Titanic Post

Many of the ‘lefty blogs’ are gleefully predicting the eminent fall of The American Empire. (’Righty blogs,’ just as gleefully, point at moral decay.) The rise of corporatism, perpetual war, global warming, widespread corruption and degeneration of our most cherished institutions, the triumph of religion over reason*; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion with the state, and the introduction of torture as a means of gathering information, are just a few of the issues heralding a new Dark Age. I am using the Fall of the Roman Empire as a guide here.

However we shouldn’t despair, in three years, George, the boy emperor, who has done much for the Empire, will be out of a job. That is, if the Supreme Court doesn’t make it a lifetime position. Elections, which in the past was the only method the American people had to replace a ruler, can now be digitally manipulated to reach any outcome our Lords and Masters desire. So maybe it’s not a bad thing that Empires eventually fall under their own weight.

Jefferson prescribed regular revolutions to keep our nation healthy. Violent upheavals kept me healthy as a child when my mother gave me castor oil for an upset stomach. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the last verse of Selige Sehnsucht summarizes:

Und so lang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trueber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

Ecstatic Longing roughly translated by me with apologies to Goethe:

As long as you don’t understand,
This: death and rebirth!
You are only a sorry guest
On this dark earth.

*The triumph of reason over religion wasn’t so great either.

Karl Boehm-Tettelbach - 2nd From Right

Everett, an old friend and colleague from my Pan Am days in Nuremberg, called last week. We had not talked in over twenty years. Interspersed with our reminiscing, he dropped the question: Did you know who Karl Boehm really was? Well, Karl Boehm was our station manager at the Nuremberg airport and a man whom I greatly admired and who had once helped me out of a very tight spot.

Everett continued that Karl Boehm-Tettlebach was his real name and he had been a high ranking Nazi army officer (Oberstleutnant or Lieutenant Colonel) and aide to Field Marshall Werner von Blomberg and later had served in Hitler’s headquarters during the war. I should have expected something like that, because Herr Boehm was the right age to have been there and everyone then had been involved at one level or another. However, I had not expected what Everett was telling me.

Other than the fact that Karl Boehm had given me that job, and thereby assuring my existence for a few years, he was one of the most kind and understanding men I had ever met. He would do almost anything to help his employees do their work more effectively or with their personal problems. As a result, the Pan Am station was the most pleasant place I had worked up to that point. He affected everyone he came into contact with: the staff, flight crews, Customs, even the BP fuel-crews would go out of their way to help us. This mostly because Karl Boehm was such a likeable man.

Our Operations Supervisor, Alfred Peter, was also affected. ‘Pete’ went on to become the Director of Training for the Frankfurt Airport. In 1971, I went to work there as a trainer. Karl Boehm’s management style was carried on by Pete and we successfully worked together for the next seventeen years.

After the phone call, I googled Boehm-Tettelbach and found several quotes of his. Laurence Rees had produced a documentary film for BBC and had interviewed my old station manager:

Rees asked Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, a Nazi army officer who served in Hitler’Â’s headquarters in East Prussia during the war, how German people could respect Hitler and what he was doing for Germany when Jews were being forced to lose their jobs and leave the country. Boehm-Tettelbach replied:

That never came up. Everybody thought the same, that you were in a big team and you didn’t separate from the group. You were infected. That explains it a little bit… Hitler fixed you with his eye contact, looked at you just a bit longer than anyone else.

Heinrich Himmler, the man behind the Holocaust, sits rather oddly with the picture of the man we see from those who knew him. Many have described Himmler as coming across as a kindly, eccentric schoolmaster. Field Marshall von Blomberg’s aide, Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, liked Himmler more than the other Nazis he met:

He was a very nice and agreeable guest because he always involved younger people like me and would enquire about the air force, how I was getting along, how long I would be with Blomberg, if I liked it, what I had seen the last trip to Hungary and things like that.

That the traits of men as despicable as Adolf Hitler and Himmler, which so impressed Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, are the very same traits that had such a profound effect on me, Alfred Peter, and all those people at the Nurmberg Airport and resulted in the two best jobs of my life calls for a rethinking of my stereotypes and prejudices. I guess that nobody really is all bad or all good. Karl Boehm has been and always will continue to be one of the major influences in my life.

Most of the world’s major religions and non-materialist philosophies have ways for us to re-link to the essence of the universe, or the creator, if you will. Simplified, they tell us to live in the ‘here and now’ and things will get better. And if they don’t get better, it won’t bother us so much.

Not too long ago, on a hike in the foothills, my hiking companion mentioned how difficult it is to live in the here and now with all the distractions and demands on our time. I replied that it might help to lose the ego, whereby she rightly asked “How do you lose that?” My background is in sociology and experimental psychology. I am also an ordained fake minister. In other words, I have my own ego problems, and I don’t really know. However, I have seen clues here and there.

I do know that we somehow as children get separated from each other and from nature and most of us then never reconnect. We become important as individuals and lose sight of our community and commonalities. I believe its because almost everything we do has its goal somewhere in the future. The rare exceptions to our living in the future are listening to music and sex. As small children, we are told to be good so that we won’t burn in hell when we die. We then go to school with the goal of being able to get a job and earn money so that we will have a comfortable future. We save money for a rainy day, we buy insurance in a wager with the insurance company against our best wishes and interest that we will die “before our time.” We bet that our house will go up in flames along with all our possessions. I am not saying that we shouldn’t take prudent precautions. Maybe something will happen, maybe it won’t. Its really too early to tell, isn’t it? Meantime the ‘here and now’ is gone forever never to be reclaimed.

We strive to make our lives safe and predictable. Our leaders go so far as to devise vast homeland securities with huge armies to back them up, thereby removing some of our freedoms while not making us one iota more secure. Security is in reality an illusion. No amount of preparation can make us secure.

We should also realize that we are free to make mistakes, free to waste time, and free to die. We should have faith in ourselves, in life, and in others in this instant and in this place. If we don’t, we are doomed to live in the ‘there and then.’

Imagine, if you will, what it would feel like if we all got together once and awhile and admitted that we don’t know why we are alive, that nobody knows for sure if there’s a higher being who created us, and that nobody really knows what the hell goes on here.  Then maybe we could enjoy being here more.