At moments of profound change, it’s easy to see the same thing two ways. Is this the long-needed clearout of a sclerotic bureaucracy that ties the American people down like so many Lilliputian strings on Gulliver? Or is that just the cover for the beginning of a racist autocracy of the craven?
It could be either, or both at the same time. When you look at the image, do you see a duck or a rabbit? (Or, as Ashley Mayer pointed out to me, do you see white and gold or black and blue in the dress?) They should call them optical confusions, not optical illusions, because that’s what they do — confuse.
For even more of a mindblow, note that the duck-or-rabbit illusion first ran in a German humor rag a few years after Hitler was born — plenty of ambiguity that society had to parse during that period, the Second Reich.
To protect us from ambiguity, we have some guides. The Jewish concept of fences — refusing to do things even adjacent to the Bad Thing, because they might inadvertently allow you to do bad things — seems to apply, for example, to anyone making a heartgiving-or-was-it-Nazi salute.
Needless to say, leaders take responsibility for the impacts of their actions. If you do something ambiguous, and someone mistakenly — and justifiably —worries you’re acting like a fascist, clarify that you’re not.
Otherwise, keep your heads, my friends. Remember both can be true and you can still fight for the one you want.
