"I shall call these the “Foul Four” because the researchers showed words conveying negative evaluations exemplify four themes. Those themes are worthlessness, stupidity, depravity and peculiarity."
4. KEEPING UP WITH THE MILLERS: STEPHEN MILLER AND HIS WIFE, KATIE, FOUND LOVE IN A HATEFUL PLACE
The mind of evil is hard for most of us to fathom. Michael Cohen says that's one reason to read his new book Disloyal. Well here's another look at the lives of evil - Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Miller - in Vanity Fair. It reminds us that in a United States that works, people like this are sidelined, but just waiting for the opportunity to take power. I guess I should qualify "United States that works" to mean for white citizens since the supremacist hatred of Miller was alive and well in the Southern United States, legally, until not that long ago, and symbolically in the many confederate statues that are still all over.
According to this February 2020 post on Stephen Miller, I'd opened a draft about him back in early 2016, linking to an article about him at Santa Monica High School. So I've known about his depravity a while. I didn't know anything about his wife Katie, who appears to be just like him according to this article. Here's just one episode that's described.
"In 12th grade AP English, she found a way to stand out. Her teacher was Simone Waite, a revered educator and one of the few African American faculty members at the school, which had a Black student population of just 4%. Waite was teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which she had done many times before, and gave them some historical background, including about slavery. “One of the many things it did was that it took away our history,” she told the class. Waldman didn’t like that, and asked, “Couldn’t they just tell each other about their history?” Waite explained that it wasn’t that easy. They went back and forth, but Waldman wouldn’t let it go. Seeing that they were in a rut, Waite told her that they should agree to disagree and move on with the lesson.
Waldman stopped coming to class and promptly drafted a petition, calling out Waite for being “psychologically damaging” and “sickening,” as the teacher recalls. Waite heard about it from a student, and was confused and devastated. The student assured her that no one agreed with Waldman. Waite eventually met with Waldman and her father, Glenn. After hearing both sides, Waldman’s father concluded, according to Waite, that “this teacher is extremely well-liked,” and that the best course of action would be to take Waldman out of her class.
Waite struggled not to take it personally, and eventually came to a realization. “I hesitate to say this, but it was about race. ‘Here is a Black woman teaching me this novel by another Black woman, and saying things that I definitely do not agree with politically,’” Waite posits. “She did whatever was in her power to show something. It just didn’t work.” There were aftershocks. Waldman was in two classes with Waite’s daughter, Alexandra, who was often the only Black kid in the class. Even after publicly trying to take down her mother, Waldman would text Alexandra to ask for homework help, as if nothing had happened. Alexandra and her mother didn’t know what to think. Alexandra and Katie weren’t friends. There were plenty of other kids to ask. It struck Waite as another kind of power play. Alexandra did her best to ignore Katie."
Okay, I wondered 'Who are Mr and Mrs Stephen Miller?', so I googled them. The lost minutes I read about them reminded me that Gene and I had talked about how removed we are from a retooled 'banality of evil' in the USA. We ended that talk feeling it was good we had left.
ReplyDeleteEven with daily, world-wide news-in-hand, we don't understand how America is made 'great' in people such as the Millers. What we can see, what we know, is how the Millers lift up, like the Kardashians, what is seen, who is successful.
You ask about evil but I want to know: Can good win out against the American Dream?
The Rolling Stone has an article that declares the end of the American Era.
Delete"In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.
For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century."