Dear readers, listeners and fellow bloggers:
Good morning. Our new podcast The Banality of Death is live at anchor.fm/dr-mario-o-laplume.
As in our new book Emotional Frustration – the Hushed Plague, we discuss the consequences in our lives of this long SARS – CoV2 pandemic and its associated Social Isolation, which has imploded all the traditional socio-economic parameters of the whole planet. Aren’t we all fed up with all this?
In this podcast we discuss how the daily worries about our personal safety, including our family’s and the news of the recurring spikes of infection around the globe has somewhat eroded the sharp edges of the word Death and, if not becoming comfortable with that concept, we are inured to it.
Trying to emulate Hannah Harendt, who famously coined the provocative term of Banality of Evil after watching the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in Israel, we are proposing that we are tragically surviving immersed in the Banality of Death, which has anesthetized our senses to the ongoing decimation. Adolph Eichmann organized the infamous train convoys from the Polish ghettos to the Auschwitz concentration camps and his figure and pleas for mercy in a Tel Aviv courtroom in 1962 tried to mendaciously convey the image of being just a Third Reich logistics engineer that was making sure trains ran on time. There was a sick commonality in his histrionics.
Note. This reproduction of a 1942 image of Adolph Eichmann in Nazi uniform was taken from Wikimedia Commons.
Can’t you see that in that picture his oversize military cap makes him look like a tragic clown? Did you notice the Totenkopf (skull and crossed bones) insignia in the middle of it? Defiance of Death. That mischievous smirk meticulously supervised the transfer of millions of innocent Jews, Gypsies, Gays Intellectuals, Political activists, etc. to their final inexorable demise in the burning ovens. Until it was swiftly erased from his face by the hangman’s noose in a Tel Aviv prison. Justice was served.
We hope you will like our talk, we hope it will spark some badly needed discussions of the pitiful dearth of empathy in society and, if you have any ideas or suggestions, please send us a message at:
email@drmolaplume.com
Stay distant. Stay safe. Stay beautiful.
What do you think? Please tell us.
Don’t leave me alone.