bornAfrican - The Convergence of Africana

Diagnoses of the Gulagan: Critical Notes from Gulag

Posted April 16, 2010 · Charles O

Please permit a quick definition of terms: (1) Gulag: some country on the Dark Continent, eons behind its potential. (2) Gulagan: a person from Gulag; the adjectival form of Gulag—i.e., of or belonging to Gulag.

These notes take the Gulagan to task for, on the one hand, accepting the ridiculous living standard imposed on him by The Grand Kleptocracy (my coinage), and on the other, for acting in ways that encourage, reinforce, and propagate the set of circumstances that place him in his grim situation to begin with—a vicious cycle, if you like. The tone is deliberately unforgiving; the hope, that it might jar a Gulagan or two into considering the Gulagan situation in new light.

I must preemptively acknowledge and immediately address the risk I take in using the generalization, “the Gulagan,” in that it might be construed by the uninitiated to be the literal equivalent of “all Gulagans.” Suffice it to say that I use the expression as a mere rhetorical device that, expanded, might be taken to mean, “the Gulagan in his most banal form.”

Enough, then, of the preamble; let’s get on to the substantive matter. CEO.

§

It befuddles the mind to consider that the Gulagan electric power situation has not seen any improvement for over two decades. Indeed, one’s daily experience, as it has always been in the Gulagan space, continues to be suffused in protracted periods of debilitating boredom and lack of productivity, occasioned by the electricity company’s lack of charity.

It is the twentieth day of December, only four days before Christmas, and Gulag is besieged by yet another petrol scarcity. By now, the Gulagan is immune to the irony of the matter—that is, that Gulag is the 10th largest oil exporter in the world, but, yet, her citizens suffer an unremitting insufficiency of that commodity.

And therein lies the crux of the matter. Gulag is an unmitigated story of ironies: Gulag supplies other countries with petroleum, yet burdens her citizens with a shortage of it. Gulag, by way of its singular hydroelectric power station, illuminates the streets of its neighboring nation-spaces, but subjects her citizens to a deficiency of electricity. The head of the Gulagan government admittedly attends the launching of a Saudi university at exactly the same time all Gulagan federal universities are closed, encumbered by a strike instigated by unpaid academic staff. Another irony yet: Gulag ranks 38th of roughly 190 nations in the world in terms of gross domestic product, an indicator of national economic output, but 130th in terms of purchasing power parity per capita, an indicator of average wealth per citizen!

‘Ironies on Ironies’ would be an apt title for the story of Gulag, but no doubt the greatest irony of all is the fact that the myriad ironies of which the Gulagan tapestry is woven are largely lost on the Gulagan. The average Gulagan is now given to addressing the inconvenience of bedraggled, pothole-riddled roads by aspiring to the use of sports utility vehicles. The Gulagan must supply his residence with diesel generator-powered electricity to augment—nay, replace—the remarkably unreliable electricity company; he must source water from an on-site borehole—or otherwise purchase it by the gallon and the sachet; he must provide for his own security by way of a full-time on-site security guard. Indeed, to say the Gulagan Police Force is merely moribund is to be needlessly charitable. In the end, the Gulagan must provide for himself every conceivable service that would be provided by some system of government elsewhere.

How is it that the Gulagan is so totally and utterly incapable of progress… of organizing himself and his compatriots into a formation that functions to address the needs, yearnings, and aspirations of the collective? Why is Gulag incapable of producing a system of government that takes the common good as its highest ideal? These questions I ponder as I drift in and out of various states of boredom, induced by the electricity company’s umpteenth seizure (to use the local colloquialism) of the light.

As it appears that no psychologist, Gulagan or foreigner, is ready, willing, or able to diagnose the Gulagan collective of its numerous afflictions—particularly since there is clearly a need for such a diagnosis (for is not an issue diagnosed, half-resolved?), I shall hereby take the liberties upon myself to do so—mostly as an exercise to relieve myself of this insufferable boredom.

§

My diagnosis of the Gulagan is multifold, the initial being that he is trapped in a perpetual state of delusion. This delusion explains why the Gulagan considers the countless aberrations he encounters on a daily basis to be quite utterly normal. The Gulagan will accept the most morbid manifestations of his and his compatriots’ basest tendencies and retire at day’s end with adulation to his deity of choice—who, as it is purported, has been so good to him. Indeed, the Gulagan is said to be at once the happiest and most religious person on earth. That the Gulagan is a happy person to begin with is another matter that boggles the mind—that is, until one remembers that this “happiness” is in the context of the grand delusion that comes with being in a permanent state of—among other things, as we shall soon see—a religiosity-induced trance.

On my most recent travel to Gulag, I suffered a reminder of the Gulagan anomaly. My experience on attempting to board the connecting flight in Frankfurt was to jar me into a recollection of the Gulagan way. At gate B23 of that German airport, a hoard of Gulagans were to form an irksome bulbous mass around the boarding attendant, pushing, shoving, and generally contaminating the German air with the noxious odor of the Great Gulagan Psychosis. Two German police officers stood by at the ready, wondering, I suppose, what a hoard of barbarians the Dark Continent has coughed forth in the Gulagan. It will be rather redundant to explain that there are not many convincing rationales for the impatience of the Gulagan collective in this case: firstly, each traveler on the flight had a pre-assigned seat and is not in any discernible way better-served by getting on board earlier (as opposed to, say, later), for his seat remains open to him whenever he boards the plane. Secondly, while one could make a case for the potential loss of desirable space for carry-on luggage the longer one takes to board the plane, one must also concede that this is not an altogether reasonable excuse to conduct oneself like a lout. Thirdly, given that the plane will generally not leave until every passenger present at the gate has boarded, the epistemological question remains: why the rush?

I render, at this juncture, another diagnosis—which is that the Gulagan suffers from an unremitting need to rush. This need is, as it turns out, a veritable addiction—one that compels him to rush even when there is neither an apparent nor latent requirement to do so. In fact, this affliction is so severe that the Gulagan will delay action until the last minute, so as to then have an excuse to rush. The Gulagan’s need to rush explains his proclivity towards “Gulagan Time.” Gulagan Time differs significantly from World Time in that it is permanently set three or four hours behind. That is, for example, if an event to which a Gulagan has been invited is billed to begin at five o’clock, one should expect that the Gulagan will begin to prepare to leave his house at exactly the same time the event is scheduled to start. This, of course, then permits him to rationalize his devolution into a psychotic rush through roads burdened with fellow sufferers of his affliction. He will eventually make a grand entrance (for what else shall we call it?) at nine o’clock, four hours after the event’s scheduled start time, and, as it will turn out, thirty minutes prior to its conclusion.

Another diagnosis yet: the Gulagan suffers from a chronic desire for confrontation. Indeed, the Gulagan’s day is so suffused in confrontation, that he is now fully incapable of thinking in affirmative and non-contrary terms. Mundane daily activities—boarding public transportation, purchasing products in the marketplace, et cetera—conducted in an atmosphere of cordiality in other climes, are needlessly adversarial in the Gulagan context.

The bus conductor asks a passenger for the fare a second time (mistakenly or deliberately, no matter). He receives not a simple, “you are mistaken; I did pay you the fare at the previous stop, there yonder” but an acerbic, “say, why don’t you go ahead and steal the fare from my purse, you scoundrel!”

The customer haggles the price of a product a quarter of the quoted price—knowing fully-well the quoted price is exaggerated anyway. In response, the shop-keeper discharges the customer, escorting him with assorted insults, and sweeping the floor in the customer’s wake to rid the shop of the customer’s literal and figurative rubbish. In this manner, the Gulagan must at once be the happiest person on earth, yet the most antagonistic. In this sense, the Gulagan suffers from a bipolar disorder.

The Gulagan revels in extremes: he is at once kind and wicked; gentle and wild; religious and animistic. On the last point (and as promised, we now return to the matter of religion and religiosity), it is now an open secret that the “big-men” who occupy the front pews of the churches and mosques and practically bankroll said institutions of organized religion engage in human sacrifice and imbibe in other potations of the dark arts as a means towards achieving their stupendous wealth. Politicians who harbor little compunction about murdering critical journalists and political opponents are known to have fulltime pastors and spiritual advisors on staff. (A word of caution here: the Gulagan is known to be an effective purveyor of rumors and urban legends. Let us agree not to be altogether surprised if the reporting on this matter is ever so slightly exaggerated).

Of complacency. The Gulagan suffers from a banal complacency. On consideration, this is not a difficult diagnosis to reach in light of the previous diagnoses of delusion and religiosity. The Gulagan’s delusion convinces him that the anomalous is normal; his religiosity assures him that his state would be worse were it not for the grace of his patron deity. These two—delusion and religiosity—together, provide nourishment to the Gulagan’s complacency, so that in spite of the assortment of peculiarities he faces daily, he turns out to be, lo, the happiest person on earth!

One celebrated Gulagan enigma sums it up succinctly when he avers that the Gulagan harbors a predilection for suffering and smiling. Indeed. The Gulagan is either utterly ignorant of the entailment of his birthright or else has permanently assigned it to that grand kleptocracy. For why would the Gulagan, whose country’s resources assure him of a respectable citizenship, choose to accept the perennially dehumanizing treatment meted to him by those charged with conducting the business of government? Indeed, why does the Gulagan submit himself, every four years or so—and, truly, every single day in between—to be sodomized by a perpetual oligarchic cabal?

The answer is deceptively simple: and it is that in spite of his being the happiest person on earth, and regardless of his ardent religiosity, the Gulagan is, at his core, a self-loathing sado-masochist who revels in suffering and who derives a pleasure—a perverse pleasure for sure, but a pleasure nonetheless—from agony and affliction. This must be true, for there appears to be no other assignable cause for the Gulagan’s seeming ability—especially in the context of his multitude of inabilities—to adapt to the most degrading of conditions, particularly the one that serves as impetus for this write-up: a national electrical system that is now an incongruent hodgepodge of sporadic hydroelectric power, diesel-powered generators, wax candles, battery-powered torchlight, kerosene lanterns, and hours upon hours of sheer intolerable heat and darkness!

CEO
12/2009
Gulag

Email to Friend | View Blog Archive

Comments

Add a Comment