21st-century Moses

Another trip to the ER, another real-life episode of "Cops".

My mom and I took my grandpa to the ER last night as he evidently needed to go, based on my mother's medical knowledge. (He turned out to have bronchitis and a urinary tract infection, and my mom remains convinced he would've developed pneumonia without the ER treatment, so her judgment held up.) As always at the VA hospital, this mainly meant a lot of waiting in the lounge of the emergency room.

Not that I really minded. I brought along the two books I had been reading, finished the last 90 pages or so of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of short works by Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman that my dad loaned me, and got through a like amount of Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, an excellent living political history in the form of travelogue I recommend to everyone. For good measure, I also had my 30 GB iPod with me to ensure hours of musical enjoyment.

Of course, there was plenty of free entertainment on hand.

Sometime around midnight, paramedics brought some guy into the ER on a stretcher. I overheard them say something about the guy having mental problems of some sort, but didn't think anything of it. A little while later, we heard some screams coming from the ER, and a hospital police officer standing outside soon started yelling at the guy in the ER, telling him to get down, and using his nightstick to try to hold him at bay. That didn't seem to work, so he raced out to his squad car and returned to pepper spray the man, who was then sedated and confined to a bed with leather straps. It was a bit harrying, mostly because we could only see the cops reacting to whatever was happening and couldn't actually see the guy in the ER.

But, we shouldn't have minded so much, because the delay meant we got to meet Moses.

Shortly after the commotion in the ER, another prospective patient wandered in, ostensibly because of inscrutable pain in his stomach. It soon seemed, however, that he was determined to be a pain in the neck to the rest of the ER waiting room.

At first I didn't pay much notice to the guy. But then he started ranting about the meds they were going to give him, how they'd give him Vicodin and he wanted Demerol, so he'd have to get a little marijuana to go with it for the pain. This prompted a discourse on how the Germans had invented Demerol since they didn't produce poppy seeds and needed a synthetic substitute. This then prompted the guy to talk about Hitler and the Second World War, subjects that really grab your attention.

Essentially, the guy thought Hitler did pretty well, raising Germany out of the Depression and taking a tiny country -- he touched his forefinger to his thumb to illustrate -- damn near took over the world. Of course, the whole killing Jews thing was bad, but that stemmed from Hitler being angry. Angry about not making it as an art student, angry about Germany losing the First World War, and angry that the Jews held all the money. Yup, he managed to propagate at least two of the more popularized and dangerous German myths for why life sucked in Deutschland during the interwar years: Germany had been stabbed in the back in the last war and now suffered at the hands of supposed Jewish usurers. It was harrowing to hear someone in the flesh who seemed an apologist for Nazi Germany.

If I wasn't paying attention before, I couldn't help it now that the guy turned around and began talking to me. He asked me if I was German. I do have a fair bit of German heritage, so I replied yes. It was the truth, and I was also getting the sense that this was not a conversation I wanted to keep up.

But it was OK that I was German, he assured me, since I hadn't done any of that. See, the guy thought that I was German in the born-and-bred, Leiderhosen-and-Spätzel vein. I am, in fact, your garden variety German-American, someone who's ancestors immigrated from the Vaterland more than a century before and who experiences his German heritage primarily through Bratwurst and Sauerkraut. Still, I figured better to allow him to keep believing this and spare myself a lengthy explanation.

From there he started going on and on about how well Germany did during the war and the reasons they ultimately failed. This took some rewriting of history, as the German Army never actually took either Leningrad or Moscow. Nor did it seem likely they'd turn against the Italians (or the Japanese for that matter), at least so long as they remained allied against Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, et al. I also thought it prudent not to correct him when he asserted that Hermann Göring, not Josef Goebbels, headed the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. Still, he went on and on, confusing history and claiming that tiny Germany, a country apparently 1 inch in diameter, came close to conquering the world. That was interesting.

But then he asked me if I knew why he was here. Rather than state the obvious ("You seem to be in some kind of pain, man.") I shook my head. He then mumbled something about the Lord Jesus bringing him here because he was the Moses for the 21st century. Not Moses like Charlton Heston, mind you. That drew quite the chuckle from my mom and prompts me to lament what I've done to perpetually run across the delusional people who think they're Moses.

Soon the guy got up to ask the ER receptionist why he hadn't been seen yet, and I took the opportunity to go to the bathroom. When I returned I thought it would help to listen to my iPod. This inspired Moses to pull out his CD player, and to show me all his CDs. Blind Faith, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and the Doors. To make sure I knew what he was saying with my music on, he started talking even louder. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Jim Morrison -- all killed by the government, I learned.

By now I was wondering when my grandpa would be done so we could take him home. I didn't really want to listen to Moses much longer, since I think he was just trying to lead me into a desert wilderness of ignorance and misinformation. At one point he told me he thought that Berlin Wall was pretty cool. Why? But I think I managed to shake him by throwing his own misunderstanding back at him. He asked me where I was in Germany, Bonn, Berlin or which city. I told him Berlin. After all, that's where I had spent a weekend two summers ago (and I didn't think to mention Heidelberg, where I spent a day last winter). He thought I had been in West Berlin. I hadn't been in the East, right? I had. ('Twas true. The Circus Hostel where I stayed and most of my sightseeing had been in East Berlin.) That took him aback. "Oh wow, so you guys just got freedom. That must've been pretty exciting when you guys took down the Wall." I smiled politely.

So, there you have it. That's the story of how I became an East German in one night. Just remember, an estimated one-in-three East Germans informed for the Stasi at some point during the Communist era. Your attitude is being noted.