By Jan Herman
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.