Yes, It Is Monotonous and Tedious and Boring...and That is the Danger...
It’s so monotonous and tedious and boring. Every day we check the news to see what Trump has done or said, what piece of our lives he’s ruined, what bit of government he’s trashed, and what relationships he’s destroyed. We are no longer concerned with Trump busting norms (how quaint!), as he’s moved onto breaking the law (with an assist from the Supreme Court). The horrors continue and continue with such frequency that they blur. Trump’s victims morph from individuals to one class of people, those who are fucked. Even our fighting back seems like more of the same and the same and the same. Monotonous. Tedious. Boring.
Welcome to authoritarian rule.
Thanks to decades of History Channel-style World War II documentaries and fictional accounts of totalitarianism like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, we’ve gotten a warped view of what authoritarianism looks like. The documentaries present Nazi Germany as a sleek, orderly killing machine with some dark high style, and Fascist Italy as a macho march of flexing and timely train service. Our fictional dystopias are full of drama, tension, and excitement…because that is what engages readers, listeners, and viewers. Even popular history books on authoritarian regimes pump up the spectacular moments of fascism while mostly ignoring the day to day, which is monotonous, tedious, and boring.
True that there’s nothing not spectacular about rounding up people, forcing them into cattle cars, and shipping them off to death camps where they are starved, beaten, gassed, and incinerated to death or shunting dissidents off to far away labor camps where they are starved, beaten, and worked to death…that is until it becomes an everyday occurrence, something that happens with the regularity and predictability of a weather reporter standing hip deep in flood water while struggling with the wind. Disaster is disaster until it becomes porn and then as plain as mayo on white bread…and we start to become numb to it all.
When WWII documentaries, which very much influence our education, focus on Nazi “concentration camps” they almost always are centered on a handful of facilities – Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen – while ignoring the vast network of death camps, forced labor camps, concentration camps, transfer camps, reeducation camps, resettlement camps, and show camps designed to con outsiders into believing that camp life was near benign.
The narrow focus on a few camps singled out as extreme neglects the truth that the Nazis ran more than 40,000 “concentration camps” and subcamps. Most of these camps did not garner attention from the outside, even neighbors, as they were designed not to call attention to themselves and/or located far away from the German population. They were operated as one would run a widget factory, with that much flair. Life immediately outside the camps was much like it is portrayed in the movie Zone of Interest, monotonous, tedious, boring, and seemingly normal.
What is your idea of the typical American prison? A big building, bars, cells, prisoners in uniforms, gangs, violence, riots, break outs, etc. Most likely, the basis of our understanding of prisons and prison life is taken from movies or unique lock-ups like Alcatraz. The names most people know are what they’ve learned from entertainment and legend: Alcatraz, Sing Sing, Attica, Folsom, San Quentin, and Leavenworth. If you read the news, maybe you know Florence, Pelican Bay, Angola, and Corcoran. But there are thousands of others, especially when you include jails, juvenile detentions, work camps, and other facilities we use to incarcerate people.
As with the Nazi’s camps, our penal facilities are spread throughout the country, in rural areas far from major media centers to neighboring major cities to remote parts of a city to smack dab in the middle of an urban area. As with Nazi Germany (and other authoritarian regimes), we also outsource our incarceration, to private corporations (ours are Geo Group and CoreCivic, the Nazis used partnerships with companies like Volkswagen, BMW, IBM, and Shell to run their work camps) and foreign countries (Guantánamo Bay, CIA rendition sites, CECOT). Whether in country or out, many of these lock-ups are out of sight, either because they are far from public view, they blend into the community, or they’ve existed so long that no one much notices them as something unique.
And life in these facilities? Correspond with someone inside or talk to a former inmate and you will hear the word boring much more than anything that denotes excitement. Certainly, prison can be dangerous, but it is mostly monotonous, tedious, and boring – the same space, the same food, the same people over and over and over again. When violence does come, it arrives as a release from daily dullness.
The most damaging fiction about Nazi Germany (and other authoritarian regimes) is that it was orderly, streamlined, and efficient. There are three things behind this. First, the idea that Germans are an orderly people, not exactly true. Second, the Nazi filled a lot of file cabinets full of paperwork, which should be a red flag for anyone who has done busy work in an office. Third, the Nuremburg Rally, which was a made-for-media spectacle, Nazi show biz concocted and filmed to make the outside world believe the Order myth.
The reality is that Nazi leadership was sloppy, corrupt, and inept. As with the Trump administration, Hitler’s hierarchy contained “all the best people” – sycophants, ideologues, cheats, climbers, morons, and hacks. Goebbels was the brightest of the bunch, but not a spectacular person outside the Nazi system. Albert Speer would have been a C-level architect anywhere else. Goering was an opportunist filthy with corruption. Himmler was as mediocre a person as there was. And those who filled the lower ranks were either bottom feeders, job seekers, or pressed into service, while the best best people opposed the Third Reich while living underground or in exile.
Even militarily, the Nazis were cracked. Hitler’s conquest of the west was thanks to a combo of timing, chance, and speed. The Nazis overwhelmed the unprepared and needed others (the Soviets) to take on tougher countries like Poland. The London Blitz created a lot of damage but it stalled. Hitler’s obsession with North Africa was pointless. For some insane reason, Hitler turned to the east and tried to take on Russia, in the winter with supply lines that stretched hundreds of miles. None of this was orderly, streamlined, or efficient. It was a mess, with soldiers acting every bit as undisciplined as Trump’s ICE agents.
As noted earlier, sloppiness, corruption, and ineptitude were not unique to Nazi Germany. Nor did the Nazis have a monopoly on sycophants, ideologues, cheats, climbers, morons, and hacks. Fascist Italy’s trains might have run on time, but Italians strung Mussolini up for reasons that had more to do with him being a shitty leader who was ruining the country than his alliance with Hitler.
Franco’s Spain was thoroughly corrupt and haphazardly run. The best of their countries fled Chile, Syria, Philippines, Iraq, Indonesia, and Argentina rather than serving Pinochet, Assad, Marcos, Hussain, Suharto, or the junta. Like Trump, these “strong men” were left with their versions of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kristy Noem, Linda “A1” McMahon, Dr. Oz, and RFK, Jr. And while there certainly were round ups of dissidents and plenty of violence, daily life in these authoritarian regimes was mostly monotonous, tedious, and boring, especially once power was established. What was once spectacular seemed as routine as Trump rattling on about the number of dolls a 15-year-old girl should own or his desire to reopen Alcatraz after watching a movie.
I want to be perfectly clear that in focusing on Nazi Germany in relation to Trump’s regime, I am not making an apples-to-apples comparison. The United States is not Nazi Germany as it is not Fascist Italy or Pinochet’s Chili or Greece under the generals. Every authoritarian regime has its own way of doing things with unique cultures, personalities, and structures. However, because authoritarianism in practice is generally unpopular, all authoritarian regimes struggle with competency and corruption. While they all put on airs of orderliness and lean into “efficiency,” daily life is as haphazard and chaotic as Elon Musk and as monotonous, tedious, and boring as listening to Stephen Miller.
And don’t mistake me saying that all this is monotonous, tedious, and boring as thinking that there’s no danger here. Not at all! While the spectacular can overwhelm, it also prompts us to act with the intensity of the spectacle itself. The real danger lurks in the boredom and monotony of normalcy and even deeper, within us, in our numbness and desire to shut our eyes and wish this all way.