So do Nazis have grandmothers? Were all the Nazis orphans? Did their mothers and grandmothers tell them to not only not talk to strangers but to not allow strangers to live? Perhaps the grandmothers told their little Nazi tykes that not only "...should you not trust strangers but you should round up and kill those people whose ways or beliefs seem strange to you". Certainly there were Nazi grandmothers, there had to be. Logic dictates.
My grandmother was a Nazi. Now mind you she was not living in Germany, she did not wear a brown shirt, she never pushed a Jew or Pole in an oven or gas chamber, but she was a Nazi, nonetheless.
So the title tells you where this is going. I am a half-breed; part native or as I prefer the term Aboriginal American, and part Nordic (Scandinavian most likely). A sweet chubby cheeked boy adopted into a fairly well educated upper middle class white family. Well not too educated, grandma and grandpa were farmers and machinists, who made some money and became landlords, had a slew of kids who became preachers and civil servants and college professors and such.
Good white, God fearing, (ethnic fearing) German dirt farmers gone middle class. I did not know that I was being adopted into a family of Nazis. How were you to know such things at such a young age, just a few weeks old, I was. How was the adoption agency to know these things? I was like the little dog the young girl brings home. Oh so cute, and cuddly. It is no chore to clean up its little messes, 'cause it is so damned cute'. Then gradually over time the little girl grows up and so does the puppy. Slowly, you notice that those cute little tricks it does are not so cute, or maybe they are just not as novel.
Any way the three-pound handful of furry joy has grown into an 80-pound not so cuddly dog and is still growing. And it eats so much and it needs so much attention, and shots and it keeps digging in the neighbor's yard and hopping the fence and running around the neighborhood sniffing butts. And the messes it leaves are not cute little reminders of your precious fur ball they are hot steamy piles each three pounds and they smell so bad. You hardly smell them though; you have work and family and that other dog, this dog's sister. She was easy to train, and made you so proud when you walked her. This dog is huge and growing and does not seem to easily learn its manners.
Well he learns, but you are never there to remind it, and you have so much to do other than putting it on a leash and fighting with it. Up and down the street, you feel that the neighbors are laughing at you. "Don't get that breed, they" they say, "That breed likes to run, and you can never fully train that breed unless you get them fixed." Fixed, just the notion can make this breed want to run. So when you take out the garbage at night you neglect to lock the gate, and when you let the dog out in the back yard to make piles, you send him out a little hungry. So the dog wanders. It wanders out to find a bite, and to stretch his legs and to maybe sniff a butt or two. It's the middle of the night, nobody sees him and when there are people the dog learns to stay away. Even that stupid breed doesn't like rocks thrown at him. Not to worry though, he'll come back, you can pat him on his head, and he does chase the critters away and keep the neighbors from getting too close.
Leave the door cracked he'll nudge his way in and find a spot to curl up. He's just that dog, sure is comforting to see him lying there, too bad you just didn't euthanize him early or not even have brought him home. That would have been better, let someone else take care of him.
You have made the obligation, so you are going to stick with it even if it means a little inconvenience. Whoops, I mistook you for my psychotherapist, I was telling you about grandma. Wonderful, sweet, gentle Nazi Grandma.
We all have that archetypal image of 'Grandma' in our sub-conscious. She is that mother's mother image. The one who makes cookies and thanksgiving dinner and gives you presents and will go out of her way to encourage and stand up for you. I suppose if I was that young Nazi that sprung from her loins she may have appeared that way to me. She would have said thing like, "Well look how handsome my little Hitler looks this Sunday morning." Or "There's my chubby little field marshal" or "It's such a beautiful day, why don't you go on outside and persecute a Jew or beat up a homosexual."
But alas, I was not. I tried when I was young to be grandma's little Nazi, but nothing ever seemed to please her, cause I was a savage, a mongrel, a breed. Grandma's second youngest child, the woman I call 'mother' could not have children. Rumor had it that she was infertile due to cancer or bad genetics, some say it was from abuse and a subsequent botched abortion.. Perhaps from bad breeding, perhaps from disease, perhaps by the grace of an Almighty being, she could not have her own little bundle of Nazi joy. In some secret whispers around the family her lack of conception was due to her frigidity, perhaps due to molestation by her Nazi brothers or father. This is not the point, at this point. The point is for one reason or another; she was forced to adopt so to give the appearance of being an upstanding member of the community.
For if she was to look like a normal member of society she would have to raise children. First adopted is my half sister. Same mother for sure, and perhaps, most probably a different father than I. Then a couple years later, the adoption agency called and said, "We have her brother, and we here and 'The Christian child-for-sale Adoption Agency'
we try to keep siblings in the same home. Out of good Christian guilt, and the need to maintain a good social image, I too was brought into the house.
Such a cute little thing, dark eyes and dark hair and such chubby little cheeks, how could anyone resist. I looked so cute in the little church suits and with the lisp I had I said everything so funny (many speech therapists believe that speech impediments are a result of childhood abuse). It made people laugh. Well, that cute little chubby cheeked boy grew up to be a 6 foot 4 inch, 265 lb. half breed. To this day, I scare my folks when I approach them in a crowd. They keep hoping to see that little chubby cheeked boy. Never again, he is far past that cute stage.
Sure as an infant and toddler I was doted over by all, even Grandma. But as I grew larger and stronger and taller and smarter than the rest of the grandkids, I began to scare the Nazis family.
Nazis are funny types. They goose step around killing retards, and crazies and Jews and Gypsies; they take what is not theirs, the rape and burn and plunder. They are admittedly quite scary folks. I firmly believe that they are this way because they themselves are quite scared: scared to death, scared of everything and everyone that is not exactly like them.
My Nazi family was scared of me. I was great big huge and they were just average. I was dark skinned, they were pale and pasty. I was not German, and they were German. Not that all Germans are Nazi, far from it, but these folks were.
They had long traded in the Nazi rhetoric for fundamentalist Christian rhetoric. Now they could hate for God's sake. Mind you, most Nazi's in Nazi Germany were Christians; Protestant or Catholics. My family was Protestant. Cause we all knew (we being those in my family) that Catholics were actually worshipping Satan incarnate (the Pope) and were going to burn in hell for letting Christ hang on that cross for two thousand years.
Being Fundamentalist Christians is a good cover for the hate monger, just like being a humble servant of the 'Vicar of Christ' is a good cover for being a child molester. They can hate and hate and hate and when called on it, can just say, well they are going to hell anyway, why be nice to them now. Maybe if we are cruel and vicious to them while they are alive they will realize what hell will be like and convert thought we prefer they didn't because we don't want their type in heaven anyway. If they don't repent, then we are just getting them used to what they got coming to them when they die and go to hell.
Odd thinking to be sure but it works when you are ignorant and full of malice and xenophobia.
I remember visiting Grandma and Grandpa when I was a youth. The family would gather around the Sunday dinner table and eat and laugh and talk of how all those people would burn in hell. Heck the niggers already looked liked they were burnt (this was a common joke around the dinner table). The Poles were ignorant and the Wet Backs (Latinos for you who are not up on your racial slurs) were lazy and the Niggers were thieves and the Asians (Slant-Eyes, Chinks, Zipper-heads, gooks and 'Charlie') were clever but evil communists and Satanists and were going to burn in hell right along with the rest of them. The Arabs should have been all killed off when Moses and Aaron took back the promise land and the Jews needed to die too for killing our Jesus Christ. I don't think I was ever successful in convincing my family that Jesus was a Jew. I had uncles who went to seminary and studied theology and the bible, the equivalent to having a PhD, and they still could not get their heads around the fact the Jesus was a Jew. Ah the good old days of family gatherings and the talk of the saving grace of Jesus Christ and in the same breathe racial slurs.
Grandma was the Matriarch of our family, barking out orders and insults and telling everyone what to do and when to do it and who to do it with. She was an old bitch for sure, but a devout Christian and a 'died in the wool' Nazi.
You would never know from looking at her, no knee boots, no snazzy Nazi outfit, no swastikas, no little moustache, and no goose step. Just a sweet looking bitter old Christian Nazi grandmother.
One time I was sitting on a stoop in Portland Oregon, I at the time only wore black, it made it easier to run around doing graffiti and I thought I looked cool, besides I didn't have to worry about matching colors when getting dressed. I had also recently shaved my head. This was not a fashion statement, it was for practical purposes: multiple hair dyeing sessions and a unfortunate pass-out session with a couple of punk rock girls who could braid and had access to beads feathers and melted bees wax had turned my head into a hideous piece of art. It was making finding work quite difficult, so I shaved it all off.
I was sitting there when I was approached by a group of skinheads, oddly enough, one of them was of African-American heritage. I began to mouth off about him being a bit confused about his allegiances. They began to inform me that they were "SHARP" (Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice). Come to think about it I believe that skinheads prefer to use the term 'skinhead' as a single word, so more accurately they were 'SARPs'.
This gave me a bit more fodder for harassment. They continue to inform me that they were part of a militant faction of skinheads that hunted down and beat up racially prejudice skinheads. I exclaimed "Ooooh, so you are bigots against racists!" This, after much explanation on my part upset them and the scene turned ugly. They started accusing me of being a non-committed skinhead. I had forgotten that I was recently been sporting the bald look up until that moment.
I assured them that I was not a skinhead, that I just happened to be bald at that particular moment, and that I was in fact a bigot against bigots against racists. Which after a bit more explanation on my part, made them even more angry. They then accused me of being a JEW! Perhaps I should not have been sitting on a stoop of a Synagogue (I was also unaware of this fact at that moment).
I assured them that I wasn't a Jew either. I took that opportunity, being a teacher at heart, to educate them on the Jews being, not only a religious sect but a race of people, there fore they by there own omission could not in fact hate me: because I was not a Jew and because, even if I was a Jew, they were not racists and therefore could not by their own creed hate me.
This caused much cognitive dissonance in this already confused group of young Nazis. How could Jews be a race and they, not being racists still hate them. One of the brighter of the group stated that Jews killed Christ so this gave them the right, or prerogative to hate all Jews. I did not want to get into the whole discussion of the fact that not all Jews that have lived could have possibly been present when Christ died. Not only that, technically it was the Romans (Europeans/Caucasians) who had indeed killed Christ. Using their own logic, they (with the exception of the African-American skinhead) where, I deduced 'of the group' who killed Christ, therefore, using my strong logic skills, explained why they were obligated to hunt themselves down and beat themselves up. I also suggested that this was not only the most appropriate course of action, but the most socially acceptable course of action. I even suggested that they not stop at beating themselves but completely eradicating themselves.
I now had on my hands a small band of very angry, violent, militant skinheads. I decided that it was time to end the conversation and depart. I took a moment to explain in brief yet accurate detail that Jesus was a Jew and thus they worshiped a man who was a Jew, thus proving they indeed were to blame for the death of the Christ.
As I ran as fast as I could with this jolly bunch of Nazi's in hot pursuit, I thought about all Nazis and fundamentalism and these boys grandmothers. Were their grandmother's Nazis? Did their grandmothers sit in rocking chairs knitting sweaters and teaching their young grandchildren to hate?
We will never know about that group of grandmas, but I assure you my grandmother/Nazi did not! Her arthritis was too advanced to allow her to knit.
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