Miscellaneous Mischeif

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you see one on the street,

For decorum is essential when a lobster you must greet.

You may comment on the weather, compliment his choice of hat,

But crustaceans like their space if one should stop them for a chat.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you’re strolling down the coast,

Simply nod and give a greeting, or a handshake at the most,

For a lobster’s first priority is formal social graces,

And one seemes over-familiar if a lobster one embraces.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you meet one in the sea,

For a lobster’s spines and chitin make it difficult, you see,

And he might become self-conscious if you bring that fact to light,

Like, I find it just incredibly doubtful that most Nazis have ever read it, or that it would convince anyone of the merits of Nazism. And I want to be clear, here I'm saying this as somebody who read it as a teenager. I came out of that experience thinking that Germany was absolutely stupid for banning it on the idea that it was so dangerous that no one should ever read it, because the ideas in here were so terrible. I came out thinking that strategy does a lot of harm. Because yes, the idea is in here are so terrible, and also Hitler is so deeply incoherent and unpersuasive in expressing them. No one is going to be convinced by Mein Kampf, and the only people who do find it convincing were already convinced before they read it.

In fact I would go so far as to say I think we should be reading at least exerpts of Mein Kampf in high school history, because nothing demystifies Hitler, and dispells this common image of him as this evil genius pied piper, who bespelled Germany, like reading his paranoid, hate fueled, and I can't stress this enough, incoherent ramblings.

We treat Mein Kampf like it's the fucking necronomicon. When I read it in high school, the school librarian reported me to the vice principal. Everything about this experience told me that this book was dangerous that it was something I needed to treat very seriously. It didn't live up to the hype. I came away from reading it thinking that clearly nobody who supported the Nazis had ever read it. They might have owned it, it might have sat on their bookshelf, but they certainly never read it, because if they had they would have realized that Hitler wasn't just evil and completely detached from reality, he was also not very smart.

Now, admittedly I am a Jew and I was reading it in high school, because I wanted to know why somebody would want to kill all of my people. I was not going to be an easy audience to persuade under any circumstances. But the point is that I found reading Mein Kampf very valuable, if incredibly unpleasant. It gave me tremendous insight into how the Nazis saw themselves and the world and how they understood what they were doing. It helped me understand how something like the Holocaust comes to seem reasonable, and it helped me contextualize and understand a lot of the modern antisemitism that I have to deal with, epecially the conspiratorial varieties. It helped remind me of that great truth that almost nobody believes they are doing evil. No matter how evil what they are doing is, they believe themselves to be in the right.

This idea of him as this brilliant charasmatic manipulator really developed afterwards to try to justify the amount of power he attained and the amount of damage he was able to do. There were some people at the time who would talk about the German economic miracle, and this must mean he was a financial genius (he had good luck, good timing and a willingness to deficit spend lavishly on the military), but genuinely, most people paying attention to him were baffled because they were like, this guy is a clown! Haven't you read his book? He's a joke!

Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.