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21.08.2014 Feature Article

Fate Of A Sick Scholar 6

Fate Of A Sick Scholar 6
21.08.2014 LISTEN

“Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself (Assata Shakur)”

Why should the all-knowing gods and ancestors endow some with plenteous wisdom, intelligence, and prescience, others with diarrheic stupidity, dumbness, and cluelessness? Is it a slapstick comedy on the part of ontological transcendence, of otherworldliness? Are there all-knowing gods of intelligence, wisdom, and prescience, gods and ancestors of The Scarab Beetle, Patrice Lumumba, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Sojourner Truth, as opposed to all-knowing gods of stupidity, dumbness, and cluelessness, gods and ancestors of the sick “scholar,” Idi Amin, Francisco Nguema, Omar Bashir, Mobuto Sese Seko? No one seems to know the answer for sure. It does, however, appear possibilities of binary opposition exist between the gods of poetic, journalistic, and novelistic creativity and the gods of poetic, journalistic, and novelistic stupidity, a view whose wide possibilities of existential actuation the powerful forces of transcendence are unwilling to unfreeze for public digestion.

This seeming mutual ideational exclusivity is indeed a verifiable reflection of the deep dichotomy The People correctly associate with The Country's polarizing inter-ethnic socialization and ever-widening political intolerance. Is there a future for the shoddy poetry of intolerance? Is there a future for the yellow journalism of stupidity? Is there a future for the parboiled novelism of ethnocentrism? What about the natural science of creative poetization, journalism, and novelism? The gods and ancestors are not exactly saying. Not exactly answering. Obviously it is part of the uncolored mystery of transcendence. But who cares? The People certainly do. What have The People done as yet to neutralize the viable agency of the gods of stupidity, dumbness, and cluelessness? Cipher; zero. Does this not call for revolution, at least of the kind The Scarab Beetle, Harriet Tubman, Paulo Freire, Assata Shakur, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Molefi Kete Asante, Camilo T. Restrepo, Nelson Mandela, and Malcolm X waged?

Evidently we are not calling for a revolution of arms, of terrorism, of cluster bombs! We are rather invoking the legitimacy of intellectual direction and moral revolution, noble abstractions of which the sick “scholar” and others of similar ideational bent are distantly identified with, for, apparently, it is one thing to come across as a fashionable category of conscious deceit, quite another to come across as a confused agent of moral dereliction. Even then, consistently living a lie is morally repulsive enough, not to talk of its potential to negate one's personal dignity as well as to overturn the sovereignty of “truth.” Of course “truth” is itself not necessarily the audible absence of falsehood. Rather, “truth” is necessarily the audible absence of mutual neighborliness, of tolerance, of love, of mutual understanding flashed across the moral silhouette of internecine differences. Understandably this simple narrative is beyond the sick “scholar's” and the Statue of Liberty's grasp.

That possibly makes the sick “scholar” a lost cause predictably. Yet this seeming lost cause is inseparably enmeshed in the political psychology of The Country. In the meantime, the superimposition of minds, The Country's and the sick “scholar's,” is problematic for The Country's progressive direction as The Scarab Beetle had conceived in line with the concept of philosophical consciencism. But the moral dynamics of this problematic designation is parallel to the graphic clumsiness of developmental retrogression The Country is apparently suffering from today. It is more like the awkward spatial gait of two antagonistic massive conjoined heads precariously dangling on a ghostly underfed torso. It may therefore seem a divorce between the sick “scholar's” derailed psychology and The Country's confused national psychology is urgently, even morally, called for. However, this contention poses the greatest moral challenge to The People's fragmented psychology. Indeed any piece of mind that is not accommodative, progressively adaptable, or plastic is just as good as discarded in The Ignoramus Cage.

Clearly the sick “scholar” is not an apologist or exponent of logic, the instruments of critical thinking. This view is not debatable, however. Everybody knows this for a fact. The sick “scholar” himself knows this too, even his family including his deceased architects. Thus it is hugely disappointing for the pantheon of intelligence, wisdom, and prescience to distance themselves from mortal fallibility, from the mortality of man's psychological finiteness. As it is already the mortality of the sick “scholar's” psychological finiteness is as stiflingly constrictive as it is claustrophobically repugnant, since the graph theory of his stream of thought is replete with misplaced and disorganized nodes of critical thinking. This symptomatology, in principle, is typical of The Country's politics as well. Yet these noble suites of gods and ancestors, the pantheon of intelligence and stupidity alike, are immanent impositions of otherworldliness, an acknowledgment that places human psychology in a controlling position, a location of authority as far as intimate interpretation of his environment goes.

It is as though The People should have to approach the sick “scholar's” derailed psychology the same way Dr. Ben Carson approaches a mind of seizure with moral quanta of operational hemispherectomy, the same way Martin Luther King, Jr. approached a sick, seemingly reprobate society with moral rays of corrective embrace of his tormentors, perceived and real. Therefore, could good ethno-animal men and women of conscience flash a sense of narrative objectivity, critical thinking, and the scientific method across the unplastic synaptic clefts of the sick “scholar's” asymmetric cranial morphology, restoring, as it does, sanity to an otherwise unbalanced psychology, O Great People of the World, for the sake of The People's and The Country's aggregate sanity? We certainly hope so, as others with good sense have already taken it upon themselves to effectuate. This should commensurately unburden The Country of the philosophical miasma of moral and intellectual indirection. But exactly how so? Let us see. The fiction, Achebe's “imaginative literature,” thus speaks up in an auctorial guise of rhetorical otherness. Listen up:

“Ours is an excessively conscious age,” notes D.H. Lawrence in his essay “Making Pictures.” “We know so much, we feel so little.”

What kind of world was Lawrence referentially speaking of? It is a given the sick “scholar” is a mountainous heap of dysfunctional neurology. Yet The Country's biggest “Atumpan,” an empty-barrel Talking Drum, the sick “scholar's,” says confidently to D.H. Lawrence: “I know so little, I feel so big!” That sentential betrayal is reflective of the sick “scholar's” depraved state of mind, the retrogressive antiworld of Lawrence's progressive world! That, however, represents an enormous elephant of contradiction sapping the intellectual energy of The Country, The People, the national conscience, even the sick “scholar's” own self-imposed funky stupidity, his funky dumbness...“Mine is a conscious age of stupidity, something of my own making!” adds the sick “scholar.” Certainly, bearing a psychological library of information glut is not the same as being qualitatively well informed; after all, not every piece of information is qualitative. But the sick “scholar” misconstrues possession of information glut, worthless as they might be for the most part, as a reliable trope of intellectual resourcefulness. Therein lies a subterranean tomb of autogenic contradictions implicit in the public demeanor of the sick “scholar's” intellectually sustained vainglory!

Question: How can an individual, supposedly enlightened, if we can allow that for the sake of argument, be so destructively set against himself, self-cannibalism? There should be an answer somewhere. How? It should, however, be argued that endless oppositional sliding of innate contradictions past each other within the narrative circumvention of personal privacy could, perhaps, constitute an internal psychological formula for implosive destructiveness. The sick “scholar's” misbehavior is a perfect clinical exemplar. This is not merely a question of lazy speculation but one of critical pontification. Definitely, Obuoba J.A. Adofo's “Ofie Nipa See Woa” and A.B. Crentsil's “Anyen” and KRS-1's “Self-Destruction” have much to say about such individuals whose oversight of their psychosocial environments includes opaque forests of self-destructive tendencies. Ready exemplars being ethno-animal nation wreckers in The Country's recent political history, individuals full of self-hatred! In fact, the psychosocial parameters of commonplace neocolonial confusion, self-hatred, and collective racial inferiority complex are still a mark of internecine national disunity.

Another Question: How can the insights of Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, Ama Mazama, Cheikh Anta Diop, Molefi Kete Asante, and Kofi Kissi Dompere successfully recover the sick “scholar's” cranial barrenness from the flea market of intellectual trinketry? This is an extremely difficult, if not as impossible, task. It still is not untrue individual carriers of self-hatred have a group or communal dimension. Then the integral of communal idiosyncrasies, as of self-hatred, per se, have national and continental connotations. Alternatively phrased, therefore, geography defined in terms of geopolitics is merely a theoretical construct, meaning that the element of geography as a function of national consciousness is as emotionally fluid as it is intellectually plastic. The sick “scholar's” “I know so little, I feel so big” sentential smallness is a perfect candidate for the reductionist narrative of geographic inclusiveness, but his empty boastfulness is hostile to cosmopolitanism. That notwithstanding, a logical connotation therefrom points to progressive humanization of The Country's variegated ethnicities within the topological space of collective existence. Unfortunately the element of self-hatred, personal or corporate, undermines the ring of mutual co-existence.

That is why The People and The Country cannot afford to allow the so-called “bystander effect” to fester around the central question of public socialization in the body politic, to take over affairs as the sick “scholar's” innate psychology continues its deterioration beyond help, past the geostationary orbit of sanity. Accordingly, a convincing case could be made that because social individuation has never been a characterological fixture of The People's national psychology since time immemorial, there is an urgent need to bring back the flesh and blood and soul of collective harmony back from the deadly world of neocolonialism to an emotional world of material actualities, though the sick “scholar” does not see the emotional dot of his mind as part of the rational constellation of the larger world of creative, productive intellectualism. This decidedly requires a difficult tradeoff, one between self-hatred, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia on the one hand and mutual accommodativeness, tolerance, and respect on the other hand, much like the antagonistic polarities of electric charges finding a common ground of quantum acceptation across a plane of electromagnetic interaction.

This philosophical value system of polarizing electric socialization does not rule out creative possibilities of autogenic mutual repulsions taking place either within a separate field of positive electric charges or of negative electric charges. In other words, the fact that two separate individual families experience internal friction independent of one other is not enough reason to preclude simultaneous possibilities of interactive accommodativeness between them. That should underscore the moral aesthetics of community. However, the actualization of this social phenomenon of neutralizing the polarizing antagonisms of discommunity requires some degree of intellectual seriousness and moral honesty on the part of all progressive interacting variables in the equational cauldron of multiethnic socialization. On the other hand, it is such a confused irony, a national disgrace, even, that the sick “scholar” can only be as distantly intellectually good as the stale, clownish histrionics of The Three Stooges, Bob Cole, Kohwe, Charlie Chaplain, Santo, Funny Face, Bob Okala, Nkomode, Lil Win, Richard Pryor, Agya Koo, Super OD, Mr. Bean, Waterproof…

The fact of the matter is that the sick “scholar” has been allergic to intellectual seriousness ever since he came of age, having been also a philosophical negation of moral honesty. A Janus-faced sick “scholar” who always goes about the gravitational field of cactus intellectualism in drab masks of poetic, journalistic, and novelistic hypocrisies! A smattering of the sacred language of decency and decorum and respectability he lacks. The sick “scholar,” aside from all that, is more likely to engage in a case of encyclical journalism of insults than to serious actualities of applied knowledge or wisdom. However, as far as intelligent people are concerned, O Great People of the World, these critical questions are not ennobling virtues for him, the sick “scholar.” No wonder he is always smarting from the critical bites of more knowledgeable thinkers. These considerations boil down to unethical questions of vacuous boastfulness on the part of the sick “scholar” who is also, incidentally, among other things, dialectically out of sync with the modernizing compass of fruitful intellectualism.

How then do the supposed littoral facts of avian behaviorology answer to the aquatic mannerisms of ichthyologic actualities? In fact, those who do not intimately know him or about his anti-people socializing psychology have repeatedly failed to answer this question. It is even likelier the major reason lurking behind The People's and The Country's consistent tendency to stand in awe of his trinketry of scholarship lies with another major problematic, the question of why he did not take up a covetous specialty in the theatrics of comedy while pursuing his rusty anachronistic degrees in The Ignoramus Cave! Where are the imperatives of critique of his work? None. Besides, he has said time and again free speech and freedom of choice actually had driven him in that direction in pursuit of Monkey Literature for The Ignoramus, Orangutan Poetry for The Ill-bred, Bonobo Journalism for The Buffoon. What is this mystery all about?

Let us see. Since when did the people of The Country become reading monkeys, orangutans, and bonobos? What a contumely posture on the part of the sick “scholar”! What a national insult! Has the sick “scholar” finally come to a realization that his readership and The Country's leadership are humanoid primates? Where is the sick “scholar” to answer this charge? Granted, is he, perchance, covertly sending signals to The People that the lackluster political performance of The Country's leadership is ascribable to what he considers primatial intelligence? Is it possible for an ethno-animal man to write for primates in The Ignoramus Cage? Where is the sick “scholar” again to answer this question? Missing in action. Do like charges attract each other? Possibly in the sick “scholar's” antiworld. Let us look at the question from another angle: Given that the sick “scholar” is a primate himself, what makes him think he is more intelligent and more human than his primatial clade? The latter defines the national dilemma, a blurry overlap between primatial psychologization and humanoid pretensions.

In what way is the primatial intelligence of the sick “scholar” different from ethno-animal man's? This question is closely analogous to the ontological relationship between a doppelganger and a ghost, a not-so-grotesque case where a blind man fails to tell an alligator and a crocodile apart, or tell blindness from dark matter. However, somewhere along the spectrum of ironic confusion lies the graphic node of the sick “scholar's” iconized stupidity and intellectual buffoonery. How come the sick “scholar” cannot differentiate between the cosmological modalities of white hole and of dark hole as regards questions of historical “truth” and moral honesty? There is another angle to look at this question. And here it goes: The modalities of free speech and freedom of choice could not have been so incontestably unkind to the sick “scholar” since the same variable inducements have made geniuses out of Ave Kludze, Ama Ata Aidoo, Victor Lawrence, Yaw Nyarko, Ayi Kwei Armah, Molefi Kete Asante, Kofi Awoonor, Francis Allotey, Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, Trebi Ashitey-Ollenu, Francis Allotey, Kofi Anyidoho, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Thomas Mensah, Isaiah M. Blankson…

What is the secret then? Free speech and freedom of choice are the reasons for the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, allegedly, at least so saith D.H. Lawrence's “the Bible is a great confused novel.” If this is in fact true, why then have the same modalities of free speech and freedom of choice permanently made a clownish dunce out of the sick “scholar”? Are the modalities of free speech and artistic choice freedoms exchange rate for inelegant stupidity and intellectual moronism on the sick “scholar's” part? Where is the beef, the sick “scholar's”? Thank God, thank the ancestors, thank the gods the sick “scholar's” comedic intellectual theatrics has given The People and The Country something to laugh about, enough comic relief to sustain the corporate mentality of latter's much-abused national psychology. A therapy of sorts!…The sick “scholar,” the fool in Shakespeare's “King Lear”; the foolish Porter in Shakespeare's “Macbeth”; the foolish grave-digger in Shakespeare's “Hamlet”; the befooled buffoon Roderigo in Shakespeare's “Othello”;…The sick “scholar,” a matchless kurtosis of stupidity!

The sick “scholar,” the good-for-nothing-cassava-man Kofi Ako; of Ama Ata Aidoo's “Anowa”; an ethno-animal man who is not even qualified to bear the cumulative weight of Shakespeare's discarded folios and quartos and octavos on the physical pregnancy of his cranial worthlessness! The sick “scholar,” an ethno-animal poetaster and novelaster wannabe whose chickenshit intellectualism, first and foremost, Soyinka conceives of as integral to the philosophical cartilage of “prejudices of the 'fictionists' of her reality, the heirs of Herodotus.” Even Wole Soyinka understandably sees the sick “scholar” as a bundle of lies. Who, then, after all, let The Baha Men's dogs out, O Great People of the World? What are The Country and The People doing about the sick “scholar's” charged mental entropy, The Baha Men's dogs of mediocre literaryism? Could the sick “scholar's” fragmentary enema-bag cranial morphology have contracted the bug of Johannine revelationism, of New Testament absolutism? If not, why then has the thunderous cloud of religiosity taken over the social space of The Country's national conscience?

Yet many a sophisticated thinker considers the ethnocentric religiosity of the sick “scholar” a trivial matter. Is the enthalpy tension bubbling up in the sick “scholar's” “Atumpan” head too much for him to bear? There apparently seems to be a lack of ready-made answers. Where do we look? Let us retrace our steps. Now, talking about the modalities of freedom of choice and free speech, how come “The Allotey Formalism,” one of the outstanding achievements of The Country's most renowned mathematician and scientist, reliably predicts the behavior of matter in outer space when the sick “scholar” barely can see beyond his raptorial bird beak-nose? Are his fake nerd glasses the cause of his stiffened intellectual myopia? Is the ventriloquist's diamagnetic voice of political ethnocentrism truly the sick “scholar's”? Or is his the entrenched voice of demonological possession? Is the sick “scholar” capable of the mystifying intelligence of the golden plates of Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon, the Biblical Abraham of the Joseph Smith Papyri, so-called Book of Abraham? Oh yes. Are the requirements of free speech and artistic choice freedoms then grounds for feeding The People and The Country with suicidal potions of Jim Jones' cyanide-tainted sedatives of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical mediocrity?

Ideally, it is only appropriate to declare at this juncture it is not for anything peculiar that we invoke the cultic imagery of religiosity on our exegesis of inter-ethno-racial relations in The Country. Yet the issue of religiosity is a deeply troubling one. What say? It appears all the Abrahamic religions conspired to and did eventually succeed in robbing Africa of its ethno-animal humanity via gamma-ray irradiation of physical, cultural, psychological, and spiritual enslavement. Talmudic and Islamic and Christian traditions and self-serving Biblical exegesis conveniently reorganized the individual ethno-racial bricks in the monolithic edifice of ethno-animal humanity into a hierarchy of race relations in which whiteness assumed the place of God and perfection and blackness the place of Satan and blemish. Today, balls of unrestrained fire of religiosity rage through The People's psychological bushels.

And as it were, O Great People of the World, self-proclaimed Boko Haram prophets wield the Koran and their Al-Shabab Christian pastors the Bible, self-righteously, all over the bruised face of The Country, claiming the two books of civilizational pastoralism as divine approval of their infallible authority while egregiously masking their ethnocentric and political biases and material greed under cover of neutrality. Most of these self-seeking prophets and pastors of spiritual and psychosocial terrorism have done their utmost to dethrone the authority of critical thinking, science, and tolerance and then turned over that authority to superstition, demagoguery, and intolerance. Thus, they have, in a sense, taken the place of Talmudic and Christian and Islamic relegation of blackness to the backwater of ethno-animal racial irrelevance. Today again, a large segment of the Christian and Moslem population sees itself primarily as God's children and non-Christians and non-Moslems alike as Satan's children.

The unfortunate part of this shameful narrative is a clear existential overlap between the sick “scholar's” authorial slant toward ethnocentric and ethno-political psychologization and the divisive prejudices of religious fanatics. Incidentally the Christian Church of The Country has become Wall Street, a metonym for capitalist exploitation of mostly the socially marginalized poor. As a matter of fact, the Country's Christian Church has also become a psychiatric institution and a crowded prison where some of The People are voluntarily institutionalized and imprisoned, respectively, at the expense of their psychological individuation and emotional balance. Moreover, these materialistic evangelical Christians live extravagantly on earth, as angels certainly do in heaven, even while they shamelessly preach to their largely poor congregation to wait upon Elijah's Chariot of Fire and extraterrestrial spaceships to freight them to that utopian place, heaven.

Taking note of all the above, O Great People of the World, the element of religious exceptionalism on the part of The Country's pastoral elitism is, evidently, not dissimilar to the sick “scholar's” consistent dogmatization about ethnic exceptionalism, of which he belongs. As well, it should be a concerned matter of critical emphasis that, the sick “scholar's” inflated opinions on ethnic exceptionalism are, unmistakably, kleptomaniac internalization of Talmudic, Christian, and Islamic despoliation of blackness, which he injudiciously projects onto ethnicities other than his own without regard to the central theses of human genomics, sociolinguistics, human geography, genetic flow and genetic drift. Yet his poetic and journalistic and novelistic unscience blinds him to what knowledgeable people everywhere know is patently amiss, which is that the etiological transmissibility of his Ebola virus literaryism easily dissolves all rigid man-made multinational barriers of ethno-races. Is there a moral imperative justifying a need for ethnic exceptionalism then?

Apparently not. Likewise, we may have to present D.H. Lawrence's “the Bible is a great confused novel” as a ruthless, uncompromising internal critique of the Biblical infallibility of God, who, not unlike the sick “scholar,” failed to integrate a foreknowledge of Satan's Machiavellian, authority-averse pretensions into his scheme of creation, thus undermining creationist exceptionalism. This element of internal critique, however, points to the sick “scholar's” scientific unintelligence and flagrant ignorance of his family history, of his multiethnic pedigree. Then again, the element of internal critique should have to entail a revolutionary portfolio of rhetorical action, critical conscientization, scientific literacy, cross cultural sensitivity (cultural awareness), Ubuntu, and outright rejection of sentimental essentialism. Consequently, The People must corporately resist his calculated attempts to impose his divisive views on ethnic electrophoresis on The Country by force of intellectual arms and of journalistic will.

Matters arising! It turns out the sick “scholar's” political coevals from The Country are in on this ethnic exceptionalism nonsense, too. Let it be known henceforth that The People and The Country will not stand idly by or look insouciantly on as the sick “scholar's” chickenshit poetry and novelistic trivialization induce aliteracy and illiteracy in The Country, threaten the enervate edifice of national psychology…and even become part of the running current of unscientific ideas, what Wole Soyinka frames as “proliferating autogeny within a hermetic realm.” Technically, the phrase “hermetic realm” stands in for the sick “scholar's” confused, airtight, non-trivial knot donut-head, a trefoil-knot kind of deceased head; “proliferating autogeny” is the sick “scholar's” self-perpetuating lies, uncorroborated or unscientific pontifications! In that regard, O Great People of the World, does the sick “scholar” deserve the same dialectic height of uncompromising defense which Soyinka gives Africa in his masterpiece “Myth, Literature and the African World”?

Should the sick “scholar” be forced to drink the cup of hemlock from which Socrates drank dying in order to end his miserable life of intellectual apostasy and uncommon tomfoolery?

Final Questions 1: Does it come as a major surprise, then, O Great People of the World, to read the sick “scholar's” self-authored obituary, his corpus of soap opera scholasticism, something as questionably yet expectedly as Moses self-consciously yet mysteriously did in the Book of Deuteronomy? Is the Book of Deuteronomy not a compendium of moral law, penance, cleanliness, obedience, devotion, animal oblation, and what have you? It is generally agreed, though, that the sick “scholar” need avail himself of these Deuteronomic stipulations to cleanse his polluted psychology, which The People are ready to accept as a well-deserved penance for his ethnocentric and revisionist crimes. That aside, could the sick “scholar's” dislocated psychology and sickly literary works have resulted from the Plague of Athens, putatively the virus of auctorial trashiness, the likes of which decimated a large segment of the Athenian population during the Peloponnesian War? Did Thucydides' “History of the Peloponnesian War” see the sick “scholar's” second-rate literaryism coming? Is the ethnocentric Plague of Athens not a threat to intra-national cohesion? Is it possible for The People and The Country to wait up for the sick “scholar's” Ebola virus literary ordinariness before embarking upon corrective measures?

Final Questions 2: Could stupidity and dumbness be more expensive than education? And if indeed “a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” what have The People and The Country got to say about a stinking garbage-filled mind that repairs to a toxic waste dump for self-burial?

Final Question 3: Could Max Romeo's “Chase the Devil” track do the trick? Or even of Pharrell's “Happy”? Where are the gods and ancestors of intelligence, wisdom, and prescience?

Oh, O Great People of the World, The People are calling the sick “scholar” the Devil. This name does seem appropriate for him, nevertheless, and we shall shortly see why this is so. “Every Dung Beetle knows about the morphological texture of dung,” says The Scarab Beetle, “therefore, the particular Dung Beetle that timidly feigns ignorance of the excretory consciousness of material dung-ness is an incorrigible liar. Such a Dung Beetle is not deserving of the communal sympathy of The People.”

That chronic lying Dung Beetle in question is the sick “scholar,” the Devil!

We shall return…

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