“Hippo King” — a recent episode of PBS’ “Nature,” a show I find difficult to watch but am nonetheless drawn to — tells the story of a hippopotamus from birth through violent maturity to his becoming the primary bull in his pod and eventual death at age 35. In a key moment, the young hippo, on his own for the first time, is eyed by a pride of lionesses. But they turn their attention to a swift gazelle that flashes before them until they attack and devour it as our hippo protagonist watches and moves on, perhaps relieved that it was not his day.
I find myself thinking of that hippo of late as Passover approaches and Holy Week begins in a saason that has always symbolized death and rebirth. Why do we suffer? Well, I think we know why we suffer — OPS (other people’s selfishness) for one thing and then there are those calamities the flesh is heir to that we generally have no control over, like many illnesses.
But the greater questions are why does God allow us to suffer and why are we complicit in it? While I cannot pretend to understand the mind of God, I feel compelled to plumb the ways of his creation. Covid was always going to be bad — and perhaps might not have existed at all but for the tradition of Chinese wet markets — but there was no reason for more than six million people to die. A lack of transparency (the Chinese), politicization of the virus (we Americans) — indeed a total lack of Alexandrian leadership, which is leadership from the front — doomed hundreds of thousands of people.
Fear — fear of losing face (Xi Jinping); fear of the stock market collapsing, along with his reelection bid (Donald J. Trump); fear of the unknown, of having to roll up your sleeves in the face of that unknown and a long haul that may never end; fear of suffering itself created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which suffering was inevitable.
Is fear ruling us in Ukraine? We pray our prayers for Ukraine and other suffering nations at Sunday Mass; we collect money for relief and refugees; we watch as governments appropriate funds and NATO circles the wagons and imposes sanctions and reporters report. But are we really helping? To help in the way that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants aid would be to engage with aircraft and even troops — and thus risk a nuclear World War III. But what would happen if we called Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff? That’s what a friend of mine asked at our weekly roundtable. Surely, Putin would be crazy to risk nuclear retaliation, he mused.
But perhaps that’s a risk Putin — a malignant, nihilistic narcissist in search of an imperial legacy — is willing to take. We don’t know and that fear of what we don’t know keeps us transfixed — like the hippo that watches the lionnesses shred the gazelle, glad it’s not him.
But we are not hippos. “A man has a choice,” the dogmatic father tells his rebellious son in the 1954 film of John Steinbeck’s novel “East of Eden.” “That’s where he’s different from an animal.:” And when we choose not to act or to limit our actions, that’s a choice, too. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” — a quote attributed to everyone from the 18th-century Irish statesman Edmund Burke to the 19th-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill. We’re not exactly doing nothing with Ukraine. But as Zelensky has made clear in his tireless video presentations, we’re not doing all we could.
Pieter Brueghal’s “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” (1526/1530-68), painting, Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussel.
Perhaps the reason is not only fear, which can paralyze as well as liberate. Perhaps Ukraine is not is as important to us as it should be. Poet W.H. Auden captures that relativity of tragedy in his masterpiece “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a meditation on Pieter Brueghal’s “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” in which the stark white legs of the boy who flew too close to the sun, disappearing into the water, are pictured off the center of the canvas as a plowman and ship plow and sail calmly on.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
Thus Auden, who understands a thing or two about suffering himself, opens his poem, which concludes:
…the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Yes, we’re upset by Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine, the gangland-style murder of civilians, whose bodies lie in the streets like something out of Sophocles’ “Antigone.” However, we elect leaders not only to navigate international conflicts for us but to keep us out of harm’s way.
Can they? Auden wrote his poem in December 1938 while staying in Brussels and visiting the Musée des Beaux Arts, where he saw the Brueghal painting. By then the Nazis were already on the march to carve up Europe and exterminate its Jews. Yet it wasn’t until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 that the United States entered World War II. When desire trumps fear — when the conflict is at your door — then action transpires.
The young hippo watches and moves on. But in maturity, he meets the inevitable challenge of a rival.
For us, push may come to shove yet.