Hitler, Tweeting

SELDOM TO NEVER does anyone, friend or foe, provide me an idea for a good essay, wittingly. Oh, they provide, all right, but I have to be stealthy about it, and steal the ideas without the victim ever knowing they've been embezzled. But miracles happen, and a fellow progressive mentioned to me an op ed in the L.A. Times in which someone asserted that Adolph Hitler would have loved social media. That caught my fancy. he suggested I read the piece, and I immediately retorted "hell no, I won't go" (left over from my Viet Nan war days0. What I had already decided to do is to write my own version, then read the imposter. Or maybe its the other way around. I'll rush right through this essay, than go read the role model, who's only role modeling adhered in the title, and the concept. Hitler, in point of fact, was among the most personable, charming people who ever lived. This was attested by hundreds of people who met him, and hundreds more who knew him well. Like all good politicians and CEO, Hitler had a warm, enticing, alluring personality, as opposed to Winston Churchill, who was an irascible old crank. that's how he won his followers, that's how he got elected, that's how he came to power' the power of personality. It aint the latest thing, as the rolling Stones would say; its been happening for millennia; in this world, you succeed largely through your personality, even more than by knowing who you know, or by being talented in some way. the very thought of Hitler having had the power of tour social media to use at his disposal is beyond mind boggling. and the issue isn't whether he would have love Facebook, Twitter, and all the others; we can safely assume that he would have, the issue is what diabolical evils, beyond those he actually enacted, would he have brought into the world by influencing the behavior of millions of other people on the internet, as he did in actual history, off the internet. Twitter in particular comes to mind. Hitler, the master of the clever short, cliched, sound byte sounding few words strung together craftily, would have been the greatest tweeter in the history of birds Trump has, what, thirty million or so "followers?" Aren't they called. A "follower" is merely a sycophant, or rather a person who regularly reads the tweets, posts, and utterances of a particular person on social media, correct? In most instances, presumably, people who follow someone do so because they like an admire, rather than dislike and despise the twitter tweeter. Hitler's personality, and his ability to use words clever and manipulatively to motivate people to do his bidding made Trump look like chump change, a rank amateur, trust me. For diabolical charm, Trump aint half bad, but he don't hold a candle to uncle Adolph. Ask any historian. From the eagle's nest high in the Bavarian Alps, or from the Fuhrer bunker buried deep beneath Berlin, the Leader, ensconced in n easy chair with but a smart phone and avocado sandwich in hand (he was a vegetarian), could have turned the German population into mindless, sycophantic zombies far more readily than he actually die by merely utilizing his voice and passionately exhorting the great master race to greatness from the pulpit, voice rising and falling, fist clenching and unclenching, verbs rising to crescendos at the end of every melodramatic sentence. Hitler on social media is a thought to frightful to barely bear. Even more frighteningly is the thought that somewhere in the world today there might be, and probably is, someone with even a modicum of Hitler's talent for charm and verbal persuasion lurking, ready to type, point, click, and manipulate the sluggish masses, bringing them to life, and to mass destruction and death. Even more frightening is the thought that this person may be the president of the United States.