extantialist

“It is in that very puniness that insatiable evil lies. In 1931, after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party had surged in the polls, he was interviewed by the US reporter Dorothy Thompson for Cosmopolitan. “When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof hotel,” Thompson recalled, “I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”

“Think of Benito Mussolini,” wrote the journalist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in the LA Times, “jackbooted, lantern-jawed, squeakily bombastic, posturing from the little balcony of his office on Piazza Venezia in Rome – that remarkably dopey stiff-armed Fascist salute, the absurd oratory. Think of that funny man, that consummate buffoon”, and remember that “just because something is silly doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous”.”

Thinking about this old car today. Not sure if I miss it or I just miss being 25 years younger.