{"id":399,"date":"2003-10-04T11:17:31","date_gmt":"2003-10-04T18:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2003\/10\/little_adolf_schwarzenegger\/"},"modified":"2023-04-08T11:57:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-08T15:57:00","slug":"little_adolf_schwarzenegger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2003\/10\/little_adolf_schwarzenegger.html","title":{"rendered":"‘LITTLE ADOLF’ SCHWARZENEGGER"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jan Herman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Have the chickens begun to roost? There probably wasn’t a pre-adolescent boy growing up in
\nAmerica in the immediate aftermath of World War II who didn’t mimick Adolf Hitler’s salute as a
\nform of mockery during a game of King of the Hill or its equivalent. But “Little Adolf”
\nSchwarzenegger was a bit older than that — 32 at least — when he used to “imitate Hitler for laughs.”<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The co-writer of Schwarzenegger’s autobiography, Douglas Kent Hall, remembers him
\n“clowning around in a barbershop, pulling his hair down over his forehead, employing the end of a
\ncomb as a short mustache, and raising his fist” as late as 1980. Hall even has photographs of it.
\nWhich seems to indicate that the would-be governator of California<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a> either had a very
\nlate adolescence or never got over the jest.<\/p>\n

Equally disturbing — whether aping Hitler was a sign of mockery or implied admiration (along
\nthe lines, say, of a Freudian slip rather than a Chaplin comedy) — Schwarzenegger’s egoistic
\nadmiration for, in his own mangled words, “people who are powerful … who people listen to and
\njust wait until he comes out with telling them what to do” stamps him as a self-proclaimed
\nstrongman in the style not of John F. Kennedy, whom he cites, but in the fashion\u00a0of an
\nold-world politician whose authoritarian roots in mittel Europe<\/em> Austria are still too
\nmuch with him.<\/p>\n

If California voters aspire to the status of lemmings<\/em><\/b><\/a>
\nand want to elect a leering, breast-and-ass-grabbing, post-adolescent Schwarzenegger as their
\ngovernator, it’s their game to play. But they should be prepared to live with the idea that a he-man
\n“little Adolf” could come back to haunt them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-6r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56547,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/56547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}