Leninad

So I visited my aunt over the weekend, and we went to a hardware store, and at the hardware store they had this:



(Which reads, above the name, "Get hammered and sickled!" Oh terrible, horrible, awful puns. Someone had waaaaaaaaay too much fun with this.)

Obviously I had to buy it. It's just too bad I can't show it to my old Russian professor - it seems to be an occupational hazard of Russian professors that they can't resist quasi-Communist kitsch.

In the Garden of Beasts

I loved Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (the serial killer parts got kind of repetitive, but the Chicago World's Fair is endlessly fascinating), so I've been waiting basically forever for his new book - In the Garden of Beasts, about the American ambassador's family in Berlin in 1933 as Hitler solidified his hold on the country.

And I finally got a hold of it this weekend and I've gotten about seventy pages in and I'm not sure I can continue, because I've conceived such a violent dislike of the American ambassador and his kith and kin. The ambassador has resolved to be open-minded about the current regime, for the value of open-minded that involves rationalizing away evidence that the current regime might be evil.

(I get that he has fond memories of Germany from his youth and thus wants to give the country the benefit of the doubt, but really, there needs to be doubt before you can give someone the benefit of it. He was getting daily reports of government officials beating up unassuming bystanders with impunity. Any doubts he had were self-imposed.)

But he's less obnoxious than his daughter, who not only whole-heartedly ignores any and all evidence of that Germany might be going wrong - even unto ignoring brutality that takes place right in front of her face - but actively excuses it, because, as far as I can tell, she finds brutality attractive. She meets the leader of the secret police and is all "Oooooooh you're the leader of the secret police and everyone thinks you're terrifying! IT IS SO SEXY HOW YOU BEAT UP INNOCENT PEOPLE!"?

To be fair, she doesn't seem to have thought beyond the "everyone thinks you're terrifying! (and that's so sexy!)" to why everyone finds him terrifying. But at some point being thoughtless becomes a form of callousness - cruelty even.

***

And then I tried to watch St. Trinian's which I had also been looking forward to, and had to give that up because schoolgirls being horrid to each other just wasn't hitting my hilarity buttons. Ugh.