CatherineRhodes.com

Who knows what courage lies within us?

I’ve been loving Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal these past few months. It’s much less partisan and more observational than it was last year during the election, as if to say: “I’ve been on this planet for over six decades and let me share what I’ve learned.” Her Memorial Day piece focused on American heroes, specifically war heroes, a designation that has fallen out of favor.

The category of military hero—warrior—fell off a bit, in part because of the bad reputation of war….somewhere in the 1960s I think we decided, or the makers of our culture decided, that to celebrate great warriors was to encourage war. And we always have too much of that.

I’d have to disagree slightly with her on this. Consider the depiction of the soldies in Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers or of the surge of patriotism kicked off by Desert Storm a decade ago when George Bush Sr enjoyed a 90 percent approval rating. Maybe our acceptance of war heroes depends on the moral gravitas of the war being fought. Another of Ms. Noonan’s interesting ideas is about the nature of America’s need to create heroes:

More than most nations, America has been, from its start, a hero-loving place. Maybe part of the reason is that at our founding we were a Protestant nation and not a Catholic one, and so we made “saints” of civil and political figures.

Her column tells the stories of two American farmboys, Alvin York and Audie Murphy, who were drafted into battle and fought heroically. Who knows what happens when ordinary people get thrust into extraordinary times.

Thanks to Amy Wilentz for the passalong on this one.

It is big and ugly — isn't that the point?

Why are people still interested in movies about the Holocaust? IMHO, it’s because the central question is still unresolved: How much did ordinary people know? How could they turn a blind eye? What is it in the German national character that made it possible?

Watched “The Reader” the other night on Netflix. The Kate Winslet character is on trial for having been a Nazi guard who allowed 300 prisoners to burn to death in a locked farmhouse. Her defense: If the doors had been opened the prisoners would have run everywhere. It would have been chaos.

Just doing my job. Just following orders.

Was in Berlin with my brother Stef a few years ago and three things stood out. First, the newly opened Jewish Museum, wherein exhibit after exhibit chronicles anti-semitism in Europe, as if to plead, “see, it wasn’t us, everyone hated them. We were just willing to take action.”

Then there is the so-called Holocaust memorial, a square block full of tombstones of varying height with corrridors that allow visitors to walk through. There is all sorts of symbolism, but the upshot .is that it is like a boot in the face, located across from the Reichstag, and is widely despised by Berliners They feel forced by outsiders to deface their lovely city with this monument to the past.

Ah, the power of a uniform

But my favorite was a temporary exhibit set up for the victims of people who died trying to cross the border from East Germany into West. There were about 700 victims over a 45-year period. The organizers of the memorial had a hand-lettered poster that read, “Why should the people who died in the Holocaust get all the attention? After all, they weren’t even real Germans.”

Could the Holocaust happen again? In my opinion, no. An operation of that size could not be hidden with today’s technology. The chimneys flaring at Buchenwald would be picked up by Google Earth and some dude with a flip video would upload the footage to YouTube where it would most likely go viral. I suppose the better question is, If they could get away with it, would it happen? Given who we are as a species, I think the answer is most definitely yes. Ask any Frenchman candidly if he would like to cleanse his country of the Muslim population (10 percent) and you see that it’s not just the Germans. The Germans just took their task seriously.