May 3, 2020 Bonus: I Fixed Your World War II Analogies; You're Welcome -

Having sounded off about Anne Frank, I find that some of my countrymen and -women are now chiming in with more crummy WWII analogies. I want to get the worst of these over with now, so that tomorrow I can move on to something else. I have better stuff to do, and I'd like to ignore this, but it appears to be today's theme.

To review: I don’t think those of us who are cooped up and wearing a mask at the grocery store and missing work and choir and family right now are suffering quite the way those who were “cooped up” trying not to make a sound or pee all day, trying not to get caught by the Nazis and sent off to the death camps, suffered.

But here’s a “cooped up” analogy I can go for: how about the kids kept in cages at the border camps? That’s "cooped up," for our time. There's even barbed wire, so it's reminiscent of the death camps where a lot of Jews ended up. (This photo is from an article by the Council on Foreign Relations, updated February 10, 2020, in case you thought this atrocity ended last year. 

(Ah, but, you say: NOW those folks we imprisoned at the border have been deported, so hooray, they are out of their cages and "back" in the horrible conditions they were trying to flee, or "back" where they never lived! Well, yes and no. By the end of April, “receiving countries” like Guatemala were refusing our planes because so many of the people we were trying to send “back” were positive for COVID19. Forty on one plane alone! Anyway, that’s my alternate Anne Frank analogy – kids in cages at our border.)

And this brings us to the extended version of my demanding better analogies, the "Arbeit Macht Frei” protest sign that got a lot of press coverage this week, when some woman carried it to let the Illinois governor know that she thought he ought to open up the state somewhat faster. That's a Holocaust phrase, old "Arbeit Macht Frei." 

I don’t know the woman who carried that sign, but I’m convinced she is failing to make her point, here. She’s got on her American flag mask, and she’s taunting the (Jewish) governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, with a Nazi slogan that was on the entrance gate to the Auschwitz death camp:  Work Makes Free. I don’t like her or her message, but I DO think we can find a use for her sign right now -- just not in the way she is using it.

I mean, what is she (unsuccessfully) attempting to say? Presumably she wants to go back to work and escape lockdown (or she wants somebody else to go back to work), and she is calling on the governor to lift the quarantine, suggesting that he is acting like a Nazi in limiting her freedom.

This is – clearly - the lazy, contemporary American use of “Nazi” to mean “anybody who is rigid and in a position of authority, and telling me to do something I don’t want to do.”  It’s part of the joking use of “soup Nazi” or “grammar Nazi” or the way a (Jewish) friend of ours, when his wife was pregnant, said, “All OB nurses are Nazis.”

Really? ALL of them? I could swear one of the ones who was in the room while I was in labor wasn’t a Nazi, but then again, I didn’t ask her point blank.

I know this battle is lost, utterly, and I just avoid the joking use, myself. But here’s our sign lady, saying: Governor, you are being a “Nazi” by not letting me go back to work, because FREEDOM means I can go to work if I want to, dammit!

In the great Competing Imperatives scheme of things, I think this woman is a 3 (protect the vulnerable)  not a 4 (keep the economy afloat). I say that because I think, crucially, she has defined herself as “the vulnerable.” Maybe she isn’t working, or maybe she’s one of those people who is enraged because her manicurist isn’t working. But either way, I believe she sees herself as a victim. Seeing oneself as victimized is super-popular right now. I don’t think she has defined people who might get a wicked or fatal case of COVID19 as “the vulnerable.” 

I realize I’m just making stuff up, here, but it’s the best I can do to explain her sign, as if it made some sort of internal "sense."

Anyway, I think her sign does NOT work as she intended it to, but I believe it could be deployed brilliantly, or even used as an entrance gate inscription right now.  Arbeit Macht Frei isn’t the cry of the worker. It’s the cry of the employer, as it were. The “work camps” run by the (actual) Nazis were work-until-you-get-sick camps, and then they were death camps. That sign over Auschwitz was a cruel joke. The Jews who were rounded up and forced to work at Auschwitz were told that “Work” would Make Them Free, but actually, they worked in support of the Nazi war effort, and they were starved and exposed to the cold, and left to get sick, and gassed when they couldn’t work any more.

So in my quest for a better analogy, I’m looking for employment that is involuntary and deadly, and I think I’ve got it. US News and World Report said, two days ago, that over 5,000 meatpacking workers have contracted COVID19 at plants, and at least 20 have died. 

Some folks who worked under those unsafe, shoulder-to-shoulder, no decent PPE and not enough tests* conditions, had the “luxury” of getting furloughed, for a little while, but many had to stay on the job because, like a lot of low-wage service people, they were deemed “essential.” And now, if their governors have decided it’s too expensive to keep cutting unemployment checks, the ones who did get out of the plants, however briefly, THOSE folks are ‘Free’ to go back to work! 

So I’m just saying,  an Arbeit Macht Frei sign might actually have a place right now, but that place is in the hands of a protester outside an unsafe workplace, who is making entirely the opposite point.

* It's heartening that the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, came up with a way to protect his state's recently acquired  coronavirus tests, as reported in this all-caps Newsweek headline: 

NATIONAL GUARD PROTECTING MARYLAND'S CORONAVIRUS TESTS IN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION SO FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CAN'T SEIZE THEM

Governor Hogan is no slouch. He and his colleagues arranged for the very first ever Korean Air passenger flight to land at BWI instead of Dulles, because if the plane with the PPE had flown into DC, federal agents might have seized the goods. But this way, Hogan could have troops meet the plane! Pretty clever!