One of the ways that the Parks and Rec writers back in 2011 fleshed out Aubrey Plaza’s April Ludgate character—to make her more than a caricature of a moody, sarcastic teenager—was by having her inform her clueless boyfriend, on a co-worker’s mock-dating show, that her favorite Rock star is Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel:

In this exchange, April briefly drops her sarcastic front and betrays a moment of real hurt when she realizes her boyfriend had not been paying attention all the times she had told him how important this band was to her. Key to revealing this more sincere and vulnerable side of April was the choice of band itself: Neutral Milk Hotel. Because if there’s one Indie-band on God’s green earth that is utterly devoid of irony, sarcasm, or self-conscious “cool” (that is, the polar opposite of April Ludgate’s persona), it’s Neutral Milk Hotel. Jeff Mangum was pretty much the anti-Lou Reed, and Neutral Milk Hotel the anti-Velvet Underground: unlike their predecessors, NMH actually had zero interest in being perceived as “cool.” As Pitchfork itself noted in a retrospective review of their cult-classic 1998 album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea:

“This album is not cool. Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing [first album] On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum’s honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.”

As this reviewer explains, it was precisely Jeff Mangum’s childlike naivety and lack of guile (for of such is the Kingdom of God) that caused him to be overwhelmed with grief and sadness by the Diary of Anne Frank–a book that most of us slept-walked through reading in middle-school–in a manner that could cause all the hipsters and “cool” kids to cringe in second-hand embarrassment; save that this exact same guilelessness is what allowed Mangum, against all odds, to write genuinely moving songs about the Holocaust! Seriously, titles like “Holland 1945,” “Ghost,” “Oh, Comely,” and “Two-Headed Boy Part Two“^[1]“Two-Headed Boy Part One” also makes a good Christmas song for your Holiday playlist, btw. somehow find ways to sing about Anne Frank and the Holocaust tactfully, tastefully, and respectfully, all without sacrificing their intimacy and emotional power. Adorno once said that after Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry, yet Jeff Mangum found a way to do it. He had taken the total cliché that is Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and defamiliarized it through his own lo-fi and shambolic art, in order to recover the profound grief and humanity at its heart. In a late-90s era when saying “Hitler Bad” was widely considered self-evident to the point of cliché^[2]1998 was the same year when “Saving Private Ryan” debuted in theaters, remember., Mangum had made Anne Frank and the horrors of the Holocaust feel real again.^[3]Ironically, the unexpected success of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea caused Mangum himself to get treated as an idea, not a living, breathing human being; in 2003, author and fan Kevin Griffis … Continue reading

But now a quarter century later, we live in a distressing age when assuming we are all on the same page about “Hitler Bad” is no longer a given. When the election is won by a candidate who had literally kidnapped children of Anne Frank’s age from their parents at the border and thrown them into animal cages; who openly complimented Hitler on the campaign trail and used the “America First” slogan of the Ku Klux Klan; banned an entire religion from entering the country as his first act in office; called all black-majority countries “sh*tholes” while yearning for more Nordic immigrants; declared immigrants of color to be a “poison” upon “American blood”; when he calls Mexicans rapists and criminals despite being himself a rapist and criminal, and his supporters excuse him for it; when many of these same supporters call him a potential dictator approvingly; when they start leading chants of “mass deportations now!” at the RNC; when even his own running-mate had called him an American Hitler but still cowardly consented to serve him; when he openly discusses “denaturalization” and deportation of even “legal” immigrants; and when certain NBA and Hip-Hop stars also start mainstreaming Holocaust denialism^[4]As a general rule, folks who deny the Holocaust was real do so because they wish to perpetrate another one. again—it is high-time to stop treating Anne Frank’s story as a cliché but a very real possibility.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are”^[5]From his 1844 essay “Experience”—written on the occasion of his son’s death, incidentally—that is, it’s a song of mourning as well.–and in this he wasn’t being facetious, but acknowledging the awful fact that most of us never treat the people around us as though they were real at all, let alone kindly. Indeed, the core problem all along is that we have not been treating people as though they were real, not Anne Frank, not anyone: for large swaths of the American electorate just recently, it simply did not register for them that immigrants, migrant workers, minorities, refugees, and everyone else who stands to suffer immensely under the incoming administration, are all actually real people, with real passions and real hopes and a real existence.

Jeff Mangum too, in all of his “naive,” childlike guilelessness, felt keenly over a quarter century ago that we have a nasty habit of treating each other as though others were not real. He accurately intuited that such an attitude is exactly what got Anne Frank and her family murdered in the first place; that in fact Anne Frank was not a cliché at all but a real, breathing human being, a fact that most the students who slept through The Diary of a Young Girl in middle school had long forgotten, if they ever fully comprehended it in the first place. Mangum was reminding his listeners that she was real–that we are all real–because we keep on willfully and stubbornly forgetting the same.

Perhaps this is why Christ taught that we must become as little children or we can in no wise inherit the Kingdom of Heaven: little children do not need to be reminded that the people around them are real. They accept everyone around them, like they do all things, as a given fact of the universe. Little children have to be taught to treat human beings as abstractions, as not real. This understanding of the reality of others is exactly what we each must recover, and is which Jeff Mangum was trying to channel throughout In The Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Perhaps this all is why Neutral Milk Hotel in particular was cited as April Ludgate’s favorite band on Parks and Rec: the whole reason she had constructed her defensive teenage armor of sarcasm and irony in the first place was because she too intuited that she was strained by people who did not in turn consider her to be real at all—for later the subtext here (which Parks and Rec doesn’t even acknowledge) is she is from a Hispanic family in deep-red Indiana, and hence among those most targeted for deportation. Hence, April was perhaps grateful for whatever crumb of art acknowledged not just hers, but everyone’s reality and existence. Her love of Jeff Mangum was predicated on the fact that (like Emerson preached) he treated others kindly, as though they really existed—which is sadly far rarer than we think.

Mangum opens track 2 of the album, “The King of Carrot Flowers, Parts Two and Three,” by belting out long and slow, “I love you Jesus Christ”—and that, again, not sarcastically or ironically, by all appearances—though it’s perhaps an odd choice for an album purportedly honoring Jewish Holocaust victims. But then, Christ was a Jew, one executed by the state as well; and one who also taught that the two great commandments are to love God and love your neighbor—that is, to treat the people around us as though they were real as well—our collective failure of which to follow is what directly lead to the Holocaust, and every other ethnic-cleansing since. For these reasons, perhaps, Christ warned “Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold; but he that shall endure to the end, the same will be saved.”^[6]Matt. 24:12-13