Cheap Evil

"On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Congressman Barney Frank asks a young woman at a recent town hall on health-care reform. This young woman had just asked Frank "Why do you support a Nazi policy like Obama does?"

Sad to say, "earth" is the answer to Frank's question about the planet where this young woman spends most of her time. On this earth, in this country and in this time, right wing opponents of health-care reform have drawn on Nazi allusions and images to claim health care reform is "evil." From pictures of President Obama defaced to look like Adolf Hitler, to references to Nazi plans for exterminations of those deemed "undesirable," these protesters are using Nazis to mean "absolute evil."

This use of Nazis as code for absolute evil is ripped from its actual historical context, the context that gives it meaning. How else could this young woman have asked this question of Barney Frank, a gay Jew, a man who belongs to two categories specifically targeted by the Nazis for extermination?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Christian ethicist who was hung by the actual Nazis for his resistance work against Hitler, talked about "cheap grace." "Cheap grace" is when people think that just saying "sorry" and asking for forgiveness means you don't have to actually change and become a more decent human being.

I believe the best way to describe this rash of Nazi allusions in the health care mayhem is "cheap evil." Cheap evil is an emotional appeal that has no historical context and no real content.

The reason cheap evil is so attractive to people is that it seems to cost nothing to make these emotional appeals and not have to back them up with any facts.

It's cheap evil when your ethics becomes disconnected from reality. Real struggles with evil most often require sacrifice and a willingness to deeply engage with this awful question about you and your own soul: where am I complicit and where is my responsibility?

That's the spiritual struggle to be both a decent human being and a decent society. It's a struggle that comes with a price tag, and it's not cheap.

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  |  August 21, 2009; 10:22 AM ET
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