the holocaust
Pete Temko | October 2, 2009I posted a link to the Nation Magazine’s blog entry about Alan Grayson’s outburst regarding health care reform.
There is some question and difference of opinion about whether Facebook is the place for serious political discussion. I don’t really have an opinion except to say that “what’s on my mind” a good bit of the time is stuff like this and not so much on what I had for breakfast. I understand completely the value of staying up with friends on that level. Its nice to be in touch with the daily stuff of people you like. Posts such as this one generate some gentle and some not so gentle responses, and to my eye, that does seem out of place in a setting in which people are generally informing each other about their daily and very personal successes, failures and commonplace events.
The heart of the issue and controversy seems to revolve around the use of the word, “holocaust,” to refer to the systemic failures that allow many unnecessary serious illnesses and deaths to occur in a country that spends far more and has far lesser results than many other countries. The outrage is coming largely from the right, but the left-middle is certainly queasy about the use of the word. We live in memory of an occurrence which forever elevated the meaning of “holocaust” to such an unbearable level that no other use of the word seems possible.
I’ll discount for the moment the protestations of the branch of the right wing which has no problem with calling Obama a Nazi, and I’ll assume, however gullibly, that the horror of the rest of the spectrum is based genuinely in the opinion that inserting the word,”holocaust,” into a discussion of anything but the most massive attempts to extinguish a people cheapens the word and renders it meaningless.
My immediate impulse to cheer Grayson on rises from the intense frustration that most Democrats feel at the seemingly passive responses to outrageous assertions and downright lying from the right. A Democrat who responds with the same passion and doesn’t hesitate to use inflammatory rhetoric to ratchet up the heat can seem like a hero to some. I admire swinging for the fences when necessary.
As a practicing Jew, Grayson has some credibility on the issue. I don’t know if that’s an excuse or a true reason to use the word. The “h word.” Sigh… We know what the word means, and the use of it is intended to define what’s happening here as monstrous.
On balance, my present feeling is that he’s done a service which outweighs the negatives. When the indignation dies down, it will have been helpful to define the extremes on both sides of an issue for once. Finding the middle is easier if you know where the tails of the curve are.




