During a recent sleepy Sunday morning at work I began browsing Time.com. My manager walked by and said, "Are the calls slow?" I said yeah, I had actually been reading
some old articles about Mussolini.
"Who in the world is Mussolini?!," she asked, as indicated by the question mark at the end of the quote.
Now, this woman has to be 60 at least, so she appeared on the Earth not long after Benito Mussolini left it at the end of World War II. It's not like I'm talking about a field general in the Greco-Roman wars, I'm talking about a major figure in one of the largest wars in history that took place less than 70 years ago, very nearly within her lifetime. And she's never heard of him! And what's worse -- SHE'S MY BOSS! This is my "superior," somebody who doesn't know something any 10th grader should know.
I've noticed this anecdote doesn't travel well, either. Sharing it with someone presumes
they know who Benito Mussolini was, but I can tell by the faces of a couple of people I've told it to at the call center that they may have been sympathetic to my boss' uninformed perspective. Who can keep up with a key figure from the largest conflict the United States has ever been involved in that happened just a few decades ago?
So if I tell people I know who Mussolini was, am I just being a show-off? From now on I dare not go near the topics of Hirohito, Goebbels, Rommel, MacArthur, Patton or Churchill for fear others will think I'm "putting on airs".
And think of how Mussolini himself would've felt. This guy took time to become the fascist dictator of a nation, went to war against the world with Hitler and then got shot by a firing squad, all the time thinking his actions would surely earn him a place in the history books. Instead, scarcely 65 years later call center managers don't even know who he was.
I used to think Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments were faked, but now I believe they're real.
I guess I'm a show off too 'cause I know who Patton, Churchill, Goebbels, Rommel, et al are as well.
For a lot of folks, the mind,...is a terrible thing.
A few fascinating facts I learned about Mussolini:
1. He was given a lion cub as a gift. It was presumed he would give it to a zoo when it got bigger. Instead he kept it in his office even after it reached adulthood, and would go in its cage to play with it. They say it seemed genuinely fond of him and never left a scratch on him.
2. He came to power as a newspaper editor and opinion columnist.
3. His title was Il Duce, which in Italian means the leader. So in the song "I'm the Man" when Anthrax says, "Il Duce says, 'Smell my anal vapor,'" that's a historically correct quote from the Moose.