A Worry for Wednesday

If this quote is correct as reported in the NYT online today:

“As one Jew to another, I deeply regret that the Sorkin family did not perish in the Nazi death camps.”

I think we, humans, should just pack up our suitcase full of ethics and throw it in the ocean.

Supposedly, a victim of that Ponzi Schemer exemplar, Bernie Madoff, said the above about the attorney defending Madoff.

We could go into how could a Jew say that about another Jew regarding the Nazi Holocaust but the quote is woeful beyond any religious or ethnic context.

Human beings can say horrible things out of ignorance but unless you’ve been living under a rock, humans beings living in the western world know about the Nazi death camps in their most graphical horror.

Yet the above quoted person was able to triage that horror below his “horror” of being a victim of a massive swindle. That’s a neat piece of triaging. Capitalistic swindles trump human degradation and death.

Another piece of news which ties neatly into this is the chimp news.

You know, Santino, that anti-social chimp in the Swedish zoo who stockpiles stones so he can bean the visitors to his cage. Scientists are ecstatic since this behavior helps in tracing human traits back to our ancestors.

So what? Just what did these scientists think? Humans are warlike but our monkey ancestors were peaceful?

Some years ago I was at a Sigma Xi lecture by Francine Patterson of KoKo the ape fame. She told us that she had spent 9 years with the apes and was about to return to civilization to write her book on their peaceful existence. Then, just before her departure, her apes and other group of apes began a bloody, unprovoked war. As she said, if she had left before this occurred, her data would have been incomplete and erroneous.

So, Santino at the Swedish zoo may be unusual in captivity but monkeys possess the killing gene like their descendants.

Just like the person quoted above, humans can accept horrors. After all, we are called rational creatures. It’s not that difficult to tweak rational thinking to fit our beliefs. It becomes pretty easy with time. It becomes even easier when ego trumps empathy. Freud got it. Santino gets it. We just keep pretending.

However, let me leave you with two hopeful entwined thoughts. From Caryle:

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

And an example of hearty laughter from Jon Stewart: (edit below)

The link posted on Wednesday was time-sensitive but the video is still available at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

However, if you're wandering on this posting even further in the future, go to TheDailyShow.com where they seem to archive past episodes for a month.