His name is pronounced "Staan-sick," and he was a famous figure in Polish history. Stańczyk was a court jester to three different kings during the Polish Renaissance, famous for his wit and his ability to speak sometimes-dangerous truths to the king without losing his head. He once called King Sigismund the Old a fool for allowing his wife the Queen to be injured when he took her with him on a bear hunt, yet somehow everyone merely mistook his insult as a comment on the Prussian situation on the border. Though historical scholars debate whether he was one man, or possibly several, or even a fictitious person altogether, the fact remains that he is a well-known fixture of Polish lore.

I was first exposed to this painting of the noble jester several years ago, and the haunting reality of the portrait has stuck with me ever since. The painting, done in 1862 by Polish painter Jan Matejko, is one of the most famous paintings in the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, both because of the artist's skill and the subject it depicts.

According to the artist's explanation, the painting depicts an actual event in 1514, when the famous jester was at the court of the King and Queen. While entertaining at a party in celebration of a recent Polish military victory against the Grand Duchy of Moscow, he reportedly found a letter discarded by the nobles in which was conveyed the news that despite the Army's victory elsewhere, the Russians had captured Smolensk. In effect, Stanczyk was the only one who realized that the military victories of his country had been completely irrelevant, and that their celebrations were hollow and pretentious while in reality their empire was crumbling around them.

I wrote a secret post while on deployment about my timely discovery of the book "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" right as I was living in my own personal insane asylum. It's a sad fact that when surrounded by insanity, the most natural reaction in the world is to simply laugh. Unfortunately, when one's entire job is dependent on one's ability to be funny, you can find it pretty emotionally draining to keep a smile on your face when the news of one's daily life continues to get progressively more bleak.

Since I've come back from deployment, I have had a wonderfully positive shift in mood and general restfulness as time has gone on. Nevertheless, like poor Stanczyk, I too have been guilty of putting on a smiling face when inside I feel as if the crushing weight of my realizations overseas will smother the joy right out of me. The world is much uglier than we ever imagined, and sadly I fear that things will only get much, much worse in the future.

The lessons of this painting to me are twofold:

1. The smartest man in the room is rarely the most powerful person. People with power are necessarily expected to have all the answers. Some people even take their powerful position as a sign that their superior intellect and leadership acumen have somehow been "recognized," rather than acknowledge that they may simply be the lucky beneficiary of time and chance. Even a turd will find its way to the top, given enough time. Though Stanczyk was by no means the most powerful person in the Polish court, he has become even more famous in the minds of the Poles than the three Kings he entertained (and even carefully criticized) with his jokes. Sometimes intelligence is its own form of power.

2. Intelligence is a Curse. Whereas the foolish nobles were content to ignore the grave news about the loss of Smolensk (which any student of history will tell you has belonged to the Russians ever since that fateful day in 1514, barring a brief reconquest from 1611-1667), Stanczyk on the other hand immediately realized the implications of what he was reading, and to him it signaled the doom of the Polish Kingdom. From the times of the Russian wars onward, Poland never again enjoyed the hegemony over Eastern Europe that it had had during those heady years before 1514. After that, the Prussians and the Russians on both sides of them began to progressively chip away at their empire, and the Kings and Nobles did little, if anything, to stem the tide as it turned against them. Smart people unfortunately don't have the luxury of burying their heads in the sand when they hear depressing news, which is why many smart people (read: artists, inventors, writers, etc.) have always been of a very melancholy disposition. It's very telling to me that some of the most brilliant writers and artists of the modern era (Van Gogh, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Cobain) all succumbed to their inner demons, probably because they realized that at its core, life is a joke; just not a very funny one.

If you're familiar with the book Ender's Game, or the sequel which is actually titled "Speaker for the Dead," then you have a general idea what I mean by the title of this blog. For those who don't, just understand that the book Ender's Game is a science fiction novel about a young boy who unwittingly wipes out an entire alien civilization, only to later discover his guilt and eventually adopt the title Speaker for the Dead. He traveled the galaxy not only to tell the story of the aliens who he had killed, but also to speak for any deceased person, and to eulogize them as full, complete individuals, and not merely condense the memories of their lives down to the happy highlights. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia on the concept:

While obviously this concept is an invention from the mind of Orson Scott Card, I believe that he has unwittingly stumbled upon a kernel of Biblical truth in the telling of his story. God genuinely cares about the plight of the dead. Those who die for the sake of the Gospel hold a very special place in God's heart, and he WILL avenge their blood upon the unrepentant remnant of humanity at the appointed time. Equally importantly, I believe that he has appointed each and every one of us as a kind of "speaker for the dead," because as long as someone's memory lives on in the lives of those they touched, they can never truly die.

My job on board the ship during these last seven months gave me special insights into what was happening on the land around us. While most people had a vague idea that bad things were happening on the shores a few miles away from our ship, I unfortunately had the rare burden to know in very specific detail just how bad things sometimes were on the ground. As it says in Ecclesiastes, "the more the knowledge, the more the sorrow."

When I came home, I was not only physically but also emotionally exhausted. I had spent seven months as a "rider" (someone not technically part of a ship's crew) on a ship where my job was (at times, but admittedly not always) to catalogue the deaths of innocent people. I couldn't talk about it with anyone on the ship, not even the Chaplain (mostly because he was a very weird dude), so I just bottled it up inside and did my best to smile. Upon my return, however, I was finally forced to confront the ugly truth of life, which is that good people can and often do die senseless deaths at the hands of evil men who very rarely get caught.

My trip to the hospital was essentially resultant to the confluence of several unfortunate factors all at once. I had just come back from halfway across the world, so I was dealing with major jet lag. The inability to sleep more than a few hours a day led me to drink inordinate amounts of caffeine, and also to smoke more cigarettes than I should have (I took up smoking on deployment as a needed form of stress-relief), and also I was drinking excessive amounts of alcohol to "celebrate" my return home. These things, coupled with the crippling amount of work I still had to get done at the office before they'd let me take leave, essentially all caused me to have an emotional and physical breakdown.

The official hospital report lists "anxiety" and "abnormal EKG" as my causes for admittance. While that is true, I think the real cause of my meltdown was simply the inability to continue dealing with the crushing demands of life, especially in light of my recent and disturbing discoveries overseas. One of the psychologists who interviewed me during the examination process quite astutely diagnosed me as having an "existential crisis" as a result of my troubling observations of the depths of human cruelty. I broke down in front of him as soon as he said it, because I knew he was absolutely right.

I can't even guess as to the actual number of people who died senselessly under my watch, but I know beyond a doubt that it is a far, far higher number than that of how many bad people we actually killed. Faced with this crushing realization for the first time in my life, I was forced to confront the depths of my own powerlessness; namely the inability to prevent good people from dying. I'm sure it's something that doctors, policemen, and many others deal with at some point or other in their careers, but to me it was on such a scale, and took place in such near-total isolation, that I was forced to internalize it all and save it to be dealt with at a later time.

Now that I'm home, I'm going to make it my mission to speak as openly as possible about what happened. Obviously I have some constraints, namely that a lot of what I did is classified, and also that some of it is still a little too personally troubling to discuss in intimate detail. Nevertheless, I feel obligated to say something on behalf of the dead, because they have lost the ability to speak for themselves.

Westerners live in a very tidy, ordered world. They exist, either by sheer ignorance or by self-imposed neglect, in a bubble of financially prosperous isolation that makes them immune to the suffering of people all over the world. Intellectually speaking, I always understood that on some level. Nevertheless, now that I have, for the first time, come face to face with the horrors that impoverished people all over the world take for granted, I feel I have a moral obligation to let the insulated Westerners know just how ugly life can be outside their bubble of prosperity.

Money isn't real. Money is a contrivance of advanced civilizations designed to simplify the process of exchanging goods and services. Yet all over the world, people are slaving away their entire lives to acquire this imaginary substance, and in some places people are even killing one another for no other reason than because it pays a few dollars more than subsistence farming. If we want to at least reduce (since we cannot truly eliminate) the influence of money on people's desire to do evil, then we need to fundamentally reevaluate its place of importance in our society.

My existential crisis is still somewhat ongoing, but thanks to the love of family and friends, I am gradually finding my way back to a place of happiness and hope.

What I want everyone to know right now, more than anything else, is that many good and decent people died on my watch while I was over there. Maybe they weren't American, and maybe there was nothing that could realistically have been done to prevent their deaths, but in the end that doesn't matter. Someone has to speak for them, or their deaths will have been meaningless.

Remember them, so that they may still live on.