Stephen Miller

When I hear Stephen Miller spout his Nazi line (maybe even cribbing directly from speeches given by German Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels) I’m reminded of Tobias Wolff’s _This Boy’s Life_. In his memoir, Wolff tells us about his time with the two Terrys, Terry Taylor and Terry Silver, when they were just turning adolescent in the late 50s.

The three of them would watch all the TV shows on Nazis—“TV was very big on Nazis then,” Wolff tells us. The kids were enthralled by all the violence of the war, naturally, and saw through the pretense, as they thought, of the shows. They were supposed to be about the victory of good over evil, but for the boys “the real point was to celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars. . . . These shows instructed us . . . that victims are contemptible, no matter how much people pretend otherwise; that it is more fun to be inside than outside, to be arrogant than to be kind, to be with a crowd than to be alone.”

And so Silver made a Nazi armband for himself and strutted around wearing it. He consulted the phone book for people with “Jewish sounding names,” called them, and then “screamed at them in pig German.” In the final scene of the chapter the three of them climbed to the roof of Silver's apartment building and threw eggs at a flashy Thunderbird passing by below. As the driver finally went off, defeated because he couldn’t see where the eggs were coming from, “‘Yid!’ Silver screamed, and again, ‘Yid!’”

Earlier in the chapter, as Wolff introduces the reader to the two Terrys, we learn that both of the Terrys, and Wolff himself for that matter, were not exactly the cool kids on the block. They were outsiders in the extreme, losers as we might say nowadays.

Wolff also comments in passing that Silver’s father was a cantor.

And therefore I think of Stephen Miller.