Author Nyla Bright

Nazi’s and Certainty

Nyla Bright

What follows is a portion of an essay my son, Grant Bright, wrote for a scholarship application. I thought I would share it here.

“This place. This is the fruit of unquestioned, ferocious conviction. This is where absolute certainty leads.” 

Most people who read this essay probably won’t recognize that quote. Those few who do are probably wondering how a quote from Wolfenstein: The New Order, an M-rated video game, could possibly be relevant to an essay about the importance of lifelong learning. Allow me to explain how.

To understand that quote and how it’s relevant, we’ll need a little context. Those three sentences are spoken by Set Roth, a jewish character from The New Order. And “the place” he’s referring to is Camp Belica, a nazi-run death camp. It is, in essence, a place run by people so certain in their worldview and ideology they are willing to engage in industrialized mass-murder in that ideology’s name, so certain that they have nothing more to learn that they slaughter millions of people who they believe have nothing to contribute to their New Order. 

And as you are likely all too aware, the Nazis didn’t just do that in the context of Wolfenstein: The New Order. Despite what some holocaust deniers would have you believe, places like Camp Belica did exist in the real world, places such as Auschwitz and Dachau and Nohra. I should know; I’ve studied the Nazis very thoroughly, reading things like Maus and Night, all in my quest to understand what drove the Nazis to let their fanaticism override their basic human decency, what drives other cultures to keep making the same mistake, even after the end of World War II. And I’ve found that the reasons why a group decides that another needs to be wiped out almost always boils down to the same absolute certainty Set Roth spoke of.

That, right there, is why lifelong learning is important. Absolute certainty that there is nothing more to learn is what brought about the holocaust, so naturally the best way to prevent it is to embrace uncertainty, embrace the fact that there will always be more to learn. And we do that by understanding other viewpoints, acknowledging and listening to criticism, and being willing to change our beliefs when they’re proven wrong or misleading. Instead of just blindly accepting statements because it’s what we want to hear, we ask ourselves hard questions about those beliefs and whether they line up with our values and knowledge, backing them up not with raw emotion but evidence, research, and data, and changing them to reflect new information we receive. 

That’s why I’m seeking a college education as an Economist. While many of them, like Claudia Goldin, have been doing groundbreaking research on the flaws in our society and how we can leverage economics to fix them, others are falling into the same trap that the Nazis fell into, clinging to economic policies that benefit the rich and powerful at the cost of those below them because they don’t want to admit that they’re wrong. We need more Economists like Goldin, like me; people who go in with a willingness to analyze and deconstruct past assumptions, people who are willing to acknowledge that they don’t know everything, people who truly understand that the quest to learn is life-long, and doesn’t end when you graduate from school. 

Momento Mori by Darrin Bright

Nyla Bright

My husband, Darrin Bright, read to me an email he sent to a high school acquaintance. It was beautiful, as much for the writing as for the fact that he teared up reading it. I wanted to share with you, so I asked Darirn to rework it as an essay. – Nyla Bright

Momento Mori

by Darrin Bright

I am at a Depeche Mode concert in 2023. I shouldn’t be here, but I am, and I am also sending a Facebook IM to someone I knew back in high school, that I have barely spoken to in the last 30 years: Marty. He popped up in my Facebook feed a couple years ago, and while we weren’t exactly friends in high school, he was in several friend circles of some people I cared deeply about. We both played clarinet in band, and for a year or so I thought we were both interested in the same girl. So if I needed a reason to not like him, there was that, and also one other thing: he was a huge fan of Depeche Mode. In 2023, I know he lives in New York and not much else beyond that, but I know he’d probably appreciate where I am, so I send him an IM. I am surpised when he responds almost immediately. He’s jealous, and hoping he can fly out and see them next year in California.  

I did not like Depeche Mode in high school. In fact, you could probably say I despised Depeche Mode. It was not my kind of music. I had no interest in depressed, mopy lyrics. They were counterculture, they were an offshoot of punk, but they weren’t my particular kind of counterculture. It wasn’t my tribe. Van Halen, Rush, Led Zeppelin, that was my tribe! Get your mopey, emo synth-pop away from me, go cry into your mascara somewhere else.

So why am I here, at a Depeche Mode concert? I’m here with Gretchen, my wife’s best friend and roommate from college, and Depeche Mode was HER tribe. The first day of college, Nyla (my wife) walked up to the first person she met on campus and introduced herself. That was Gretchen. They lived in the dorms together at Baldwin Wallace University, and have orbited into and out of each other’s lives since then. In 1995, as a graduation present to Nyla, Gretchen, and Gretchen’s younger brother Ben, the four of us went to Cedar Point, one last day of being young and having fun at an amusement park. After that, jobs, rent payments, grocery bills, and all the various terrors of adulthood set in and must be dealt with. In 2005, my wife and I bought a house in Seven Hills, and Gretchen orbits back in as a renter and roommate, she’s going to Case Western Law School to get a law degree. A few years later, she orbits out again to SUNY Stonybrook, then UNC Chapel Hill. We see her sometimes at Thanksgiving, or Christmas, when she visits her older brother Jeff, who also lives in Seven Hills, about 10 minutes south of us.

Gretchen is slowly digging herself out from student loan debt and dealing with the fallout of realizing, after getting a Law degree and passing the bar, that she really didn’t want to be a lawyer. She’s in charge of dealing with immigration and visa issues for international faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. Depeche Mode is on tour, impossibly, in 2023, nowhere near Chapel Hill, but… CLEVELAND? She has friends and family back there. Impulse buy! Although for Gretchen, sudden impulses like this are more of a long, drawn-out internal debate with anxiety, self-doubt, self-denial. Before she can overthink it, she gives in to this indulgent moment of insanity, the deed is done, she has two tickets. Who will go with her?

The natural choice is Jeff, her older brother. But there is a miscommunication. Jeff can’t go, for some stupid Jeff-being-Jeff reason. My wife, Nyla, doesn’t do concerts anymore, can’t deal with the noise, the people, the uncomfortable chairs. I am volunteered into duty. Can Gretchen crash with us for a night? Yes, of course. Then Jeff sorts out the being-stupid thing, Gretchen can stay with him, but now he wants to go to the concert. I am not sure of the details, but Gretchen buys Jeff a ticket on the floor somewhere in a different section, row YY, as a Christmas gift.

In 1990, Depeche Mode released their seventh studio album, Violator. “Enjoy the Silence” is moving up the charts and enters heavy rotation on MTV, back when they had the decency to still play music videos. I am still wallowing in the classic rock and hair band era: Van Halen, Rush, Led Zeppelin, but also New Wave: The Cars, the Go-Gos, Duran Duran. Violator is a landmark album for Depeche Mode, another high point after the massive success of Music for the Masses. But this is different. “Personal Jesus” is smashing the charts. It’s not just disposable pop music, this is ABOUT something: religion, faith, and homoerotic cowboys dressed in leather. Also, “Enjoy the Silence” is a really, really good song. In 1990, my “I hate Depeche Mode” stance wavers. Later, in 2014, when I’m burning CDs in a haze of nostalgia for simpler days, “Enjoy the Silence” enters as track #4 on my “1990’s Mix” CD, as it should be. In 2023, at the concert, Gretchen would explain this to me: “Yeah, that’s when they discovered electric guitars were a thing!”

I was worried going into the concert, I wouldn’t be enough of a “fan” to appreciate or recognize the music. Depeche Mode has 15 studio albums, and I was barely familiar with… mostly the songs that I only remember being overplayed in high school? I should have done a deep dive into YouTube and compiled another mix CD, pulled out the other tracks on those 15 studio albums that, like “Enjoy the Silence”, broke through the ignorance and stupidity of my youth. But I hadn’t quite gotten around to that, so I was going in with a little bit of “Imposter Syndrome” haunting me. Fortunately, this wasn’t a problem.

Depeche Mode opens with “My Cosmos is Mine” from their new album, Memento Mori. I google up the set list from the Detroit show a couple nights ago, and four of the two-dozen songs are from the new album. The rest of the songs are their pop hits, songs I can recognize. But there is a theme here: Memento Mori. Dave Gahan and Martin Gore are not young, and the years have not always been kind. There is something cartoonishly garish about Martin dressed up in studded leather with a mohawk at his age, but the music starts and Dave is singing and HOLY FUCK that voice, that deep timbre grabs something deep inside you and vibrates at a frequency that transcends sound and emotion. There is a shadow, though. Andy Fletcher is not here. He died suddenly in 2022, and now Depeche Mode is on tour in 2023 without him. The album and the tour is as much if not more so about Andy than about Dave and Martin: Memento Mori, a dedication to the memory of their partner and friend.

If I had to describe the mood of the first half of the concert, I’d say it was somber, serious, reflective. Depeche Mode are not playing their greatest hits, they are playing a lot of tracks from the new album. And the pop hits they are playing are part of that theme: Mememto Mori. Depeche Mode, on the album and on this tour, are asking themselves some somber questions: How long can we do this? Can we do it without Andy? Should we do it without Andy? What will be our legacy? What will remain, after we are gone?

Depeche Mode took their name from a French fashion magazine, roughly translated as “Fashion Dispatch”. Magazines are disposable. Fashion is disposable. Pop music is disposable. For a brief moment, you may be popular, you may be a band with a hit song, you may even have a series of hit songs, and for a few years, maybe you even have a career being young and popular and disposable. But in the grand scheme of things, everything is disposable. Memento Mori, if everything is disposable, what remains after we’re gone? Is there anything that remains?

Martin Gore delivers the answer to those questions at the midpoint of the concert, at the heart of the show. Dave and Christian exit the stage, and Martin takes the microphone alone to the front of the stage, with Peter Gordeno behind him. Martin has no instrument, only his voice, as he launches into “Strangelove”. Peter plays a minimalist stripped-down piano melody behind him. Everything disposable is stripped away, no flash, no fashion, no fancy instruments or prancing around. Is there anything that remains? And Martin sings with the audience, they both know the words and he builds this intimate moment where it’s just him singing with the audience, pain, will you return it? I’ll say it again, pain. Will you give it to me? And this isn’t my song, I didn’t listen to this in high school, and then suddenly it is my song, and I am crying, and I am part of this moment. And Martin Gore gives us all the answer to that question, is there anything that remains, when everything fades away? Yes, there is pain, there is suffering, and there is pleasure, and joy, and you can share that with the people around you, with your friends and family, or with several thousand strangers in a basketball stadium with horrible steel-shed acoustics. And in that moment, whatever time we have left, we can have this moment together, and that pain you share with others, that joy you share with others, that is what remains, for however long you have. And after this moment, after you go home, and you share your pain and joy with others, they will have their own moments, and share it with the people they are with. After you’re gone, they carry those moments with them, and yes, everything fades away with time but those moments, somehow they live beyond us, maybe for a short time but maybe even longer. I am at a concert, listening to a band I didn’t think I liked, and I am thinking of what Kurt Vonnegut told us about the purpose of the universe: “We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

And so, here is the pain I want to share: I did not like Marty in high school. He was different, not part of my tribe, even if circumstances or friend circles brought us together. Were we friends? Not exactly, more like friend-adjacent. Were we rivals? Hah! (That girl I mentioned earlier, he took her to Prom.) I was an idiot in high school, and I didn’t understand Marty or want to understand him. But I did see him in a high-school production of “All My Sons”. It’s an emotionally intense play, and even if I didn’t like him, he was fantastic in that! And then, so many years later, he popped up in my Facebook feed, and he was in New York! And performing! And working! And he had greyhounds! (I must visit him eventually, if only to meet his dogs.) And he also looked ripped! And maybe even happy? At the very least, a good long way from Woodpile! (A colloquial sobriquet for our hometown.)

And that idiot I was in high school, that’s disposable. I’m a different person now, although some things remain from that younger person (still listening to Van Halen, for example). My stance on Depeche Mode has changed a bit. I’m not a really HUGE fan, not like Gretchen, but I do have that moment with Martin Gore, Peter behind him, Dave and Christian watching the audience sing along from the shadows, and several thousand almost-strangers in a basketball stadium, all sharing a moment of pain or joy or remembering a dear friend that we lost or maybe another one who might still be around. I think I understand better who Marty was in high school. And I hope I understand who I am now a little better. Pleasures remain. So does the pain. Words are meaningless (holy fuck, I just wrote a bunch of them!). Enjoy the silence.

Anyway, the mood in the concert starts to change after “Strangelove”. Guitars and keyboards come back for “Ghost Again”, then back to something more familiar with “I Feel You” and “A Pain that I’m Used To”, building towards “World in My Eyes”, their Memento Mori, their dedication to their dear friend Andy Fletcher. The mood is still somber, still reflective, but now Depeche Mode is ready to move on, whatever they have left, whatever time remains, this audience is going to remember this show! The songs are bigger, louder, Black Celebration, Stripped, John the Revelator, then they throw everything they have into Enjoy the Silence.

They come back for the Encore, and yes, there is still that theme, Memento Mori, we’re here to remember Andy, but we’re also here to have fun and be disposable, but also share our pain and our joy, our fears and our hopes, and to celebrate that which remains after we are gone.

The next morning after the concert, I send Marty a long email, very close to what you’re reading here. In a few hours, he responds with an email of his own. Turns out there was a lot more going on with him in high school than I ever imagined, and he is a very, very different person from way back then. I’m different, too. I no longer hate Depeche Mode. And, I hope he doesn’t mind, but I consider Marty a friend.