This week's quotes: “But here are men, men of education and intelligence, honest and upright men who suddenly give up the highest human privilege. They have ceased to be free and personal agents.” “Man no longer questions his environment; he accepts it as a matter of course.” Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946). These were quoted in Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (Macmillan, New York, 1970).

I got on to Lisa's show for a few minutes this week. She knew that I fumed against the City Council on its resolution and invited me to comment on air. My message was learn your damned history before you tell another country how to run its affairs, especially when your house is in such poor order.

So here was Speer citing this because it was an expression of the thing he did. At 28, he was the Reich's architect. What you get is the complete banality of evil. Speer was there to build. He didn't have any animus against the Jews. He didn't have any notion that Hitler's rhetoric would take the direction it did.

In hindsight, he saw that he could have seen it if he had not given up that agency, but he was as besotted as any other German. He looks back at a certain period where he was particularly taken with Hitler's brilliance, but when he returned to look for the things that must have inspired him, he sees it for the garbage it is.

It makes one wonder what we don't see today. And maybe we are those who take a stand. It could be worse.