Two Degrees of Adolf Hitler
Readers connect the Führer to the three major presidential candidates.
By Timothy Noah
Slate.com
Posted Friday, April 18, 2008
Yesterday I challenged readers to do ABC News' George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson one better at the guilt-by-association game. I invited the public to connect, "six degrees"-style, one or more of the remaining three major presidential candidates to der Führer und Reichskanzler himself, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Stephen Colbert included a joke on the same theme in the April 17 edition of The Colbert Report. (This appears to be coincidence; although it airs at 11:30 p.m. ET, The Colbert Report starts taping around 7 p.m. ET, and I posted my Chatterbox at 7:13 p.m. ET.) Colbert's treatment of the conceit was fanciful. He suggested, with mock indignation, that Barack Obama was linked to Ted Kennedy, who was linked to the pope, who, by virtue of having joined the Hitler Youth at 14 (membership was compulsory in Germany) is linked to Hitler. Here at Slate, we try to do better than that. My inbox was inundated with reader entries linking the candidates to Hitler via actual acquaintanceships, friendly or not, as the contest required. The challenge was to make the connection with a minimal number of links. Only two entries got it down to two degrees of separation; several got it down to three.
This exercise, which began as a gag, quickly became an intriguing illustration of the "six degrees" phenomenon. For politicians, who spend their lives meeting lots of prominent people, it is seldom necessary to forge a six-link chain, even for someone as long-dead as Hitler. In "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," a 1999 essay written about the mother of Slate's editor, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the six-degree phenomenon depends on "connectors," people who know lots of different people from lots of different walks of life. Lois Weisberg, he writes, is a connector. Connectors play a role in the global web of acquaintanceships that can be compared to that of an airline hub through which multileg flights are routed en route to a final destination. Politicians are practically by definition connectors, but to make the leap all the way to a distant figure like Hitler, they must rely on super-duper connectors, people whom one might compare to a fortress hub like Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
In seeking a fortress hub for "six degrees of Adolf Hitler," it's often wise to look across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom. Queen Elizabeth is a fortress hub because she was born in 1926 and from birth has made acquaintanceships with major players on the international scene. For instance, as a child she knew Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who (fatefully) made peace with Hitler at Munich. Ergo, anyone who has ever met Queen Elizabeth stands three degrees from Hitler. The Mitford sisters, collectively, are a fortress hub because a few of them lived into very old age (one survives still); because they adopted wildly divergent ideologies and sensibilities; because they were aristocrats and therefore had easy access to big shots; and because one of them, Jessica, emigrated to the United States. Pamela Harriman is a fortress hub because she had many famous and powerful husbands and lovers; because she, too, emigrated to the United States; and because, late in life, she became involved in politics, principally as a fundraiser for the Democratic Party.
(Continued here.)
By Timothy Noah
Slate.com
Posted Friday, April 18, 2008
Yesterday I challenged readers to do ABC News' George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson one better at the guilt-by-association game. I invited the public to connect, "six degrees"-style, one or more of the remaining three major presidential candidates to der Führer und Reichskanzler himself, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Stephen Colbert included a joke on the same theme in the April 17 edition of The Colbert Report. (This appears to be coincidence; although it airs at 11:30 p.m. ET, The Colbert Report starts taping around 7 p.m. ET, and I posted my Chatterbox at 7:13 p.m. ET.) Colbert's treatment of the conceit was fanciful. He suggested, with mock indignation, that Barack Obama was linked to Ted Kennedy, who was linked to the pope, who, by virtue of having joined the Hitler Youth at 14 (membership was compulsory in Germany) is linked to Hitler. Here at Slate, we try to do better than that. My inbox was inundated with reader entries linking the candidates to Hitler via actual acquaintanceships, friendly or not, as the contest required. The challenge was to make the connection with a minimal number of links. Only two entries got it down to two degrees of separation; several got it down to three.
This exercise, which began as a gag, quickly became an intriguing illustration of the "six degrees" phenomenon. For politicians, who spend their lives meeting lots of prominent people, it is seldom necessary to forge a six-link chain, even for someone as long-dead as Hitler. In "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," a 1999 essay written about the mother of Slate's editor, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the six-degree phenomenon depends on "connectors," people who know lots of different people from lots of different walks of life. Lois Weisberg, he writes, is a connector. Connectors play a role in the global web of acquaintanceships that can be compared to that of an airline hub through which multileg flights are routed en route to a final destination. Politicians are practically by definition connectors, but to make the leap all the way to a distant figure like Hitler, they must rely on super-duper connectors, people whom one might compare to a fortress hub like Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
In seeking a fortress hub for "six degrees of Adolf Hitler," it's often wise to look across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom. Queen Elizabeth is a fortress hub because she was born in 1926 and from birth has made acquaintanceships with major players on the international scene. For instance, as a child she knew Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who (fatefully) made peace with Hitler at Munich. Ergo, anyone who has ever met Queen Elizabeth stands three degrees from Hitler. The Mitford sisters, collectively, are a fortress hub because a few of them lived into very old age (one survives still); because they adopted wildly divergent ideologies and sensibilities; because they were aristocrats and therefore had easy access to big shots; and because one of them, Jessica, emigrated to the United States. Pamela Harriman is a fortress hub because she had many famous and powerful husbands and lovers; because she, too, emigrated to the United States; and because, late in life, she became involved in politics, principally as a fundraiser for the Democratic Party.
(Continued here.)
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