Hitler Cab Co.

America is the land of fresh starts and opportunity, right? Right?

To start with, a content warning: If you feel squeamish at the very thought of fascism, this is post is not for you. Stop now.

Not that this post is about actual fascism. It’s not. It’s about humor and taboos. For yuks, let’s try and break as many as we can.

His Holiness wears an ancient symbol of auspiciousness and good luck. See Wikipedia.

But before we jump in, I’d like to credit Barry Blitt, who coincidentally has the Nov. 18 cover of the New Yorker (discussed below). Blitt talks about this conundrum of taboo and humor in his book about his work. I think it was this one. He uses as an example how Hitler is just beyond the pale. Nobody but nobody will publish a Hitler cartoon, but still, as a cartoonist, when something pops into your head, it’s hard to shake. “Why not?” a little voice says, “Who says you can’t?” And then this happens:

Dig that Clara. Exorcist level chilling!

I’m bringing this up because the word fascism has got a lot of attention lately, which is too bad for several reasons. First, it does a disservice to history. What we are experiencing now is nothing like fascism in Germany 1930-45 when rival gangs of thugs, National Socialists and Communists, roamed the streets beating people up. Whatever nonsense America has to look forward to, there will be no death camps, no invasions and conquests of other countries, no plundering of museums. No. Not happening.

Second, it does a disservice to intelligent discourse, in which serious matters like political power are discussed thoughtfully, carefully, judiciously by people who know quite a lot about it. Just because we have a vehicle to spout off doesn’t mean we should say every goddam thing that occurs to us. Elon and Zuk have opened the floodgates but respectful dialogue starts with you and me. We are the only people who can control that.

And finally, throwing the word about willy-nilly is the worst kind of dangerous, painting as evil people you don’t know anything about, demeaning them, insulting them, objectifying them and potentially making them the target of harm. All of which is inexcusable, made 1000x worse by the fact that the word is spitting out of the mouths of people whose no. 1 virtue signal is to profess care for others.

But I digress…

Blitt isn’t the only one to talk about the impossible cartoon so I guess it’s a pretty regular thing for gag writers and drawers (gagists? gagsters?) to deal with; all comedy starts with ideas, good, bad and ugly. You don’t know what’s funny or why until you try it out, e.g.:

For sure there are topics so profoundly evil, tragic, deplorable that not one word should be spoken. We all feel that. Yet we must and we do talk about such things as the Holocaust. I learned only recently that the general term “holocaust” as describing any great calamity was not used to describe what Jews knew as the “Shoah” and some of the rest of us knew as “The Final Solution” until the 1960s and did not become widely known until the made for TV movie of that name starring Meryl Streep in 1978.

As for Hitler, this popped into my pea brain back in 2021. I’m not sure why the date is backwards or why this occurred to me at that time. After all, America had been “saved” by Biden right?

It’s funny how German war criminals were allowed to resettle after the war in places like South America, Spain, Switzerland, but also the US and Canada. Not funny haha, but funny odd because that would be the humanitarian thing to do, to maybe not forgive exactly, but to reconcile, what’s done is done. Not so funny is how here in Canada, we recently had a scandal over an invited guest to Parliament who it turned out had served in the German army. The moral outrage was incredible. But really, more incredible to me is the hypocrisy; a total reneging on the deal that was made with that person after the war. What a betrayal. I feel ashamed to call myself a Canadian.

One final note. I have a lot of respect for Barry Blitt who started this (my) whole screed. He is as accomplished as one can be. But his cover for this week’s New Yorker is, for me, a profound disappointment. Not only has the New Yorker so caved into wokeness as to be virtually unreadable now, but this? Is it so hard for the self-righteous social justice folks to show even a modicum of respect for the person who has overwhelmingly gained the confidence of a majority of their fellow Americans. As I have said before, “What is wrong with you people?”

To be honest, when I first saw this image I did not see the idea of The Donald being a Rorschach ink blot: people see in him what they will. Clever though that is, the image is, for me, just too dark, a stain. (Good likeness though.)

So no, no thank you New Yorker, I won’t be completing my order now or anytime soon.