Saturday, March 03, 2018

"An Antidote to Trump and to Our Times"

"Most important of all, he never succumbed to the belief that evil was always on the other side, that those fighting for the good weren’t also capable of great wickedness, and self-deception. He was not one of those, in Mendelson's words, 'who can say of themselves without irony, "I am a good person," who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own … He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland.' I love that line. But what he saw most potently was that victims are also capable of becoming victimizers, that the best intentions come wrapped in the crumpled tissue of human fallibility, that 'I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.' He was, like Orwell, a patron saint of anti-tribalism.

At New York, Andrew Sullivan turns to W.H. Auden during the dark days of Donald Trump.

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