Was Stalin Bulimic?

                                       U.S Signal Corps

Was Stalin bulimic? Does that explain his purges? Out of the frying pan and into the fire is the expression, but it may seem like a long road from the toilet to the gulag. But who is to say how the functioning of the GI tract and the varying sphincters of the body affect the creation of personality. Back in 2005 Paul Starobin wrote an essay in The Atlantic called “The Accidental Autocrat” about another Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Starobin attributed some of the games Putin plays on the stage of history to morphological singularities. Starobin cites Brenda L Connors “a certified ' 'movement analyst’" at the Naval War college to show that “he seems to lack what is called contra-lateral movement and instead tends to move in a head-to-tail patern, like a fish or reptile." Starobin quotes Connors to the effect that reptiles “patrol their borders, and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively.” Like reptiles Putin is particularly border conscious. Starobin is more skeptical about Connors’ irredentist hypothesis that Putin’s “instinct to make himself whole is mirrored in his imperative to keep Russian from breaking up.” However, it would be interesting to look at whether Stalin suffered from some grave eating disorder which became the only tool available for him to deal with his paranoia. It’s easy to test the DNA from the remains of a dying person and famously Einstein’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde, but it’s impossible to get a stool sample from a corpse and even if Stalin had ever seen a GI guy for any of his complaints, it would take a pretty wily researcher to attain those records. But it’s not hard to imagine Stalin gorging himself on Chicken Kiev at some state dinner and stealthily going off to the bathroom, sticking his finger down his throat and later ordering the elimination of a good portion of the attendees.

The Zeitgeist

The Zeitgeist is like a person who walks into a room and feels totally at home. “Zeit" in German is time and “Geist" is spirit. So the words literally means “spirit of the time." But there are, in fact, certain people and cultural artifacts that reflect the Zeitgeist of a time. Camus’s The Stranger, a book, by an obscure French intellectual, who had edited the resistance newspaper Combat, became a publishing phenomenon in 50’s America. Bob Dylan epitomized the Zeitgeist of the 60’s. He would have several other incarnations which would make him at the very least a fellow traveler in the Zeitgeist of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. However, that first album, The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan (which included songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War,”) with the picture of him walking down the street, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and his arm around a pretty girl was like the concept of a first cause in philosophy. Today Lena Dunham's  Girls seems to be a candidate for Zeitgeistmeister, to the extent that it portrays a whole post-modernist generation who have majored in ambivalence and see all of life as a work of meta-fiction in which reality has been mirrored so many times that it’s been reduced to chards of relativity. Opportunistic art entrepreneurs are always on the look out for the next Zeitgeistlich writer, artist or musician, but it’s hard to predict what the Zeitgeist will be since the pupa of its essence is often embodied in a personality like a Dylan whose imagination is like the ignition on an explosive device. Does Karl Ove Knausgaard reflect the Zeitgeist of Norwegians since one out of 8 of his countrymen own Min kamp. The book's incipient provocativeness seems an unlikely candidate for the Zeitgeist of a nation with such a reserved façade? Is the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey a reflection of the Zeitgeist or is E.L. James’s novel merely a clever manipulation?  Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Annie Lennox and Sting all reflected the Zeitgeist of their respective times, as did Picasso, Jackson Pollock and now yes Damien Hirst? In the political sphere, do the beleaguered Barack Obama, the arrogant Vladimir Putin or even the horrific ISIS reflect the wobbly nature of our globe? And has our age become too complicated to produce philosophers like Plato and Aristotle whose tomes emanated an eternal Zeitgeist, however oxymoronic, that ultimately could tell us how to live?

Are There No Coincidences?

The two top stories in the news are the fates of flight 370 and the Crimea and the prospects for neither seems particularly hopeful. So what that someone in the cockpit programmed the plane to fly off its course. As much as the Times tried to make out of this “scoop,” (“Lost Jet’s Path Seen as Altered via Computer,” 3/17/14), it doesn’t lead us any further toward discovering the changed trajectory or the reason’s for it. Of course it did take about a week for the Malaysian government to enter the houses of the pilot or co-pilot and it’s hard to fathom the rationale for the delay. Traveling to the right column of yesterday’s front page of the Times, we read, “Putin Recognizes Crimea Secession, Defying the West.” But what can we really say about this? Obama and Putin are like two drivers with their chests pushed up against one another in an incident of road rage. Will they both return to their respective vehicles and simply drive away or will somebody actually get hurt? But the more profound question that those interested in the paranormal, who believe there are no coincidences, might ask is, are these two events in some way connected? One thing is certain they are both dead ends of one sort or another. NATO, the US and Russian will continue to be at loggerheads and the plane’s disappearance will continue to be a source of hope—though hope of what kind? Some day it will all make sense. The pieces of the puzzle will fit together. Hindsight is always 20/20 as the expression goes, but whether 370 crashed as a result of terrorism or malfunction, then the absence of the wreckage only prevents the families and friends of passengers and crew from getting closure.