Wotan Pass

A retired cop in the Catskills said to me at a Fourth of July picnic his family invited me to: “I had to kill a lot of Germans for this.”

He was pointing to his G.I. decorations for soldiering in Europe in 1944-45. He was an American of Germanic ancestry and his surname was underscoring it like a drum. It would be only natural if down in the vibrations of his voice there would reverberate a tinge of sorrowful unease.

It did.

We Europeans devoured each other grisly in 1939-1945. We may as well get destroyed thoroughly before this century’s end. But this time it may happen not proactively by our abstracted selves so much, as by the reciprocal invaders tearing into our granaries and culture algorithms for over half a century now.