'LITTLE ADOLF' SCHWARZENEGGER

Have the chickens begun to roost? There probably wasn't a pre-adolescent boy growing up in America in the immediate aftermath of World War II who didn't mimick Adolf Hitler's salute as a form of mockery during a game of King of the Hill or its equivalent. But "Little Adolf" Schwarzenegger was a bit older than that -- 32 at least -- when he used to "imitate Hitler for laughs."

The co-writer of Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Douglas Kent Hall, remembers him "clowning around in a barbershop, pulling his hair down over his forehead, employing the end of a comb as a short mustache, and raising his fist" as late as 1980. Hall even has photographs of it. Which seems to indicate that the would-be governator of California either had a very late adolescence or never got over the jest.

Equally disturbing -- whether aping Hitler was a sign of mockery or implied admiration (along the lines, say, of a Freudian slip rather than a Chaplin comedy) -- Schwarzenegger's egoistic admiration for, in his own mangled words, "people who are powerful ... who people listen to and just wait until he comes out with telling them what to do" stamps him as a self-proclaimed strongman in the style not of John F. Kennedy, whom he cites, but in the fashion of an old-world politician whose authoritarian roots in mittel Europe Austria are still too much with him.

If California voters aspire to the status of lemmings and want to elect a leering, breast-and-ass-grabbing, post-adolescent Schwarzenegger as their governator, it's their game to play. But they should be prepared to live with the idea that a he-man "little Adolf" could come back to haunt them.