Hitler Was a Piker

I grew up in Chicago, on the northwest side of the city, in a lower middle-class Polish, German, Irish neighborhood. I went to the neighborhood Catholic elementary school then St. Pat’s High at Belmont and Austin. When I wanted to go to college, a resident school was beyond our means, so I was a commuter student to Illinois Institute of Technology where I majored in first chemistry, then political science but always in Air Force. I minored in beer, girls, cars, and hanging around the back of the McDonald’s parking lot. When I was in high school and through college I listened to the radio in my bedroom as I fell asleep and almost always tuned to a jazz or Chicago blues station. One of my favorite disc jockeys was a guy named Jesse Owens.

He had a smooth, mellow voice that fit right into the breaks between record cuts. He knew his music and he educated me in Thelonius Monk, Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson. I didn’t know that he was also the “fastest man alive” and the guy who upstaged Adolph Hitler on his home turf.

It had been 1936 and the XI Olympiad was held in Berlin. That simple fact should quickly be brought forth to illustrate the fallacy that the Olympic Games are about athletics and not politics. Hitler was at the peak of his utopian grandeur. He had total control of the resources of a mighty industrial nation that was peopled by his master race. He built spectacular venues and created incredible militaristic ceremonies to trumpet the Thousand Year Reich. His Aryans would sweep the events and the world would kneel before German superiority.

But, then this slender Black man from Ohio State came forward and in spectacular fashion ran away from the field in four premier track events capturing four gold medals and the focus of the world’s fickle media. Jesse was a long way from Aryan and there was nothing Hitler could do about it.



That was a simpler time, despite the machinations of Der Fuhrer. Today we know that you can manipulate judges. You can chemically enhance your performance potential. You can even ignore the rules and change the published data of the past. You can PhotoShop the display. You can make footprints walk across the night sky, even if the fireworks fizzle on the launch pad. You can delete entire chunks of your recent uncomplimentary history from the massive scroll of life. Today, Jesse would have been disqualified, discredited, or prohibited from winning on some technicality if the goals of the governing party weren’t met.

Each day now we find something new popping up about the Olympics and the host nation. Bob Costas will continue to fawn, but there is a seamy underside being revealed that should confirm the apprehensions that many of us recalcitrant Cold Warriors have harbored.

Take a look:

Walk This Way

Or sing-along here:



Or:

Year of the Dog Counts as Seven

Let’s acknowledge that the little girls were great. But no mature adult who doesn’t lean toward pedophilia would ever have thought they could pass for sixteen. The rules are to protect children from injury and exploitation, but I guess if the state needs you then you must take risks.

If Hitler had only known how it was done.