The Case of Tashfeen M.

portrait of Sigmund Freud by Max Halberstadt

Human beings are maladaptively adaptive which is another way of saying they'll put up with almost anything. The only question really is, how far can you go before you either break their spirits entirely and turn them into zombies--or they drift to the dark side where the Shavian life force becomes a juggernaut of destruction as we’ve seen in the viral proliferation of terrorist movements? Sonderkommandos, concentration camp inmates, who survived by clearing the gas chambers and contributing the piles of glasses, gold teeth, and hair you’ve seen in famous pictures taken by liberators of the camps are examples of this perverse survival capacity. On the dark side, you have Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Farook, who forswore survival, in place of what they obviously considered a form of transcendence. We look at them as murderers, but they have supporters all over the world who regard them as heroes, if not saints. During the second world war allied intelligence created psychohistories of their enemies. If they were able to understand the character of the Goebbels or Heydrich then they would be able to defeat them. There's no doubt that military pressure has to be exerted on Raqaa and other ISIS strongholds, but if the Islamic state is more of a state of mind then a bona fide political entity than what must be first understood is the nature of the beast. You can’t fight effectively unless you know what you're up against and the coalition might take a cue from martial artists who don’t seek to overpower their opponents as to use their adversaries' own force against them.

Putin Towers

The Times story read “Vladimir Putin Chides Turkey, Praises Trump and Talks Up Russia’s Economy,” NYT 12/17/15). The article went on to quote the Russian president as saying about Donald Trump, “There is no doubt he is a very bright and talented man. It is not our business to assess his merits. That is up to the U.S. voters. But he is an absolute leader in the presidential race.” It would have been nice if Trump has issued one of his legendary fiats masking as Tweets, in which he slapped a little honey on the man who buttered his bread. But be that as it may it’s plain that the two leaders share two qualities in common: 1) a love of carpet bombing (“DonaldTrump, 'I would bomb the s--- out of' ISIS,"Business Insider, 11/15/15) and 2) a dislike for paperwork (ie constitutional protections of free speech, “Donald Trump Thinks He Can Call Bill Gates to Shut Down the Internet,” Forbes 12/8/15). Plainly, Trump intends to treat the First Amendment a little the way he would someone who occupied a rent stabilized apartment in a building he wanted to tear down. The Russians haven’t been too successful in their campaign to support the agenda of their  client Bashar al-Assad; the cost to them of playing hardball in Syria has been one downed Russian passenger jet and a helluva a lot of opprobrium from the rest of the world for supporting a monster. But Putin’s approach to foreign policy would go a long way in the competitive New York real estate market where Trump made his bones. Imagine putting Putin in charge of emptying a building filled with middle income tenants like Stuyvesant Town so that he can turn it into a luxury coop. The Russians haven't been very successful in The Ukraine or Afghanistan either, but the bullying tactics used those places would make him an instant success in residential real estate. Trump is a kingmaker who likes naming things. Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning to the sight of a stratospherically high new addition to the New York skyline called Putin Towers--catering to rich Russian oligarchs and sponsored by The Trump Organization. As for Trump with his beautiful Slovenian wife and big mop of blond blow-dried hair, he looks just like the billionaires in Putin's inner circle. Everyone is talking about how palsy-walsy Cruz and Trump have become, but will Putin/Trump be the ultimate bromance to  emerge from the contest for the Republican presidential nomination?

Sperm Count: The Origin of Consciousness in the Advent of Oral Sex

 

Julian Jaynes wrote a famous tome The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Essentially Jaynes was trying to shorten the time line and show that human consciousness is a relatively new phenomenon having first started to be evidenced only three or four thousand years ago. Jaynes might have benefited from using a simple litmus test which would have helped him to pinpoint the exact point in the evolutionary ladder where consciousness started to appear by examining the advent of fellatio. Giving or getting a blowjob is an act that has both physical and cultural significance, in that it has to do with tool using rather than tool making and reflects that stage in development where the ancestors of man began to demonstrate prehensile abilities. You can’t really give a blowjob, for instance, until you are able to hold a penis in your hand, which may explain the evolutionary significance of homo erectus. Experienced metrosexuals realize, of course, that a latter day hunter gatherer not only has to be able to stand up on his or her two feet, but most have good posture when he or she is out to hunt and gather in bars or parties. While cunnilingus can be accomplished without the prehensile ability, it similarly reflects a cultural transformation in which the palette is increased by the use of the palate. If you have ever gone to the ape house in a zoo you'll notice that  outside the lustily bonobo, there aren't too many primates male or female who show the ability or interest in going down on that part of the body that has the name of a baby cat. Jaynes should have capitalized on his success with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by writing a sequel entitled The Origin of Consciousness in the Advent of Oral Sex.

Where Do All the Lonely People Belong?

“All the lonely people/where do they all belong?” sang the Beatles. Where do they belong? At the Club Hedonism or Club Med, at Sandals, at Beaches and if they are past their prime in retirement or assisted living communities? True some old age homes have problems with STD’s, but the question remains, where to put the chronically lonely? Tolstoy said, “All happy people are alike, but all unhappy people are unhappy in their own way.” And that  applies to the lonely people. All those people with tons of family and friends and lovers are alike, but the lonely people are the ones who insist on being different. Perhaps the solution is to put them all in uniforms so that they can at least identify themselves to each other. Maybe they should even be remanded to reeducation camps where they can learn to stop being lonely and different and start l behaving like everyone else. Donald Trump is talking about making America great again, but how can America  be great if it’s full of guilt inducing lonely people intent on marching to the beat of a different drummer? How can we be number #1 when we have all these people reading The Sufferings of Young Werther and feeling they're terminally unique? The growing population of homeless folks addicted to synthetic marijuana pose an even greater challenge, but if we can lick loneliness, we will be on our way to building a more cohesive society filled satisfied customers chanting  Handel's Messiah.  Some of the lonely people are obviously illegal immigrants who arrive without any friends. In their case, we will be doing them a favor by deporting them so they can be with people who they know.

The Narcissistic Pursuit of Narcissism

Let’s say you’re given just a couple of days, a week at most to live. It happens all the time. People go to the doctor and get bad news, a lousy prognosis while the rest of us are deciding whether we are going to have fish or meat for dinner. But let’s also say that you can’t get rid of the longing for attention that has always dogged you. Do you think you still have time to get a book out of this and will it be a novel or one of those non-fiction accounts, in this case of your short lived battle with chronic illness? Maybe if it’s a memoir you'll deal with this very tendency to experience grandiose fantasies even as you're on the brink of non-existence. Perhaps you'll title the book The Narcissistic Pursuit of Narcissism; in spite of your years of self-involvement you'll be praised for a relentless search for attention that dogged you right to the grave. In the book you'll describe how you put off dying for several hours or even a half a day so that you could complete the last chapter which was a summary of all the things you were never appreciated for. You'll describe how your last breathes were given up to the hope of posthumous fame. Part of what will be driving you will be the fact that there’s a certain cachet to being an artist or writer who'd not discovered in his own life time. Even though he was an aristocrat, Guiseppe di Lampedusa had trouble getting the attention of the Italian literary establishment and The Leopard, was only published after his death. And he wasn't the only one. The photographer Vivian Maier only achieved renown after she’d died. You realize your death is going to be your big opportunity and you throw yourself into the endeavor, refusing to see any loved ones, whose ministrations might impinge on your writing time. You decide to be an objective observer and keep six degrees of separation from your own end. The only rub is that you'll never know if your sacrifice pays off.