Today, a prophecy fulfilled. For more than 80 years Americans could imagine no day of greater infamy. Suddenly the nation was at war by brutal invitation, a global war of unexampled death and devastation. Never, or so people believed, never will the United
States again be staggered by an evil of that magnitude.
That belief turned officially untrue at noon today. Indeed this infamy is much greater. This one, we brought upon ourselves. And while America emerged from the Second World War prouder and stronger than ever before, from this infamous affair we'll someday sneak away under cover of night more shamefaced and spiritually gutted than ever.
Comparative history calls often, most always with caveats and exceptions. Yet on rare occasion it speaks with freakish symmetries, and rarer still, it offers a doppelgänger that horrifies. History made such a call on this day of infamy, one that puts a lock on the forecast of infinite shame and spiritual desolation.
It was 92 years ago plus 10 days to the day when another demagogue of robust psychopathy created the Reich Cabinet of National Salvation. Today we heard its last two words of ironic mission repeated again and again, the selfsame thrust and overriding theme hustled insanely by a self-professed messiah whose swindle of national salvation will also end in ruins.
One other word on that 1933 cabinet, specifically Day One, the inauguration of the madman's inner circle. There we encounter history's more common dissimilarities. Of special note, no Reich Cabinet member was a gazillionaire, and only two shared The Leader's diseased ideology. The cabinet's pathologic minority was of course a temporary number, one imposed by soon-dead political constraints.
Parenthetically, to briefly swing back to that nation's twosome of freshly seated government madmen and the irony of their missionary salvation writ large, one was Hermann Göring the eventual suicide, the other, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, born, Alsenz, Bavaria, hanged, Nuremberg.
Today's inaugurated demagogue — our very own Reichpräsident severely unbalanced, racked by nearly every conceivable personality disorder and on a megalomaniacal quest of inexorable doom — will have no politically imposed, temporary number of like-crazed cabinet members. He can get right to the work of destroying America.
Wrapping up, every now and then I think it just might be a pleasant thing to be as profoundly ignorant of history as you-know-who — to be as he, for sure not a malignant only a silly-goose breed of human who knows perfectly nothing of all that came before. I can't know if bliss would ensue, nor can I simply order up such a condition. Maybe someday creeping senility will take care of that for me.
For now, though, you and I are living in and suffering history itself — the unequivocally ugliest of its kind, and it's unshakable. For now.
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