“…Look, without humor we would all have committed suicide. We made fun of everything. What I’m actually saying is that that helped us remain human, even under hard conditions.”
– Holocaust survivor, quoted by Dr. Chaya Ostrower, PhD of Beit Berl College, Israel
in Humor as a defense mechanism in the Holocaust
The article above is about the victims of the death camps using humor to stay sane in an inhuman, insane situation. Humor is a great coping mechanism. If it worked for people who lived in the shadow of a crematorium, it can certainly work for us.
I came across the above quote this morning while checking the Pendulum listing on dmoz.org. Holocaust humor? WHAT????
No, there was nothing funny about the Holocaust. There is nothing funny about genocide. There is nothing funny about a thing that goes beyond hate, that stigmatizes, dehumanizes, and then brings formerly rational human beings to methodically exterminate their next-door neighbors.
“Holocaust” means “complete burning.” The word Holocaust is technically used to refer to the six million Jewish victims. The goal was to exterminate an entire race just because they weren’t Christian. Ok, well, there were other factors, but nobody had to wear an “successful” badge. They had to wear a Judenfleck.
I am misusing the word to include three million other victims. Feel free to comment.
My personal interest in the Holocaust focuses on the “Aktion T 4,” the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate “life unworthy of life”. The Nazis tuned up the Death Machine on mental patients before grinding through the other 9,000,000 victims.
Nine Million. Can you even get your brain around such a number? That is like murdering the inhabitants of SIX Philadelphia, PAs. (Philadelphia population is from the Census Bureau’s State & County QuickFacts.)
“The murder of the lunatics contains the key to the Pogrom of the Jews…”
– Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
quoted in The Cynical Republic, “Haus des Eigensinns – House of maddening beauty”
Sita Sings the Blues was created by animator Nina Paley, who you might remember from her animated IMAX feature, Pandorama. All I’ve seen of Sita is the preview on archive.org, embedded later in this post, and it really captured my imagination.
Sita is great, like those wild Bollywood movies they show on Namaste America. Singing, dancing, love lost, singing and dancing, love regained, and more singing and dancing. It’s delightfully melodramatic. The Goddess’ story is interspersed with an autobiographical storyline from Ms. Paley’s own life. The movie is narrated by three sock puppets. Errr, that should say shadow puppets.
The music in the preview sounds like a cross between Timothy Leary’s White Birds Sing (Beyond Life) and Led Zeppelin’s Four Sticks (Led Zeppelin IV), however Sita Sings the Blues uses the music of Roaring 20’s era songstress Annette Hanshaw to express Sita’s (and Nina’s) feelings.
Edit:
That didn’t sound quite right. I like White Birds Sing and Four Sticks, but I realized later that other folks might not. The music was raucous and fun. Unlike the Indian engineers and professors I’ve met… What, do they only let the boring people come here? Maybe the US is a kind of exile.
Another edit:
When I wrote this article WikiPedia had nothing about the movie Sita Sings the Blues. After I added an item to the Sita disabiguation page, an article on Sita Sings the Blues showed up. Magically. How did we live without the interNets?
One way is to make a rough calculation of the percentage of support list email that is yours. Is half the email yours? That’s the support list equivalent of being at a party and running around in a frenzy trying to keep tabs on every conversation.
My personal favorite way to tell is to read my own posts and count how many times I begin a paragraph with the word “I”. If I write a post and every goddam sentence is about me, me, me, then I know that I should be talking to a therapist instead of taking energy from people whose boundaries are too soft for them to say or even think “no” or “you are a boring, self-involved twit.” When folks talk talk talk, it’s because there’s something that they want to say. Not the mush that comes tumbling out in idle chit-chat, but something important and maybe life-changing. OMFG, no, keep talking loud and fast so that you can’t hear it.
In case you aren’t aware of yourself enough to gauge when your thoughts are racing, you are emotionally labile, or you are feeling overly optimistic, grandiose, charitable, attractive, psychotic or whatever else might be part of your mania, then you have to focus on your behavior. Or more specifically to others’ reactions to your behavior.
I realize that gaining some awareness is the first step in being able to reduce your meds, get out and make new friends, do volunteer work or maybe even get job training, and eventually even stop hating yourself and your bipolar disorder. In a way, allowing yourself to be competent and independent is like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on if your continued access to medical care requires that you be sick enough to qualify for it.
“… he mimicked President John F. Kennedy’s Boston accent and also mocked Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s speech. “Nobody says to a Kennedy, ‘You speak bad English,’ ” he said. “Only to a black child was that said.”
“Errrrr eh, errrrr eh…” But we do make fun of Ted Kennedy’s Boston accent! Pretty much everybody does. In fact, I think I’ll call it Bobonics.
The number one thing a bipolar can do is develop self-awareness. The ability to identify an impending crisis and take steps to prevent it makes a huge difference in the quality of your life. If a bipolar is so first-person that they don’t notice racing thoughts and they don’t have enough of a grasp of formal logic to recognize a delusion for what it is, I don’t see how meds can do anything other than make them easier to handle. “Easy to handle” is not, in my non-professional opinion, a positive therapeutic goal.
Some days I think every bipolar should be forced to take Abstract Algebra. That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, eh?
“Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson said. “What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.’”
–Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry.
I occasionally interfere in the perpetual misconception that science is
somehow more than a quasi-objective reality check. The other day a
questioner postulated that the continued existence of homosexuality
effectively disproves “survival of the fittest” I give the fellow credit
for understanding that homosexuality is more than a lifestyle choice.
Nonetheless, I left a steaming pile for the questioner to ponder. I’ll go
back next week and vote for myself.
Survival of the Fittest applies at the population level, not at an individual level. It isn’t a “rule” in the way you’d think of a rule, it is about how environmental factors affect the diversity in a population. For instance, there has been an upsurge in asthma deaths since the US has relaxed air pollution standards.
Homosexuality is a continuum of desires whose expression is modulated largely by social forces. (I’m purposely leaving out the nature-vs.-nurture aspect. The jury is still out on genetics and in-utero exposure to hormones.) At one low point in our history, there was wholesale witch burning using homosexuals as faggots to light the fire.
For all you know, you are completely surrounded by homosexuals who are maintaining heterosexual relationships and reproducing just to “fit in.” You’re familiar with the concept of a “beard,” right?
I think this is a perfect adaptation, one that Evolution would be proud of if Evolution had intelligence. What intelligence is killing asthmatic children, again?
Modern women often prefer sensitive guys. Who knows? Maybe homosexuality confers a great breeding advantage on men who carry the trait.
“Vocatus atque non vocatus… deus aderit
Called or not called , GOD will be present.”
– Inscription on Gravestone of Professor Dr. Carl G. Jung, Kusnacht, Switzerland
Quoted from Heaven’s Register
Have you read any Jung? Jung was a medical doctor whose father was a philospher and pastor. Jung believed that God is not “out there” but is inside us all. God is our subconscious mind! You feel deep down what is right, now don’t you?
Jung pointed out that God evolved morally over the course of biblical history. That’s right, God got better and better. He had to, to keep up with his children’s moral evolution.
Being the firstborn is a curse for a lot of reasons, and it didn’t start with that whole “Dad forgot to paint the lintels” thing.
It can be deduced from the concept of a morally evolving God that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of this evolution. the “God made flesh.” God hoped that a physical manifestation would convince the Pharisees, the NT version of the Religious Right, to evolve too. It didn’t work, though. The Pharisees, like any hierarchical structure heavenly or temporal, were notoriously inflexible. Anything the Pharisees disagreed with was a sin, Evil, abomination. As a child Jesus was almost stoned for breaking one of the old rules.
If God is within us, then the fight between good and evil is going on inside us too. In Jung’s words, “from the psychological point of view demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process.”
Here’s a simplification derived from Alan Watts‘ Tribute to Carl Jung. Satan isn’t in me, it can’t be, because I am Good. The Evil and the hate must be over there in you! (That’s the non-self-aware speaking, the one with Blind Faith and no reason.)
Look in your heart. Both good and evil are right there inside your own subconscious, making you act out their presence. Like a projector you are shining your own ugly thoughts onto the blank screens of the A-theists. This is the psychology of evil.
And until you discover your self-contradictions, you will always hate anyone who disagrees with you.
As for me, I’m not afraid of the guru. I’m afraid of the people who threaten me with eternal torture in his name.
suicide 
Nazi 
holocaust 
T+4+Aktion 
mental+illness 
Judenfleck
) and Led Zeppelin’s Four Sticks (
