My father’s grave is marked with a large tombstone that notes, in an ancient tongue, that he was an intelligent and modest man.   His father’s grave, in the low-rent section of the same small town cemetery, where the tomb stones are jammed together like a mouthful of crooked teeth, is marked by an epitaph calling him straight and simple.  There are no other grave stones, going further back than that.  The Nazis simply didn’t give the Jews they killed such amenities.    

“Well, look, Elie, I don’t blame you for being disgusted, and angry,” said the skeleton of my father, “though I think we can safely throw these paragraphs into the circular file.   You are talking statistics again, a few handfuls of terrified, powerless Jews run into the swamp to drown, shot in the head.  They happen to be our people, fair enough, but, I mean, what is your point, really?”    

When I said “fuck Hitler” a few weeks back, this is part of what I was talking about.  

“Well, I’m sure the corpse of that psychopath is twitching in rage at your disrespect, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “In your fucking face, Hitler!”  

Fuck Hitler, dad.  In all his forms.  Hitler was a rock star of genocide, as charismatic as Elvis, to those who loved him.   We have always had these types among us, they tap into that rage we all feel sometimes, transform it into an irrational movement, capable of the worst mob violence.   When I used to rail against the aptly named Dick Cheney I was walking a mine field.  I had to be careful not to make any Nazi references, because, of course, Cheney never set up a system of death camps, didn’t even make any racial laws.  Killed a lot of people, sure, but not in the organized, systematic way Hitler’s folks did.  The comparison was unfair, even I realized that, even as he oversaw the torture and deaths of perhaps a million people in his borderless, trillion dollar, permanent war against Terror.    

“The pundits still call it that, ‘The War on Terror’, just goes to show — the power of branding,” said the skeleton.    

Yes.  So in the time I have left I suppose I want to testify.  I want to stand against the bullshit that is force fed to us by the marketing geniuses, by those who make big bucks to make atrocities sound benign, to keep the wheels of the war and oil industries humming.  

“That’s a big job, Elie.  Those types have already won,” said the skeleton.  “And besides, what do you really hope to gain?  You don’t even know the names of any of Pop’s large family, Grandma’s.  You have three siblings of my mother, Chaski, Volbear and Yuddle, just their names and no trace of the hamlet they lived and died in.  On my father’s side, just like him, a complete blank, two eyes, a nose and a mouth, in Eli’s immortal phrase.   That’s all you have, that and the area that 3/4 of them lived in,  where they all died horrible deaths.   At least they were spared being forced into cattle cars and railroaded off to slave labor and brutal living deaths, until their actual deaths.”  

You’re right, dad. Some days, it’s just too big a job to even contemplate.  I need to find a fucking chain pharmacy that has the shingles vaccine, before I start my immunosuppressive therapy in a few days.   Shouldn’t be this hard, I’ve been to several pharmacies already, one hurdle after another– now apparently it has to be a CVS that has the vaccine in stock.  Should not be this fucking hard, “should”, of course, being a word one shouldn’t use in a nation that places corporate personhood over the personhood of humans.   Give Hitler some credit for that, he showed how it could be done.  

“All roads lead back to Hitler with you,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah.  And there’s a freshly painted sign on that road, I painted it myself.  It says “fuck Hitler.”    

“Sieg Heil, man,” said the skeleton, listlessly lifting an arm in the Hitler salute.