Some people born today: the late Tito Jackson; celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse; Barry McGuire of “Eve of Destruction” fame; Linda Lavin a.k.a. Alice; neurologist Anthony Hopkins (not the Anthony Hopkins); and Richard Carpenter (Karen’s brother).

Also the ancient Roman poet Virgil, with whose work I am (cough) unfamiliar — I was an English major, not a Latin major — and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who I am tempted to describe as the Kanye of his time: a brilliant talent who’s also crazy and a little too Nazi-adjacent for comfort. It’s not necessarily Nietzsche’s fault that Hitler copped some of his ideas, and the question of how anti-Semitic he was has been debated for hundreds of years and is not likely to be solved by a morning’s Googling. But my research did turn up this blurb for a book called Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem, which I am going to take as the definitive statement on the subject for the nonce:

For more than a century, Nietzsche’s views about Jews and Judaism have been subject to countless polemics. The Nazis infamously fashioned the philosopher as their anti-Semitic precursor, while in the past thirty years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The increasingly popular view today is that Nietzsche was not only completely free of racist tendencies but also was a principled adversary of anti-Jewish thought. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem offers a definitive reappraisal of the controversy, taking the full historical, intellectual, and biographical context into account. As Robert Holub shows, a careful consideration of all the evidence from Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings and letters reveals that he harbored anti-Jewish prejudices throughout his life.

So Nietzsche remains cancelled. Sorry, Wilhelm.

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Also born today: yours truly. My birthday present to myself is going to be to go on writing at as much length as I feel like. Generally I pride myself on being respectful of your time and attention span as well as my own, but sometimes it’s fun to ramble.

And though as previously stated I hate to beg for comments, today I’m going to beg a little. I often wonder who still reads this thing. There are plenty of valid reasons not to: Output has been spotty in recent years, notification emails get lost, people have other things to do, etc. etc. But if you are out there drop me a line. (Knox and Professor Magnanimous are absolved from this.)

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Yesterday I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night when I came across the following passage. For context, the first line is spoken by Dr. Lionel J.D. Jones, DDS, DD, a nutjob white supremacist dentist, who has just been captured by the FBI.

Dr. Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. “All I’ve done,” he said majestically, “is do what you people should be doing.”

“What should we be doing?” said a G-man. He was obviously in command of the raid.

“Protecting the Republic,” said Jones. “Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let’s go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!”

“Who’s that?” said the G-man.

“I have to tell you?” said Jones. “Haven’t you found that out in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don’t have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christs and the Jews!”1For the record, this was 20 years before the Sex Pistols.

“For your information,” said the G-man in cool triumph, “I am a Jew.”

“That proves what I’ve just been saying!” said Jones.

“How’s that?” said the G-man.

“The Jews have infiltrated everything!” said Jones, smiling the smile of a logician who could never be topped.

“You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes –” said the G-man, “and yet, here your two best friends are a Catholics and a Negro.”

“What’s so mysterious about that?” said Jones.

“Don’t you hate them?”

“Certainly not,” said Jones. “We all believe the same basic thing.”

“What’s that?” said the G-man.

“This once-proud country is falling into the hands of the wrong people,” said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. “And, before it gets back on the right track,” said Jones, “some heads are going to roll.”

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. “You’re completely crazy,” he said.

Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell — keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

I won’t insult your intelligence by pointing out the relevance to our current timeline, except to say that here’s a guy who’s slipped quite a few gears while still managing to convince large numbers of people that he should be the leader of the free world:

I expect there’s quite a bit of spinning in graves today: Leonard Cohen, James Bown, Prince, Sinead O’Connor, whoever wrote “Ave Maria.” Others now living may be on the phone to their lawyers. That Fucking Guy should no longer be considered a candidate for president, but is legitimately in the running for mayor of Crazytown.

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In an opinion piece today Paul Krugman suggests that That Fucking Guy has become “unmoored in time,” which brings us right back to Vonnegut. Thinking of TFG as Billy Pilgrim would probably make him more sympathetic than he deserves, though of course every living creature is worthy of compassion on some level, especially the mentally ill. I’ll just be more inclined to extend it once he is no longer in a position to become the most powerful man on Earth.

To the Birthday spirits I say: Take this year’s wish and any more I might have coming. Just keep him out of the White House. He doesn’t even have to go to jail, though that would be nice; just give us four more years of sane, even boring, leadership. There’s still the Middle East and climate change to figure out, but we can deal with that later.

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I had no ending for this thing and I like to have an ending, though even the most faithful reader may have drifted off by now. So I put it aside and went outside with Mother Night, which is almost done with; and there was Kurt asking to be heard one more time. I’ll give him the last word, then I’m off to poke around in the wine cellar.

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting… but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on his side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

It’s that part of an imbecile… that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.

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I lied, one more thing… the above reference caused me to listen to “Eve of Destruction” for the first time in a long while. It feels apropos.