Clocks from Hell
Last night I finished Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Its one of his earlier works, published in 61. At the end his main character gives an interesting analogy on extremist like Nazis or the KKK, etc. He describes them as clocks from hell. Not exactly. Clocks, at least in the past, were built on interlocking gears and it was the teeth lining up that kept the time. He said some people file teeth off. So then the clock tells time perfect for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, then misses, then another 2 hours and 52 minutes and then misses. These people in extreme political movements have access to see the world as all of us do, to know reality as we all do. But they take some of their teeth off with a metal file. They remove the vision of, lets say, little Jewish children being so similar to their own children. So then all their gears turn and they love Wagner and Brahms, perhaps even Prokofiev Peter and the Wolf (1936), but they file off the teeth for Jewish human-likeness. Part of the