The Flaccid Fist And Dilated Pupils Of Fascism

Many dictatorial regimes have decided on the raised fist as their favored salute, and there is a certain rhythm to that. The fist delivers the appropriate sense of aggression and danger, if displayed properly. Trump has been trying for months now to get it to catch on, but he's not having much luck so far. I don't see a lot of fists raised at his rallies. It's probably because Trump's fist is so uninspiring. It conveys none of the required aggression, and the element of danger is notably absent. It's such a poor, dead, flaccid thing. It doesn't look like a fist at all. It looks for all the world like the small hand of a woman in the act of clutching her pearls.

You know what I mean; you've seen him do it at rallies. Please spare me the necessity of introducing yet another photograph of Trump into our discourse. He raises this “fist” with a fully bent elbow, displaying his closed hand up close to his head. There is no tension in it, not in the hand and not in the wrist. He simply closes his fingers gently and holds it there, with the top of the hand falling weakly back towards his forearm so that the knuckles in the middle of his fingers point skyward. He even waves it back and forth to emphasize the loose, feminine quality of it all. You will break some of those fingers if you hit anything with a fist like that.

The effect ruins everything that he sets out to prove by his Steven Seagal tough-guy facial expressions and his attempted tough-guy rhetoric. One look at that sad little fist and he is betrayed as a wannabe. He'll never get his colors; he'll always be sent out on the beer runs.

What's he doing calling attention to those little hands anyway? I thought he was sensitive about it. Maybe he wants to prove to everyone how big and masculine they are. You never know what's going on in that head of his.

Trump's dilated pupils, on the other hand, are a true icon of fascism. That's a symptom that we've seen before. And not only on the offending mongrels in, “Dingoes Ate My Baby.” No, just ask the French about the nightmarish black eyes of those meth'd out Nazi Blitzkrieg enthusiasts. The Hitler Gang loved the stuff, cleverly marketed under the brand name, “Pervitin.” As everyone knows, when you get it from a doctor, it's not narcotics, it's medicine, it's vitamins or something. The Germans in the 1930s were marketing it blended into chocolates to housewives. Oh, honey! You'll just fly through your day's housework with a few of these! They go great with coffee! It was all over the place. The entire Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were tweeking their brains out, until it was time for them to crash, anyway. How did you think that the English got away at Dunkirk? Pluck? Nope. It was good luck. Seventy or eighty hours is all a body can stand, Nazis included. Finally you collapse on the ground with your eyes open.

In other photograph-related Trump news last week there was a meme consisting of close-ups of Trump's eyes at a press conference. He's standing there at a bank of microphones, looking out into TV lights and cameras, with only a thin circle of blue surrounding the huge black dishes of his dilated pupils. He looked like someone in an ophthalmologist's antechamber waiting for his eyes to be ready for a procedure requiring full dilation.

There are several possible explanations for this. David Bowie had a permanently dilated pupil in his left eye due to head trauma received in a fist fight as a teen. Trump's condition seems to come and go, so it's not this one. I think that it's safe to say that Trump is not an LSD aficionado. That stuff will spread your pupils out to the corners of your face. Also on the subject of drugs, though, speed is a distinct possibility. That stuff is very popular in America, and it has been for a long time. The doctors have always been way up on the game, too. They still are! As I mentioned, it's not narcotics and it's not illegal if you get it from the doctors. It's FDA approved! These days, disinterested parents give their kids Ritalin to keep them occupied and malingering adults claim ADHD to get Adderall from carefully selected doctors. Malingering adults like Trump, perhaps, or do you think it's normal for someone to be frantically Tweeting while respectable people are sleeping? Midnight Tweeting and tweeking go hand in hand.

Was it Ivana that informed us that Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table? A bit of light reading for sleepless nights? Maybe he has more in common with those Nazis than we thought. They found out the hard way that the reckless misuse of methamphetamine leads only to tragedy. I hope that we get off easier than they did.

And lose the fists, Jimboni. Keep those little things in your pockets, if they'll reach.

Speed Is Not Good For You

There’s a funny thing that happens with speed. It happens at different times and in different countries. Whenever speed appears on the scene as a novelty, people get carried away and think that the speed won’t hurt them a bit. Then comes abuse, and finally, for individual abusers and larger communities, there comes a terrible reckoning.

This pattern sure hit the Nazis hard. The word is that speed came onto Nazi radar during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Many sources mention American athletes using Benzedrine. The Nazis saw the results, and they were smitten. Within a matter of months a German pharmaceutical outfit came up with a much stronger variant, a kind of crystal methamphetamine. It sounds familiar to anyone who properly experienced the 1960s and 1970s; it is very reminiscent of the pills that were called “Black Beauties” at the time. Boy, were those things strong. The Nazi speed was branded as “Pervitin,” and very soon it was the toast of the town.

It was marketed to housewives in the form of speed-laced chocolates. It became very popular with factory workers. The Nazi military machine was particularly enthusiastic. When World War II started, millions upon millions of the Pervitin tablets were issued to the troops, from tank crews to pilots, and everyone in between.

WWII was the first war to be fought on speed. “Blitzkrieg” was partly a matter of tactics and partly a matter of the drug of choice: Pervitin. In 1939, the French were at a loss to explain how the Germans could keep moving and fighting for days at a time without stopping to rest. They thought that it was a mental condition, and they had a great French name for it: phenomene d’hallucination collective. That is also how the German Landsers went into Poland and the USSR, and they used the stuff throughout the war.

Hitler was abusing speed as well, and the effect on him can easily be seen in photographs taken over the years. He was getting “vitamin” shots from his personal doctor. Speed and cocaine were prominent ingredients. (The cocaine came later on, and Hitler quickly became a big fan.) Speed leaves you a wreck, a physical and nervous wreck. After a matter of time, the results become obvious and only the most desperate abusers will continue the behavior.

The effects are so inevitable, and so terrible, that it is a marvel to me that our current epidemic of crystal meth abuse has been going on for so long. It can only be that there are deep psychological needs that are being met by blasts of Crank. People are very afraid, and they have lost their confidence and their security. They grasp at meth even though they must be aware on some level that it is massively self-destructive and only a temporary patch at best.

I’m afraid that we’ll need to get used to it, because everything is only getting worse these days, and that trend is bound to continue with the current bunch in charge. It’s a shame, too. America has never been a perfect place, but it was a pretty good place there for a while. (Especially if you were a white American.)

I’ll take credit for the editorializing in the last two paragraphs, but the rest of this piece relies on an article by Antony Beevor called, “The Very Drugged Nazis,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books on March 9, 2017. The article was a review of a book on the subject by Norman Ohler.