Opinion: Godwin’s law and the law of men

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Over at his ArtsJournal music blog, the composer Kyle Gann applies his microtonal skills to finding the secret Nazi origins of — what else? — the Bush Administration’s perfidy.

The evidence: Aldous Huxley writing in 1945 about how the Allies had to build up their own militarist muscles in order to fight the militarism of the Axis. It’s all about the somatotonic (‘love of muscular activity, aggressiveness, and lust for power; indifference to pain; callousness with regard to other people’s feelings; a love of combat and competitiveness; a high degree of physical courage....’), but it’s a truism that the United States emerged from the war a substantially more regimented, less freewheeling society.

Unfortunately for Gann’s (possibly facetious) thesis, all this occured at a time when the Democrats controlled everything in Washington D.C. except one janitor’s closet at the Smithsonian; and in the decades that followed, our battered nation took in quite a bit of muscular activity from the football-tossing Jack Kennedy, combat and competitiveness from LBJ, activity and aggressiveness from Scoop Jackson, and all those Democrat wars Bob Dole was always talking about.

Mike Gravel might even note that it was in gearing up to fight the Central Powers, not the Axis, that the United States opened its heart to pointless militarism. Pat Buchanan would take that back to the Spanish-American War; and me, I’m not too sure the U.S. heart was ever closed to pointless militarism in the first place.

I mean, isn’t there a statute of limitations on this kind of They-saved-Hitler’s-brain woolgathering?