The Curse of the Headless Hitler

Mack Hall

In Berlin a Communist ex-policeman crossed a barrier in a private museum in order to twist the head off a wax statue of Adolf Hitler costing around 250,000 U.S. dollars. Or, in terms of real purchasing power, a couple of gallons of gasoline.

Was that not bravely done of the Communist? Of course one wonders if the Communist ex-policeman is aware that his hero Stalin and the now heil-less, headless Hitler were great chums at one time, sharing the occasional quiet evening over Poland.

One would think that an ex-policeman would respect the property rights of others, and twist off Hitlerian heads only with the permission of the owners. "I say, Franz, may I twist off the head of your wax statue of Hitler?" "I’d rather you didn’t, Heinrich, but over here I’ve got this lovely, pre-owned Admiral Darlan you might fancy."

Another question obtains: who would spend the equivalent of a cup of Starbuck’s coffees building a wax statue of an emo creep who murdered almost as many people as Stalin or Mao-Tse-Dung? If a private museum has a quarter-mill lying about gathering dust or wax, why not build something useful, like a library of history for the children of Berlin?

Will folks now make a habit of decapitating images of Saddamn Hussein, Osama Bin Ladin, Henry VIII, Nicolae Ceaucescu, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and whoever invented TV reality shows?

Revising and sometimes eliminating history are as American as tortillas. All the schools that were named for George Washington or Davy Crockett or Kit Carson have long since become renamed for contemporary heroes or perceptions of heroes. William Barrett Travis Elementary becomes Emilio Zapata Elementary, and in a few years Chou En Lai Elementary.

Those type-A personalities who, for good or for evil, thundered through history and thought their names would live forever are as but dead double-A batteries leaking acid in a child’s discarded video game in a ditch next to the beer cans and the fast-food wrappers and the rotting armadillo done in by a speeding Hyundai.

Heck, even your bank changes names two or three times before you go through a couple of boxes of those prettily-printed checks. A friend suggests that banks would do well to put up their new signs in velcro; they’ll be coming down in a year or two. And do you know who owns your neighborhood bank? In my little town’s case, a company out of Spain at present; the revolutionary process seems to be reversing itself.

I wonder if there is a statue of a 19th-century Spanish financier somewhere. And would anyone care if its head were knocked off by some Communist screaming "Death to El Caudillo!"? Um, dude, like Hitler he's been dead for years now. Your show of righteous outrage is about eighty years too late.

What will happen when The People learn that the Dalai Lama was a slave-owner until the Chinese ran him out of Tibet? He’s living large now, though – jet planes, hotel suites, an entourage, medals of freedom here and there. There’s lots of money to be made in the holy man business. With no statues of the Dalai Lama, folks will just have to smash their made-in-China Dalai Lama coffee mugs in protest outside Abraham Lincoln – Teddy Roosevelt – Al Gore Consolidated High School.

Watch out for the carbon footprint, though.