On top of everything else...

In The Book Club’s episode on The Thirty-Nine Steps, which I wrote about two days ago, Dominic Sandbrook describes the trick John Buchan plays on the reader in the first chapter when Scudder, a crank American investigative reporter, reveals to the narrator that the plot he’s uncovered to foment world war is a Jewish conspiracy. This turns out not to be the case, but Sandbrook describes the way some readers—many readers, it would seem—react to Scudder’s revelation when they forget that Scudder is a fictional character: they assume that the author “has left himself down,” in the understated British phrase.

That brought to mind one of the few passages I can remember from The Thanatos Syndrome, the Walker Percy novel with the Robert Ludlum title. (I read The Thanatos Syndrome during our honeymoon, which was a legendarily poor choice for such a happy time.) Near the midpoint of the novel, Dr Tom More visits Father Smith, an eccentric priest living in isolation atop an abandoned firetower in the Louisiana woods. Father Smith, who may have moved beyond eccentricity into insanity, makes More increasingly uncomfortable with his disjointed theological ramblings, and as More tries to open the hatch to leave the exchange reaches its climax:

“My heart sinks. On top of everything else, is he one of those?”

“The Holocaust was a consequence of the sign that could not be evacuated.”
“Right.”
“Who remembers the Ukrainians?”
“True.”
“Let me tell you something, Tom. People have the wrong idea about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as people see it, is a myth.”
Oh my. My heart sinks. On top of everything else, is he one of those? I try harder to open the damn door.

This too turns out to be a misunderstanding of some kind, but I think of this passage often because More’s sinking feeling is all too familiar now.

I almost wrote a post like this four years ago after a certain rapper’s deranged pro-Hitler interview with a well-know paranoiamonger. I didn’t, because I don’t care about that guy and I didn’t really want to address anti-Semitism here at the time, but the moment I saw the headlines I thought: “On top of everything else, is he one of those?”

And of course I’ve had many, many more occasions to remember that line since. And the groundswell, the anonymous comment-section lurkers and social media cranks, has given way to high-profile media personalities with millions of followers. Someday I’ll write about my realization that subjects I once thought rare and academic have, in fact, returned in new strength. But in the meantime, one hopes for more John Buchans, refusing to conform to such conspiratorial bigotry no matter how widespread.