Dear Time Travelers,

As I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, I found myself transformed in my bed into a monstrous vermin.

An eel, more specifically. I wriggled my slimy head across the pillow while thrashing my body through the sloppy loose folds of white cotton sheets until I could see my alarm clock. It was nearly quarter to 7. The alarm had been set for 4 AM. Evidently my alarm had failed to go off or I had slept through it, which seemed scarcely possible, cacophonously loud as I knew it to be.

"Shit," I thought to myself. "I'm going to be so late for work."

In truth I had already known I was late. I had woken up with a start, a creeping sensation of dread, and two unmistakable realizations - A) I no longer have eyelids, & B) I am late for something.

Unfortunately, I am not in the habit of locking my bedroom door at night, and I could hear light footsteps coming up the stairs towards my room. The steps arrived on the landing and proceeded directly towards my door. There they took a pause in front of the door, but I could hear the floorboards creak as someone shifted their weight from one foot to the other. Then the doorknob slowly turned and the soft voice of my sister followed shortly thereafter saying, "Sebastian, aren't you supposed to be..."

It stopped abruptly as the swing of the door revealed her face. The moment of silence was longer than I expected it to be. As this moment stretched on and her eyes grew ever larger and the color drained from her face I felt compelled to break the silence with some kind of explanation so finally I said, "Sarah, something odd has happened to me." But the words that actually came out of my toothy open mouth dissolved into an awkward hiss.

Her knees unexpectedly half-buckled, dropping her head down a few inches in a sudden lurch. Her mouth and eyes were now both so wide open it seemed they had consumed her entire face, with no room left for a nose - it was virtually swallowed up by them. I found that my new body was very sensitive to vibrations, and the shockwave that emanated from Sarah's mouth felt like it was putting me into cardiac arrest. All of the muscles in my body contracted involuntarily. After the spasm, my face was now pointed towards the headboard, and I could no longer see Sarah. I guess she must have run out of the room, because when I finally wriggled back around, the open doorway was empty. I never heard her footsteps going back down the stairs, even though it must have been thunderous.

"So it's not just me. I really am an eel," I determined. "Maybe it's temporary," I thought. "I woke up as an eel; maybe going to sleep and waking up again will change me back tomorrow."

I could now hear somebody rummaging frantically through the kitchen drawers downstairs and the muffled tones of Sarah yelling loudly at someone; on her phone presumably.

I didn't know what Sarah was prepping for down there, but I knew it wasn't going to be good news for me either way. Even if she didn't come running back up with a shovel or call the exterminator or a sushi chef, I had paid attention in 11th grade English class. The best case scenario was slowly dying of shame while getting apples chucked at me.

As it had always been my custom to visit the bathroom after waking up in the morning anyway, the path forward was obvious to me.

I wriggled across the bed and flopped out onto the floor with a wet thud. As I made my way towards the open bedroom door, a sickening thought crossed my mind - what if the bathroom door was closed? I froze for a second, realizing that I had already left the safety of the bed behind without knowing whether I would be trapped in the upstairs corridor.

"You're dead in the bed," I reassured myself as I slithered through the door. I almost grinned as I remembered how I had pulled the covers over my head as a child, fearful of the monsters lurking in the dark shadows of my bedroom. As if 400 thread-count sheets and a comforter were an effective barrier against the fearsome monsters I had been imagining. But that moment of levity quickly turned to fear as I turned the corner and started down the hallway. I heard what sounded like a solitary footstep at the bottom of the stairs. I wriggled faster. Definitely another footstep. Evidently, Sarah had recovered her nerve.

I could see the bathroom door, but it was hard to tell whether it was closed or just ajar. It definitely wasn't wide open, that was for sure. My vision was starting to get cloudy now and I knew it would only get worse the longer I stayed out of water. My whole body was starting to feel sticky. Whereas I had at first glided on a film of slime, I now felt more like a limp linguini noodle stuck to the inside of the pot.

The cautious steps continued to ascend the stairs as I approached the bathroom door. As my progress slowed I had time to think about what I would do if the door were latched. I felt dry and weak. My skin was beginning to burn. My vision was getting extremely hazy. Jumping three feet into the air and somehow catching a doorknob in my mouth was a non-starter. Was there some way I could communicate with Sarah and let her know that it was me? Talking to her had obviously failed, but maybe there was another way to get through to her. Maybe a gesture she would recognize as mine. Maybe I could tap the floor in morse code.

"You don't fucking know morse code, you idiot," I said to myself. "Neither does Sarah."

I reached the bathroom door at about the same time that Sarah seemed to be reaching the top of the stairs. The door was ajar. I pushed it a little further open and wriggled through onto the gray bathroom tile. The door and the jamb conspired to scrape off what felt like all of the remaining slime on my skin and both sides of my long body burned like hell. At least the tile floor was cool to the touch.

The bathroom light was off, of course, not that the dim lighting mattered much - I was getting pretty close to blind anyway at this point. I had lost track of Sarah after she got to the landing. Hopefully she was tip-toing nervously through my bedroom, but maybe she was about to throw the bathroom door wide open and chop my head off with the machete I knew we kept in the garden shed.

If there's any route in the world I could navigate blind it's the path between my bed and the toilet, and I found it pretty quickly. I expected Sarah to burst into the bathroom at any time, but she didn't. Still cautiously poking the pile of sheets on my bed with a machete, I presumed. As I struggled to lift my head up to the top of the toilet bowl I was disappointed to discover that the toilet seat was down (thanks a lot, Sarah) but relieved to find that the lid was up. It took a herculean effort to heave enough of my body over the seat so that I didn't fall back down onto the hard tile floor, but after two tries I had done it. I wriggled up and over and was down the drain, leaving the human world behind forever as far as I knew.

One rather exhilarating water slide later I was in the main sewer line and from there I navigated by necessity towards the waste water treatment plant. It was located near a small river, so after running into the first row of debris screens I backtracked to the nearest open storm drain and it was a relatively short, grassy trip to open water from there. It was mid morning now, but there was still some dew on the long grass and the sun was shining brightly as I slid down the bank and into the gently flowing river.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief for the first time in three hours as I let the current carry me.

Whereto now?

My first thought was to migrate to salt water for the spawning season, but my instincts told me that would be my final act as an eel so I thought it might be best to save that bit for later. My sense of direction was remarkable. I could feel the pull of the earth's magnetic field whenever I concentrated on it. I wish I could tell you how South East feels different from North East, but there aren't really any good words in human language for it. South East is kind of a puffy tingly feeling along the lateral line, while North East is more of a sinky rhythmic feeling. That's actually a pretty weird abstraction of what it feels like. I don't know, like I said, there aren't really any good words for it.

As I gulped down the first fish I had ever caught with my own teeth, it came to me. I would go somewhere quaint. Some place lost to time. A place where no one would ever try to cut off your head with a machete.

I would find the place where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. I would migrate to Lake Wobegon.

And I did. As I said before, my sense of direction was literally superhuman. An eel's sense of direction plus old memories of basic geography & the ability to read signs is an unstoppable combination.

Lake Wobegon was just as quaint and folksy as you would imagine. There was a diner there called The Brown Pebble that was kind of like a cross between The Cracker Barrel & The Krusty Krab. The walls were cluttered with early & mid 20th century Americana. The residents were warm & welcoming. There was Sally, a sunfish who worked at the post office, the gas station attendant, Bill. One of my best friends was a Johnny Darter named Johnny. I remember how Gary & Ted, the two gay frogs would croak out "Fine Morning, wouldn't you say, Sebastian?" As I went past their rock after breakfast on my morning swim. There was Patricia, the crayfish, who I "accidentally" ate before they told me hunting was only allowed outside borough limits. 

Yes, it was an idyllic existence in my cozy hole on Sundry Lane. It would have been nearly impossible to get a place that close to Main Street, but Patricia had been well-connected.

And then one day after four years of living in Lake Wobegon, I awoke one morning to find I had been transformed into a monstrous vermin. 

A human, to be more precise. There was a lot of choking and a fair amount of asphyxiation, but I managed to reach the surface of the lake, thrashing in all directions and coughing violently as I broke the surface of the water. This attracted the attention of a passing fisherman and his son, who trolled over to me in their bass boat.

"Are you OK, sir?" the bearded fisherman asked from behind a pair of wrap-around sunglasses and a camouflage Bass Pro Shops hat as they pulled close, but not too close to me.

I had to get a few more coughs out before I could answer. 

"Yeah, I think I'll make it," I eventually sputtered while treading water.

The fisherman pulled back his young son, who was leaning out of the boat, staring down at me in amazement.

"Why are you out here naked?" The fisherman asked.

"I guess the COVID vaccine finally wore off," I replied. 

"I told you people not to get it," he answered.

"I had to because of my job," I lied.

The fisherman grimaced and gave me a sympathetic nod. "Do you need a lift back into town?"

Swimming had because a lot more laborious since transforming back into a human.

"That would be really appreciated, actually," I replied.

The fisherman told his son to look the other way as I clambered into the boat. He gave me an olive green poncho to put on and then opened the throttle to full power as we turned towards town. I felt like an outdoorsy exhibitionist pervert as I tried to hold down my poncho from fluttering in the breeze.

The human side of Lake Wobegon looked a lot different from what I expected. There were a couple of homeless guys sleeping on a bench outside the Burger King. 

After realizing it was a gas station and not a brothel, I walked across the street to Kum & Go. One of the signs on the outside was in the process of being replaced by the new name - "Maverik." I didn't know how or why a gas station named after a whore house was being transformed into a John McCain memorial, but I made a mental note to follow up on it later.

The bell jangled as I walked through the door. I threw some newspapers, magazines, a cheap android phone and a SIM card starter pack on the counter. I said hello to the cashier and then looked out the window at a guy who was walking past in a classic red MAGA hat. Weird that people are still wearing those, I thought. Must be an ironic/retro thing. I turned back to see that the cashier had been following my gaze.

"Still waiting for the greatness?" I quipped.

The cashier rolled her eyes.

I understood her reaction better after I had returned to the Burger King and threw my purchases down on the table to start catching up on the last four years.

Inflation, wars, illegal immigration, lawfare, identity politics double and triple downed on, assassinations, assassination attempts.

In 2017 I had written of the next (2020) election cycle - 

If the Democrats present themselves as a return to sanity, to decorum, to moderation and common sense, I could see them staying in power for at least the next decade, maybe longer. Or the Democrats could present themselves as the party of identity politics, condescension, and self-righteous, UC Berkeley neo-marxist illiberalism, in which case the country will lurch left and right nearly every election cycle, alternately running to and then desperately trying to escape the clawing, gnarled grasp of the rabid, reactionary zealots on both sides.

 

Apparently the Democratic party had taken my second scenario as a roadmap rather than a warning. Admittedly, things were looking pretty sketchy in 2021, but I had still hoped Biden might lead the U.S. on a rather boring four-year journey back towards something a little closer to normalcy. No such luck. Instead he had gone all-in on open borders and DEI, all while showering MAGA with more than enough attention to keep Trump nice and toasty on the back burner. Apparently Biden had then garnished this shit sandwich with a dash of ego and a sizable dollop of senility on the side.

I leaned back in the Burger King booth, looked out the window and took a long sip of my drink.

I was mightily disappointed. This was like waiting for months to get a reservation at the best Michelin-star restaurant in town and then being forced to eat cat poo.

Ok, I'll be honest, my expectations weren't actually that high in mid 2021, but still, it was very dispiriting. Maybe the equivalent of opening your Big Mac carton to find a single piece of dog shit, to use my third scatological metaphor in the last six sentences.

I looked at the pile of magazines and newspapers spread out across the table. The topic du jour seemed to be the assassination of some guy named Charlie Kirk. I had never heard of him, so I whipped out my phone to look him up (accidently watched the videos of the assassination; wish I hadn't). The people on the Left seemed to think he was Hitler, the people on the Right considered him a martyr. That seemed like a pretty wide divergence of opinion, so I dove into the the plethora of Charlie Kirk content.

As someone who formerly identified as an eel, (and still often stares at SCUBA divers with my mouth half open) I naturally disagreed with Kirk's views on transspeciesism, but his opinions seemed pretty mainstream for a Christian conservative. I doubt my own parents would disagree with a word of it. If you welcome this guy's death, then there are about a hundred million other Americans you'd probably enjoy seeing killed as well. I'm not sure about you, but any time I catch myself rooting for a holocaust, I take that as a sign to stop and reconsider my priors.

While Americans can't seem to agree on who's Hitler and who's not Hitler, one thing everyone does seem to agree on is that if you had a time machine, you should travel back and kill him. That's a dangerous consensus in a world filled with so many people suffering from Hitler dysphoria. 

It feels cruel to undermine one of the last remaining points of agreement in a world of so much division, but I would posit that were it actually possible to do so, your best course of action would not be to travel back to 1894 and murder a five-year-old boy named Adolf in Braunau, Austria. Nor, even, would your time be best spent travelling back to 1907 and admitting a certain 18-year-old candidate into the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Despite the fact that most historians abandoned the Great Man theory of history decades ago, it lives on in the popular conception. Most of us imagine that revolutionary ideas and new inventions are the brainchildren of singular geniuses who stride atop the influences and lesser minds of their time and impose on history from the top down. We remember Edison and Ford and Alexander Graham Bell and Eli Whitney and the Wright Brothers and forget about the thousands of contemporary inventors who were solving the same problems at the same time, and more often than not having their intellectual property stolen from them by the famous names we recognize. We remember Darwin and forget Wallace. We remember Newton and forget Leibniz. We remember Jobs and forget Wozniak. History is easier to remember and easier to romanticize when we have a single protagonist, and so we rip them out of space and time, set them on a pedestal above their contemporaries and pretend each of them was a Prometheus instead of someone who hit the jackpot three times - right place, right time, right PR team.

That's not to say that nobody's special or there's no such thing as genius. But the vast majority of breakthroughs are the culmination of decades, centuries, or even millennia of work coming to a head. That's what Isaac Newton meant when he said, "We stand on the shoulders of giants."

Darwin is an interesting case study because he waited over twenty years to publish his theory. He finally did publish because Wallace had independently come to the same conclusion and was about to anticipate him. Evolution by natural selection was going to be discovered in the 19th century, with or without Darwin's participation. A couple hundred years of observations had been leading up to it. Evolution of the species could have been (and was) speculated upon in more general terms for centuries and millennia beforehand, but it could not have been described narrowly or supported by sufficient evidence much earlier than it was because the fossil, geological, biological, and zoological evidence for it had not been discovered yet.

If Ken Ham went back in a time machine and killed Darwin before Charlie could embark on the HMS Beagle, I'm reasonably confident that Ken would arrive back in the present and discover a world that while perhaps different in some ways, would still be one in which the evolution of species by natural selection was taught in every biology department. Ken could then go back and kill Wallace as well, and again, I think Ken would return to the present only to find that his old nemesis, evolution, was still here.

So if Darwin wasn't The Indispensable Man, could it be that Hitler wasn't either?

Well, it's impossible to prove a counterfactual, but let's take a look at the cultural milieu of 1930s Germany and the extent to which Hitler was or wasn't solely responsible for creating the wave upon which he rode.

The Nazis modeled their neo-classical architecture, art, and even their salute on the Romans, although the salute was almost certainly the result of artistic license taken by the likes of Jacques-Louis David in the 17th century.

The history of antisemitism in Germany goes back through Martin Luther and all the way to the pogroms of the Middle Ages.

Prussian militarism really started to take on its 20th century form in the wake of their defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806. In 1855 The German expat and Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had already diagnosed the two great ideological forces of the 20th century and predicted their dire outcomes:

This confession, that the future belongs to the Communists, I made with an undertone of the greatest fear and sorrow and this undertone is by no means a mask! Indeed, with fear and terror I imagine the time, when those dark iconoclasts come to power: with their raw fists they will batter all marble images of my beloved world of art, they will ruin all those fantastic anecdotes that the poets loved so much, they will chop down my Laurel forests and plant potatoes... And yet, I freely confess, the same thoughts have a magical appeal upon my soul which I cannot resist .... In my chest there are two voices in their favour which cannot be silenced .... because the first one is that of logic ... and as I cannot object to the premise "that all people have the right to eat", I must defer to all the conclusions....The second of the two compelling voices, of which I am talking, is even more powerful than the first, because it is the voice of hatred, the hatred I dedicate to this common enemy that constitutes the most distinctive contrast to communism and that will oppose the angry giant already at the first instance – I am talking about the party of the so-called advocates of nationality in Germany, about those false patriots whose love for the fatherland only exists in the shape of imbecile distaste of foreign countries and neighbouring peoples...

And nearly a century before the Nazis came to power, a younger Heinrich Heine wrote in 1835:

Christianity – and that is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. ... Do not smile at my advice – the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Heine's books were censored in Prussia and later burned in Nazi Germany.

Nietzsche described concepts such as the super-man (Übermensch) and the will to power in the 1880s. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, first mentioned eugenics in the 1880s as well, as part of a larger philosophy which Joseph Fisher coined Social Darwinism in 1877. While the eugenics movement in England and the U.K. mostly focused on forced sterilization, euthanasia has of course been practiced by humans since the earliest known times.

Germany's defeat in WWI and the harsh terms of the subsequent Treaty of Versailles splintered German society. Some reacted by rejecting conservative Prussian values and embracing individual free expression, while others shunned modernism and became obsessed by grievance. The reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles contributed to the hyperinflation of 1923, which decimated Germany's middle class. When the Nazi's coup (the infamous Beer Hall Putsch) failed in that same year, Hitler lamented from prison that never again would such an opportunity for revolution present itself. Luckily for him, The Great Depression would begin only seven years later.

Hitler didn't invent Fascism. That distinction goes to Mussolini, at least nominally, although some of the core tenants in Fascism can be traced back to ancient Greece. Supposedly, Mussolini consulted Plato's Republic every morning before starting work.

Hitler didn't even invent the Nazi party.

The emblem above is that of the Thule Society. Does it look familiar? The Thule society was a group of occultist Aryan nationalists obsessed by race and mysticism who hated communism. It originally started as a study group in 1911, founded by Walter Nauhaus. You didn't know that name, did you? Nauhaus would later be wounded while fighting in WWI and go on to become an artist. Interesting.

To join the Thule society you had take a solemn oath that: 

The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races.

The Thule society sponsored the German Workers' Party (DAP), which Anton Drexler founded in 1919. I bet you've never heard of Anton Drexler. Hitler became the DAP's 55th member later that same year. The DAP was only one of many tiny far-right parties, paramilitary organizations, and movements at the time.

"But Sebastian," I can hear you saying, "Only Hitler had the oratory skills and demagogic prowess to pull the whole thing off. If I kill Hitler then those centuries of historic currents will never come to a head."

Guess who was a big fan of the Great Man theory of history.

Sure, Hitler was a charismatic public speaker. From a field of many thousands of far-right zealots, I'd expect the winner of Germany's Next Top Fascist to be a very charismatic speaker.

However, a big part of the reason why Hitler still looms in our collective imagination as a larger-than-life character to the extent that he does, is because Leni Riefenstahl and the rest of his propagandists did a really good job of pushing that narrative. But assuming you don't believe the rest of Nazi propaganda, why would you take their word on Hitler being a prime mover of history or a titanic figure of superhuman (albeit evil) ability? 

North Korean state media reported in 1994 that Kim Jong-Il hit 11 holes-in-one on the first round of golf he ever played. They also claim that Kim Jong-Un doesn't pee or poop, and could drive a car at the age of three. Are you impressed? I'm not.

I've read Mein Kampf. I can tell you that the thoughtful and compelling organization of arguments wasn't Hitler's strong suit. Operation Barbarossa should be enough evidence for anyone that he wasn't much of a military genius either.

Neither I nor anyone else can tell you what 1930s Germany would have looked like had Hitler never been born, but I don't think there are many alternate universes out there in which that toxic mix of ingredients go into the cocktail shaker of history and a fuzzy navel comes out. 

Today's mystery ingredients are bleach, fluorine, and weapons-grade plutonium

Like Ken Ham trying to stop the theory of evolution, I think a time travelling Hitler assassin would get back to the present and be disappointed pretty much every time. Sometimes things would turn out better, sometimes they would turn out worse, but it would always become apparent that Hitler was merely a manifestation of a disease which was much larger, much deeper, and much older than any one man.

How else could Heinrich Heine have seen the Nazis coming from a hundred years away? Note also that neither Italy nor Spain required Hitler's particular melodramatics to put their own fascist regimes into power.

Note further still how bad humans have historically been at predicting the outcomes of assassinations or achieving their desired ones. For every Park Chung-hee (and even here it's not clear that restoring democracy was his assassin's primary objective) there are multiple examples of assassinations ultimately leading to very different outcomes from what the assassins would presumably have wanted. Julius Caesar was murdered to protect the Roman Republic from Tyrannosaurus Rex. Wait, no; tyranny. Tyranny was the threat. But several civil wars later Augustus was on the throne and the Republic was gone forever.

"Great," you're probably thinking, "then how can a single, ambitious time traveler with a full clip and a passion for murder be confident that they're making the world a better place?"

I think the truth is that you can't, at least not with any high degree of certainty, and you may inadvertently make things worse instead.  Idiosyncratic cases like serial killers might be "assassin-solvable." Maybe Dexter had the right idea. But if there was a mass movement or an ideology behind a bad man, taking out the bad man probably isn't going to solve the problem, because the problem is a bad idea.

And my old friend Messala from Ben-Hur knows how to fight an idea-

It's not sexy, it takes a lot longer, it doesn't make for a very satisfying Hollywood screenplay, and it flies in the face of the over-simplified Great Man theory that many of us still think explains the events of history. It may sound like something off a Hallmark card or a motivational poster, but history really is written by all of us and shaped by the ideas which travel like viruses between us.

This guy fought Fascism harder than you or I ever will. It's hard to see in this picture, but I assume he needed a wheelbarrow to walk around with those watermelon-sized testicles.

If I shared the priors of Charlie Kirk's assassin and really thought Kirk was a horrible fascist who was spreading hateful ideas and I absolutely felt compelled to do something about it, I probably would have driven to Utah Valley University and sat behind a card table with a sign that said, "Humans can become eels. Prove me wrong."

Sincerely,

Sebastian Braff