This guy walks into work, trying to act all casual and everything. And I didn't suspect anything, he wasn't wearing, like some guys, a trench coat which has sort of morphed into young urban professional wear in the intervening years between today and the First World War, even though as a sartorial option it looks kind of fussy- like double breasted peacoats; I am digressing because could probably talk about issues pertaining to winter wear for at least the whole of this post. The guy pulls out his wallet and takes off his black leather glove to go in to get his eftpos card.
I think as soon as you decide, at whatever point you are in during your life, that a leather glove is a "good idea" you are running into some sort of massive brick wall of a mistake. Blinded by the conception that leather will be technically warmer than wool and that black leather conveys instant suavity and panache, the unfortunate buyer becomes for all intents and purposes instantly threatening.1 The leather gloved hand implies all sorts of things, mostly a darkly lit room with a swinging lightbulb and some guy casually "havving vays of making you talk." The guy seemed really nice and all, well innocuous as every one is when purchasing a stabilo boss highlighter, but it really made me think about the banality of evil, of normalising the unthinkable.
The wikipedia page on Arendt's term, the "banality of evil" is, in case you hadn't looked it up, really politicised. 2 Not in a bad way, just in a discreet way. While the thesis refers generally to the Holocaust, thereby implicating specifically Nazi Germany but in some extents the other Totalitarian nations complicit in the Holocaust- Pax Germania and the Soviet Union. The accompanying photograph in the article is of a US State Department facsimile requesting autopsies of victims of medical experiments during the Holocaust. The photograph raises the issue of US complicity in the Holocaust, or at least some degree of benefit, from the war crimes of Nazi science. In fairness, it is a subtle point in the article that isn't explored. But I guess you don't really expect Wikipedia or this blog to go into details on post war issues with the normalisation of evil, especially when it questions America's conception of itself as the "good guy" in a "good war."
Yeah but leather gloves hey, really evil right. I don't know probably got too serious in that later section.
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1. Am not really sure if the brick wall metaphor has enough foreshadowing for the next sentence formation of leather gloves as "instantly threatening". I am hurtling deep into cliche territory, like implying that wearing brick gloves is like swimming in shark infested water or something. Leather gloves are a pit full of bears. It is probably too early to be writing. One day I will be a really great writer, potentially.
2. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
