They dream in flickering black and white newsreels, these squares with crew cuts slicked back with Brylcreem. Weimar? A hazy postcard of flappers and jazz, a decadent playground for the swells. Blind to the shadows at the edges, the thuggish brownshirts goose-stepping down cobblestones, a guttural roar rising from the radio static. Somoza in a pinstripe suit, a Stetson tilted low, a cigar clamped between his teeth – that’s the strongman they crave, the one who’ll “clean things up.”

They wouldn’t recognize the jackboots on their own front steps, the stench of fear a cheap cologne. Delusion a virus, replicating in the petri dish of their skulls. Good guys? Pull the other leg, chum. They’d be goose-stepping in time with the worst of them, faces contorted in a rictus grin, blithely saluting the swastika rising like a malignant tumor on the horizon.

Sleepwalkin’ into a nightmare in their star-spangled blinders, convinced they’re heroes in a John Wayne flick. Brainwashed by AM radio static and reruns of Leave it to Beaver, they wouldn’t recognize a jackboot on their lily-white asses until it was crushing their discount cigarettes.

That would make all the good ol’ boys just a buncha Weimar squares, huffin’ on fascism like it was Lucky Strikes, blind as bats in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. They think they’d be fightin’ the good fight, wearin’ their white hats and singin’ that barbershop harmony, all the while goose-stepping right into der Fuhrer’s meat grinder. Don’t get me wrong, they’d be the first to string up a pinko, but put a swastika on it and suddenly it’s apple pie and Chevrolet. Delusion, man, pure uncut delusion. They’re livin’ in a dreamland paved with Coca-Cola bottles and barbed wire, where cowboys are the master race and the only good Indian’s a lobotomized one on display at the state fair.