If you are one of those reasonable souls who doesn't spend a lot of time with social media channels, then you might not have heard about the teenage girl from Alabama who became (to use her word) "famous" last week for taking a cell phone photo of herself during a June visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She was smiling in the photo, with two barracks that once held the camp's internees converging behind her head at what would be the picture's vanishing point.
She posted the photo to her Twitter account, punctuated with a smiling emoji.
A month or so later, she's an Internet sensation--the next object of our planet's two-minute hate: She's a horrible person, an insensitive, narcissistic millennial with no sense of history.
Maybe that's harsh. All of us do stupid things. Perhaps this is what is called (unironically, in some circles) a "teaching moment." After all, if there's anyplace on earth where decency forbids the idiot rictus of the selfie, you might think it would be the place where at least 1.1 million people--about 90 percent of them Jewish--died as a result of genocidal insanity not all that many generations ago. Some times and places call for solemnity, or at least respectful silence.
But because she's an American, barely out of high school, the young lady is not about to apologize just because some people were offended. You see, she knows all about Auschwitz--she told a local television station that World War II was "the only thing that ever interested her" in history. She used to study the Holocaust with her father, who died. In fact, the photo was taken on the anniversary of his death. They had always planned to go to the death camp together. When she finally made it, she was happy and meant to preserve the moment.
"Honestly, I don't think I would do anything differently, because I didn't mean any harm," she told the oddly sympathetic anchors on Take Part Live, a news show aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds that airs on the "disruptive" cable and satellite channel Pivot.
"And, like, I told everybody my story behind it, so that's the only reason I don't regret taking it."
Naturally, a few people have risen to the young lady's defense, some more eloquently than others. Some on both sides have been cruel. The young lady--whose name and Twitter handle I'm withholding on purpose, though I realize that anyone thinking of piling on her probably knows how to Google--has reported death threats. As they do on the Internet, people have suggested she kill herself.
She seems unfazed. And, on the plus side, she got more than 3,300 re-tweets. ("Turnnnnnn uppppppp," she types.)
Oh dear.
But if Michael Vick deserved a second chance (and I think he did, though I'm not sure he's worthy of any adulation beyond the observation that he has at times been very good at football), we probably ought not heap too much opprobrium on a dumb kid. Maybe she deserves a break because--though I doubt she really knows "all about" Hitler and his Final Solution to the Jewish question--she at least ventured out of Alabama and exposed herself to this place where bad things happened before she was born. She seems to have at least an inchoate sense that she needed to see this charnel house, that somehow, some way, these ancient things matter.
The selfie was a mistake. It should be embarrassing to her and I suspect that--despite her Twitterverse bravado and painful TV appearance--at some level she understands what she did was tasteless. That she apparently doesn't realize that doesn't make her a horrible person, just a clueless and callow young person who has been brought up in a world where apologies are generally read as a sign of weakness and where deep and sincerely felt emotions are privileged over those archaic and mildly hypocritical conventions of society we call manners.
Engaging with the enormity of the Holocaust is problematic for us all. I have thought hard about what Claude Lanzmann, the French director who made the nearly nine-hour Shoah, the 1985 film that consisted of interviews with both survivors of the Holocaust and their Nazi oppressors, has often said. He considers any fictional re-creation of the Holocaust obscene and "tantamount to fabricating archives." Even a well-intentioned and scrupulous movie such as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List feels a little off to me, a trivialization of the worst of which our species is capable. Sometimes even the honest effort to honor becomes, in its obvious insufficiency, a kind of mockery.
(So really, an emoji?)
We might hope that someday she'll understand this, but it's possible she will remain a wonderfully oblivious American teenager all her life (so many of us do), engaged by reality television and the other banal comforts of the digital age. But we must hope that at some point she acquires the sort of moral acumen necessary to empathize with those gray people of the past, all those black-and-white faces who left behind their shoes and suitcases and who would most likely be dead now anyway.
It is not her fault she was born in an absurd time in an absurd world where atrocities like the Holocaust are possible and where the digital documentation of one's own existence has become the default mode of self-expression. Some believe that cell phones and the Internet might have prevented Hitler from attempting to exterminate the Jews, but genocide persists. It takes more than technologically driven transparency to change the nature of this shrugging, eye-rolling, LOLing beast.
Rather than educating her, the online shaming of this Alabama princess just perpetuates the cycle. It's the sort of low-grade snark that exposes our kind's capacity for cruelty and willingness to receive our fellow humans as Other, as fundamentally different from ourselves.
This is the lie we tell ourselves about anyone whom we seek to denigrate and marginalize: About Nazis, about immigrants, about Muslims. About poor idiot children from Alabama.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 07/27/2014