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The Banality of Evil

Stuart Butler

Saturday, February 23rd, 2002

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 I’d forgotten we were playing away tonight,
You get thrown by Friday night games, don’t you?
And what with work and food and drink and books,
I’d forgotten all about it, until I was shaken and stirred
By who knows what with about 15 minutes to go;
So I absent-mindedly turned on the telly to BBC 2,
With teletext 307 on top of whatever irrelevance happened to be on,
And there was Tranmere 0 Swindon 0,
(Promising, can we hold out for an away draw?)
Merging in with a ledger containing lots of zeros,
A Final Solution death list.
And then there was the smiling face of Adolf Eichmann, 1942,
And the 1961 archive footage of his trial,
Where he says he was only obeying orders
And was therefore innocent of any crime,
And as the trains rolled across the screen to Auschwitz,
Beneath a score-line heading for its final whistle,
There could be no pleasure in a second clean sheet
And an invaluable away point,
And the phrase “the evil of banality” leaped to mind.

© Stuart Butler

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