On Books: Susann, Jacqueline, Valley of the Dolls, Bantam Books: New York, 1967.

I decided to read this book after chancing across the movie version on television and realizing, to my surprise, that it was not a horror story, as I’d always thought it was. (I suspect that as a child I got it confused with a book written by V.C. Andrews, of whom my older sister was very fond.)

I’m not going to bore you with the plot points – it’s an engaging if overdone exploration of the high-pressure and sometimes cutthroat world of show business – but I do want to point out that it was hardly the first story of its kind, and certainly not the best. Think The Bad and the Beautiful, Sweet Smell of Success, and, of course, the masterful All About Eve. Indeed, when you look back on the number of motion pictures that revolved around the stresses of Hollywood ladder-climbing in the middle of the last century it makes you realize that this was actually a fairly new phenomenon at the time, wasn’t it? The big stars of Broadway or film experienced fame on an entirely different level than the entertainers of the nineteenth century or before. While it may be argued that, owing to technological advances and the invention of social media, modern performers are subject to even greater stresses, this is a quantitative rather than a qualitative change. And indeed, one only has to glance at the headlines to realize that the entertainers of today have just as many issues with drugs and backstabbing as those of Hollywood in its infancy.

In any case, plot aside, what was really striking about the novel is what jerks the men are, and what idiots the women are. In fact, the jerkier the men, the more idiotic the women become. No, strike that. The women are idiotic in their own right, too, independent of the men. And sometimes the women are jerks, and the men are idiots. Really, what man would ever go on about how he loves a woman for herself, and then in the next breath declare that he loves her for her breasts? What woman would ever decide to give up on having children because she’s reached the ripe old age of thirty? I mean, I know we’re talking about fifty years ago here, but biology hasn’t changed that much. And the attitude towards women, especially coming from a female writer, is just unbelievable. At one point one of the main characters gains a lot of weight, and everyone – men, women, and she herself – refer to her as a useless “sack of blubber.” To paraphrase, “He can’t be in love with her; she’s a pig!” Trust me, if you read the book, it’s clear that this was not ironically intended.

Finally, the sexuality that made the book so sensational at the time is horrible, just horrible. It makes you wonder if the author ever had a satisfying, or indeed, even a vaguely pleasant sexual experience in her life. The women hardly ever want or enjoy intercourse, but that’s okay, says the novel, because they get their satisfaction from “pleasing their man.” Ugh! If this is the kind of example of liberation that women were given back in the sixties, it gives me new respect for my mother’s generation. How heroically well-adjusted they were, it seems to me now.

It’s so offensive that it’s actually worth reading, if only to get a sense of the cultural context. I promise, you will be eternally grateful that these days you can get a wrinkle without wanting to kill yourself. That you can have enough self-respect not to have to lay down like a doormat to “hold on” to your man. And that men nowadays don’t expect you to.  

Yolen, Jane, The Devil’s Arithmetic, Scholastic, Inc: New York, 1988.

Author Jane Yolen will always hold a special place in my heart. She was my writing tutor in the sixth grade. Yup, it’s true. I have no idea how my school district finagled that or if this was a regular part of her community service or what, but once a week she came out and worked with me one on one. Apparently this is what happens when you’re the one kid in class whose stories are always over the page limit and not under it; people start to wonder if you might have some talent.

Anyway, I can’t say that I remember much of what she taught me, or even much about the many books of hers that I’d read before I met her, but recently I ran across this young adult novel of hers called The Devil’s Arithmetic. I had never heard of it, but believe me, once you’ve read it, you’ll never forget it.

The premise concerns an adolescent American Jewish girl who, in the midst of a Passover celebration a generation after World War II, mysteriously and magically trades places with a rural European Jew caught up in the midst of the Holocaust. It then traces – in surprising detail for a novel aimed at children – her experience of concentration camp life, with particular focus on the individuals surrounding her, and their methods of coping with their chilling confinement. Indeed, the book’s greatest strength is perhaps its ability to “rehumanize” what are, to most of us, faceless masses of concentration camp victims, by delving into their various personalities. And they are human, very poignantly so. While there is a fair share of heroism among the main characters, there is hopelessness and helplessness as well; selfish and altruistic behavior on both sides. The sufferers are not perfectly good, just as their captors are not perfectly evil.

In addition, by literally walking the reader through the trials of entering and then residing in a concentration camp, the book introduces young readers to the Holocaust in a very accessible manner; by forcing them to live it day by day along with the main character. In some ways it reminded me of John Hersey’s The Wall, in which you follow the daily routines of a small group of Jews clinging to life in the Warsaw ghetto during WWII. Sometimes you forget that Jews and other victims of the Nazis were not merely killed; they lived entire lives between their moments of capture and execution or eventual release, and The Devil’s Arithmetic makes those lives real.

My one complaint about the book is that I had difficulty accepting the premise itself. I can certainly see why the author presented events the way she did – there are solid reasons for it in the story – but when confronted with evidence of the “switch,” I sometimes found myself unable to suspend my disbelief. But this is a very small flaw in an otherwise wonderful work that has the power to truly bring home the experience of the Holocaust to all readers, young and old alike.  

One of the surprisingly interesting things about maintaining a blog are the insights you get into what all of those “anonymous” people on the Internet are doing. Blogger, for example, gives you some basic statistics on who’s viewing your blog: what country they’re in, what language they speak, and what browser and operating system they’re using. The data that’s available from Google Analytics – which I’ve just signed up for – is even more detailed; you can see, for example, not just the countries where your readers reside, but down to the very cities in which they live. On top of that, you can apparently get stats like how long someone spends on a page, how many pages they view per visit, and so on. It’s a bit nosy, really. But somehow I doubt that anyone in South Korea will care if I know the name of their hometown. In any case, I’m looking forward to getting more information on who my readers are and how they found me.

The Gay Pride festival takes place this weekend in the City of San Francisco. The LGBT community in the Bay Area is large enough and demonstrative enough to have prompted Oakland to host its own Pride Festival in September in the last few years. Thus, those of us who live here are reminded at least twice a year of the prevalence of homosexuals in our area and in the country at large.

Personally, I think it’s a disgrace. To my mind, there is absolutely no reason why the gay and lesbian community should still, in the twenty-first century, have the reason or need to hold a festival in order to discourage feelings of shame in being gay.

I mean, really, people. Homosexuals have been around for thousands of years that we know of, and probably since the beginning of humankind. Clearly they aren’t going anywhere. Get over it.

And people are getting over it. Like non-whites, like non-Christians, non-heterosexuals are gradually becoming a part of mainstream America. They’re characters on television, and in movies; characters with depth and style, not mere stereotypes of what homosexuals were once popularly supposed to be.

Yet, compared to other minority groups, there’s still a difference in the way gay and lesbian characters are handled in the popular media, and this, to me, is the crux of the matter, the yardstick by which we know that the homosexuals have not yet gained acceptance as a mainstream minority. Because so many of the roles featuring homosexual characters are not about ordinary people who happen to be homosexual, but about their homosexuality itself.

And that’s a crucial difference. Living where I do, I’ve met many gay and lesbian couples and the fact is, apart from the same-sex issue, most of them are basically indistinguishable from heterosexual couples. In my experience, most homosexuals don’t actually fit the “types” you’ll see featured if you attend the Gay Pride festival. Most of them are perfectly assimilated into a mainstream American lifestyle, and many more of them would be if the heterosexual community would simply let them. Being gay doesn’t mean they have different customs and values; if it did, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard for the right to marry. Shouldn’t we be applauding their desire to make permanent commitments to their selected mates? Doesn’t that make them more like the majority culture, not less?

Yet people continue to argue about homosexuality as if it’s a moral or behavioral issue and not a physical one. But homosexuality simply cannot be a choice, for the very logical objection that if it were, who in their right mind would choose it? Who would willingly volunteer to spend their lives being mocked and scorned and beaten and abused if they could help it? The fact is, there’s no overcoming the sexual instinct, not for heterosexuals, and not for homosexuals, either. And it seems to me to be both foolish and pointless to try.

Minorities will always be minorities, and to a certain extent, they’ll always stand out because of that. Indeed, this melting pot that we call America was basically founded as a haven for differing minority groups, and its multi-culturality only continues to increase as the decades pass, which is certainly not a bad thing.

But the day will eventually come when non-heterosexuals won’t have to be defined by their sexual orientation. When they’ll be able to be people first and gay second. When they’ll no longer need a Pride festival to champion homosexuality. Because no one will even give a damn anymore whether they’re gay or not.

I’d like to attend the Pride festival a few decades from now, when they make the announcement that it’s to be the final one. And if the LGBT members of our community are all at home or at work going about their own business, then I’ll know it’s time to celebrate the equality that they have finally achieved.

Starkey, Marion L., The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc: New York, 1949.

I wrote a report on the Salem Witchcraft Trials when I was in the seventh grade. Most of what I remember about it was having to deliver it orally to the class off of those stupid 3×5 cards, from which I read it essentially verbatim. Not only because I was incapable of spontaneous speech, but also so I would have something to look at besides the eyes of my classmates. This worked pretty well except that my hair kept falling into my face and I had to keep tucking it back behind my ears so I could see. I don’t think I would even have recollected that part of it except that all the kids made fun of me afterwards for playing with my hair during my speech. Strange the things children find amusing…

Anyway, being a native of Massachusetts, I was perhaps more drawn to this particular subject than I otherwise might have been, particularly since Salem was a mere two hours away from my hometown and we actually visited the Salem Witch Museum on a school field trip during my formative years. A skeptic even at twelve, I was impressed most by the illogic of the proceedings, in particular the torture devices by which “confessions” were sometimes obtained. But I can’t say I had a fair recollection of the actual historical events until I recently read Ms. Starkey’s fascinating and very well-written study of the subject.

Ms. Starkey, by her own description, decided to approach the Trials from a psychoanalytic standpoint, Freudian analyses of human behavior being tremendously popular in her day. Her theory is that the teen-aged girls who were essentially in charge of accusing the witches were suffering from hysteria brought about by the repressive nature of the Puritan society in which they lived. (She doesn’t go so far as to term it sexual repression, which perhaps would have been too delicate a matter to address in American non-fiction in 1949, but it’s implied.) Whether faked or not, the fits into which the girls dissolved, repeatedly and often, under the claimed tortures of invisible witches, did accomplish the objective of placing the girls squarely in the center of attention in the community. It’s certainly plausible that the people of three centuries ago suffered just as much from the illness of “look-at-me-itis” (as I like to call it) as the humans of today.

Now as you’re reading through Ms. Starkey’s history, it becomes apparent that the witchcraft hysteria that so rapidly engulfed the community did not really come about because the people were overly superstitious or inclined to belief in demons and witches. Rather, it arose because they were naïve. By and large, they simply could not believe that the stories the accusing girls told could be anything less than true. And if you have that kind of faith in the stories of children, then the idea of putting another citizen to death on the basis of spectral evidence alone doesn’t seem quite so outlandish.       

Of course, had there not been an underlying belief in witchcraft to begin with, no reasonably rational person could have overlooked the wildly evident illogic of the proceedings. For example, one of the most surefire means by which the allegations were proved true took place during the examinations themselves. The accused witch would be brought into the presence of the accusers, at which point they would cry out in pain, claiming that the “specter” of Goody So-and-So was pinching them mercilessly. Now, really. Why would any witch with even less than half a brain send her specter to attack innocent children right in the midst of her own trial, knowing that this would be taken as evidence of her guilt? And if these witches truly had the power to use their “specters” to do evil while their physical bodies went about business as usual, then what was the point of locking them up? And as time went on, the quantity of accusations and the quality of the persons accused both increased greatly, to the point where witchcraft of such magnitude would have been logistically impossible to have carried on unnoticed in such a small community.

There were those who made arguments along these lines right from the very start; one patriarch even “cured” a girl of her visions by simply threatening her with a lashing, and suggested that the same punishment be applied to the other accusers as a means of ending the witchcraft threat. And the community at large did, of course, in time, come to see the light of truth through the veil of hysteria and lies, but not before twenty innocent people were hanged for sins they did not commit.

Not even the most faithful of God-fearing folk believe any longer that the Devil possessed the old-time villagers of Salem and turned them into witches and wizards. But, if you believe in that kind of thing, you could conceivably make the argument that the Devil was, indeed, in Massachusetts in 1692. Not the Devil who hosts Black Sabbaths, acquires the souls of young girls by forcing them to sign their names in a book of his legions, and accompanies his servants in the forms of familiars like black cats and snakes, but the Devil who works his evil in underhanded ways: by entering the hearts of good, worthy citizens and turning them horribly and pitilessly against one another.  
 

https://avbc.com/ai1ec_event/boonville-ca-17th-annual-legendary-boonville-beer-fest/?instance_id=196

The 17th Annual Legendary Boonville Beer Festival: The bahlest steinber hornin’, chiggrul gormin’ tidrick in the heelch of the Boont Region!

Or so they say up at Anderson Valley Brewing Company, where they host this annual event at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds.

Now I can’t say that Boonville is my favorite of the beer festivals I regularly attend. In fact, in my book, it pales by comparison to the festivals at The Bistro in Hayward, most notable of which are the Double IPA festival in February and the Wood-Aged festival in November. In terms of selection and style, these fests offer a larger variety of the kinds of beers I really, really like, and more importantly, they tend to feature a greater number of beers I simply don’t see in my regional market.

However, no local beer festival can match the power of Boonville for sheer good time. That’s because it’s not merely a beer festival; it’s a weekend-long party complete with camping, barbecuing, loud music, and vast numbers of otherwise quiet, sober people generally making drunken asses of themselves. Not me, of course, because to the best of my recollection I have never, ever made a fool of myself, and I’m quite certain that all of the stories concerning my behavior during my rare nights of overindulging have been entirely fabricated.

I won’t regale you with noteworthy tales of prior Boonvilles, many of which are incredibly embarrassing either to me personally or to people dear to my heart, but here are a few of the life-changing observations I made at this year’s festival:

Bright, sunny and ninety-five is way better than rainy, muddy, and fifty-five, especially when your friends who arrive first are smart enough and early enough to pick out a shady camping site.
A wise woman drinks beer with breakfast, not before.
Patience is a virtue that women develop while waiting in line for the “real” bathroom when the Port-A-Potties are full.
Patience is a virtue that men develop while waiting for women to emerge from the “real” bathroom.
A man who is so anxious to get a beer that he shoves a woman out of his way has no right to complain when she shoves back. Not even if, in so doing, she spills said beer.
A true friend is someone who waits with you in the line for the Port-A-Potty just to be able to hold your beer while you’re in there.
Plastic cups don’t break with the same joyful ringing clarity as glass ones, but at least no one loses an eye.
It’s rarely worth standing in the long line for that special beer that some brewery always decides to put on exactly at four o’clock, but you’ll be sorry if you don’t do it anyway.
You can’t appreciate really good beer until you have some bad ones.
Caterpillars do not improve the flavor of tenderloin.
Just because there’s a bridge doesn’t mean there’s anything special on the other side of it.
Dancing on the roof of an RV does not make you look foolish. Dancing unenthusiastically does.
Friends are people who can drink with you all weekend and still like you afterwards.
Blessed are they who for once find a quiet camping spot and don’t have to listen to those #$^@&$! jerks screaming and running around all night.
Everyone looks like crap the morning after a beer festival, either because they drank too much or because you did.
Choose your first three beers well; by the end of the festival, they will be the only ones you remember.

No Generation X-er could fail to have noticed the thematic changes in popular culture over the last thirty years. Styles of music change, of course, as do styles of movies, books, and other media, but these stylistic differences are not necessarily related to the themes which underlie popular culture. A sappy love song is a sappy love song whether it’s done in the style of rock, or country, or disco, and there are plenty of these still being created and popularized every year. However, over the last several decades, American society has become far more permissive in what it will accept on the subject of sexuality. Those who were offended by Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” when it was released must surely suffer nowadays, being only able to find refuge in the ever-dwindling number of oldies radio stations, which, if you have not listened to one lately, now often in fact play music from the eighties. But even Cyndi Lauper’s ode to masturbation “She-Bop” appears tame compared to the expressions of female sexuality prevalent in the popular music of today.

The theme of David Guetta’s recent hit “Turn Me On,” provides an interesting example. The main lyrical premise of the piece, sung by Nicky Minaj, can be adequately summarized by its refrain:

Make me come alive,
Come on and turn me on.
Come on, save my life
Come on and turn me on.
I’m too young to die
Come on and turn me on.
You’ve got my life in the palm of your hands.
Come, save me now, I know you can.

At first listen, this sounds like a bold stroke of female sexual empowerment. The female is the aggressor; she demands sexual attention, perhaps even satisfaction. But listen a little more closely, and it becomes clear that even here, the woman is utterly dependent upon the man, not only for her sexual needs, but for her very life. “My body needs a hero,” she cries; “Don’t let me die young.” She literally cries out to the man for salvation, almost as if her sexuality is a burden, a drag on her very existence.

The issue is similar in Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been?” in which the singer declares:

I’ve been everywhere, man
Looking for someone
Someone who can please me,
Love me all night long…

You can have me all you want
Any way
Any day
Just show me where you are tonight.

Again, the female singer’s sexuality is at stake here, and not the male’s, yet again, there is a sense of dependence on the man. Although Rihanna’s tune does not imply that death is imminent if the singer fails to find the lover who can satisfy her, it does suggest that she has been searching rather endlessly (“all my life”) for this magical being that she suspects is hiding from her. The image of a woman who’s “been everywhere” hunting for the right man can hardly be called empowering, and furthermore, her desire for a man who will “love her all night long” is unrealistic and bound to end in disappointment, particularly if this is what is required to please her. Once in a while, okay, but people need to sleep, after all. At bottom this is a song of frustration, not of desire, which actually makes it very similar in theme to “Turn Me On,” if different in form. Finally, there is nothing in the least bit feminist about the singer’s desperate cry of “You can have me all you want!” which rather only implies that she’s willing to strike a bargain, offering sexual complicity in the man’s desires in exchange for fulfillment of her own.

Of course, there’s at least some sense of fairness in that, particularly when contrasted to the odiously pathetic “Brokenhearted” by Kashmir, a nearly fifties-themed anthem of the dependence of feminine happiness on the behavior of men. This seemingly harmless, lighthearted tune features the following reprehensible refrain:

I’ve been waiting all day
For you to call me, baby
Come on, finish what we started
Don’t you leave me brokenhearted tonight.
Honest baby, I’ll do
Anything you want to
Let’s get up, let’s get on it
Don’t you leave me brokenhearted tonight.

Can you picture Jane Fonda sitting around waiting all day for a man to call her, and then blindly agreeing to do whatever he wants? But this point is so vital to Kashmir’s theme that she even repeats it in her spoken-word interlude:

Anything you want to do
I’ll be on it, too.

Which leaves one wondering whether men really like women who bow to their every whim. Popular musicians certainly seem to think so.

Interestingly, it is Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones” that, to me, portrays feminine sexuality as most nearly on an equal footing with masculine sexuality. The opening chorus is sung by the female, Sia:

Hey, I heard you were a wild one
If I took you home, it’d be a home run
Show me how you’ll do
I wanna shut down the club with you
Hey I heard you like the wild ones…

The male voice then interjects with verses which expound upon the man’s interests (“I like crazy, foolish, stupid, party goin’ wild, fist-pumpin’ music” and so on) and then the female chimes in again:

I am a wild one, break me in
Saddle me up, and let’s begin
I am a wild one, tame me now
Runnin’ with wolves, and I’m on the prowl…

Very interesting. Now the song is not about the particular desire of either the man or the woman; rather, it concerns two like-minded people, “wild ones” who happen to find each other. Both parties are the pursued and the pursuer; neither the man nor the woman is dominant. However, the same theme of submission as an expression of feminine sexuality that dominates Katy Perry’s “E.T.” is also present here: the female singer wishes to be “tamed” and “broken.” If we’re uncertain about this, we only have to listen to the second-to-last line of the male singer in response to the female’s refrain:

Tear up that body; dominate you till you’ve had enough.

The language is harsh, borderline offensive, yet it’s along the line of what the woman appears to want; he promises to fulfill her desire (“till you’ve had enough”) by putting himself in control over her body. Think of the similarity to Christina Aguilera’s line in Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger”:

You wanna know how to make me smile
Take control, own me just for the night.

Which, again, leaves one wondering whether men really like women who bow to their every whim. Or whether women really wish to be the ones to bow.

In other words, even in the popular music of today, the sexually-desirous woman is still submissive; hopelessly subject to the whims of a man, and furthermore, seems to want it that way. The only difference appears to be that in the new century, she begs for sex instead of love. Not what I would call empowering. Ultimately one must conclude that although the sexual content of popular culture has increased, and the sexuality of women in particular has grown in acceptance, that the songs of today are no more liberating, and possibly even less so, than those of a generation ago. They’re just more graphic. 

Hess, Rudolf, Commandant of Auschwitz, tr. Constantine FitzGibbon, World Publishing Company: Cleveland and New York, 1951.

Commandant of Auschwitz combines the autobiography which Rudolf Hoess wrote while awaiting trial at Nuremberg as well as a number of official statements he gave to his interrogators regarding other SS personnel with whom he had significant contact. There is a lot I could say about this book, because Hoess, rather surprisingly, has a number of interesting ideas and observations, particularly in regards to the concept and execution of imprisonment and the lesser-known victims of the concentration-camp system, but for the moment I’ll confine myself to what he has to say about conducting the affairs of Auschwitz.

Hoess makes no bones about his political beliefs; he unwaveringly avers his continued allegiance to the Nazi Party, and, unlike many Nazis, who denied complicity with the concept behind or execution of the Holocaust, even suggests that he would have been in favor of it were it vital to the cause:

“Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.” p. 160.

However, what is most fascinating about the book is that as it progresses, it becomes clear that Hoess was, generally speaking, against the customary Nazi treatment of the Jews, not out of compassion for their situation or any sense of wrongdoing in causing their suffering, but for purely bureaucratic reasons.

Thus he complains about the nature of the site, which lacked sufficient water, drainage and building materials for the size it was later to assume; he argues against the massive overcrowding, which caused disease to run rampant and had terrible psychological effects upon the inmates, which he believed led to rapid deterioration in their health; against the incompetence and maliciousness of the guards under his control, whose approach to corporal punishment he felt was detrimental to the objective of maintaining peace in the camp while it conducted its operations. He berates the Food Ministry for constantly reducing rations during the course of the war, not because he had pity for the starving concentration-camp dwellers, no, but because it prevented him from maintaining an adequately-functioning work force. The selection process itself, he argues, was faulty at its core:

“If Auschwitz had followed my constantly repeated advice, and had only selected the most healthy and vigorous Jews, then the camp would have produced a really useful labor force and one that would have lasted.” p. 176.

The implication is that more Jews should have been sent immediately to the gas chambers rather than being corralled into the work details if the goal of attaining adequate war-workers was to be achieved. In other words, if Hoess had had his way, the concentration camps would have contained a large contingent of healthy, well-fed Jews and many more dead ones.

Hoess relates anecdotes of the desperate starvation of the camp residents; of inmates being attacked and beaten by their fellows for a crust of bread, of cannibalism among Russian prisoners-of-war. He assures us that his war-time prisoners became little different from civilian criminals, unhesitant to sacrifice their fellows in order to improve their own condition; in order to get an edge on survival. He speaks of the attachment of the Jews to the members of their own families; of the efforts of the mothers to calm their children as they walked into the gas chambers or to throw them out of the doors, pleading for their young lives, just before they are sealed. And then he tells a story of one Special Detachment Jew who had been assigned to the burning of corpses. When the man pauses for a moment in the course of his labors, Hoess inquires of the Capo in charge as to the cause. The Capo informs him that one of the dead in the pile is the man’s wife.

But following his moment’s pause, the man has already gone back to work. And that is when it struck me, that in spite of the distinction between the powerful and the powerless, what a terrible similarity exists between the Commandant and the prisoner. The Commandant does not deal with people; he deals with issues, problems, supply chains, bureaucracy. He is almost entirely detached from the suffering of those under his care. And likewise the inmate has detached himself from his own suffering; he is unable to acknowledge or permit it to penetrate him. Instead he merely attends to his work, the work that, ironically, makes him free, even as the sign above the gate so illusively promised. Detachment means survival; and the ability to detach oneself from one’s circumstances is perhaps a necessary adaptation. For as long as people are able to view one another without acknowledging their humanity, their personhood, they will treat their fellows cruelly. And in order to endure that cruelty, those who suffer from it will have to become like their oppressors: empty of compassion and feeling, intent only on bare survival.

It is now well-known that many Nazis who were recruited into concentration-camp or extermination services were unable to endure it; indeed, many were transferred, upon request, from participation in the brutalities that accompanied occupation and deportation into other branches of service. Considerable care and effort were expended in making exterminations tolerable for the executioners as well as their victims; as horrendous as the mass gassings were, they were viewed as more humane, less wearing on the soul than the mass shootings which had theretofore been employed. Hoess describes how numerous of his subordinates approached him, expressing deeply-troubled thoughts over the mass exterminations; how he deemed it his duty to appear unmoved. Not all of the Nazis were able to view their captives as chattel, as mere bodies to be fed and housed and employed and killed and burned, any more than some of their victims were able to forget the essential humanity of their captors. Consider Hoess’ description of the Allied air raids, which brought terror to the skies over Germany and the occupied lands:

“Attacks of unprecedented fury were made on factories where prisoners were employed. I saw how the prisoners behaved, how guards and prisoners cowered together and died together in the same improvised shelters, and how the prisoners helped the wounded guards.
During such heavy raids, all else was forgotten. They were no longer guards or prisoners, but only human beings trying to escape from the hail of bombs.” p. 183.

Humans, one and all. Hoess is not one of the Nazis who viewed the Jews as somehow less than human, and therefore worthy of extinction. He sincerely believes that they were a threat to what he sees as the truly German way of life, and that the measures that were taken against them were necessary in order to preserve the integrity of the nation. He is therefore offended by the vicious propaganda propagated by publications such as Der Stürmer, believing its exaggerated attacks upon Jewish morals and behavior capable of backfiring and creating sympathy for the Jews. He argues that the nations conquered by Germany during the Second World War should have been treated with greater respect and kindness, which would have unmanned much of the resistance which grew following the invasion. And finally, in the ultimate expression of utter disregard for the unadulterated evil imposed upon the unoffending peoples of the world, Hoess at last concedes that the Holocaust should not have occurred. But listen to his reasons why:

“I also see now that the extermination of the Jews was fundamentally wrong. Precisely because of these mass exterminations, Germany has drawn upon herself the hatred of the entire world. It in no way served the cause of anti-Semitism, but on the contrary brought the Jews far closer to their ultimate objective.” p. 198.

The Holocaust was wrong, according to Hoess, not owing to fundamental human principles of kindness and decency, or compassion for one’s fellows, but because it did not serve the Nazi cause. Which eerily implies that he believes that it would have been “right” had it only served the purpose for which it was intended. Is that, too, an essentially human characteristic? To be able to justify the means, if they achieve what is perceived to be a desirable end? 

I first became interested in popular musical censorship sometime in the early 2000s. I had moved from Western Massachusetts to Northern California, and was riding in my car with a friend when the song “Date Rape” came on the air.

“Here’s that new Sublime song,” I said.

“This isn’t new,” he answered. “It’s been out for a while.”

“Oh,” I answered. “Well, it couldn’t have been that long; I only just started hearing it.”

“It came out years ago,” he assured me.

But I had never heard it, and on consideration I put together a hypothesis as to why. It had to be because the song simply didn’t get airplay in my conservative area of New England. It was evidently not because Sublime was locally unpopular; they were popular enough for me to immediately recognize “Date Rape” as theirs, although I did not own any of their albums. And so it seemed highly likely that the mysterious absence of the song from my northeastern airwaves must have been the result of local censorship.

It was not, of course, the first time I’d heard music censored. Swearing in popular music was still pretty uncommon in the nineties, but there were definitely stations which played kinder, gentler versions of certain music. So, for example, one might hear Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” with the section about the “little red panties” expunged, which undoubtedly made it more palatable when they decided to use it in The Tigger Movie (go figure). Interestingly, though, I never heard the “crystal meth” portion cut out until I got to California. Perhaps the drug was already popular here then; I was barely aware of it at that time myself, so perhaps there was a coastal disparity in its perceived threat. But after that I began to notice regional disparities in popular music and how it’s censored – I heard, for example, the “hash” silenced out of Weezer’s “Hash Pipe” somewhere in the Midwest when it was first released – and more recently it was brought to my attention in a rather startling fashion when I was in a department store in Salinas, and found that the following line from Kashmir’s “Brokenhearted” had been replaced with an instrumental on the store stereo:

Sippin’ on my Patron just to calm my nerves.

Wow, I thought, really? You can’t refer to Patron in department store music? I assumed this was an alcohol and not a brand issue, but given what plays on the radio nowadays, I was amazed. Anyway, so this inspired me to start keeping track of these weird little instances – not the bleeping of ordinary swear words, mind, but the unusual or inconsistent stuff – and my only regret is that I didn’t do it long ago. But here is my list, such as it is, all involving songs I have heard on the radio this year.

Flo Rida ft. Sia, “Wild Ones”: One Northern California station plays a shortened version, eliminating the lines:
     
Show you another side of me
A side you would never thought you would see
Tear up that body, dominate you till you’ve had enough
I can’t lie, the wilds don’t lie

I have never heard this station shorten any other song, so I have to imagine that it’s a content and not a length issue. The other stations of the same format play the song in full.

Pitbull ft. Ne Yo, Nayer, Afrojack, “Tonight”: In the line “My family’s from Cuba, but I’m an American, I don’t get money like Seacrest,” I heard the word Seacrest bleeped on a Los Angeles radio station in July. Really. The line on Lindsay Lohan remained intact, though. I’m not sure whether that means she outranks him in this station’s eyes or vice versa.

Flo Rida, “Whistle”: One Northern California station – not, incidentally, the same one that plays the short version of “Wild Ones” – censors the “damn” out of the line:

It’s a d**n shame, pulled a d**n hamstring tryin’ to put it on ya.

Now, if you’re familiar with the song, which is incredibly sexually graphic, you know that this cannot have been done for the sake of the children. But I wonder whether there are still people who adhere with particular attention to the idea that “damn,” unlike other swear words, is a blasphemy, for although I don’t recall the song involved, I also heard “goddamn” replaced with “doggone” on an L.A. station this summer. Talking about fellatio, after all, won’t get you sent to hell.

Finally, I’d like to close with two songs which, like my Sublime example, appear to be subject to some form of local bias, for although several months have passed since I first heard them on the radio in the L.A. area, I have yet to hear them on the Northern California airwaves: Cash Out’s “Cashin’ Out” and Young Jeezy’s (ft. Ne Yo) “Leave You Alone.” Now, I don’t know for certain that either of these songs does not, in fact, get airplay here, but if they do, I haven’t heard them, and it does seem to me strange that I have not heard “Cashin’ Out” north of Santa Cruz nor “Leave You Alone” north of Ventura County, particularly considering that I heard both songs down south in the context of a countdown of popular music. It would make more sense if these were artists indigenous to the L.A. area; it did not surprise me, for instance, that I did not hear Kreayshawn’s “Go Hard” while down south, as she is an Oakland artist. It is certainly possible that these tunes are deemed members of a different genre here, and play only on certain stations, but I suspect there are likely other factors at work. The California/Massachusetts thing I can understand, but what possible explanation could there be for such a disparity between two major metropolitan areas in the same state? You tell me.