AMERICAN WOMANHOOD

I’ve hung out with Lemmy and watched hundreds of hours of The History Channel, so I am under no illusion that an imperative to the panoply of Nazism lurks just below the surface of our political culture, both in the US and Europe. In some cases, it’s nothing more than a matter of dress-up. First-generation punks and, before them, the Hells Angels flaunted Nazi regalia to scare the squares. But then the skinhead faction took on the political philosophy of violence and race-hate with jackbooted glee, and swastikas were no longer a joke. They became symptoms of chaos, as their wearers pissed on any semblance of human civilization, and made themselves posturing, Wagner-lite media fodder. Swastikas are hardly a joke today as the extreme fringes of the Republican right pussyfoot around a new crop of master-racers who seem to have re-invoked their parades and costume parties as bigot commentary on the first black president of the United States, and a play by the deeply ignorant and loathsome to cast themselves as the saviors of white America in these desperate days. The idea is, of course, completely nonsensical. I’ve never met a neo-Nazi who could explain National Socialist economic policies beyond predicable anti-Semitism, and, in the long term they go away. Their membership dwindles or the hardcore attempts some dumb scam involving guns and dynamite and falls foul of the FBI. Uniformed, uninformed brown shirts, despite their furious display, hardly stand a chance in a society where true fascism wears a blue suit with a flag pin in the lapel and treats the poor as sub-humanity. What does worry me, however, is what unholy alliances, infections, and cross-fertilizations might occur during flirtations in the twilight zone between goose-step Nazi flag-wavers and the dangerously lumpen, outer-limited, far-right supporters of Palin and her ilk. That needs watching. They should not be allowed to breed.

And click here for a gratuitous clip of "Tomorrow Belongs To Me."

The secret word is Heil