06 Sep 2024 / Viewpoint

When Pastiche of the Grotesque Trends

By force of habit, I must digress a little. Herr Albert Speer and the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic before that great city (mercifully reunited, since) fell on April 12 th 1945. Herr Speer, the Reich minister for armaments and war production had organized this concert for the Nazi elite. A finale of sorts, by extension and rich stretch, inspired by the Samson Option. The concert concluded with Brunnhilde’s Aria. The Aria closes the third act of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, in which the Valkyrie immolates herself atop an enormous pyre. Flames consume everything – the world of men, the halls of Valhalla, the entire pantheon of gods. As the audience filed out, cries of Brunnhilde as earworm, members of the Deutsches Jungvolk handed out cyanide capsules. Votive offerings, if you will. Goring, Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann bit the exit. Other military leaders shot their craniums and simultaneously bit their capsules. Separately, the Fuhrer asked Blondi, his dog, to eat it before he bit one. An atom of carbon, an atom of potassium and one of nitrogen. And what a quick painless check-out. Besides Teutonic precision and great sartorial sense, I admire the Reich for its sense of timing and style.

Here's big stretch, rubber-band connect to present time. There is certainly a connect of pretty much everything in the world because there is a fractal geometry of disaster. Small disasters are microcosms of big ones. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s extended duel with Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy continues. Former KGB agent Vs former actor and comedian in tragi- comic setting. Tragic for obvious reasons. Comically twisted because it brings to mind the caricature of a contemporary strongman. Strongmen are trending. Worse, there are several waiting in the wings, eager to spring on the world stage as they practise hard on domestic ones. Snarling clowns with injections of insanity…..But there is another layer of this tragi-comic disaster --- that of many and acute distractions. Confronted with time sensitive, acute existential disaster, the world has digressed to this rencounter. Fact that the Russian gentleman nurses a mythopoeic mind, espouses nuclear war, underlines the gravity of this situation. Beyond infected mind lies the heart of the heart.

The core kernel. It is this:

Between these warring Slavs, rather than replicating the great battle of Thermopylae, the younger gentleman of the smaller country may wish to consider strategic surrender. If Russia achieves complete victory, it will reduce Ukraine to complete defencelessness. Russia will then dictate political terms subject only to the necessity of making political payments for the surrender of Ukraine’s residual capabilities. Not a good thing. Japan’s surrender in WW II shows the defeated power’s residual strength and its extreme will to resist. At this point Ukraine has both. Japan’s terms of surrender were unpalatable to the Americas and defied unconditional surrender, Japan was able to create a sufficiently strong bargaining position in getting its conditions accepted because it had residual strength and strong will. American decision to cut losses was the swing factor in Japan’s bargaining position. There is a relation between order and disorder as a theme and it develops implications for understanding interpretation itself. For the long haul, Ukraine may creatively apply subterfuge via Macaulay’s Minute. Pastiche, which notes the age we live in, but that's fine. Parody of pastiche, so what?