The Untouchables, with grave detail

He felt so guilty about this that he became exhausted and started having nightmares. Then one night he dreamed that someone came to him and said, "Don't worry, Ashura has its own master. It will look after itself.--p xii, The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran

My viewers probably do not realize my interest in Holocaust deniers stems more from personal experience over and above proclivities in examining extreme rhetorical utterance: Picture a sexually vibrant invalid on the phone arguing with her former deep chocolate building manager who invited himself over for a drink. "I have a girlfriend," and this slammed the door on a spastic who lost her cool, honest enough to tell you I have my regrets, but it was probably for the best. However pleasurable a hard intercourse session with an oversexed son of a reverend named Michael Washington might have been, my latent racist tendencies, lusting in the university media center, would have felt soiled, as I do anyway, had that drink occurred and we had taken a roll that makes cinematic pair bonding look like a kid's birthday party, layering icing on the cake promising satiable gratification. It never delivers, does it? Our generic desserts for these ritualized, stale, celebrations.

While I was doing my balancing act with my doomed liberalism with pretty almond eyes on one end of the wire, a student possibly named Sherri was to my left, condemning homeless predatory behaviors on pity. "I would say to them 'I won't give you money but I'll buy you a sandwich if you clean up the litter."

I was rather indignant to discover she mistrusted the genealogy surrounding the Third Reich and fascism at the height of its ascendancy,  and in this nondescript student office, desks, black phone, my memory annoyed by off yellow lighting, Sherri and I battled over the history of the 1930's, and this was 1986, at the latest. She backed down, but remains part of a curious sub-contingent, sometimes political, like the former lightening rod of the post revolutionary Iranian presidency, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-- but such positions, perhaps embodied in Jean Marie Le Pen, speak of the desire to obliterate moral guilt. Their voices are a small minority. I am not sure designating their speech as a hate crime stifles the dissent it represents. 


It is not that video archive footage of emaciated bodies and Berlin in ruins has registered as sacrosanct verification of the worst genocide on record-- not that I believe these images were manipulated, but I cannot disavow my family history, which was a product of WW2, and this is the dowager taking a break from her work. I imagine you think it would be pleasant if I could still go horseback riding in New Jersey on a long made dog meat stallion named Big Red. I loved that damned aggressive and powerful beast. It nearly broke my mother's foot.