To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People July 8, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/rogue/1999/07/08/muddle The muddle people Hey, knuckleheads! Ya wanta live in our kountry, learn to speak our langkwage; Hitler's paintings: No wonder he went into the dictator business. Plus: Woman hurtles off cliff, hangs onto cell phone, rescuer gripes about audio quality. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Douglas Cruickshank What's with hate groups and gobbledygook? Has anyone researched this issue? Are they just so sputtering mad that the language kind of gets away from them? Certainly some scholar, some linguist studying aberrational expostulations, must have looked into the gibberish syndrome that afflicts the hateful, hostile and overheated. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, has a long history of using the letter 'K' at virtually every absurd opportunity, resulting in words like "konfederate" and "kamellia." And when they run out of legitimate words to subject to k-ification, the linguistically challenged kluxers make up new ones, like kludd and kleagle (a master race of bigoted beagles?) Now, in the wake of last weekend's ugliness, comes this Matt Hale character, I mean karacter -- a muddleheaded moral munchkin who identifies himself as the "pontifex maximus" of the World Church of the Creator -- er, Kreator -- and rails about the non-white "Mud People," who seem to have him in an absolute state. (Members of the WCC are said to hail one another with the greeting, "Rahowa," an acronym for either "Racial Holy War" or "Rambling Hothead Wackos.) Kould somebody kindly throw me a frickin' bone and tell me what the heck a "pontifex maximus" is as used by Mr. Hale? Is the esteemed head of the WCC in fact the leader of ancient Rome's supreme college of priests? Or, as some rumors suggest, does the phrase in this case refer to the spawn of a hideous, top-secret government breeding project underwritten by those evil kapitalists in the auto industry? It would be just like them -- wouldn't it? -- to sequester themselves in a vast underground kavern and develop a mongrel beast from the conjoining of a Pontiac and a Maxima. Anyway, in a recent interview, Hale, chasing his tail in mental circles while trying to capture a thought, came up with this curious observation: "We do urge hatred ... We believe that a life without hatred is like a bird trying to fly with one wing." That wouldn't be Ferrari's dreaded new Pterodactyl Maximus with dual overhead cams, five-speed automatic and the super-tight turning radius, would it? And while we're on the subject of pterodactyls and mud, have you ever taken a good look at Adolf Hitler's paintings? Good grief! Last week, England's Guardian newspaper reported that two of the Fuhrer's murky canvasses turned up in the basement of a museum in Tehran, Iran, which is an excellent place for them. In his youth, the dictator to be, who was turned away when he applied to study at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, mastered an excruciatingly wooden style that, to be fair, might have been just the ticket for those scenes featured on old toffee box lids. But otherwise, nein. Hitler, deeply miffed when the academy rejected him (he lied about it in later years), once told Nazi photographer Heinrich Hoffman, "I didn't want to become an artist." And, as evidenced by the recent discoveries (dreary pictures of Viennese landmarks), he got his wish. The good news, however, is that on Tuesday in west England, a car went sailing majestically over a 150-foot cliff. The driver, 18-year-old Rebecca Richards, was thrown from the vehicle and knocked unconscious, but still managed to hang on to her purse. This is reason for comment not because Ms. Richards needed to freshen up and retouch her mascara after she came to and found herself wedged among some rocks 60 feet above a Cornish beach, not because she needed to apply lip balm after her windy flight, not because she needed to clean out her purse and just hadn't had a free moment to do it until then -- no, but rather because the purse in question contained her cell phone. Richards couldn't get herself unstuck (she had a broken hip) but she was able to call for help. But did she get any credit for her levelheadedness? Not a bit of it! Instead, Darren Gibson, an ambulance spokesman and undoubtedly one of those laconic colorful Brits, could only grouse about the audio quality: "It was a bad reception area and it kept cutting out." Well, how about this, Mr. Gibson? Next time Ms. Richards has a wee spat with her boyfriend and goes madly driving off through the fog on a cliff-top road with no barriers, how about she calls you first to see if she's in a coverage area that meets your approval? Would that make your royal spokespersoness more content? As for you, Ms. Richards, hang in there. salon.com | July 8, 1999