Once I get beyond the basic data — a healthy adult can live three days without water; babies have more bones than adults — I find it increasingly difficult to make generalities about humanity.
Terrence, a Roman playwright, said: “I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.”
Even so: A German cannibal advertises for a willing victim, then kills and eats him, snubbing at least five more applicants. A German Austrian heiress allows 50 strangers to decide how she should give away her $27 million fortune, then follows through. I could spend my whole life contemplating either story, the alternate poles of the human psyche, and never reach any conclusions, beyond “It takes all kinds,” as my own German American relatives used to say when confronted with the inexplicable.
In 1917 a soldier from my hometown named James Bethel Gresham shipped out to fight the Germans and became the first American to die in the War Which Failed to End All Wars. A generation later, German American men from the same area lined up to fight the Fuhrer, and many stayed over there, beneath headstones.
Now, some grandsons of men who died fighting Nazis proudly sport swastika tatts, sig-heil, read Daily Stormer. As if there was anything the slightest bit neo about race hatred.
There was a time when humanity seemed to agree that Nazis were, you know, evil, and that people who thought otherwise were abhorrent. How, then, to draw sweeping conclusions which accommodate the most powerful man on earth idly musing that Hitler did some good things and had enviable generals? Or the richest man on earth sharing a post absolving Hitler from Holocaust blame. Or Pete Hegseth, the beefcake Aryan, banning Maya Angelou from the United States Naval Academy but not Mein Kampf. Perhaps if the caged bird had been a Proud Boy he’d be more open-minded.
Or my grandmother, an Indiana schoolgirl, receiving first communion with her praying hands holding a Bible printed in German. It sits on my desk as I type.
I don’t recall her ever voicing fond memories of the Reich.
Oh, that baby thing? Apparently, some of their bones will later fuse together, forming new, stronger bones, Metaphorically, at least, I wish adults could manage the same trick.