew that any approach to unraveling the myths I’ve been told about the Southwest had to include taking time to not only think about O’Keeffe’s work and what it said about the land, but about O’Keeffe herself, and what she means to women who want to live and create on their own terms. Since Georgia provides one of the two competing epigraphs that open “The 10” I knew that I would be picking this book up quite a lot. It popped up many times in “The 10,” almost always right when I needed it. When everything seemed lost, including myself.

3. God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright

On the original trip across the 10 I took with my mother in 1996, one of the memories that stands out the most are the days and days and days it took to drive across Texas. That hazy horizon always moving away from you as you move forward, like the famously discomforting film shot known as a “dolly zoom” (as in ‘Jaws’ and others). In 2019 I took my time in west Texas, trying to acclimate to life in the Lone Star State, and what I learned is that Texas and California are like a set of twins who argue that they don’t have anything in common. I was perfectly set up, being a Californian, to not understand any facet of Texas, so I desperately needed a translator. This book by New Yorker staff writer Wright was a perfect jumping off point. The way he breaks down how culture is built (top down or bottom up) was so fascinating, I was actually able to put down the Ninfa’s enchiladas I was scarfing and actually pay attention. No lesser book would be capable of the same.

4. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans by Lawrence N. Powell and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit & Rebecca Snedeker

I bought both of these books at the estimable Octavia Books in New Orleans proper, when I already had about 8 books on the Crescent City that were festooned with marginalia and Post Its. The thing about books though, and New Orleans, is that I love them, so I couldn’t pass them up. Pound for pound the Powell was the most helpful historical reference point because, as the subtitle suggests, New Orleans has always played fast and loose with its own existence, and I needed to come to terms with that before anything else I wanted to say about the city. I love my hometown, but when push comes to shove, I think New Orleans is just about the best thing America has ever offered the world. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or safe, or understandable, I just think it’s the best. I wrote a huge chunk of the book in New Orleans because I knew it had to be written there. Leaving, and continuing east (and months later continuing west) was very difficult for me, not only because I missed New Orleans, but because I found it very hard to write of NOLA without actually being there. Listening to WWOZ helped, but not as much as “Unfathomable City.” It became a text I could turn to whenever I needed, well… Vibes. Vibes that became data that inspired sentences that got the work done. I still turn to this when I miss New Orleans. So, a lot.

5. The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis

I don’t want to drag Donald Rumsfeld into this, but when you start writing a nonfiction book, there are things you know you don’t know (Why does Houston not have literally any zoning laws?) and then there are things you have no idea that you don’t know about. Right around the time I got to Houston, where you can put a tattoo parlor next to a high school, and the fulcrum point of my trip between Desert and Swamp, I realized something. I had been thinking about this trip as being bookended by two oceans: the Pacific and the Atlantic, when in fact, the Gulf of Mexico was a huge factor in everywhere I was going. I didn’t know shit about it. This book, dense as bone and I think equally enduring, opened up a lot for me and taught me more things I didn’t know that I didn’t know. It’s not all “Salt Life” stickers and oil rigs — though there’s plenty of both. But I don’t think you can understand America unless you take the time to shake hands with the Gulf.

6. Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity by Ersula J. Ore

The thing about a journey rather than a trip is that you don’t always know where you’re headed. Several times on the 10 I was rerouted just by room temperature curiosity, but what I saw in Mississippi altered not just the course of the trip, but me. It sent me, burning and ashamed and furious, way off interstate 10. I bought this book at the Legacy Museum of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, which also hosts the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, more colloquially known as the lynching memorial. I would be very hard pressed to pick one place from my trip to recommend, or one book of research I wish all my readers would also pick up… But there is something important for you to see in Montgomery. And while you’re there, buy this book.

7. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class by Dean MacCannell

I don’t know how “new” a theory can be when it was first published in 1973, but this was a book that helped me on a couple levels. I knew that at some point I wanted to talk about why we travel, and I had a lot of things along the lines of Joseph Campbell’s dissection of the hero’s journey, I had “Women Who Run With Wolves,” and certainly “Eat Pray Love,” to consider as well. Basically I had the woo woo bases covered — and good thing, because I think the woo woo stuff is important! I also, however, wanted to discuss the unavoidable connections between travel and consumption — that good good juicy sociological nerd talk. MacCannell might not have had Instagram in mind in 1973, but the theories he builds around “collecting” experiences were integral to how I started thinking about what exactly we’re supposed to be getting out of all these trips, anyway. Experiences? Wisdom?…Content?

8. The White Album by Joan Didion

In some ways, Joan is there in everything I do. She’s from Sacramento, so am I. She moved to New York to work at a Condé Nast magazine, so did I, etc. I put this on the list because I had a very specific problem on the road that Joan helped me with. Over the course of the half-a-year or so I was on the road, I interviewed anyone who would let me: the manager of a Waffle House, a Cajun who asked me to two step, someone acting as a green energy advisor to the Navajo nation. I was rusty at first (it’d been a while since I was in interviewing shape from my days at the Huffington Post and Vanity Fair) but improved over the course of the trip. Fact is, I just like talking to people — but writing about what we talked about was much harder. Rereading Joan, as I so often do, reminded me that the most powerful reporting happens when you just show the reader who the person is, and what they said. Trying to interpret only clutters things up. Stay out of the way and the reader will get it.

9. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller

Something I learned pretty quickly on “The 10” was that in a book about subjects as big as Mothers and Daughters, and Manifest Destiny, I needed to find shortcuts to discuss some things. For example, I couldn’t exactly walk readers through the decade plus of therapy I went through that enabled me to do something like writing this book. Instead, I needed to find a pow! bang! book that could drive home the lessons I had in my back pocket when I hit the road in March 2019. I’m not all that widely read in Psychological books (I’m really just getting into them now, actually) but just dipping my toe in these waters, the first title that came up — and then kept coming up seemingly everywhere I looked (and I pay attention to such things) — was Miller. When you’re talking about mental health, you have to take into some account that not all readers are going to be familiar with psychological language; plonking in a quotation like “Each mother can only react empathically to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood,” does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

10. The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus Contributing Editors: David Auburn, Michael Dirda, David Lehman, Stephin Merritt, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith, Jean Strouse, David Foster Wallace, Simon Winchester

This is a bit of a cheat because I use this behemoth for everything I work on. At some point I was a used book buyer at Los Angeles’ The Last Bookstore, and as an employee we got a handy discount on merchandise. I used almost all my allotted discounts on big reference books — I also bought the concise Oxford English Dictionary. It comes with its own magnifying glass! I don’t use this thesaurus to find fancier or more impressive words to replace solid workhorse words, which I think is what most assume a thesaurus is for. I mostly use this to explore or confirm different nuances and meanings to words I think I know, but don’t really. For example, if something is the opposite of another thing, does it also contradict it? The other reason this book is such a treasure, is that each of the editors has their own mini entries amongst the pages to discuss words. Look at this little aside from David Foster Wallace on the word, “if” :

“From experience born of repeated humiliation, I can tell you there are two main ways to mess up with if and make your writing look weak. The first is to use if for whether. They are not synonyms — if is used to express conditional, whether is used to introduce alternative possibilities.”

If you want to know the rest, you’ll have to get the book. The BOUNTY in these pages! Writing lessons from DFW!

So there you have it, ten books that influenced a book that you haven’t read yet. But they give you an idea, yes? An inkling?

XOEA

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