During the first World War I had a real job. Of course I have worked through others my entire existence but only during the War did I, as Hanz Eichmann , make a sole profession my focus. For three days as a private in the German army I bludgeoned the still living and feeble French and Belgian victims of mustard gas warfare. I was an after-attack soldier. My weapon was a large hard rubber mallet wh

By Gus Bode

My name is not really Hanz Eichmann, but it was the name given to the young private in the German army whose body I possessed. When at last I departed, his mind was mush and his body in the uncontrollable jactitations of insanity. A rather unforunate situation for such a receptive vehicle. Several years later I discovered that he had made a partial recovery with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, changed his name slightly and rose to military prominence in the German Army during World War II, but finally met his end in Nuremburg.

Again, this extended excursion into the physical theater of humanity was a unique experience, but one that I was well suited for. Wouldn’t you agree?

We know each other, you and I and I even know you entire family. I have worked on your grandparents and your grandparents parents and now I work on you through others.

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Do you recognize me? I am your father when he tells you to get a real education upon you confessed desire to be an artist. When the profanity of rap music assails my ears I am the offended white conservative, the pillar of moraltiy. I am the pretentios educator when he stands behind the works of others yet asks you, the student, to give me originality. And when you give it, I thruogh him, look down at you and say you are too enthusiastic or that you must surely be a plagiarist of the worst kind because an undergraduate is incapable of such work. Jumping onto the bandwagon of ridicule I am you best friend when he oshe laughs at your ideas and humiliates you in front of others. I am your bitching insecure wife orhusband, your very soul mate, when he or she derides your need to grow in the name of love.

I make a mockery of all your relationships and then I make a mockery of you. When you long to strike out and when you burn with the passions of your own emotions I am the yellow paralyzing mist that inhibits action. Filtering, like a gas mask, I remove the inapropriate and allow only the acceptable to pass.

Now do you know who I am? I am the censurer, the expurgator, and the repressor of all human creativity. With deft swings I srike the mallet of fear against the skull and life percolates to the ground, and with the assistance of the poisonous brainshredding haze of ignorance I lay low the existence of man.

Know me well, for we will surely meet again in the trenches of life.

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