Evil is boring

In my life I've reserved quite a bit of face area (eye glint, wry smirk) and brain time (innuendo, word play) for the ironic. I relished themes that undermined dominant narratives and twisted the undies of convention. Over the years though, I've noticed that my enthusiasm for irony and poking a stick in the Eye of Society has diminished.

One ready example that came to me recently involved the Whitey America Loves to Hate, Adolf Hitler. I was once involved in a bit of street theater with Isaac Sanchez and Eddie Lee Sausage where my role was a Deadhead puppet master controlling the actions of marching brownshirts. The piece skillfully connected the stagecraft and mass-mind control of Alpine Valley '89 and Nuremburg '36.

A flimsy and slanderous connection? Before hippies pelt me with love beads and falafel, they should note that History doesn't wholly refute the connection, as this image of Der Fuhrer and his pet transportation project reveals.

So, thanks to my friends I had a perspective of Hitler that was a little more nuanced than simply as a Bogeyman to promote fear as means to advance political agendas.

A few years later I inherited a largess of photos from my Aunt Ione who had served as an Army librarian in Europe after the war. One of the more curious images she had was a postcard with a photo of a trim overly large ranch style home on a mountaintop. The card identified the structure as Berghof, Hitler's vacation retreat.

I put the photo in a small frame on my wall. I liked it for the obvious linkage of modernist architectural style and the banality of evil. I felt a fiendish delight in the idea that the style of Hitler's leisure palace could easily nestle in a '50s vintage suburban America cul-de-sac.

But no more. I've grown weary of such play. Besides, Third Reich architecture is no longer subversive and relegated to the bland suburbs. It's gone prime time and been coopted for more prominent monuments.