The lighter side of Nazis

Back when I was working for HBO, I was invited to a spiffy lunch thrown somewhere in Century City. This was in the early days of them producing their own movies—long before The Sopranos and Six Feet Under.

The one thing about that event that’s stuck to me ever since was that they’d brought in some consultant to tell us what sells and what doesn’t. And Nazis sell. Basically he said that if your movie or TV show has “Hitler” or “Nazi” in the title, your audience increases by 15%.

So, I’ve been contributing to that statistic in recent weeks, watching Nazis: Evolution of Evil on (oh, I can’t even bring myself to name the channel. Go look it up if you care).

This is clearly a UK production—all the talking heads are Brits, although the voice-over narration is American. I really only watched the first installment because, hello: Nazis, but I got kind of hooked when Professor Frank McDonough of Liverpool’s John Moores University started in on the German Workers Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei).

That was the organization that German authorities paid Adolf Hitler to infiltrate and rat on. The group he eventually co-opted and turned into the Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei.

Here’s how McDonough described (in his unrepentant Scouse accent) the DAP at the time Hitler joined: “They were basically two blokes and a ferret.”

I think I’m in love.

Psychotic schooling

Yesterday’s post about Bing somehow linking Josef Goebbels with Fiennes (not specific about which one) reminded me of the section in Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch-22, in which he describes his early educational experiences.

In relating the “mania and ritual” of the boarding school to which he was sent at age eight, Hitchens encapsulates the best depiction of life in a totalitarian state I’ve ever seen. And please do believe me, I’ve seen a lot.

He starts out noting how the students are “robbed of all privacy, encouraged to inform on one another, taught how to fawn upon authority and turn upon the vulnerable outsider, subject at all times to rules which it was not always possible to understand, let alone to obey.”

All of which you’d expect. But it’s the last point, about the rules, that’s crucial. All the fawning and informing in the world really doesn’t buy you anything, because “the rules” keep changing. Hitchens absolutely nailed it:

“The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is ‘systematic.’ The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong. “

In such a regime you are never able to find a path through the crocodile-infested quicksand. If you made it through the swamp yesterday, that route doesn’t work today. What is acceptable—possibly even applauded—right now will be dangerously—possibly fatally—wrong ten minutes from now.

You never know what’s in the minds of the psychopaths in charge and there is no rest for the weary. That covers Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Maoist China and all the others, large and small.

Aside from capturing that reality in one succinct paragraph, this passage got me thinking. Considering that much of Britain’s leadership have cycled through public schools such as the one Hitchens describes, I really wonder what psychoses lurk in their carefully-coiffed crania?

Actors, not Nazis?

There are many places on the interwebs where you can find lists of autocorrect fails—you know, when the helpful software changes a word you’re actually typing for something it thinks you really meant. Without consulting you.

You’re most likely to experience the annoyance when you’re on a mobile device and not really looking at what you’re keying in on your magic glass surface, so you hit send before you realize you’ve just said Granny is a homosexual (instead of coming home from the hospital).

You really have to wonder what the product teams that built the software were thinking.

(Of course, it just occurred to me that it’s entirely possible if not probable that the development teams, from product manager to QA, are located in countries where English is not their first language.)

Anyway, here’s my latest: I was looking up Goebbels on my Kindle. For some reason, the Silk browser that’s native to Kindle keeps pushing me to use Bing instead of Google, so as it happens I was Binging for the Nazi propaganda minister.

But Bing kept replacing Goebbels with Fiennes. I mean—repeatedly. As in, again and again, until I finally kludged up Google and got my answer.

Now I am just having a hard time understanding why Bing does not recognize Goebbels, but it thinks Fiennes is just, you know, fine.

Is it a Microsoft thing?

The bloody month of May

May of 1864 marked a huge change in the prosecution of the war against the Confederacy. Two months before, Abraham Lincoln had given Ulysses S. Grant command of all Federal armies, and Grant’s strategy was to go on the offensive in every theatre of the war.

(Many years ago, on one of my cross-country trips, I was driving through Tennessee on I-40 and noticed the highway signs for Shiloh. It seemed weird to me that I was east of the Mississippi, and yet still passing a battlefield that was in the Western Theatre. But the country was still young, then, and the Mississippi was sort of the jumping-off point for nowhere.)

So in the first week of May, the Army of the Potomac (still commanded by our pal, George G. Meade, who’d faced Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg) moved out of its winter camp and pushed across the Rapidan River in Virginia.

They encountered the Army of Northern Virginia at the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, on 5 May. That’s not very far from Fredericksburg, where the Army of the Potomac had lost a catastrophic fight in December 1862, positioned between the Confederates on the high ground and the Rappahannock River behind them in bitterly cold weather.

And it’s also not far from Chancellorsville, where the year before Lee’s best lieutenant, Thomas J. Jackson—known as “Stonewall”—had been mortally wounded by his own men in the confusion of battle. (He actually died of pneumonia after having his shattered left arm amputated; but the precipitating cause was the gunshot wound.)

That part of Virginia is beautiful—lush, green pastures, farms, woods. It kind of reminds me of Northern France in both appearance and feel. Coming as I do from the semi-arid climate of Southern California, when I see miles and miles of natural green, I want to jump in it and roll around.

But, you know—they didn’t call it “the Wilderness” for nothing. That area is rather like the Ardennes in France—densely wooded, with a lot of brush among the trees. Not ideal terrain for massed infantry to take on one another; there’s no maneuvering room, and no one—not infantry, not cavalry, not artillery—has any clear perspective on what’s going on. (Well, even less that you ordinarily do on battlefields.) But that’s where the two armies met, so that’s where they fought.

The trees and underbrush caught fire in several places from the artillery fire. Men unable to see anything through the black smoke burned to death, or they shot themselves before the flames engulfed them.

Two days of fighting left Lee with a technical victory, although it had cost him a lot. In all that chaos—and spookily close to the place where Jackson had been shot by friendly fire—James Longstreet, one of Lee’s finest corps commanders, was (accidentally) wounded in the right arm by his own men. Lee could not really afford to take the 11,000 casualties, or to lose Longstreet, even temporarily.

And in the end, it didn’t matter to Grant. Unlike any other Union commander before him, he never viewed a tactical defeat as anything other than a setback. He was intent on getting to the Confederate capital at Richmond, basically regardless of the cost.

So throughout May, he pushed the Army of the Potomac to engage the Army of Northern Virginia—at Spotsylvania from the 8^th to the 21^st, and then at Cold Harbor at the end of the month. Every time Lee blocked him, he moved laterally and then pushed forward again. The cost was high, but he had the materiel, the conscripts and the backing of Lincoln; he ignored everything else.

Gratitude Monday: A lovely day for a walk

On this Cinco de Mayo Gratitude Monday, I am deeply grateful that hundreds of people turned out Saturday for the WalkMS event in Los Gatos, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars towards support services for MS sufferers and research for more effective therapies and, eventually, a cure.

It was a great crowd, including many repeat teams, outfitted in custom tee-shirts. It seemed to be personal to a lot of them.

This woman’s hat kind of tells the story—she was in a wheelchair, and each of the ribbons hanging from the hat represents a person. I counted at least 22.

There was also this pair: mother with MS, daughter born about a year after she was diagnosed. An act of faith; or at least of hope.

And this mother, with an “I have MS; that’s why I walk” bib, and her son, wearing the “I walk for” bib. 

This was just a walk, you know, a very social affair. Although, this being the Valley they call Silicon, there were those who ran the 5K route. I caught up with a fellow who’d set a good pace and he and I walked most of the course together, having quite a nice chat.

The volunteers were really great—at least half of them looked like high school kids, bagging a Saturday morning in paradise when they could have been hanging with their posses. Instead they watched a bunch of people walk and urged them on all along the route. We told them they were doing a good job, and they cheered us.

They handed out medals when you crossed the finish arch, and that felt good. What felt better was that I could do something to help by just walking. And I’m grateful that I was able to do that.