Consequently, as I sat there with the Smiths pretending to be a retired auto worker, everything I knew about what I purported to be "the personal experience of a lifetime spent on a Detroit assemblyline" consisted of the information I had photographically memorized while speedreading my way through a mountainous pile of literature on the subject. The one book that proved to be my most useful source for both the technical and the psychological raw material with which I could turn myself into a downtoearth character like Arthur Long was entitled, A Portrait of America's Most Successful Car Dealer as a Young Greasemonkey. When Vicky Truelove sent me a paperback copy it had been out of print for more than 20 years, but at the time it was first published in 1963 A Portrait of America's Most Successful Car Dealer as a Young Greasemonkey remained on the N. Y. Times nonfiction bestseller list for more than 6 months and (not uncoincidentally) was reputed to be one of JFK's and Jackie's favorite bedtime reads. In the mid1980s it resurfaced briefly as a literary cause celebre when its author, Gus Otto, was revealed to be the infamous Gustav Otto Shickelgruber, a distant cousin of Adolf Hitler and the pathological wunderkind who masterminded the "mercy killing" of 250,000 Germans whose IQs fell short of the Third Reich's Aryan standards. But before Otto was unmasked as the archest of Nazi war criminals his "touchingly human" autobiographical account of having risen from the oily rags of a Detroit assemblyline worker to the silksuited haberdashery of a car salesman extraordinaire was not only regarded as a classic mid20th century American Success Story, it became a bible for evangelical psychiatrists like the late Dr. Carla Tann, who believed in the reversibility of mental retardation.
According to Otto, his success story began at a level far below any Horatio Alger could even begin to dream of in his wormturning philosophy. When he was liberated by the advancing Americans from Euthanasia Facility No. 4 at 1322 hours on 21 April 1945 he was, in fact, only 8 minutes away from having his own brain added to the 37,00 which had been surgically removed from the decapitated skulls of mentally defective Germans so Nazi scientists might find some explanation for the overlynumerous exceptions to their rule of Aryan intellectual superiority. Otto had managed to elude the Nazi's "dummkopf" dragnet until December, 1944 not so much by his own wits—of which he was in short supply—but because he was himself one of the Hitler Youths assigned to ferret out those Germans whose subnormal intelligence made them candidates for a Euthanasia Facility. His downfall came about one day when he fingered an "absentminded old fart" who turned out to be a retired professor of musicology and Germany's leading authority on Wagner's transfigurational use of antiSemitic metaphors in blazing new operatic trails of racial bigotry. The subsequent investigation of this "mistaken identity case" revealed it wasn't an isolated one caused by Otto's youthful exuberance to "serve the Führer in purging our Fatherland of racial undesirables." A review of the records kept in the Berlin archives of the Mental Health Ministry established beyond a reasonable doubt that virtually all the brains removed from Germans Otto identified as being incompetent were in fact either normal or above average. Pleading the congenital shortcomings of his own intelligence as a defense, the panel of 3 people's judges (in a rare example of poetic justice Nazistyle) sentenced Otto to receive the treatment he was so clearly in need of at the nearest Euthanasia Facility.
That was the story Otto told to his rescuers, and the one which appeared on the front page of every American Newspaper at the time. 40 years later at his war crimes trial he tearfully confessed it had all been an elaborate hoax: that far from being an innocent victim of Hitler's antiIdiot policy he was, at the precocious age of 21, its chief architect. With the end of the war approaching, like many other highranking Nazis, he used what remained of his crumbling bureaucratic prerogatives to provide himself with a new identity. In Otto's case he decided, rather brilliantly as it happened—and not without a Teutonic flare for chutzpah—to utilize his expertise in the field of mental subnormality by assuming the identity of a man whose intelligence had been congenitally marginalized. Not only would such a charade make his claim of innocence that much more credible by enabling him to admit his guilt for sending thousands of innocent people to their deaths (an admission only someone whose IQ was severely impaired would make)—a tale of human wretchedness so blatantly pathetic was likely to pluck a redemptive tune on those emotional heartstrings most Americans pride themselves for having. The grotesque depravity and cynicism of his obscene calculations concerning the mawkish sentimentality of the American psyche did not, as was so often the case in WWII, prevent them from being prophetic. The "heartwrenching" story of his hereditary simplemindedness, his "tragic" complicity in Hitler's euthanasic atrocities and his dramatic lastminute rescue from the very operating table on which so many (therebutfor thegraceofGodlayI) slightly less than average human beings had been radically lobotomized was featured in every newsreel and on the cover of every magazine in America.
Gustav Otto became an instant celebrity. For the first time since America had been drawn into the nightmare of WWII the name of a single civilian victim had put a human face on the hitherto impersonal statistics of the holocaust.13 Shortly after VE day this "quintessentially innocent" survivor of Hitler's psychopathic scheme to eradicate Germany's dimwits found himself sitting between Generals Eisenhower and Marshal as they motored their victorious way through a recordbreaking blizzard of tickertape on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. When all the parading was over (Otto's celebrity was exploited for a warbondselling tour that took him across the heartland of his "adopted country") some delicate questions about his future had to be asked.. Should he be sent back to Germany—where his status, like others who had propagandized against the Fatherland (no matter how egregious its sins), was not unambiguously heroic? Or, if he were allowed to remain in the States, either as an alien refugee or a citizen by Act of Congress, would he be mentally competent to manage his own affairs? Despite the scientific stigma associated with his having been diagnosed as an idiot by the Nazis, the hard objective truth was that Gustav Otto was indeed a man who suffered from an IQ deficit. All of these problems were solved with the providential arrival on the scene of Dr. Carla Tann. She was the founder and president of the Institute for the Study of Human Intelligence. ISHI was an organization dedicated to the general proposition that all human beings are born with IQs which are substantially equal. According to Tann and her disciples the variations in mental capacity that subsequently develop between individuals14 are attributable to such factors as the cultural context, social environment, family milieu and educational system in which one is born and raised. In particular the Tannites believed that by exposing patients diagnosed as retarded to the most elementary remedial measures they could at the very least achieve normality and, more often than not, attain an IQ level considerably above average.
These "elementary remedial measures" consisted of teaching patients not only how to read but, more importantly, what to read! And, when they were able to make the distinction between worthwhile and worthless literature, they went on to learn the differences between good and bad music, painting, sculpture, choreography, theater, film and television. Having reached a "postgraduate" level, some of these former "hopeless cases" applied their artistic expertise to critiquing such normally non artistic matters as the state of America's social, economic and political institutions—and the even broader question concerning the general decline of Western Civilization.
WITH THE RISE of Nazism and its concurrent racial theories it was inevitable ISHI would become the most ardent and outspoken critic of Hitler's euthanasia policies. Tann herself wrote an open letter addressed to the Nazi Minister of Mental Health, Herr Doctor Professor Emil von Quaksalber; challenging him to a public debate on the scientific merits for his assumption that congenital retardation was "absolutely unrectifiable." To her astonishment she received a reply published in a Lisbon newspaper declining her "impertinent offer" but containing data purporting to "prove beyond the shadow of any scientific doubt" that the brains removed from those who were "humanely put out of their intellectual misery" all manifested the unmistakable signs of a functional degeneracy which was organic and could therefore not be cured by Dr. Tann's socalled "educational therapy."15
So it was that Gustav Otto provided ISHI with a golden opportunity to put Tann's Retardation Reversal theories to the acid test. If ISHI succeeded in normalizing Otto's IQ it wouldn't only solve the government's practical problem of how to handle someone who had been certified by the Nazis as a menace to himself and society at large, it would also discredit von Quaksalber's racist credo that our intellectual horizons are circumscribed by the cranial capacity with which we are born. And with the surrender of Japan the Truman administration (whose plate was already heaped with a variety of peacetime vexations) needed little persuasion to pass this particular postwar buck to ISHI by putting the fate of Otto's mentality into Carla Tann's eager hands. His progress under Dr. Tann's personal supervision was quite remarkable. After a mere 6 months of remedial therapy he appeared at a press conference where he demonstrated, in reasonably fluent English, his ability to master the kind of basic knowledge expected of any average American citizen, such as: Naming the capital cities of North Dakota, Delaware and Montana; Dating the battles of Brooklyn Heights, Bull Run and San Juan Hill; Comparing the literary styles of Melville and Hawthorne with those of Stendahl and Tolstoi; Discussing the antiIntellectualism of the American educational system as a reaction to the cultural contempt in which the colonists were held by their aristocratic "betters;" Enumerating the reasons for the decrepitude of an Atomic Age political system that was dreamtup in several smokefilled rooms by a committee of 18thcentury wheelerdealers, and; Attempting to reconcile the paradoxical values of a nation which is fanatically egalitarian in its pursuit of the happiness that comes from living in a state of sociocultural mediocrity while simultaneously preaching the virtues of economic Darwinism.
When he had reached an educational level comparable to that entitling any other American to a highschool diploma, the scientific (and ethical) question arose as to how much farther the frontiers of Otto's IQ could (or should) be pushed. On this issue Tann, who quite naturally favored "the maximalization" of her patient's mental capabilities, was criticized in some scientific quarters for "playing with experimental matches that might consume her, her theories, and her 'human guinea pig' in a hubristic conflagration." And, now that his thinking processes had been more or less normalized, Tann was in the awkward position of losing the authority she previously had over her protege by reason of his incompetence. As for Otto's own opinion on the issue of maximizing his intellectual potential, he was just smart enough to be frustrated by an awareness of the wisdom he lacked for dealing with such a thorny issue. Nevertheless he was inclined toward "the most conservative approach." His argument for imposing a temporary moratorium on her remedial therapy was based on the proposition (which Tann herself found irrefutable) that: Since he was sufficiently astute to propound such an elegant compromise it probably would be the most appropriate solution to their predicament. After all, what harm would there be in seeing for himself whether he would be satisfied living the life of an average American? If he later felt the need to adjust his IQ a notch or two upward in order to enhance his lifestyle they could always renew their therapeutic relationship.
In the final analysis Dr. Tann could think of no other option but to agree with her "star pupil" that it was probably better to be safe than sorry. 20 years later, when it became known he had been the brains behind Nazi Germany's euthanasia program, Otto's reasons for bailing out of the ISHI/Tann limelight lost their homespun luster. It seemed apparent his motives in choosing to voluntarily limit his IQ to the water level of mainstream America had more to do with concealing his evil genius than it did with any patriotic sentiments he might have felt for the mediocrity of his adopted countrymen. Unfortunately, the ambiguity surrounding the pristine state of Gustav Otto Shickelgruber's gray matter cast a very dark cloud indeed over what had been Tann's apotheosis as the Guru of a Golden Age in which the world's unwashed masses could bathe their way to cerebral nirvana in the holy waters of her remediational Ganges. The humiliation, disrepute and eventual obscurity resulting from the Otto fiasco was more than just a personal tragedy for Dr. Tann. Had it not been for the farcical elements (including what turned out to be the uncanny aptness of her name itself) surrounding Carla Tann's philanthropicallymotivated (no matter how misguided) experiments on remediating Otto's (understandable but nevertheless erroneously diagnosed) birth defect, her otherwise pioneering efforts in the field of IQenhancement would have marked a major advance in the way humans perceive the very nature of their being, to wit: That true bliss is not an attribute of ignorance and can only be attained by those who apply themselves assiduously to shaping their own existence as if it truly were a work of art.16 Since Tann was discredited by the Otto scandal no reputable17 scientist or academician has been willing to unfurl the battleflag of her visionary crusade to raise humanity's collective IQ to a level currently regarded as belonging exclusively (and congenitally) to that elite class of people known as geniuses. As we shall see later in our story the same reactionary forces are still at work to maintain the average IQ at 100—not 105, 120 or 180! Only now those forces have gathered themselves into a far more sinister and farreaching conspiracy to prevent me from telling you the truth about the Klutz Affair.
In a final ironic twist toward the very end of her life, having been thoroughly disillusioned by the ingratitude, ridicule and scorn she continued to experience long after the Otto debacle, the level of Dr. Tann's own mental acuity fell off sharply. She began to rant and rave about "the deluge of American mediocrity" that would ensue upon her demise—and the resulting "irreversibility of Western Civilization's decline since America was in the driver's seat of that particular runaway train." She also suffered from a form of paranoia unique to those whose heroic efforts to save the world are rejected or, even harder to endure—simply ignored; the principal symptom of which is the delusion that one is being persecuted by some sinister and farreaching conspiracy. Those who actually witnessed her last gasp describe it as surprisingly serene. After using her death bed as a soapbox from which to harangue some imaginary multitude for their obstinate refusal to profit from her martyrdom she suddenly became calm and emitted what some witnesses describe as "an extended sigh of resignation"—while others depict it as a "prolonged whimper"—before she finally gave up her tormented ghost.
The Carla Tann tragedy is one that deserves to be chronicled in its own right—and perhaps the valiant role she played in urging the masses to remove the shackles of their intellectual mediocrity will be reappraised as a result of my own heroism in the writing of Morons Awake! In retrospect I should have perceived her outrageous fate as a harbinger of the slings and arrows I would be dodging in my own solitary crusade against the evils of ignorance. But at the time I read A Portrait of America's Most Successful Car Dealer as a Young Greasemonkey her sad story seemed to be not much more than a footnote to the more relevant and fascinating tale of how a simpleminded fugitive from a Nazi Euthanasia Facility turned himself into an average American auto worker.
BASING MY OWN PLANS FOR METAMORPHOSING into Arthur Long on the testimony of a man who was eventually shown to be a pathological liar was, of course, a dubious proposition. However I had little choice in the matter since "average" Americans rarely write autobiographies; and when they do their purpose is never to educate the reader with a detailed account of a working life spent grinding crankshafts in a Detroit machine shop. Because of Dr. Tann's affiliation with the University of Michigan's School of Psychiatric Medicine, ISHI was located in Ann Arbor. This fact made Otto's choice of Detroit as the locale for wetting his feet in the mainstream of American life more than merely a convenient one. Along with being just a stone's throw away from any succor he might need from his exmentoress, Detroit offered several other advantages. In 1946 it was the single metropolis that best symbolized America's industrial leadership of the world. Moreover, the nowridiculed cliché—"What's good for General Motors is good for America!"—was an incontrovertible fact of life as the USA approached the midpoint of the 20thcentury. It was also true that Detroit's booming postwar auto industry represented an employment bonanza for unskilled immigrants from Europe and the deep American south. And, although it didn't seem important to anyone else at the time, for Gustav Otto Shickelgruber Detroit had one other advantage that might prove to be useful in the event his true identity was discovered—its proximity to the Canadian border.
His journey from ISHI's institutional setting to that of a Hamtramck boarding house was duly recorded by a contingent of newsreel cameramen and reporters from the national press services and popular magazines. Rumors circulated about Frank Capra's plans for using Gus (as he now preferred to be called) Otto's real life pursuit of normality as the basis for another of his cinematic tributes to the uncommon virtues of being an ordinary American citizen. Despite his repeated pleas for privacy, every move he made was documented and analyzed in detail. His choice of clothing (a navy blue nylon windbreaker over gray cotton twill trousers and loafers), his favorite meal (Tbone steak, mashed spuds smothered in brown gravy followed by apple pie ala mode), the beer he drank (Schlitz), the gum he chewed (Juicyfruit), the song whose crooning pleased him more than any other (Perry Como's "I'll Be Home For Christmas"), the Sunday evening radio program he found to be consistently the funniest (The Jack Benny Show) all became topics for lively discussion, if not controversy, among average Americans who weren't always sure themselves exactly what it meant to be an "average" American.
Like all banner headlines, the Gus Otto story soon faded its way from the front page into the editorial backwaters of an occasional column inch or two sandwiched between a truss ad and one for an underarm deodorant. Within a month after leaving Dr. Tann's maternalistic nest the fugitive from Euthanasia Facility No. 4 had become just another face in the crowd populating a major American metropolis. If we can believe him (and I think we can on this point) he took to the American way of life "like a duck takes to water." Swimming in the mainstream of a society where everyone was equal and nobody gave a damn about who you were or where you came from so long as you didn't step on their toes was a refreshing change from the class- and cultureconsciousness of a Germany in which the upward mobility of untermenschen (subhumans) like Otto was still inhibited by a feudalistic mentality. In 1946 the American dream was alive and well! And there was still plenty of room in the legendary meltingpot where European "vermin" like him could not only blend themselves into the immigrational stew, some of them would succeed in bubbling their way to the frothiest echelons of America's socioeconomic cocktail. It was in this context that Otto spent the next few months methodically observing the mores, customs and behavioral characteristics by which he could shed his Old World identity and turn himself into a runofthemill American citizen. Among the Rules for Winning Friends & Influencing People he formulated as a result of his observations I found these to be the most useful for my purposes: (1) The discussion of politics, religion or any other subject that is inherently controversial is to be avoided like the plague; (2) If you don't have anything good to say keep your mouth shut; (3) Don't ever tell anyone what you are really thinking—or better yet, don't let them know you are capable of thinking; (4) The less you know and say about any topic of conversation the more friends and fewer enemies you are likely to make; (5) When a conversation is exclusively male, the topics most likely to engender respect for your status as a "good old boy" are women, firearms, batting averages and the horsepower of Detroit's latest musclemachines; (6) If you happen to find yourself as the only man in an otherwise allfemale gabfest the best policy is not to inhibit your masculinity but rather conform (within the limits of decency) to the stereotypical expectations most American women have of being verbally stimulated (or, in some extreme cases, linguistically fondled) when they engage in a form of polite social intercourse so palpably polygamous in the asymmetrical way the gender ratio of its participants has been constituted; (7) When the conversational bag is a sexually mixed one you should limit yourself to making only the blandest remarks about the weather, the newest Rogers & Hammerstein musical, the virtues of living in Michigan, or if all else fails, expatiate briefly on one of those patriotic platitudes ("This is God's country!" "America is the greatest nation in the world!" "Where else can the dreams of the common man actually come true?") no really redblooded American ever tires of hearing articulated.
The Rules for Winning Friends & Influencing People Otto derived from his American observations substantiated to a remarkable degree the conclusions I myself had reached after 50 years of studying the conversational habits of the typical Moron. Given the many other similarities between the American and Moronic social schemes I wasn't all that surprised by what Otto had to say on the subject. But having my educated hunch confirmed from the mouth of such a percipient horse was reassuring. Once again, the fact that first hand data concerning the trivialities of everyday life among America's silent (and illiterate) majority was extremely difficult to come by for someone like me who, because of my persona non grata status within the State Department, had spent the better part of his life in virtual exile (not to mention my predisposition toward a certain aloofness when it comes to the mindless badinaged of conventional social intercourse) can't be overstated. Otto's equally (if not more) detailed18 description of the years he spent on (and under) a Detroit assemblyline was an even more valuable resource. From it I gleaned the kind of authentic minutiae relating to the daily lives of blue collar workers by which I was able to hoodwink the Smiths into believing I (as Arthur Long) had devoted my entire adult life to grinding gears and crankshafts for General Motors. So convincingly did I establish my "automotive expertise" the Smiths promised me they would trade their Toyota in for a Chevrolet upon returning to Muncie!
"You've convinced us, Arthur," said
Mr Smith, "that the time has finally come when we—and millions of other
garden variety Americans like us—can harmonize our abiding sense of
patriotism with our right to purchase a reliable and economic means of
transportation."
"And in buying that Chevy," Mrs Smith chimed in, "as
you pointed out to us so passionately, Art—we might help the son or
daughter of some humble Detroit auto worker get the college education that
will improve America's prospects for competing in the global economy of the
21stcentury."
It couldn't have been more obvious—or gratifying—that: For the Smiths this "buying American" decision I had smooth talked them into making was a genuinely emotional one. When I left them they were huddled in a mutually cathartic discussion about the possibility of adding Hawaii to their travel plans so Mrs Smith might make her long delayed pilgrimage to the USS Arizona Memorial. Under which the sainted remains of her father had lain moldering since 7 December 1941.
Book One Chapter 2 Part 3 Return to Index
Footnotes
13 With the publication of Anne Frank's diary, Otto's more problematical credentials as a gentile, a man, a German and, at the very least, a Nazi dupe, resulted in the rapid deescalation of his once preeminent stature as the archetypical holocaust victim. Otto himself made it clear he harbored no malice toward the adolescent Jewess who had posthumously outmartyred him; and even went so far as to express his gratitude to her for relieving him of the "awesome responsibility that went along with being the 1 person on the planet whose life had to be constantly lived as if it were a monument to those millions of anonymous souls whose own lives were cut so tragically short by the insanity of total war."
14 Variations which, over time, produce those intellectual traits we associate with particular tribal, ethnic and national entities. Hence the difference in attitude toward intellectuality itself one finds between the American ethos of the ruggedly individualistic frontiersman hacking his way through a natural (and selfmade) wilderness, and that of the Europeans, which is rooted in the more refined concept of employing the collective mind to conquer, tame and eventually harness a hostile environment.
15 The exchange of "open letters" between Tann and von Quaksalber continued on a surprisingly civilized (if not entirely cordial) and scholarly basis throughout the war and until the very day, in fact, when von Quaksalber was found dead in his Nuremburg cell with a suicidenote/Final Position Paper addressed to "Mein freundlichfeind, Karla" [my friendly enemy]. The question this oddest of all academic couples wrestled over couldn't have been slipperier—dealing as it did with the very nature of the human mind; and whether the most decisive of its limiting factors were innate (von Quaksalber) or environmental (Tann). This is, of course, the same issue that makes the Klutz Affair. such a hot sociopolitical potato. Especially in egalitarian cultures like Moronia (and America) where the merest hint that all men might not have been created equal; or if they were —by definition they must be held accountable for any deviation in their IQs either below or above the normal 100. But, my dear reader, more— much much more!—about such fascinating matters when we get deeper into this Revolutionary Manifesto.
16 Tann, Dr. Carla; "Life As Art: The Application Of Aesthetic Principles To The Daily Lives Of Average Men And Women," published by ISHI Press as Vol XXIV of The Collected Works Of An American Martyr For The Cause Of A More Intelligent World.
17 Her ideas were taken seriously by the scientific community of the USSR, whose ideological bias has always inclined it toward an emphasis on the efficacy of environmental factors in enhancing the productiveness of such perennially deficient resources as livestock, agricultural crops and the intellectual output of the average soviet citizen. While their work in this area throughout the cold war still remains top secret, it is probably fair to say that, judging by what we can now see clearly since the advent of glasnost, any use made of Tann's theories and techniques didn't produce that race of Soviet Supermen the Kremlin hoped might prove to be decisive in its claim for planetary fame as the ideological wave of a future wherein the congenital IQ disparities separating one individual from another since the human race was created by a laissez-faire capitalist god could be eradicated through the application of certain Marxist techniques of intelligence enhancement. The failure of communism in this regard, as with the total collapse of its bid to create a more socially and economically equitable world, is not, I think, a cause for celebration. Just as the defeat of fascism, no matter how justifiable because of the evil and incompetence of its principal protagonists, brought with it a general distrust for all Great Men and Great Ideas which has accelerated the global trend toward mediocrity in politics—so too, lying in the same coffin with the late and unlamented Karl Marx is the saintly corpse of Idealism herself.
18 A Portrait of America's Most Successful Car Dealer as a Young Greasemonkey is replete with footnotes and appendices.