Lenny had been reading a study of anti-Semitism by Jean-Paul Sartre. Now, on stage, giving credit to Thomas Merton's poem about the Holocaust, he requested that all the lights go off except one dim blue spot. Then he began speaking with a German accent:
My name is Adolf Eichmann. And the Jews came every day to what
they thought would be fun in the showers. People say | should have
been hung. We/n. Do you recognize the whore in the middle of you-that you would have done the same if you were there
yourselves? My defense: | was a soldier. | saw the end of a
conscientious day's effort. | watched through the portholes. | saw
every Jew burned and turned into soap.
Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your
enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you
had done to them? Hiroshima auf Wiedersehen. [German accent ends.] If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls, Jim. Are you kidding with that? Not what kid told kid told kid. They would just sch/ep out all those Japanese mutants. “Here they did; there they are.” And Truman said they'd do it again. That's what they should have the same day as Remember
Pearl Harbor. Play them in unison.
Lenny was arrested for obscenity that night. One of the items in the Chicago police report complained: “Then talking about the war he stated,
‘If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls.’ ” The cops also broke open Lenny's candy bars, looking for drugs. They checked the IDs of audience members, including George Carlin, who told the cops, “I don’ t believe in IDs.” Then they arrested him for
disorderly conduct, dragged him along by the seat of his pants and
hoisted him into the police wagon.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030190