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We find messages of death and danger almost everywhere. On the nightly news, in the medical column, on the health channel, in the images of the homeless and the AIDS-afflicted, in the junk mail, in the public service advisories, in the supermarket tabloids and their cult worship of the celebrity dead. It's all mixed together, routinely braided into our lives -- murder, torture, superstition, satire, grueling human ordeal. Information shades into rumor and mass fantasy, which convert to topical entertainment. Our levels of perception begin to blend. It isn't always easy to separate disease from its mythology or violence from its trivialization. Not that we're necessarily eager to make distinctions. We depend on an environment that softens and absorbs, that receives the impact of dangerous things without recoil or echo. The message is processed, assimilated and made into something else entirely. Idi Amin became a T-shirt. Racial hostility is a frequent subject of commercials for beer, soft drinks and running shoes. In these 20-second sociodramas, danger appears in the form of angry-looking blacks, who are then instantly reconstituted as happy Pepsi drinkers. We try to obscure threats and disruptions by tailoring them to a format of consumer appeal.
There is another danger we must think about. It reaches us across the decades, subject to the same occasional blurring. We know it mainly by its original markings, its blazonry of the death's-head and the swastika.
Is there something missing from your life which the imagination of the Nazis can helpfully provide?
Nazi lore and notation represent a rich source of material to be consulted in the service of fantasy and self-fulfillment. For your sub-erotic side, there are bondage hoods and tooled black leather. For your violent or racist side, there is inspiration to be drawn from Aryan publications and white power music. For wholesome family entertainment, you have the Holocaust thriller. This is the category of book, movie and TV drama in which the madness of Hitler and the suffering of the Jews function as story apparatus, easily inserted components that are recognizable at once for their vivid qualities of suspense and melodrama. For your sentimental side, there are many detailed studies of the last days of the Third Reich running their melancholy course...