For those who don’t know (and I certainly didn’t) “Barry Farber,” according to his author’s biography at World Net Daily, “is a pioneer in talk radio.” He’s also really, really old, and his writing is delightfully weird and frequently incoherent, so I can only guess that his extemporizing on the radio for hours at a time is a bit like listening to Lewis Carroll free-associate after taking the brown acid.
Mr. Farber, like many people, is a bit peeved at Adolf Hitler, but not for the same tired old reasons — warmongering, mass murder. Mostly he seems irked that the Führer’s bumbling has somehow made common sense fascism unfashionable.
Do you know the origin of the handshake? It was to show the other person you weren’t holding a weapon. Forget that. It’s unimportant. You don’t need it.
Okay. What the hell did you bring it up for?
Do you know why so many otherwise reasonable people think Arizona is absolutely awful for its new immigration law? This is very important. America needs it big time.
But forget it. Who cares? You don’t need to know that!
Just as President Obama dumps a lot of blame on George W. Bush, I blame the late Adolf Hitler for the rather serious perversion that it’s racist to enforce this law.
So…Obama is right to blame George W. Bush? Or are you admitting that you’re given Hitler a bum rap?
Even those who have no memory of World War II, and never saw Peter Lorre in a movie, still hold a soul-memory of a jackbooted bad guy looming up before a terrified innocent refugee and demanding, “Vere are your papers?”
Well, Peter Lorre specialized in playing notably shady characters (including the murdering black marketeer in Casablanca and the child killer in M) rather than “terrified innocent refugee[s]“, so I guess he must have been the “jackbooted bad guy” in more World War II films than I thought (they say when you get older, your soul-memory is the first to go). I imagine it’s hard to loom when you’re 5′-5″, but Lorre was a consummate actor, and came across on camera as 6′-2″ and nordic.
Even though your typical Arizona cop is no Nazi, and an alien, if illegal, is no innocent refugee, the mindset of a civilized people recoils from the whole scene. We should congratulate ourselves for our instinct, and then get over it.
“I’ve concluded that you’re a kind, decent human being with a great deal of empathy, and I’d like you to stop it.”
Apparently, an ounce of instinct is worth a pound of rational thought. No, an ounce of instinct outweighs a ton of rational thought. How dare we let an idea as intrinsically worthy as identification papers lose out to folk-disgust based on comparisons barely excusable in an 8-year-old?
Is folk-disgust caused by disgusting folks? Because I’m feeling a little queasy all of a sudden. Know any good folk remedies?
I rejoice in the spectacle of not bad humans, but bad ideas crumbling and falling when hit by silver bullets of intellect.
According to Barry’s bio, “He speaks dozens of languages fluently.” None of them English, apparently.
There was such a moment on CNN in mid-May when the irrepressible James Carville got repressed, but good, by radio talk host and former Reagan Cabinet member Bill Bennett on this very issue. The question was, “Is it really important to round up and deport illegal aliens?” Carville offered forth the good old party line about most illegals doing nothing in America but working hard and trying to make a decent life for themselves and their families. Bennett quietly invited Carville to talk to police chiefs across the state of Arizona and ask them what kind of problems, if any, the illegals presented. “No,” Bennett concluded. “To say illegal aliens aren’t a dire threat to America is stupid.”
That’s some high quality repression.
So, you who view life from the campus, the pulpit, the union hall and the Oval Office reject the notion of American law enforcement asking likely suspects to show their ID in 2010 because uniformed Nazis did that same thing to suspected Jews and others in the 1930s and 1940s.
Not really, although the groups you mentioned — students, clergymen, trade unionists — were all persecuted by the Nazis, in a totally bizarre coincidence that we should be careful not to learn anything from. The Oval Office, on the other hand, was never sent to a concentration camp, but since the current occupant is black, the Germans probably would have made an exception.
How smart is that? The respect I’d accumulated for Mikhail Gorbachev for being such a failure as a Communist dictator was washed away when he taunted Americans for talking about building a fence along the Mexican border. He chided Americans on how distasteful we found the old Soviet Iron Curtain. A lot of Americans fell for that taunt despite its glaring, screaming infirmity. “Fences! Don’t you see? Bad!”
But I rejoice in the spectacle of not bad fences!
The eye-rollingly hypocritical Gorbachev knew most of us would be too dumb to harpoon that charge with the elementary observation that the Iron Curtain was designed to keep Communist subjects in; whereas the purpose of a Mexican border fence would be to keep unauthorized people out.
Why are we bothering to harpoon these observations? If we were smart, we’d shoot them with silver bullets of intellect, just in case they turned out to be were-observations.
I even blame Hitler for our drug problem.
If there’d never been a Nazi era and drug addiction had advanced to where we were, say, in the late 1950s, I believe members of Congress would have proposed we concentrate the addicts apart from the population to keep them from recruiting more addicts in order to support their habits. We could concentrate them together in camps. Maybe we could call them “concentration camps.”
Our society could have benefited greatly from Nazi methods of social control, if only they hadn’t been discredited by association with the Nazis. Still, the networks are rebooting all those old TV shows — V, The Rockford Files, Hawaii 5-0 — why not the Third Reich? (Although Arizona is running the risk that Hitler might sue them for theft of intellectual property. Look what Apple did to Jason Chen, and that was just over a phone.)
And those proposals would have come from liberals.
Ah, speaking of plagiarism, Jonah Goldberg would like his Liberal Fascism back.
The conservatives would have said, “Let’s try something else. Camps cost too much money.”
There’s got to be a way to monetize genocide. Maybe instead of “Final Solution,” we could call it “Planned Obsolescence.”
The notion of concentrating people together in camps is not likely in any decent country until history pushes “reset” and starts all over again. And if you think these notions of Hitler still exerting this kind of historical paralysis on our policy-making are frivolous, ask any scientist whatever happened, after the surrender of Nazi Germany, to the science of eugenics, improving the breed among humans. Don’t even bring it up. That’s what Hitler did.
According to his bio, “Farber is also an accomplished author, whose books include “Making People Talk” (presumably under duress).
Finally, there’s something racist about opposing the Arizona law. How dare you assume those likely to be in violation belong to any particular race?
Truly, it makes no sense, when the law clearly states that jackbooted Peter Lorres will be saying “vere are your papers” to everyone — red, yellow, black and white! It’ll be like the opening theme to Kid Power!
Be thankful bad ideas, and oil leaks, eventually end. So far there’s been no organized protest against stopping at red lights and going on green.
Driving while brown, however…
I mean, good God, man; don’t you realize that’s what they did in Nazi Germany?
I’m sure there’s a difference between “talk radio pioneer” and “80-year old guy in the rest home dining hall who insists Khrushchev stole his fruit cup,” but I admit, it’s too subtle for me.