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Would you like a little sauerkraut or borscht with that cheeseburger?

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Not too long after the shoulder replacement surgery I wrote about here, my dog and I embarked on a 43-state, 35-40,000 mile backroads tour of the United States in a small camper, and we’ve been living in that ever since. With the exception of a total of less than 900 miles on freeways when they were unavoidable, or the occasional need to go through a city, this entire trip was in rural areas. From the upper right-hand corner of the country in Maine to the upper left at Cape Flattery, through northernmost Idaho hinterlands (where some kind soul shot at me and missed (but nailed my camper a foot outboard from my head), the deserts, the prairie, the deep South and what Kennedy called “nut country” in Texas… it seemed like the pollsters were reporting more on the reflection they saw staring back at themselves from the walls of the bubbles they were in than what was going on. The by-now-famous Trump enthusiasm gap was palpable. It was nauseating, but it was there. 

What added another layer of darkness to this voyage was intensive research I had been doing about a case of Soviet espionage on one side of my family and wartime Germany on the other. The research is a bitch—the FBI tells me they have so many documents on my family that it’ll take them 17 years to clear it for release under my three and four-year-old FOIA requests.

One of the people involved, my father’s first father-in-law, was accused by Hitler and Göring of setting the Reichstag fire on the night it happened, and that made me branch the research out into a close study of that event. The history wasn’t new to me, but the immersion in the details was. Lots of people are talking about the parallels between Trumpism and the mechanics of fascism and Naziism. Watching it unfold in real time while studying it was unnerving. There are more than parallels. The plays are being repeated.

On this trip, I learned that there is a right-wing army waiting for its marching orders. I, for one, fully expect it to be called into action. It won’t take much. They’re waiting, they’re heavily armed.

Remember when Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care? Of course they wouldn’t; they’d like nothing more than to join in.

I wrote a longish post up about that on a new section of my blog called Mein Camp, titled, Would you like a little sauerkraut or borscht with that cheeseburger?


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