Blogout
Inspired by both Seema and general exhaustion, I’m joining in the day of
blog silence tomorrow. It’s not because I need more time to watch the media
frenzy, or that I approve of media frenzy. I don’t have an anniversary blog
entry to cite, since I started blogging later in the month last September, and
only about sci-fi at first.
There just isn’t anything you can say about evil. No matter how much
media frenzy Americans whip up in our unique edutainment approach to coping,
and no matter how hard certain
non-Americans try to pin the whole thing on the victim, evil is an irreducible
thing. Neither ribbons nor excuses can make it disappear. Calling it boring is
not a deep statement on the banality of evil - saying they’ve been repeated too
often is just another attempt to evade the facts.
Evil doesn’t fade, though
it may be surpassed by fresh evils. Evil gains you, not a spot in heaven with
seventy-odd virgins, but a permanent place in the memory of man. Ignomy
is eternal. The
Spanish Inquisition didn’t kill all that many people (as a percentage of the
potential victim pool), but you recognized the term immediately, didn’t you? Five
hundred years haven’t been enough to rub that one out, so don’t bother
looking to forget evil just one year after the event.
(Yes, I know the Spanish Inquisition didn’t end formally until
1834, but that was
long after the heretic-roasting heyday upon which its reputation in Anglophone
countries rests.)