The Rot

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Murderous hunk who has caused temperatures and humidity to rise across the land.

NEW YORK (GLOB) — Murderous Hunk steals the hearts of a nation

That should have been the headline on The Old Gray Mare (NY Times). The city of New York can’t catch a break. First the Twin Towers. Then a sexy hunk murders a CEO of UnitedHealthcare and the reaction?

All the panting women of TikTok say, “Put a baby in me NOW.”

Can you hear the shrill laughter from Beijing?

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

William Shakespeare understood humans. If you want insights into anything going on now, you will find some point of reference in Shakespeare.

For example, Romeo and Juliet. A love story, right?

WRONG

Stop thinking about all the stupid soppy movies and high school plays you have seen. This is not a story about True Love.

Shakespeare gave it away in the title. The full title of the play is "The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet"

This play can be summed up as, “Two dumb teenagers think they are in love and commit suicide.” It is a very good example of what being young and dumb means when the only understanding of love is that you are tragic and depressed and suicidal.

Romeo and Juliet is a cautionary tale about being young and stupid. I know, because I lived it. No one died, but you get the drift.

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But I’d like to call your attention to Hamlet, or as Shakespeare titled it, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”

“There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.” This line is said by Marcellus, a minor character, in Act 1 Scene 4. Pretty early in the play. Shakespeare is setting the mood early. Something is wrong at the core of Denmark. Marcellus, having seen the ghost of the murdered king beckoning to Hamlet, is reading the signs of the times.

It is worthy to note in this context that one of the themes in this play is that personal conduct matters. And corruption and moral decay have far reaching effects on individuals and society.

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One bad apple: You’ve probably heard that “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch.” I had a boyfriend that worked in a produce department. He told me he had this realization that all these cliches become cliches because of some underlying truth.

In his case, they would daily, even multiple times a day, “cull the rack.” This means going through the produce and pulling out the stuff that didn’t look good. It was especially important to do that with fruit. He commented that if you leave a bad apple in the rack overnight, then next morning you will have two or maybe three bad apples. The corruption of one spot of the apple will spread to any other apple it touches.

One bad apple does spoil the whole bunch. If something rotten in your produce rack can take down the whole rack, what about a state or country?

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Reading the signs of the times, as highlighted by Murderous Hunk and the public reaction, it seems that indeed something is rotten in the state of Denmark. As Mark noted in his article on health care, things can go bad, and be unnoticed until, well, until they smell. Healthcare in this country smells. And he alludes it starts up high, with the rich and the powerful.

Does it matter if leadership is moral? Hell, we can’t even ask such a question because Patriarchy. But, we need to be asking questions. Here is another lesson from the produce rack. My friend told me that the first time he culled the rack, and it took him far too long, the produce manager went behind him and culled it properly. My friend was mortified that he had missed so much. He looked at the produce manager who shrugged and said, “You’ll learn.”

You’ll learn - what a concept. By simply looking at the good stuff everyday, he became more and more sensitive to the stuff that was “off.” Even slightly off. And he got fast. The net impact, contrary to what you might think, is that spoilage went down and gross profit went up. By aggressively culling the bad, the remaining fruit stayed healthy.

I am not comparing murdering a CEO to culling the rack.

Let me repeat that. I am not comparing murdering a CEO to culling the rack. This murder is a sign of rot. The fact that people are kind of OK with it is a sign of rot. Before we can cull the rack we need to be able to spot the rot. Murder is not culling the rack, it is a demonstration of rot. Celebrating murder is a sign of rot.

We would do well to look at the signs of the times. What are we missing?

I originally thought this whole event, the murder and the ho hum attitude and the drooling over Murderous Hunk was about the loss of empathy and compassion. I still believe that but I read an interesting article about how empathy makes us cruel and irrational.

This article focused on the bizarro world view evidenced by those who support the lying con-artist murderers, the Menendez brothers. Do read it, it is rather fascinating. I want to focus for a bit on something he says about empathy.

The main use of empathy is to help people form personal connections with others. It’s a social guide, not a moral or judicial guide. And yet people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, and in this capacity it becomes dangerously delusional. -Gurwinder writing in The Prism

Though I believe the loss of empathy plays a role, I needed time to reflect on his article to form my opinion. I set it in the back of my mind and let it germinate.

Then I read an article about how “the hot women have spoken” and transgenderism is over—even if they just don’t know yet. That caught my eye, so I read the article and found some thoughts that work with this article.

Oddly, the article, titled Transgenderism is over, in my mind speaks to my thoughts on empathy and compassion. Why? Because the hot women have spoken. Let me explain.

Louise Perry makes a very compelling argument working from a scene in “The Devil Wears Prada.” If you’ve seen the movie, you may remember the part where the fashion editor Miranda Priestly explains how fashions come and go to her PA. If you don’t remember, follow the link above - it’s right at the start of Perry’s article.

Perry brilliantly compares fashion trends to political trends, hence the “hot women” connection. But I want to focus on something she said about AOC dropping her pronouns off whatever social media platform has her bio. Perry says,

AOC isn’t a political innovator, or even an early adopter. But I think she’s instinctively in the ‘early majority’ category, and – by virtue of being a hot woman – her influence over the fashion cascade is particularly powerful. If she is sensing a change in the political winds, that means that a lot of other people are about to sense the same thing. Not – crucially! – because transgenderism is true or false, harmful or benign, but because it is a political trend that is now reaching the end of its lifecycle. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It has never mattered if it’s true. Expressing allegiance to this bizarre ideology has always been about social status, which is why it will be disastrous when the hot women abandon it once and for all. (Emphasis mine.)

And this, I think, is the starting point of The Rot. Empathy and compassion have been replaced by performative virtue signaling. And performative virtue signaling is capricious and whimsical.

Summary: Here is what I believe. Empathy and Compassion in this country have largely been replaced by performative virtue signaling. I think we need empathy because, as Gurwinder says in his article, it helps form personal connections. But his caveat is important. Empathy is not a moral guide.

Compassion is necessary as well. The word compassion is from Latin and means to endure or suffer with or together. And we can all use some of that.

I think The Rot in our country started with a loss of understanding of what moral leadership or moral action even means. With the loss of a common basis for morality, people have to decide on their own how they know they are good. And if all the touch-points to good behavior are essentially whims of fashion, then the country is adrift. And Murderous Hunk thinks he has a right or even a duty to murder. And people think he’s hot, and well, the CEO had it coming.

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. To cure The Rot, we need actual, not performative, virtue. There is work to be done.

Thoughts? Please argue with me in the comments.

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As an aside, I deliberately used the term “murder” as opposed to killing or slaying. Words matter. Mark discussed this in What’s in a word?