Sometimes you find reminders of evil in the most unexpected places. The glittering world of fashion, for example. Take this account of a dinner in Boston from designer Joseph Abboud's Threads:
We were buying 4,000 garbadine suits a year from a company called Windsor of Germany. They were made of Italian fabric and manufactured in Germany, where they were fused.The traditional suit is hand-tailored, made by people who actually sit down and sew. But these suits were... the nice industry words are "automated" or "engineered," but in reality, fusing is a form of gluing. It doesn't sound very appealing, but there's an art to it. In many cases the fabric will look smoother because the linings are fused--by steam, heat, and adhesive.
Our sales rep at Windsor was a guy named Hans Schultz. We called him "Schultzie," like a Hogan's Heroes thing, and we loved him. One night Murray and I were having dinner with him out in Chestnut Hill, and one of us asked, "When did Germans get so great at fusing? How come you don't do tailored suits anymore?"
Silence from Schultz.
Then, "Don't you know? Most of the tailors in Cher-many were Choo-ish."
Here was the German salesman with the Jewish retailer, offering a forceful history lesson. The Germans had killed off their workforce, then developed all this great technology to fill the need they'd created. They'd come up with something good, but to us it was now like a weed in a beautiful garden.
Having to glue your suits together is among the least of the consequences of a fanatical ideology that leads to genocide. But the persistent depth of evil's effect on the perpetrating culture is something of which certain modern fanatics seem entirely unaware...
