Cruel To Be Kind

A Colorado high school teacher who drew parallels between George W. Bush's State of the Union address and the oratory of Adolph Hitler was recently reinstated after a brief investigation into his classroom conduct. Though ill-considered and utterly naive, his remarks do not interest me nearly so much as the phenomenon of the invocation of Hitler's name in general. In contemporary discourse, a comparison to Hitler basically expresses the most savage condemnation possible of another human being. However, in the annals of state-sponsored annihilation, Hitler "only" comes in third, after Mao and Stalin.

Mao Zedong, the architect of Chinese Communism, described himself as "a man without law or limit." According to a recent biography, his policies led to the deaths of perhaps seventy million people. This staggering number equals the combined populations of California, Texas, and New York, nearly a quarter of the current population of the United States. Mao's butchery proved so extreme that even the Communist Party of China, in 1981, repudiated his "Cultural Revolution."

Joseph Stalin, regarded for over half a century as the premier mass-murderer in world history, has now been relegated to a close second. He remains responsible for a mere sixty million deaths, an amount equal to the entire population of England. Stalin bequeathed to history his maxim that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." His successor, Nikita Kruschev, disavowed Stalinism in the so-called "secret speech" of 1956.

With such competition, Hitler but manages to take the bronze medal in killing. The death toll of Nazi Germany stands at around twenty million, certainly an appalling number, but insufficient to make Hitler history's purest personification of evil. My high school Global Studies teacher observed that "Stalin made Hitler look like a Boy Scout." Why, then, do commentators wishing to castigate heads of state whom they regard as oppressive not then compare them to Stalin, or better yet Mao?

Shockingly enough, while Hitler succeeded in discrediting Naziism, Stalin and Mao somehow failed to discredit communism in the popular imagination of the West - though not for lack of trying. Overall, communism worldwide may have claimed as many as 150 million lives in the 20th century, which makes it a force nearly eight times as destructive as Naziism. Still, many Westerners persist in their desperate romance with communism. Some believe that, if only the right people would implement it, then it would finally work. This attitude ignores Albert Einstein's definition of insanity, "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Others have more nefariously allowed their enthusiasm for what they regard as communism's noble ends to justify its most ignoble means. Such Machiavellian thinking enables them to decry the violence of fascism, while embracing the violence of communism. Who will proclaim "never again" for the victims of not merely Stalin and Mao, but Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Kim Il-Sung? Not the modern apologist of communism; to him, this legion of dead just counts as "collateral damage."

If someone believes that America has squandered its moral credibility in Iraq, he cannot turn around and regard Hitler as the quintessential tyrant. Such fallacious speech demonstrates that he cares, not for human life itself, but only that human life is sacrificed on the altar of an ideology which he finds personally satisfying. This brand of self-indulgent selective indignation represents the lowest moral ground that a person can occupy, for it involves only the barest pretense of morality. Those who truly feel this way should just admit it; but as for me, I stand on the side of life and reject wholesale slaughter altogether.

Anatomically Incorrect

This post contains graphic language. Reader discretion is advised.

Penis. Penis. Penis, penis, penis. There, I said it. Yet somehow I fail to feel liberated, empowered, or personally authenticated. Instead I feel like I'm 12 again, looking up anatomically correct terms in the dictionary in a desperate, barely pubescent search for sexual gratification. I'm older now, with more satisfying options for accommodating my basic instincts (should I choose to avail myself of them); but as I have matured, culture has apparently regressed. A prominent playwright has repackaged juvenilia as avant-garde literature; her titillating tripe now plays as sophisticated entertainment in theaters and on college campuses across the nation.

Yes, today I had the misfortune of actually perusing Eve Ensler's ubiquitous Vagina Monologues. In so doing, I realized too late that curiosity doesn't merely kill the cat, it violates the soul. This trashy, vapid work purports to somehow elevate the status of women by celebrating the vagina. But with friends like this, the vagina doesn't need enemies. It needs a genuinely talented author to restore its dignity after page upon page of incessant reiterations, contrived euphemisms, and florid metaphors. Ensler strives to lay the vagina bare in her insipid, popular style, and in the process manages to trivialize the very object, that seat of the sacred feminine, that she seeks to venerate. The Vagina Monologues is to women's studies what The Da Vinci Code is to theology.

Often as not, the stories which Ensler adapts fit a peculiar pattern: a woman endures a repressed upbringing and years of bad sex; she seizes on her vagina as a symbol of her self-loathing and relational dissatisfaction; then, upon a profound initiation into the Sapphic arts, she finds healing and contentment. As much as anything else, the Monologues serves as a primer on the virtues of lesbianism. After all, as everyone who's attended high school knows, women would never dare treat each other with disrespect.

This play, to say the least, offers strongly mixed messages. It addresses the truly grievous reality of misogynistic violence, containing a trenchant clinical description of the barbaric "procedure" of clitoridectomy and a gut-wrenching section on rape used as a military tactic during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But it ultimately leaves the reader with the impression that the most serious issue confronting women today is their reluctance to moan loudly during orgasm. I just don't find America as sexually repressive as Ensler does. In a world where "honor killings" persist, I simply can't become exercised over the fact that not all American women feel a moral obligation to "wake the neighbors," so to speak. The Vagina Monologues has inspired a movement, V-Day, dedicated to eradicating violence against women. I can only hope that this organization has a mandate which extends beyond, in effect, changing the Declaration of Independence to read, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Uninhibited Sex."

Despite (or maybe because of) its overall lack of redeeming value, Eve's opus has captured the public imagination, and it does have its appeal: artistically, to those who mistake crudeness for genius; socially, to those who believe that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle; and politically, to those with a highly selective sense of indignation. I shudder to envision the reaction if a man wrote something like this, but as the saying goes, only a woman knows what a woman really wants. And if women really want this, I think I'm going to become gay.