Thus Spoke Hannah Arendt

 "Evil is banal" wrote Hannah Arendt, now famously, of those who perpetuated the Holocaust.

And certainly after watching Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" again last night, staying up way past my bedtime, I couldn't help but be dumbfounded by the stream of platitudes mouthed by der Fuehrer! Had I seen the speeches on paper--as textual artifacts--I might have called more attention to their appalling lack of substance.

I can no longer call on my old friends Orwell or Simone Weil to parse the language of politicians. And dear Hannah has been gone for many years.

I'm sorry I cannot ask her what she meant when she wrote "evil is banal", left alone as I am to ponder the statement's ineffable peculiarity.