Take a careful look at this picture:

Same incident. After I sat back down on the couch, hours passed. I wrote some more, watched TV, drank more coffee. Then I glanced over at the scene and saw that the fly was gone. I couldn’t believe it. I got up to look closer. Yep, he’s gone.

Apparently, there is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination, and of flies that cannot be killed. It is an area which we call . . . the Twilight Zone.

I’ve studied the Holocaust in history classes, of course, and read some books about it and watched a few documentaries. On a brief trip to Berlin once, I even visited Dachau. I was and remain deeply horrified, ashamed, angry and sad that such a thing could happen to people—by other people. I’m sure most people have the same reaction.

Early on, I found it strange that those events—the concentration camps and the outright rounding up and killing of people—were so contemporary. It was antithetical to my notion of history. Since the newsreels, films and photographs were in black and white, they registered as history—squarely in the past. Safely in the past. But paradoxically, I knew that my stepfather had served in the Army in World War II. Further, he even was in a unit that liberated one of the concentration camps in Europe (and, more astonishing, had an album of photographs that he took while he was at the camp.). And yet, while I was growing up: there he was, my same stepfather, going to work, or helping one of us kids fix something, or sitting on the couch with my Mom watching a Western on TV.

As an adult, once in a while I’d remember the album. Those pictures in that album told a terrible tale. The most terrible tale ever told, the most horrible thing that will ever be told, I believed.

I was wrong.

Much later, in my fifties, I learned something about the Holocaust that is arguably more terrible than what that photo album told me: as the Nazis advanced across Europe, they received substantial voluntary help in killing the ‘undesirables’ in the villages that they overtook; and, horribly, that help came from the victims’ fellow villagers, or neighbors. Over and over again. This was the utterly shocking conclusion behind deep research, manifested in an extraordinary documentary, and backed up by every credible manner of investigation. There are photos, records, witness testimony and especially participant witness testimony to this fact.

You really have to picture this at the village level to see how people can just fucking snap. Let’s say it is 1940 and you are fairly cordial with everyone in your Eastern European village. You live a pretty normal life, though events in Germany have been rocking the political world and putting a lot of people on edge for 7 years now. So, the Germans, drunk on power and hubris, finally unleash and crash into your country and start ‘liberating’ it. They’re in your village now and they want all the Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and other named undesirables in the town square jetzt! There is enormous excitement, everything stops in the village, there are shouts in the German language, shouts in other languages, and the targeted families are crying and in great distress, holding their children close. A certain giddiness takes hold of a number of the other villagers and some get into the act by helping the German Soldiers round people up, shouting at and striking the ‘undesirables’ in the process. Soon everyone is marched to a huge pit outside the town, in a field shielded by a tree-line just off the main road. A large amount of the village has come to watch, and you are there among them. The Germans are coordinating with the participating group of villagers, and those villagers now have rifles. There is robotic obedience from the stunned and overwhelmed undesirables as they are lined up to be shot. Some of your friends are in the line to be doing the shooting and you can’t believe how excited, powerful, and righteous you feel. You never liked these people, and you know it now. You really know it now. These fucking Jews. And the queers are going to Hell anyway. They must all be sinners. We’d all be better off without them.

You are now standing with your comrades, shoulder to shoulder, and looking down your rifle into a long line of men, women and children standing in the pit. Beside you are some SS Einsatzgruppen Soldiers and behind all of you are a few German Officers. Behind the Officers are the villagers who’ve come to watch. Your family is here and are with this last group of people. Some of the women on both sides of the rifles are carrying infants. The Germans are giving commands through an interpreter and it’s just only seconds now . . . .You scan the line for a moment and think: “There’s the guy who used to play chess with us on Tuesdays, and there’s the idiot who helps out with the horses at the end of the street, and that’s my wife’s friend, I think, and her two sons—they’re Jewish.” You look back above the sight of your rifle and you’re looking straight at a teenage girl who is sobbing and shaking, clutching her little sister’s hand. It was such a beautiful May day, that day. A beautiful meadow, the sun, the warmth. It’s something everybody there later remembered; everybody mentioned how beautiful it had been that day. BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

The passive villagers greatly outnumbered the German Soldiers but never stopped the killings.

The participating villagers were feeding something very dark that had been sleeping in their souls.

I imagine it was initially a surprise even to the German Officers, hardened beyond hard, that every village had so many people who would rise up to assist them in the killing of their fellows. So many were eager to satisfy a deep prejudice, exact a petty revenge, or gain some other minor advantage. So many that, grotesquely, it became a measure of additional labor that the Germans could count on as they went from place to place, day after day—killing.

I was beyond surprised when the Rwanda genocide happened 1994. I will spare you what this must have looked like with machetes, but it should suffice to say that this was more, and more recent, proof of the tenuous hold on civility that humans have with each other. Nationalism drove this bloodbath with shocking speed and brutality; collective madness in humans is apparently always that explosively close to the surface.

And. Now. This. Election.

The anger and feeling spit from Trump supporters is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the anger and feeling that motivated the aforementioned horrors. Nationalism and racism in this country are becoming more and more indistinguishable from that which drove the events in Germany and Rwanda. The only question that remains is whether we have the same kind of people in ‘our’ village here that other countries have evidenced to their eternal disgrace.

Trump’s words and actions have been sent through America’s body politic like a medical dye sent through a patient to ‘light up’ the cancerous cells for everyone to see. The ‘Nationalist’ theme is the same, and white as ever. (When Trump said that there were ‘good people on both sides’ in Charlottesville, I could hear glass starting to break in Jewish storefronts. And when he told the Proud Boys to ‘stand by’ – I heard a pre-mobilization order.) And the ‘undesirables’ theme is the same, let’s just update the definition of undesirability: lazy immigrants, snowflake liberals, welfare blacks, inferior women, Mexican criminals and rapists, social justice warriors, Democrat leaders and yes, still the Jews.

We’re not all the way to killings yet, but, if you are really angry and disappointed that Trump lost this election, if you got a thrill from seeing ‘militia’ strut through our streets brandishing rifles, start thinking about whether you can see yourself in that body of villagers watching the slaughter with some quiet grotesque satisfaction. Would that be enough? Or, would you want to be actually out front holding a rifle?

And please stop the bullshit about your merely supporting Trump’s policies. Trump’s peddling of hate is his policy.

Your Facebook posts are assiduously cataloging the nature of your nature.

You are now ‘lit up’ for everyone to see.

———

Take a careful look at this picture.

Now, we’ve already discussed the original kill-strike at the fly that resulted in shot-gunning the room with perfectly delicious mocha coffee. We’ve been through all that.

After taking that first picture and cleaning up, I sat back here on the couch in front of that gorgeous fire and got back on the computer (I began to write Fly Shot!) for a good long while, chuckling occasionally about the incident. Eventually, and I mean maybe 30 or 40 minutes later, I looked over that way.

The fly was still there.

In the same place. Wow. I had been all under and around that table swiping away with paper towels and somehow missed the fly? I had forgotten about it during the cleanup and could have easily sent it flying across the floor.

OK. I got up and began walking over to it with a napkin to grab it with. As I was bending down to it, it suddenly lifted off and began to wing its way slowly up and around in a wide low circle around its liftoff spot. I started. WTF?! I lurched backward toward the couch, grabbed the fly-swatter and was back as the fly buzzed back a few inches above where he had started from; improbably, I hit him again, in the same spot where he had landed after being struck initially. Since he hadn’t buzzed away noticeably, I studied the business end of the swatter to find him: there he is stuck to the lower left corner of the yellow square part. Still bending over and studying, I decided to simply lay the fly-swatter directly down. I didn’t want to disturb the scene any further.

There it is as a memorial. The killer and the killed. The law of the jungle, spread at our feet in plain sight at last. You, with your neatly prepacked food, losing sight of the violence that enables your life.

Anyway, I can’t believe he was alive that whole time, slowly recovering. And after I had made such a big thing of my killing him by writing that previous post! Embarrassing! (Who’s the real hero here Kevin? You, with your awesome weapons and resources, or the fly, brave beyond brave, suffering in silence and gathering the strength to fight again―while you warm your toes by the fire?)

So. Either way, I killed him.

Again.

―――