Triumph of the meek?

"Libertarians believe fewer people should vote."-- John Streck

Despite my skills, not everything is in my immediate grasp, and this pertains to Bulgakov. I do not dislike his classic contribution to the Menippean form, but I bookmarked my e-text in place and started over with The Master and Margarita. Dissident voices have reasons why they need to be decoded-- something that the episode Schotty's Struggle points to in dealing with Germany's legacy. The moral lesson here is more complex than it seems, and skirts the edge of our human abyss with as much guts and more subtly than some of my tirades-- but it also points to why I rebelled against Martin Amis in his promotional tour for his Holocaust novel. We make Hitler's rise, and to a lesser extent, Mussolini's, a man who sometimes looked the other way, an exceptional thing, enshrined, as 9/11, in more sybaritic fashion, is memorialized in the US, but fascist extermination only seems to exceed the human capacity for destruction due to the sheer size of its genocide and its mechanization.

And Hitler is nearly a metaphysical intrigue for authors like Amis, and Norman Mailer-- which is really just feeding the machine. If Adolf was a paranoid schizophrenic, this does not explain his Nietzschean will to power, nor the ability to control his brown shirts. He cannot be dissected that way. Leaders and events converge, and there will always be hate crimes. Pause to consider the developmental spectrum, and the extremist anger of my once activist colleagues; even Stephen Hawking wasn't always shielded from the natural inclination for omnivores to exploit the sick. Omnivores are intelligent opportunists.

Bulgakov is a bit of a puzzle. I do not see orthodoxy in his wonderful subversiveness. He trained as a physician, and it shows in his humor and descriptive ease with cadavers. He too understood materialism and was uneasy with it, and seemed to prefer the aspiration toward salvation that hope embodies. My mistake has been my lengthy pauses. I forget the keynote to the disruptions that create the comic tensions in his dissent. Dangerous in some ways. If this is the profile of the Streck I once knew, he might be gratified. I am not in denial about my age, nor physical vulnerability: What I'm fighting is the welfare system. It's hurt me, and I want these viable months I have to myself, until I decide otherwise, not the Department of Public Welfare-- who essentially wants me to assert a declination of services so that my rental agent can then proceed with its next step, which is nonsensical. In six months I might change my mind.

Medicaid, HMO, I assure you, to doctors I am merely a specimen, their protests to the contrary notwithstanding. They stopped me from dying, treated my lungs, signed paperwork. My quality of life? Polite fictions.