I don't know what prompted me to watch Europa, Europa again after twenty years (I first saw it in an art cinema in Bloomington, Indiana in 1990 when it came out, if memory serves), but I streamed it on Netflix last night, and aside from still lusting after a young Marco Hofschneider (who was actually 21 — my age — at the time of the film's release, and who is still my age now, but has wizened into this somewhat tragic creature in middle age), I was struck by how the only two scenes I remembered at all were the one where his skull is measured in front of his class and he is pronounced the perfect Aryan (oh, the irony!) and the one where he examines his battered dick after trying, very unsuccessfully, to "grow" his foreskin back (oh, the jewmanity!).



Aside from that Europa, Europa is as feel-good a movie about the Final Solution as you're bound to see, and is well worth the two hours of your time if you haven't seen it yet (and even if you have, but not in a while).

Of course any tale of the survival of Jews in Europe during World War Two comes down to blind luck and random acts of kindness — I know that's putting it in trivial terms, but those who survived all have stories of bravery, selflessness and sacrifice, where someone or other recognized a kindred humanity in a time when humanity itself was in peril on all fronts. 

Evil, to paraphrase a psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials, is the absence of empathy.  Stories of survival always involved individuals defying the dehumanization of the Regime.

This morning, still basking in the afterglow of a young Marco Hofschneider, in one of those moments in the hypnotic, hallucinogenic slipstream of cyberspace, I stumbled on a video from ABC News about the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi. 

The thing that struck me, aside from the obvious, was the short interview with a friend of Clementi's roommate Dharun Ravi, who in live-streaming Clementi's intimate encounter set the tragedy in motion.  In the the clip, Ravi's friend Michael Zhuang (interviewed in a surreally bleak suburban setting), tells the camera Ravi is "very, very open-minded, and ... I feel like if it had been a girl in the room it wouldn't have been any different."

So, in other words, an equal-opportunity cunt.  Nice.

The idea that someone who bears some responsibility for someone else's suicide, who invaded someone else's privacy with such callous disregard, with a cold, calculated contempt worthy of a character from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos — the idea that his "open-mindedness" is at all relevant is perverse. 

I mean, it's a little like saying of someone who, say, ran down an old lady, tweeted about it while dragging her body three miles until her pulped carcass dislodged from the undercarriage of his car, stepped out, checked for scratches on his bumper, snapped a shot of her mangled corpse with his cellphone to send to his Facebook account, hopped back in his car, and drove off — it's a little like saying, "but he's a great guy — and come on!  He was driving a Prius!"

You hate to think of it as a generational thing, and the truth is, the personalities involved echo (for me at least) the "careless people" of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby.  It seems cyclical, really.  The fact that it took place in a college setting among a diverse milieu — in other words, amongst young people who are educated and "open-minded" — just puts a contemporary politically correct spin on it.

If I were going to don my curmudgeon cap (and you know I can't resist), I would say that we have raised a generation that is both broad-minded and cruel (a killer combination — literally).  Broad-minded politically (as young people tend to be) but, armed with new tools that make my generation's attempts at evil look strictly amateur, capable of careless acts of cruelty towards their Facebook frenemies that could shock the most cynical among us.

The tribalism of today's youth is not based, necessarily, on the coarse criteria of ethnic or racial affinity.  It is much more nuanced the higher up the food chain you go, and the social stakes of losing the thread, of fumbling the meme, are higher, too. The subtleties are, again, reminiscent of Dangerous Liaisons, so minute and well-managed are the on-line personae, and so high-stakes any misstep. Sexting can ruin your life, they've been told.  Once The Google's got hold of it, it's forever. 

It is truly frightening, given the stakes, how easy it is to destroy a reputation.  (This is why I have been proactive in destroying mine — why give someone else the pleasure?)  Whether Ravi and his sidekick Molly Wei were explicitly aware — whether they really understood — in real life terms — the ramifications — they cannot have been other than intuitively aware of them.  You don't get into Rutgers without any sense of the nuances of social networking and how it works today.

There is obviously a disconnect.  It is not enough to "know what's right", to be generally "open-minded", if, when faced with the particular of another's humanity you demonstrate no impulse of empathy towards him.  Or perhaps there's such a thing as "negative empathy".  We know how to inflict pain — we know just where the bullseye is, expert marksmen all — but don't seem much concerned about how it feels to the target.   

It is deceptively simple to say, almost dismissively, "yes, of course, do unto others, yadda yadda yadda", and to then disconnect entirely when it comes to actual encounters with others.  It only matters to us when we are the others being done unto.  We have an intense sense of the unfairness of being treated without empathy, but a withered sense of what it feels like when we treat others that way.  We know what empathy is but only recognize it when it seems to us it's lacking in the other.

There are moments of crisis in History where our world is turned upside down, and all that can save it is real human empathy in action.  We're talking courage that overcomes the exigencies of self-preservation.  When we're not in crisis, though, we sometimes forget that social-climbing can involve the kind of cruelty we saw in the Tyler Clementi case.

When I see a tragedy like that unfolding, it reminds me that every generation faces its own crisis of humanity, that, in fact, every life is about that struggle to locate our own humanity in the humanity of others.  But, as the curmudgeon, I have to say, this latest crop needs to wake up and smell the fucking fair trade coffee, already.

Tell me, is this really what you bitches believe? — From a recent "Dear Reader" column, by a young writer at the Weekly Dig:

A few weeks ago* I mentioned the transformation that our economic system is going through, and, judging by the response, I feel it's important to make sure we all know what each of us needs to do to see it through.

Nothing.

In the end, we all know what is right. We all know, for example, that we need to be diligent reusers and composters. We're all moving back to the city.And we all know that digital is the way forward.

The kerfuffle over the decline of handwritten letters, vinyl albums and (yipes) books is ongoing, but as anyone who can rip through a novel on the Kindle (or can instantly listen to any song, or crack Mom up with a text message) will tell you, they're not anti-past; they're pro-future.

(And the irony of writing this in a newspaper is not lost on me. Fortunately, it's an independent paper, and they let me write things like this.)

So roll with it. If we simply pay attention to the numerous paradigm shifts afoot and continue to do what we are doing—supporting them, believing in them and acting on them—it's about as easy as a revolution gets.

I'm good!  I recycle!  I compost!

And so did Jeffrey Dahmer, bitch.

Seriously. Talk about the forest for the trees.  I wonder how old this kid was when Bush answered the profound shock of 9/11 with "go out and buy something."  Because he's obviously adopted the creed that the evil in the world can be addressed — easily addressed — by going out and buying something.  Preferably from the Apple Store.

Honestly, I don't know what gives me more hope for the future:  the uncritical faith in technology or the elevation of consumerism to the level of religious conviction?  That air of moral certainty is always attractive. If this is any indication, the future is going to be... well, hopefully it's going to be.  But it sometimes seems, to borrow from the brilliant Neil Postman, that we are amusing ourselves to death.

The degree to which we've abandoned the rigors of actual empathy for abstract notions of affiliation with the Empathy Tribe are obvious. It's easy to do.  And getting easier.  I think there's an app for that.  A generation is obviously coming of age with no understanding of the gulf between the virtual and the real, between information and understanding, between, to paraphrase a famous poet, the idea and the reality, the motion and the act.

There are wonderful things about youth, all of which are obvious.  Empathy often blossoms later in life.  But where it's not cultivated, it doesn't grow at all.  And no amount of googling can help you find it.  It's probably the curmudgeon in me talking, but sometimes I'm afraid we've entered the Brave New Age of Evil 2.0, where it's so hard for us to imagine the inner lives of those without empathy that we become victims of its absence ourselves. 
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*The earlier piece was a priceless Dig-style take-down of Paul Krugman, who had argued that we were headed for an economic depression. The Nobel-winning author of the Dig piece begged to differ: "I don't know what the future holds exactly, but I do know what we're seeing is more than a recession, depression or any other traditional economic concept.  It's a transformation."