Ep. 40: "Status Butter"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How are you?
I'm good.
You sound subdued.
Hmm.
Well, it's so early.
Hmm.
We're recording on a different day than usual, and it's exactly the same time we usually record, which is 20 minutes late.
Which is 20 minutes after we agreed to meet.
Yeah, but the fact that it's a different day makes it feel really early.
Hmm.
Do you do anything differently to prepare for the show, for our recording?
Do you do any kind of stretches or have any special angle once you apply?
Hmm.
What I do to prepare for our show is I wake up earlier than I normally would.
That is the preparation that I have.
I'm so sorry.
No, no, it's perfectly fine.
I should wake up before noon.
Well, I should be a good father.
You're a great father.
You know what?
I have really mixed emotions about this.
First of all, I am sorry.
I know you are sorry.
That's your primary emotion though.
Yeah, that's a great word is poorly.
I love when people say poorly.
Poorly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They say it on Deadwood a lot.
I think it's the way people used to say – I think maybe English people still say it.
I'm poorly today.
Oh, I'm poorly.
Yeah.
Or like, you know, I'm feeling poor, you know, feeling poorly would be like the way my grandfather would say it.
Well, it's like the fashion that that swept our great nation to respond to the question.
How are you doing with well instead of good?
Remember when we were kids, if somebody said, how are you?
You said good.
Do you have a problem with that?
No, not at all.
But there was a moment in time where someone started saying to their friends in an elementary school teacher's voice, you know, properly we should say well instead of good.
So I'm confused.
What's your preference slash beef?
You like good?
I have no preference or beef.
It's just something that I am noting that the use of well, the supplantation of good with well swept our country.
Mm-hmm.
And now everywhere you go, if you say to a barista, how are you doing today?
They go, I'm well.
How are you?
Yes.
No one.
And if somebody says, if somebody says, I'm good, how are you?
Generally, most people will say, I'm well.
And it's a kind of, it's a little bit of a, like a, it's a little bit of an.
Is this because I talked about misspeaking?
It's because I talked about misspeaking.
It's like reaching, it's a grammar reach around you.
I'm well.
And then you're like, oh, ooh.
You know what's interesting, though?
It's also just hearing you say that.
Let me see.
Good.
Let me try it again.
Let's see here.
I'm well.
If you say I am well, you can't help but sound like you paused and are a little fancy.
That's right.
You paused and you were like, should I be saying I or me?
I am well.
Me am well.
Well as I am.
But, you know, it's a really good point, and I'm usually a bit of a stickler about those things.
But the thing is, it swept the country in such a way that the implication was that saying, I am good, was improper.
And, in fact, saying, I'm good, is just fine.
I think that counts as vernacular.
And I've got to say, if you're feeling upbeat, you know, I'm well sounds like I'm undiagnosed.
Ha, ha, ha.
And you say, how you doing?
You go, good.
And I think that's – man, that is efficient as shit.
That's so good.
It's so well.
I'm well.
Can I give you – I've never been to Bellingham, but can I give you a Bellingham-ese reframe on this?
I've heard an occasional – I don't know if it's a correction or just – I blocked a lot of it out.
But sometimes people will say, well, there's only one way to do good, which is to do –
And it's like, you know, shut up.
And that's the slap engendering way of correcting people.
Is that a little bit Bellingham-ese, you think?
There is no one in Bellingham for the last seven years that has ever said they were good.
They all are well.
Unless they worked at the magazine.
Is there a magazine called Good?
I'm sure there is.
And I'm sure it features locally artisanally crafted food stuff.
It's beautifully designed.
Of course, I'm pretty sure Al Gore is involved.
Good.
The design, like the magazine itself, is extremely pleased with itself.
Yeah.
Well, and I think personally, I feel like...
If you have completely replaced describing yourself as doing good with describing yourself as doing well, if you have completely replaced it, I mean, I use the two interchangeably.
But if you can never, ever say to somebody that you're doing good, then you're a little pleased with yourself.
Like, people need to reintroduce that sometimes, you know what, the correct answer is that you're doing good.
And if you can't do that, if you're so convinced that well is the only proper response, then you're a little precious and you need to check yourself.
You know what?
I'd like to see the return of feeling fine.
Like that, which is a little bit – like certainly on the pie graph, 30 percent is going to – that's going to be tower snipers and white van people.
But I think that's kind of –
If somebody says, how are you doing, and you say, feeling fine, and a cartoon rainbow doesn't come from behind you, and little cartoon birds are suddenly singing around your head, then you're not taking enough LSD.
Let me ask you a question.
Give me three other ways to make a cartoon rainbow and birds appear without saying feeling fine.
It's an incantation of joy.
It is.
It really is.
Although, if your name is Uncle Remus...
Boy, that's a dirty name.
You can conjure rainbows and birds at any time.
You know what?
I don't even mind the ping pong.
That just sounds like a porn name.
Remus?
Yes.
I never thought of it that way.
Oh, Uncle Remus.
I want to come back to my second reason.
Uncle Remus and Uncle Licky are driving around.
I want to come back to my second reason that I'm discussing why I feel bad about getting up early, but a couple quick ones.
These are two that I'm a little bit pedantic about just with me.
Just with myself.
One that drives me a little bit crazy, just to get it out of the way, is people using and I in the object of a sentence.
Give me an example.
Jim came to the abattoir with Lucille and I. Because people think they're Mrs. Howell.
Oh, that's terrible.
And they were corrected so many times.
I think for some reason, as kids, you think of yourself as me.
This is me.
This is for me.
Because you are the object of everything in the world.
And then someone hit you on the knuckles with a ruler for five years.
Right.
Saying, it's not me, it's I. Right.
And now you do it without understanding why.
You do it without understanding the grammar and you use and I in situations where... I don't make it Japanese, excuse me, German.
But now I think you're thinking more about corporal punishment than you are about communicating clearly.
Right.
Or you're thinking more about now that you have been improperly schooled.
Now your job in the world is to go improperly school.
And now we're back in England where the spanking is contagious.
How can you have...
You're pudding when you don't eat your meat.
You know?
You know where that all started.
You know that started with, you are absolutely right.
No.
Absolutely.
And you know that started with him spitting on a fan.
Spitting on a fan of the band or spitting on an electric fan?
This is a reason that I would like Roger Waters and Mike Love to be in a super band together because it would save me.
Wait a minute.
Are you conflating the great Roger Waters with Mike Love?
No, no, no.
I'm not conflating them.
I'm just saying that they should both never stop being hit by somebody.
Mike Love really is.
Oh, you know what?
We should come up with a new game.
You can rig up an electric fan that has like rubber gloves at the end of popsicle sticks.
And it just, this fan spins and the rubber.
Oh my God.
1132 on this day.
I want to keep it timeless.
This is the day that I figured out my first fucking Kickstarter.
I will give a nickel to, and that is the Mike Love slapping fan.
Mike loves slapping fan.
Take off that hat.
You've been bald since surfing USA.
Take that thing off.
Okay, okay.
Shoot, I'm getting deep in the stack.
Okay, so first of all, and I also want to provide our listeners, John, I'll never be as helpful as you, but perhaps you can share with me whether you think this is as useful as I have found it.
So first of all, only say I if it's in the subject of the sentence.
I do things.
Things are done to me.
Object, object.
Here's the really simple way.
I don't want to be banantic.
I want to be helpful.
But here's the thing.
Take off the – what was it?
Stephanie?
What was the name?
And I?
I forget who.
Lucille.
So you say Jim came to the abattoir with Lucille and I. Take off Lucille and – and how would you say it?
Would you say Jim came to the abattoir with I?
Yes.
No, you would not.
Doesn't that seem helpful?
Well, here's what's confusing because you would say Lucille and I went to the store.
And so people become accustomed to thinking that that's… Anytime there's two.
Sure.
And that little clause or that phrase then is mobile and you can use it as a subject or an object.
I bet you the Inuit don't have any problem with this.
Is it Inuit or Eskimos?
One's a language and one is dog sledding people?
No, there are Inuits and Eskimos.
God, this is complicated.
People are all the time saying to me... Correcting you?
No, they don't correct me, but they're like, so what about those Aleuts up in Eskimo country?
And I'm like, you're getting it wrong.
There are Aleuts?
Is that how you say it?
Is it Aleut?
Like Aleut?
That's right.
Inuits and Eskimos and Athabascans, which are Indians, not an Eskimo people, not a seafaring people, the Athabascans.
But you wouldn't call those Indians Native Americans.
You would.
In fact, you would call the Athabascans.
Well, you know what?
I don't call anyone Native Americans because I think it's a dumb phrase.
It's a dumb phrase.
Remember that show we couldn't put up because of me going off on African American?
You remember that?
You were just going off on everybody.
It was great.
It was really wonderful.
And maybe one day when the world has evolved to a place where people have enough understanding that they can appreciate that you don't like other races in your country, we can play that episode.
But anyway, Athabascans are related to...
Like the Shoshone, I mean, they're related to the Indians that live in the continental United States, whereas the Inuits and the Aleuts are more what you would call... In fact, I think they are closer genetically to the Southeast Pacific Island people.
They are seafaring people from the coasts who arrived in boats.
A kind of Pangeic evolution.
Yeah.
I can't keep up with you.
It's a little bit after Pangaea, but Landbridge, what you're thinking of is Landbridge.
That's when they walked from the former Soviet Union to Anchorage.
Correct.
Okay.
Correct.
They were Soviets.
Can I give you my third one?
Yeah.
This one is a personal mission, and this is more of something that I would like to try and advocate for, or as the grammarians would say, that I'd like to advocate for which...
Yeah, you would for which like to advocate.
Okay, John, thank you.
Yes.
What do you say?
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you for saying, you know what, thank you for saying, thank you for saying you're welcome.
I've realized I'm becoming troubled by no problem.
No problem.
Think about it.
Thank you.
No problem.
Well, you know what, you know where I think that's coming from?
It's coming from the ubiquitous denata question.
Oh, you find that ubiquitous.
Well, it is no longer ubiquitous, but there was a time there in the 80s and early 90s when the kind of Jimmy Buffettization of the Southwest was happening, and everybody was wearing puka shells, and there was a lot of denata happening.
Denata, hey!
Hey, Cheech, denata!
I think it's got a little bit Spicoli to it, too.
There's some Spicoli to it.
And I think it just – that has passed.
That dark cloud has passed in America.
But I think one of the residuals of it is that people say no problem now when what they mean is you're welcome.
And the two that may be worse than that, one – waitstaff, not a problem.
Yeah.
What the fuck does that mean?
Thank you.
Not a problem.
What –
Yeah, well, my belief in that is that the waitstaff in America, at least, have been trained by one another, by no outside force, but they have trained one another to think that they are an oppressed class of artists and poets who have been forced into waiting, who have been forced into servitude by an unjust system.
Yeah.
So every time you say, hey, thanks for that glass of water that I asked for 11 minutes ago, and they say, not a problem, what they're trying to say to you is, I shouldn't be waiting tables.
I should be on the big stage.
Oh, that's good.
I should be one of Madonna's dancers.
And it's like, no, you shouldn't.
You should have brought me this glass of water four minutes ago right after I asked for it.
Oh, boy.
That's a big card.
And then the final one I just want to leave off.
This is seriously punchable beach bar or taqueria or barista shit.
It's all good.
It's all good.
I really don't like it's all good in any form or fashion, but especially – and now – so anyway, now let me ask you this.
Here's the big one, and this is the one I struggle with.
This is the one I struggle with.
No, it's all good.
You know what?
Hey, shocker bra.
Date rape.
Pook a shell.
Oh, date rape.
You got to throw that in.
Whenever someone says thank you, just merely say date rape.
Now, that's the Jimmy Buffy way to do it.
There it's in date rape.
Okay.
And then now here's the final.
God, this is tedious.
I'm going to cut all this out.
And this is the one where I suffer because here's my feeling.
My feeling is that when someone says thank you, you should respond by saying you're welcome.
And you know what my biggest offender is?
And if you don't mind, would you please say thank you?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, right.
That's very Bellingham.
Well, and it's very waitstaffy.
You know what I mean?
But I don't mind that one so much, but I think I can do – you know what?
I think I'm capable of better, and I think that we as a culture are better.
Most of us have been on waitstaff, John.
I think what we're saying here is we're not simply teaching each other as waitstaff to be passive-aggressive because we're not on Broadway, so to speak.
But I think we're also developing a kind of cultural inbreeding where there's nobody that's intervening to say, you know what?
It's okay to be a professional waiter.
No, I did not say server.
I did not say waitron.
That gentleman who brought us the steaks at that place, do you remember?
He brought us fruit on a plate with giant knives.
He did.
He was a middle-aged man.
He was older than we were, and he had dignity, and he had grace.
How many times, well, you know what, we should take you out of the equation.
But I think it's more, I think the epidemic is worse in the sense that no one in America now, and when I say no one in America, I mean none of the shitty, over-educated West Coast people that we know, and the shitty, over-educated East Coast people who have been imitating shitty, over-educated West Coast people for 20 years.
None of these people can accept a thank you.
It's not just a problem of all of the many different problems we've elucidated so far.
It is that
what they have convinced themselves that to be thanked in that way is in itself a kind of classism or it's they they don't want to be put that i think this is behind your like thank you you absolutely become uncomfortable even in even being put in a position of power so great as to be thanked for something that you did no i i am unworthy and i reject your colonialism
Right.
Which is why when people say thank you to me, sometimes I will respond with, it was my pleasure.
Oh, no, I think that's lovely.
Or you know what else?
I like the pleasure was all mine.
The pleasure was all mine.
Or just simply my pleasure.
And if I really believe it and if I honestly feel this way and I thought it was a great opportunity, I'll say it was an honor to do.
Exactly.
And those are things, what that does is it honors the person's gratitude and
And, and, and it honors it by accepting that you have done something for them instead of saying, no, no, no, no, I, I am, I am unworthy of your gratitude.
I mean, that is, you think that's both, that's both.
It's a bookended nation.
You think both coasts are contributing to this.
Do you think this is part of our evolving leftist culture?
He said, wishing he already wishing he hadn't said it.
Yes, I do.
And I think the people in the center of America, I think those corn fed truck driving center Americans, if you say thank you to them, they go, you're welcome.
My pleasure.
Anything else I can do to help?
I like that.
You know what?
I got to tell you, I like civility with strangers.
I don't like over-familiarness.
I'm on record for this, but I love civility amongst strangers.
I know.
It's so nice.
It's the oil that keeps it all running.
To your point, I'm going to take a slightly different point of view on this, but here's the problem, is that I think the same fucking reason that people don't use turn signals, these people should not be allowed to drive if they don't use turn signals.
Turn signals do not make you weak.
Well, maybe in your case, because you're clearly doing some secret work that we probably can't get into.
Well, you don't want to turn your turn signal on if you feel like you're being followed.
No, no, no.
Unless it's a distraction or a diversionary.
But if you never turn it on, that's a rookie mistake.
Sometimes you can turn it the wrong way, be in the wrong lane, and know when to get over.
I got into this situation the other day.
I came to an intersection where no one ever uses their turn signal.
Because it's an intersection where the arterial route...
makes a free left, right?
Nobody goes straight there because it's a dead end.
So it's an arterial, but it's a turn, a left-hand turn.
And I'm coming to this intersection.
I'm at this intersection every day.
No one ever uses their turn signal.
So I arrive here, and there is a taxi coming at a right angle to me.
And I just...
assumed he was going to make the left and pulled out in front of him.
And he was a taxi that didn't know the neighborhood that was looking for an address down that dead-end road.
And he was from Eritrea.
And he made some Eritrean gesture with his hands and his forehead and his hair where he was just like...
what is wrong with your brain and he he like he pulled he put his both hands in his hair and pulled his hair straight up in the air like your brain is is like in your hair i think was what i think that was may your sorghum be consumed by rats and i was so like amazed by the gesture like my brain is in my hair that
That it took me a second before I realized like, oh, I completely created a traffic accident there by assuming that nobody's ever going to use their turn signal here.
And I was in the wrong and I put my foot on the brake and I did a little bow to him and I was like, I beg your forgiveness.
Oh, God bless you, John.
My brain is in my hair.
Do you think you'll pick up that gesture?
Well, what was amazing was it required that he put his foot on the brake and take both hands off the steering wheel and give himself a fright, like an eraser head.
Oh, so I'm trying to do it with my own two hands.
Is it like a frustrated, make a eraser head hair like you're frustrated?
Yeah.
Yeah, it happened so fast, like, his hands went up to his forehead, like, OMG, and then zip right up through his hair, so his hair was standing straight up, and then he ended, like, his dismount was that his hands on both sides of his head were up in the air, like, what is wrong with you?
Oh, so it was an OMG to a WTF.
An OMG to a WTF with in the middle and an eraser head fro pick.
That's a fucking great move.
It was a great move, and it was not an American move.
It was an African move, and it was like, you, sir.
I mean, because he's probably come to an intersection before where there was a convoy of Toyota trucks with .50 caliber machine guns mounted in the back, and he probably made that same gesture, and they were like...
We spare you.
You live today.
So it worked again for him.
I just think not being civil to strangers does not make you powerful.
And it sounds silly to have to say that, but I think a lot of people think that if you're a dick to the waitress, that gives you a little bit of power.
And I'm not talking about whether good or bad service.
I'm just saying being a dick is just to be a dick.
This is the problem of Bellinghamming, Merlin, which is that people think that when you say thank you and they go, thank you, or they say no, that they're actually being civil when in fact they're being cunts.
That's – well, that's good.
And it really is true.
It goes for lots of things.
Now, the other one – and this is really probably going too far now – the compliments.
Sometimes someone will pay me a compliment and because of my horrible combination of arrogance and zero self-esteem, I will start –
not precisely rejecting it, but I end up fishing for more compliments because now I'm describing why I'm unworthy of that.
And that's something I'm trying really hard to stop doing.
And you know what I'm trying to say?
I think I might've learned this from, I forget who I learned this from.
I want to say Colton, but like you just say, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And then they say, no problem.
And I fucking hit him in the balls.
Well, in those situations, this is what I learned from my brother, Bart.
In those situations where someone is complimenting you for something for a performance that you just did or something that you, that your instinct is to say, you know what, actually, like people come up to me right after a show and they're like, that was amazing.
And for years, my response to that was, actually, it was a shit storm.
And the fact that you liked it means that you don't have any taste.
Yeah.
Because my feeling when I walk off a stage is generally like, I'm running down all the ways that I fucked up.
You think Rihanna does that?
I don't think she does.
And I would come off the stage and people would crowd around and be like, that was the greatest show ever.
And I'd be like, actually, it was in the bottom 2% of all shows ever performed by a human being.
And what would happen is these people would be like, crestfallen.
Because not only did I not accept their compliment, but I abused them.
You showed them the Matrix.
You made them realize, you know what, that actually wasn't that good.
And then an hour later, after I processed, after I've been through my whole process, I realized like, oh, now that show was pretty good.
Why did I just abuse all those people?
And my brother Bart was standing around after a show.
This is years ago.
I haven't done this since my 20s.
But he was standing around after a show and he heard me do that like...
say to somebody like, um, no, actually that was a, that was a, it was basically a puddle of vomit, but I'm glad you came, paid your ticket.
By a shirt asshole.
And Bart walked up to me and he said, John, don't take the pleasure of the show away from people.
If you can't accept their compliment, just say, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
And I was like, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
And I walked around for a week or two practicing that.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
And that accepts them.
That's a little bit big city.
But you know what I mean?
It is a way of getting, if you cannot in that moment accept the compliment.
Oh, I see.
That's your fallback.
You can at least say, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Try saying it again with just a tiny bit more stress on you.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
And now it's a different sentence.
It really is.
But I mean, if you can just make your face into a mask and say, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
It gets you through that first hour after a show where I want you to die because you came to my show.
I want my audience to die.
I want them to choke on their enjoyment of my show.
I can't believe you people saw that whole thing and didn't leave.
Exactly.
I might be on a slow Prius ride to Bellingham with this one.
But I think where it's possible, and this is a little bit of civility, and this may be getting a little too far, but I think if it's at all possible to repay a kindness with another kindness, then that's not bad.
So in that situation, I think another one might be, hey, thanks, and thanks for coming to the show.
Yeah, but that's not my style.
No.
That feels a little bit like a pat on the ass.
Hey, thanks.
I think it goes beyond the improv thing.
I think when we're in conversations with people, I think we should always try and do more than 50 percent, not of the talking necessarily, but of the propelling the conversation.
Of the heavy lifting.
Yeah.
I mean it's like any kind of communication, any kind of a job, any kind of thing you do, if you want it to be good, you should be – however many end people are involved, you should be dedicated to doing much more than one-enth of the work, whether that's putting on a party or whatever.
Although, when somebody... I've seen this happen with you.
When somebody says something that sticks in your craw, you roll up the drawbridge.
What do you mean?
My craw doesn't get stuck very often.
But sometimes, somebody will say something where you're like, oh, really?
And then you go into that mode of like...
100% of the conversation is on you now.
Oh, no, no, John.
I'm going to watch you squirm on the end of the line.
You may be Batman, but I am very good at being Robin.
I can do my own.
If somebody needs to be corrected, I just want to make it clear to our listeners, John helps way more people than me, but I have helped the fuck out of a lot of people who needed it.
I believe it.
Often by showing them a slightly lower peg that they might be more comfortable with.
Yeah.
Often by stripping away the nice cities.
Welcome to our frat party.
I think you – have you met Ahmed?
No, I understand.
You have to understand that I like civility.
I like people being nice to each other.
And I can even put up with a certain amount of bullshit.
Yes, I know you can.
But I will not be trifled with.
When it comes to certain matters, I will not be trifled with.
This usually happens when somebody thinks – I've seen this happen.
A young man – You're talking about in the hotel lobby.
A young man who feels that he is at your level, and he hears you jesting, and he wants to be a part of it, and he thinks the way in is to insult you comedically as a kind of like, I'm here, I'm here too.
You get two freebies.
Two freebies, no problem.
Right.
And then the third one.
Well, the third one, you only get two gloves, buddy.
When those are gone, you better put up those skinny little Ivy League-educated fists of yours.
Yeah.
No, no.
You know what it is, though?
It really is something where I feel like I've learned a lot from you.
I've learned that some things not only should not but must not be suffered.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
I do know what you mean, exactly what you mean.
And I think this is the problem with the society of ours is that it's okay.
It's okay to do certain kinds of passive-aggressive things and then like I'm supposed to sit there and go, oh, that's normal.
When clearly you're trying to telegraph something completely different that in like this – in this secret language of yours that I'm supposed – or me or whomever is supposed to go like, oh, yeah, that's cool, man.
Yeah.
And that will not stand.
It should not stand.
And this is why we owe this.
Can I just say we owe this to young people?
The young people are such a fucking mess today, John.
They really are.
And I mean my sense is that they would be less of a mess if people would help them.
Well, the thing about you and I, Merlin – No problem.
It's all good.
Date rape.
The thing about you and I –
Let that not be the meme for this show.
Stop it now.
It's never going to happen.
It's never going to be in a shirt.
I don't want to see it on Twitter.
They're making fan art right now.
There's a fan with some rubber gloves and a slapping Mike Love who's saying... Here's your latte and your scone.
Thank you.
Date rape.
is that we are willing in a hotel lobby or somewhere else, in public, in a casual encounter, let's say, in a casual encounter even with a stranger, we are willing to talk about what's behind the curtain.
We are willing to talk about real things in short-term encounters, right?
A lot of people keep their short-term encounters so greased with...
with seven layers of hot butter just because they want to get out of there.
A lot of it's status butter.
There's a lot of status butter.
They want to get out of there with their dignity intact or what little dignity they have intact.
And they're not ever willing to, certainly not willing to engage a stranger in a discussion about what
What's behind the curtain?
And so that's where you get all this.
That's where there's just tracks of hot butter everywhere we go in the city because people are just slathered with like what they consider to be social lubricant.
And what it means is that no one is saying anything and they're just trying to get home so that they can masturbate in front of the TV.
God bless you.
But that's misplaced butter.
It's a lot of wasted butter.
And you and I will... And I've seen you do it a million times, and I do it also every day.
We will stop...
We will stop what we are doing in the middle of a casual encounter and we will say something about what is really happening in that moment.
And you smell the asbestos burning as these people try and change gears.
And you see the looks of like electroshock on their face.
Because they just slid their own status butter.
Because their butter is useless in this instance.
You're literally hitting them with their own butter.
Their butter has encountered a spinning saw blade.
And you and I aren't trying to do anything except say what's happening.
Like, okay, you're here.
I'm here.
Here's what's happening.
Well, yeah, but there's like two important parts to that apart from the societal assistance, which is that, you know, you're – yes, there is something else going on here and you're not winning at this.
And now we're still, friend, you are about to clearly in front of lots of people lose at this.
Because I used to do that, kid.
I used to do exactly what you're trying to do right now.
I used to be better at it.
But now I'm really good at showing people what they're doing.
Did you ever see – I think I've mentioned this to you before.
But I think one of my all-time favorite movie scenes is in the Jose Ferrer version of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Are you familiar with the movie at all?
I'm familiar with the book.
Okay.
Well, and there's a wonderful scene in the movie.
Jose Ferrer is just fantastic in this movie.
There's a great scene at the, I think toward the very, very beginning.
Yeah.
This is where Steve Martin meets Holly Hunter.
It's in that movie too.
Steve Martin is flying like he's a pilot that puts out forest fires and he crashes.
Yeah.
Sleepless in Seattle.
And then he's like, he's a ghost, but... But then he has that one volleyball.
Patrick Swayze is there.
And he put a volleyball face on it, put a bird on it.
I didn't really watch a lot of movies in the 80s, but go ahead about your Cyranova.
This is from, I think, the early 50s.
It's black and white.
And I think Jose Ferrer had been in the play.
It's French, right?
But, you know, so basically, well, no, it's a Hollywood movie.
But it's... So anyhow, the point of the story... It's a Hollywood movie starring someone named Jose?
Hmm.
Jose Ferrer.
You know Jose Ferrer.
Is he like riding a donkey and wearing a sombrero?
I think you're thinking of Man of La Mancha.
Man of La Mancha.
You know, I've actually been to La Mancha.
There's really not much going on there.
Anyway, Cyrano's in a theater.
Okay, I'm listening.
This is like the third time this happens, and I'm literally so angry.
No, so Cyrano's in a theater.
He's very displeased with the performance.
He basically stops the performance and makes fun of this guy, and it's very funny.
And so this one – and, of course, Cyrano has a rather prominent nose.
He's a smart guy, Cyrano.
He's very smart, and he's the best swordsman in France.
And from across the room, this dandy says that, oh, this man here, he's very arrogant.
He doesn't have any ribbons and da-da-da-da-da.
And so he walks – this guy walks over to Cyrano and he says, your nose is rather large.
And Cyrano turns to him and goes, my nose is rather large.
And long story short, Cyrano says – basically says, well – long story short, I'm about to kick your ass.
You're so happy.
I'm going to compose a ballad while I kick your ass about all the ways you could have insulted me better.
Yeah.
And he says, give me a moment to get my rhymes.
And then he kicks the guy's ass and shows him all the different ways he could have done it better.
And I rarely think about the scene from that movie until the asbestos starts burning and the butter starts melting.
Yeah.
And anyway, you know, I think we all need to help.
That was a great recap of that scene.
If I made fan art, I would make some fan art about that story.
Do you remember when Steve Martin would have the arrow through his head?
That was funny.
That was funny.
Oh, man.
He's as good as the Beatles.
The Beatles are good.
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Hey, wait a minute.
We should have been talking about Hitler this whole time.
I didn't want to say anything, but there's so many topics.
See, the thing – I don't want to go into Insight Baseball here, but I couldn't decide.
You know what?
This could be a work session for us maybe.
This is a chance to just toss some ideas around.
Okay.
All right.
Now, would you think this should really be its own separate property?
Would this be a regular feature?
For our listeners who haven't been with us, please go back and listen to the previous 30-something episodes.
Yeah.
What are you doing?
Why are you listening to this episode?
To start at the beginning.
That's like coming in at the end of a movie.
You can't possibly understand what we're talking about.
Yeah.
Unless you go back to the original episode where you didn't understand what we were talking about and listen to 39 episodes where it's not really clear what we're talking about.
Absolutely.
And the shame of it is you come in, you hear a little bit talk about Hitler and a punchline that goes date rape.
And that's going to sound really insensitive.
Uncle Remus jokes.
Oh, my God.
That sounds so racist until you go back.
Well, I made a joke about racism the other day, yesterday.
And the people that were the butt of the joke didn't appreciate being called racists in jest.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And I was like, hey, calling you racists is funny.
And they were like, we don't see how that's funny.
I was like, oh, well, you're not very evolved.
What?
It's typical for your type.
It really is.
For your type of people, that's right.
A lot of them are very clean.
I feel like... Well, see, my instinct is that we should have a completely separate podcast that we do once a week where all we talk about is Hitler.
But you're feeling like...
You're feeling like if we have a whole separate podcast, that that's going to split our listenership and all the people that just want to hear about Hitler are going to listen to that and they're going to stop listening to our main podcast where we help people.
Possibly.
That is certainly one angle.
It's what we in business development call cannibalization.
And I feel like I want to grow the property more.
Grow the property.
Thank you.
No, I think it could be perfectly good.
I got to tell you, something just went through my head.
Theme music with tubas.
Oh, that's nice.
You know what we could do?
Normally, when you call and you say, or I say hello, and you say, hi, John, and then I go, hi, Merlin.
Oh, no, don't say it.
Please don't say it.
Please don't say it.
What if I said, Sieg Heil, Merlin?
What is Sieg?
What does that mean?
Sieg Sputnik.
Love Missile F-111.
What is Sieg?
That's a good question.
Sieg means... There comes the keyboard.
It means...
Well, it's a river.
It's a river in North Rhine, Westphalia.
Let's see.
Okay.
I think I misspelled it.
Translate from German.
S-I-E-G.
Oh, see.
I did the classic inversion.
You did the S-E-I-T.
Except when you're invading Poland.
Yeah.
Victorious healing?
That doesn't sound right.
S-I-E-G.
You know, they've got those laws.
They've got a lot of laws in Germany about talking about Hitler.
You can't say Sieg Heil.
There's all kinds of stuff you can't do.
Now, I know at the far end of the continuum, you're not allowed to wear swastikas.
I don't think you're allowed to sell swastikas.
You're probably not allowed to collect swastikas.
You're not allowed to have a website that talks about collecting swastikas.
I think that feels a little bit like a red herring.
Well, it is.
It's the old thing, and this happens in America all the time, which is the assumption that racists and bigots are as hung up on language and words as liberal intellectuals.
So liberal intellectuals think that if they can erase the word, they will erase the bigotry.
But bigots and racists really aren't, they don't care about words so much.
Bigots and racists, if you say, you can no longer say the word nigger.
Bigots will, they will happily say the word urban instead.
They will raise their eyebrows and smirk and they'll say, it's an urban problem.
And also, don't imagine for a minute that they're not mentally transliterating that with a different word.
Oh, absolutely.
And they know that all their friends know exactly what they're saying, but they have politified it so that it's now socially acceptable, and they can say the exact same racist crap trap, you know, clap, clap-a-lap, blab-a-lap.
They can say the exact same stuff on television, and it's acceptable now.
It is just as racist at its core...
But they've changed the word.
And the liberals pat themselves on the back and say, well, we're making a real difference here.
And there is nothing more liberal than modern Germany.
There really isn't.
Especially in terms of what you get, like big vacation time and there's all kinds of ways.
I'm sorry, do you mean strictly in politics but also in policy about things like economics, right?
Yeah.
I mean mentally, intellectually, Germany is a modern liberal democracy, and they do all this type of overthinking of stuff, but nationalism has not gone away.
Isn't it like exploding in Greece right now?
It's exploding all over Europe because nationalism is what happens when stupid people don't understand what's happening anymore.
Nationalism is the result of it.
When people that don't read books feel like people that are reading books are stepping on their necks, you get nationalism.
Also with farmers.
Well, yeah, and immigrants.
Now, you've been to Germany more than once, right?
I have been to Germany 100 million times.
I'm curious about how that works in practice because I had a rebound girlfriend who was German.
She's very young.
Young Germans.
She's 20 and 6 feet tall.
Yeah, they feel very strongly about things, young Germans do.
They will sit in their bars and they will spill beer on you and tell you all the reasons that America is stupid.
Well, here's the thing.
Now, she was from very far east.
She was from a place called Passau, which was like right – it was like in Stripes, I think, when they rolled the tanks, when they ride the tank.
I think that was probably – right?
I mean it was basically Czechoslovakia more than it was Germany.
But she was too young to remember before the war.
Well, here's the thing.
I mean – I mean before the wall.
No, no.
I mean she'd been alive for that.
This was like over a decade ago.
Oh, I see.
This is back in the day.
I've been with the same lady for 13 years.
But the thing about this was though is that I don't think I went super crazy with the Hitler stuff.
But when you're a provocative man in his 30s with a 20-year-old German girl, Hitler is going to come up.
Of course.
And she'd cry.
Yeah.
Oh, she, she would cry.
So two things about her.
She refused to tip for anything because she was German and she was super duper sensitive about even getting anywhere near world war two in general.
You know what I mean?
It's like, it really is like that faulty towers thing, you know, don't mention the war.
It was, it was absolutely like that.
And she would, she would burst into tears and, and talk about like, you know, people not understanding, like what a sensitive issue that was.
And I'm not, obviously, and her saying specifically, I wasn't there.
It's not my fault, which I get.
Yeah.
Right.
But, you know, still.
It's very embarrassing, but, you know.
Is it like, I guess what I'm asking you is, was that your impression when you were there?
You don't just walk around and ask questions like, you know, was your grandpa in the SS or something like that?
Sure you do.
You do or lots of people do?
I don't know if it's part of other people's tourist experience, or I'm not sure if one of those tour buses pulls up into the square and the guide stands at the front of the bus and says, okay, everybody, we're here in Passau.
Now, as you walk around, make sure you ask if anybody's uncle was in the SS.
This strudel isn't great.
Is it true that the gay Jews had to wear two triangles?
Pink, yellow.
One was pink and yellow?
Yeah.
Now, the black ones were troublemakers?
Is that right?
Yeah.
I love talking about World War II and Hitler.
Do you know about the patches?
Do you know about all those?
You didn't get a bar if you're a troublemaker?
Did you know that?
Of course.
Of course I knew that.
Sorry.
Please continue.
Talking to modern Germans about World War II and Hitler is a fascinating exercise because everybody there has a different feeling about it and everybody has a different family history.
And it is a nation that, at least for the last 50 years, has been processing that experience every day.
Every person in that country is processing that experience every day.
Even the ones who are like, it's not my fault, I don't want to think about it.
They are processing it.
And each interaction that happens in Germany between two Germans, it's there in the room with them.
Are you kidding?
Not at all.
So it's a... At least once a day, it goes through somebody's mind.
Absolutely.
Wow, that's a lot to walk around with.
When you bring it up with people there, you are acknowledging the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
And a lot of people are relieved...
Because it relieves the pressure to be able to talk about it.
And, you know, of course, everyone has a different experience of it.
And there are young people who feel like that everyone in Germany is complicit in it.
And there are a lot of people, the prevailing wisdom is that, you know, we have atoned.
And it's very complicated.
Yeah.
You know, after the war, I mean, I walked across Germany, right?
Of course.
I spent two months walking through fields and going under little stone bridges and back in their deep forests.
And everywhere I was, I was looking for...
that one swastika that someone had not chipped off of a bridge abutment.
Because when the Nazis were building things, they built a lot of things and they put swastikas all over everything.
And after the war, they have gone through every inch of that country and chipped every little swastika off of every little concrete culvert so that they have erased it completely.
There is no... You will not find...
a little swastika in the corner somewhere.
Do you think there were any masons that had to undo their own work?
Interesting.
Or like seventh level mages?
But I wonder, I mean, you're right.
It was like FDR to the hundredth level.
There was a lot of work to be done and a lot of bridges and a lot of fountains and statues.
But the same people who put those on probably had to take it off.
Well, I don't know.
A lot of the people that put them on probably are dead or were dead after the war.
They were pretty low.
They were low on dudes, let's say, at the end of that war.
Low on marriageable men.
But every attic in every home in the country has a picture of great-grandfather in his Wehrmacht outfit at the very least.
And I did find one time...
Stop me if I've told you this story before.
I was up in the mountains in a little town called... Well, it's not a little town.
It's actually a pretty big town.
Garmisch Partenkirchen.
This is not the Hunting Tuba Festival.
This is not the Hunting Tuba Festival.
This is down in Bavaria.
I was up in the mountains.
There are hikers, the Germans, and particularly in the Alps.
I'm hiking around.
It's in the Alps.
And I find a little chapel.
And it's not a chapel where religious services are.
The Germans have all these little chapels in the forest because, in fact, they never fully abandoned paganism.
Like, the Germans have adopted Christianity, and it was one of the hotbeds of Christianity in the early years.
But really, they are still a pagan people, and they go out into the forest, and they worship berries, and they worship squirrels, and they worship leaves and dirt, and they cover themselves with...
pear juice and have sex in chapels i have no idea how much of this to believe so they have little chapels everywhere you go you're walking out in the forest and you're like no one has ever been here i'm deep in the forest like a druid kind of thing yes there will be little and they're they're christian right there's a jesus in them there's a there's a cross and there's a jesus but the jesus is draped in pine boughs
That someone has recently cut, some forest hunter has come and draped the Jesus with pine boughs and made flower garlands that they drape around the Jesus in a very, very pagan kind of naturalistic offering to the forest Christ.
It's a very strange thing out there in the woods of Germany, let me tell you.
But I found one of these forest chapels up on the side of the mountain, and on the back wall of it...
There were pictures of all of the men from the neighboring town that had been killed in the war.
And they were all in their uniforms.
And there were Gestapo guys up there.
And there were SS guys up there.
And there were just a lot of Wehrmacht normal guys.
But all these pictures on the back of this chapel that you wouldn't have been able to see unless you went around and kind of pushed your way through the woods or whatever.
Here was this shrine to the men of the town, and there were flowers draped all over these photographs, and it was obviously tended by people from the village.
That was the only instance that I ever saw of like a public acknowledgement.
And by public, I mean perched on the side of a cliff somewhere, but still outside of someone's home.
This kind of this temple or or or mausoleum to these guys, these Nazi guys.
And like you were saying, for some reason I'm thinking about Slaughterhouse-Five and Billy Pilgrim was getting picked up at the end of the war.
And one of the guys – I guess it's like, what, 44?
Yeah, I guess 44, 45.
But anyway, one of the guys –
One of the guys is a very old man in the mopping up party, and the other one is like a 14 or 15-year-old kid or something.
I mean, it got that bad, right, after 44.
There was no one between the ages of like 16 and 50.
No one left.
That's astounding.
And so, you know, I mean, like, boy, this is where we really need a separate show for this.
But I mean, you know, per capita, their losses were greater than ours in terms of
losses in in combat you know one of the funny things about the story of world war ii that that it's it never gets told is that after the war of course there were germans before the war there were germans living all through what we think of as poland czech republic slovakia hungary romania there were massive german populations uh
In all of Eastern Europe that were historical populations that had, some of them had been living, some of those areas were historically German for 900 years.
Like Germans had been living there as the resident population, surrounded by Slavs.
But it was a German part of Poland.
Or it wasn't called Poland then.
It was, you know, Prussia.
Or the Germans colonized all of Eastern Europe.
And after the war, all those countries, those, you know, newly reconstituted countries, they wanted the Germans out.
And it didn't matter if those German families had been living in that part of Hungary for 900 years.
They wanted the Germans out.
And so there was a massive...
exodus forced exodus of germans from all of eastern europe where they were marched back to germany a place where they had never lived you're talking you're not i'm sorry to interrupt you but you're you're not talking about the people who are quietly relieved that that germany was going to make their place more germanified you're talking about like a forced like uh what a stalin style like relocation like you've got to go back you're being forced you're repatriated to the back of germany
repatriated back to germany a place where you have never lived i totally never knew that grandparents never lived yeah you've been living in hungary albeit speaking german but living in hungary for you know your family has been here since that is really ambitious 1500 and you are out now you are gone and they marched what ended up being like a million people
uh villagers basically like marched them back to germany and they all arrived in germany which was a completely bombed out resourceless smoking hole of of like war rubble and then all of a sudden all these other people showed up who had never lived a day of their lives in germany and they were like well hi okay
We're here too.
You got room at the bombed out inn for us and my six kids.
It's a thing that it's part of the World War II story that doesn't get told because all the people that got hurt in that war, like some little burgermeister from Hungary that had to walk back to Germany is like, it's pretty small potatoes considering what else was happening in 1946.
But in fact, there's like a million people being forced marched
back to a country that they've never that they never lived in it's it's one of the like untold stories what do you know about um i think we might have mentioned this before what do you know about the um what what they now call like you know the fillmore western edition japan town what do you know about the relocations in uh in san francisco yeah you know about that no uh i mean and i this is something i should probably bone up on for the
Oh, sure.
And, you know, Japantown and but but also, you know, moving into what has become to call, you know, the Western edition, which is really kind of the Western most part, as this name implies, of San Francisco for a long time.
And but the way I understand it is that at the time they started the.
uh, what's it called?
The, um, internments, right.
You know, a lot of people got sent to like fucking Arizona, you know, they were sent to these really far away places out in the middle of nowhere.
Angel Island out in the middle of San Francisco Bay is where like a whole bunch of Japanese people had to go and live for several years.
They lived there or they were there as a part of a relocation where they eventually were sent to Arizona.
Uh,
They actually lived on Angel Island?
I believe that's the case.
There's like a visitor center.
There's like a whole historic thing out there.
Yeah, go Google it.
But yeah, pretty bad news.
But the story goes that a lot of their homes were basically –
They were sent to Angel Island, and in their homes were placed a lot of people who were going to work in the factories, which, as it happened, were a lot of African-American people.
So they pushed out all the Japanese people, gave their homes over to the – I'm sorry I'm using that term I don't like – to the then Black or Negro people, and they worked in the shipyards and all of that.
And then after those jobs went away, it kind of turned into a slum because those jobs weren't there anymore, and it wasn't like the Japanese people got to come back and claim their house again.
Right.
It's pretty amazing the kind of shit that goes on in a war and depending on who won and who gets to put up the plaques, the stuff that you never find out about.
Certainly during the Civil War, that's absolutely true as well.
Well, as my high school AP history teacher said, some families are still fighting the Civil War.
He was an idiot.
The Japantown in Seattle was similarly decimated.
And then after the war, it had become kind of a shantytown.
And they tore it down to build one of the very first public housing projects in America on the site of Seattle's historic 100-year-old Japantown.
And the Japanese of the Pacific Northwest did return to the city, but they didn't want to live in Japantown anymore, and they moved out to the suburbs.
So anyway, that became a public housing project called Rainier Vista.
And then when they were building the freeway, of course, they plowed the freeway right through there because nobody was going to fight for that.
And so what used to be Japantown is now basically just a sinkhole where the freeway runs.
Wow.
Pretty sad story.
My dad, of course, grew up in Seattle, and many of his friends in the 30s were Japanese.
When we had a funeral for my dad here in Seattle, it was in the lobby of a big hotel.
And I published an obituary for him in the newspaper because I knew that a lot of these guys were out there.
That there wasn't any other way to reach him but put a big obituary in the paper.
And the newspaper wrote an article about him.
So we're at his funeral service and all these little old dudes start walking in.
These little 88-year-old Japanese guys.
And they're all about 4'11".
And I'm walking around and I'm like, hello, you know, I'm John Roderick.
I'm David Roderick's kid.
And these guys are like, oh, God, your dad was such a good basketball player.
What?
And my dad would tell these stories where he went to Broadway High School in Seattle, which has since been turned into a community college.
But he said Broadway High School was undefeated in basketball because we had all the Japanese students and the Japanese were the...
absolute best basketball players in the city and most are you kidding me no most of my dad's closest friends were either jews or japanese this is before the war and so when when pearl harbor was bombed
Dad used to tell this story.
He went down to Japantown to visit a friend of his, and he showed up at the house, and they were being forced to sell all of their stuff.
Have I told you this story?
No.
And my dad sits in the living room, and his friend's mom is standing there in the doorway, and a white guy comes in a fedora and walks through the house like he owns the place.
Yeah.
And he says, I'll give you $5 for the refrigerator.
And his friend's mom is like, it's a brand new refrigerator.
You know, it costs $60 or something like that.
And the guy's like, well, today it's worth five bucks.
And they were like, okay, five bucks, fine.
And this guy kind of walks through their house and he buys all their stuff, all their furniture and their new appliances and just is paying them like insulting money.
And he's kind of insulting about it.
And my dad is 19 years old and sitting there in his basketball shoes, just furious, just wanting to punch this guy in the face.
But his friend and their family, they were being put on a train and sent out to Central California where they were going to live in a camp for the rest of the war.
And my dad went down and enlisted in the Navy and was sent to fight the Japanese.
And throughout the whole war, he's having this very, you know, something that's, I think, specific to the Pacific coast.
These, you know, these guys who grew up with Japanese and the Nisei were their tightest bros.
And they did not have that same feeling that I think a lot of Americans had, that the Japanese were dehumanized or were like this alien foreign people.
And my dad was like, oh, my friends...
These are my guys.
These guys are great basketball players.
I mean, they're not tall guys, but they really, you know, they take it to the net.
So the rest of his life.
Anyway, sitting at his funeral and watching all these little guys come in and like stand around and especially given.
So had you known about this basketball stuff before?
Oh, yeah.
He talked about it his whole life.
But you also know he shot a zero out of the sky with his .45.
My dad told a lot of stories.
But in fact, like a lot of men in my family, if you start to doubt that those stories are true, then a guy will walk in off the street and be like, oh, absolutely.
I watched your dad shoot a zero down with a .45.
I waited my whole life for that guy to come in and say, yeah, sure.
I saw it happen.
Because his stories were constantly confirmed.
Yeah.
by independent sources, by these weird situations.
But I did not expect that many...
I didn't expect that many of these guys to still be alive, but let alone that they would all come in and talk about Seattle before the war.
And that they all were... Either they went into the army or they spent the war in camps and they came back to Seattle afterwards and started their businesses up again and...
I don't know how much of it is I mean I have to again I'm not going to sit here and surf the internet for this but supposedly in a lot of the camps they'd sit around and like make fucking American flags their patriotism was if you like unflagging
It's just – that's mind-blowing.
But like the thing is, it's like – I mentioned this before but when you first see color photos of World War II, it changes it completely because it looks like pictures of Vietnam in the sense that when you see a bunch of guys, GIs in the jungle in color, it looks so different and so much more – that sounds silly but it seems so much more real.
Your father having firsthand experience of dealing with Japanese people makes that such a complicated thing.
I think –
For a lot of people, World War II is this high-contrast black-and-white war in every conceivable sense where you see pictures of Hitler up there.
You ever seen the pictures of Hitler practicing?
Oh, you're talking about practicing to sign the... His moves.
He would practice his moves and have people photograph it and then pick out which of his stentorian-speaking moves would be most effective.
Oh, he's such a... But you see, but go listen to something.
There's these singers, like the Comedian Harmonists, which are this group of mostly Jewish guys.
They were part of that whole crazy party scene in Berlin.
You watch something like friggin' Cabaret.
It was raging, and it's so...
bizarre to see and i thought this was handled well in like uh what's that uh the adrian whatchamacallit movie the piano is that what it's called the pianist oh yeah the pianist just that sense of impending downhillness that you know that like it started out it was a real slow burn at first and it was merely insulting treatment but to know that these were people that there were so many people who were wealthy that had roots
You know, that's to me where it becomes so staggering is when you take the contrast of seeing like newsreel footage of people doing the Charleston or whatever and sitting around, you know, in expensive clothes and know that those people would be dead in like fucking 10 years.
Well, what's incredible is that the intellectual life of Europe –
for at least 400 years prior to the 20th century, was so threaded through with Jewish intellectual culture, you couldn't separate them.
In the 1700s, the Germans were already worried that the Jews were kind of
getting above their station or whatever.
And they were always trying to make these separations between like, this is high German culture.
This is German thinking.
This is German art.
But the Jews and their intellectual culture were already like a plaid through all of...
like European culture and to think that to think that in the 20th century there would still be this idea that you could you could eradicate what had what was ultimately like
A culture that was your culture.
You could not separate.
Just as we could not separate Jewish culture from American culture now.
All of our culture is... Ultimately, when you trace it back to who wrote it, it was probably a couple of Jewish guys in a room somewhere.
You know, there is no American...
There is no 20th century pop culture without the Jews, without Jewish culture.
You can't separate.
That's a good way to put it.
You know what I mean?
There is no television.
There is no rock and roll.
There's sure a lot of cool movies we wouldn't have.
You know what I mean?
There is no American literature.
And I'm not saying that the Jews are responsible for it all, but their influence, their participation in the culture, it's inextricable.
And this was absolutely true in Germany.
Even to a greater extent in the 17 and 18 and 1900s, or, you know, early 20th century, it was just as threaded in their culture as it is in ours, the presence and the participation of the Jews.
And to think that there was ever a way, or to even imagine that it was a separate thing.
Well, that's the really bananas thing.
Like I said, I spent like an hour the other night reading about the different patches in the camps.
And at every stage of this, it's fascinating and incredibly well-organized how they did this.
It's really bizarre.
They had some for Roma.
They had some for people who – and the thing is like homosexuals, they have the pink triangle.
It was really any kind of – anybody who had been convicted of a sex crime in court was what it was specifically.
It's just that happened to be – yeah, that happened to be mostly gay people, but it was also pedophiles.
Anybody could be like – Man on dog.
Lady horses.
But no, but that's what pink triangle meant.
And then green ones, they called them the green triangles, were like the criminals.
But then truly – and this is like how – from a design standpoint, you had to get a special extra yellow one to form a star of David if you were Jewish as well.
Like how dark is that?
But in reading that, you see absolutely Jews were singled out for special treatment.
But in the same way, it would be bananas for us to say let's take out all the Jewish culture and then call that American.
Well, what was happening over there, how do you come up with something that's purely German culture?
How do you take out the Dutch component of that?
How do you take out the French component of that?
How do you take out the – again, what's going to be left?
You're going to have less than tubas at that point.
It's so bananas that you could get to a point where that seemed like anything sensible.
It's just as crazy now when you read it in the newspaper every single day.
There are people talking about American culture like it is a monolithic thing that they can identify the components of.
And these other things like Hispanics or...
Any kind of immigration or us people out here on the West Coast with our faggy ways and our rock music or whatever it is.
Like there are tons and tons of people in America that think that there is an American culture that is being assaulted by all these terrifying outside influences.
And it's like there is no such thing.
The terrifying outside influences are absolutely American culture staring you in the face.
That's it.
I mean, the Germans were so traumatized by Napoleon.
That far back?
Oh, the story starts all the way back.
The story starts with the Germans fighting the Romans.
But the situation with Napoleon was that before Napoleon, the Germans were all...
There was no central idea of what the Germans were.
It was kind of like this idea that this village is full of Germans and this village is full of these other Germans and this village is full of these other Germans.
And they're really much more concerned with bickering over the line between their little...
their little duchies than they are with worrying about anybody outside.
You know, they're, they were not centrally, there was no central control.
There was Prussia, there was Austria, but there were all these little, you know, Hesse castle, uh, principalities and so forth.
And Napoleon came through and just absolutely smeared them all.
Um,
The French marched in and they subjugated all of the Germans.
And it was really the first time the Germans had been united was under the boot of France.
It was so traumatic for them.
Did you just invent that?
What?
The first time they had been united was under the boot of France?
Oh, no.
I think that... Well, yeah, maybe.
Sorry.
That's really good.
Maybe I coined it.
And so that was so traumatic that when Napoleon was finally defeated...
it left this lasting impact on the Germans.
Like we need to get our shit together.
We need to be the Germans.
We need to stop fighting.
We need to stop bickering over, you know, the, who owns the covered bridge over this, over this river, over the river Saul.
And we need to say, we are the Germans.
We need a strong central, you know, and for a long time it was, is it going to be Prussia?
Is it going to be Austria?
But this mentality of like,
We are one people.
in my opinion, is a real aftershock of having Napoleon come through and say, yeah, you are one people.
You're all my boot blacks.
You are the farmers and the dopes that are going to be supplying the French army as we march into Russia.
That's who you are.
And they were like, oh, no.
No, no, no.
We are the Germans.
We are the hunters.
We are the...
That was the beginning of that, like, unified consciousness.
So Versailles was just merely another compounding giant kick in the balls that led to the famine and the wheelbarrows full of marks and all of that.
So it took something that was already stinging, something, what, I guess, what, 30 years older than our own Civil War, but something that was still very much around.
There were still bullets in somebody's couch up in the attic.
Yeah.
Yeah, 100 years later, Versailles was another instance of the French humiliating the Germans.
And in the case of Versailles, humiliating them for no good reason.
Just humiliating them.
Like, that war ended... World War I ended in a draw.
And...
Like, had America not come into the war, and even with America in the war, it was a draw.
They fought themselves to a standstill.
There was never going to be a winner to World War I. And the idea that America and Britain and France won World War I is pretty ludicrous.
They basically... I mean, Germany just kind of ran out of gas.
Nobody ever... There was no big...
Victory there.
All three countries, Britain, France, and Germany, they all lost more than a million men.
And it was a standstill.
And by the end of that war, it should have been like, you know what?
Okay, let's just shake hands and say the war's done.
Let's just stop doing this.
That's basically what happened.
The Americans came in and they were like, over there, over there.
And everybody went, oh, fuck.
Here they are.
Okay, we surrender, I guess.
I mean, when the Germans ended the war, they honestly felt like, okay, you know what?
Let's just...
They had no idea that – hadn't you said that Wilson in particular – there were a lot of people who thought that the terms of Versailles should not be that crazy just because they knew how monkey balls this would make them once they got the chance.
Wilson was totally opposed to imposing all these massive sanctions on Germany.
It was all Clemenceau and this kind of French mentality that like now we get ours and –
And we are going to shame the Germans.
We're going to punish them.
They're never, ever going to do this again.
And it was a super bad move.
And really, relative to how that war was fought and how it turned out, it was just a bitch slap.
Do you think it would have made a difference?
Do you really think it would have made it less likely that things would have gotten as bad as they did?
Do you think it stung that hard that there was some kind of a tipping point where if that had not been as onerous and people could have bounced back faster?
If there was no Versailles, there would have been no Hitler.
What if there was just less Versailles?
I mean, there were reparations.
Tell me a little bit about Versailles.
You've got reparations, like really onerous reparations.
You can't have a standing army over, what was it, 100,000 or something?
Well, you also lost the... I mean, Germany lost...
not inconsiderable amounts of their territory to france but but more than that it was uh it was that i mean the big effect of versailles was was as a result of trianon which was this kind of separate sub-treaty where they redrew the borders of all of eastern europe the modern hungary is a product of
of basically the Treaty of Versailles, modern Romania, the whole idea of Slovakia, really, Poland, modern Poland.
I mean, all those countries, their borders were all drawn up
in that treaty as a way of punishing Austria in particular.
Um, but the, I mean the, the reparations that Germany had to pay to France, bankrupted the nation more, more than that though.
It was just this, it was, it was the, it was the institutionalized humiliation of the Germans that was like completely unnecessary.
And you look at the end of world war II, uh,
Where America instituted the Marshall Plan, which was, listen, not only are we not going to shame you... We're going to make it nicer than it was before.
Yeah, not only are we not going to tax you, we're going to show you how...
We're going to show you with money how we suggest maybe we can make this a better place.
We got so much mileage off of that.
It's mind-blowing.
We really did.
Until just about, let's say, maybe about...
nine years ago, eight years ago.
We got so much of a pass on stuff, maybe even stuff we didn't deserve, just because people were still drinking out of those wells or whatever.
I mean, just still driving on those roads.
It's mind-blowing.
But we remade the world, too.
I mean, modern Europe is, in so many ways, a product of the Marshall Plan and a product of that American, what you would call
I think a Wilsonian idealism, the idea that America is able to be altruistic.
And there are a lot of cynics that are going to poo-poo that and get slobber on the front of their bibs.
But that altruism of like, not only are we not going to punish you, we're going to stand in front of anybody who wants to punish you.
And we are going to pour money into this country to redevelop your industry.
The industry that we just bombed into rubble, we're going to build it back up for you and turn it over to you.
Mm-hmm.
And all we ask is that you not start any more wars.
Does that sound cool?
And you know what's amazing in retrospect, especially for somebody – and this shows you again the gulf between the classic idea of – well, like in the old days when Republicans – being a Republican or being conservative mostly meant being financially conservative by and large.
Right, not socially conservative.
Yeah, but it also meant like we all agree that what's good for business is good for America in some ways.
And think about the Marshall Plan as something also where you're creating markets.
I mean think about how many of our biggest trading partners over the next 30 years came straight out of countries that we were trying desperately to destroy and then help rebuild.
The Japanese and the Germans.
The Japanese and the Germans.
Two of the strongest economies in the world.
Right.
Right.
I just Googled this just so that I had my facts straight.
But in 1921, the amount of reparations demanded of Germany was the equivalent of 100,000 tons of pure gold, which at the time represented more than 50% of all the gold ever mined in history.
Wow.
So there's the insult of this impossible thing being put on the table, and then there's the 10x insult of you have no fucking choice but to sign it.
Right.
It's that kind of like users.
We're not here to defend the Germans.
You have no choice but to sign it because – and really this is the thing.
We're all out of food.
And that was it wasn't like Germany, you have to sign the Treaty of Versailles because you are out of food and France is sitting here like sipping from the milk of human kindness or whatever.
France was out of food, too.
Like everybody was out of food.
Yeah.
England didn't come out of that for like another what, like five or eight years.
But England is still recovering from World War I. They lost an entire generation of men in World War I. You don't want to be a dumbass.
I'm thinking about World War II, of course.
I apologize.
That was a stupid thing to say.
No, right.
England got back from World War II a little bit faster.
Really?
It took that long to come out of World War I?
Let's say England was back in 1985.
Yeah.
Well, 89, let's say.
Between 1945 and 1989, they were just limping along.
I mean, it looked pretty hot in London.
I think we can thank Oasis.
Yeah, it was Oasis, really.
It was Madchester.
It was the Happy Mondays that really brought England back.
But no, I mean, in 1919, there were no Englishmen left.
I mean, an entire generation of, and probably what you could arguably say was going to be England's most brilliant generation.
Those guys, what it looked like in 1914, if you could be in 1914 and imagine...
What they thought the next 10 years was going to be.
It was going to be the most fertile time in English history.
I swear to you.
Why is that?
There was this feeling in the air in 1914 that anything was possible.
Modernism was happening.
There was a culture of literature.
People were moving away from... Colonialism was kind of on the wane.
But they still had all the power of their far-flung colonies.
Intellectually, it wasn't very fashionable anymore, but they still had all the strength.
It was this incredibly fertile time.
It was all across Europe.
You think about the fin de saccal art in Germany and Austria, all of the sort of Bauhaus-y, Klimt-y kind of...
You go to those cities, you go to those little towns in the Czech Republic that were not bombed out by the war, where the architecture is this incredibly feminine, beautiful architecture and public planning place.
Where the cities feel incredibly solid, but there's a femininity to everything that you don't associate with the Germans.
Or at least a fragility.
When you look at the expressionists, there's such a fragility to everything and such a questioning of your own perception of things.
An emotional presence and an emotional awareness that was actually taking shape in the way towns were built and in the way in such small things as like men's fashion.
And I mean, it was this incredibly sensitive time and everyone was killed.
Everyone through the whole continent was just massacred.
And at the end of it, there was nothing left.
It was just these shards of memory that we're still trying to recapture.
The tragedy of it.
Will send me into a blue funk.
It really will.
But what was lost?
And we think about history being a thing that like, oh, it's inevitable.
It happened, right?
History.
There it is.
And you never think about what could have been, what small differences happened.
back then, could have produced an entirely different world now.
We can't even imagine.
They felt at the time that they were on the cusp of discovering a new way.
A new way in music, a new way in art, a new way in politics.
They believed that it was the dawn of a renaissance, and I think it was too.
And that renaissance was...
Um, was just wiped off the, off the earth.
Well, I mean, yes.
And think about, think about where we got all our guys to make the bomb.
Think about like what, what, what, so much education that was all years.
They were all years that were chased out.
Yeah.
And, but I mean that, that was, this was, it was also, there was, there was so much great stuff happening in education scholarship, you name it.
but but and you know i think there's a reason uh several reasons it's not the story of something like anne frank resonates with us because you know it was a child and an innocent and it was a complicated thing and like oh and fucking a if it had been like one more month she might have lived it's such an awful story but you know what really gets us is it's one story that we can understand it's unbearable to think about the number of people who died but you know it's also it's just also unbearable to think about how many of their own people they killed uh certainly people from all over the place and but but
you know for me this is the weird thing again when i get off on these jags these hitler jags on wikipedia and i'll go and i'll look at a section that's i'm pulling this out of my butt but it's like um certainly things like musicians who died in the holocaust right or you go you could go and read about writers who died you could certainly read about oh gosh you can read about writers that were just killed in the in the field in world war ii it's astounding how much uh
I certainly will not say pointless or unnecessary, but how much just like senseless death on both sides happened to level like some of the best minds of the generation.
And sometimes you don't see it until you go like fucking trumpet players who died in the Holocaust.
But you know what I'm saying?
Like when you take it down to that level and then you go and read about that one person, you know, and that resonates.
Yeah.
You know, especially the Anne Frank thing.
I mean, like, that's such a cliche, but, I mean, it's such a story that's been passed.
But the whole fucking idea that she died of a disease, like, seriously, wasn't it like a month before they liberated the camp?
Yeah.
I mean...
And this is the kind of tone that you can expect from Hitler and stuff.
We're going to find easy answers.
This is going to be a fun podcast.
It really is.
I think we got something here, John.
What's astonishing to me, though, is that when you think about all the writers that died or all the trumpet players that died.
You think about that in terms of like, oh, well, there might be a couple fewer books or there might be a few more trumpet solos or whatever.
But the reality is that we, the culture that we're living in now is a product of the people that survived the war.
Mm-hmm.
And thinking about all the people who didn't survive the war and the culture that they would have produced and where we would be now, our understanding of the human condition that would have resulted from those trumpet solos and books that didn't get written—
It's unfathomable how far, I think, how far behind we are where we would have been.
And it's impossible to measure.
It's numbing to think about.
But I read an article in the newspaper the other day.
It was the 60th anniversary.
No, what was it?
The 70th anniversary just a couple of days ago of the day that...
All of the Jews in France were marshaled into the trains.
And this woman who survived the war was talking about she and her five brothers and sisters were standing in this camp.
They were in the camp with their mother and their father was somewhere else working.
And the word went out through the camp, okay, tomorrow all the mothers are going.
Okay.
So say goodbye.
And they spent all night huddled together.
And then in the morning, they huddled together crying.
And then in the morning, they came.
And these aren't Germans.
These are French men who were working for the Germans who came in the morning and took the mothers away and put them on a train and sent them to the gas chambers.
And imagining that now as a father...
These kids, you know, with their hands through the barbed wire fence as their mother is being led away by like a local guy.
and being put on a train, it's one of those moments where you think about the Holocaust all the time, where we're raised thinking about World War II, but the unfathomable inhumanity of those small moments, where it's just like that guy who probably lived the rest of his life in France and was never prosecuted for it, he woke up every morning remembering that, what he did.
you couldn't help but remember it.
You could not help but be haunted by it every day of your life.
And all through France, there are a million stories of that.
And this is the thing.
We think about, oh, we walk around Germany and...
Oh, they've erased all the swastikas, but there are a million people in France with a similar story, with a similar picture in their attic that they don't bring down because it's a picture of granddad in his like collaborationist cop outfit.
But what it would take to do that, how your mind would... I got into this long correspondence with a professor at the University of Washington when I was walking across Europe where I was saying, listen, it is gone from Germany.
Whatever that mentality was, I cannot find it anywhere.
I talk to Germans every day.
What about the war?
What about the war?
What about the Holocaust?
What did your family do?
What are your feelings about it?
And it is gone.
Whatever it was that made that happen is no longer here.
You could not get the Germans to do it again, right?
But the fact that it was only 40 years ago at the time, or 50 years ago...
And the fact that it is completely erased now means that it is, in my opinion, in all of us all the time.
Like, it is never gone.
It's always there.
Because it happened so simply.
You know, there was a series of factors, sure.
But the people in Europe were waiting for the opportunity to become monsters.
And I believe that...
We are all human beings waiting for the opportunity to become monsters.
It is in us.
Because the inhumanity it would require of a person to reach through a fence and take a mother away from her child and put her on a train is, it's so unfathomable that it, in fact, I think is like this dormant,
monster that is in all human beings and this professor at the at the u who i admired very much kept writing me saying do you honestly believe that do you really believe there could be a holocaust in the united states and i was like so here's the problem i don't believe it could have happened in germany i'm standing in germany surrounded by germans every day and i don't believe it could have happened here but it did and so if you are standing in america and you don't believe it could happen
that's the problem and and and that's what really well put but it was also amazing is in some sense is you could ask ask people anywhere in the world um anytime after say you know uh what happened to say the armenians and you say uh could oh wait a minute now we're losing turkish listeners
But you start and you say like, well, could there ever be a situation where millions of people were basically exterminated in one of the most civilized countries in the world?
And of course everybody – in 1920, you'd say no.
And in 1930, you'd probably say no.
Weirdly enough, a lot of people in 1940 would have said no.
A lot of people in 1950 would still be saying no.
Yeah.
And of course, there are people today who not only say that it didn't happen, but it can happen.
And you're right.
You're right.
There's still insanely relative recency of that.
The fact that we still know family members who would never even drive in a BMW.
Or a Toyota.
But also, all along the way, it is actually so inconceivable, the scale of it, and yet it is so incredibly present, and yet it's that very presence that makes it so hard to accept.
And there's this part of me that wonders how many Holocaust revisionist people are just bananas and how many people and how many of them know they're lying and how many of them just frankly can't grok the staggering nature of it and think that there's no logical way that it could have happened.
Not to apologize for that, but it's something that is almost impossible to imagine.
When you watch those film roles, when you go see Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, when you take up any of the German culture that was just happening at the time that – what?
The people who would be college age would be dying.
It's staggering how quickly that happened.
It really is.
Boy, Hitler and stuff.
Yeah, this is going to be good.
I really like this podcast.
It's going to be so fun.
Did you know that raccoons are native to North America and were introduced into Germany right before the war by a game warden?
Hmm.
who said, why don't we turn some of these little funny bears loose in Germany so that the hunters will have something new to shoot?
What could possibly go wrong?
What could go wrong?
And so now there are millions of raccoons in Germany.
The Germans call them Wachbären, meaning little bears that wash themselves.
That's so sweet.
It is sweet, except that Germany is divided between half the Germans who think that the little wash bears are cute, and the other half of the Germans who feel like the little wash bears are massive pains in the ass because they're, like, breaking into their homes and stealing their stereo equipment.
And it's a major problem.
And then there's other ones that are really into Vos Bärenscheisen.
Vos Bärenscheisen, yikes!
Do you know about Nutrias?
I do know about Nutrias, but why don't you tell us about Nutrias?
Have you ever seen a Nutria?
I have never in the flesh seen a Nutria.
I understand that they are big like... They are fucking horrific.
Like beavers, right?
They're big as beavers.
Yes, they are.
But here's the thing.
Imagine all of the worst aspects of a possum, a rat... A rat that's as big as a beaver.
A possum, rat, beaver... I don't think there are any bad qualities about a beaver.
Well, if you see it with a rat's tail, you might change your mind.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Go look at it.
Go look at it.
And look at the teeth.
I don't want to look at them.
They're so gross.
I've seen them before.
And they make it sound like this.
Oh, you've seen Nutrias in real life.
I was in New Orleans a long time ago in probably the early 90s.
And we were driving around.
Our friend was like, oh, Nutrias, they're everywhere.
Story goes.
You were riding in your Big Chief tablets.
LAUGHTER
I fear that my pyloric valve might seal permanently.
And we were driving around and – was it Kristen?
Was that her name?
Kristen was saying like, well, you know about the Nutrias.
And I was like, I don't know anything about the Nutrias.
I'm not going to read this, but just from memory.
The story goes that in the midst of the whole like roaring 20s – what was it?
Was it –
bear coat remember they were trying to make uh trying to make a beaver coats or whatever there were all these like animal skin coats that everybody was buying that were like a less costly version of like furs but you know you're riding you're riding in the rumble seat of someone's mom and you're in your fraternity you're wearing a straw boater and you're stuffing as many guys as you can into a phone booth
And so you want to be a coach.
You want to be a coach.
Well, because the thing was, understandably, this was going to be to this was like the knockoff Rubik's Cube of Harry Coates because they were going to there's no way they could come up with the man to keep up with the demand.
So I apologize if I have to go correct this later.
But the story goes, they started raising all of these.
And seriously, I really encourage you to go and look at images of these creatures.
I'm going to go look at it.
I think you're going to see how it is really the worst of almost everything.
Where did they come from originally, Nutrias?
Well, let's go to the Wikipedia.
Let's look it up.
My understanding is that now they're trying to serve them in restaurants down there.
They're trying to do fucking anything.
They'll build houses out of them if they can.
Now, wait a minute.
It's called a koipu.
Yeah.
From Mapudungan.
Also known as the River Rat.
Oh, I see.
Mapudungan is a language.
Papadongan is the Mapuche language.
Originally from South America.
But go scroll down a little.
Now, you know beavers got orange teeth, but this one's got super orange teeth.
And look at it.
Just look at every aspect of that.
Do you see how big they are?
And she's talking about this and she says, oh, so here's the story.
So the story goes then, then the bottom falls out of the market for fucking animal coats.
And you know what they did?
They opened up the cages and let them run.
What could possibly go wrong?
What?
Oh, look at them.
And like so many of these kinds of creatures, they bred prodigiously.
And now they run around New Orleans.
And I thought, oh, that's very funny, if memory serves, Kirsten.
Kirsten?
No, her father's not a dentist.
Kirsten.
Kirsten.
And she said, well, at one point we're driving along, she goes, oh, look out the window.
Like, look at the median strip.
Mm-hmm.
And this thing, the way that it was ambling, it's horrifying the way this thing moves.
And it's so much fucking bigger than you think.
I mean, it is like, you know, like when you see a raccoon, you think, oh, ha ha ha raccoon.
But if you really see a raccoon, like when you saw that mama, she might have weighed 15, 20 pounds, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
She was a big girl.
Yeah.
So what did one of these weigh?
I don't know, but I love here that they have the conservation status on a sliding scale from extinct.
Yes, to green for least concern.
That's on every animal page, and it always makes me laugh.
There is no concern about this.
It's the status that says, fuck you, animal.
We are not concerned about the Kuiperoo.
So now these things run around.
They run around.
They're fucking everywhere.
And really, go look at lots of pictures of these because you're not going to sleep well tonight.
And now they have this whole thing.
I think for a while they had a bounty thing.
I think I saw something on cable where they actually got.
And you go out and you try and shoot these things.
And I think there was actually like a control efforts.
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
I knew about that and that they were trying to convince people that they were good eating and that in New Orleans you could go in and get Nutria Gumbo or whatever.
I guarantee.
But, you know, you think a beaver's cute and a beaver's cute enough.
You know, I'm clicking on some of this stuff and the number of pop-up
Pop-up ads that just came up?
I haven't seen a pop-up ad since 1994.
I think you might have a Windows virus on your Mac.
How do you get a Windows virus on your Mac?
Date rape.
I got date raped, and now I'm looking at it like...
You think a beaver is cute, and a beaver is cute enough, but A, a beaver has fucking orange teeth, and two, this ain't no beaver.
You ever seen a possum, and it's got that real weenus-looking rat tail on it, like a big penis rat tail?
There are possums all over Seattle.
I threw bleach on a possum once.
This story, oh, that's terrible.
Did you really?
No.
Why would I say something ridiculous like that?
Josh Stewart of Springfield, Oregon crawled under a house on a plumbing job.
He was nearly at the back of the house when he heard a noise behind him and turned to see five baby nutrias between him and the way out.
His first thought was, where's the mother?
Then he saw three adults closing in on him.
The first one ran at him and he kicked at it.
There wasn't much room to maneuver in the 20-inch crawlspace, but he managed to get a hold of a rock and smashed it repeatedly in the head.
This guy is a super commando.
He's a plumber under this house killing nutrients with rocks.
The second one came at him, ran up his leg and tore his face, so he grabbed it and killed it.
This guy is drenched in blood at this point.
One of the babies as well.
He is...
God.
Where are you reading this?
Oh my Christ.
This guy is the Mengele of nutrients.
And that wraps it up quite neatly.
Oh, no way can we put this out.