Lucky Lucky

Ok, this is a story about Adolf Hitler, not St. Patrick, although there's some luck and a big sense of the ridiculous about it.

About 30 or 35 years ago, I found a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf in an antiques shop inside a converted barn on the west side of Boone, Iowa. It was a deluxe edition, English language with white leather covers and fine typography. Obviously, loot. Somebody found it during their tour of duty in Germany, back in WWII or maybe in Cold War Berlin, I really had no idea. The thought of possessing such an oddity gripped me, for a few weeks, the way a boy collects toads and snakes, or a pretty girl tattoos. But...

The demon that truly had got its fangs in me at this time of my life was not Hitler, but sex and marijuana, and I was not lucky, being one of the few in the crucible of whose skull psychedelics boil and fume and tend not to lead, Aldous Huxley-like, toward Enlightenment. On the contrary, drugs and stupidity made me a hyperaesthete at the mercy of phantasms. That white covered book turned so green and nefarious, so dripping with the ashes of the Holocaust that I had to throw it away. But it was expensive, and it was History, so I dropped it down a library book return slot and have not thought of it until recently.

Fasting forward... Curiously enough, you can find anything at The Pirate Bay dot com in Sweden, including porn and neo-Nazi entertainments of all sorts. Such as, meinkampf.pdf — a lovingly crafted scan of Hitler's first book, with searchable salients like VOLK capitalized in the English because they are, as goes without saying, "untranslateable." The first chapter is one of the funniest reads I've ever stumbled upon.

Adolf, for all his skills as the original Great Communicator, is unaware of the extent to which the Times will reduce his passions and furies to self-parody and foible. Most of that first chapter is the Young Adolf, an idyllic cosplay in short pants the imprisoned adult Adolf likes to pose in, the Hero who had a rough and tumble, brawling sort of youth in the country lanes of rural German Austria, back in the day when he was eight or ten years old walking to school uphill both ways through the snow and rain, just learning how to cadge his boyhood companions with the untutored guile of a developing world class rhetoric, to no avail in endless debates with his benighted, stodgy, hidebound, unimaginative, selfmade father concerning this selfsame Young Adolf's future prospects.

Hitler polishes his scenes and his halo; he "loves" the old martinet, as all German youths properly admire their elders, whilst brooking no patriarchal nonsense, with which he disagrees almost to the point of mentioning on several occasions, preferring on the basis of self-evident passion to be an artist and study painting, whilst eschewing his old man's practical cant and predictable predilection for study tending toward a career in the Austrian civil service. How modestly the incarcerated Nazi will nod toward History's doublet ironies, as though intended all along!

This part of the book is ringingly familiar, because it was part of Western Civilization before television, almost before radio, certainly before Hitler. You may find those Unstudied Boyhood Scenes not just in Leni Riefenstahl's absurdly glamorous Hitler Youth (including herself, fresh and naked and slightly furry, posed as a golden hood ornament) — but also on the Norman Rockwell covers of the Saturday Evening Post before and even after the war, in Boy's Life, Andy Hardy, in the Shire, on the orange clockwork streets of Young Nero's sleepless Rome, on MTV, in Exodus (The Movie) and Leave It To Beaver, even... (*gack*)... Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog. Hitler beguiled because he was an idealist, a Romantic and a German Romantic at that, in tune with his own transcontinentally orchestral times — with everybody's times. Everybody, that is. Everybody young, twelven toned and beautiful.

To the extent that I can empathize with any world before Kinsey and Miltown, Lolita and Peyton Place — springtime for Hitler — I'd have to say my immediate ancestors were all chasing a fool's pyrite, and no wonder that war only lasted four years — unlike the Pacific war, the European version was essentially a family squabble, even although at the age of three, my toddler lederhosen were made of corduroy and my bib buttons were canary yellow. Some of you will recognize the twangy thud of one single rubber Cat's Paw heel hitting the cobbler's hardwood floor — something left out, but there you go, full circle! Back to leprechauns and merely fairytale evil.

Third millenium America is no longer European (nor is Germany, not that Europe, nor even the EU, nor Ireland, not even Sweden, the Balls of Scandanavia, and not France, torn but not broken on the Algerian rack), that world has been burned out of us, cauterized by the Cold War and the Muslim pique which placed its first American thumbtack on the empty cushions of the Peacock Throne three decades ago — awash in the pacific seductions of electronic Japan over the last 50 years. My kid despises the Punch & Judy caricatures of Dickens, loves the dark interminable ramblings of J. K. Rowling, lives and breathes Naruto. I watch Univision for the unalloyed joy of fútbol — but our American dream, which flickered beneath our hegemonic eyes, has vanished like the pookah, leaving only the vague jade memories of a fairy ill-discerned, a green and wispy premonition.

We creatures tuckpointed into circumstance, bricks in the wall, what are we missing now? What is the sound of one shoe dropping, one pot 'o gold upturned and vanishing in the dewy morn?