Editors’ note: The opinions and ideas expressed in The Accidental Gentrifist are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook and belief of anyone else in the Ist network.

Most rambling Texans I know have long grown tired of lamenting to friends in Europe and on our opposite coasts how the Bushes aren’t really Texans. Yes, I’ve seen him clear brush. Yes, I’ve heard him speak. But it doesn’t change the fact that W. was born in Connecticut, that his father was born in Massachusetts, and that both are products of a wealthy and powerful New England social class.

If you want the nitty-gritty, the millions his grandfather Prescott Bush used to start their Texas energy empire were primarily from a single share he held in the company he also directed, the Union Banking Corporation, which was founded by his daddy in law, George Herbert Walker. Of course, Prescott (and at least 6 other U.S. senators) had to wait until after WWII to dissolve UBC and cash in their shares—because the company had been seized following FDR’s Trading with the Enemy Act, a response to the sudden public knowledge that U.S. companies had been (thus far legally) trading with Nazi Germany. It turned out UBC had strong connections to a Dutch bank owned by Fritz Thyssen, Adolf Hitler’s main fundraiser. Thyssen urged tycoons to give millions to the Nazis, and even helped persuade President Hindenburg to appoint a young Adolf as Chancellor. For all his hard work, Fritz was made governor of Prussia, an honorary title with even less actual responsibility than Managing General Partner of the Texas Rangers. But then, Bush made over $14 million owning a chunk of the Rangers, and Thyssen ended up in Dachau. And he didn’t even trade Sammy Sosa.

Anyway, many years ago I shared a little bohemian bungalow in east Austin with several roommates, one of whom was a UT undergrad from Midland. We’ll call her Tuesday. Tuesday told me that her dad had known (well, had known of) the Bushes before their ascent to the White House. Once, under a particularly dazzling Permian basin sunset some thirty-odd years ago, a colleague of Tuesday’s father was driving down a Midland street when a young man suddenly waltzed out in front of his car. The colleague slammed on his brakes and very narrowly missed splattering the witless pedestrian all over the asphalt. Naturally, the guy turned out to be young George W.

See kids? Darting out from between parked cars is not only dangerous—it can alter the course of history.

When I told my third-hand Bush story to Miranda Brown while drinking miniature beers at an eastside wedding, she asked me if I’d ever read a short story by Roald Dahl entitled Genesis and Catastrophe. A week later I found myself at the Yarborough library, checking out Kiss Kiss, Dahl’s 1960 short story collection. As if to accentuate that it wasn’t a collection of his children’s stories, the only copy they had was in LARGE TYPE. (The same subtlety one finds in the story, no less. Ah, Dahl.)

Anyway, Genesis and Catastrophe is set in Austria during the reign of Franz Josef, and starts out as an exchange between a doctor and woman who’s just given birth to her fourth child. She’s anxious, understandably, because the other three died shortly after birth, and this one looks even smaller and sicklier than her previous ill-fated progeny. She cries and laments how much she has prayed to God to have just one child live. The doctor urges her to relax, and pleads with the cold, drunk, and judgmental father to be kind to his troubled young wife. He tells them not to worry. There’s nothing wrong with the baby, he’s perfectly fine. There’s every likelihood he will grow up to be a fine and strapping man. Then the reader discovers that the baby—wait for it—is the newborn Adolfus Hitler.

Do I wish W. had been struck and killed by that car? No, because untimely death is a tragic waste. But would I allow a young Hitler to perish shortly after birth? Sure. I don’t think it would have caused him much pain, and there could have been other, less Hegelian children. His mother may have gone mad from grief, but I don’t think she was in a position to start deporting communists and homosexuals.

Ironically, babies are far cuter and more innocent than oblivious j-walkers. They are clean little slates. I guess this is why I’m troubled by my willingness to trade a baby for 100 million lives, but not a young man to mitigate a different episode of widespread destruction, albeit by preserving a different brutal dictatorship. This is tough. I recall that F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” But that’s not really helping me here. And F. Scott never met our president.

Maybe there really is some sort-of-secret NWO cabal running things, and maybe any other elected official would have pushed us into Iraq II. But also, maybe it was Germany’s time 75 years ago. A butterfly, somewhere, had spoken, and the tsunami of their will had no choice but to erupt in some shape or another. But without radical, militant, and anti-Semitic leadership, they may have used that same energy, will, and capability to do truly great things. Or at least empowered a similar head who wouldn’t have fought a two-front war. Either way, we’d all be speaking German by now, probably. But, if it hadn’t been Hitler who rode a wave of millions of reichsmarks and dollars to the Reichstag, or if the democratic process had been allowed to flourish under a conscientious and socially liberal progressivism, then maybe, instead of taking your 6th grade World History class to see the Schindler’s List matinee at the discount theatre, we’d all be flying Touregs through the stratosphere and drinking steins of Spaten on the Moon: An idea I find so attractive, it’s almost enough to wish for the death of a child.