Is it Good to Be Bad?

 Antichrist and the Devil from the Deeds of the Antichrist fresco by Luca Signorelli

“Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble” sang the witches of Macbeth, but what is the mantra of the anti-Christ? Imagine knights in armor covered with shit, fighting for a world in which everyone has the right to fuck each over with impunity and we all recite the Devil’s rather than Lord’s Prayer at meetings of our covens. Our Father Who Art in Heaven, not  hallowed be thy name. My kingdom come, my will be done on earth as it is in hell. Give us this day everything we want and fuck our trespasses. For mine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen. However blunt, does this not sound a little closer to home? Com’on do we really think that there are knights in shining armor, doing something for nothing? And what about the ego of all the proselytizers of selflessness? Where are the Gandhis of today and did they ever exist? Read for instance,"Thrill of the chaste: the truth about Ghandi's sex life, " The Independent, 1/1/12). Boys will be boys and Gandhi might have slept with young girls to test his willpower, but he still slept next to them. And what about those rumors that Mother Teresa was a bitch and that Pope Francis is just a good salesman, out to get new customers for his brand? Goodness is always a reliable sales pitch. Certainly Francis wasn’t going to increase his base by offering up more punishment for sinners. Let’s say we’re all thieves and crooks like Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock or Alex in A Clockwork Orange. We’ll have are cards on the table. They’ll be no surprises and perhaps the honor amongst thieves who have nothing hide is more reliable than that amongst the seemingly honorable, the equivocators who, by definition, because they're human, are condemned to live double lives.

The Illiteracy

  

The ILLITERACY is the state of mind occupied by all the people in this country who are either functionally or de facto illiterate. Sure there are those unfortunates who really can’t read. However, a good part of this modern nation state communicate freely and express their outrage and fantasies to one another on social media. So they're definitely capable of reading and writing. But the majority of this increasingly large demographic have been deprived of any sense of history. A large proportion have never heard of The New York Public Library, Shakespeare or Beethoven, the Cold War or utopia. Expressions like parliamentary democracy, economy of scale and conspicuous consumption are totally foreign. They have never heard of Pyongyang and hence have no idea that it's the capital of the insular and rogue state of North Korea whose youthful leader Kim Jong-un has made lots of wild threats. They may have heard that Syria is on fire but they don’t know why and they certainly have never heard of Mr. Assad or could care less. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, Werner von Braun, Einstein and certainly Niels Bohr all fall under their radar. Queen Victoria sounds familiar due to Victoria’s Secret, but no, they never have heard of Nelson Mandela, much less Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi or FDR. And no they didn’t read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and they never heard of  “Trane,” John Coltrane that is. They never got polio because they were vaccinated, but they never heard of Jonas Salk and certainly not Alexander Fleming, whose invention of penicillin spared them from infection. Ask a member of the Illiteracy, who is our current Vice President? If they fail ask about earth and what galaxy it’s in and failing that ask, if there is any truth to the fact that it was created in six days (and nights) and that on the seventh God was finished and took a rest.

The Life and Death of the World Historical Figure

At the end of his short encomium to Mandela in The New York Review of Books, “On Nelson Mandela (l918-2013)," J.M. Coetzee writes, “He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.” Then who will rescue us? Where is the hope? Even without the notion of God, it’s nice to believe that history takes a human shape. It’s something like the spirits that haunt Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Hegel believed in dialectic and historical necessity. But like a nuclear bomb which requires a powerful detonator, history has its servants, or World Historical Figures. Thomas Carlyle subscribed to the greatman theory of history, but such anthropomorphizing flies in the face of the variegated web of social and economic conditions which are the petrie dish that produces political leaders. Would Hitler have come to the fore, without a Versailles Treaty? You make your bed and then have to sleep in it. Would Roosevelt have prevailed without the Depression, Gandhi without British colonialism, Lenin without the Czars and Mandela himself without Apartheid? If Apartheid hadn’t been instituted, then Nelson Mandela might have ended up being a high powered lawyer. Look around you, how many determined men and women of great character, have become merely competent or even great in their jobs instead of being world historical figures? Is Mandela the last of the great world historical figures, or is it a little like Six Characters in Search of an Author? Is it a matter of timing and the fact that the world has become so complex that the outlines of history themselves blur the prospect of greatness? Perhaps we no longer appreciate the great men and women in our midst since it’s more difficult for them to shine out. Barack Obama is a source of disappointment to some who thought he would be great, but maybe the multivalent problems he has faced make his greatness harder to appreciate.