It’s spring! And, since I suffer from that “ear worm” condition under which practically every sentence I say or write makes me think of a song, the first thing that “springs” to mind is the title song, Springtime For Hitler, from the play-within-a-play of the Mel Brooks’ Broadway musical The Producers. In Brooks’ satire, two struggling producers conclude that the best way to make a lot of money, fast, is to create an unthinkably bad musical, get unwitting investors to give them a total of 25,000% of the cost of it, and then, when it fails, pocket all the investment money. Or what our current economy-wrecker would call The Art Of The Deal.
The sure-to-fail musical includes a Busby Berkeley type number with storm troopers forming a giant swastika, and lyrics like “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!” Unfortunately for the desperate producers, the play is so resoundingly bad, it gets rave reviews as a satire, is a hit, and lands the boys in jail for their fraud.
So…it’s spring and I can’t keep the lyrics out of my head: “Germany was having trouble/What a sad sad story/Needed a new leader to restore/Its former glory/ Where oh where was he/Where could that man be/We looked around and then we found/The man for you and me.” Well we found him, too, and the echoes of Hitler are undeniable. It’s no longer a matter of simply using a label.
The range of evidence runs from our own brand of masked storm troopers, acting in unison, like an ominous Chorus Line, surrounding and carrying off our citizens, to clowns dancing with chain saws, to the least qualified Cabinet, ever, nodding like bobble-head dolls at made-for-TV meetings, to defunding universities, lawyers, courts, non-profits, libraries, museums, media outlets, health and human services providers, and anything that disagrees with the “agenda” of the current administration, to selectively ripping books out of our libraries (I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, gone from the Naval Academy library, Mein Kampf, still on the shelves), to defunding and purging staff from all the programs that made the USA a respected leader and partner all across the world, to using the federal investigatory and prosecutorial agencies as private police to target enemies. It’s a fascist dream.
The cruelty is palpable. Three US AID workers received notices of their termination while frantically digging to save people trapped in the rubble of the Myanmar earthquake. The ever-more mentally disordered Bobby Kennedy Jr., when told that 10,000 people have been fired, including those staffing treatment for juvenile diabetes, disease prevention, food safety, and so much more, looked blankly into the camera and said “I’m not aware of those cuts.” Apparently, he was too busy lauding the unqualified doctor who is treating measles in Texas with asthma inhalers (I kid you not), the same doctor who was meeting with patients while he, himself, had measles. (Not a rumor, he shows the breakout on his face in an interview).
The Department of Justice (what a misnomer) is directly targeting all those on the Worst President Ever’s enemies list, while twenty-two states are considering bills introduced to arrest and imprison people for dissent, marching, or speaking out, based solely on the subject of their protest.
However, like the blinking and stunned characters emerging from Plato’s cave into the light, people are beginning to wake up. They are realizing that the claim that the government is their greatest enemy was a lie, deliberately developed to undermine faith in the work the government does to provide and guarantee equality under the law and in our budgets. They are beginning to realize how many of our freedoms, protections, and improvements are overseen and made possible solely by our government. As Joni Mitchell put it “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” Or, to put it another way, our government has been, until now, the greatest delivery system of equality. Indeed, it is the only entity with the power to do so.
Now, it is, indeed, Springtime for Hitler. The current tenant of the white house campaigned on a hugely inflated version of “a chicken in every pot” and the rhetoric was so rosy, and the populace so hopeful and gullible, he turned out to be a hit. Instead, however, America is reeling from an endless combination of sucker punches, financial, diplomatic, and in every area we can imagine: democracy, balance of power, courts, health, national security, research, education, all corrupted and starved in less than three months.
Fortunately, the promise of spring, as well as that of our own history, if we can learn from it, just might help us figure out how to stand up and fight back.
The First American Revolution
Spring is the time of rebirth and we are variously celebrating Easter, Passover and, in another possible rebirth, the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
Suddenly, this commemoration is anything but dry and ancient history to us 350 million Americans. Indeed, there are a remarkable collection of eerie parallels worth exploring. But first…a story…
Twenty years ago, my eye was drawn randomly to an ad in the LA Times for an estate sale which was scheduled to take place in an auction house not far from where I lived. I have no idea why I decided, on the spot, to go and look around, but I did. Arriving at the cavernous place, I was handed a list of items scheduled to be auctioned off, most of them antiques and paintings, and all of them way out of my financial reach.
One listing, however, labeled “various newspapers”, seemed oddly out of place so I wandered through the jumble to find and inspect it. Tucked away next to tall stacks of books was a small, white, cardboard box, about the same size as one that would hold a ream of paper, but more sturdy. No labels, just the box and the item number.
I was not at all prepared for what I found inside. Neatly folded were five or six newspapers from the early years of the 20th Century, and one from more than a hundred years before that. There was a copy of the Times Picayune from New Orleans, dated 1915, that looked to be one of the first rotogravures printed in America. It depicted, in full newspaper pages of drawings, each of the floats in that year’s Mardi Gras Parade. Another, smaller paper was from 1910 Santa Fe, New Mexico, inviting people to move to the small town of Los Angeles, California, where work was available in the production of adobe bricks, and where your family would “enjoy the felicitous aire and good health afforded by the gentle weather.”
The capper, however, was a copy of The Boston Gazette dated November, 1774. On the front page was a cogent and fiery exhortation, written by the radical liberationist and pamphleteer, Samuel Adams, exhorting the colonists to go beyond simply protesting the tariffs of the time and the unfair “taxation without representation” they were suffering, and to declare their independence from Great Britain. I framed that one to protect it from deterioration but just holding it in my hand made me feel an electric connection to a dangerous, exciting and meaningful time.
I don’t know if this was just another example of the everyday miracles, messages, coincidences or prompts from beyond that we experience throughout our lives, recognized and unrecognized, but I woke up this morning thinking of those young men reacting to their rough and imperious treatment by King George III, and of their dangerous and brave decision to fight back.
The parallels to our time are close and numerous. In 1766, King George III was on the throne. He is traditionally called “the mad king” for his unexplainable, random and impetuous behavior, which was, historically, attributed to a rare physical ailment. However, in 2013, two professors at St. George’s University of London, Dr. Peter Garrard, a specialist in neurodegenerative dementia, and Dr. Vassiliki Rentoumi, a researcher in natural language processing, carefully parsed the King’s use of language in his letters, and also as reported by many witnesses. In a voluminous number of these, the researchers found that, during bouts of illness, the length of his sentences increased exponentially, with sentences running to 400 words, rife with circular thinking and increasing repetitions. At times his sentences made no sense but were filled with colorful and overlapping metaphors. The words, themselves, however, became more and more simple. The Professors concluded that he demonstrated familiar signs of mental “derangement” during episodes of “acute mania”, differing from times of stability. Trump exhibits exactly the same symptoms, and calls it “weaving”, while describing everything he does as “beautiful.”
The parallels are even more striking in the area of policy. King George III had imposed a Stamp Act, which placed a direct tax on the colonists for every piece of printed material, in order to pay for billeting British soldiers. Colonists were forced to welcome these enemies into their homes. (Read the Third Amendment to our Constitution to see how important it was, at the time, to guarantee this would never happen again). Following a great uproar against the Stamp Act, the British Parliament and the King withdrew it. However, they continued to look for ways to raise funds to support their troops and enacted four new indirect taxes, in the form of tariffs, under the Townsend Acts of 1767. Duties were placed on glass, paint, paper and tea. The colonists were not fooled. They understood that an indirect tax, by which consumers pay increased prices caused by tariffs placed on the import of goods, is still a tax. They began their collective objections peacefully, by boycotting these goods and petitioning the King to remove them. The man whose work I held in my hand, Sam Adams, was prominent in these actions.
Crowds gathered at customs houses to harass customs officers, making it impossible to enforce trade regulations in Boston. Frustrated, the British colonial government requested military assistance and sent British troops to occupy Boston. The British regulars shot and killed several people in the crowd in what is now called the Boston Massacre, and Bostonians protested the tariffs by dumping 342 chests of tea into the waters of Boston Harbor. The Crown struck back by enacting The Coercive Acts, greatly clamping down on the independent colonial governments and their powers. In response, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts created the first minutemen companies, militiamen who were trained and held ready to act on a moment’s notice.
In the middle of the night, on April 18, 1775, British troops were sent to Concord to seize and destroy military supplies stored there by the colonists. A messenger named Paul Revere was dispatched to warn everyone that, as we all learned in school, “The British Are Coming.” The minutemen gathered, waited, and then surprised the marching British, firing, as Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed it, “the shot heard round the world.” The American Revolution began on the morning of April 19, 1775, 250 years ago.
Now here we are, saddled with a self-proclaimed King, a man who is as insane as George III, who tries to convince us that his “beautiful” tariffs are not going to cost the American people. He is using his troops to violently intimidate communities and stifle dissent. We suffer from “taxation without representation” as he imposes these tariffs without the consent of Congress. Already millions are gathering to protest. Might it be time for the Second American Revolution?
