I was born 15 years after the end of World War Two.   I was taught as a toddler that the atomic situation had settled everything and that mankind had seen the folly of their ways.   Being around my grandparents, hearing Eisenhower, reading about Roosevelt and Lincoln, and even after their deaths studying Kennedy and King, I had no reason to doubt that it was impossible for fascism to ever penetrate the United States, that we were not that malleable, even to the nihilists in Hollywood.   The Vietnam War and race struggles over Civil Rights seemed a sickness and a growing pain. There was a conspicuous collision of American discourse with the Soviet Union and I could feel the question of American belligerence strongly enough that I began to suspect that fascism existed behind the Wizard’s curtain.   In time, I did learn that Adolf Hitler said he would destroy the world if he had to in order to conquer it as a master race. As a toddler, I was uneasy with my father’s assurances that he died, but like the passage concerning Gandalf in Tolkien’s book, I went back to my carefree thoughts concerning American integrity.   Since all of my friends were Jews, it never occurred to me to think badly of anyone Jewish. I danced the hora in the folk festival as a preschooler.   

         Spending much of my free time in Ian Wattenmaker’s backyard or under the shuttle of his mother to Trees Pool, I absorbed lessons I didn’t realize were lessons.   Mother had made me obedient and unquestioning. IW unearthed WW1 magazines in his garage loft, showed me how to shoot a bird with a bb gun, which I still regret, and spoke admiringly of the blonder Aryan boy at Trees who had perfect form diving, bending as he fell at the waste in a sort of one-two dive.   This would have surprised me, this Jewish scientist and Aryan team if I knew more, it doesn’t now. Why my mother continued to let me go there after Ian taught me to swear and got me to number two outside, instead she just said, “I know what you did, I can tell you by the way you walk.” So could the St. Bernard.

         Leanne Ellison Norman wasn’t followed either, when across the street from Friends Meeting, among the mansions there, a spinster counciled me about the Draft.  Norman dismissively ignored me as though she’d already put the punch in with Swimmer. The leathery dude, Richmond, who worked with Burstyn on psy-films at Mt. Desert Island with Abira Ali and Zell for sale to Harlem and Temple U. was a Norman dacoit, so are that Rusted Root band.   They all know why Miles still laughs at Nancy’s son, for as Migliosi liked to chime, “everybody and their mother.”

       Sex is hidden in the closet, so why shouldn’t that be where the British hide Hitler’s revenge?    King Edward KE is easy to remember in Japanese hirigana, he’s the one that carries the sword for the cross of Heil Jesus.   The stupid queers would rather play Let’s Just Destroy the World, Then, than ask why: I LOVE SIRA SIRAN was spraypainted on a garage door where a photo was taken of me in Cyril Wecht’s neighborhood in 1966, back where that mean Siamese cat froze.