Nothing is subtle or subdued about coverage of Detroit emergency management in The Michigan Citizen, which calls it "the occupation."
Still, it's startling to see a particularly unrestrained column in this week's issue of the fringe newspaper, suggesting that Kevyn Orr displays a Nazi-like "capacity to think in a logic that excludes the consequences of [his] decisions."
The provocative essay, headlined "Evil consequences," is by Shea Howell, an Oakland University communication professor and longtime Detroit activist.
She does not call Orr a Nazi. Instead, she writes about thinking of German war criminal Adolf Eichmann while listening to the emergency manager during a nearly 90-minute interview at the weekly's office on Trumbull. (Its news analysis of the conversation is here and a Q&A transcript is here.)
Howell feels Orr acts inhumanely toward city retirees with "this horrific effort to protect banks and assault pensioners" during Detroit's bankruptcy process. "It will take a loud outpouring to break through such evil," her column concludes.
As I reflected on this interview, an old essay kept coming to mind. Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote it in 1963. Arendt had fled the Nazis in Germany in 1933 and ultimately came to the U.S. . . .
In 1966, as Nazi war criminal Adolph [sic] Eichmann went on trial for his role in the effort to exterminate the Jewish people, Arendt wrote an article for the New Yorker based primarily on her interviews with him in prison.
The phrase that kept running through my head as I listened to Mr. Orr: The banality of evil. In Arendt’s words, Orr seemed to me “terrible and terrifyingly normal.” He did not talk of grand schemes of dispossession. Instead, he talked of numbers and debts and blight and streetlights. . . .
Arendt captures this kind of conversation. She says, “The longer one listened to [Eichmann], the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else.”
This capacity, to think in a logic that excludes the consequences of your decisions on the lives of others characterizes much of what we saw in Mr. Orr.
This was most evident when he talked of pension cuts. Here he stressed, “There are only 20,000 pensioners in a city of 700,000.” This is just a few people. A sacrifice for the many.
This kind of numbers game is chilling.
The impact of a 34-percent cut in pensions is catastrophic to people who are barely getting by now. The pain of people is absent from Orr’s view. . . .
Mr. Orr has developed a habit of mind that seems to have given up an essential part of himself. He speaks of numbers, not people.
In a sense, Professor Howell's edgy column reflects a sharp turn familiar to any reader of hot-button discussions on social media or other online forums.
Playing a Nazi card is so common that it even has a name -- Godwin's Law, in recognition of a description by attorney-author Mike Godwin. "As an online discussion grows longer," he wrote in 1990, "the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
By tossing Adolf Eichmann's name into the Detroit bankruptcy discussion, Shea Howell delivers a new example of Godwin's Law in action.
