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Fate Of A Misguided Scholar 5

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 Source: Kwarteng, Francis

True, the expired, rusty narrow-minded “scholar” will stretch the stringed beads of Soyinka’s sagely morsels to anorexic dog-bites of intellectual philistinism if given the slightest opportunity, with the former himself being a first-order intellectual Philistine. What exactly is wrong with the sick “scholar” then? A cornucopia of theories exists to account for the sick “scholar’s” auctorial foolery. One such is a running speculation that the sick “scholar” is philosophically blinded by the thunderous sociology of informed reference-frames or of Lorentz transformation in connection with the central issue of ethno-animal human relations viewed across the broader context of perspectival differentiality, a metaphysical question set up by Henri Poincaré’s and Hendrik Lorentz’s relativistic physics of mutual tolerance against the backcloth of internecine differences, a powerful idea asymptotically close to Michael Jackson’s “We Are the World,” Bob Marley’s “One Love,” Ziggy Marley & The Melody Makers’ “Love is the Only Law”…

Love is the only law indeed! Arguably, then, E.M. Forster’s essay “What I Believe,” a sort of literary requisition for a communal system based on the socializing variables of tolerance, sympathy, natural warmth, good temper, etc., substantively jibes with the moral temper of D.H. Lawrence’s “Why the Novel Matters,” an acknowledgement which makes more sense when dialectically viewed under the microscope of rigorous analysis as they mutually touch base with the rehabilitative potential of topological neighborliness, arguably, the first bold step toward improving the sick “scholar’s” base poetry of intolerance, his derailed novelistic psychology of ethnocentric self-centeredness. Technically, though, both essays intrinsically frown upon the institutional autocracy of superstition and somewhat loosely with the running skepticism usually associated with mentalism. Again, here is part of the conundrum the sick “scholar’s” postpartum hemispherectomy has occasioned:

“Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be,” notes Forster, further declaring: “What is good in people ? and consequently in the world ? is their insistence on creation, their belief in friendship and loyalty for their own sakes; and though Violence remains and is, indeed, the major partner in this muddled establishment, I believe that creativeness remains too, and will always assume direction when violence sleeps…” Here Forster’s “insistence on creation,” “creativeness,” and “belief in friendship and loyalty for their own sakes” feed into the progressive ethos of The Scarab Beetle’s “categorical conversion.” Why, then, does the sick “scholar” doggedly refuse to draw on the sagely recommendations of E.M. Forster and The Scarab Beetle for intellectual reawakening? Could it be the sick “scholar’s” entrenched funky stupidity, his funky dumbness constitutes a major hindrance to creativity even as Forster’s “violence” sleeps?

Regrettably, the Nation of Little Monsters (NLM) expressly stood in the way of the consummate blossoming of “categorical conversion,” a sort of philosophical détente designed to neutralize the plague of internecine differences in the body politic, whose absential realization is still felt all over The Country today. Where is The Country, that nostalgia of a polity, now? Perhaps a maggot-infested neocolonial mirage. Rather, the NLM resorted to an infamous formulaic agenda, terrorism, so-called “sickly bombast of seismic pretense,” also viewed potentially as political, economic, and ideological sabotage, a propagandistic distraction. Quite uncontroversially, the blood-sucking Zombie disciples of the NLM did not pass for real men and women with any functional skeletons of moral intelligence, however thorough The People looked at it. Rather, they came across as Frankenstein androids, irredentist strains of humanoid Ebola virus; of moral Philistinism, a motley anthology of glacial individuals ideologically hostile to the question of moral inertia, to wit, the conscious pursuit of consensus building. Even of the non-aggressive principle of peaceful mutual existence, E.M. Forster’s “What is good in people.”

It is, however, also true the fluidized mercurial behavior of the humanoid Ebola virus in the body politic had not been as tangibly predictable as the largely emotional praxis of poetic novelization, perhaps one of the easiest of ethno-human animal intellectual activities! That may explain why The Scarab Beetle made conscious attempts at making the natural science of decorum accessible to The People, thus eventually dissolving the rigid boundaries of antagonistic contradiction in the body politic. Yet those intolerant ethno-animal men and women of the NLM even had the nerve to quote E.M. Forster, telling The Scarab Beetle to his gracious face: “The evidence of history shows us that men have always insisted on behaving creatively under the shadow of the sword.” What “evidence of history,” a history of bestiality, feudalism, backwardness, and terrorism?

Importantly Forster’s “under the shadow of the sword” evokes the destructive imagery of “the sickly bombast of seismic pretense” while the phrase “the sword” takes on the temper of rustic ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and intolerance in The Ignoramus Cave, though they, akin to the uncritical sick “scholar,” had no inkling as to what the natural science of “the evidence of history” actually entailed, for, once again, they merely rhetorically identified with scientific idiom just so they could advertize their cheaply acquired erudition of political xenophobia. This is the shameful legacy the sick “scholar” has inherited. Besides, the praxis of mathematicizing or equationizing a purely metaphysical quantum of idea on questions of national integrity and multiethnic mutual accommodativeness, such as guaranteeing the sleep of “violence” in the body politic, say, came as relatively easy to The Scarab Beetle as it did prohibitively cumbersome to the constitutive trilogy of The Brethren.

Yet the natural science of statecraft did not come easily to the blockheads either, those bacterial flesh-eating scarecrow members of the Nation of Little Monsters (NLM). Is it therefore any wonder the autocracy of the NLM and the concept of liberty of conscience would eventually be characterized by the contrastive vector fields across the magnetic field of national formation? How about The Brethren and the sick “scholar” always assuming the negative axis of the Cartesian coordinate system of moral stupidity, national nihilism, and revisionist factoids of history? Are the sick “scholar’s” polarizing views on ethnicity, say, worth the creative attention of progressive group theorists, The Scarab Beetle and E.M. Forster, for instance, since his alphabet soup of negative ideas does not fit the two-dimensional topology of polar coordinates, let alone fit the complex homeomorphism of inclusive thoughtfulness on critical questions related to nature. But unlike E.M. Forster, members of the NLM would not allow “violence” sleep!

Also, members of the NLM have always mistaken the relative simplicity of poetic versification and novelistic pagination as twin exercises sentimentally capable of supervening upon the dialectic knottiness of the scientific method, critical thinking. Namely, granted poetic versification is not as tough as nation-building, though the natural science of critical thinking definitely is, relatively speaking. It is also interesting to note that the poetic versification and novelistic pagination of the leadership of the NLM, even of the sick “scholar,” were and even now, in hindsight, that is, merely repacked lies of political distraction, for instance. Those foregoing concessions are essential to fruitful digestion of Forster’s philosophy of creativity against the backdrop of mutual accommodativeness and peace.

Having said that, the tachyonic natural science of the “inner mystery” of Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal woman,” of The Scarab Beetle’s matchless prescience and intellectual resourcefulness, for instance, may equally prove somewhat evasively convoluted than any metrical line or verse drama of lies ever composed for artistic consumption. In other words, the tachyonic foresight of The Scarab Beetle, however one looks at it, always ran ahead of The Brethren’s lumbering speed of light. That necessarily put the more inclusive dialectics of The Scarab Beetle’s General Theory of Relativity way ahead of the constrictive particularity of The Brethren’s Special Relativity. What this means is that The Scarab Beetle tactically converted the former into social-political generalities of inclusiveness, national unity, seeming equalitarianism, ethnic-blind society, Africanization, while The Brethren converted the latter into terroristic particularities of ethnocracy, political ethnocentrism, borrowed elitism, excessive infatuation with foreignism, aristocratic nothingness.

Again, this suite of hard facts positioned The Scarab Beetle light-years ahead of the Machiavellian, virulent microbiology of the humanoid Ebola virus, thus making it forbiddingly tricky for the latter to outmaneuver the former! Forster’s “creativity” is a perfect exemplar of the latter, The Scarab Beetle’s strategic principle of intellectual and political maneuverability. On the other hand, the public health scare engendered fortuitously by the humanoid Ebola virus across the left hemisphere of cranial geography is a clear symptomatology of the sick “scholar’s” uncooked scholarship in disguise, Forster’s implied “violence” wakefulness. Epidemiological sleuthing has, however, pointed to the sick “scholar’s” poisonous cranial geography as the established etiological pandemia of literary ordinariness. This is the more reason why the sick “scholar’s” substandard works read as the Ebola virus scare among panic-stricken virologists of literary criticism, hence their opportune quarantine in The Ignoramus Cave.

The shameful irony is that these same virologists of literary criticism, call them venture capitalists, have developed unbridled interest in the exclusive ownership of The Country’s vast mineral resources and profitable running public services. Consequently there simply are no concrete instances of Forserian “creativity” gracing them, the sick “scholar’s” viral works of literariness. Again, more specifically, though, the haphazardly and poorly done, prematurely and unprofessionally facial cicatrices etched on the sick “scholar’s” trinketry of literary works, observations typical of The Country’s discreditable political underperformance, scare away potential virologists of literary criticism and investors, respectively, if in fact there are any such retinue of individuals at all to impose their sledgehammer of critical and fiscal expenditure on the pathology of such cancerous literary works and of The Country’s underperforming economy.

Moreover, with his awful poetic versification, with his novelistic cacography lacking a holistic touch of political direction, thematic coherence, the natural science of critical thinking, structural integrity, ideational ordination, well-managed faithfulness to the tenets of literary theory and literary criticism, and the like, the future of The Country’s intellectual development and economy is bleak. What is the basis of this assertion? Literary halitosis is what some have classified the sick “scholar’s” dental caries of dead literary works, but placebo effect is not the kind of charming rubric others will characterize them. What is it then? The sick “scholar’s” major problem appears to be principally one of neo-colonial intellectual terrorism, a virulent strain of the NLM’s “sickly bombast of seismic pretense,” of psychotic boastfulness, of topical perseveration, of nymphomaniac moan! And as it is the sick country is in for a big trouble, like the sick “scholar.” It should appear then, at least from the instructive landscape of the foregoing, The Scarab Beetle and E.M. Forster on the one hand and on the other The Brethren and the sick “scholar” share no common point of intersection as to creativity, mutual tolerance, and national formation!

Nevertheless, it turned out, The Scarab Beetle, a discerning character, was decidedly too slippery for them, The Brethren, the sick “scholar,” in terms of The Scarab Beetle’s strategic manipulation of their callous warped psychologies to his advantage. Meanwhile, The Scarab Beetle, too, recalling the NLM’s “evidence of history” refrain, however, quotes them Forster as a matter of urgency: “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it. And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its color.” What specifically are The Country and The People to make of Forster poetic lines for revelatory reasons? Here it goes: The concept “nakedness” is none other than “truth,” the truth, a sense of justice, moral or righteous indignation, among others. In effect, The Scarab Beetle, not unlike E.M. Forster, forwardly advocated “ordering and distributing man’s native goodness” as an infectious moral refrain of natural warmth among ethno-animal humanity. Perhaps this philosophy constitutes the only radical response to ethno-animal man’s innate bestial tendencies, primarily the sick “scholar’s” and The Brethren’s, the same destructive salvoes of “violence” alluded to previously.

Accordingly, the sick “scholar” and The Brethren stand tall as razor-sharp moral negation of “man’s native goodness,” the latter phraseology suggestive of the philosophical, moral, and cultural framework of “African Personality.” Was this not what The Scarab Beetle had formulated as a countervailing prescription to the blazing hegemony of ethno-animal man’s innate bestial nature, the sick “scholar’s” and The Brethren’s evil nature, rather than, as it were, of the misapplication of “force,” the abuse of “power,” in the body politic, The Country? Did The Scarab Beetle’s version of “African Personality,” then, O Great People of the World, not come out as conceptually gorgeous as the architectural tapestry of Sungbo’s Eredo (The Walls of Benin), the Great Pyramid of Giza, Great Zimbabwe? Of Robin Walker’s “When We Ruled: The Ancient and Medieval History of Black Civilizations”? Yet neither the sick “scholar’s” inchoate poetic versification nor pedestrian novelization pagination comes anywhere close to the architectonic adulthood of the afore-mentioned. The prophetic yet scholarly array of writings by E.M. Forster and The Scarab Beetle had presaged these!

In other words, Forster’s concept of “creativity” is possible, even if remotely, only within the presential absence of the political weight of brute “force” in The Country, a position George G.M. James expatiates upon in “Stolen Legacy,” his most influential work, as a developmental process hostile to the so-called Greek Miracle, the sick “scholar’s” ill-conceived pigsty-influenced literaryism. The Scarab Beetle had in fact tried to create that enabling environment to foster the element of creativity, but, yet again, the NLM’s terrorism, its feudal backwardness, had reversed that progressive agenda. Here is E.M. Forster’s take on the debate: “Not by becoming better, but by ordering and distributing his native goodness, will Man shut up Force into its box, and so gain time to explore the universe and to set his mark upon it worthily. At present he only explores it at odd moments, when Force is looking the other way, and his divine creativeness appears as a trivial by-product, to be scrapped as soon as the drums beat and the bombers hum.”

Sadly, this is not the kind of progressive thinking the sick “scholar” has been willing to cultivate. Nor The Brethren before him! Thus let “the novel” of moral truth speak up! Thus let the progressive national character, Achebe’s “the fiction,” speak up! Thus let The Scarab Beetle’s “categorical conversion” speak up! Thus let Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentricity speak up! Thus let our internationally acclaimed poets and writers do the bidding of The People, of The Country…Those powerful writers, those influential poets gracing the pages of this essay, for the problem of the sick “scholar’s” Ebola virus literaryism is a supreme one, of course. Understandably the latter is not the kind of Beloved Republic or democracy Forster characteristically alluded to. It is, in fact, rather part of the internecine streaks, to put it differently, of neocolonial political and intellectual quackery, said to be antagonistic to The Country’s development economics, to the corporate mental hygiene of The People.

Equally true is the commonly accepted view that part of the practical solution to the easy epidemiological spread of the Ebola virus literaryism of the sick “scholar” also lies with what has come to be called the classical metaphysics of Newtonian “action-reaction zero-sum prescription.” The “action” part follows immediately from the sick “scholar’s” rather unconscious, or conscious, sympathies for Greek anti-black views, including one directly pointing to ancient Ethiopians, Africans specifically, whose heads allegedly grew on organic structures other than the hyoid articulation of the neck, armpit, say, and for Victorian adventure novels and their contemporary literary descendants, both of which directly inferiorize the ethno-animal humanity of Africans. Alas, it pays to see the sick “scholar” appropriate these uncomplimentary views of ancient Ethiopians and simply graft them onto the rich tapestry of The Country’s variegated ethnicities, electing, as he is wont to do, his own ethnicity as the universal standard of ethnological evaluation, a superior “race,” and the others inferior “races,” a view contrary to The Scarab Beetle’s Avoidance of Discrimination Act.

Yet the sick “scholar” also makes matters worse by inflexibly paying no mind to the authoritative voice of reason, mistakenly construing himself as a symbol of Solomonic wisdom, when, he is, essentially, merely a crawling toddler of Aesopian or Orwellian language! But the literary annotations of ancient Greeks, of Victorian adventure novelists, and of Leo Frobenius, David Livingston, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Henry Stanley, Joseph Thomson, Mungo Park, and their kind, are not far from the “truth” given contemporary realities, as in the lamentable case of the sick “scholar” and his clueless alter egos running The Country. Wole Soyinka evokes a Shakespearean line, words uttered by Othello, worth quoting here: “…the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

Such words of indictment and others of their kind eloquently speak to the headlessness of individuals, such as the sick “scholar” and his elitist congregation of political coevals, who are unable to carve critical paths of intellection through the emotional edifice of ethnic-blind community, of political neutrality, where the future of multiethnic socialization is at stake. Still, technically, the former is philosophically out of sync with the progressive coordinates of the heuristics of statecraft, much less on the side of critical thinking, a view borne out of his unrelenting journalistic clamor for an institutionalized aristocracy of political xenophobia and ethnocentrism, of dynastic ethnocracy, although, again, his discounted genre of poetic and novelistic tribalism should have long been thrown out together with his umbilical cord of intellectual stupidity in the Stone Age of paralitearture, with the latter not faring better either.

For instance, The People’s children are bemoaning the failure of The Country’s leadership, their grievances painstakingly collected in Uwen Akpan’s “Say You Are One of Them,” and yet the only practical solution the sick “scholar” proffers, as far as anyone could recall, is another rhetoric feint, “My head is a graveyard of idle words,” prompting focused attention from the precocious children. The sick “scholar” did possess a conspicuously missing head. Only a Hoot Owl head he had, and a hugely empty one at that! Further, the missing head was neither part of the anatomic privacy of his anal cleavage nor of the openness of moral truth, historical-political actuality. The sick “scholar’s” absent head had had to be conveniently interred in a deserted cemeterial island, The Ignoramus Cave, even while pretending all was rosy with him. Yet behind the felicitous exterior of The Ignoramus Cave, his seemingly happy physiognomy, lie buried storied tombs for a deeply troubled soul, a symptomatology of multiple personality disorder; a myriad of grave problems plaguing The Country; a neocolonial nation-state.

Of course a nation-state, a theoretical interaction of minds, is also a representational interplay of culture, policy decisions, international law, customs, politics, entertainment, corruption, races, geography, ethnicities, social constraints, economics, institutions, social facts, and such. Therefore, an optimal or suboptimal socialization of these interacting ideas determines the direction, or the lack therefore, that is, growth or retrogression, of the nation-state under clinical study. Yet a nation-state and the portmanteau of ideas it is made of exist also in a state of chemical equilibrium subject to the operational chaperonage of Le Chatellier’s Principle, more or less. A nation-state is thus healthy if the mind is correspondingly healthy, sick if the mind is correspondingly sick, relatively speaking. The phrase “the mind,” however, represents an interactive spatiality of speaking minds, healthy and unhealthy, of a group of individuals bounded by an agreed-upon set of laws and geography, the collective conscious. Consequently a bad apple of a mind potentially spoils an apple bouquet of minds.

The mind is therefore the smallest unit of a nation-state, a judiciously or badly superintended project management of ideas. Against this backdrop, a misplaced node in the graphic theory of national introspection, the supply chain of ideas as some to label it, may inevitably spell doom for the material and spiritual well-being of the nation-state. This is why a healthy national conscience, as well as an extensive, efficiently-run public services and disease management through group solidarity or social consensus, are such laudable concepts. These are three hot areas of public concern The Country’s children are worried most about. It is through the audible absence of these development variables that the sick “scholar’s” mind is pragmatically viewed as the bane of The Country’s very existence. Apparently the sick “scholar’s” corrupt political coevals have consistently failed to hearken to the corporate voice of The People’s children, let alone address the depressive state of public service in The Country, particularly as it relates to disease management of the mind.

The People’s children have the sick “scholar’s” diseased psychology in mind. They knew efficient disease management policy in place would certainly have served the sick “scholar” very well, his moronic Ebola virus literary personality; the epidemiological spread of the latter having been efficiently facilitated via telepathic contact with ethno-animal human disease reservoirs of the sick “scholar’s” viral literariness that are often irredentist strains themselves, hotheaded ethnocentric antigens that are also often partisan bibliophobes and aliterates. That Ebola virus literaryism diagnosis, nevertheless, is a serious matter, a matter of psychological security in the interest of The Country and continental corporation, not something to make light of, as it indiscriminately kills many an unsuspecting reading mind, engenders aliteracy and illiteracy in The Country, worsens the sick “scholar’s” derailed psychology…On the other hand, the other controversially held notion of the sick “scholar” as the most likely causality of The Country’s problems is analogous to couvade or sympathetic pregnancy, in which part of the symptoms and behaviors of an expectant woman, the sick “scholar,” are somehow induced in her partner, her prostituting neocolonial husband, The Country.

Unfortunately, the geography of the sick “scholar’s” cranial pregnancy is a mere physical protuberance of ideas incapable of relieving the suffering of The People, of advancing The Country, of helping him manage his own diseased psychology. The cranial pregnancy itself is ectopic with hernial and elephantiac brain parts, unripe brains neurologically based on the information map of the Book of Judas, Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” and William Luther Pierce’ “The Turner Diaries,” three vital source materials whence came the sick “scholar’s” yellow journalism of political xenophobia, of intellectual ethnocentrism. It is in this context, therefore, that Stephen Howe, a professor of history and colonialism at Bristol University, makes the following remark befitting cactus intellectualism. It is worth quoting in part: “…of Herodotus’s pronouncements, and reminds us of the Greek historian’s takes of dog-headed men, headless people with eyes on their chests, people with no names, and so on.”

Is Howe’s “people with no name” a sarcastic reference to the sick “scholar’s” unrecognized scholarship? What of “headless people”? Of “dog-headed men”? Of “with eyes on their chests”? Is the latter phrasal prefabrication another sarcastic reference to the sick “scholar’s” cataractal intellectualism? What of his sick political coevals of The Country? Has the sick “scholar” irretrievably sunk so low to the point where evocative remarks affrontive to his intellectual integrity are the norm? In the first place, from which height has he reportedly sunk so low, so unfathomably deep, O Great People of the World, given his perennially attachment to an unoriginative flooring of intellectualism? The sick “scholar,” a collection of potboilers; his Cowper’s fluid of uncreative literariness! The sick “scholar,” an intellectual bankruptcy of a cactus-writer! Is the sick “scholar” under the crushing influence of false consciousness, of cognitive dissonance? It is, therefore, not surprising The Country’s youth should be averse to education, should harbor no reverence for the saintly wisdom of gray hair after the sick “scholar’s” coffined head has exposed him as an empty suit.

The sick “scholar,” a lone cactus of a derailed head perching forlornly on the tailhead of a desert, O Great People of the World, thinking it is the Iroko Tree of commonsense psychology, of folk wisdom, when, in actuality, he is a measly poetic and novelistic and journalistic coffin. How sad! Is it a matter of laughable irony then that The People, ethno-animal men and women of conscience, should already have given him a heavy slap of damnatio memoriae, a photoshopped pink slip of “damnation of memory”? Indeed the sick “scholar’s” cranial problems of uncreative literariness are many and varied. But intellectual demagoguery seems to constitute the major fixture in the symptomatology of his low-priced, taphonomic scholarship, his yellow journalism and novelistic childishness and poetic stupidity particularly, among others. The sick “scholar” is not even aware of this fact though the intellectual giants in his sham or non-existing bailiwick are! In fact these intellectual giants are incognizant of his literary presence, just as foreign investors are ignorant of The Country as the site of the Bermuda Triangle.

What is there to do for this sick “scholar”? That having been said, the “reaction” part of the classical metaphysics of Newtonian “action-reaction zero-sum prescription” is said to embody the progressive ideas advanced by The Scarab Beetle and several others, but which the sick “scholar” has conveniently ignored at his own peril. Admittedly then, the issue on The People’s hands is a grave one, even beyond the threshold of Fustian stupidity, however. Is it not also reliably true the sick “scholar” has been boastfully asserting he is capable of literarily licking his back, literarily swallowing his mouth? Could the Persian Farid ud-Din Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds” teach the sick “scholar” and others of like mind anything usefully impactful about the question of pantheistic sublimity connecting ethno-animal man, nature, and God, predictably about our common ethno-animal humanity? About human fallibility? About humility? About Platonic love? About ethnic-blind community?

Are we taking life-learning cues from the allegories of the locust, birds, and tortoise, O Great People of the World, themes novelistically captured in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” regarding the problematic of change, the complexity of ethno-animal human nature and civilization, the political morality of kindness and philanthropy, the political economy of survival, the psychology of collaboration, and the potential of false knowledge to destroy intellectual civilizations? Have the scholastic “things” of the sick “scholar” not fallen apart already? Have the political and economic “things” of The Country not fallen apart already? What has the poetic and novelistic and journalistic unscience of the sick “scholar’s” comic intellectual theatrics got to say about his potboiled shenanigan as a reliable vaccine capable of neutralizing the side effects of psychological malnutrition induced in unsuspecting readers who come into direct telepathic contact with his Ebola virus literaryism?

As a matter of fact the sick “scholar’s” comic intellectual theatrics has long translated into a democratic mandate which, as is widely known, the headless leadership of The Country uses to slowly poison and strangulate and crucify the neocolonial nation-state. Could the sanction of cognitive immunity by literacy and bibliophilic proaction guard against unsuspecting readers’ directly eating into the viral economy of the sick “scholar’s” Ebola virus literaryism? Change! What does “change,” an evolutionary process, mean to the sick “scholar”? Change as probably the only constant in life. What if Shaka Zulu and The Zulu People, like Achebe’s Igbo People, had not slighted or underestimated the variable factor of change in their equational dealings with Europeans as far as the survival of their humanity and communities went? Positive, O Great People of the World, not negative, change is The People’s ultimate asking, be it intellectual, cultural, economic, or spiritual! Progressive change, not retrogressive change!

These foregoing guideposts, meanwhile, offer strategic insights into countering the contagion of the sick “scholar’s” Ebola virus literaryism, a virulent prostituting psychology; the bane of The Country’s developmental existence and Machiavellian usurper of The People’s children’s hopeful future; the diabolical serial killer in Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist.” As well, the sick “scholar’s” Ebola virus literaryism is, indeed, a menace to the ideational prospect of bringing the variegation of multiethnic socialization, for instance, into the flowerpot of peaceful existential corporation for the advancement of The Country along the lines of James Maxwell’s unifying theory of electromagnetism. Sadly, the sick “scholar’s” poetic and journalistic vaccine, his snake oil, is impotent in the face of the expanding mental mortality of those reading-victims who come into telepathic contact with his Ebola virus literaryism. Where is the progressive change in all these?

The People and The Country know the source of the problem but no one apparently seems to care. It may be due to the fact that the sick “scholar’s” intellectual tuberculosis is beyond remedy. Yet The Country and The People cannot simply give up on him, just as they cannot give up on the ailing economy. That is, the sick “scholar’s” non-elliptic literary infantilism, a mirror image of The Country’s leadership naiveté, and his vulturine psychology which others essentially see as a virulent strain of ethnocentric antigen, constitute a major threat to development economics and effective containment of the pandemic spread of his Ebola virus literaryism. In that regard, how does the disease burden occasioned by the epidemiological presence of his Ebola virus literaryism impact the developmental mobility of The Country and the seeming heterogeneous aggregate psychology of The People?

Unfortunately, the absent head of the sick “scholar” is eventually given a jolt of transubstantial presence on the hyoid articulation of the neck of The Country’s clueless leadership, with his asphyxiating Ebola virus literaryism being a true reflection of neocolonial confusion and poor policy decisions undertaken by The Country’s leadership and falling educational standards and public assassination of critical thinking and general political underperformance. The ant of a sick “scholar” has been under the igneous curse of intellectual hibernation after having voraciously feasted on the carcass of an intellectually inert adult elephant while Anas Aremeyaw Anas does his work for him, unbeknownst to The People and The Country. In fact the sick “scholar” is like that lazy plant which denies itself the participatory benefits of ideational cross-pollination with capable instruments of intelligence, wisdom, and critical thinking. Again, what this implies is that critical thinking, investigative journalism, The Country, and The People have a brighter future if the supposedly absent sick head of the “scholar” is relocated and forever banished to Dante’s Inferno, his Hell.

What use has the sick “scholar’s” intellectual caliphate to the intellectual development of The Country? What is the noble place of The Scarab Beetle’s and E.M. Forster’s wisdom in the emotional gridlock of the sick “scholar’s” Hitlerite world of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, gutter journalism, trifling scholarship? Then, as it were, let the authoritative voice of The Country, the good conscience of The People, the dialectic contraptions of critical thinking, and a good sense of intellectual propriety completely take over the sick “scholar’s” irreverent lying tongue, as, eventually, the Ebola virus literaryism of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, The Country’s absentee intellectual trickster, would assume its rightful place in the narrative lullaby of The Ignoramus Cave! The kind of narrative lullaby passing for “scholarship” that eventually ends up numbing inquisitive minds, thereby turning them into break-dancing zombies. What a sad future for The Country’s youth!

We shall return…

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis