Just Another Nazi Granddaddy

Say goodbye to Racine, Wisconsin, motherfucker.

Josias Kumpf is going bye-byes, off to Austria, and he's not thrilled to be leaving his porch and his Chinese-made American flag stuck in the planter.

Oh, well!

The benign-looking sag-ass sitting in his plastic chair wearing his Costco parka ain't your old granddaddy. He is a Nazi who, in 1943 participated in a mass-shooting that left 8,000 Jews dead in one day. He did other things, too, I have no doubt, that we will never hear about, because, even sixty-six years later, they're too shocking and too horrible, even for Yahoo! News.

Apparently, Kumpf got his citizenship by not mentioning that he was an SS guard because, according to this lawyer, "he feard it would disqualify him when he applied for a visa."

Now, that's good thinking, Kumpf!

I'm sure there are some who are upset over Kumpf's deportation. Those assholes in the Lehigh Valley who named their kid Adolf Hitler, I'm sure aren't pleased. There are other, seemingly more normal folk, though, who seem to think that the mere passage of a large chunk of time is all that is needed to absolve someone of a heinous crime.

Here's what I say to those people:

"Let someone kill someone you love, let forty or fifty or sixty years go by, and then let's see what you think."

On May 21st, 1971, during the height of racial tension and unrest in New York City, two young New York City patrolmen were summoned to a project in Harlem at a little after ten p.m.-- a woman needed help. It came in as "a sick call." As the two patrolmen walked back to their radio car, chatting about this or about that, three armed men snuck up behind them and shot them in the back. Waverly Jones, 33, was killed instantly. His partner, Joseph Piagentini, lay writhing on the ground, begging for his life as his butchers fired bullet after bullet into his body. Piagentini was white, Jones was black-- and they were both killed in the name of black liberation, although the only thing Jones was liberated from was his family.

38 years later, the two surviving killers (one died in prison) come up for parole every two years. They are consistently denied by a parole board that is still mindful of the horrors they committed against humanity. There are some people out there who say that the killers have been imprisoned for long enough. That "enough time has passed." That this "all happened a long time ago." That "it's time to move on."

But, how can we do that? Sure, it was a long time ago. So was the Civil War-- but we don't stop trekking to Gettysburg. Washington sparred with Cornwallis a long time ago, too-- but we still have our bewigged patron saint on the one bucker, don't we? Martin Luther King, Jr. got shot in the face a "long time ago," too-- but I wouldn't suggest we stop honoring him, or forgetting what he stood for anytime soon, just because that all happened "a long time ago."

Memory is only as brief as we allow it to be. And I wouldn't presume to slap a police officer's widow or the kin of a Holocaust survivor across the face with a "well, that was really a very long time ago." Who are we to say?

So, as you look at the picture of this pathetic, droopy old fart, settin' there on his porch in the Wisconsin sunlight and question whether we are in the right to kick him out of our free country, picture him instead like this, and maybe that will give you a moment's clarity.

There is no statute-of-limitation on murder, just like there's no statute-of-limitation on memory.