In a very real sense Hans Eiger was killed in 1976 by a guy called Joe Johnston. His boss came and asked him to design the thing that ultimately did the job and gave him four weeks and he sweated blood and got it done and finally it just dropped in my lap and I sent it where it was meant to go. That is one way of looking at it.

The other is that once upon a time there was a little kid whose grandfather was secretly an evil wizard. The little kid was totally in love with his grandfather and he wanted to be an evil wizard too when he grew up. He spent his young life copying his grandfather in every way he possibly could and developing his evil wizard powers so that one day he would be able to just become that old guy. Completely become him.

But a bunch of things happened along the way as things will do. The first thing that happened was that the kid became enamored of a sort of a romantic idea in a movie that he saw and when he compared that movie with the real world he came to certain conclusions about who was cool and who was not and Nazis very specifically were not. Furthermore the old man taught him to be Swiss, and while Switzerland is a long way from perfect and the banking community didn’t one hundred percent or indeed really even fifty percent cover itself in glory in the twentieth century, in terms of right now this moment today there is very little that is less Swiss than a Nazi. Among many other flaws and failings such as being Nazis generally, Nazis are exactly the kinds of people who will fuck a chicken in public. And that is what Hans Eiger did when he started a gun fight in the capital of his own country for financial reasons. And when I called Evil Hansel a Nazi, the little psycho experienced what I guess is an epiphany or whatever that is one of those things kids go through.

Love turned to hate all at once and no one—no one—hates like a nine-year-old betrayed.

No one.