Moet Hennessy buys stake in Jay-Z’s brand

Moet Hennessy is acquiring a 50 percent stake in rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z’s Champagne brand in an effort to up its cool factor and expand sales. Terms of the deal weren’t released Monday. Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, acquired Armand de Brignac in 2014. The brand, produced in France’s Champagne region, is known familiarly as Ace of Spades because of its distinctive label.

“The Banality of Evil” was a phrase coined by Holocaust survivor, political theorist, philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt when she was sent to Jerusalem in 1961 to report for the New Yorker magazine at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi transportation minister who was responsible for the deaths of Jews and other minorities being sent to concentration camps.

In the New Yorker magazine and later in 1963 in a book titled “Eichmann In Jerusalem — A Report on the Banality of Evil,” she came to the conclusion that Eichmann was nothing more than an “ordinary man, rather a bland bureaucrat, an inarticulate buffoon.” She also opined that “Eichmann did not understand what he was doing was wrong.” He was, she said, “terrifyingly normal.” Her reporting and book were received with both accolades and condemnation. Her book will probably be debated for years and years, as it has been since first published.

As Arendt pointed out in her writings, of which there are many, “terrifyingly normal people can perform evil without evil intentions.” I bring up this bit of history and present here the comparison that I wish to make when the United States Senate debated the need for votes to convict the previous president. Former President Trump encouraged a mass of people to force their way into our Citadel of Democracy in an attempt to reverse the vote of the majority of Americans who voted for our current president. Some of the attackers on the Capitol egged on by Trump call themselves “freedom fighters.” We now unfortunately have in Congress representatives that spew out anti-Semitic remarks, which only adds fuel to the fire of insurrection. Donald Trump’s daughter is quoted as saying that those attacking the Capitol were “patriots.” The Banality of Evil is again taking place, 60 years after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. This time, in Washington, D.C. Marvin Cohen

Hamden