Think Tanking

“Collateral damage” is the term most often given to those innocent civilians who die ‘accidentally’ during the course of a war. It is a graceless parting moniker first coined by the American military to anesthetize the American public to non-combatant death in war. It is a departure from other euphemisms for death in that it equates the accidental death of a civilian in war to that of any other physical object that might be taken by a financial officer as collateral such as a watch, or some form of ID. The very definition of collateral is that of something inferior, an article of significant, though not comparable value to that for which it is necessarily and temporarily in place of. Taken together, collateral damage, then is the loss of something less valuable than that for which it is a temporary substitute for: American military success. Its phraseology is unique - or was, until this past few weeks - in that it intimates so little guilt and yet so much contempt for its subject: the dead.

This week, Alan Dershowitz issued his own phrase for ‘collateral damage’. While it is more a concept then a phrase, the two were constructed as a result of similar exigencies. While the phrase itself may not rival its bureaucratic forebear in guiltless contempt for its subject, it is no less its equal in semantic gymnastics or ‘semnastics’.

In Dershowitz’s treatise on ‘civilianality’, we are introduced to a seemingly new world of what he calls “the continuum of civilianality’. The concept is founded on the belief that all deaths within war fall somewhere on a continuum. At the one end, there is a dead 2 year-old, who, having no cognitive or psychoanalytic capacity or indeed the physical ability to act upon it, is deemed entirely innocent. On the other end, there is a suicide bomber; a willful, cognizant and manifest combatant. The middle, however, is populated by a wide spectrum of individuals: from the mother who supports the terrorist spiritually, to the doctor who supports him financially, each is characterized by both their lack of full participation in committing the crime and by their tacit, complicit or otherwise approval of the acts of the perpetrator. In the mind of Alan Dershowitz, and those of other notables, they are thus neither guilty nor innocent. It is similar in more ways than one to the reasoning used by bin Laden for the WTC bombing or by the Nuremberg judiciary charged with sentencing Nazi officials for war crimes. The reasoning here was that while their jobs may have not been on the front line in the traditional sense of military war, the bankers, investors and other professionals that constitute essentially the machinery of the American capitalism are as guilty as their armed brethren in the military. Thus while the semnastics may be of interest, the kernel of his theory is not. The only innovation Dershowitz has come across is that of a more limber, robust sense of ‘semnastics’.

Over the past several years, few, if any, new insights concerning the humane treatment of individuals during war has fundamentally shifted the discussion. And there have been no groundbreaking philosophical developments. What has mushroomed however, is the insurgence of Dershowitzes: polemics that seek neither to infuse the debate with intelligence nor to engage in any academically rigorous fashion the kernel of the debate. Rather, the debate finds itself now bloated with articulate, brilliant writings of, regrettably, no philosophical worth. Much like the 'fog' Secretary of Defense Macnamara alluded to in Errol Morris’s documentary on the Vietnam war (The Fog of War), a similarly distortive mist has befallen the world of coherent, worthwhile debate; the consequences of which, may even be greater than that of the fog of war.

Memorials for and by other means

On Canada Day, a few individuals were reprimanded for pissing on a war memorial in Ottawa. The news received national coverage, appearing twice on the nationally syndicated news program, The National. Some called it: “an atrocity of immeasurable proportions,” others petitioned politicians to insure the sanctity of the memorial by securing the surrounding premises with vigilant Mounties. Ottawa South MP, David McGuinty, was perhaps the most damning in his contempt of the perpetrators calling them “the worst of the worst that society has to offer.” It is presumed that the group in which these offenders are a part, as claimed by McGuinty, includes rapists and murderers. Not only am I disinclined to see the drunk adolescents as card carriers of this particular group, I am baffled that McGuinty suggests they constitute the “worst” of this group. It is an egregious error in political judgment tantamount to the very lack of general judgment for which the subjects of his condemnation are guilty.

In political terms, the solution is clear and risk-free: the perpetrators are young, usually overly apathetic when it comes to voting, the victim is the very ideal for which any nation exists – patriotism - and the solution, a simple, yet firm statement expressing the punishment for any indiscretions in the future. One needs only a morsel of political acumen to hit the ‘ball out of the park’. Yet, by being overly critical of the youths and issuing incorrect analogies, McGuinty’s gauche handling of the situation is as exposed and foul smelling as the urine which now coats the steps of the war memorial.

The furor, articulated mostly by retired generals and self-serving politicals –typified by McGuinty - all seemed a bit vacuous. It was ignorance, fury and self-righteousness dressed up as patriotism by an ever obliging media, who - having recognized the symbolism of the story rather than the substance of it - were all too happy to pander to the special interests of some entrenched former pugilists and contemporary mugwamps looking for some quick political capital. There is, however, a more puzzling element within this topical discussion, one that is characterized not necessarily by the self-serving antics of various politicals but rather by the unquestioned presence, purpose and relevance of the “war memorial” in general to society.

In the early 19th century, Carl Von Clausewitz, a Prussian general and military theorist, wrote: “War is merely a continuation of politics by other means.” While the quote is itself a trite, somewhat hackneyed synthesis of a much larger theoretical treatise: On War, for which Clausewitz is best known, its general resonance today, and within this particular story, begs some further consideration.
Our country, and indeed most countries, recognizes fallen soldiers by way of erecting what is invariably a phallic monument situated in some public sphere. While I have no problem with the act of erecting monuments to those ‘that have fallen’ - apart from the unjustified lionizing of ‘those that fall’ (from 1990 to 2003 an American service men was six times more likely to be murdered by one of his comrades, nineteen times more likely to kill himself and fifty times more like to die in an accident than to be killed in combat– N. Ferguson, Colossus, Penguin; 2003) - it seems necessary to infuse a bit of logic, by way of Clausewitzian theory, into the debate.

If war is diplomacy by other means; that is, if they are essentially the same, why then do we have only 'war memorials' and no 'diplomacy memorials'. Pacts, alliances, treaties and accords kill just as many people, if not more than wars do - and they do it in a much more insidious fashion: by constructing themselves as for the ‘greater good’. I don’t see diplomacy memorials for those that died obscure deaths in a hospital in Scarborough or Moncton because the government decided to spend his or her Medicare on improving NAFTA or softwood lumber. I encourage war over diplomacy: it doesn't get one wrapped into malevolent pacts with illusory friends and imaginative evils like treaties, alliances and 'general agreements'.

While I do not necessarily condone the actions of those that pissed on the war memorials, those public figures that hastily vilified the perpetrators of the act would themselves benefit from a healthier, more rigorous sense of judgment when publicly excoriating the acts of their fellow citizens.

I heart Fetish: the Bourgeoisie Paradox

It’s not so much the fetish that I heart, but the idea of possessing one. Since adolescence various authorities have told me, well not me directly, but certainly indirectly, to resist the urge to do what your ‘body tells you to.’ Ive never really had a problem resisting the things my ‘body says’ it desires, the problem Ive cultivated is one much more pernicious: not doing what my body tells me to do. I’ve tried, earnestly, to do things that I want to do, but each time my efforts are deflected by a strong sense of one of two things (and in some cases both): indifference, and lethargy. I can’t help but not do what I want to do.

Mine is a disease common amongst jaded disjointed, well off and well adjusted youth (too well adjusted). I was once convinced that my lethargy was the result not of some consistent predilection for indigence but rather of some fortuitous, catastrophic event in my youth of which my laziness is a simply a symptom. This is only in part true. I suffer from a much more oblique evil, the intellectual shrapnel wounds of which are manifest in my lack of desire. There is a great sense of foreboding within this suspended reality: everything eventually slides to the middle. It is ultimately a state, as economists have dubbed it, of equilibrium. Ultimately all rational individuals with expendable incomes recognize the world for what it has been made to look like to them: a world of opportunity, where everything is possible except failure. It is the bourgeoisie paradox: why pursue anything when you have everything?

Her and History

There are two opposing strains of thought concerning the worth of history. The first, expressed by philosopher George Santayana, claims: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The second, antithetical to the first was originally declared by Freidrich Hegel and later paraphrased by one of History’s greatest actors, Winston Churchill, follows: "The one thing we have learned from history is that we don't learn from history." It seems however, to examine the true worth of history - if that is indeed possible - these particular strains of thought are relevant only in so much as they constitute the opposing ends of the spectrum of the debate.
The history of History is convoluted. It is, for some, a moral anchor and a necessarily incorrigible truism. Those who violate it, as David Irving is intimately aware, do so at the risk not only of one’s own freedom, but more importantly and naturally more contentiously, at the behest of the devil – as some may have you believe. Irving’s indiscretions, being as they were, un-scholarly and hackneyed, received their rightful recompense but only because he was an anti-semite. However, while the substance of his work may not reach beyond the superficial anti-semitic rhetoric in which it was marinated, the philosophical argument concerning the nature of his work – revisionism – remains on the concious backburner for many a historian and philosopher. There are, for some, specific events that cannot and should not be open to different interpretations. The phrase ‘never forget’ speaks to this sentiment. For others, History’s dissolution into the minutiae of personal pasts is necessary. History is, they argue, the consolidation of millions of personal histories, reasoned, articulated and forwarded by and of the tip of the academic sphere – intimidatingly, forcefully - and to others – liberally or coservatively. And to some, it is neither something to be forgotten nor is to be remembered, rather, it is just to be. What then with such ambiguous definitions of history is history’s worth today?

The worth of history in making decisions, such as invading Iraq, labeling genocides, and more topically, invading Iran, inevitably cut across many spectrums of interpretation each couched in endless levels of dense ideological and philosophical bias.

Often our understanding of and appreciation for History is more nuanced than those views expressed by Churchill and Santayana. It is naturally encumbered by fractured thoughts, manufactured opinions, sensitivities and proximities. Fraught with such inconsistencies and inconveniences, traversing the academic terrain of historical analysis is mission impossible. It is a post-modernist minefield. As Lothrop Mothley said of History to the NY Historical Society in 1868: “ It is all confused babble, hieroglyphics of which the key is lost.” Despite History’s necessarily modest conceptual boundaries, it, more than any other form of academic inquiry, penetrates the public discourse. For this reason alone it stands to be worth something. Why, though?

One reason is that everyone has history, each can reference their own past. Arthur Schlesinger said of history that “it is to the nation as memory is to the individual.” History is thus the projection of individual pasts upon a collective canvass. This is the pixelization of history; only coherent from a distance. This distance though is not of space, but rather a distance of time; time from the ‘screen’ of the past.

There exists an intimate relationship with history within the self. In this way, each individual of society has within themselves a particular history – one that is easily referenced, brought upon debate and thrashed about at dinners throughout the world. It is this intimate relationship we have with our own history that makes history as a justified form of academic inquiry so vile.

Such conveniences are not extendable to other academic lines of thought that are equally - and indeed, the argument is made here - far more relevant to current events, than those methodologies preached by the historian. Sociology, Psychology and Economics do not themselves lend to easy incorporation into everyday debate. They are for that same reason often marginalized for their lack of a ‘personal touch’. They require at the very least elementary understanding of basic concepts and, being as they are, not necessarily everyday experiences (ie; no one has a sociology or a psychology for which they feel or have felt objectively exposed, in contrast to that of history), the average person is less inclined to relate to abstract concepts. History, however, is with us all. We reference it, analyze it, forget it and remember it. History thus trumps all other line of academic inquiry simply by way of presence. Its presence in both our subconscious and conscious thought impedes our ability to think objectively about events, people, actions and movements. Schlesinger, responsible for packaging a potent, proud and righteous history for which JFK is indebted for both gaining his presidency and a Nobel, called these “permutations of consciousness.” Like all spin-doctors, Schlesinger was a master of deciphering new permutations of history – in an effort to contextualize the present in manner fitting of a great nation. In this way, history, having as it was several interpretations, is the anti-christ of academic inquiry. History is everywhere and at the same time nowhere.

Crucially, though, presence does not then beget relevance. On the contrary, relevance may in fact be best understood by the lack of presence. Even if we were to have ‘the annals of mankind’ in our lap to read, as Motley claimed 150 years ago, it would be beyond the human capacity to do so.
It was Marx, a historical theorist in his own right, in Das Kapital, that suggested that the real factors that control humankind’s destiny lie below the superficies of the knowable, deliberately and necessarily beyond our collective or individual ken. The contemporary ‘false consciousness’ – the term Marx used for such a state of ignorance and under which he believed all but the capitalists were held captive - is the product not of some nefarious plot conjured by ideologues, capitalists or of some similarly slimy ilk (as Marx might argue), though it may be deliberately forwarded by them, but of each person’s exposure to their own individual history or to our own individual ‘annals’. The mere act of inquiring into one’s past, let alone a nation’s, is in and of itself a doomed endeavor forever a fruitless, counterproductive pursuit. Collective history dogmas, those that speak of events, movements, people and places as though they happened in isolation to both their actors and framers struggle earnestly to disambiguate history from itself. When then we speak of a collective history such as WWI or the Cold War, we are really attempting to consolidate individual histories into various shared histories – a process that irrevocably distorts history so as to produce a palatably democratic one. Palatable permutations are the victors not truth. We are thus held to ‘never forget’ an event like the Holocaust if only because we can never truly do justice to it through the anti-rational pursuit of history. Thus we try and remember it by way of fracturing it off into little things like: memoirs, numbers, pictures, records etc. We may in some cases restrict the various ‘permutations’ of these variables, or those voices such as Irving’s that pursue them, but ultimately the permutations for which we are responsible are fraught with similar endless fights, each victimized by an earnest though subjective tendency: the pursuit of truth.

Peace Corpse

An Army of Peace

Spiro Agnew, UN Ambassodor under the JFK administration, once characterized the America Peace Corps as "a spirit of national masochism, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." His statement has stood the test of time, regrettably.

Designed to corral the virile and sustained optimism common amongst youngsters proceeding graduation and in an effort to funnel it into constructive programmatic development projects rather than have it siphoned off into the degenerative abyss that is after graduation domestic employment in the US, the American aide agency, the Peace Corps, is by most standards a valiant, worthwhile development objective. It attempts to marry the quixotic views of American peaceniks with that of its unwieldy though equally ambitious paradigmatic cousin: the American development agenda. It is un-holy alliance, between those that make policy (Government) and those that are the physical manifestation of it (Peace Corps volunteer). This grotesque partnership is personified by the unabashedly opinionated, helplessly unintelligent, overwhelmingly ignorant, and lastly, and perhaps most regrettably, ubiquitous Peace Corps volunteer.

The first thing that strikes you about the Peace Corps is the name. It suggests a sort-of Hobbesian world, where anarchy reigns. Peace is won, but only through the legions of idealistic, lost, confused 20 somethings fighting for it. It implies an army of Peace (which is in itself an unadmirable oxymoron), in which individuals are labeled volunteers, or, when taken collectively, a corps. Despite its intentions, the semantics are decided militaristic. Secondly, it registers ‘volunteers’ despite the fact that the stipend they receive far exceeds that of any ‘native’ they are charged with aiding. It is indicative of another paradox within the Corps. The Corps relies heavily on appealing to one's self interest (in the form of tuition repayment schemes, career opportunities and a substantial stipend upon completion: $7,000) to recruit people. Yet it asks them, once signed, to be selfless, to teach and propogate. It thus attracts a brutally self-seeking, opportunist type of individual interested only in preaching.

Crouched over, attempting to escape the thunderous rain under an awning in downtown Nairobi, I had the misfortune of meeting my first Peace Corps volunteer. It was a loud night, the rain hit the awning with a deafening, consistent beat a sound I was soon to beg for. I stood in a corner hoping the only other white person corralled in with us wouldn't drag me into a conversation that I not only did not wish to participate in but feared might involve the weather. Luckily neither happened. She ended up speaking to me, but neither about the weather nor with the intent to elicit dialogue. This happened to me a lot with Peace Corps people: they tended to talk about things not with, but at me and not about anything but rather about everything. I found this lack of coherence disturbing partly because it sounded very similar to how I had envisioned a subject in a Picasso picture might talk, struggling to open its disjointed jaw only to spew out a distorted and disjointed smattering of vowels, ultimately resigned to the fact that it simply was not meant to speak. Simple resignation however, was not a trait possessed by peace corps volunteers. I often used art as a basis through which I could compare Peace Corps volunteers to normal people. It provided for me the visual representation necessary in understanding what seemed to me a species not only appropriate for but the heinous product of another world. A world where being a wallflower was not only not a euphemism but also an admirable trait and, all be it, a functional reality. Mostly, though, it took my attention away from having to listen to them. It was not so much my first encounter with the Peace Corps that piqued me, but rather, the consistently bad encounters that followed. The mind can only take but 5, at very most, 6 conversations with these idealistic, uber-motivated muftis before it begins to wonder not just about the Peace Corps, humanity and life itself but of more reasonable questions like: the reason for their ubiquity. They are everywhere, inescapable, the personification of spam. Unfortunately, no human faculty of mine could discern an ‘x’ on which I might click. It was not long before I made the seemingly simple philosophical leap from not concerning so much of the guy (Peace Corps volunteer) as I did about the ‘guy behind the guy’: the US government. To a certain extent, those who participate within the Peace Corps are given, through the mandate on which the Peace Corps is itself framed, a sort-of moral, intellectual and culture ascendancy. They are told to teach rather than to learn, to patronize rather than to care and to talk rather than to not. Despite that many Peace corps volunteers are liberals, they exult views that are neither progressive nor open. It is fundamentally opposed to the idea of indigenous knowledge. Indeed the phrase itself is understood as an oxymoron. The ethic of willful ignorance is palpable.The first goal of the Peace Corps is to " Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women."

There is little effort to learn from the subjects as they are told not to listen - and most are inclined to not without having been being told - but to teach. Perhaps Incapable of making the connection, peace corps volunteers spend their time disaffected, ignorant and irritated. The peace corps volunteer is thus the ultimate manifestation of their government’s moral, ethical and philosophical core: ignorant, infuriating and everywhere.

Coping with Hoping

Hope did this

A recent survey by Gallup International Association of 50,000 people across the world found that Africans are the most optimistic people. Asked whether 2006 would be better than 2005, 57 percent said yes. Asked if they would be more prosperous this year than last, 55 percent said yes.

Where does such relentless optimism in the face of unyielding misery come from? Africans can expect to live the shortest lives, earn the lowest incomes and suffer some of the worst misrule on the planet. They are more likely than anyone on earth to bury their children before the age of 5, to become infected with HIV, to die from malaria and tuberculosis, to require food aid.

Could the paradox of African optimism be reducible to pure idiocy? Perhaps it is simply a rational response to an overwhelming sense of pessimism; a sort of collective cognitive dissonance. Often this perceived dissonance is reduced, without justification, to a cliché: those without anything have only hope to live for. However, this specific cliché, as argued here, mistakes ends for means. Hope is insufficient as an end. Alone, it is but the mere motivation inspired, embodied by and emanating from a desire (often this hope is manifested as an irrational reliance on events extemporaneous from the self). That is to say that hope alone, baseless as it is, is never an end nor is it even sufficient as a means to a desired end. Thus no one lives for hope nor does hope allow the possessor of it to live for the end it irrationally motivates. Re-defined then, hope, is merely the perpetrator of irrational perseverance.

In Greek mythology Hope is personified as Elpis. Elpis, mother of Pheme - Goddess of Rumor - is often portrayed as a young naive woman. In the one myth that involves Elpis directly, Pandora - the main character - opens her box so as to let out all the ‘evils’ except one: Hope. These associations are not coincidence. Hope’s propinquity to evil and her birthing of the Goddess of Rumor call attention to her capacity for perversion. Taken within the context of contemporary events in Africa, its role, though equally as devious, is, however, more likely the subversion of reason rather the propagation of rumor.

Primo Levi, in his book Hope and Despair in Auschwitz, suggested hope and reason, opposite as they are, lie within the same continuum. He calls attention to this continuum by locating the idea of hope antithetically to reason: “…and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day.” His uncertainty, rather than his hope, allowed him to persevere beyond the limits hope had set for others. Hope implies a certain amount of perseverance, a perseverance born not of reasonable inclinations, but rather, in contradiction to them. It is the act of believing that something is possible even when there is some if not all evidence to the contrary. Being that it is fundamentally counter-productive to solve problems through the willful neglect of reason and reality its purpose and ultimately its survival within the human psychee is reliant upon the suspension of reality. In doing so it operates as a mechanism through which leaders and major religions in Africa enslave those they claim to represent. It is a theme not unfamiliar to those with power in Africa.

Steven Biko and Frantz Fanon, two philosophical towers of black consciousness thought, believed that the balance between hope and despair - that which the British and French colonial governments had mastered - had prevented the development of identity and purpose in the oppressed and had led to the perpetuation of the fractured self, which was, and remains still, manifest in the idea of 'hope'. Under its spell, hope compels one to look forward rather than at and beyond rather than within. The Black 'self' under apartheid, Biko argues, was incapable of finding meaning in action and thus resorted to hope. This psychological state, elegantly phrased by Biko in his only book, I Write What I Like, led him to believe that "the most valuable weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed". This condition, as it concerns the manipulation of the mind by the conjuring of hope, resonates within contemporary events.

Distinguishable, if only by its topicality, Kenya's First Lady - Lucy Kibaki - after a spate of 'bad luck' (famine in the north plane crash in same region) has, by some grotesque miss-use of governmental fiat, established a day of prayer so as to heel the country of its bad luck. Kibaki, the ruthless shrew she is, is not herself so much concerned about the spate of “bad luck” as she is the detrimental effects bad luck has on the perseverance of hope within the minds of the Kenyan psychee. That is to say, her reliance on divine intervention is merely a thinly veiled ploy in an attempt to maintain a level of hopefulness. What better way to deflect scrutiny then to chalk it up to the gods. Read more about Kenyan dignitarial despairs with Moi's call to arms (be they the extensions of clenched hands in prayer) here: http://allafrica.com/stories/200604210891.html.

It should also be noted that even amongst this optimistic, hope-filled fervor there remain pockets of pessimism, though these pockets of optimism often reside exclusively within sectors of African society (government) that might inspire the exact opposite emotion: optimism (if only because African governments have a remarkable track record of absorbing their country's resources, and within it, the optimism the citizenry might otherwise lay claim to). The resulting paradox, then, that pervades virtually every ‘social space’ in Africa is: how individualistic and cynical African politicians are, and how communal and hopeful most African citizens are. Between rulers and ruled, there is little connection or even shared values. The result is a dysfunctional political culture where big men operate within the most cynical realms of Machiavellian real-politik and the citizens below within the cushy confines of ignorance. So why then are politicians – individuals with, comparatively speaking, far better life prospects then the underlings that support them – pessimistic, while lowly citizens – people who have little to live and very much to die for – are optimistic? Religion.

Religion, if anything, seeks to re-conceptualize pessimism as optimism. It harvests an optimism far removed from any rational thought. In fact, the very foundation on which religion is based requires the existence of a gap between reality and reason. In the west it does so through employing, and indeed, evangelizing the sanctity of the written word of god – as captured, they reason, in the Bible. In Africa, not only is the space between fact and fiction infinitesimal (as described in several oral history accounts that bear no resemblance to truth), but the arbiter defining which is what (fact or fiction) is not the written word, but rather, the spoken one. Oral testament in African religion, culture, society is profound. It carries a moral significance and omnipresent relevance that’s rivaled by no other communicatory method. In Africa, compelling and charismatic reconnoiters decide where and to what extent this gap exists. They’re bounded not by antediluvian ethics delineated in some tome 2000 years ago, but rather only by the whim of their wit. They are, essentially, responsible for both the rhyme and reason. Africans, then, are optimistic precisely because the leaders that rule them have provided the religio-ethical edifice necessary to make it so.

My Jim Crow Theory

When living or traveling in the third-world it is often hard to grasp the significance of the poverty and despair one frequently witnesses. Often we seek to understand these foreign elements through exhibiting some form of compassion, usually manifested in the overly empathetic and not necessarily crystallizing mantra ‘put yourself in their shoes’. I tried that and it didn’t work. Often the person I was staring at had no shoes for me to put my feet in - nor would I want to had they. I tried, sometimes even earnestly, to give a shit about the social decay that I so often was a part of, if not responsible for. Instead, I found a new way of appreciating the significance of social decay. I now look at the size of the crows that live in the city. For example, yesterday I saw a crow the size of a my bed-side table. Had I weighed it, which I momentarily contemplated, it would’ve tipped the scales at nearly 30 lbs.
The degree to which crows, specifically, and flying objects in general, are disproportionately sized to the environment which they live, is the key factor I now use in assessing the general degree of social decay in specific regions. I watched this horrific flying beast feast on a heaping pile of burning rubbish for nearly an hour. It was masterful in its environment: meticulously discarding plastic in one pile while sifting deftly through the flaming feces in the other. This crow knew how to scavenge. Similar to the products of Beethoven’s brown study in squalor or Michelangelo’s maniacal masterpieces in suspension, this crow was clearly master of its domain, unfettered by anything. Though its domain was flaming asshole shit and, quite possibly, bird flu, it was undeterred in its pursuit of excellence. But, much the same as its prodigal predecessors, this crow was too good for its own well-being: it had become enormous and could not fly, so it simply sat there waiting to digest. Such is the case with many crows in Africa, the social decay (measured here in terms of the lack of sanitary systems, poor sewage mechanisms and number of burning piles of crap) and the inevitable run-off it creates, offers up feasts so plentiful and so accessible, the purpose of flying is deemed useful only when seeking one’s next feast. Gradually their wings become smaller and their mass greater. Thus, the crows evolve, as any animal does, to suit its environment. It is the endearing logic of Darwinism, only its methodology in this case is used as a means to analyze a different end: how shitty a place actually is. This is why crows in Kenya, on average, resemble medium-sized dogs; in DRC their enormous plumage is used as roofing for huts and in Nigeria I’ve heard of people mistakenly boarding them thinking they're small passenger aircrafts. It is no wonder, then, that the shittier the place, the huger the fucking crow.