From 1965 to 1971, Americans were treated to the madcap goings-on inside a Nazi-era German POW camp. The CBS sitcom(?) Hogan’s Heroes featured a plucky band of Allied POWs who, every week, ran circles around the bumbling Colonel Klink and assorted Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht and Gestapo soldiers from inside Stalag 13, the wackiest Nazi prison camp ever.
But no member of the Hogan’s Heroes cast was more lovable than the rotund Sergeant Schultz, whose catchphrase was “I know nothing . . . nothing.”
It never failed to get a laugh, by which I mean they turned the laugh track all the way up every time he said it.
For those of us not old enough to remember, Sergeant Schultz’s MO was to turn a blind eye to the secret doings of the prisoners who were, during every episode, fighting the Nazis from inside the camp, having made it, essentially an underground base from which to execute Allied sabotage operations against the Germans.
In radio promotions during the first season, they used the tagline, “If you liked World War II, you’ll love Hogan’s Heroes!”
But back to Schultz.
Sergeant Schultz was a man in a bind. He had a job he didn’t want. (Interesting Hogan’s Heroes trivia: Schultz was a professional toymaker before the war. He was, in appearance and occupation, just like Santa if he were a lovable Nazi prison guard!) He saw things that demonstrated he was doing a bad job. And he knew it was hopeless to try to get Hogan’s men back under control.
And so, Schultz’s perspective shifted from efforts to rebuild his control over the barracks to seeking simply to hide and survive the recriminations that would inevitably follow if they were to become known to Colonel Klink and the military higher-ups.
He “knows nothing . . . nothing” because, according to his inner calculation, he looks less incompetent if he’s tricked than if he’s passive. If he’s just a boob, he’s less likely to face a firing squad or get “sent to the Russian front” (the show’s ultimate punishment for German characters) than if he is actively allowing Hogan and the boys to continue their sabotaging ways. Or, God forbid, secretly on the side of the good guys.
Turning a blind eye to trouble is related to (but not identical to) the act of screening out irrelevant noise. The relevance spam filter we each deploy is our customized algorithm for coping with the barrage of unwanted information the world is throwing at us — allowing to pass through only those with something useful to share with us.
The Sergeant Schultz filter is a little different. In this case, something you wish weren’t true gets through (“The enemy is digging tunnels from inside my stalag”) and you position yourself in relation to this unwished for information.
Trump rhetoric capitalizes on the Sergeant Schultz filter phenomenon perfectly.
For a portion of the electorate that has been conditioned consciously or unconsciously to respond to reality by turning a blind eye (“I know nothing . . . nothing”), the candidate will win who most thoroughly and completely honors that foundational fiction. The candidate or brand will lose that tells people “You’re ignoring something that’s right in front of your nose.”
This portion of the electorate has already adopted a point of view that says, “There are tunnels under this POW camp? I don’t see any tunnels. And I would know. I’m the prison guard.”
The irrelevant candidate tells them they are idiots or traitors for not seeing.
Trump says you’re absolutely right. He channels their sustaining fiction, helps them deflect accountability in precisely the way they are trying to do themselves, in a sense gives them the microphone and then broadcasts their weak fiction until it becomes something that passes for fact by dint of repetition and groupthink.
The other members of the Republican field come close but they mess up the message in the end. They say, “On the whole, you’re right. I agree with you. But there are some nuances and intricacies I have expertise in by virtue of my experiences that can help shape your ideas into something that will work for the country. Let me add a little of my own value to your righteous anger, not to correct it, but to make it workable in the long run.”
It’s that little bit of promised “added value” that gets those messages stuck in people’s “blah, blah, blah” filters and ultimately make those candidates irrelevant.
Trump gets through the filters by saying, “You see nothing . . . Nothing. You couldn’t have known. You’ve done your best, sergeant. It’s not your fault.”