Tomorrow Belongs To Me
After I got out of the Marines and my best bud got out of the Army, before settling down, we figured we wanted to see the world. We hitchhiked to New York, flew Icelandic to Luxembourg, hitch hiked to the Lakes of England and worked in a luxury hotel. Just as we were getting our work visas, on October 6, 1973 war broke out between Israel and Egypt, the Yom Kippor War. We couldn't let that one pass, quit our jobs, hitched to London to take an El Al flight to Israel to help the cause.
It was three days before the flight. Caberet was playing then. We had seen all the sights and decided we wanted to see this movie we had heard so much about. It's still one of my favorite movies of all time, in fact.
It contains the best scene in Hollywood history as far as I'm concerned. In the movie we see the obscure thugs called Nazis suddenly become a force to be reckoned with by the time the movies over. One side was using them against the other for political manipulation and Hitler was using everyone to gain power.
Suddenly, just before movies end, it made sense. The Nazis, yeah, the Nazis, they are the ones that can do it. The movie did not spare them, make them look heroic, or inevitable. It just showed how it could happen and the scene that represented that is my favorite scene ever.
You could feel it. The electricity, the timing, the meaning, the energy. A young blond haired kid gets up from his table in the outdoor area of a restaurant. People are haggard, perhaps indifferent. But this kid begins to make sense. A stirring melody, meaningful words, conviction, determination and one by one you could see the look on the faces of the people there. It makes sense, the kid makes sense and he's a Nazi. Hitler makes sense.
It was very stirring and the title of the song was Tomorrow Belongs To Me. The rephrase rang:
Fatherland Fatherland
Show us the sign
Your children are waiting to see
The morning will come
When the world is mine
Tomorrow belongs to me.
The song almost never ends and almost everyone is singing it and I began to look at myself, me too, that's what I want. I could see how it happened. I wasn't living in a depression like they were, I wasn't curtailed by treaties like they were, but what you could sense, was the power that was forming and you saw the corruption by those around in power, in Germany and throughout Europe. A vacuum existed that Hitler was going to fill. It was incredibly seductive.
But I didn't need to be a Nazi, and who cares. You could still feel the power, and I was in life's arena. I didn't want to be home where my friends were. My friends bored me. I wanted this tomorrow like in the song. Just seeing the world was seductive to me. Just meeting people that I had seen in movies or news or history books. I could not live a normal life, even nobody that I was.
It's easy to see the folly and destructiveness of Hitler, but to me that was only a warning, not the lesson. The lesson was that energy, that fervor, just a different path. One I've never heard of before, only about.
And I'm still looking, still not satisfied, but light years beyond from where I would have been by staying home and minding the store.
I still chase that dream. My El Dorado. I still only regret not having found it, not the search.
It was three days before the flight. Caberet was playing then. We had seen all the sights and decided we wanted to see this movie we had heard so much about. It's still one of my favorite movies of all time, in fact.
It contains the best scene in Hollywood history as far as I'm concerned. In the movie we see the obscure thugs called Nazis suddenly become a force to be reckoned with by the time the movies over. One side was using them against the other for political manipulation and Hitler was using everyone to gain power.
Suddenly, just before movies end, it made sense. The Nazis, yeah, the Nazis, they are the ones that can do it. The movie did not spare them, make them look heroic, or inevitable. It just showed how it could happen and the scene that represented that is my favorite scene ever.
You could feel it. The electricity, the timing, the meaning, the energy. A young blond haired kid gets up from his table in the outdoor area of a restaurant. People are haggard, perhaps indifferent. But this kid begins to make sense. A stirring melody, meaningful words, conviction, determination and one by one you could see the look on the faces of the people there. It makes sense, the kid makes sense and he's a Nazi. Hitler makes sense.
It was very stirring and the title of the song was Tomorrow Belongs To Me. The rephrase rang:
Fatherland Fatherland
Show us the sign
Your children are waiting to see
The morning will come
When the world is mine
Tomorrow belongs to me.
The song almost never ends and almost everyone is singing it and I began to look at myself, me too, that's what I want. I could see how it happened. I wasn't living in a depression like they were, I wasn't curtailed by treaties like they were, but what you could sense, was the power that was forming and you saw the corruption by those around in power, in Germany and throughout Europe. A vacuum existed that Hitler was going to fill. It was incredibly seductive.
But I didn't need to be a Nazi, and who cares. You could still feel the power, and I was in life's arena. I didn't want to be home where my friends were. My friends bored me. I wanted this tomorrow like in the song. Just seeing the world was seductive to me. Just meeting people that I had seen in movies or news or history books. I could not live a normal life, even nobody that I was.
It's easy to see the folly and destructiveness of Hitler, but to me that was only a warning, not the lesson. The lesson was that energy, that fervor, just a different path. One I've never heard of before, only about.
And I'm still looking, still not satisfied, but light years beyond from where I would have been by staying home and minding the store.
I still chase that dream. My El Dorado. I still only regret not having found it, not the search.
posted by CottonSr @ 8:44 PM
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