LUDIC LOG

This time of the year is always the worst.

Of course, no time of the year is particularly pleasant, especially at his age. The first part of September finds him wistful and the end of April finds him despondent. And, for goodness sake, he's a hundred and fourteen years old this year. You know how people are at that age; all he can talk about is the war and his various infirmities. (I must say, he has taken to the Spanish language; its florid and colorful histrionic character brings out his flair for the dramatic.)

It should have been a good time for him. The American president, in whom he finds a great deal to admire, was on the television a lot this week; the incompetent puppet Schroeder crawled on his belly before the press, and I know how he enjoys seeing his successors squirm. (He calls Joschka Fischer "die Gosseratte".) And best of all, that pestilential Jew Wiesenthal has finally closed the books on those of us who are left, which takes our chestnuts out of the fire in a big way. When we told him the news that Wiesenthal had given up, all he did was snort derisively; he spared us not even a smile. "Weak," he said, "like the rest of his race. No initiative, no determination." Bormann, who has been increasingly contrary in recent years since his houseboy Amualdo left us, pointed out that in fairness, Wiesenthal is in his nineties and is probably wearying of the chase. "You don't see me giving up," the Fuerher responded, betraying not even a little joy at our having escaped the pest. We all thought, well, Wiesenthal probably doesn't have the benefit of fresh weekly orphan-blood and turtle-placenta injections to keep him going, either, but nobody said anything.

The thing is, it's so hard to keep his mind occupied anymore. He doesn't seem to enjoy tennis or chess anymore. He's been inconsolable about the whole neo-Nazi thing for years -- not so much our failure to get a decent Fourth Reich going so much as the fact that we have been supplanted in the public imagination by those ridiculous Moslems. He's largely given up on his dreams of becoming a film producer ever since he abandoned the biographical picture; he was devastated when he learned Dustin Hoffman was a Jew. "The irony," he said at the time; "he was the only one who could have really captured my essence." We tried to interest him in Kiefer Sutherland, but he doesn't like tall actors. Occasionally he will dabble at getting some funds together to get Oberleutnant Schwarzenegger's son's movie made, but his heart isn't in it. The only real excitement he seems to get anymore at all is evading the pesky photographers from the Weekly World News.

So we really try and go all out for his birthday. At first we gave him little mementos of the good times -- maps, medals, uniforms and the like -- but those only depressed him and reminded him of his failure. Then we would take him to the gravesites of his old enemies so he could dance on them, but when his leg started to go he didn't enjoy that anymore. For a while we practiced a more metaphorical approach -- we would collect articles that mentioned his name, or we would compare him favorably to other dictators, but even that all went downhill in the 1970s, when we started to find out how bad Stalin had really been. When they stopped making the Volkswagen Beetle, I thought he might kill himself for real.

Eventually, a few of the old boys and I got the idea that maybe what he really missed was the whole glory of war -- the knowledge that young men were killing and dying on your behalf. Personally, the thing that I really miss are the snazzy outfits and the really top-quality sausages, but different strokes for different folks. So we decided that we would arrange little "events" on his behalf -- a shootout with the government here, a murderous conflagration there, anything to remind him that there were still people who cared enough to kill a bunch of total strangers on his behalf. He seemed to respond well to these things at first, but the press always seemed to play down the Nazi angle, which angered and frustrated him. Then came Oklahoma City, which was supposed to have gone really well, but that idiot Nichols forgot to set off the fireworks in the shape of the swastika, so the Fuhrer just found the whole thing terribly confusing. Columbine, likewise, should have been a triumph -- it had racialism, it had Nietzschean overtones, and we even managed to get those young fellows in Rammstein who the Fuhrer likes so much involved -- but once he found out the boys liked to play "Castle Wolfenstein", he refused to even talk about it anymore.

This year, I got up the courage to actually ask him what he wanted for his birthday. He looked me in the eye and said, in that warbly voice "Franz...all I want is for someone, anyone, to invade Poland for me, just one more time. Is that so verdammt much to ask?"

I got him a tie. Fuck it.