Beethoven Rolled Over on Top of Zombie Hitler

            On Wednesday morning I had the first twenty lines of “Flash Forward” by Serge Gainsbourg memorized and only had six left to go.

            I worked on my journal.

            I finished listening to the U2 discography. The real star of this band is The Edge. The only innovative elements added to the sound of this band come from him. His style is very minimalist and he seems in his guitar style to be a hybrid of Keith Richards and Pete Townsend. He’s also a better singer than Bono. Bono's lyrics tend to be drawn from clichés and they tend to be more message than art. Where there is more message than art there is pretension. They do have some good songs but none of them break any ground, which is what a work of art is supposed to do. Arcade Fire does everything that U2 tries to do but they do it artistically and without being full of themselves.

            Around midday I started organizing the top bookshelf in my bedroom. Some of the books are already listed in an index that I started a few years ago, categorized according to the Library of Congress system that U of T uses. I looked up the codes for some of the books I’ve acquired since then and added them to the list.

            For lunch I had five of the rollini that I'd cooked the night before, this time with melted process cheese on top, but they were still a bit bland.

            I went out to the liquor store and bought a six-pack. All of the employees there are now wearing full plastic face shield visors.

            In the afternoon I didn’t do my exercises but did take a bike ride downtown. It was my first bike ride of the year in shorts. I rode to Yonge and Bloor and then south on Yonge to Queen. I noticed that Homesense is now open and there was a very long line-up.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I flipped several photos that I’d scanned the wrong side up with the negative scanner.

            I put seven of the spinach and feta rollini in the oven and melted five year old cheddar on top of each one. I had them with a beer while watching the Playhouse 90 production of “Judgement at Nuremberg” from 1959. This teleplay was four years later made into a critically acclaimed motion picture. Coincidentally I had earlier that day listened to Chuck Berry's 1957 first album "After School Session" and so the dark intensity of the teleplay stood in stark contrast to the upbeat optimism of Chuck Berry's songs. Chuck Berry may have been in reform school for armed robbery at the end of World War Two, but when he later caused Beethoven to roll over it was on top of Hitler and thus Hitler’s zombie was never able to return.

But a more bizarre and inappropriate contrast came from the commercials that were aired right after real footage of Nazi atrocities had been shown. After a part that showed documentary footage of Nuremberg’s persecution of the Jews and Hitler’s famous Nuremberg rally, there was a Kleenex commercial with a perky spokeswoman. The most disturbing scene was of British bulldozers ploughing mountains of corpses of Holocaust victims into massive pits because they had no choice for the sake of public health but to bury the bodies as quickly as possible. After that scene was an Ansco camera and film products commercial showing how their film will bring out the blue in a little blonde girl’s eyes.

            The trial was a fictionalized presentation of the Nuremberg judges trial. In reality a much larger number of judges were tried but in this story there were only four.

The prosecution brought up certain incidents that it argued the judges were responsible for, such as cases forced sterilization, the execution of a Jewish man because he had a physically affectionate relationship with a sixteen year old girl. The prosecution’s main evidence was documentary footage of the Holocaust itself.

            The defence attorney rightly argued that Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the United States argued for forced sterilization. It isn’t mentioned there but it has been put in practice in both the United States and Canada, especially against Indigenous people, even up until very recently.

            A woman was put on the witness stand to testify that she had been the sixteen year old girl who had been seen sitting on the Jewish man’s lap and kissing him. She argued that he had been like a father to her and she had been physically affectionate with him in a non-sexual manner.

            One of the judges suddenly pleaded guilty in the middle of the trial but he was still sentenced to life in prison. Another got life, another twenty years and another ten. Apparently none of them were still in prison by the time the show aired in 1957.