CDC or CPC (Center for People Control)?

Auschwitz inmate Czeslowa Kwoka (taken by prisoner and photographer Wilhelm Brasse)

Is it easier to control a disease than a person? There are some diseases which don’t respond to anything and simply progress along their deadly course. But most diseases respond to medicines. We take penicillin and other antibiotics for infection and chemo and radiation rid the body of many cancers. But controlling people is another matter. We may subdue another person through threats, intimidation and emotional blackmail. But the results of colonization which have left in their wake a whole generation of angry offspring, some of whom have themselves resorted to terror tactics are plainly visible in the recent upsurge in the kind of violent activities that have afflicted France. The French have upgraded their security. But will containment actually work? Even massive genocide has not actually proven effective in ridding enemies of each other. The attempts by the Hutus to murder the Tutsi, the Nazis to eliminate the Jews and the Turks to erase the Armenians are three prominent cases which illustrate the regenerative nature of the human spirit. Attempts to crush and repress actual kindle fires and in some cases unfortunately lead to oppressed minorities reenacting the sins of their oppressors. On an individual level, the results of domination and subjugation are evidenced by our soaring divorce rates. South Africa is a unique example where inspired by the spirit of personalities like Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission became 
another path whereby revenge was replaced with remembrance. Tunisia has recently also taken a similar path (“Torture Claims in Tunisia Await Truth Commission,” NYT, 5/19/15). “Turn the other cheek” rather” than an eye for an eye” have been the guiding premises of that revolutionary commission.  “Never Again!” is the famed motto of Holocaust survivors. It’s a lesson that both individuals and national states need take to heart.

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.

Mandela’s Evolutionary Politics

It can be hard to identify with the goodness of the great. The bar is set too high. Figures like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela are almost superhuman. And there are those who  even attempt to find flaw in them if only to make them more fallible and hence human. Gandhi tested the temptations of the flesh by sleeping next to young girls, Martin Luther King was a rake. Nelson Mandela liked violent sports like boxing. Mother Teresa befriended dictators. But following the recent eulogies for Nelson Mandela one is likely to be caught up short, recognizing the extent of his achievement. Even among names like King and Gandhi, he stands out due to the revolutionary nature of the legacy he left. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the way that South Africa dealt with horror of Apartheid. And what was it? An attempt to replace retribution with memorialization. But The Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be looked at not only as a revolutionary phenomenon, but an evolutionary one to the extent that its legacy demonstrates how natural selection finally favored altruism as a survival mechanism. There are those like the South African writer T.O. Molefe who point out that the significance of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s is overshadowed by that economic inequality still plaguing South Africa’s blacks (“Mandela’s Unfinished Revolution," NYT, 12/13/13). However, imagine if there had been a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as opposed to the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War and imagine if murderers like Eichmann were allowed to walk among us? It’s a horrifying prospect and yet one that South Africans have lived with ever since Apartheid fell and Mandela came into power.

Ordinary Pain

You are speeding along by yourself on an Interstate when a really great song like Stevie Wonder’s Love’s In Need of Love Today comes on, and you turn the sound up as loud as it will go.

    

What is a nice guy or girl? Cordelia wasn’t nice because she didn’t say what Lear wanted to hear. Goneril is definitely not nice. Oracles are not nice. Soothsayers like Calchas are not nice. The Sphinx is not nice in Oedipus because it only proposes riddles. You have to go through hoops to answer what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

  

Lionel Trilling dealt with this subject in a series of essays called “Sincerity and Authenticity.” But what do these terms really connote? Are the Cordelias of the world better than the Gonerils, or are they merely seeking another kind of gain, i.e., martyrdom and moral superiority? One way to get ahead in the world might be to ask for things, another might be to propose self-deprivation. Though Augustine repudiated earthly desires, he made it (by the worldly standard of fame). Gandhi had a good run of success, as did philosophical kindred like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who used passive resistance to achieve their aims. Is the man of peace better than the warrior? Is Mother Theresa saintly in comparison to Clausewitz, who argued that war was merely “the continuation of politics”? We are all imperialists, both on ontogenic and phylogenic levels. We all want to control and dominate, whether it’s a person, a class, or a society of people. Was Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik fundamentally more evil than the politics of conciliation that might be advocated by organizations of doves?

   

So is it all a matter of presentation, The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life that Erving  Goffman described in his famed sociological tome. Is it all public relations? Is personality a series of conscious and unconscious decisions with a pubic face, but no moral scorecard?

   

Now you are speeding down the same highway and Freyda Payne’s disco classic Band of Gold comes on the oldies station.