How was your parking? / The little actions of little men

Luke O'Neil

25 Mar 2026 • 19 min read

March gotta be the cruelest month hands down. Will update my rankings next week.

We've got a real powerful one today from Rax King on reading Milton Mayer’s 1955 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 in our age of ICE.

"Still, one glaring similarity offers itself up readily: ICE, like Hitler’s brownshirts, are not presently undertaking a campaign of extermination. The current project is separation," she writes.

Incompetence might be the simplest explanation for their splashiest kidnappings, like that of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos — allowing that sweet little boy to be photographed in his bunny hat on his way into a police vehicle was a tactical catastrophe that they’ve since tried, with mixed success, to avoid. For every Ramos whose kidnapping goes viral, who knows how many people are being snatched up much more quietly? As of February 7, there were 68,289 people in ICE detention, and I’m ashamed to say I can name maybe five of them. Moreover, ICE is notorious for shipping detainees all over the country and outside of it, making it exceedingly difficult for even their lawyers and loved ones to find them, much less the public. The American press must be grudgingly credited with advertising a few of the horrors, some of the time. The most significant difference between us and the Germans in 1938, it seems to me, is that we have access to a little more information than they had.

Rax most recently wrote for Hell World about Emerald Fennell's “Wuthering Heights."

Please be sure to also check out her recent thorough eviscerating of an "A.I." user in her advice column.

God, where to begin. Here, I suppose: if this letter is an example of your Claude-less writing, you're bad at it. That sentence was gentler when I first drafted it, but why should I stir any of my good cheddar into your grits? You're clearly not worried about offending me. So I'll tell you very bluntly that you need to worry about style and usage before you think about getting your memoir published. Your copy is dirtier than this simile is folksy, boy. You've outsourced clarity to AI, retaining for yourself the coveted role of "ideas man," but look at how you struggle when parted from your precious fucking Claude for a five-paragraph email! Plenty of great writers draft messy and revise clean, but your lazy repetitions of words and obviously hurried sentences suggest the more fundamental problem that you think language is beneath you. But there, you don't traffic in anything so pedestrian as diction or syntax, do you, my little kapellmeister? You stand at the head of the room and conduct a symphony of ideas."

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33% off one year of Hell World

Coming up soon we'll have pieces from Jeb Lund and Hussein Kesvani as well so be sure to get your sub in order.

Meanwhile I am very sorry to preface Rax's serious piece with a story about me parking at the hospital and having a certain examination done which is free for all to read.

A bit more from me after that.

Meanwhile please also enjoy some posts!

Hear you all like tattooing so read a piece about the history of tattoos in Boston; an investigation into the identity of a long lost mysterious 19th-century tattoo artist; and an interview I did with a contemporary legendary artist Jonathan Shaw.
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T15:57:58.103Z

Following the news that Trump has sent his ICE goons to "help" at airports during the government shutdown I thought we might also take a look at this piece from last summer again about The Airport.

Every picture of ICE agents in airports is just this again
— Will Burrows 🖖🥖🥀 (@reforest-kelley.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T16:14:17.144Z

Why not let us also look at this one from WHIC.

When you’re an addict you get to relive the feeling of being executed every night before bed. Usually it doesn’t take and you fall through the trap door and come out the other side like holy shit I’m alive what the fuck. But sooner or later the device generally works as it is intended to.
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2026-03-22T13:03:49.956Z

I put too much shit in here. This one has too much shit on it.

How was your parking?

I got an email the other day from a company I now know is called parkwhiz BY FLASH. The folks down at parkwhiz BY FLASH were writing to thank me for parking but also wanted to know:

How was your experience at:

Emerson Hospital?

Not that great man. If you want the truth of it parkwhiz BY FLASH. I was parking at the hospital for starters. As you well know. Parking and going to the hospital are two very famously stressful things.

I’ve been going to the hospital a decent amount lately. I’m in my Bolsonaro era.

The parking itself was fine I suppose but paying to get out was all fucked. I didn’t have my card on me and when I pulled up to the payment machine I panicked a little because there were cars lining up behind. I pressed the button on the thing to call the attendant thinking this is fake this is nothing while it rang but then a guy came on all pissed off and said follow the instructions on the side of the box. I had to get out of the car and do the I’m sorry I’m sorry but get over it Larry David kind of wave and scan a QR code and sign up for a website and enter my details and then bing bang boom my parking journey at the hospital was complete. Besides the kind email followup of course.

RIP Mitch Hedberg. You would have hated getting 25 receipts for a donut.

I suppose the real headline is my testicles look normal. According to the ultrasound. I loved Ultrasound’s 1996 top 40 eurohouse track The Rhythm of the Rhythm by the way.

Earlier that day I went to my normal doctor and told her something was off with my right testicle. I am aware that I have a right testicle all the time is how I explained it. We aren’t normally aware of them I said. I’m not sure if women know that. Or doctors. The ball sack in general comes up a lot for us sure but it’s usually not so specifically insistent in terms of announcing itself.

I am not a sick pervert but one still doesn’t feel all that great about any woman having to go looking too closely at your balls even in the rare situations when she seems like she really wants to. My doctor said she had to have another person in the room and I said of course and then she brought in a nurse who was unfortunately very hot and so now it was like goddamnit. No one wants this. No one wants a hot lady around. We’re just trying to go about our lives.

The exam went by without incident and the results were unremarkable but still she thought I better go have some images taken so it was off to the hospital as previously mentioned above.

I waited a hospital’s waiting time in the hospital waiting room watching an old Family Feud and dicking around on my phone in the more fraught and weighted way you dick around on your phone in a hospital waiting room as compared to normal life. As if it has an anchoring power of sorts. A talisman.

After a while the technician came and got me and she asked if I had ever had an ultrasound before and I said yes but not in this area. In Concord she asked and I said no I meant my balls.

She had me lay down and – this was rather odd I thought – pull out my balls but lay a towel over my penis. For decency and decorum’s sake I gather? But it seemed worse to me somehow. Like it was a little striptease. How someone with very little clothes on can be so much more erotic than someone fully naked. Not that there was a single thing erotic about any of this.

She said you’re going to hear a sound now waving the wand along my scrotum. That’s just your heartbeat she said. And then I heard it and I am ashamed to say I laughed. This after having been completely silent the balance of the procedure. That’s my heartbeat in my balls lol. I’ve never heard that before. The technician ignored it. Just went about her duties.

In my defense it might have been gallows humor in part. There was a chance she was going to find something troubling in there.

She did not. She sent me on my way with the knowledge that there is nothing obviously wrong with me that they can find. Which is the best case scenario for any doctor. The Not My Problem results. This is some other guy’s problem. So now I’ll wait a couple weeks or months to see what this next guy thinks. I wonder what the parking situation there will be like.

A little while later I got another email from parkwhiz BY FLASH.

It read:

Please do not tell us all of that.

The little actions of little men

by Rax King

Milton Mayer’s 1955 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 is a profile of ten ordinary German men which was originally conceived as a profile of Adolf Hitler. The author spent a month 1935 failing to get Hitler, who was presumably a little busy that year, to sit for an interview in Berlin. When that project fizzled, the author (who was Jewish, and it matters) stayed in Germany for a time anyway. He was surprised to discover that the Germans he met seemed pretty upbeat for a people supposedly being crushed under the heel of a mad dictator. Nazism wasn’t one man’s insanity imposed on millions, he realized — it was a mass movement. “I wondered if Adolf Hitler was, after all, the Nazi I wanted to see,” he writes in the foreword. “By the time the war was over I had identified my man: the average German.”

The book that follows is an eerie profile not of one hateful lunatic but of ten “little men.” That’s no insult but rather the men’s own term, deployed repeatedly to distinguish their class position from that of the wealthy and the highly educated. All ten lived in the university town of Marburg, pseudonymized as “Kronenberg,” in the conservative (even “backward”) state of Hesse. All were members of the Nazi Party — functionaries and brownshirts only, no blackshirts among them. A couple had turned anti-Nazi by the time they sat for their interviews with Mayer, but most still saw their time in the Party as an unusually happy and fruitful period in their lives, and always for the same reason. These ten men were not, prior to their time in the Party, accustomed to being taken seriously. And they seemed to agree that they’d never be taken seriously again.

“I liked them,” Mayer admits in the foreword. “I was overcome by the same sensation that had got in the way of my newspaper reporting in Chicago years before: I liked Al Capone. I liked the way he treated his mother. He treated her better than I treated mine.”

His conversations with his little men were warm and cordial, to the point that he describes them most frequently as his friends. He initially struggled to establish relationships with all ten, winning them over by means of his ineptitude with the German language — postwar, they were all wary of spending time with an American professor until they realized they had something to teach him. They enjoyed making a show of their pedagogical patience with him, the sort of show which was rarely theirs to make. In a moment that’s chilling specifically because I don’t think it was intended to be chilling, Mayer admits he never told his little men he was a Jew, “on the advice of [his] German colleagues and friends.” The war was over, but for his cohort of warm and friendly antisemites (and, to be fair, for veterans of all wars everywhere), it sort of wasn’t. They Thought They Were Free has been criticized for only interviewing ten men in one country town and presenting those findings as representative of Germany more broadly. But for purposes of comparison to the present-day U.S., which is forced by the electoral college to give a huge amount of weight to a “median voter” who always seems to be a small-minded country bigot, that controversy might also be a strength.