Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • May 25, 2011 but his head with the brain still in it was cut off when it hit the edge of the windshield and landed safely in a snowdrift. The Mad Doctor Ishii retrieved the brain and, realizing that Klopfinn’s body hadn’t suffered any structural damage, he transplanted the Japanese brain into the German corpse. “So des! Wakari-masu-ka. Watakushi-wa nihon-go dekimasu, neh! ” I rattled on in Japanese for a little while – I don’t have a big vocabulary, but my accent is pretty good, in a gruff sort of way. The young ladies in my audience didn’t speak Japanese either, but they knew what it sounds like. “Do you want to see the stitches in the back of my head where they put the brain in?” I asked. “No. We believe. How old are you?” “The corpse was born in 1920 and the brain was born in 1924.” As luck would have it, I could augment this story with a curious piece of evidence. Some weeks before, I had applied for some sort of count-down of overdue books. In processing the information, the library computer disgorged a sheet that listed by birth date as “none.” I kept that paper against future need, and showed it to them. “You see, this proves it. I was never born; I was sort of graphed together out of spare parts,” I told them. They all nodded as if this seemed logical, though they didn’t really believe it and they were laughing without making noise. But they disappointed me by not leaking the story. It would have been awesome to have read: “Koster Is Axis Frankenstein” on a blog. Of course, if people saw it, nobody sane would believe it –but there are at least a few people out there who would like to believe it. The American version of the story was less well received. Tutoring two of the same girls, sisters, I was asked how I knew so much about history. “I remember a lot of this stuff when it happened,” I said. “In fact, I was at Custer’s Last Stand, but the Indians let me go because I was nice.” They quickly flipped through their U.S. History book and found that Custer’s Last Stand happened in 1876, did the math, and realized that if the story were true I would have to have been at least 150 years old. “He lies,” the older sister told the younger one. “He’s not that old.” She must have picked up some of that notorious endemic Russian cynicism by osmosis. The kindest cut of all from the blog was that “nobody in Ridgewood takes John Koster seriously.” That’s good to know. One hopes the perception doesn’t percolate outside the blog to the state-level professionals who gave me the AAA Highway Safety Award in 1971, the New Jersey Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Public Service in 1974, and the nominations for two NJPA Awards, an Ernie Pyle Award, two Spur Award nominations from the Western Writers of America, and an award in sociology from New Jersey Institute of Technology. One hopes it doesn’t go national, where I’ve had books published by Doubleday-Bantam-Delacorte, McGraw Hill, and CBS Popular Library, and a cover story in “American Heritage.” I am now awaiting an introduction to a scholarly book published by the University of New Mexico, the third printing of my latest book, and the release of the video from The History Channel. If anybody took me seriously, I’d run out of wall space to hang all the awards. Worse yet, if I got a swelled head, I couldn’t find a hat to wear. Size 8 hats are tough enough to find, and don’t even ask about buying Size 13 shoes at standard shoe stores. One suspects that blogging in general is “publishing for the unpublished.” Perhaps that’s why it’s so popular with a certain type of writer. Maybe it will take the pressure off real writers who actually are published and have the reviews and awards to prove it, or prevent us from being poisoned or sniped at – perhaps not just metaphorically -by jealous rivals who couldn’t make it. I could also hope that the people who try to manipulate the politics of a fine and impressive community would attempt to run for elected office under their real names and find out whether they’re credible. A few years ago, bloggers derailed an apparently qualified superintendent because his choice of a math program displeased them, which gave anonymous people the right to stir up rumors and gossip that caused him to write Ridgewood off as a sleazy place where he didn’t want to work. I think that’s an unfair judgment of the community, but I can see why he felt that way. This was defended by some bloggers as “democracy in action,” but if they read a little more quality writing, such as Thuycidides and Plato, they would know that the mass murder of the City of Melos and the execution of Socrates were both carried out by a “democracy.” Most Greek writers despised democracy as mob-ocracy because they knew most people weren’t very bright. The Founding Fathers established the United States as a republic and wanted to avoid democracy just as they wanted to avoid tyranny. The model for the United States was not “Athenian democracy,” which flopped in a little more than a century, but the Roman Republic, which lasted for about 800 years. The hope that cowards and sneaks might use their real names, of course, is unduly optimistic. Klansman usually wear hoods, too. The most vital hope is that people of that ilk will pick on those of us who can take it. I’m not about to blog and I’m not about to lift the grate and swim in the sewer. Nor do I snoop around teen suicides or invent scandals where none may exist. I can never be a gentleman, because I was not born rich, and a true gentleman never works except as a clergyman, physician, or military officer -- or lives on inherited money. My life didn’t work out like that. I can, however, try to act like a gentleman, and that could be more important than whether I’m taken seriously by snobs without portfolios or signed names, or whether I’m an Axis Frankenstein or the actual Custer Survivor. It happened while men and women of good will were asleep. A person who hates me because I can get published recently placed an evaluation of my career on two national websites related to “Custer’s Last Man: I Survived the Little Bighorn,” which appeared on The History Channel earlier this month. I had previously viewed cyberbullying as being somewhat removed from my own reality. “We all hate you” has tragically prompted some likable kids to take their own lives, and that is both a sin and a shame. It’s a sin because the Scriptures warn against bearing false witness and casting the first stone unless you are without sin. I try not to cast stones because I am not in the least perfect. It’s a shame because the bullies who do this sort of thing generally function in gangs, and sometimes anonymously. But I never understood the threat until it happened to me. The real bad news, however, is that my own rap sheet was an endless roster of worthless opinions. My detractor missed all the good stuff and had to make it up as he or she went along, without much skill. How about the Koster-Is-A-Frozen Corpse Story? How did they miss that? That one started when I was helping three high school kids – two Koreans a few years out of Uzbekistan, and a Chinese two years out of Beijing – with English grammar as they completed their college essays. They had recently pointed out some of their friends clustered around a Ridgewood Library table during a thunderstorm, emitting shrill stifled shrieks as they spoke in one of the few languages I don’t claim to understand. “They’re telling ghost stories,” my interlocutor explained. “If you can make everybody’s hair stand up, you win.” Go for the gold! I could tell by the way that they were peering at me that they were trying to figure out if a white person might be intelligent. I figured I’d give them a break. “You’re trying to figure out how an American knows so much, right?” I asked bluntly. They nodded, shocked at the mind-reading act. “I’m not really an American,” I said. “I’m a Japanese brain transplanted into a frozen German corpse.” One asked how it happened. “The body belonged to Hans Klopffin, who was captured at the Battle of Stalingrad and sent to Sibera.” One of them had been to Siberia, so the plot thickened plausibly. “As you know, there are no barbed wire fences in the Gulag, because the distances are such that nobody ever tries to escape, but Klopfinn tried. We know this because they found the last of his stash of pretzels in the pocket of his greatcoat.” “Germans eat pretzels?” one asked, somewhat askance. “Jawohl,” I nodded. “Klopfinn made it from Siberia to Manchuria, but he got caught in a snowstorm and froze stiff. A Japanese cavalry patrol found the body and brought it in to Unit 731. That same day, a Japanese pilot cracked up his airplane during the same snowstorm and was killed, American nightmare: Cyber-contamination Student-athlete earns scholarship Brandon Nicodemo, a senior at Ramapo High School was named as one of four student-athletes to receive the New Jersey Devils Alumni Scholarship. The scholarship award was presented at the annual NJSIAA luncheon in Edison. Each of the four recipients received a $2,500 scholarship toward the cost of college and an engraved plaque from the NJ Devils Organization. Former Devil players Bruce Driver and Jim Dowd presented each of the four high school ice hockey players with their awards. Scholarship recipients were chosen by academic achievement and commitment to community service. Brandon Nicodemo is pictured above flanked by former Devils players Jim Dowd (left) and Bruce Driver (right).