WEST CHESTER, Penna. – Countless people have come to grief for comparing someone to Adolph Hitler. The latest, Chef Mario Batali, compared Wall Street executives to Hitler at a Time magazine panel recently.
“The ways the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed and taken most of it into their hands is as good as Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys,” Batali said. A hue and cry followed immediately, and an apology immediately followed that.
The Orange Chef does not lack for company. In the last six months Hank Williams Jr. and Megan Fox have lost paying gigs for playing the Hitler reference. So has John Galliano, the Christian Dior designer who said that he loved Hitler, a love that dare not speak its name.
Also on the Hitler List are Oliver Stone, Lars von Trier, and Kanye West, who likened his numerous haters to Hitler’s. Mr. Stone got away with an apology for his Hitler remarks; Mr. Von Trier got booted from the Cannes Film Festival; Mr. West got away with being himself.
If you don’t want to get ruled off for something you say at Cannes, consider a Hitler substitution instead when you want to make a point. Suppose, for example, that Chef Batali had said, “The ways the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed . . . is as good as Newt Gingrich and the evil guys.”
Imagine if Megan Fox said of Transformers director Michael Bay, “He wants to be like Muammar el-Qaddafi on his sets.”
What if Hank Williams Jr. said that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner playing golf together was like “Jeffrey Dahmer playing golf with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
Or if Kanye West, while onstage at the Big Chill Festival in the U.K, had compared his many haters to Sarah Palin’s.
Oliver Stone could have avoided trouble by saying, “Octomom did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.”
Finally, for now at least, Lars von Trier might have been able to enjoy his entire stay at Cannes if had said, “I understand Anthony Weiner. He’s not what you would call a good guy but I’m . . . I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit.”
The take away? When you’re making comparisons, it’s never springtime for Hitler but always winter for Poland and France.
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