Rainy day, and that's fine.

There are several cliches you'll hear throughout the day, usually spoken with exaggerated sincerity so everyone knows you’re not serious, but are performing the role of The Guy Who Says Those Things. My favorite is “good for the crops,” or “the farmers need it.” This might not be true. It could be too wet to get anything in. I don’t know what statewide conditions might be. I don’t know how far my concern for the farmers should extend. A hundred miles? Past the Iowa border? Those are important farmers too. They might need it.

But we don’t give them any thought because there’s always bread and corn.

I do think about local farmers, though. Hope it's going well.

Sudden need to get out beyond the city, soon. I need to get out of town, stop at Treasure City, see the small towns, drive alongside a long train, drive half an hour without seeing anything but rows of crops on either side of the highway, slide into Moorhead, cross the Red, sit in the gazebo in Island Park at twilight and have a whiskey in a Broadway bar.

Been on a bit of a Hitler binge lately. A nice break from the Roman binge. For this I can thank my absolutely favorite podcast, “The Rest is History,” which matches Dominick Sandbrook and Tom Holland to discuss absolutely everything. Perfect chemistry, very British, wry, droll, laugh-out-loud as well.

Eh? Laugh out loud? And Hitler? Yes, because there are absurdities and banalities that are darkly comic. They’ll do four hours on the rise of Hitler, then four more on the consolidation of power, which seems to involve an inordinate number of conferences at German spas - old-world faded charm, elderly waiters, ticking clocks in the lobby, musty smells, and it becomes a running joke referred to in passing, giving the faithful listener a recognizable callback in the next ep. All unplanned and chatty - as I said, the chemistry is great, two like-minded people who have an impressively substantial storehouse of knowledge and a sense of the breadth and scope of history, but are still continuously curious.

When I say “Binge” I mean that I’d finished the rise-to-power series and was offered up a new documentary on one of the streamers about HITLER’S MARCH TO WAR, or something - new footage! Recently uncovered documents! The hook was a countdown to WW2, and hence they had a chronological splash screen at regular intervals. MUNICH. 362 DAYS TO WAR. These words appear as if slapped on the screen, then vibrate out with a great whoosh.

Because the thing about the run-up to WW2 is this: it needs goosing to make it compelling. Jump cuts and sound effects and ADHD Ken Brown pans.

It got me thinking about the inevitable AI upscaling and enhancing of WW2 footage, particularly of Hitler. Right now he’s mostly the grainy guy shouting in newsreels, or the very grainy guy gliding in a limo as he heils the cheering throngs in Vienna. Color footage is rare. When it’s all made 4K, what sort of impact will it have?

I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I don’t think he’ll earn many new converts. I think some might be mystified by his appeal, because his speeches are like, you know, cringe. Like dude. I don’t know, I guess you had to be there.

1934-1939 absolutely fascinates me, but not because of the marquee events. Those we know. We’ve seen the newsreels. It’s the infiltration of the ideology into everything, the total Nazification of civil and private society. The closest we ever got to that was the ubiquity of the NRA symbol, for a while, and the fact that they incorporated it into a movie musical along with the picture of our Leader is one of those things that makes you think how it might have gone on here.

Flag = Leader = Symbol of Government Program. Kinda sorta Fascist-flavored, no? Maybe not the actual thing, like orange juice that's 25% concentrate.

Our civic buildings looked fascist, too - but as I’ve said before, there was something in the American style that lacked the graceless, overpowering dull banality of fascist architecture.

It made me think about the fusion between statism and futurist aesthetics. What saved us? The aesthetics of World’s Fairs, I think. There was simply too many things outside of the state, and virtually nothing that celebrated the State. The states, yes, and certainly the benevolent technocratic power of the Federal Leviathan, but it was more about corporations and hula girls.

For all its abstraction, there is still something about this that inspires, and does not attempt to intimidate.

And it's down the street from the happy-hued Wonder Bread pavilion.

There’s a bigger piece here, and I think I will write it for Discourse. So I’ll stop here. Except to say that it’s a pity Hitler wasn’t captured alive and hung in the ruins of Berlin. You wonder what Eva Braun would’ve gotten for a sentence. She would’ve been out of jail by '61, perhaps. Retired to a small town. Sold her story to Life. Hung on long enough to be interviewed for “World at War,” irritatingly cbipper. Obit? Page 2.

It’s 1858.

What can possibly seem relevant to us clever moderns? Well, let’s see.

More tyopgraphically diverse than you might have expected?

St. Louis prices! That must have meant something. But what are Star Candles?

		Apropos of absolutely nothing:
		Humor is the best medicine

This incident does not appear in the historical record - by which I mean, of course, Google.

Mesilla Guard - there is a reference to a Mesilla Road. We can find the judge:

President Franklin Pierce appointed Kirby Benedict associate judge of the Third Judicial District of New Mexico Territory in 1853. In 1858, President James Buchanan appointed Benedict as chief justice of the territorial Supreme Court. He was assigned to the First District and headquartered in Santa Fe. From 1854 to 1866, Benedict rendered twenty-two supreme court decisions.

In addition to his legal work, Benedict helped organize the Historical Society of New Mexico. He was elected as President of the Society in 1862. Governor Connelly appointed Benedict to the three person committee to complete the 1865 Revised statutes and laws of the Territory of New Mexico.

They got an early start on a historical society, no?

I’m curious: does this comport with your assumptions about relations and attitudes in those times?

The third page is entirely in Spanish.

		Oh and by the way, get hitched! The paper strongly advises it. If you're wondering what type of woman to seek . . .

		Consult this Iinterminable doggrel. Well, that took with a morbid turn.
		It goes on, but I think they lost a lot of people with the metaphor about the dead body in a box.

That'll do! Is there cellophane?