Peggy offers a **#%*! suggestion

Peggy sometimes offers subtle criticisms regarding the subjects I write about. For example,

“Why the fuck don’t you ever write about something more interesting than religion?” (Peggy will argue that that she didn’t say the f___ word, but since I am “overly sensitive to criticism,” as my mother put it, I always HEAR the f___ word at the least suggestion that I'm anything less than perfect.)

“Okay, Sweet Lambikins Baby Lovey Dovey Pumpkin Strudel, what do you suggest?” (I ask smilingly).

“Well, how about what you just said?”

What I had just said was that Fox News’ policy of continually assuring its listeners that it’s “fair and balanced,” is not only unforgivably redundant, it also suggests a cynical attempt to appeal to an audience that is too stupid to distinguish between a claim and a reality (“Your president is not a crook;” “I didn’t have sex with that woman;” “I know the Bible is true because the Bible says it’s true;” and my own dear father’s favorite, “I’m going to be honest with you”). Furthermore, it reeks of Orwell:

“Political language is designed to…give an appearance of solidity to pure wind;”

of Lenin: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes truth;”

of Hitler: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it;”

and even of that bumbling little bastard who was our last president: “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again…to kind of catapult the propaganda.”


“But isn’t what I just said rather obvious, Peggy Darling Dearest?”

“Not to some people.”

Which is precisely why I had said it to Peggy. Intelligent though she is, she doesn’t know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, a Catholic and a Shiite, a Brit Hume and a Jon Stewart, simply because it is all so senseless and depressing that she doesn’t want to know the difference.

Sometimes, I think Peggy is onto something, yet I remain inveterately incapable of “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,” because if there's safety to be had, surely it lies in at least knowing from which direction danger approaches. Besides, human inanity can be awfully entertaining at times.

Who would you like to go back in time and kill?

Oh, the usual—Hitler, Stalin, George W. Bush.

Anybody else?

Well, there might be one or two, but you’d think I was absolutely horrible if I told you.

No, we wouldn’t.

We?

Me and the Internet. You know you can trust us.

Well, alright then, here goes.

I would take out Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and everyone else who ever tried to rule the world. Columbus and all the old Indian fighters (that’s Native American Indians, not Indian Indians, but maybe some of them too). Ted Bundy and all other serial killers and mass murderers (yes, I do recognize the irony) as well as all torturers, drug lords, child molesters, and slave owners. Then would come Jesus, Mohammed, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and a lot of other religious leaders. Everyone who ever killed another human being for reasons of race, religion, or ethnicity.

Let’s see, who else? Demagogues. Union busters. Furriers. Rapists (I would definitely kill rapists even if I do get off on an occasional rape fantasy). Chronic litterbugs (I can sympathize with a great many murderers, but littering is inexcusable). Druggies who have multiple babies that are taken away by Children’s Protective Services. People who breed animals to fight or dump their pets on the side of the road (I would really like to take them out). Men who beat women. Vivisectionists. Bullies who drive their classmates to suicide. People who are mean and/or dishonest their whole adult lives. Every last monarch and rich person who ever became wealthy off the backs of others. Yes, I know this would include Britain’s own dear Queen Elizabeth II. Sorry, Queenie. You’re not the worst of the lot by far, but you are the richest woman in the world, and what the hell have you done to deserve that?

God, Snowbrush, you are one bloodthirsty son of a bitch.

Thanks, but shut up now, I'm on a roll.

I would also kill all psychopaths and sociopaths, and I would euthanize advanced dementia sufferers and profoundly retarded people who are kept alive at taxpayer expense (the money really could be better spent, you know). Oh, yeah, everyone who ever suffered needlessly only to die anyway (I would be gentle with them). And, of course, lawyers—not quite every lawyer, but almost every lawyer. Sarah Palin? She died with the other demagogues.

But enough about me. Who would you kill?

Nobody. It's patently wrong to go around killing people, even mean people. You are one sick s.o.b.

So, you’re telling me that you would let 70-million people die before you would kill one Austrian megalomaniac!!!??? What if your family was being attacked, and the only way you could save them would be to kill the attackers. Are you saying you wouldn’t do it?

I wouldn’t know until it happened, but that’s different from what you’re talking about. You’re talking about the premeditated murders of thousands of people.

I would call it execution (and, in some cases, euthanasia), but putting that aside, if wanting to go back in time and right wrongs before they occur is evil, then I’m evil—and proud of it.

How do you know that killing all those people wouldn’t lead to even more suffering?

In some cases it would. For example, if I kill a child molester who is the sole support of his family, then his family might starve, or 300 years later, the world might be denied the birth of a truly great person. If I knew that would be the outcome, I would spare him, but my fantasy doesn’t allow me to consider the everlasting implications of every case. It only allows me to do what I think would make things better in the big picture. Since none of us can see into the future, this is basically how we already live.

But would you REALLY kill all those people?

You question reminds me of a joke. A man was seated beside an attractive woman at a dinner party. After an exchange of pleasantries, he asked if she would go to bed with him for a million dollars. “I would,” she said. “Well, then, would you go to bed with me for $25?” “Sir! What kind of a woman do you think I am?” “We’ve already settled that. Now, we’re dickering on price.”

Now, you tell me whether or not you would kill Hitler. On the one hand, you have the lives of 70 million people, untold millions of other creatures, and the lifelong emotional and physical impairment of many times that number. You also have incalculable environmental, artistic, historical, and financial destruction. On the other, you have the life of a scumball named Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, imagine that you don’t even have to go back in time and get your hands dirty; you can kill him right now simply by wishing it so. Picture him in his crib in May 1889 (see photo), and wish him dead, and, presto, he’s dead. If you don’t kill him, then I, for one, will think of you as someone whose ethics are so divorced from reality as to be utterly egocentric, but if you do kill him, we will know what you are. The only remaining question is whom else you would kill. Surely, Stalin. Unquestionably, Pol Pot. Doubtlessly, Kim Jong-iI. Where would you stop? Why would you stop?

How do you recognize a non-comformist?

They all look alike. In 1923 Germany, they looked like Hitler. In 2010 Oregon, they wear tattoos, nose rings, lip rings, eyebrow rings, green hair, and faded jeans with gaping holes in the knees. The Hitler look was more than a fad, of course, while the current buffoonery will soon go the way of crewcuts and bellbottoms, and dermatologists will get even richer removing indecipherable tattoos from wrinkling skin.

I’ve become absorbed in Hitler lately. No, I’m not going to become a neo-Nazi. Passing passions are just how I learn. They’re why I know a little about a lot of things, but not a lot about anything. So it is that my time of late has been devoted to Hitler documentaries, Hitler movies, and Hitler books. I even took a stab at the music of Wagner, but sixty minutes of boredom was enough.

I have a Nazi flag plus the certificate an American soldier had to get signed to bring it home as a war souvenir. I bought the flag at an estate sale in Minneapolis in 1989. $75 seemed like a good price, so I figured I would sell it and pocket the difference. Then it occurred to me that some neo-Nazi group might buy it, so I kept it. Now, I don’t even know where it is, but it’s here, probably tucked away in a box of clothes that I bought on sale but never wore (I’m forever thinking I should dress better, but I never quite work up to doing it). I once got the idea that I should burn the flag as a symbolic refutation of evil, but then I remembered that destroying history was what the Nazis did—and what the Taliban did when they blew up that statue of the Buddha.

Besides, I rather like having that flag because it’s surely the single most powerful symbol the world has ever known (there being many different Christian crosses). Even though I don’t even know where it is, the mere fact that it’s in this house somewhere gives me a connection with the billions of people whose lives it touched. Kind of, anyway. My problem is that the past seldom seems real to me. The future doesn’t either, actually, but it seems more real than the past because the past is gone, and the future hasn’t gotten here yet. The present seems real enough, but everytime I try to grasp it, it has already become the past. This makes me feel as if I’m floating, which is why I plan to re-read Sartre’s Nausea when I’m done with Hitler.

Of all I’ve read and all I’ve watched, the thing that stands out most is the execution of a Nazi war criminal by a firing squad. His was but one of scores of deaths I saw, but the rest run together. The morning on which he was marched into a large pit was cold. He wore his uniform and walked upright. When he reached the place where he was to die, his legs were tied together loosely for no good reason that I could see. Then a hood was placed over his head and his hands were tied behind a wooden post. He was standing tall with his chest out when the twelve soldiers fired. A spray appeared behind him, and, after a moment, he slumped forward. Then a dog howled piteously. I watched this execution…

I stopped writing to answer the phone, and, as I talked, I could see the words I was saying. I could even see the punctuation. It’s scarier to hallucinate when I haven’t taken anything, but it’s also more interesting.

I watched him die repeatedly in slow motion. The spray seemed to be composed of flesh and splinters, which was what I expected. But I also saw what looked like smoke rising, and it took me awhile to realize that it was condensation caused by heat from his body meeting the cold air. A few moments earlier, the heat had come from his nose; now it came from his back. Over and over, I listened to that dog, and his howl seemed to encapsulate all the misery of the war. Fifty-five million people died. Imagining their deaths is like imagining time without end or space without boundaries. Still, I can’t stop reading about the man who started it all, the man who would surely have been stillborn if the universe were benevolent.

Peggy has little tolerance for tragedy (she sees enough of it as a nurse), so last night—after having watched a little of what I had watched and hearing me talk about it for days—she insisted on watching “Charlotte’s Web” to lift her spirits. Until this moment—now—I never shed a tear about all the misery I absorbed through my study of Hitler, yet I cried over the death of a make-believe spider in “Charlotte’s Web.” I guess it was safer that way.

I can’t leave World War II alone (I’ve returned to one aspect of it or another for years) because to do so would be to imply that all that misery didn’t matter. Besides, I am desperate to understand it. I simply have to know why we are as bad as we are when it would seem so easy to be better. I write this as a citizen of a nation that is ever at war. I think it’s what our leaders do to feel important, and that was probably Hitler’s reason too, that and wanting to rule the world.

I always edit for days before I post, but this feels right without editing. I’ll probably be mortified tomorrow and spend next week editing the hell out of it, but I’ll take that chance. I’ve heard that shit happens, so I suppose spontaneity does too.