05.12.06
Pellicano and Hitler?
Ross Johnson provocatively wondered why Hollywood was ever scared of Anthony Pellicano: “Despite all his posturing with bimbos and outright lying to reporters about his prowess with a Louisville Slugger, Pellicano has always been a punk from Chicago who, as attorney Stephen Yagman is fond of saying, ‘escaped his punkdom and moved to L.A., where nobody knew he was a punk.’”
Rather than dismissing Anthony Pellicano as an unworthy Public Enemy No.1 because of his current fallen chaotic state in prison, I’m going to Goodwin** the discussion by comparing the present distortions going on in our perceptions of the Pelican debacle to the continued difficulty most of the world has in putting the Hitler era into any cogent and meaningful perspective. Please take the liberty to substitute any name provided at the appropriate points in these excerpts from the excellent interview that Luke Ford did with William Grange, the author of the new book “Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich.”
“People don’t like to think that [Hitler/Pellicano] was like everyone else. He liked to laugh. He liked to see plays. It’s true that [Hitler/Pellicano] was a little strange, but in many ways, he was just like you and me. People try to heroize people who stood up to [Hitler/Pellicano] as morally superior and when you get into those kinds of debates, then you look at somebody like [Hitler/Pellicano] as defective. But he wasn’t defective at all. He was an evil genius…
We know that on [Hitler/Pellicano]’s 50th birthday, [Joseph Goebbels/Ron Meyers] gave him 18 brand new prints of Disney cartoons and [Goebbels/Meyers] reported that [Hitler/Pellicano] said it was the best birthday present he ever had…
[Maria Von Trapp/Kat Pellicano] tells an anecdote about [Hitler/Pellicano] laughing hysterically, gasping for breath for laughing, at a [gross joke/once-weekly-rub-down]…
[Hitler/Pellicano] had no sexual attraction for men but he loved male companionship, particularly with the guys who were the early [fighters/celebrity lawyers/producers] who were with him in [Munich/Hollywood] in the [twenties/eighties/nineties] and were responsible for [the revolution/his making hundreds of thousands of dollars]…
[Hitler/Pellicano] had affairs but he was not promiscuous. There were lots of women, particularly older women, who were madly in love with [Hitler/Pellicano] and wanted to take care of him. He cultivated that and got a lot of money from them…
The real question is, ‘Were people who did not resist [Hitler/Pellicano] collaborators with the [regime/wiretapping/crimes]?’ It’s a difficult question, predicated as always on a sense of moral superiority. It’s easy to look back [sixty/twenty] years and appoint moral standing or deny it to someone else.”
**Goodwin: (verb) Internet slang for being the first one to usurp an online discussion by raising the spectre of Hitler.
