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When I first looked at the old film strips of Nazi parades, the people looking at them lovingly, cheering madly, making that same, stiff armed salute, I thought, “What was wrong with them? Were they all dropped on their heads as babies?”
I believed then, as I had been led to, that German people were awful. Monsters. They killed Jews and homosexuals. They allowed books to be burned. They starved people, whole countries, like Poland, they did terrible sexual abuses and physical torture and mutilations on people who they treated worse than animals,
[Hitler reputedly loved his dog, Schatzi (I don’t really remember the name, I’ve never wanted to know more about Hitler. I don’t find him interesting) In general, people love their dogs because they believe that their dogs love them, that they ‘see’ them. No one should get points for being nice to their dog. Dogs are almost 100% transactional. If you feed them and exercise them and, yeah once in a while pet them, maybe coo a little, then they love you. It doesn’t mean you are a good, okay or even marginally acceptable human being. It isn’t PERSONAL. How did the Little Fuhrer not get that?]
Anyways, back to the people who were putatively dropped on their heads.
One of my younger son’s best friends, Zach, a wonderful young man who practically grew up in this house and who I love like family, voted for Trump. He’s half El Salvadoreno. His father Pedro, a legal immigrant worked like a dog to support his family, wife, five children. He was not educated very far but he was very, very bright who was limited to underpaid jobs, learning as he went. He was short, dark, thin, shy, brown and pretty bad at speaking English. But he did become a mechanic and all the way up, from job to job, he worked harder than anyone else. Four of his children went to college.
I ask myself, how could Zach have done it? How could he ignore the nobility of his parents and siblings and the beautiful life they constructed here at enormous cost to themselves and vote for a man who calls people like Pedro “vermin” and “criminals”? How could he, this sweet young man I watched grow up so beautifully fall for a creepy, crass, undignified grifter and not only vote for him but believe him?
It’s been eight years since this terrible man and his, yes monstrous family, came down the garish gold plated elevator in one of the buildings that he more or less owns (along with Deutsche Bank and Tony Soprano) with his wooden statue of a wife and his own bloated overly made up face and spun glass hair and in all that time I have tried to understand.why would anyone buy a used dream from him.
I don’t wonder about him and his willing executioners, time and tide will take care of him. I wonder about the people who think it could be true and I can’t help but ask myself: What is wrong with them? Did they get dropped on their head a lot when they were little?