I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian
mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose
teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought
machine, driven by a standard or even substandard libido, whirls
with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in
Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the
gears in the mind of Jones. “You’re completely crazy,” he said.
Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the
classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated,
will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are
immaculately, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell-keeping perfect time for eight
minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes,
keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds,
keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping
ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths
available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filing off of gear teeth, the wilful doing without
certain obvious pieces of information–
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of
Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptaer, and the Black
Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony–
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an
indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase–
That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate
over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for
corpse-carriers–
That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences
between civilization and hydrophobia–
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the
nations of lunatics I’ve seen in my time.