Jackass

I can't make this crap up. Maybe somebody else can, but this is supposedly a true story. See, I'm checking out the news feeds, and I run headlong into this one from MSNBC: "3-year-old Hitler can't get name on cake."

Yes, that's the headline.

It seems that there's this utter jackass in New Jersey, a man named Heath Campbell, who, along with his wife, decided to name his son "Adolf Hitler Campbell." Now the child is turning three, and--in a not particularly surprising turn of events--Mr. Campbell finds it difficult to persuade a local ShopRite to produce a birthday cake emblazoned with the name, "Adolf Hitler," presumably in the context of some happy statement like, "Happy Birthday, Adolf Hitler!"

Mr. Campbell, who named one of his other children "JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell" (no, really, that's what the MSNBC article says), is quoted by the MSNBC article as saying "he liked the name and because 'no one else in the world would have that name.'" Well, no shit he liked the name: considering the name he gave his daughter, Mr. Campbell appears to be an antisemitic white supremacist douchebag.

One has to pity baby Adolf, of course. The child is going to be raised by a man who, from all appearances, is not merely a bigot, but also a moron. I presume he intends to homeschool his child, who otherwise will find himself tortured and abused within seconds of his entry into kindergarten--and heaven help the poor boy when his classmates figure the name out and join in. At the very, very least, one must assume that if the boy attends public school (and I doubt Herr Campbell will allow his darling boy to attend school with all those people's kids, but still) that there will actually be one elementary school in New Jersey in which a sixty-year-old ditty is pulled out of oblivion and given new currency:

Whistle while you work
Hitler is a jerk
Mussolini bit his weenie
Now it doesn't work

Here's a child who will be having nightmares about being castrated by the Macy's Parade Bullwinkle float for his first nine years on Earth. Probably will cause a lot of bed-wetting, I'm thinking.

I'm also thinking karma will be sweet indeed if Adolf Hitler Campbell acts out in his rebellious teenage years by insisting his friends call him Abraham Cohen and dating a black girl.

Mockery seems justified and is the easy route, but let's take a moment and somberly recall what the original Adolf Hitler accomplished in his fifty-six years as a boil on humanity's ass: the Nazi party murdered something like nine million people--this is a conservative estimate--during the Holocaust, four-to-six-million of whom were singled out for torture and death because they happened to be more-or-less Jewish (six million is a conventional figure for Jewish deaths, and figures for the Holocaust in toto run as high as seventeen million depending on the source; eleven million total is a conventional estimate). These are the people the Nazis and their proxies rounded up and put in death camps; of course there were actual soldiers killed in combat--Russia lost something like nine million soldiers killed outright and nineteen million civilians, mostly against the Germans, and then there's the hundreds of thousands lost by the Americans, British, and French. Oh, but wait, you know you can actually do even better if you're running the numbers: after all, the German war was a suicidal, stupid, doomed effort that could only have succeeded if the Germans had overwhelmed the Allied powers with such rapidity that the Allies chose to surrender in shock instead of fighting--in a protracted war (which is what Hitler got his country into), the vast manpower of the Soviet Union and the vast industrial resources of the United States meant that Germany was ultimately fucked-by-math as long as either opponent had the will to fight (and they did). Accordingly, while it may seem perverse to blame all the six million-or-so German soldiers and civilians the Allies were obligated to kill putting the Nazis down on Hitler it's also only fair--his war, his choices, if he hadn't been around none of that shit would have happened. (Assorted numbers may be found here, by the way.)

Herr Campbell is quoted in the MSNBC piece as saying, "They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did." Well, gosh Campbell, you ignorant jerkoff, we can only hope your son doesn't manage to get millions and millions and millions of people needlessly killed. Unfortunately, I would have to say that his father's behavior suggests the deck is cruelly stacked against Little Adolf Hitler and he's unlikely to make much of himself for good or ill.

Nice going, Campbell. Your kid's three and you already broke him.