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Opinions of Friday, 1 August 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

Fate Of A Misguided Scholar 3

The “scholar,” a poetaster, a novelaster, a special case of Antonio and Hanna Damasio’s Phineas Gage, a neurological weathering of sorts. And General versus Geronimo? What a moral contradistinction? The Native American leader Geronimo, a symbol of justice, rebelled against the perfidious, predatory tendencies of his colonial masters in behalf of his long-suffering people. General Akwasi Afrifa, on the contrary, fought against his de-colonized people in behalf of his treacherous, predatory colonial masters. Why the nominal swap then? In fact, Benjamin Franklin, O Great People of the World, otherwise referred to by Walter Isaacson as “An American Life,” meaning “Franklin as a holistic embodiment of colonial American virtues,” writes of Native Americans in his famous autobiography:

“And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formally inhabited the sea-coast.”

What? Did you just read that? Are these criminatory pronouncements really of Benjamin Franklin, purportedly “An American Life”? Admittedly, Franklin’s graphic apologetics in respect of colonial attitude toward ethno-racial blackness may even be more comically glamorous. That is to say, in retrospect, the likes of General Akwasi Afrifa bore the condemnatory brunt of Franklin’s apologetic scientific racism in his sweeping autobiographic indictment of non-white others, philosophical otherism, if you like, an ideological affectation not unlike the “scholar’s” yellow journalism, the “scholar’s” scrappy scholarship! Is it therefore any wonder Franklin’s “rum” would come to assume an expressive investiture of yellow journalism across cyberspace, of scrappy scholarship in the exterior conscience of the nation’s character? The “scholar,” an evil forest, the Jayson Blair of American journalism, a journalistic fraud, an advertorial illusionist, is perhaps the journalistic antitheses of journalism professor Neil Henry’s “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege In An Age Of New Media” in a self-cognizing, self-governing polity such as The Country.

Therein lie the seething embers of ethnocentrism, of ethnic chauvinism…And quite apart from everything else, The People and The Country have simultaneously identified a vestige of apologetics, of scientific racism, particularly, in the philosophical karyotype of The Brethren, an observational given typified by The Brethren’s vexatious infatuation with aristocracy and royalty, granted The Brethren’s sharp dislike for the common man, the proletariat, the plebeian, so-called! On the one hand, mutual accommodationism between aristocracy and the common man becomes a topical anathema in The Country, even now, which is to say, on the other hand, binary contestation between the social dynamics of aristocracy and of the common man takes on an intellectual affirmation of unbridgeable social distance. Thus, Franklin’s scientific racism undergoes a direct cultural transliteration across The Brethren’s and the “scholar’s” misguided posture of ethno-animal nationalism.

These clinical sociological narratives then present with all the packaged cultural symptomatologies of anomie. Yet at the same time these narrative libraries run counter to the philosophical bookshelf of Albert Einstein’s and John A. Wheeler’s “Unified Field Theory,” a contrarian view caught up in the boundless architectural space of ethno-animal human sociality. We are here directly dealing with the accommodative mechanics of “shielding field,” of harmonious ethno-animal human community in the prehensile dark-hole of entrenched traces of internal disagreements, not with inter-electron repulsive tendencies associated with the topological narrowness of ethno-animal human asociality, as, certainly, Cheikh Anta Diop would have vigorously argued his way along his sophisticated, complex linguistic and cultural ziggurat of ethno-animal human commonality, particularly of the African world, The Country.

Alas, these portmanteaux of ideas understandably are beyond the vaunted intellectual grasp of the shallow-minded “scholar.” Obviously, as is always with him, the “scholar” appears to suffer irreversibly from inoculation contamination of mind-control processes, techniques Dean Koontz novelistically delineates in “Night Chills.” Not even the applied mechanics of Le Chatellier’s Principle can reliably bail the “scholar” out of the stifling miasma of his coarctate psychological delimitation. Clearly, the “scholar” being Christopher Snow of Dean Koontz’s suspense novels “Fear Nothing” and “Seize the Night,” counts among the so-called Children of the Night, a victim of Xeroderma Pigmentation (XP), who, though not through any faults of his, fails to recognize the facial fingerprints of “truth” in The African Sun when he is confronted with them, for, once again, his miscomprehension of the concept of logarithmic spiral, of self-similarity, an idea closely similar to Diop’s philosophical and scientific conceptualization of linguistic and cultural unity among Africans, is hardly surprising.

Still, these do not exclude the sustained factuality of the “scholar’s” nebulous philosophical sexuality, O Great People of the World, which adds incrementally to his layered complexity of socio-intellectual personality, for, as it were, he has never, as is proverbially known, taken to the glistening “inner mystery” of Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman,” of The Scarab Beetle. In other words, the “scholar” passionately hates the woman, a brazen defier of ethnocentric pretensions, Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman,” by passionately hating himself. A simple matter of implosive self-hatred. Once again, the “inner mystery” of Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman,” however, shares a parallel world of topological community, Hugh Everett’s multi- or meta-universe, with the kaleidoscopic melting-pot of variegated ethnicities, of which the latter is arguably none other than the woman, The Country, The People. But the “scholar” is wont to make his ethnic geocentrism, his putatively superior ethnicity, the Mountain Kilimanjaro in that melting-pot of ethnicities, when he does not appreciate the quantum physics of human geography, human evolution, linguistic sociology, and human genomics. Yet the “scholar” himself is ironically a regression analysis of ethnic multiplicity!

Questions: What on earth would make a self-conscious individual resort to the socio-psychological logistics of Franklin’s scientific racism and to deploy it against his person? Why does the “scholar’ so passionately detest the principle of mutual accommodativeness vis-a-vis ethnic pluralism, himself? Are The People and The Country even aware the “scholar’s” managed intellectual portfolio in Social Darwinism is hyperbolically troubling? Yet again, the “scholar” evidently if disappointingly does not apprehend the supply-chain economics of ethno-animal human genetic complexity, the electrostatic potentiality of harmonious ethno-animal human cohabitation, Erwin Schrodinger’s internecine electron-spin cohabitation. Neither does he grasp the episodic formatting of James Michener’s “Hawaii,” let alone the philosophical query represented by the “Golden Man,” Michener’s novelistic stamp, a narrative typification of harmonious cultural and ethno-racial alloy, with the social-political metallurgy of ethnic harmony constituting an alien concept to him.

Food for thought: The “scholar’s” dilemma is more a question of The Sow’s wondering why her piglet-daughter lacks a prominent snout on her babyish architectural physiognomy than of the piglet-daughter wondering the presence of a prominent snout on her mother’s wrinkled physiognomy! Or why the middling flight mechanics of The Butterfly, Kohn K. Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” does not linearly transform into the supersonic flight mechanics of The Crow, an ethno-animal with an enviable high encephalization quotient, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Wizard of The Crow”! Yet the polarizing animus between the “inner mystery” of Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” and the “inner identity battle” of the “scholar” reflects so badly on the parenting skills of the latter, on his lackluster intellection, as well as on his overall characterological development. What is more troubling, though, The People and The Country cannot surgically divorce the “scholar’s” internecine identity battles from the aggregate characterology of The Brethren’s.

This recalls another moral dilemma which The Country and The People cannot simply gloss over for political convenience. This concession opportunely invites The Scarab Beetle’s mediating portfolio for the active rehabilitation of the “scholar” in the wake of the latter’s postnatal intellectual hemispherectomy, given the “scholar’s” inflexible habituation to the architectonic subtext of social stratification novelistically highlighted by James Michener’s “Hawaii.” Still, the only Sisyphean challenge placed in the mediating path of The People, of The Country, which requires their vaulting over successfully, importantly, constitutes the “scholar’s” gross misunderstanding of the mysterious ways of the ethno-animal human head, that of misconstruing his perched station on the crest of Mountain Kilimanjaro as height advantage, an interior misconception he peculiarly likens to superior intelligence. But that seeming height advantage is instructively moral stupidity or intellectual backwardness.

Thus, in these diverse contexts of narrative pointedness, the “scholar” cannot militate against the good intentions of womanhood, of The People, of The Country, of the national conscience, and even of his own interior psychology, if he expects to maintain a semblance of atomic sanity upon his intellectual hemispherectomy. That exemplar of ethnocentric skirmishes between Angelou’s phenomenal womanhood and the “scholar’s” misplaced ethnic geocentrism has been the auctorial foci of several novelistic explorations across geography, time, and history. Yes, it is appropriate to acknowledge here The Scarab Beetle’s telepathic acquaintance with Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.” Accordingly, O Great People of the World, he, The Scarab Beetle, namely, neutralizes the forced social resignation of Virginia Woolf’s womanhood, “Professions for Women,” in the body politic with institutionalized largesse of first-class citizenship, universal quality education, equal opportunities bestowed upon the thinking-heads of women and girls, the female.

This neutralizing force is a philosophical facsimile of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, definitionally constructed as “action and reaction are equal but oppositely directed.” The concept “action” is The Scarab Beetle’s central idea of equalitarianism and unity and African Personality, a formulaic trilogy of progressive thinking captured in the philosophical coppice of “categorical conversion.” Nevertheless, “action” may also remotely if roughly connote the dialectical materialism Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about, which also may not be too far from Cheikh Anta Diop’s cultural renaissance, Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentricity, Kofi Kissi Dompere’s polyrhythmicity, The Scarab Beetle’s African Union, Einstein’s and Wheeler’s “Unified Field Theory” of ethno-animal human cohabitation. But for every peaceful “action” in the social balance-sheet of cohabitation there is certainly a “reaction,” often a violent one. The latter may then assume a political-philosophical transcription of The Brethren’s summative subversive, Machiavellian behaviors toward the institutionalization of commonsense politics and national-continental coherence. Even the “scholar” is promotionally caught up in the dragnet of anti-commonsense politics, the anti-gravity physics of politico-ethnic Balkanization.

More emphatically, though, the classical physics of “action” and “reaction” contradistinctions re-discovers itself in the critical pages of writers from around the world. “But the likes of Geronimo Akwasi Afrifa were political animals known for their conscious deceits,” declares E.M. Forster, one of the creative founders of the English modern novel, along with D.H. Lawrence, etc. It still is all about the political economy of “good name,” peaceful ethno-animal human co-existence, if you, the reader, should ask her, the national conscience, Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman.” But political economy is undoubtedly not the “scholar’s” forte, his bailiwick. In fact the theoretical landscape of political economy is reserved only for intelligent scholars, ethno-animal men and women who are richly invested with powerful instruments of critical thinking. Unfortunately, the sick “scholar” has never been part of any serious topological confraternity of intelligent men and women whose scholastic corpora penetrate the copse of critical valuation.

That is why the political economy of Julius Wilhelm’s Dedekind Cut of ethnic and gender equalitarianism, for instance, remains beyond the sick “scholar’s” bucolic intellectual reach. Again, as before, the “scholar” is just too uncomfortably uncosmopolitan to figure out the simplistic contradistinctive potentialities associated with the political economy of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” and James Brown’s “Say it Lout: I’m Black and I’m Proud”; Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Milton Allimadi’s “Heart of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa”; Haile Selassie’s 1963 “U.N. War Speech” and Bob Marley’s 1975 “War”; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” and Beyoncé’s “Flawless”; ethnic geocentrism and ethnic heliocentrism; Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom.” Let see:

The sick “scholar,” a self-proclaimed intellectual Kweku Bonsam. The sick “scholar” whose academic training is totally devoid of the mind-body conundrum of peaceful multicultural sociality. The sick “scholar,” a political autotype of Theodore Kaczynski the Unabomber. The sick “scholar,” a sadistic proponent of ethnic chromatography. The sick “scholar” who reads like sewage drains of stinking vomit. The sick “scholar,” a skinflinty intellectual cockatoo who in some way believes the twin parameters of artistic economy and poetic license admirably make for an ideal exchange rate in the marketplace of integrative appraisal of imaginative literature, given his sham federation of novelistic and poetic stylistics, thence his Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22.” The sick “scholar” whose psyche is merely a public latrine saturated with a mephitic aura of information minutia…his rank yellow journalism, his farthing poetry, his lemon literaryism, all leftovers from Chinua Achebe’s Irish bull!

Therefore, The Country, The People, the national conscience have more than a bigger problem, a national tragedy, on their hands for proactive resolution. Most importantly, let no one, The People, overlook the sad fate of the sick “scholar” as a moral question that does not come across as biographically circuitous “as the crow flies” does come across as autobiographically linear, something Jeffrey Archer’s “As the Crow Flies” attempts to limn in his stylistic novelization of Charlie Trumper’s social trajectory from a station of humble beginnings to a covetous pinnacle of financial presence. There is therefore hope for The People, The Country, the national conscience. But that hopeful resolution is far from approachable, far into the frigid future trajectory of death itself. No need to lose hope then, as death is a certainly, not the brutalized slave of mathematical probability. Death can indeed go as far as actuarial speculations…On the other hand, here is how it, the “scholar’s” partial biography, goes, cutting droll paths via an emotional botany of self-adulation, self-deception, self-delusion. Listen up:

Once upon a time…The sick “scholar,” an intellectual eunuch with a grossly castrated intellect, is teleported to The Ignoramus Cave, a jealously guarded secret location enjoying a height of domiciliation in a topological space of cranial bipolarity, with the teleportation adventure particularly coming across fully packaged with ambient affectation of musical immanence. One such musical genre, a teleportation piece, is a rap track, specifically Lords of the Underground’s “Chief Rocka,” a rhythmic sheet- or lead-paper with the following catchy lines:

“But they don’t understand how I feel about the ‘funk’; I walk with the ‘funk’; I talk with the ‘funk’; I eat with the ‘funk’; I sleep with the ‘funk’; I live for the ‘funk’; I’ll die for the ‘funk.’”

Meanwhile, some immanent musical compositions come littered with vocal transpositional renderings with “dumbness” in lieu of “stupidity,” of “funk.” The sick “scholar,” a mere bundle of used tissue soused in the poison of circumstantial speech, of tangential speech, is also an ethno-animal man of many parts: The Country’s Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels; The Country’s J.E. Hoover, a Machiavellian spinner of yarns of cheap kente clothes of lies, a fecund factory of revolving streams of dangerous falsehoods; the Nebuchadnezzar of yellow journalism…The hyenine “scholar” always on the lookout for informational chitterlings to throw at unsuspecting readers by burying his hyena-head in the anal cleavage of the carcass of a female elephant…The sick “scholar” contemplates these during his teleportation adventure. In no time, however, another parallel running stream of catchy poetic rhythmicity, Bob Marley’s “Stiff-Necked Fools” and “Forever Loving Jah,” usurp the presential rhythmic funkiness of “Chief Rocka,” taking up the topological niche of silential preeminence.

Obviously, O Great People of the World, Bob Marley’s referential attention makes a beeline for the sick “scholar’s” proverbial intellectual tackiness, with implicit allusions to what Bob Marley’s aptly labels the sick “scholar’s” “wrong interpretation,” his intellectual mediocrity, pointedly, that is, a severe negation of Chinua Achebe’s “imaginative literature,” “the fiction.” It also turns out, then, the sick “scholar” has never, for once, if you will, successfully escaped the large swathe of public calumny carved out by Bob Marley’s phraseologic scythe “Only a fool leans upon his own misunderstanding” against the syphilitic person of the sick “scholar.” Herein lies The Country’s and The People’s major moral quandary, the sick “scholar’s” stilted allegiance to “his own misunderstanding.”

Matters arising! The moral import of “the fiction” pervades the stomata of the “scholar’s” impaired conscience…The teleportation adventure continues even as the sick “scholar” contemplates the genre of significations the musical transpositions seemingly hold out for his deranged psychology. This is by no means an oblique reference to the sick “scholar’s” misplaced aural expenditure on “his own misunderstanding” per se. It means more than simply that, a Pandora’s box. Looked at closely from another angle, however, the sick “scholar” may precisely be the subject of Wole Soyinka’s descriptive sledgehammer of corrective justice, the characterological thesis of Soyinka’s “products of the exclusivist narrowness of vision among people,” of Africa, the sick “scholar’s” shotgun marriage to “his own misunderstanding.”

The teleportation adventure continues. O Great People of the World, peeping through the translucent train of windows of his teleportation spacecraft, the sick “scholar’s” visual canopy happens upon a mobile panorama of ethno-animal human-derived de-civilizational conflagrations, among which the following have come to represent depressing exemplars of intellectual and spiritual failures on the part of…Somalia…Mali…Northern Nigeria…The Congo…South Sudan…Basque Separatism…Northern Ireland…Iraq…Libya…Syria…The Rwandan Genocide…and Eastern Ukraine. That is it, the jaundiced meta-narrative of the sick “scholar’s” authorial poetics, journalism, and novelism represents a political motif of a failed state, a symbolism of his own abject scholastic failure. He then links the latter to the fate of The Country!

No wonder Soyinka’s observation constitutes a fundamental usurper of the rights of national sovereignty! This, too, is unfortunately beyond the grasp of the sick “scholar,” given the habituation of his deranged psychology to the anarchic dynamics of sovereign ruination, F.C. Volney’s “The Ruins of Empires.” The sick “scholar,” a slackened knit of trashy neurons interlaced with the Nazi swastika, Apartheid, Jim Crowism, pogrom, slavery, genocide…intends to do everything within his non-existent power to graft his self-imposed abject failures onto The Country, spiritual anchorage of his ancestral umbilical cord, from a retreating distance of oceanic comfort in a backwater shantytown called The Shrine of Lower Learning, supposedly one of the worst transmitters of knowledge in Amerigo Vespucci Island. The sick “scholar,” the flesh, spirit, and blood of lies…an automaton as calculated and yet as whimsical as Idi Amin, as deadly and yet as paranoid as Francisco Nguema…The sick “scholar”!

Then, O Great of the World, a sudden materialization of diversionary waves of entertainment modules cuts through the sick “scholar’s” dense visual universe, an experience very much like the science fiction of Michael Crichton, his “Prey.” The sick “scholar,” no less than a grey goo of intellectual backwardness, gets his aural, visual electrographs tuned in to the exhibitionistic waves of Uri Geller’s public display of illusionary skills, of telepathy, psychokinesis, dowsing, telekinesis, and so on. All creative lies, Platonic noble lies, which the sick “scholar” would eventually launch into the taxidermic paleontology of his mediocre poetic novelization, long since buried in unmarked graveyards, his derailed psychology. Before long the “scholar” comes to realize the genre of his poetic and novelistic blathering does not measure up to the terpsichorean footwork of Pelé, with the “scholar’s” rigor-mortis corpus of literary works failing to light up as the “candle” in Elton John’s elegiac track “Candle in the Wind.”

Notwithstanding his teleportation-induced jetlag, the sick “scholar” soon comes into contact with another entertainment module, a personal infatuation with his intellectual nomenclature, “Atumpan.” Understandably the sick “scholar” prefers “Atumpan,” an empty-barrel Talking Drum, to others, “Frontomfrom,” say, for obvious reasons. Can a drum talk by itself? Can a drum beat itself? Can a drum undergo self-promotion? No. Evidently an “Atumpan” requires the promptings of tactile externality or the physical suasions of drumsticks to relieve itself of the carapace of rhetorical nonchalance, of silential protuberance. In that case has the “scholar’ learnt anything of value from K’naan’s “More Beautiful than Silence”? Not to The People’s knowledge! It does make perfect sense for The Country and The People to apprehend the negative self-talk of the sick “scholar,” given that negative self-talk brings some measure of presential garrulity to the cemeterial “Atumpan,” among others.

And finally, “Atumpan” is a parallel stage name of a popular hiplife artist in The Country, a talented musician whose major hit “The Thing” is a sarcastically dismissive rubric for the sick “scholar’s” poetic and novelistic puerility, his yellow journalism.

Quite surprisingly, “The Thing,” the sick “scholar’s” novelistic and poetic yakety-yak, forms part of the private conveniences of The Call of Nature, toilet paper. Yet again, the topical immanence of “The Thing,” seen as such by literary giants almost everywhere, becomes an actuality when the sick “scholar” finally reaches his destination, The Ignoramus Cave. The Ignoramus Cave houses eight latrines, public latrines extracted from the paginated leafage of the sick “scholar’s” collective works, upon which Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda N. Adichie, Derek Walcott, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Alice Walker comfortably squat in private gestures of evacuation, easing themselves of all trapped bowel pressure. The sick “scholar” whom these literary giants would never employ even as a novelistic garden-boy, a journalistic mortician, a poetic chamberlain, believes he has blithely re-discovered himself in “Alice in Wonderland,” even happy to see his corpus of dead works being put to good use.

Question: Did Chimamanda N. Adichie, Ama Ata Aidoo, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Alice Walker, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, and Toni Morrison duly entertain any fears of contracting poetic and novelistic hemorrhoids via injudicious deployment of papery unwholesomeness papery against their rear ends? The sick “scholar” is not interested in the epidemiological dynamics of the question, yet again, with the “scholar’s” works being put to good use in the physiological monarchy of Nature’s Call, the question becomes moot. Somehow the sultry voice of Natalie Cole makes a bold rhetorical presence in the sick “scholar’s” auditive head: “When life gives you candy, savor every moment…When life gives you lemons, you’d better learn to make lemonade.” Achebe et al. liberally gave the sick “scholar” a “candy” of intelligence, but in the end, the sick “scholar” threw it to the dogs. The sick “scholar” instead gave them “lemons” of stupidity and “dumbness” in turn.

In the end, O Great People of the World, the sick “scholar” whose nerd glasses makes him look like a Hoot Owl jubilantly settles in The Ignoramus Cave, literally forever, contemplating the import of Benjamin Franklin’s “rum” and scientific racism and insensitive “design of Providence,” Einstein’s and Wheeler’s “Unified Field Theory,” class privilege, Geronimo versus General, The Brethren’s unpatriotism and Machiavellian tendencies, and his own mental illness, “his own misunderstanding”…Could Bob Marley’s “The rich man’s wealth” have been an existential clade of the sick “scholar’s” city, hypothetically The Ignoramus Cave? Could the sick “scholar” make obeisance to Bob Marley’s “erase your fantasy”? Is the sick “scholar” not dying for want of wisdom? Why are wisdom and prudence the immanent province of “babes” and “sucklings” rather of the senescent sick “scholar”?

Further Questions: Who in his right mind expends quality time perusing the sick “scholar’s” moth-eaten thoughts apart from dead illiterate animals like the Duvaliers, Idi Amin, Omar Bashir, Mobuto Sese Seko, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Nguema, P.W. Botha, Francisco Franco, Joseph Stalin, Augusto Pinochet, Charles Taylor, deceased clones of the sick “scholar” himself? After all, are his moth-eaten works not the major cause of aliteracy in The Country? That is unavoidably so given that the nauseating stench of the sick “scholar’s” poetic, novelistic, and journalistic prattling is as overtly appalling as the notorious cover-up of Catholic pedophilia is as covertly disgusting, the reason being that his authorial pen, his misaligned mental faculty, his tactile incertainty is trapped on a receding uni-dimensional treadmill of cognitive stuntedness.

The major problem is that the sick “scholar,” a preying mantis, its eggcorn praying mantis, the sick “scholar’s” ornymic stupidity, is inescapably stuck in the narrative stone-age of linearized literaturization, while innovative thinkers such as Wilson Harris push the inwardly tightening threshold of the classical physics of poetry and novelism to the accommodating quantum physics of social consciousness, a fictional novelty very much on the same wavelength with Joyce Cary’s short story “Umaru,” a snappy investigational vista into a rarefied question dealing with the commonality of ethno-animal humanity, even as the “scholar’s” readers continue to experience the bloodsucking agony of his auctorial inanities. Again, is the sick “scholar” incognizant of Scorpions’ power ballad “Wind of Change”? Of Burning Spear’s “Identity”? Of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”? Of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”? Of KRS-1’s “Self-Destruction”? Of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”? Of Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side”? Of Peter Tosh’s “Glass House”?...Is the “scholar’s” Lilliputian brain the functional equal of the Gulliverian neck of The Giraffe?

Final Question: Does the sick “scholar” perchance think his mental singularity supervenes upon the totalized calculus of The People’s consciences? Well, not to anybody’s knowledge. The sick “scholar” would have wished he could comprehend the layered social-political sophistication represented by the neo-soul of Erykah Badu’s “On & On” as well as by the scratch-sampled bridge rap of Mos Def’s “Mathematics”! As usual, those are beyond his grasp as well!...The teleportation adventure, it turned out, finally, was merely an immanently revolving mirage of The Spinning Dancer, the so-called Silhouette Illusion, a psychologic symptomatology of haphazard talking dwarfs, doppelgangers, ghosts, changelings, etc., apparently a package-insert epidemiology of the “scholar’s” auditory and visual hallucinations…schizophrenia, his manic-depressive disorder…Virginia Woolf!

We shall return….