Ethical Diversions

[Monte Davis]

MalignD: 
> For whatever reason -- race is an obvious one -- the Herero, Cambodia,
China 
> under Mao, what's going on in Africa now, pick your atrocity, don't seem
to
> carry the same sense of immoral gravity...

That the Holocaust was carried out *in* Europe, not in a remote colonial
outhouse where a man can let down his trousers etc, was also important,
different from race if also inextricable from it. Europeans who had long
been accustomed to page past the news of Maxim guns at play in Wogland had
to acknowledge that the heart of darkness was at both ends of their domestic
train lines. E.g., Wislawa Szymborska's Polish knock-knock joke:


STILL

Across the country's plains
sealed boxcars are carrying names:
how long will they travel, how far,
will they ever leave the boxcar--
don't ask, I can't say, I don't know.

The name Nathan beats the wall with his fist,
the name Isaac sings a mad hymn,
the name Aaron is dying of thirst,
the name Sarah begs water tor him.

Don't jump from the boxcar, name David.
In these lands you're a name to avoid,
You're bound for defeat, you're a sign 
pointing out those who must be destroyed.

At least give your son a Slavic name:
he'll need it. Here people count hairs
and examine the shape of your eyelids
to tell right from wrong, "ours" from "theirs."

Don't jump yet. Your son's name will be Lech.
Don't jump yet. The time's still not right.
Don't jump yet. The clattering wheels
are mocked by the echoes of night.

Clouds of people passed over this plain.
Vast clouds, but they held little rain --
just one tear, that's a fact, just one tear.
A dark forest.	The tracks disappear.

That's-a-fact. The rail and the wheels.
That's-a-fact. A forest, no fields.
That's-a-fact. And their silence once more,
that's-a-fact, drums on my silent door.