--They always disappoint you.
--Norman Wilson, "The Wire"
--You got to be taught to hate and fear
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught.
--"South Pacific"
--These are the worst people. Really the worst and most dishonest.So unfair!
--Donald John Trump
--Say it ain't so, Joe!
--Kid to Shoeless Joe Jackson
One of the most difficult things in life is to learn that what you have already learned is wrong, or only part of the story.
For one thing, what you've learned sometimes releases all sorts of endorphins, joy juice: Babe Ruth, who you've seen step to the plate under nail biting circumstances and face the fear of failure and triumph with a home run, has to be a great man, has to be a ROLE MODEL! Then you find out more about him: not so much.
One of the most destructive things ever to happen to the Catholic church, to millions of Catholics world wide was to have their faith in the Church dealt a body blow with the emergence of revelations of pedophile priests abusing children. Pope Pius XII may have been complicit in the Holocaust, bishops may have blessed corrupt politicians--well, everyone who swims in the dirty waters of our planet gets dirty, but the priests sexually abusing children, no.
When that attractive, bright young priest has been fondling your daughter, or that venerable old pink perfumed priest has had sex with your son, that shakes your faith in a way nothing else could.
When you have been brought up and conditioned to think we live in a meritocracy, and if you just work hard and apply yourself and resist the temptation to go out and play baseball and stay in and learn your calculus, and practice your clarinet and the college acceptances come in and you don't get into Yale, but you do get into Penn, well, you just weren't worthy. It's not that the meritocracy doesn't work. But when you transfer in your sophomore year to Yale and you discover the students and faculty look no different in quality, you are disappointed. When your father gets sick and can't work and you wind up at the University of Maryland, a dreaded state school for the C students, and you discover there are plenty of kids there who are every bit as bright as those you befriended in the Ivy League and the faculty is of equal quality, then that whole psychological structure of "deserving" the glittering prizes starts to collapse.
It's even worse with historical figures, who are even more creations of our imagination than real people in our own lives: Roosevelt rebelled against his own class, brought relief and hope to the suffering, destitute masses, stood up to Hitler, sent forth the forces to bring Japan to its knees, turns out to have been the kind of man who would throw people into concentration camps for being born to Japanese parents, embraced the genteel antisemitism of his class, allowed a boatload of Jews to be denied entry to America and sent back to die in the gas chambers of the German concentration camps.
Churchill, who vanquished the racist Nazis, was himself the leader of a fundamentally racist regime.
Philip Sheridan, that essential pillar of the cause to save the Union and free the slaves, after winning that war through a scorched earth campaign in the Shenandoah, went on to wage war on the Indians and to say, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Sherman, his brother in arms, was no friend to the freed slaves or the cause of abolition.
Labor unions, the only real and effective force to champion humane and just treatment for workers, have too often proven to be corrupt and their officers self enriching. "Animal Farm" depicted this problem so brilliantly, with the slogans of liberation and justice written in chalk on the blackboard, but then changed over time, so "All animals are created equal" becomes "But some animals are more equal than others" and pretty soon you cannot tell the pigs from the human beings.
And doctors! Ayn Rand said the doctor in his daily work uses more learning, skill, perception than the President, and we grow up experiencing the benevolent pediatrician who brings down our raging fevers, relieves our burning throats and throbbing ears, and now, it turns out a physician's assistant with two years of schooling past college--less time than it takes many people to get a Masters in computer science or strategic communications or broadcast journalism--can now wear a white coat and stethoscope and see you in the office just as the doctor once did, the doctor who had to slog through organic chemistry and physics in college, gross anatomy in medical school and then do an internship--that trial by fire--and a residency.
Nope! Don't need that. Just put on that white coat and practice medicine, pediatrics.
We have accommodated ourselves to seeing heroes from the military in that Jungian way--good and bad, heroic and cowardly. Same for police--as the cop in "Crash" who sexually molests a woman after a traffic stop later risks his life in pulling her from a burning car just before it explodes.
We can learn to do that for people.
It's harder for whole systems: The political system of "service" to our country as a United States senator, who turns out, if you look at the website Open Secrets, is simply bought in advance by whoever gives her the most money.
The health insurance companies, which run soft focus commercials on TV portraying their beneficent works, when all they care about is returning profits to their shareholders and if they deny you a life saving procedure today, and you die 4 years from now, well, by then, you will have another health insurance company, and the cost of your last few months will be on someone else.
Mad Dog has imagined what it would be like to arrive at the Pearly Gates, to be admitted to Heaven, and to find a reception line there, like at a wedding, and to walk down it and shake hands with Martin Luther King, and Jonas Salk, and a variety of luminaries, but to find on the line Adolph Hitler, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, smiling, greeting the newly received from planet Earth, with bonhomie.
What would you think then?
--Norman Wilson, "The Wire"
--You got to be taught to hate and fear
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught.
--"South Pacific"
--These are the worst people. Really the worst and most dishonest.So unfair!
--Donald John Trump
--Say it ain't so, Joe!
--Kid to Shoeless Joe Jackson
One of the most difficult things in life is to learn that what you have already learned is wrong, or only part of the story.
For one thing, what you've learned sometimes releases all sorts of endorphins, joy juice: Babe Ruth, who you've seen step to the plate under nail biting circumstances and face the fear of failure and triumph with a home run, has to be a great man, has to be a ROLE MODEL! Then you find out more about him: not so much.
One of the most destructive things ever to happen to the Catholic church, to millions of Catholics world wide was to have their faith in the Church dealt a body blow with the emergence of revelations of pedophile priests abusing children. Pope Pius XII may have been complicit in the Holocaust, bishops may have blessed corrupt politicians--well, everyone who swims in the dirty waters of our planet gets dirty, but the priests sexually abusing children, no.
When that attractive, bright young priest has been fondling your daughter, or that venerable old pink perfumed priest has had sex with your son, that shakes your faith in a way nothing else could.
When you have been brought up and conditioned to think we live in a meritocracy, and if you just work hard and apply yourself and resist the temptation to go out and play baseball and stay in and learn your calculus, and practice your clarinet and the college acceptances come in and you don't get into Yale, but you do get into Penn, well, you just weren't worthy. It's not that the meritocracy doesn't work. But when you transfer in your sophomore year to Yale and you discover the students and faculty look no different in quality, you are disappointed. When your father gets sick and can't work and you wind up at the University of Maryland, a dreaded state school for the C students, and you discover there are plenty of kids there who are every bit as bright as those you befriended in the Ivy League and the faculty is of equal quality, then that whole psychological structure of "deserving" the glittering prizes starts to collapse.
It's even worse with historical figures, who are even more creations of our imagination than real people in our own lives: Roosevelt rebelled against his own class, brought relief and hope to the suffering, destitute masses, stood up to Hitler, sent forth the forces to bring Japan to its knees, turns out to have been the kind of man who would throw people into concentration camps for being born to Japanese parents, embraced the genteel antisemitism of his class, allowed a boatload of Jews to be denied entry to America and sent back to die in the gas chambers of the German concentration camps.
Churchill, who vanquished the racist Nazis, was himself the leader of a fundamentally racist regime.
Philip Sheridan, that essential pillar of the cause to save the Union and free the slaves, after winning that war through a scorched earth campaign in the Shenandoah, went on to wage war on the Indians and to say, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Sherman, his brother in arms, was no friend to the freed slaves or the cause of abolition.
Labor unions, the only real and effective force to champion humane and just treatment for workers, have too often proven to be corrupt and their officers self enriching. "Animal Farm" depicted this problem so brilliantly, with the slogans of liberation and justice written in chalk on the blackboard, but then changed over time, so "All animals are created equal" becomes "But some animals are more equal than others" and pretty soon you cannot tell the pigs from the human beings.
And doctors! Ayn Rand said the doctor in his daily work uses more learning, skill, perception than the President, and we grow up experiencing the benevolent pediatrician who brings down our raging fevers, relieves our burning throats and throbbing ears, and now, it turns out a physician's assistant with two years of schooling past college--less time than it takes many people to get a Masters in computer science or strategic communications or broadcast journalism--can now wear a white coat and stethoscope and see you in the office just as the doctor once did, the doctor who had to slog through organic chemistry and physics in college, gross anatomy in medical school and then do an internship--that trial by fire--and a residency.
Nope! Don't need that. Just put on that white coat and practice medicine, pediatrics.
We have accommodated ourselves to seeing heroes from the military in that Jungian way--good and bad, heroic and cowardly. Same for police--as the cop in "Crash" who sexually molests a woman after a traffic stop later risks his life in pulling her from a burning car just before it explodes.
We can learn to do that for people.
It's harder for whole systems: The political system of "service" to our country as a United States senator, who turns out, if you look at the website Open Secrets, is simply bought in advance by whoever gives her the most money.
The health insurance companies, which run soft focus commercials on TV portraying their beneficent works, when all they care about is returning profits to their shareholders and if they deny you a life saving procedure today, and you die 4 years from now, well, by then, you will have another health insurance company, and the cost of your last few months will be on someone else.
Mad Dog has imagined what it would be like to arrive at the Pearly Gates, to be admitted to Heaven, and to find a reception line there, like at a wedding, and to walk down it and shake hands with Martin Luther King, and Jonas Salk, and a variety of luminaries, but to find on the line Adolph Hitler, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, smiling, greeting the newly received from planet Earth, with bonhomie.
What would you think then?
Mad Dog,
ReplyDeleteWe need to do a better job of teaching kids at an early age that not all monsters have horns and look scary. Sometimes they can be quite ordinary looking-with a small black mustache or a white collar-but they're monsters just the same. Kids, as well as adults, need to realize that some of the worst demons aren't lurking around in the forest-they're out among us...It's unfortunate that our reluctance to frighten our children leaves them so vulnerable. Just like the reluctance of so many adults to confront uncomfortable subjects in general, leaves us all at risk for a variety of calamities..
Maud
Ms. Maud,
ReplyDeleteHannah Arendt spoke of the "banality of evil" observing Eichmann at his trial in Israel. She meant that he was not an evil man, a monster who had any idea he was doing really monstrous things. He was simply advancing his career and felt entirely detached from the horror his trains and schedules and concentration camps created.
Working on the cancer wards as a twenty something, watching so much death, so many bodies being wrapped up, without sympathy, every day I began to wonder if I would have been capable of being a concentration camp guard.
After enough death, it becomes commonplace, unremarkable and you lose all sympathy. Just another dead body, another death certificate, more lost sleep; do your job; move on.
It didn't matter we were trying to prevent death; what mattered was we were no longer affected by it. It was just an inconvenience, a burden. I became numb.
The priest likely had a different psychological process. He may actually have been excited by the evil he did, not numb to it.
But both he and I shared a lack of sympathy for the folks we were suppose to be protecting.
On the psych wards, I met people who had done terrible things to others, but they felt themselves the victims.
They, too, lacked sympathy.
Sympathy is a heavy weight to bear.