godwin's law

Bavarian Boyfriend is in town for two weeks. For purposes of respecting his heightened expectations of privacy, I will not say too much here, just this: in the weeks before he came, I practiced not making Nazi references. I didn't want to inadvertently offend him/suggest that he was in some way responsible for the murders of thirteen million people. This was much harder to do than you'd think, because Nazis are really in the American idiom! Or at least for me, "little Hitler" is among the top 100 phrases I use in my daily vocabulary.

Two nights ago, BB and I were waiting for the midnight train from Buffalo to Chicago. The train was an hour late because there was a light sprinkling of snow that of course had devastated Amtrak's infrastructure. BB and I killed time by arguing about the law. He was surprised that he had to show his passport to order a beer in a bar, and that he couldn't drink a beer in public or in the rental car as I drove. He is from Bavaria, after all, where beer is a form of religion. In our four-day tour of upstate New York and Ontario, we had to employ several different surreptitious strategies for drinking his beer of choice (Natty Ice - GACK), including drinking out of coffee cups and soup containers, underneath our jackets, behind our hands. All of this is fine for a twenty-something's American R.E.P. but somewhat undignified for a thirty-something's German R.E.P. So BB kept saying how American regulations were stupid and excessive and made jokes about having to show his identity card in order to drink beer, hold hands, go swimming, etc.

I tried to explain how I thought that American regulations on drinking were heavy-handed relative to other countries but had come to seem reasonable to me in light of 1) the cultural history of prohibition, 2) my expectations for not seeing drinking in public and the negative associations I have been socialized to have for people who do drink in public, 3) what I had been taught about drinking and driving, and 4) the possibility of finding responsible ways of circumventing the law if a drink in public must really be had. I told him it was less productive to say "this law is stupid" than to say "this law seems stupid to me because it comes from a cultural context different than mine." I was also very proud of myself for using free speech laws - how I could find swastikas offensive and threatening but still preferred an American society where one could wear one's swastika earrings to a swastika party to a German society that regulated expression more tightly - to illustrate this point.

BB didn't buy any of my cultural relativism and continued to insist that the laws were stupid. Granted, he is very concerned about the power of the state. Some things he said about the destruction of human dignity at international borders (and an unrelated statement he made about the fine dramaturgy - his word - of our tour of Cascadilla, Taughannock, and Niagara Falls) made my heart explode for him. It was indeed very undignified when a border guard demanded to know if we were "dating," which BB didn't understand and I didn't know how to answer. The little passive-aggressive ways BB resisted border control's interrogations were both funny and touching.

But the point of my story, however, is not that I was so moved by BB's convictions that my heart softened for him and I changed my opinions to accommodate him. The point of this story is that after about twenty minutes of arguing like this, I called him a Nazi.

Ooops!