Counterblast! by Hinko Livernoix
Maybe it's time we revived the old idea of "humors." Remember when you studied Chaucer in 11th grade and you had to learn about the "humors"? Brief refresher: Europeans 800 years ago believed that personality was determined by the relative balance of four fluids ("humors") in one's body. In other words, one's personality was determined not by the "monthlies" but what we might call the "lifelies." So if you're morose, phlegmatic, splenetic, whatever, it's just the way you are. Whatever the cause, it's pretty clear than Ms. Cassandra can't help herself. By the way, to further blunt the possible charge of sexism here, we don't known "her" real gender, because we don't know "her" real name. For all we know, "she" may be a male, tenured professor of economics at Harvard doing a bit of econo-cast Internet slumming in these pages. No matter. My point is, if you look at Cassandra's negative rants, you can only conclude that every morning she wakes up, puts on really, really dark glasses (what is the opposite of rose-colored spectacles?) and decides that the world is doomed and there's not a thing we can do about it. Let's take a closer look at her latest outburst of keening and see if we can't find flaws in her "argument." Of course, it's not actually an argument, it's a carefully constructed perception. Whatever color her spectacles are, they are also blinders, reducing her peripheral vision to zero, limiting her world to what she is looking at immediately in front of her. In the latest piece, she focuses on three perceived parallels. How nice things must have been, she says, in the years before certain recent historical disasters (democratic Weimar, early Maoist China, and Edwardian England). Revealingly, she implies that the very people she's criticizing in those times failed to see the weakness of the prosperity they were enjoying and saw instead only the beautiful string of days they were living. In other words, she attacks them for what is in fact her own most grievous fault: They were all wearing blinders. One assumes that her implied corrective for those people would have been for them to remove their blinders, see the dangers ahead, and do something about them. Well, yes, Ms. Cassandra. And how about yourself? You've spotted the splinter in their eyes (adroitly changing the metaphor), and how about the beam in your own eye? Ever think about taking off your own highly restrictive pair of spectacles? Or maybe going in for a new prescription? And even granting the limited nature of your vision, what's so special about it? Given the wobbly course of human history, and the tendency toward catastrophe which appears to be part of the package when you buy into this particular universe, anybody at any time in history can get on a soapbox, start preaching coming disaster, and if they keep on long enough they're going to be right. And where does that get us? It gets us nowhere. Almost nowhere. Contemplating Cassandra, I come to three small conclusions: 1. The naysayers we shall always have with us, so we might as well get used to them and figure out how to deal with their line, short of following them to Guyana and drinking poison Kool-Aid, or holing up with them in Waco and inciting the Feds to riot. 2. A lot better writers than Ms. C. have made a career of naysaying. Job, for starters. Schopenhauer for finishers. If you need a good solid hit of "NO!", you're better off re-reading one of the real Masters of Negativity. 3. Whatever level of naysaying one encounters, it can have a therapeutic, emetic effect. Not from the content so much as from just observing the act of denial. Ms. Cassandra's (fortunately not very frequent) columns can remind me to be on guard about my own blinders, my own tendency to assume that what's immediately in front of me is IT! and there ain't nothing else. END
Illus: Expulsion from Eden (woodcut), Hans Holbein. |
Elsewhere in Magellan's Log 10, Ms. Cassandra, a prophet who
could give sheep's entrails a bad name, lets fly with