Springtime for Harry

Prince Harry's wearing of a Nazi uniform with a swastika armband at a costume party was the best wardrobe malfunction since Janet Jackson caused a cosmic titter. The insensitive act occurred because he was either ignorant or thought it was a come-as-you-are party. Or maybe he just happened to come upon an ancestor's dusty old uniform in the attic.

As Andrew Gumbel, L.A. correspondent for the Independent (UK), reminds us: "Nobody [in the British monarchy] represented the flirtation with totalitarianism more than Harry's great-grand-uncle, Edward VIII, the ultimate black sheep of the family, who openly sympathized with the Nazis and might have pushed Britain into an anti-Stalinist alliance with Hitler had it not been for his insistence on marrying the American divorcee-and equally ardent Nazi apologist-Wallis Simpson, an insistence that precipitated his abdication in 1936...

"Three of Prince Philip's sisters married Nazi sympathizers, and the Windsors who succeeded Edward VIII...had to live it down, even after the Third Reich's demise... Harry's costume revived unpleasant parallels between the Nazi taste for bloodthirsty imperial adventure and Britain's own leanings in that direction-like using poison gas on the Kurds, shooting independence protesters in India and so on. Britain has long since repented of its imperial sins, but nostalgia still abounds in certain upper-class circles."

When my daughter Holly was 11, her best new friend was Pia Hinckle, whose father Warren had been editor of Ramparts, Scanlan's and City magazine. One afternoon, standing on the Hinckles' front porch, Holly began yelling, "Hitler! Hitler!" That was the name of Pia's cat, so named because of a square black patch under its nose, just like the mustache on Adolf Hitler's face.

I asked Holly, "Do you know who Hitler was?"

"Didn't he lead the Jews out of Germany?"

"Well, not exactly."

By the time Holly was 17, she had read The Diary of Anne Frank and seen Holocaust on TV. She had bleached her blond hair platinum, and when the roots grew in, she maintained a two-tone hairdo. Later, she dyed her hair pitch black and kept it in a style that completely covered one eye. She wore a leather jacket with chains hanging from it, and plenty of makeup, including a multicolored lightning streak on one cheek.

She was planning to audition for a new wave band called The Vktms. A lyric in one of their songs went, "Hey, you know I ain't no martyr, but I ain't no Nazi." She also wanted to change her name to Holly Hard-On, but she had the flu so her audition and name change became moot. Ah, yes, but she would've been following in my footsteps. Introducing Rumpleforeskin and his daughter Holly Hard-On. How proud could a father get?