Jamelle Bouie, Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas’s Benefactor, Is Not Just Another Billionaire:
When we want to memorialize an atrocity or a crime – when we want to remember the consequences and costs of evil – we focus on the victims… You won’t find a statue of Osama bin Laden at ground zero…
I don’t know what is in Crow’s heart. But he is a wealthy man. He is a powerful man. And power is attracted to power… Does Crow secretly admire these figures of his fascination? Probably not. But he doesn’t seem to understand them, either. He doesn’t respect the weight and meaning of the histories in question. What Crow has done is trivialize them. He has made them objects of curiosity. He has stripped them of specificity; they are meant to represent evil at its most generic and abstract…
To gaze at your collection of tokenized evil is to separate yourself from the perpetrators and their victims. It is to tell yourself — consciously or, more likely, subconsciously — that there’s nothing you could do to ever be like them.
Or so you hope.
Susan Neiman, There Are No Nostalgic Nazi Memorials:
Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them. Instead, it has a dizzying number and variety of monuments to the victims of its murderous racism…
For most Americans, Nazi is condensed into one genocidal moment that marked the outer limit of Third Reich crimes: the transport of civilians, in cattle cars, to death camps where they were murdered by poison gas. By focusing on that moment, without a glance at what happened before or after it, we lose the opportunity to learn anything useful from the Holocaust whose lessons we are told to remember. We still know too little about how Germany reached the point of committing those crimes. We are also ignorant of how German society slowly and fitfully came to terms with its violent, racist history—a process from which other nations, including the United States, can learn.
Jonathan Chait, What Is Dianne Feinstein Still Doing Here?
At the moment, [the Democrats’] judicial conveyer belt is stalled. The reason: Senator Dianne Feinstein is on medical leave, depriving Democrats of their majority on the committee. There is no way of knowing when, or even if, she will return. If Feinstein were to resign now, she could immediately be replaced by a senator able to perform his or her duties. Feinstein, however, has refused.
She recently offered to let another Senate Democrat fill her Judiciary Committee seat until such time as she can resume her duties. The trouble is this maneuver would require either unanimous consent or 60 Senate votes, and Republicans have little incentive to supply the necessary cooperation. In the meantime, the Democratic Party’s ability to restock the judiciary rests in Feinstein’s hands.