Prologue…
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or as my intellectual snob father would insist that be quoted in the original French: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. (1849 Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr)
With the world spinning about us with the vertiginous speed of scientific discovery and purported progress, often fueled by regrettably insubstantial thought, I thought that dumb. No longer. All I and you have to do is watch TV, read any non-fiction print, and skim as superficially as humanly possible all quintessentially irrelevant social media. Yup. As to fundamental relevancies, Jean-Baptiste nailed it one hundred seventy one years ago.
Pimps, whores and the rarest of the species, patrons of virtue. “Whore,” the word looked at as descriptive rather than a noun is by definition entirely pejorative. Yet, this writer finds ubiquitous instances of scale. Believe it or not, there are multiple degrees of “whoredom”. In fact, this book is devoted to also showcase whores, among all three of the species, in their blooming glory and incomprehensible worst.
Which brings us to the morally destitute Scottish Government and the morally bankrupt rubber-stamping British Government. On August 29, 2009, they decided to set free Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi. On December 21, 1988, Megrahi, a very studious, well prepared and uniquely clever monster, murdered 270 people by blowing up Pan Am 107 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
In a macabre turn of events, Megrahi was struck with cancer giving the Scotts and the British the opportunity to free him, get this, on humanitarian grounds.
Appears that his release has been in discussions with his home country, Libya, for some time. It had been integral to any oil deal the UK might have made with Libya.
They did keep him in prison for 8 years, though. That would be 10.8 days for each innocent he murdered.
He appeared to have lived a hero’s life until 2012, in what can only be characterized as a miraculous recovery from previously imminent death from cancer.
So there…
Pimps and Whores.
Read on: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The Honorable Dr. Immo Stabreit
German Ambassador to the United States of America
4645 Reservoir Rd. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20007
Dear Mr. Ambassador:
My thesaurus failed me in finding a suitable replacement for “astonished.”
What I was searching for was an apocalyptically quantifying synonym to describe what I felt when I recently read about the freeing of Kurt Franz, unquestionably one of the most efficient butchers of humans to have been produced by German loins, a – once again I search in vain for a word to use, “person” being clearly wrong as it relates to Kurt Franz – a something who so obviously delighted in mass murder of a species foreign to him. Human beings. The emphasis, sir, is on “unquestionably!”
I reflect on my frequent travels to Europe that nearly always require my passing through Germany. I reflect on my just about monthly flights aboard Lufthansa. I am sickened by the remote possibility that the benign looking old man sitting next to me on an airplane, or at a restaurant in Frankfurt, or Munich, or Mannheim, may in fact be that human aberration called Kurt Franz. How do I and every other human being on earth reconcile the German courts’ and the German people’s quiet exacerbation of the incomprehensible crimes of Kurt Franz? How can you, Mr. Ambassador, live with that existing in your physical and intellectual space, that which my parents witnessed, that which I have unsuccessfully tried to comprehend my entire adult life and that which I am unable to explain to my children?
The utterance “Kurt Franz” and “deteriorating health” in the same breath creates an insolvable intellectual Rubik’s cube. At best, it creates the unequivocal oxymoron. At worst, it defies nature: inert objects do not experience deteriorating health! Daniel J. Goldhagen wrote in his letter to the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (“A Monster Quietly Set Free”, August 26, 1993) that the German courts released Kurt Franz on the basis of “deteriorating health” and their finding that “the particular gravity of the guilt of the convicted prisoner [did not] mandate[d] the further execution of the sentence.” Perhaps the Jews and Christians of Treblinka, Franz’s personal amusement park, the place that inspired him to assemble his The Best Years Of My Life album, made a fatal mistake: they did not allege deteriorating health!
Mr. Ambassador. Your phenomenally arrogant government might have kept that monster behind bars and at least maintained the cosmetic pretense that we are not breathing the same air as he.
There, sir, I just failed. I referred to Kurt Franz as “he.”
Your government, sir, is also that wise assemblage that is going about with amoebic speed in arresting select few members of Neo-Nazi rock bands and wayward young skin heads. In principle, we agree. Of course, that activity would be like an unscrupulous dermatological practice: put some topical cream on the surface just to remove the sting and the redness and tell the patient about the cancer on his tenth paid visit. Your government may want to consider letting the skin heads go free and tar and feather the morally destitute souls who freed Kurt Franz. Perhaps we should ask the children of those judges: “where was your daddy during the war?” Unless, of course, the children of Germany, heretofore seemingly the only keepers of Germany’s conscience, have been successfully desensitized.
You know, your Excellency, there are two sides to even the thinnest pancake. Let me give you one side of a “pancake” I saw last year while at Frankfurt airport: hundreds of gypsies, men, women, young and old, and children being marched single file onto an antiseptic Lufthansa jumbo jet as they were being deported. Lufthansa staff said that their destination was Romania, although they may not have been Romanian gypsies. The visuals were overwhelming: all those people, dressed in identical jump suits, with identical little blue handbags, marching single file, under guard unto a form of mass transit, being shipped off to nowhere. Romania is not Treblinka, but then it would really be in poor form to ask that Treblinka be reopened for just a few thousand gypsies, as historically consistent as that might be. It was the crowning symbolism of Germany’s progress: no striped uniforms, no cattle cars, uniform luggage and, of course, air conditioning. Allow me the latitude, Mr. Ambassador, to not argue whether those gypsies belonged in Germany in the first place. That is the irrelevant other side of this “pancake.”
Exceptions define all rules. In Kurt Franz’s case, the “pancake” has only one side. On that side are Franz’s horrible crimes and Germany’s forgiveness of Franz for those crimes.
Finally, Mr. Ambassador, a suggestion and an offer.
Please visit the Washington, Lincoln and Holocaust Memorials. Those modest sites succinctly represent American spirit and compassion.
Offer is hereby made to duplicate Kurt Franz’s The Best Years Of My Life album for each and every judge involved in the freeing of Franz, as well as for you, Mr. Ambassador, the representative of that reprehensible group in our country. I promise that we will not alter that album in any way, except for the leather covers. This time, they shall be cow hide.
Sincerely yours,
Steve Manning
EPILOG.
Sent a copy of this to William Jefferson Clinton with a personal letter with more hurt, disbelief and naive expectations of getting some meaningful attention.
Heard nothing from the ambassador.
Got a really nice response from the President expressing his gratitude for my thinking enough of him to keep him informed on issues of concern to me.
To me.
How cool is that!
I did not keep the note from the Pres. Although the stationary was really cool, it was no blue dress.
©2025. Steven J. Manning. All rights reserved worldwide. Any reproduction, in part or whole, storage in a retrieval system or transmission in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning or other—except for brief quotations in reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher are strictly prohibited. For media inquiries: sj*******@**mc.com.