Hochhuth

Not long ago, my wife met a guy at a yard sale who was down on his luck. She ended up working out a deal where he would come to the house and fix a couple things and do some yard projects. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

One of the items he was to fix was a generator she’d bought at a previous yard sale. Generators are pretty heavy, and this one had no wheels. So I had put it on a yard wagon and pulled it around to the back patio. Since the wagon raised it up a bit, he left it on the wagon to work on it. He started by changing the oil, then he worked on checking the fuel flow.

This was going on while I was in the house, and at about this point, I heard him say, “no no no NO NO NOOOO!” And then the sound of things falling and more “NO’s” from him. I called out to ask if everything was ok, even though it was clearly not. Of course he said it was fine. But he was lying.

It turns out that while he was checking the fuel, he disconnected the fuel line. The gas tank was about half full. So gas was squirting out. And he couldn’t get it stopped. So gas was squirting out. In his further attempts to get that stopped, it started to tip off the yard wagon. This is probably the point where he started “No-ing”. As the generator continued squirting gas and continued to tip off the the yard wagon, he also lost his balance. As they tumbled over, the container of used motor oil got knocked down and spilled out, as well. But the generator was on top of it, so he couldn’t just pick it up, and used motor oil coated about one-fourth of the patio. He didn’t come back after that day.

Not everything we do works out the way we hope; you’ve probably noticed that. The German dramatist, Rolf Hochhuth, produced a nine hour play called “The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy” in 1963. It was his first major work, and of course it has never been performed in full, but always abridged. The work has been very controversial, but not for its length; it is highly critical of Pope Pius XII for his silence regarding Hitler and the Holocaust. Oddly enough, Hochhuth became good friends with British author, David Irving, best known as a Holocaust denier. At one point, he defended Irving in an interview, and became a victim of his own controversy; he was eventually forced to issue an apology.

He has gone on to produce other controversial works, including one in which he made the villain a real life person who was still alive and who successfully sued him for libel. Since Hochhuth is still alive at the time I write this, maybe we’ll run into him at a yard sale and he can take a crack at our generator.