Donald Trump is literally Hitler

As anyone who knows me will be more than happy to tell you, I am easily confused. I didn’t start out to be easily confused—I was rather hoping to play centerfield for the Yankees someday, but that dream vanished when it became clear that the curveball was a permanent part of baseball and not some passing fad like Pet Rocks, Cabbage Patch dolls, and Clinton presidential campaigns, and that my inability to hit a curveball with any degree of regularity, or never, as it is sometimes called, would permanently keep me out of centerfield at Yankee Stadium, unless I was taking the tour the Yankee organization provides when the team is out of town—but I am easily confused today, which I ascribe to being old and out of it, and to my unfortunate habit of wearing unfashionable hats.

But be that as it may, I am confused because President Trump is literally Hitler.  Not a would be Hitler or a Hitler manqué, as if he were a literally French Hitler; one assumes that the food would improve in school cafeterias if he were; or a wannabe Hitler or an aspiring Hitler or a Hitler avatar, but literally Hitler, and being literally Hitler is not a good thing to be. Now, other people have been literally Hitler before Trump was literally Hitler; Ronald Reagan was literally Hitler and both President Bushes were literally Hitler as well, as was John McCain and Milt Romney. Barry Goldwater was almost literally Hitler, but apparently he either got over it or the people who were thinking about saying that Goldwater was literally Hitler decided that calling him literally Hitler just sounded silly and contented themselves with saying that Goldwater was literally loonier than Hitler at a hot dog eating contest. I do not recall if Richard Nixon was literally Hitler; I am old enough to remember Nixon very well and I just don’t remember if Nixon was literally Hitler or if he was just sort of vaguely Hitlerish, but not during the latter half of football season.  I find the idea of Mitt Romney being literally Hitler intriguing in a strange sort of way; being literally Hitler suggests the idea that Romney had literally Hitlerian powers as governor of Massachusetts, like the power to dispose of his enemies as he willed or the power to invade such nonthreatening neighbor states as New Hampshire or Connecticut or even to arrest all the New York Yankees fans in Massachusetts and send them to summer camps on Nantucket Island, as opposed to the not very literally Hitlerish power to raise everyone’s health insurance premiums, which is very not literally Hitler-type power at all. Any idiotic dolt of a politician can do that, you know, and do it without the really cool uniforms that being literally Hitler can get for you.

One thing is absolutely true, however: Donald Trump is literally Hitler. That is an undeniable historical fact like Christopher Columbus discovering the electric light bulb or Fiorello LaGuardia discovering that secondhand tobacco smoke can give you herpes. Here, however, is the part that confuses me: if Trump is literally Hitler and Romney was literally Hitler, how can Trump be literally Hitler if Romney was literally Hitler, and how can both men be literally Hitler when Hitler was literally Hitler, and Hitler, you might be interested to know, still has living relatives who might sue the people who keep saying that Trump is literally Hitler and Romney was literally Hitler for infringing on the family’s trademark of being literally Hitler, or, in their case, literally Hitlers.  This, to me, is a lot like People magazine declaring that some male movie star is the sexiest man alive last year and then declaring another male movie star the sexiest man alive this year. How can the latter be sexier than the former when the former is still living?  I could understand this if the sexiest man alive this year was competing, if that is what you do in this situation, with the sexiest man alive from 1937, but last year was only last year and it’s unlikely that last year’s winner has diminished in sexiness so much that anyone can notice an appreciable difference between this year and last, and how does anyone measure such a subjective quality anyway?  Is there a cellphone application that will do this for us nowadays?

Finally, there is the problem that no one seems to want to deal with here. In declaring that Trump is literally Hitler, how do we judge the case of Adolf Hitler, who was literally Hitler long before it became politically fashionable to be literally Hitler?[1] If Trump is literally Hitler, then it necessarily follows that Hitler can’t be literally Hitler, he has to be someone else, doesn’t he, but Alfred E. Newman and Bill Gates are already someone else, and no, I don't know what that means. This, in turn, leads to the problem of why would anyone care if Trump is literally Hitler when clearly Hitler could not be literally Hitler because Trump is literally Hitler?  If Hitler can’t be literally Hitler because Trump is literally Hitler, then accusing Trump of being literally Hitler is as meaningless a charge as accusing Trump of being a life insurance salesman, or worse, a Red Sox fan.  So, I am still confused and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around willing to untangle the mental knot this conundrum is causing me. I must give the whole matter much more thought, I think.

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[1] I should also point out that being literally Hitler did not keep Hitler from literally shooting Hitler in the head. So, since Hitler literally killed Hitler for being literally Hitler, is this literally a good thing or a bad thing vis-à-vis Trump, who is literally Hitler but is unlikely to do the same thing?  I am still confused.

Home on the Gnome, or little people blues

Gnomes infest my home. I realize that this is something that your average American homeowner (like me, for instance) would prefer not to bring up in polite conversation—gnomes really do cause your property values to crater, especially in a tight real estate market—but the problem at my house has become so onerous that I had to do something about it.  Now, I should point out that I am not referring to garden gnomes, those happy little whatever they are that hang around people’s gardens and do not appear to be doing very much other than standing around in people’s gardens not doing very much. I have no problems with them; I am civil to them and they are equally civil to me; and I have no problems with that gnome you see on television all the time advertising travel services either. I seldom travel anywhere so our paths rarely, if ever, cross. Nor do I have any sort of problem with the rest of the little people: trolls, ogres, pixies, leprechauns (except on St. Patrick’s Day), hobbits, fairies, elves, sprites, etc., etc.—I get along with all of them.  Home gnomes, on the other hand, are a malignant bunch of ankle biting bastards and the sooner the pesticide companies come up with a way of removing them permanently from my house, our happy little burg, the Vampire State, and this our Great Republic the better.   

I do not know how home gnomes came to this country. I suppose that it may be the usual tale of immigrants from a foreign land escaping persecution or economic hardship or the ineluctable demand that you eat liver because it’s good for you, that’s why, the sort of story that brings a tear to the eye of every red-blooded American. Or, in an alternative scenario, the home gnomes could be like fire ants, killer bees, or kudzu—another country’s homegrown pain in the ass that somehow landed here and decided that being a pain in the ass back in the old country was not enough for them. America beckoned, and the chance to be a pain in the ass here as well was just too good for them to resist.  However the little bastards got here, they’re here now, and they’re in my house, and it’s driving me up the wall. 

So, you may be asking yourself at this point in this interminable screed, what is wrong with home gnomes?  How can anyone despise them? They are so cute and cuddly, in the adorable way that kitty cats, teddy bears, and hagfish are, surely no one could loathe them as much as I seem to do. My response to this is simple: baloney. Home gnomes, and I don’t think that I should have to keep pointing this out to people, behave one way when they are out in public and quite another when one is stuck with them as houseguests. Frankly, I would rather have a gaggle of gluttonous relatives come visit me over a long holiday weekend than deal with a home gnome, because home gnomes are like relatives you don’t like on steroids.

To begin with, home gnomes do not bathe. At all. Ever.  As a result, home gnomes stink in the same way that the men’s room of a bad Indo-Pak restaurant stinks after a long hot Saturday night in July, which is to say, completely and to the nth degree.  In the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries from New England tried to convince the home gnomes that cleanliness was next to godliness and showed the ungrateful little bastards how to use soap and water. Many a hoary old gnomish (assuming that’s even a word) traditionalist objected to soap and water, claiming that the stuff corrupted the morals of the younger generation and led them into such base and disgusting practices as broccoli farming and selling life insurance, but the protests of the greybeards did nothing to stop the popularity of soap and water, which the youngsters garnished with mint toothpaste and washed down with copious amounts of Listerine.   

I find the soap eating to be particularly revolting. There is almost nothing in this world more annoying than coming home from a long day at work to find six or seven unconscious gnomes fried to the gills on Listerine floating around my living room with their trousers pulled down to their ankles and large hydrogen[i] filled soap bubbles coming out of their rumps. This is, firstly, just plain disgusting—no one in their right mind wants to look at a home gnome’s bare bottom, not even female home gnomes[ii]--and secondly, it is hazardous in the extreme, since sober home gnomes—this has been known to happen[iii]—think that throwing lit matches at their drunken compatriots’ backsides while they hang in midair is in some way funny.  That throwing a lit match at a flatus full of hydrogen is not the best idea anyone could have on any given day—it could cause an explosion, after all, and a big one if there are more than one gnome involved—does not occur to home gnomes, largely because home gnomes are, collectively and individually, dumber than a box of wet rocks.  About twenty years ago, the board of education here in our happy little burg decided that what the home gnomes really needed, other than a good swift kick in the bottom, was an education. The noble experiment[iv] began with the best of intentions, but as most experienced teachers know, educating someone who does not want an education is almost impossible.[v] The gnomes cut all of their classes and spent their school days in the bathrooms drinking the liquid soap out of the dispensers and chasing pretty girls up and down the halls. In the end, the board of education admitted defeat and expelled the home gnomes en masse, but not before the gnomes burned the new high school to the ground.  

So, as you might imagine, I want to get rid of my home gnomes while my house is still undamaged. My mother recently had a deputy sheriff come out to her house to shoot a rabid raccoon in her driveway and I asked the deputy if she could come over to my house and shoot the gnomes as well. The answer was no.  She was very polite about it, but at this time there is no law against being a home gnome and therefore shooting one was out of the question.  She did provide a little hope, however.  The malfeasant peculators who run the Vampire State may not be the greatest supporters of the Second Amendment you could ever hope to find here in this our Great Republic, but if you pay for a license and wait for the proper season, the state will let you kill damn near anything you want to kill.  Well, it seems that home gnomes are an even bigger nuisance upstate than they are hereabouts—it seems that home gnomes are the leading cause of forest fires upstate—and there is now legislation before the Assembly to have a home gnome season run concurrently with deer season.  That’s it then, folks. The minute the governor signs that bill into law, I am going down the street to Don German’s Hair Cut & Hand Grenade Emporium to buy myself a shotgun, yes I am. I’m getting rid of the little bastards one way or the other.

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[i] Yes, hydrogen, not methane. They’re gnomes, not people.

[ii] Easily distinguished from their male counterparts by their shorter beards and the red rings on their prehensile noses.

[iii] Really, I’m not kidding.

[iv] Aren’t they always?

[v] I offer my brothers as evidence of this contention.

Post 999 of 12

“I want a roast beef sandwich, but without the roast beef. I’m a vegetarian.”  I’ve heard my share of very odd requests at The Horny Toad, the bar where I spend many of my off the clock hours, but this one seemed odder than usual. There is, to my knowledge, no substitute for roast beef in a roast beef sandwich, the roast beef and the salt, pepper, and other sundry condiments being the whole point of the roast beef sandwich. There is a word for a roast beef sandwich without the roast beef, yes there is, and that word is bread.  I suppose that somewhere there may be an acceptable substitute for the roast beef in a roast beef sandwich, but I do not believe that any of these substitutes would be acceptable to a vegetarian.  Roast pork, roast goat, roast lamb, roast choose any four-legged protein source you want, no vegetarian will surrender the smug attitude of moral superiority that comes with saying, I don’t eat meat, just so that they can have a roast beef sandwich without the roast beef.  Our bovine craving veggie eater could use a nice bit of fried eggplant on her sandwich, but for your average vegetarian frying anything other than a Republican is a most evil and wicked practice, comparable to bashing cute little kitty cats over the head with a baseball bat and then drinking their blood, and therefore is not a practice that any decent person who believes in the sanctity of both the human body and cute little kitty cats would choose to engage in.  

And then there is tuna fish, although it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how anyone could mistake a tuna fish sandwich for a roast beef sandwich; doing so would truly be a victory of mind over matter. In addition, it is also difficult for me to see the moral difference between eating a cow and eating a fish, unless the genetic accident of having fins instead of feet permits the peckish plant enthusiast to indulge a perverse proclivity for protein while simultaneously salving a guilty conscience. I can see no moral reason why vegetarians should consider the footless and fancy free tuna to be a legitimate source of dinner, whereas they would protect the cow from the dinner plate with the religious intensity of Hindus. This hardly seems fair to the fish and privileges a terrestrial creature over a maritime one, which is the sort of rank specieist discrimination I think we can all agree has no place in modern American life. So the next time you feel like a roast beef sandwich without the roast beef, eat the bread instead. But make sure that it’s wheat bread and filled with gluten. You can hate gluten these days and I’m sure it has done something to deserve its fate.

PS This is my 999^th post here. I kept trying to think of something outstanding for the post but nothing came, so you are stuck with this. Sorry.

Lack of writer's block and other misadventures in electronic publishing

So here’s the thing: I have lots of ideas, so the usual excuses for not writing don’t really apply here. I have, for example, a piece half written on my desk even as I sit here at work listening to some teenagers being callow assholes for the sheer enjoyment of being callow assholes, which is the sort of thing you have to expect from teenagers, I suppose.  Telling myself that they are simply engaging in the teenage imperative doesn’t make their stupidity any less annoying, however.  So yes, there is no real reason why I haven’t been writing busily away here.  It’s just that RA[1] has raised its ugly head once again and I have had other things on my mind.  Having been medically evicted from my hips for non-payment of rent, RA has, like so many people in the past few decades, decided to improve its life and move to the suburbs.  I’ve never thought of my ankles as being particularly suburban, but I imagine that if the mind itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, an annoying autoimmune disease can find suburban bliss and better schools for the kids in somebody’s ankles.  Its’ just that I would prefer that if find its bliss in someone else’s ankles. Mine hurt enough as it is.

In order to find some relief from the new tenants, I went to a very nice Chinese doctor who x-rayed my feet while I had unexposed photographic film in my pockets—yes, I know that the film is ruined, thank you for the reminder—and then told me that I had an inflammation in my ankles. The doctor was a very nice man, as I said, and so I did not tell him no shit, Sherlock, where’d you leave your squad car?  No, I simply nodded politely and asked what he intended to do about it.  He indicated that some cortisone was in order and he left me alone with my thoughts and my bare feet for a few moments to go get a nurse and some cortisone as well.  When he came back about five minutes later with both nurse and drugs in tow, I hopped up on the table as brightly and chipperly as someone who just invented the word chipperly can hop anywhere, whereupon the good doctor sterilized my right foot and then jabbed me in the ankle with a very large needle.  This being my first cortisone shot ever, I and my ankle did not respond well to the sudden intrusion of the corpus, and I wish to take this opportunity to apologize to the doctor for screaming, what the fuck, at him at the top of my lungs.  The doctor, however, did not so much as blink an eye at my comment, which leads me to believe that I am not the first person he’s injected with cortisone who has had this reaction.  Afterwards, I was left in the hands of the nurse, who proceeded to show me how to use the ankle braces the doctor told me to wear.

One of the braces the nurse gave me was a simple ankle brace that anyone who has had a sprained ankle will be familiar with. The other brace looked like a bondage device for foot fetishists.  The simple ankle brace came with a forty page pamphlet in twelve European languages (including Slovenian) and four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs.  The foot fetishist’s wet dream came with no instructions in any language at all (including Slovenian).  The nurse quickly showed me how to put the thing on and then rushed off to see other patients.  As you might imagine, I have worn the foot fetishist’s delight exactly once, because I cannot figure out how to fasten and secure the device to my ankle.  In fact, I wear the brace for my left ankle on my right ankle; it seems to work, but there may be dangers here that I will comment on at a later date. As for the left ankle brace that I wear on my right ankle, it strikes me as decidedly odd that anyone would choose to print out, in twelve European languages (including Slovenian), four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs, detailed instructions on how to put on a sock.  I realize that the bureaucratic mind will seize at any opportunity to make itself annoying to the public it allegedly serves, but this seems to be unnecessarily annoying. Didn’t we all learn to put on our socks before we started kindergarten? And even if our mothers put the socks on for us, I think that the majority of the world’s sock wearing population would have learned how to put on their socks simply by watching Mom do it every morning.  I, and I expect billions of other sock-wearing people as well, do not see the need for subjecting the gimps of the world to a forty page pamphlet in twelve European languages (including Slovenian), four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs.  We already know how to put our socks on, thank you very much, or did I miss something along the way?

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[1] Rheumatoid arthritis, if you are not a long time reader. I would say that this particular ailment is a royal pain in the ass, except that my ass is the one place it doesn’t bother at all.