All The Young Nazis
Boomers, meet Zoomers—how historical amnesia creates a new breed of radical
One of the more enjoyable and annoying elements of modern life is, of course, the give-and-take on social media, such as Twitter. It is enjoyable because you can engage instantly with people all over the world, whose viewpoints—being formed by histories and cultures partly or entirely alien to your own—you would never hear otherwise. This can expand your own frame of reference very constructively if one bears in mind the inherent shallowness of the contact. Nevertheless, you can use it as a starting point to research all sorts of persons, places, and things that might never have reached your attention otherwise—presuming you have sufficient interest to do so.
The downside is that, in accordance with both the decay of modern manners and the anonymity the internet gives so many, a good deal of the discourse encountered is crude and stupid. Ad hominems, insults of every kind, and sheer ignorance are common coin. Of course, given that we live in a time when one cannot trust the mainstream media either, and school education has collapsed (to say nothing of family life), one can’t clutch one’s pearls too tightly over it all. If nothing else, it is a monument to freedom of speech. I’m always reminded of the Hollywood Boulevard of my childhood, with its various American Nazi Party stalwarts, Black Muslims, Hare Krishnas, Revolutionary Communists, and sundry other folk—including people purely insane on their own account. Bus rides might feature impromptu “strategy meetings” with street comic General Hershy Bar, and a stroll down the boulevard could lead to an encounter with Hollywood’s then-official greeter, Wild Bill Tucker. The difference, of course, is that one had to leave one’s home for these occurrences, whereas the internet brings it all into one’s own room in a vast global jumble. On the other hand, the people who passed one’s way in Hollywood during the 1960s were tangible, despite their surreality.
At any rate, I have recently encountered on Twitter a saddening, if not unexpected, phenomenon: young, self-proclaimed Catholic Nazis. It is not unexpected because it has seemed to me for a very long time that such a thing would happen, for reasons I shall explain behind the paywall. It saddens rather than angers me (as it angers a great many of my fellow boomers) because I believe that my generation bears a great deal of responsibility for it. Although all of us at some time as adults have to take responsibility for our own lives, into our mid-20s we are very much our parents’ and teachers’ creatures. So we shall look at some of those factors—and then explore some possible solutions!
If your journey with me this week is only so far as the dreaded paywall, then I shall leave you in Hollywood in the 1960s, at the Rexall Drugs at Hollywood and Highland. At the soda fountain there, my seven-year-old self once unknowingly encountered Janis Joplin. Have a malt for me, and my best to her should you see her!