Vile human that he was – it’s true: The human butcher of the Third Reich didn’t eat meat. Look it up. Google it. Oddity of history, maybe, but does this make you want to swallow a side of beef, eat a whole smoked ham or what?
My friends who are vegetarians blow me off when I mention this truth that they consider to be some political ploy, like when people who watch Fox News won’t consider CNN news legitimate because of the whole liberal/conservative/red state/blue state competition foisted on us by pundits of every ilk. But that’s another story that doesn’t involve hams versus turnips.
How is it that a man who killed so many humans didn’t eat meat? Is it irony? Is it mystery? No. It’s just another example of contradiction – that funky concoction of misbegotten things that don’t go together, making life like a box of chocolate tumblebugs. This is a subject I know a little about, being from the Deep South (contradiction, not chocolate tumblebugs).
Last week, driving on I-85 through Atlanta late at night coming back from a funeral, I was being sandwiched tightly by two 18-wheelers. The closeness of the chomping metal monsters and the fact that I was in a rented minivan with my children and our dog gave me the urge to get away from them before I was squished into a Caravan smear on the pavement. If you have traveled the I’s (interstates) lately, you know that big trucks and small cars are mating at every turn, and the small car almost always loses the ugly embrace. Instead of dying in a fiery tangle, I sped up to get out of the way. No good deed goes unpunished. Not in Georgia.
Suddenly, a state trooper was on my tail, cranking the blues in my rearview mirror. It seemed odd that he managed to pinpoint me out of trucks flying past me going much faster, but that is also another story for someone with a law degree.
On the ticket, the officer wrote that I was doing 68 mph in a 55 mph zone. That seemed about right. But then, on the same ticket, he wrote that I was doing 80 mph in a 55 mph zone. Ah, the Southern contradiction.
Now I suppose I either get to make a choice of which to plead innocent to, or guilty to, or both, or neither. I could be innocent of both, but how can I be guilty of both?
I know I-85 in Atlanta is a horrible place for man or metal beast, but is there a dual universe where rented Dodge Caravans have superhuman powers to bend the laws of physics and travel two different speeds at once? Einstein did mental gymnastics about such things. I’ve never thought about it much, until now.
Hitler, the vegetarian, is becoming easier to understand.
