I need to clear up a little mystery here before we get into the usual weighty matters. Can anyone confirm that I was hanging with Fred Hof last night at the gig? My recollection of Tuesday's events is pretty blurry this morning. All I know is that if it wasn't Fred, then I must have been chatting about Willie Nelson with some freakish hairy stranger at two AM.
And now, watch me make a sharp left turn from the right lane, fish tailing chaotically into a larger topic.
I've done some casual research over the years into my "German heritage." The Nazi era is a key source of evidence for anyone who wants to know about humans and the way their brains work, but until recently I always treaded lightly when discussing it even in the most mundane terms. We've now entered a new time period, where talk about Nazis feels desperately relevant. I skimmed a book about Hitler's rise recently, and noted in a post some alarming psychological connections between pre-WWII Adolf and current Trump. More educated people than myself have had much to say about this; I mostly confined my remarks to a series of comments where I attempted without success to clarify my point on Facebook to a guy who was offended both on his own behalf and that of his father, who'd fought in the war. I'm not sure why having an ancestor who fought fascism would qualify you to chide people for smelling the new version in the air, but as with many outraged people, he was too angry to explain his logic, or to think about mine.
Yesterday I read an article about white supremacists harassing Jews in Montana. (Perhaps I'm too inclined to find humor everywhere, but it was grimly amusing to me that this took place in a city called Whitefish.)
Part of what I was trying to sort out was how and why the harassment began. Apparently a bunch of protestors had first harassed some supremacist's mom, and he used this as justification for sending his flying monkeys to bedevil the locally Semitic.
I'm still muddling through the back story, but out of curiosity I took a look at his online publication, the Whitefish Jew Hater/Picayune.
Okay, here's where the montage speeds up, because my organs are shutting down for a few hours. This site was notable for its poisonous hatred, but I tried to take that in stride while parsing the logic behind various things I found there. Interested readers will have to await the next installment to find out more, but here's a tidbit from my purse to tide you over.
I joked on a recent post of Keith's that I was curious about what kind of music white supremacists listen to. I was kidding, as I assumed that they did what most Americans do, which is listen to American music that's either black music or white music influenced by black music. When you eliminate those categories, there isn't much American music left.
To my shock, the site actually did have a brief aside dealing with music. I don't know whether this guy's taste is shared by his many readers, but he was waxing enthusiastic about the antiseptic German robo-pop of the 1980s. I'm no hater of the Kraftwerk/Neu sonic school, but it does somehow figure that a white supremacist would be nostalgic about the 80s, the only decade of the 20th century where even much of the black music was lame.
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