Washington Post Columnist: Dismemberment Of Humans Is ‘Banal’

Washington Post gender columnist Monica Hesse, in her Aug. 26 criticism of pro-life activist Abby Johnson’s recent speech at the Republican National Convention, chose a curious word in her description of abortion. “Johnson had to describe abortion as a horror show because the alternative would have been too banal to achieve the effect she desired,” Hesse wrote. Abortions, Hesse says, are categorically banal.

Banality, Merriam-Webster tells us, is “something that lacks originality, freshness, or novelty.” The word also has connotations to a notorious book penned by the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, based on her observations of the 1961 Israeli trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, entitled “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

In that essay, for which Arendt was unfairly maligned, she explains her arresting experience watching Eichmann, an S.S. officer responsible for coordinating the transportation of millions of people to European death camps. Eichmann, much to her surprise, was no horrific monster or sadistic genius. He was a competent, if unremarkable, bureaucrat who spoke in simplistic clichés.