Bread and Circuses or the Banality of Evil
Reflections on Art, Culture and Authoritarianism
Last week my wife and I took a post-Christmas trip downtown to the Poster House, a fabulous, relatively new museum on West 23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues in Manhattan. I’ll get to the broader theme of this post in a bit, but first I want to acknowledge a project that ran at Poster House through early September of this year. It is a much needed example of how art and political education can reach broader audiences — a recurring theme of this Substack.
I first learned of the Poster House from an exhibit earlier this year on the atomic bomb, “Fallout: Atoms for War and Peace.” The exhibit starts with a series of posters General Dynamics commissioned for the first two global meetings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under the title “Atoms for Peace.” The name of the poster series – and the IAEA itself – were launched in the wake of then U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s April 1953 Atoms for Peace speech. The idea was to derive economic benefits from nuclear technology rather than just using it to power or develop weapons of war:
‘It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put it into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic military build-up can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.”
The downside of the program was that by putting nuclear enrichment capabilities in the hands of so many nations and so many leaders, it also gave them the technology that could be used as the foundation of a national program to build nuclear weapons.
The poster series commissioned by General Dynamics for the global Atoms for Peace conference promoted every imaginable use for nuclear energy, from powering airplanes and submarines, to doing excavation for construction projects, to nuclear medicine.
The second part of the Poster House exhibit displayed anti-nuclear posters from Europe and the U.S. from the 1950s on, including the famous poster with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that was a takeoff on “Gone With the Wind.” Reagan is portrayed carrying Thatcher, with a mushroom cloud looming in the background. At the bottom of the poster it says “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to organise it!” As the spelling of “organise” suggests, the poster was created by the UK, the brainchild of Bob Light and John Huston for the Christmas 1980 edition of the Socialist Worker newspaper.
The atomic bomb exhibit was also the scene of a number of events, including a closing session co-sponsored by Sing for Science, and featuring the multi-talented artist Laurie Anderson and Princeton physicist and anti-nuclear activist Zia Mian. The event was described as follows:
“[A] conversation between Laurie Anderson and nuclear weapons policy expert Dr. Zia Mian. Together, they’ll explore how scientists and advocates work to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons – and how artistic voices like Anderson’s have shaped the cultural imagination around disarmament.”
Zia Mian is a co-founder of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, a Princeton-based group that does analysis, education and advocacy to reduce the prospects for a nuclear conflict. You can join the coalition here. Experts connected with the coalition include Frank von Hippel, a longtime expert on nuclear issues with a publication list that is literally longer than my arm; Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the most articulate and vocal critics of the president’s cherished “Golden Dome” missile defense system, which she rightly points out is physically impossible, and could be enormously expensive, even as it threatens to accelerate the global nuclear arms race; Alan Robock, a top expert on the climate effects of a nuclear conflict; and Sebastien Philippe, a winner of a MacArthur genius award who has proven that the health impacts of atmospheric nuclear tests had health impacts well beyond the test states of Nevada and New Mexico; Sharon Weiner, whose current research interests includes analyzing the political, institutional, and societal concerns that underlie U.S. nuclear weapons policy, and using a Virtual Reality experience to better understand how policy makers are likely to make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons; and Ray Acheson, a disarmament researcher with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), head of Reaching Critical Will, a member of the steering group of the Nobel-prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), and the author of Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages, a primer on how to integrate anti-nuclear organizing into broader struggles for peace and justice.
Getting back to the event at the Poster House, it delivered more than the preliminary writeup could encompass: a short film about the impacts of nuclear war, the dissection and explanation of a diagram of a nuclear warhead, discussions of the psychological and societal impacts of the bomb, and consideration of how humanity can come together to end the threat.
The session ended with Laurie Anderson leading the audience in some Tai Chi movements (I’m historically clumsy as hell at that sort of thing, but under Anderson’s patient and at times humorous guidance, I was at least average).
The atomic bomb exhibit was followed by the one we saw last week, “The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy.” A nice light topic for the holiday break . ..
One thing that stuck out in the exhibit on fascist Italy was Mussolini’s successful attempt to wed a forward looking, techno optimism with myths from Italy’s past. As the summary of the exhibit notes, it “explores how Benito Mussolini’s government created a broad-reaching culture that grew with and into the Futurist movement to claw into advertising, propaganda, and the very heart of the nation he commanded.” The idea of intellectuals and artists willingly – in some cases eagerly – cooperating with an authoritarian regime seems jarring in today’s context, where many artists support expanding democracy and freedom of speech, not curtailing them. Mussolini’s strength with the Futurist movement and in rural areas hit hard by war and disease solidified his power well before Hitler rose to rule Germany.
Mussolini and his government stressed modern style and modern technology, with numerous air and auto shows, plus a flight of Italian aircraft to Brazil to display Italy’s power in the air. But at the same time they trumpeted the past glories of Rome – after all, the symbol of fascism was the fasces, a bundle of rods and an axe that was a sign of authority in ancient Rome. Mussolini also spread his image everywhere (gee, do we know anyone who does that?). His idea was to keep dazzling people with the marvel of a strong, forward looking Italy that would not have been possible without his rule. Mussolini seemed to be pushing an updated version of the Roman empire’s favorite distractions, bread and circuses.
By contrast, later in the weekend I picked up a book of essays by Vivian Gornick that profiled major literary and historic figures, including Hannah Arendt, who maintained that ordinary people could perform acts of extraordinary cruelty, without an evil veneer. She coined the term “the banality of evil” after witnessing the trial of Nazi official Adolph Eichmann, who she described as “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but rather “terrifyingly normal.” Arendt reinforced the point 10 years after the Eichmann trial:
“I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”
Arendt’s thesis drew sharp fire from many quarters. The novelist Mary McCarthy argued that “[I]t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. But then isn’t he simply a monster?”
It should be noted that Arendt qualified her statement about the shallowness of evildoers by saying “at the least the very effective one now on trial.” So it wasn’t necessarily a blanket or universal insight.
All of which led me to think about Donald Trump. I won’t wade into the debate about the “F-word” – fascism. For the moment I’m interested in looking at our current regime in its own terms, while noting parallels with the past.
Trump certainly shares Mussolini’s love of spectacle, as well as his addiction to having his name and face anywhere and everywhere: the Trump/Kennedy Center, the Trump Class Battleship, the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (known by some as the “Donroe Doctrine”), and the monstrous ballroom that will loom over the White House, paid for by corporate donors like Google, Meta, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Caterpillar, Union Pacific, Altria, and the Reynolds Group.
The ballroom philanthropists offer a decent cross section of American industry – weapons companies, Silicon Valley tech firms, crypto companies, railroads, farm equipment, and tobacco companies. And the ballroom, if completed, will host a Trumpian version of bread and circuses, as may the new Trump/Kennedy Center. It’s not clear how broadly Trump’s taste in spectacle appeals, but if attendance and reactions at his rallies are any indication, he will certainly have a dedicated core of enthusiastic supporters.
The way that so many corporations, media outlets, universities, and other powerful institutions have bent the knee to Trump’s various crusades – particularly his war on efforts to reduce racism, misogyny and anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination and stifle free speech with respect to Israel’s genocide in Gaza – is shameful. But it is also curious. Many of Trump’s policies on immigration, tariffs, defunding scientific research, and trying to manipulate basic economic statistics will be detrimental to many U.S. corporations, and for some of them even huge tax breaks or giant Pentagon contracts won’t fill the gap. This leaves the question of whether fear is as important as greed in cementing corporate support of the Trump agenda.
As for the broader public, the so-called “big, beautiful bill” – one of the ugliest pieces of legislation in living memory – will slash programs aimed at meeting basic needs like health care, housing, and nutrition, even as it (and the administration’s proposed budget) will cut vital benefits to veterans and military families. Many of those hurt will be part of President Trump’s base. Will their love of his image and ideology and their hatred of his proposed targets of blame – Muslims, immigrants, people of color, independently minded women – allow them to swallow the Trump movement’s material damage to themselves and their families while staying firmly in the MAGA camp, or will they seek a new political outlet, whether to the right or left of Trump? That’s an open question.
As for Arendt’s observation of the “banality of evil,” that seems to be present in abundant supply in. our current political context. People who care about their church and their families, give to certain sorts of charities, and see themselves living a moral life are also supporting Trump, whose policies are causing immense suffering here and abroad and whose personal conduct does not square with the basic principles of any known religion. Some of them support him on a single issue – abortion, tax cuts, deregulation, a military mindset – and hold their noses about the rest. Others appear to be true believers who feel that Trump speaks for them and “sees them.” But the first group, the hold-your-nose single issue Trump supporters, bears out Arendt’s point to a degree. They can be perfectly nice and loving to one circle of people while ignoring, excluding or harming others through their political choices.
I wish I had a conclusion out of all of this. I don’t agree with some of the simpler explanations – all Trump supporters are shallow (or stupid), or they are all died-in-the-wool racists and misogynists, or that they will do an abrupt about face once Trump’s economic policies start hurting them in a big way.
Ideology, culture, mythology, and identity are all in play, as well as the greed I have documented in places like the arms industry and Silicon Valley. That leaves us at least two options – building an alternative culture that is more attractive and life-affirming, or delving into Trumpworld to better understand the roots of his support, in hopes of turning around some of his followers. It will likely take both, plus an agenda that meets the needs of the majority of Americans while promoting tolerance and cooperation over hatred and division, to dig out of our current predicament.