With 21 days to go I woke up after three hours and 13 minutes. My sleep o meter tells me I dreamed (was in the REM state) for half and hour and had 5 minutes of deep sleep. I tried to fall back asleep but sufficient sleep to feel alert and a weeks worth of feeling guilty for bringing my campaigning to a halt and four books that I’ve been consuming with various degrees of ardor combined with the famous question from the New Testament to take me to the kitchen and make a pot of coffee in preparation for some more reading and this post. Wow! If I counted correctly that preceding sentence as 67 words. Way too many.
I was 67 years old when I started learning French. I’ll be 74 in December and I’m still spending two hours a day at it. I’m a stubborn old cus.
Yesterday, off and on, I was imagining future political work to save America from itself. That was better, if not more rational, than feeling I’d wasted my life trying to catch some golden political ring like Lincoln. I have always been a journey guy more than a destination guy so all that nonsense about wasting my life wasn’t very productive. In the end my labors will not prevent our sun from consuming the Earth in a few billion years as a red giant before it explodes. And I’m lucky. Abe Lincoln didn’t know anything about super novas.
The three books in the picture above were spread out on a still cluttered desk to show what I’ve been reading since I finished the Eric Larson book about Fort Sumpter. The last three hours of listening weren’t quite as compelling as the first 9 or 10 which had more Lincoln gnashing his teeth over how to proceed after South Carolina declared itself to have seceded from the Union. But it did spend a little time I found interesting covering a British reporter who pissed everybody off as he traveled to South Carolina after having missed the surrender of the Fort. His appraisal of the Deep Slave South was harsh. In one of the books I’ve started reading above “Redemption” that I got 20% off some where the description of the other end of the deep slave south is equally ugly. South Carolina’s book end is Mississippi and the two states before, during and after the civil war had majority black populations. Redemption the book is also a bookend. Its a bookend to Larson’s book because its about the immediate aftermath of the Civil War when the white south unbowed determined to keep their freed slaves as slavish as possible.
Both of these books reinforce my books assessment of how the attitudes of the South, which I a little unfairly blame Thomas Jefferson for, are still poisoning of America as made manifest by the Trump phenomenon. All these thoughts combined plus several more had me thinking that I should travel to the Eighth Congressional District’s deep exurban south and put up lawnsigns rather than waste the 10,000 flyers I spent a grand to have printed.
I may change my mind on that. 3 hours is too little sleep for a 12 day passing out flyers and putting up lawnsigns.
I’ve also been nibbling at my modest little book. I have read VTTA for twenty years. Its not humiliating to red this thin thread of autobiography but it is a little humbling. The other book is one I bought a decade ago thinking it might give me more insights into Adolph Hitler who has always posed a great mystery to the world. I’ve previously read three excellent books on Adolph. The first was Albert Speer’s Inside the third Reich which I read just out of college. Another was about the possibility that Hitler was gay……It convinced me at the time that he was but I’ve reconsidered that proposition. The third was about Hitler’s circle of murderous allies a collection of sociopaths only a little scarier than Don Trump’s champions. And that leads me to the title of this post.
I skipped church Sunday so I’m not sure where that biblical passage popped into my mind recently. Its King Midas like question asks how conquering Earth will profit a man who loses his soul. It just the sort of question men like Alexander the Great, Hitler and Trump probably never worried themselves about. Trump just said he took a bullet for Democracy……OK sure but that was after he escaped a lot of bullets by claiming to have a wart on his foot. The guys who went there were losers but now Donald “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” is a great champion of our Democracy.
I’ve only waded 30 pages into the book on Eva Brawn, Hitler’s semi-hidden squeeze but last night I noted with asterisks three similarities he shared with Hitler.
1. One of his first big lies was pushing the idea called the “Dolchstoss Legend” that Jews along with communists betrayed Germany with “a stab in the back.” According to the legend they caused Germany to lose the war. Its right up there with Trump’s insistence that millions of illegal aliens had nothing better to do than illegally vote against him in his campaigns for the Presidency.
2. Allied with this was Hitler’s promise that every “non-German” who had immigrated since the start of WW I would be forced to leave the “Reich.” Trump’s going to deport ten million of them no doubt rapist all like himself.
3. He began courting a number of rich patrons who helped finance his growing movement. Trump has been aided by Petroleum billionaires, Fake News billionaires, and is lately getting help from Silicon Valley billionaires among others. Yes, the billionaires are divided here as they were in Germany but he’s got his share of people who think he can be managed just as Hitler’s financiers knew he could be managed. And after he began accumulating power with goons beating the shit out of Jews pretty soon everyone zipped their lips.
Let’s just see if, after Pete Stauber reinforced Trump’s attacks on the free press and democracy, the Duluth News Tribune endorses Trump’s loyal congressman in the primary.