In The Tin Drum, a masterpiece of Prussian literature about the Nazi era from German author Gunter Grass and an Oscar-winning film, little Oskar Matzerath determines while still in the womb that he'd rather not leave his little room, but alas birth happens against his will. Little Oskar overhears his father saying that when he is old enough, he will take over the father's store and be a respectable member of society. He also hears his mother saying that when he is three, he shall have a drum. Oskar prefers his mother's promise to his father's.
At three, having received his tin drum, Oskar decides that he shall grow no more and throws himself down the cellar stairs in a metaphoric death-and-rebirth, a rebirth in which Oskar remains three-years old for the rest of his life.
Along with his drum, painted red-and-white for Poland, doomed by the rise of the Nazis from the rubble of the 1930's, Oskar has a natural gift in his voice for breaking glass. His screams break eyeglasses, shatters bookcase glass, shatters the glass holding preserved specimens in the doctor's office, shatters the stained glass windows of the church when the Christchild in Mary's lap on the altar will not play Oskar's drum, and shatters windows in his contribution to the Kristallnacht.
Oskar is the mob, the childish reaction among people to want what they want when they want it and to lash out violently when they do not get their way. To be three-years old is to have no accountability, for after all, one is only three and what does one know at three? Oskar had the consciousness of an adult throughout his life in the story, but the emotions of the three-year-old. He joins movements and wanders away. He joins movements and disrupts them, spoiling a Nazi rally with the drum rhythm of the Blue Danube waltz, joining up with the Nazis to entertain the troops, getting his presumptive uncle Jan Bronski killed at the Danzig Post Office during the Nazi takeover of the Danzig Free State. Ultimately, Oskar is a destructive force, uncontrollable by anyone after his mother dies gorging herself on his father's catch of eel.
Oskar tells his own story from an insane asylum where he has been committed following the war, when sense returned to Germany. He has been put away, too dangerous to be out, but a charismatic figure who tarries in the asylum, perhaps awaiting that next time to be out in society to destroy it.
The conservatives in this country have been called out as anarchists, nihilists, fascists, and see themselves as principled Constitutionalists, defending what they think is truly right about America.
They are actually simply the mob. Anti-establishment, anti-conciliatory, anti-social, and surely destructive. They want what they want when they want it, and they will bring down what they will to get it, even if they don't know what it is. They are window-breakers and screamers, bangers of little tin drums.
Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, they had varying fears and hopes for the people of America, some seeing a redeemable spirit in every man whether drunkard or landed, some seeing the mob that boarded the tea ships in Boston Harbor. They all feared the mob to one degree or another and fear of the mob is present in the government they crafted in the Constitution.
This radical rabble is the mob.
This is the story of Oskar, born between faith and disillusion.