The Final Solution: Dr. Bedpan

Lisbon earthquake with tsunami looming

Voltaire parodied the delusory optimism of Leibnitz in his creation of Dr. Pangloss who infamously intones “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds” a homily that came on the heels of the great Lisbon earthquake of 1555. But what about outright nihilists and pessimists like Turgenev’s Bazarov in Fathers in Sons? What about an anti-Christ named Dr. Bedpan who cries out “all’s for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds?” The problem with millenarian pessimism is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the optimist, however misguided, is a heat seeking missile when it comes to good, the pessimist trumpets the worst. There's glee on his or her face which says “I told you so.” “The masses are the asses,” is a phrase that pessimists enjoy repeating and while they will be the first to admit that there are great leaders whose lives have been devoted to combatting greed and self-seeking, they love to point out the inconsistencies and foibles of even the great. Gandhi may have slept in the nude with young girls to test his control, but it's an anecdote that only demonstrates how desires are always festering. And what about those rumors about Mother Theresa not being so saintly? Are the great and noble souls basically gratifying yet another desire, the wish for sainthood? What’s better? To be a windmill chasing optimist or Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor accusing Christ of heresy?

The Final Solution: Sympathy for the Devil

Preaching to the choir is a precarious activity. It’s a little akin to Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection in the well and drowning. Essentially under the guise of trying to convince or convict, you're merely hearing the echo of your own voice. Remember being a teenager and pretending you were the Rolling Stones singing “Sympathy For the Devil” in the bathroom mirror? That’s about the level of reality one's talking about. Not preaching to the choir would be Greta Thunberg in the lineup at the current Republican Convention, speaking about the global warming. Not preaching to the choir would be having Anthony Fauci addressing the same body about the question of testing. Even if you believe you’re on the "politically correct" side of the fence, you should practice listening to those you despise. Democrats sat transfixed as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden addressed the DNC, but many thumbed their noses at the RNC, inevitably aping the behavior of their counterparts on the right. But then again since it's only human to want to hear the sound of your own voice or ideas, what good does anything do, when push comes to shove?

The Final Solution: The Living Dead

This is a time of collective nightmares. There was the bubonic plague that was the backdrop for the imaginative escape of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The Spanish flu of l918 was the impetus for Katharine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Stephen King dreamed up The Stand as did Steven Soderbergh, Contagion one of the hottest items on the streaming circuit. Now Hurricane Laura is reeking havoc in South Texas and cities like Corpus Christi where coronavirus has been peaking have to contend with a double morbidity of a high order. Might it be said that calamities like these out do the spells wrought by turbulent sleep from which you at least can wake up. Certain kinds of art derive from catastrophizing while other works are a response to the calamities that have or are already occurring. In the case of The Decameron the fictions are both the tales and the characters telling them. The one reality is the plague. Michael Crichton for example conjured up The Andromedia Strain, though fictions based on horrific fantasy always run the possibility of being even more horrifying than reality. It’s one thing to be scared by Night of the Living Dead or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and another to actually come upon zombies or blank eyed trauma victims acting like them walking around the neighborhood. Is this the age of retribution? Is mankind paying for its transgressions, in life as well as art?

The Final Solution: A Comparison Between Trump and Hitler

Are there similarities to Germany before the Second World War and the United States today? Certainly, the primary similarity is the abrogation of constitutional and democratic principles. And naturally there are similarities in the demographics, a large population of disaffected and disenfranchised workers (a "lumpenproletariat") who simply don’t care about principles like "inalienable rights" and "due process" which they look at as the language of an elite, a “swamp” which uses lots of pretty words and phrases to perpetuate its own power. The Versailles Treaty crippled Germany and created the mass discontent which was a fertile ground for the rise of fascism. It’s unclear what the correlation would be to America today. Perhaps the loss of jobs due to automation and technology? Donald Trump doesn’t look like Hitler. He's blond and doesn’t sport a mustache. He's large while Hitler and his Italian counterpart Mussolini were small. However, he harangues crowds in a similar way and he plays to discontent by pillorying his enemies. Statesmanship and presidential behavior are turned on their heads. Respectful discourse is treated as a lie with opponents being labeled with increasingly vile soubriquets., “Sleepy Joe,” “Crazy Bernie,” "Pocahontas,"  "Crooked Hillary.” Even though Trump’s a self-proclaimed billionaire, he's also makes himself one with his following by openly flouting the whole system including the method by which votes are cast and tallied, in order to disenfranchise the election process before it's started. The hell with ballots or voting or viruses. Trump like his predecessor in Weimar Germany has a messianic appeal in which the weight of truth is placed on oratory itself. He can say that hydroxychloroquine works or that one of the problems in the statistics of the current pandemic is simply too much testing and the words carry a magic that “trumps” scientific fact. Fascism is a juggernaut in which a tsunami of disaffection becomes the fuel for a charismatic speaker.

The Final Solution: From Bad to Oblivion

No matter how bad anything may seem, there will come a time when you may look back wistfully to that very day when you were quarantining say and in a state of total incredulity as the president of the United States tried to usurp an election in the middle of a pandemic by walking away with the post office ("Postal Crisis Ripples Across Nation As Election Looms," NYT, 8/17/20). It will get worse and then it will no longer matter since you’ll be dead. So is the point to totally enjoy the completely fucked-up day you’re having and regard it as some kind of high point? Or is it better to be one more hand or arm outstretched towards the heavens? Are you better off joining the chorus of human misery? And if the cries are loud enough will they be answered? Is crying for mercy one way of exercising the right to vote, when the ballot box has actually been hijacked? The pathetic fallacy occurs when nature mirrors the feelings of the inner soul. What to do about the deceptively promising though dissonant feelings deriving from a beautiful summer’s day with the sun shining in a cloudless sky and birds chirping outside the window? Is that a sign? Or, is it just a coincidence that you should enjoy before the onset of the next tropical storm? 

The Defiant Ones

Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) is a thriller about two escaped cons, Noah (Sidney Poitier) and “Joker” (Tony Curtis). On one level it’s a star vehicle and a kind of survival saga a la Deliverance. The two convicts are chained together, with one unable to make a move without the other. But the two characters totally dependent and intertwined  are also reminiscent of Beckett’s metaphysical duo Vladimir and Estragon. If you remember Waiting For Godot opened on Broadway only two years before in 1956. In one memorable scene, the feckless pair are trying to negotiate their way through rapids. There's a lot of push and pull a la Beckett and it’s not clear who’s saving or drowning whom. The same happens when they try to climb out of a mud pit in which they’ve been forced to hide. There’s also the obvious racial element in the script. Joker is a typical bigot who’s constantly reminding Noah of his place, but the irony is that in the end, when given the chance to escape, he’s totally dependent on his “partner in crime.” He can’t do without him. Spoiler alert. Though they’ve gotten rid of their chains by the end, they aren’t free of either each other or the law. The last lines of Waiting for Godot are famously Vladimir: "Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. They do not move." “Everybody winds up alone. Not just you. That’s the way it is,” Joker says. In The Defiant Ones, the human condition is the great leveler, creating a tutorial in equality. 

The Final Solution: Pharaoh's Dream

In the bible Joseph is summoned to interpret Pharaoh's dream in which the fat and emaciated cows would symbolize 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine. Freud famously wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. The Egyptian leader was no doubt going to a Jewish therapist for help. Maimonides would famously go on to write the The Guide for the Perplexed. But when you think about it Joseph was not just the stereotypic Jewish therapist populating say a Woody Allen movie, but a prototypic financial analyst, a biblical Benjamin Graham, the economist whose The Intelligent Investor, with its theory of value investing was an important influence on Warren Buffett. In fact, he was providing the very kind of predictions that investors have always sought to know. You might say, in this case, it was a form of insider information since it resided in the Pharaoh's unconscious. If there's going to be a scarcity of oil or soybeans, you’re going to want to buy futures. In our current world, of course, there’s a disparity between the machinations of the stock market and the economy. How can one reconcile a spiking pandemic, high unemployment figures and racial unrest with rising prices on Wall Street? Is it not a singularity that deserves some degree of scrutiny when the financial markets are so completely out of the sync with the nature of life as it's being lived by a suffering nation?