Amazon has agreed to pull a Nazi-themed ad campaign for a new TV series after New York subway riders and some public officials complained, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority source said Tuesday. Befitting the show’s premise — “What if the bad guys won World War II?” — the company plastered subway cars on the midtown Shuttle inside and out with with décor styled by the Third Reich and Imperial Japan…. “This ad campaign has a feel of exploiting things that are so sensitive to so many people,” Evan Bernstein, New York regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, said in a written statement. “We’re not saying that people don’t have a right to express themselves. We’re just saying that it has a level of insensitivity. We would hope that the people who distributed it will think twice about putting these symbols on more public transportation.”
Anyone who’s frequented my dark, cobweeby corner of Da Interwebz understands my penchant and passion for getting people to think. Sometimes, it takes pissing people off in order to accomplish that, and I’ve been known to cross that Rubicon from time to time. There are times when thinking is a very good thing, and being forced to do so by the advancing of an idea that might make some uncomfortable is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, in some cases it can be a very GOOD thing. Being forced to reexamine preconceived notions or long-accepted ideas is a sign of an intellect nimble enough to accept that the world is not a static place.
There are times when being brought face to face with something that may seem offensive is an excellent way to set people to thinking about what might have happened but for a historical twist and/or turn. In this case, having ads for a show that asks what America might have become had we lost WWII seems a great way to force people to think about the tone and tenor of political discourse today. When one listens to Donald Trump or Ben Carson or any of the other GOP Presidential candidates, fascism doesn’t seem so very far away. That’s something that should scare the Hell out of any freedom-loving American…but too many love Trump because “he doesn’t take shit from anyone.” Lost in the collective infatuation is the truth that they’re supporting a racist, xenophobic, ethnocentric, anti-democratic bully.
Americans often get lulled into the idea that freedom and liberty is our birthright, that we could never find ourselves under the thumb of a fascist government because of the Constitution. The problem is that it’s exactly that kind of complacency that makes fascism a surprisingly (and disturbingly) real possibility. Donald Trump talks about closing mosques and forcing Muslims to register with the government, and no one right of the political center says “Boo!” Ben Carson compares Syrian refugees to rabid dogs, and the response among the media and on the Right is a collective yawn. It would appear we’ve become inured to the truth that there are many (like former President George W. Bush) who consider the Constitution to be just a piece of paper. Donald Trump is merely the most visible iteration of the willingness to view freedom and liberty through the lens of one’s own self-interest.
“The Man in the High Castle” is fictional, an adaptation of a 1962 Philip K. Dick novel, but I think if nothing else it’s a useful and interesting intellectual exercise. When you consider that there are Republicans running for President right now who’ve made it clear they’re more than willing to take actions that are blatantly unconstitutional, “The Man in the High Castle” is more than a mere academic adventure. This from members of a party who claim to be deathly afraid that The Black Guy in the White House © is a tyrant threatening our freedom and liberty.
When we do it, it’s out of love of country. When The Black Guy in the White House © does it, it’s the worst sort of tyranny imaginable. By this line of thinking, tyranny isn’t a problem- as long as you’re the one in control.
