Of Lies and Eulogies

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

 - C. S. Lewis

----X----

“So long, and thanks for all the sh*t.” With due apologies to Douglas Adams, those might be the thoughts echoing through the minds of the lots which are leaving. The lot left behind shall also be a much relieved lot. They will feel what the black population of the US would have felt at the end of the Civil War. While there is still a Jim Crow-esque existence to be eked out, it would not be worse than the confederacy-come-alive which had run rampant for the last 3 months.

It was supposed to be “the best time of the career, if not of the lifetime” for those coming in. They had surmounted the unsurmountables to get there. All that ensued could have been avoided, if somebody had realized that these were grown persons, adult men and women, and not school-kids. Unfortunately, no one did. To use an aeronautical analogy, the flight of euphoria crashed suddenly into an unforeseen mountain of despair. “Catch-22” came alive for them. It was realized that between the release of that book and now, bureaucratic apathy and official stupidity have, more or less, retained their character and magnitude.

“Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.”
– Joseph Heller, Catch 22

So, for the first month, like Yossarian, they were wondering why the whole system was so hell bent on killing them. Every weekend, with the certainty reserved for death and taxes, came the long, tiring and futile trudges across the hills. And then, when mere weekends seemed insufficient to The Man, they were sentenced to a whole week of the same treatment. They were the forsaken-est of the forsaken – no one really cared if they fell down the precipice, got dashed on the flat rocks, or got impaled on the jagged, rough one, or got eaten by a leopard, or swept away by a torrential rivulet. Every day was just  stretch upon stretch of punishing ‘green miles’. It totally looked like the end of the line for them. But then, when one is treated like dirt, one develops the tenacity to stick like dirt – and so they survived, somehow. How? Ask no questions, hear no lies. And what did they learn for all their pains? Well, they learnt how to wander aimlessly and painfully across the hilly countryside – although the degree of proficiency at the same will always remain in doubt.

----X----

“Now, men, it's no skin off my behind. But that girl that wants to play the accordion for you today is old enough to be my mother. This is all voluntary, of course. I'd be the last colonel in the world to order you to go to that U.S.O. show and have a good time, but I want every one of you who isn't sick enough to be in hospital to go to that U.S.O. show right now and have a good time, and that's an order!"

  – Joseph Heller, Catch 22

Well, enjoyment was always mandatory for them. They sang, and they danced, and they played and ran, and they threw, and they jumped, and they begged, and they crawled, and they climbed. And they ‘enjoyed’ it all – not enjoying was an option not even on the table. As they were ‘enjoying’ all this, there was an uneasy sense of déjà vu, which often made those false smiles flicker and betrayed their (the smiles’ and the wearers’) falsehood. Of course, it was being done to them ‘for their own good’, ‘to make them prepared to face the world’, which, as green horns, they were pretty much unequipped to do now. It was being done to ‘groom their personality’, and to ‘mould their characters’. Now didn’t that smell like old bullsh*t being recycled anew? Where had they heard that before? The same excuses are oft paraded by the apologists for another similar practice – ragging, which, under the laws of the land, is a criminal wrong. So what is the similarity between a criminal offence involving ritual humiliation of school / college freshmen and ‘the best time of one’s career’. Well, off the top of their heads, they remembered a few points of congruence – both are done by those in positions of power, to those who are under their power, and the power differential is huge in such cases – either de jure or de facto. Both are done primarily because they have been getting done more or less similarly ‘from times immemorial’, and because the perpetrators of the day were once the victims. Finally, both are justified by providing similar excuses, as has been discussed above.

----X----

“ "Hey, Aarfy, did the bombs hit the target?"

"What target?" Captain Aardvaark, Yossarian's plump, pipe-smoking navigator would say from the confusion of maps he had created at Yossarian's side at the nose of the ship. "I don't think we're at the target yet, are we?"

"Yossarian, did the bombs hit the target?"

"What bombs?" answered Yossarian, whose only concern had been the flak.

"Oh well," McWatt would sing, "what the hell."”

– Joseph Heller, Catch - 22

What did they finally learn? With so much to ‘enjoy’, it was pretty easy to be run over flat by the steam roller of enjoyment. So, well, they learnt to prioritize and economize. The first axe fell on the things that they enjoyed naturally, without aid of the almighty shaft – and with that died the natural zeal and zest. And then, they all ‘fell in line’ – each according to his or her own capabilities and level of incompetency – set up straight by the almighty shaft.  They learnt the following – if not mandatory, do not do it. If mandatory, do just as much as would suffice. As the famous advice goes – at first, do nothing…If pushed , run around in circles. And if cornered, appoint a committee. One could almost see the next generation of dogged apathy being ‘forged in the furnace of Vulcan’. And thus, in finality, it just became an exercise in getting it done over with – who cared what one actually did – like a monotonous, never ending trudge. May be that’s why they had to do those marathon walks to begin with!

----X----

Vilfredo Pareto has contributed a lot to the ideas of societal economic welfare, but his most iconic idea was that social welfare is increased if even a single person can be made better off without making anyone worse off in the process. What happened in this case would have really sent Pareto spinning in his grave. Here, on one side, were the supposedly best minds of the realm (‘supposedly’, because they had not been ‘confirmed’ yet), and on the other side were definitely the best minds of the realm, in their own era. Yet, this confluence of the crème de la crème managed to actually make a lot of people much worse off and miserable, without anyone getting better off in the bargain. With such a glittering gathering, the possibilities were unimaginably bright – to have wrought misery instead, under conditions so propitious, is criminal, to say the least. And yet, this has happened since long, and looks as if it shall continue to happen for long, in open defiance of logic, in the name of tradition, and in the name of continuity.

----X----

Will they ever complain about it all? Will they ever come clean? That’s highly improbable. By the end of it all, half of them might be convinced that Big Brother actually loves them. The other half would be fooled into thinking that they are convinced that Big Brother actually loves them. So all of them would be selling rainbow dreams to the next generation of innocent kids, the same way they were sold those dreams. Well, the facts would be out, in a manner of speaking, but the feelings would never come out truly. They would continue to shower encomiums on the whole episode, and describe it in the most glowing terms. Because, as they say, there are lies, there are damned lies, and then, there are……….eulogies.

[DISCLAIMER- THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT IMAGINARY ENTITIES IN AN IMAGINARY SETTING. THE AUTHOR IS HAVING, AS YOU MAY HAVE GUESSED IT BY NOW, THE TIME OF HIS FRIGGIN’ LIFE ;) ]