Blog 2017 December Word

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Friday, December 15, 2017
Discussion of Daniel Shaw's book on

narcissism
Reading a bit of Daniel Shaw's work (his

book), there seems to be confusion as to why
exactly he would believe Trump must be
understood as swaying a whole nation into
becoming sadists. He is arguing that children
2
come to agree with their unloved parents' (he

can reference the existence of monstrous
mothers -- on his facebook page, he insists on
there being "many" of them for instance --
but through what portions of the book I was
able to read, it has to be drawn out of him...
not his preference) perception of them as bad
when they don't fulfill their emotional
requirements of them, that they develop
inner persecutors and inner protectors that
lord over their psyche, watching over their
"sinning" in this direction, but doesn't
conceive that this "badness" associated with
attending to one's own needs, one's own
growth, could eventually lead to them USING
"leaders" like Trump to execute punishment
against people understood as behaving
counter to their own parents' requirements
for children, that is, as behaving seemingly
self-centeredly, selfishly, smugly, only
because they exist in the realm of "badness"
they themselves had been cowed away from
much exploring. He refers to leaders like
Trump forcing their will on a populace. If
enough children are of the kind he alludes to,
they already have inner persecutors forcing
3
their wills on their own behaviour, and these

drive them to see individual growth as a
sinful, as a bad, thing. Trump, in pursuing
his purpose of shaping society so that it
ultimately feels guilt-free in persecuting and
destroying whole groups of people who well
represent what their early child selves
conceived as parent-not-approved, seems
more an executor of perpetrators already
installed in people's psyches.
His theories, in my early reading of his work,

strongly seem to suggest the problem rests in
the people, not with (charismatic,
hypnotizing... both terms he uses) leaders.
This matters. For if it's a collective populace's
overall childhoods that are the problem,
there are a multiple million number of
"Trumps" that could be called into servicing
this, probably now, unaddressable problem,
and we're wasting our time in trying to show
him up... or more accurately, pursuing some
end actually apart from the purported one of
educating the American public. If this is the
case, the only time our work in unmasking
4
him will prove "effective" is if he fails to carry

out a regressing populace's needs to destroy
their split-off "bad selves." Time would seem
better put into making sure that we ourselves
are free of necessary illusions, to confront
our own need to find sacrifices for our own
dis-ease at societal growth, and so be sure to
function through this period as strategically
astute as possible.
He's written (on his Facebook page) that the

problem is the billions of dollars put into
demonizing liberals, as the reason liberals
like Obama and Hillary Clinton accrue any
sense of legitimately being seen as deeply
flawed. I don't know why he doesn't connect
that the reason liberals are hated isn't owing
to billionaire rightwingers' media influence,
or evil Putinists', or Trump's ostensibly
inherent hypnotizing charisma, but for the
sheer fact that, objectively, they're not people
who can readily be cowed by angry parental
representatives... that is, because they very
ably, very noticeably, intrinsically represent
their own "bad selves," whose destruction
5
will surely bring an end to parental

abandonment and perhaps the acquirement
of their appreciation and love. Liberals are
always for the children, consevatives are
always for the persecuting parent. That's the
dynamic even when "speaking for the
children" has to come about in very
modulated form.
He denies on his Facebook page that Hillary

Clinton and Barack Obama were mostly
adored by the press; given an easy ride. He
refers to a Salon article which emphasizes
just how negative the press was against
Hillary (it was absolutely so in 2008 when
she was running against Obama... reporters
could barely look at her in the eye, but vastly
less so against Sanders... though still some,
yes). He points to the billions of dollars put
forth to demonize them by the rightwing and
Russia. Yet, as incomparably healthy as both
Hillary Clinton and Obama are compared to
Trump... compared to all Republicans,
Hillary Clinton is justifiably becoming seen
as psychically needing America over the last
6
few decades to produce a class of victims

whose pain would find no address... she
wasn't tortured into labelling the women
accusing her husband as scum of the earth;
she may even have known he had sexually
predated upon them when she tried to
manipulate them into being politically docile,
and thus served akin to Weinstein's
assistants/enablers; she wasn't tortured into
believing in being "tough on crime," but felt
the ostensible righteousness of it. Legitimate
criticism of her really should have emerged --
then -- from all of us, even as I still believe
we should have voted for her. She represents
that part of ourselves that participated in
making these last few decades a period of
significant growth of the professional class,
but also one that depressed and stigmatized
millions of the less fortunate. I've argued
before that there was no other way -- that
this doesn't show us up as evil, as someone
like Chris Hedges would argue it does. But
it's sane to recognize it. Societal growth
equals people sinning... has been historically
our greatest affliction. And Obama... good
lord. I don't know if we've projected onto
7
him, or if we've kind of just decided not to

look at him and just consider him a shield at
our side that hedges all self-accusers safely to
the side, but here mostly certainly is
someone we couldn't bare to denature and
address in simple good faith. We have to
examine that. It's different than even it was
with the Kennedy's, because we felt ourselves
reflected in him... something genuinely
promising. With Obama, we don't identify
with him. We efface him; make him and his
family convenient equipage, accompanying
external tools of the psyche... or so it strikes
me.
-----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Daniel, I recently read

your book on narcissism. The question that came
to me is why if you accept that many of us
develop internal persecutors who threaten us with
intolerable abandonment if we do what our
narcissistic parents didn't want us to do -- which
is, ostensibly, attend primarily to our own needs,
individuate, grow -- that you wouldn't
automatically consider that the reason for the
8
1980s working class acceptance of the depletion

of their unions/wages/security owed to a shared
sense that just the past number of decades of
sequential improvement in living standards, with
their corresponding provisioning of supplies to
"flesh out" one's freedom, post-war, meant they
really had to seek out agents they unconsciously
understood would call an end to the good times,
and would "bow" to them, even if they weren't
armed with menacing rhetorical manipulations
and rather hadn't a dime of resources or an ounce
of persuasive suavity/hypnotic appeal?
The second thing that came to mind is that in
your discussion of O'Neil's "Long day's journey
into night," you discussed how learning about
O'Neil had cruelly abandoned his children had
you feeling a more complex
appreciation/assessment of his work. (This seems
relevant considering Salma Hayek's assessment of
Weinstein: never-depleted accurate assessment of
his bravery, along with full knowledge that he
perhaps fuelled this permission by destroying the
vulnerable.) I don't sense this on your Facebook
page, however, in regards to Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama. Would you accept that many of us
9
feel exactly the same way towards them that you

do now with O'Neill? That is, that they are true
wonders, but also people who participated,
weren't ignorant of, at least unconsciously,
devastating many millions of people? This sounds
like pooling them with Weinstein, and thus
flushing them down the drain. But I mean it more
as a means of showing that we don't have blind
spots. Don't show in a larger reveal that we can't
face up to the fact that we haven't gotten
emotionally healthy enough to not need to see
sacrificed innocents incur as society continues to
stigmatize growth-discouraging people/bullies
and normalizes the full participation of every
human being in society, i.e. progresses. That we
haven't gone beyond requiring that in order for
own selves to prosper, we've still needed
displaced "bad" vulnerable selves to suffer for it.
That to deflect this knowledge from ourselves,
we've focussed on rightwing billionaires, Russia,
Trump, who are of course those staggeringly
more malign, but still....
Hillary Clinton is especially relevant to me, as
notable Hillary supporters had argued that many
men went Bernie because he enabled their being
10
invisible to their hatred of women while loudly

enacting upon it. Steinem said that the Bernie
Bros were men who saw in Hillary their own
scary mother, and sought out displaced revenge.
One of your links on this page may have been to
Salon writer Amanda Marcotte. She's mentioned
this many times as well.. the true hatred of a
significant number of feminist men for
empowered women, being demonstrated in how
they can unleash Hillary-hate under his banner
and not suspect the source of it as anything
suspect: I hate her only for being a neoliberal and
a corporate stooge! I wondered while reading
your discussion of Bill Clinton if your discussion
of his hatred of his abusive step-dad was an
advance over Hillary Clinton's own discussion of
her husband's influences with Tina Brown, or
served as super-ego-licensed because the
"enabling mother," the preoedipal "momster,"
doesn't seem the most proper focus of why he
ended up being a serial predator of women.
Thank you for your book. I really enjoyed reading
it, and especially appreciate your discussion of
how trauma theorists are encountering Freudians.
If trauma therapists are the ones who are really
11
feeling their way into the pains of the exposed

victimized right now, and Freudians more on the
defensive, then the momentum is with the trauma
therapists, and freudians will fold their influence
within their work. That's my guess.
at December 15, 2017 No comments: Links to this post

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Thursday, December 14, 2017
Discussions about Al Franken at Clio's

Psyche Discussion Group
12
me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Another case of it's-not-actually-trauma,

inflicted trauma by Al Franken.
The former staffer said she mostly kept the
encounter to herself, not even telling her boss
at the time. But she started to talk more
openly about it to close friends after the
“Access Hollywood” video was aired in
October 2016. In the now infamous tape,
Donald Trump is recorded saying his fame
13
gives him carte blanche to grab women’s

genitals.
“When it really started impacting me in more
of a ‘I’m really angry about about this’ way
was last fall when the Trump tape came out,”
the former aide said. “Hearing Donald
Trump say essentially the same thing that Al
Franken said to me, which was ‘It’s my right
as an entertainer,’ that was a real trigger,”
she continued.
The former staffer says she was particularly
shaken after seeing Franken on TV
responding to the Trump tape last year.
Franken dismissed Trump’s excuse that he
was just engaging in “locker room talk” and
joked that maybe Trump worked out with
Roger Ailes, the now deceased Fox News
chairman who was forced to resign in 2016
amid allegations he sexually harassed several
Fox employees.
“It was a moment in time where I told a
number of my friends about my experience
with Franken because I saw him on the news
being asked about the Trump tape and I felt
like it was really hypocritical,” the former
staffer said. “It’s a power dynamic and the
14
fact that Donald Trump could say that was

not much different from the fact that Al
Franken could say it.”
Franken took pains to separate himself from
Trump earlier this year before he was
accused of sexual harassment, saying just
because the two were “both in a branch of
show business” is no reason to lump them in
the same category politically.
Trent Dec
Landerson 6
You're over-reaching in defensiveness

Patrick.
Where is the claim of trauma here? She's
saying that she's angered by his hypocrisy:
“He was between me and the door and he
was coming at me to kiss me. It was very
quick and I think my brain had to work really
hard to be like ‘Wait, what is happening?’ But
I knew whatever was happening was not
right and I ducked,” the aide said in an
interview. “I was really startled by it and I
15
just sort of booked it towards the door and he

said, ‘It’s my right as an entertainer.’”
“When it really started impacting me in more
of a ‘I’m really angry about about this’ way
was last fall when the Trump tape came out,”
the former aide said.
“It was a moment in time where I told a
number of my friends about my experience
with Franken because I saw him on the news
being asked about the Trump tape and I felt
like it was really hypocritical,” the former
staffer said. “It’s a power dynamic and the
fact that Donald Trump could say that was
not much different from the fact that Al
Franken could say it.”
me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston Dec

change) 7
"Clio's Psyche" needs to have members who

encounter claims against Franken, hear how
women felt when they were made to feel like
props for the powerful, hear of his repeated
sexual sadism, and who rejoice when women
who've kept it stifled for years feel they're
16
empowered to finally say something. (This

was my first reaction with Weinstein as well.)
This can't be a boys-club enclave for
holdouts. We're supposed to be ahead in
progressive attitude and psychological reach,
not defensive rearguard. If we're disgusted at
what is happening to Al Franken, if our first
reaction isn't to deeply involve ourselves in
the situations of those he predated upon
(every person he accosted describes, first,
their initial shock and mortification [she does
say she got angry later, as you say Trevor, but
do psychologists have anything to say about
the full experience of an attack really only
manifesting in full at a later date?... strikes
me that this is essentially what Van der Kolk
is all about, and so why aren't we working
with her story that way? why aren't we
there?], and then a later experience years on
when once again they find themselves deeply
humiliated by his ongoing presumptions), we
need to reflect more and consider what we
ourselves might be guilty of obscuring.
Would how we are reacting in aggregate
enable or retard further victims from coming
17
out? Would they sense we'd rather prefer

they keep quiet? Not make quite such a big
deal out of it? Would they wonder if we're
being self-protective... of note, it's now being
revealed that Matt Lauer repeatedly waylaid
stories that involved spousal cheating.
There's a "Clio's Psyche" article in involving
ourselves in what Al Franken has been doing
for years. The childhood experiences that
gave birth to his sexual sadism. Would any of
us be inclined to want to write it? That's
where we should be. If not, we're rearguard.
Arrive late to a story... which surely isn't
psychohistorical anyway; not about a concern
for the why? about society at all, and then
only in hopes of taking it over so it can be
managed so it doesn't alarm and surprise us
as much in the future.
Trent, your reaction has been to call his
accusers oversensitive, and you've now called
me overreaching... this as half a Democratic
senate realizes that there are perhaps
hundreds more stories that'll come out
amongst Al's thousands of hugs, and that
their dear Al is not just a hapless happy
18
hugger but a Trumpian predator of those he

can presume upon; those who'll feel fear and
know they'll know "repercussions" if they
speak up against him. Brian's was to suggest
I've been triggered into losing my sane
composure [Brian, if democrats can't
automatically find themselves in the full
position of the victims, really relate to them,
then there will be a fauxness to their
populism, and to some extent they'll be
revealed as monsters too, even if only
historically... it's scary when every protector
is gone from the universe, and everyone has
some unconscious agenda to displace
revenge against incurred childhood abusers
upon some ensured subsequent category of
people], and also this: "Unless anything more
serious comes to light than what has come to
light so far, they will not find grounds for
removing him from office. But apparently if
you had your druthers, he’d be out on the
street. What is this about?"
I sensed Franken's sadism instantly, what he
was doing, and knew there were many
victims, and that he had made many people
19
feel small and used -- a shame they'd have to

suffer from for years, which might indeed
have been part of the subconscious plan. I
know the childhood causes. I know there is
no such thing as evil, just repercussions of
child abuse. I know that the clear-headiness I
ultimately seek (in appreciating how after a
mass-sacrifice-enabled golden age era has
passed a society can only further genuine
growth by also ensuring a large class of
victims and thus designates/votes in the
sorts of people who'll ensure it, and so
coming to see it ONLY as vile, that is, not as
something that IS hugely vile but also a
product of a certain kind of childrearing and
the sense of punishment that genuine growth
arouses, can mean not reading how the next
era that follows is worse -- "pure" fascist state
of good folk) can only be guaranteed by
people who I recognize as able to function
sanely. Sane people will react to the
experiences these and other women went
through, with horror, with an inclination
NOT to protect the abuser. Of these, I would
reason with them, and tell them that the
predators themselves could only have done
20
this if they themselves were victimized as

children: that this is one of the likely things
that happens to a person after they've known
abuse. They don't just stifle and hopefully
gain equilibrium later through people finally
believing them. They can grow into monsters.
That's why it's so right to see people agreeing
finally with the victims (a category of people
-- believers of victims, that is -- you'll only
really find in a profound way amongst
democrats, with republicans really being a
victim-ensuring entity [they will protect
certain vulnerable people, but only if it's
known to be part of a movement which'll
produce multitudes more of them -- i.e.,
rightwing populism]).
It didn't happen in the 80s when Frederick
Crews et al. helped manage the child abuse
scandals so they seemed erroneous, a
witchhunt and a crime against probably
innocent parents. But many more are finally
not projecting their parents (imagos?) into
those categorized as empowered predators
and seeking to gain love by agreeing not to
fully see their crimes and indeed to blame the
21
accusers (representatives of their own

childhood selves).
And thus #metoo.
-----
The second woman, who said she was groped
at a fundraiser, told HuffPost it took place in
the fall of 2008 at the Loft Literary Center in
Minneapolis. She was excited about
attending the event and meeting someone
she wanted to support.
“I had never attended anything like that,” she
said.
She and her friends found Franken and
introduced themselves to him.
“I shook his hand, and he put his arm around
my waist and held it there,” the second
woman said. “Then he moved it lower and
cupped my butt.”
“I was completely mortified,” she added.
In order to escape the situation, the woman
excused herself to go to the bathroom. At that
point, she said, Franken leaned in and
suggested that he accompany her. She
22
grabbed her friend and fled to the bathroom

without him.
-----
As Kemplin, then 27, posed for a photo with
him, she said, he put his arm around her and
grabbed her breast, holding onto her for up
to 10 seconds.
“I remember clenching up and how you just
feel yourself flushed,” she told CNN. “And I
remember thinking — is he going to move his
hand? Was it an accident? Was he going to
move his hand? He never moved his hand.”
“Looking back at the picture, Kemplin said
she recalls feeling frozen and numb: ‘I did
not process it in those split seconds.’ ”
Now, many years later, Kemplin said that “I
just feel so sorry for that young girl in that
picture.”
“You’re immediately put on the spot. What
are you going to do? What are you going to
do? Your mind goes a mile a minute. Who
was I going to tell?” the 41-year-old told
CNN, saying she was too embarrassed to tell
the other soldiers.
23
On Thursday, Kemplin told CNN that when

she saw Tweeden’s story, she “felt like the rug
was pulled out from underneath me.”
Kemplin said she later contacted Tweeden
and decided to speak out, too.
-----
The picture was striking. The military
airplane. The sleeping woman. The
outstretched hands. The mischievous smile.
The Look what I’m getting away
withimpishness directed at the camera.
On Thursday, Leeann Tweeden, a radio host
and former model, came forwardwith the
accusation that Senator Al Franken of
Minnesota had kissed her against her will
during a 2006 United Service Organizations
trip to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In a
story posted to the website of Los Angeles’s
KABC station, Tweeden shared her
experience with Franken. She also shared
that photo. “I couldn’t believe it,” she wrote.
“He groped me, without my consent, while I
was asleep.”
I felt violated all over again. Embarrassed.
Belittled. Humiliated.
24
How dare anyone grab my breasts like this

and think it’s funny?
I told my husband everything that happened
and showed him the picture.
I wanted to shout my story to the world with
a megaphone to anyone who would listen,
but even as angry as I was, I was worried
about the potential backlash and damage
going public might have on my career as a
broadcaster.
But that was then, this is now. I’m no longer
afraid.
-----
she wanted to support.“I had never attended
anything like that,” she said.
She and her friends found Franken and
introduced themselves to him.
cupped my butt.”
25

without him.
- show quoted text -
Trent Dec
Landerson 7
I'd like to ask who on this list didn't feel it

was a good thing when Roger Aisles or
Weinstein, et al, were taken down? Please
give your opinion.
That was monstrous sexual sadism in my
opinion.
I think it's very different with Franken. I'm
willing to give him a chance despite him
being inappropriate, and if he can't show
some self-control, like Weiner, he shouldn't
be allowed back in.
I have already pointed out Patrick, that you
should consider becoming a therapist
yourself and see what is real. I'm giving my
26
opinion of what I've seen come up and what I

haven't seen come up in the clinic. The
question is whether I'm a reactionary, am
conservative in attitude, unable to see whats
really there or lying and covering it up for
some agenda. Then there is the question of
whether you might be mistaken. Again, don't
listen to me, see for yourself. But don't
bellyache that this list serv doesn't have
members who echo your unsubstantiated
claims.
Go do the hard work and write the papers or
books that will change people's minds.
There are many lies in politics and I smell a
rat,
Trent
me (Patrick McEvoy- 11:10 AM (1

Halston change) minute ago)
Al Franken, Eli Weisel, Garrison Keillor, Bill

Clinton, Al Gore, Woody Allen, Dustin
Hoffman... are all more interesting to me
than Weinstein. No one is made
uncomfortable hearing of Weinstein being
27
taken down, but with the others, yes.

Weinstein isn't themselves, but the others--
Al Franken was a way in which a lot of people
could give licence to their inner bully, but
because it was directed against Republicans
it was allowed to pass notice. This article by
Salena Zito gets at that. I hypothesized a
resignation speech by him (and here's cnn
video of how one of his accusers responded
to his classless resignation speech, where he
seemed to want to blame them, and further
ignored how he had made them "profoundly
uncomfortable"... this Trevor, I SAW) where
he would fully admit that he intended to
degrade women in compromised positions
vis-a-vis himself, and there I mentioned he
would also draw people's consideration that a
person who could do that could still end up
proving solid on issues like abortion rights
(mind you, I seem to remember Socarides
saying that some predators alleviate guilt
that way). Truly, even there I was being soft
on him... as I hoped I alluded to in that
article from "Outline" magazine, which
pointed out how populists sometimes have
28
this uncomfortable habit of ending up

forgetting about women's issues they were
formerly so strong on as they champion the
working people. I felt that in the end he
would end up finding means to indulge in
revenge against women (i.e. his mother), a la
what developed with the Bernie Bros. and
their peculiar hatred of Hillary Clinton. I was
scared of him; of how he would ultimately
end up serving the American people.
I personally would love it I had some people
on this list admit just how jubilant they are to
find this #metoo movement occurring and
for criminal physical assault not to be
watered down into harassment or improper
conduct, not, that is, simply appreciative, but
alarmed at it getting out of control, and
worried at women probably having
misremembered things. I personally see
signs here of psychohistorical evolution,
where abuses that were once felt necessary
for a society to obtain equilibrium are no
longer as much required. As I've argued
earlier, out of people like that, we can start
talking widely about the societal damage
29
incurred by mass difficulties during the

preoedipal period, and getting a listen... how
do so many people become this way, people
we want to like, really?
There are many means to do good in this
world, Trevor, and I don't personally believe
that tough love (bellyache? do the hard
work?) is one of them. Being amongst the
ones who believe Franken is a serial predator
shouldn't mean finding oneself defined as
fundamentally ignorant of the ways of
people. If that's what a career in counselling
can do for you, offer this kind of leverage,
presume this kind of level of ignorance...
shame people and get away with it, it makes
one want to do a Foucault on the profession.
You can for instance hope to sway people
who are themselves therapists. You surely
should suss out venues to see if they're
sincere in wanting your voice more broadly
heard, or just hoping you'll find yourself
corrected... as Brian assumed the hearings
onto Franken's behaviour would have done
to the field of accusers "aligned" against him.
DeMausian psychohistory has very little play
30
in the publishing world. Charles W. Socarides

has very little sway as well... outside of
venues that are simply rancid. I get my
thoughts out the way I am able to now. With
#metoo I'm seeing the possibility of venues
opening up to me. It'll be amongst liberals
who are horrified at what their fellow liberals
have turned into, and who are ready to take
in voices they previously hadn't felt sufficient
prompting to really focus on and deeply
consider: they already had buttressing that
worked for them, so alien thoughts had to
remain alien.
Do people at Clio like my ideas? If so, I could
try and publish something at this journal. I
am proud of what I sent to JOP, but I'm not
sure that venue wants my work just now (and
if they do, they have a funny way of showing
it.) I'm not doing this though if I'm mostly
just an annoyance... someone who's
tolerated, to demonstrate the openness of the
Clio's Psyche project. It's hard work to be
where I am right now, to insist on fighting
this kind of fight, and I expect a venue that
appreciates that.
31
If someone knows of another venue that

might be interested in publishing work from
me, please contact me at
pmcevoyhalston@gmail.com. I don't expect
to be published, but I do expect a reader who
if s/he has to reject, is in profound sympathy
with my voice.

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Sunday, December 10, 2017
Conversations about Richard's Best 2017

List at the NewYorker Movie Facebook
Club
Richard Brody shared a link.

Moderator · December 8 at 2:46pm
It's that time of the year—the time for the
best-of list, and, because it's been a good one
for the art of movies, it's a long list; I've
added a word about the state of the business
(rather, the sorry state of the business's
32
culture) and how it relates to the state of the

art—now as ever:
https://www.newyorker.com/…/2017-
i…/the-best-movies-of-2017…
The Best Movies of 2017

The best movies aren’t only ones that include
new voices; they’re also ones that include
voices in new ways.
NEWYORKER.COM
Like
John Biers Is it that time of year? It seems
early for “Best of” lists now instead of the end
of December? I don’t understand why it has
shifted.
33
John Salvatore Because critics have

already seen all films slated to be released by
year end
Suparna Sharma A long list of must-watch
asap!! Delighted. Thanks :)
Judith Broadhurst Your list does what I
like most: Introduces me to films I wouldn't
have known about rather than just the ones
that I learn about everywhere else. Thank
you.
Will Thede I love that "Colossal" makes the
list - so underrated. I'm upset "Beach Rats" is
so high though. I thought it was thoroughly
awful. Eliza Hitmann has a weird unsubtle-
subtlety to her filmmaking. She wants to tell
truths in a quiet way, but I can almost hear
her loudly whispering into my ear: "Isn't this
subtle? Look how subtle I'm being." Not a
fan.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston You can't tell by
the picture, but "Get Out" was his best film.
They really should change it, because
otherwise you superimpose these two as two
more white goons from the film (though in
34
fact, the grandmother, whose house this is,

might have been one).
Patrick McEvoy-Halston "Wonder

Wheel" disclosed what we don't want to
know about ourselves. "Get Out" revealed
what we're in a hurry to know about
ourselves. Where were the exclusions and
suppressions in that film? If "Wonder Wheel"
was Al Franken dawning on what he'd done
in his past and his state of mind while doing
it, "Get Out" is his resignation speech: the
trouble's actually over there.
Anthony Salvatore Get Out at #1, I gotta
disagree on that. Good Time and A Ghost
Story defiantly belong in the top 5 though.
Anthony Salvatore Richard, why didn’t
Lady Bird make your top ten? Also, 3
Billboards didn’t even make the list.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston It's actually
number one; look at the picture (nobody
would actually WANT to put up a picture
which features white rich people before a
stately home, that isn't sardonic, not in 2017:
35
this, they were clearly forced into). Here's

why he voted for it as best film of the year:
"This air of restraint is conspicuous
throughout the film, and the price of that
clarity is freedom—Gerwig’s own as well as
that of the actors. 'Lady Bird,' daring,
distinctive, and personal in text and theme, is
recognizably conventional in texture and
style. The bulk of the film is, in effect,
pictures of actors acting—acting with skill
and care, imagination and vigor, but with no
more originality of tone or temperament than
Gerwig brings to the direction of the film—at
least, to most of the direction of the film.
There’s nobody in the film who performs
with the freedom or the originality that
Gerwig herself offers as an actor—in part,
because Gerwig doesn’t give her actors an
open narrative framework or production
environment akin to the ones that have given
rise to her own most original performances.
But though this sounds like a diss and all,
like, an actually very serious diss -- and close
to a dismissive one -- it remains my very best
film of the year."
36
John Salvatore Surprised to see Song to

Song on here...
Elsa Lopes Very surprised! :)
Arturo Ancira García Gaston Benitez
David Dean Daniel Saw Lady Bird and
Three Billboards.. back to back and while
Lady Bird was an entertaining film, Three
Billboards thoroughly blew it away in terms
of originality, acting, storytelling and just
plain cinematic gusto. Hard to believe the
excessive hype associated with Lady Bird,
much less that it would top anyone's top
films list for the year.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The
encouragement by the sheriff of Sam
Rockwell's character was nice to see. It's too
bad the movie had to show that his getting a
bit of support from a needed father-figure,
absent in his life as he had then proven just
an appendage of his more cunning mother,
was something he got to, well, keep, only
after also being broken into numerous pieces.
Braver if the film had allowed itself to argue
that we are allowed to feel good over anyone
receiving therapeutic assistance they've
37
always needed, even if it's done without the

person being discombobulated first.
Paula Glynn Daniel Florido
Nicolas Bordet Twin Peaks would
definitely deserve to be in the top 10...
Mark Schaffer Actually think it was a
pretty thin year
Like
Laurel Buss I know Brody panned it, but
Call Me By Your Name deserves a place on
this list.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I'm not sure it
could withstand the Bryan Singer. And Corey
Feldman is back in the news, and he thought
a "grooming" picture.
Mark Schaffer Meh
Jamie Gorham Thanks Richard for your
list. Haven't seen one of the movies on
it,have heard of two. The number one Peels
film,and the one with Natalie Portman. A bad
year for me watching film's for sure. But now
I have your list and go forth (En Avant) into
battle! Thanks again,keep on keeping on
Richard. Later.
38
Ruben Carranza Thank you that

introduction, Richard. It's probably even
more important than the list itself.
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Conversations about Ingrid Bergman at

the NewYorker Movie Facebook Club

A little late because of the tumult of movies
and news, but a glance at the December TCM
lineup yields treasures, some pretty rare, and
some curiosities that I'm looking forward to
discovering. In the latter category, tomorrow
(Dec. 6), The Great Garrick, starring Brian
Aherne as the great eighteenth-century actor
(a personality who comes in for extensive
discussion in Boswell's Life of Johnson).
Busby Berkeley's For Me and My Gal (Dec. 7)
is another stage story—combined with...a
First World War drama; it's Gene Kelly's first
movie role, and one of Judy Garland's most
luminous ones. Speaking of firsts—Gregory
Peck's first film, Jacques Tourneur's Second
World War (Russian-front) drama Days of
Glory—I haven't seen it since 1983, in Paris,
39
when it played at the branch of the

Cinémathèque that then existed on the top
floor of Beaubourg (you'd come out of the
movies and be on a splendid outdoor patio,
with café, overlooking the city). My choice for
best-rarest movie on the schedule: Fear, from
1954—the last film that Roberto Rossellini
and Ingrid Bergman made together, a tense
story of marital torment, all-too-apt for the
situation. My favorite Marx Brothers film,
Horse Feathers, Dec. 11 ("Whatever it is, I'm
against it"). One of my favorite Howard
Hawks films is Tiger Shark, from 1932; Raoul
Walsh's 1941 remake, Manpower, also stars
Edward G. Robinson, this time, alongside
Marlene Dietrich and George Raft. The 1954
remake of A Star Is Born, directed by George
Cukor, starring Judy Garland and James
Mason; there, Garland gives what I consider
one of the greatest performances in the
history of movies.
Overflowing bounty on Dec. 17: Albert
Brooks's Real Life (the brilliant parody of An
American Family) and Modern Romance, F.
W. Murnau's Sunrise (a legitimate choice,
still, as best movie ever), and two more by
40
Roberto Rossellini: The Flowers of St.

Francis, in which he shows how radical
Christianity remains; and Blaise Pascal, in
which he drags radical Christianity into
scientific modernity. Douglas Sirk's A
Scandal in Paris (Dec. 19) is a diabolically
funny historical adventure, starring George
Sanders as Vidocq, the robber who became
police chief of Paris. (It's got an
extraordinary cast of émigré character actors
who gleefully conjure the tangles of
European history.) (I'll stop there for now
and get to the end of the month later on.)
https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-front-
row-for-me-and-my-gal…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazi…/
…/08/24/a-life-of-her-own…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201
0/07/05/the-fury-3…
https://www.newyorker.com/…/movi…/the-
flowers-of-st-francis…
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-a…/
…/a-scandal-in-paris…
41
The Genius of Ingrid Bergman

To celebrate the actress’s centenary, MOMA
and BAM Cinématek are showing
retrospectives of her greatest—and most
infamous—films.
NEWYORKER.COM
Ellen Houlihan what other Albert Brooks
might you or others here in the group
recommend? just getting into him
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel "Lost in

America" (actor/director/writer) and
"Broadcast News" (actor)
Ellen Houlihan I loved "Defending Your

Life" recently caught it on tv
42
Elizabeth Blakeslee Defending Your Life

is terrific.
Carlos Valladares His first four directed

films are major, v worth your time. Real Life
is screamingly funny; Modern Romance is
painfully honest; Lost in America is acerbic
and cutting; Defending Your Life is radically
heartwarming!
Chris Karr I take Mother over any of them

and all of them together. Masterpiece — flaws
and all.
Richard BrodyGroup Moderator Yes—

Mother:
https://www.newyorker.com/.../richar.../the
-front-row-mother
The Front Row: “Mother”

Albert Brooks’s 1996 film “Mother” is a
comedy about a solitary artist’s creative
exertions.
43
NEWYORKER.COM
Okum Modern Romance is his masterpiece.
One of Kubrick's favorites.
David Troia In addition to being extremely

funny, Lost in America and Defending Your
Life also reflect one's struggle to find purpose
and happiness in life. For that reason, I'd
start with those two.
Carlos Valladares I love The Great
Garrick! One of the strangest films about
acting and artifice I've seen—from the great
James Whale.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel And Aherne's

magnificent voice.
Chris Schneider I haven't seen the film, so
this wouldn't count as a recommendation,
but ... FEAR is alleged to be based on a novel
by Stefan Zweig. That's one more reason to
see it.
Jamie Gorham Great post. Paths of Glory

is magnificent,you messed up on Horse
44
Feathers(though I love it),Night at the Opera

is my favorite. Especially the song "Alone" in
it. Harpo on his namesake very special.
Thanks for the update and list okit movies.
Many I haven't seen.
Barbara Fox Nothing against Grace Kelly -

a lovely presence on the screen and a better
actress than often credited - but really? Her
frumping down in "Country Girl" over
Garland's nothing-left-in-the-wings
performance? Really?? One of Oscar's great
mistakes. (And James Mason never winning
one either is another).
And George Sanders as Vidocq is another
great treat.
Jamie Gorham Can't believe James Mason

never won one. Criminal.
Barbara Fox A great leading man, a suave

villain, and a fantastic character actor. He
was the complete package.
45
Jamie Gorham Cross of Iron,Deen it?

Schell,Coburn,Mason. Eastern front WWII.
Great movie,Mason has smaller role.
Directed by Saying Peckinpah
Barbara Fox Yes, I have! Also a big

Maximillian Schell fan.
Ralph Benner No one has anything to say
about Ingrid? I’ll start with Ingmar
Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata.” Their
collaboration was tentatively in the works for
years, each promising that one day they’d get
together. Finally Ingmar wrote “Autumn,”
which stacks the deck against Ingrid as a
never-there mother to Liv Ullmann.
Excepting “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman
rarely gives viewers much of an escape and in
this one, meant to be a searing exposure of
parental sins, watching in excruciating close-
up Liv berate Ingrid for the long list of
motherhood transgressions, the audience has
to find ways to laugh it off as relief. As the
Sins of Ingrid are cataloged, Ingmar
unintentionally and Ingrid sneakily puts us
on her side: we cheer her on when she plots
46
to flee Liv’s domain of dreary dramaturgy,

what with her ultra-neat Swede asylum and
housefrau-braided hair. “Autumn Sonata” is
Ingrid’s movie swan song—TV’s “A Woman
Named Golda” was her lying-in-state kiss-off
—and her heralded beauty hasn’t lost its
extraordinary power; we get lost in it and if
we must endure the closing in on faces, who
better than hers to zero in on? One of the
movie’s annoyances is that Ingrid’s character
doesn’t have enough ammunition to give the
alleged truth-revealing bangs really nasty
firepower. Based on our own familial wars,
there are plenty of penetrating bullets
parents can shoot back at their adult children
when the blame games start. But Ingmar isn’t
into fair play, he’s into vengeance and
incredibility—elements Ingrid, re her own
experiences as frequently absent mother in
real life, argued with him over and discusses
in her autobiography. He remained blindly
obstinate to his outcome: when Liv’s letter to
mother arrives at the end, his house of love
reconsidered has collapsed into a Nordic
commedia dell’arte.
47
Patrick McEvoy-Halston "the audience

has to find ways to laugh it off as relief."
We do?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston We should wish

parents were more effective in shooting
penetrating bullets into their children, only
for some weird reason, Ingmar isn't into
that?
Every parent who has loads of "bullets" they
could shoot back at their children, is a parent
who knows they've done wrong, and has
experience knowing that their own
mistreatment of their children has meant
their children have had to decide at some
level they must be bad, wrong, to blame, even
if they had an essential correct sense they
weren't actually at all, for they intuited
immediately that reprisals for not seeing
their parents as their parents required them
to for their own emotional equlibrium meant
possibly losing all of their support and love,
as they withdrew it in retribution... which
would be totally crushing at that age. Parents
play on this to no end (see the results in
48
"Lady Bird"), but something about 60s/70s

culture enabled for a short while Ingmar to
go where supervising inner parental altars in
the brain, usually never permit. He didn't
refuse fair play; for the first time until
possibly today's #metoo, he showed things
fairly... as they are.

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Conversation about different waves of

feminism, Oliver vs. Hoffman, and
Affleck at the NewYorker Movie
Facebook Club
Ellen Houlihan shared a link.

December 5 at 3:38pm
Were any NY film friends at this panel? Must
watch video at the link. Imagine this was
forbidden last year to Casey Affleck.
49
John Oliver Gets Into Heated Argument

With Dustin Hoffman Over Harassment at
Film Panel (Report)
At a 'Wag the Dog' 20th anniversary
screening, the 'Last Week Tonight' host
questioned Hoffman over recent sexual
harassment allegations against him.
Eileen Carson Gillies Haven't seen
anything on Casey Affleck except we heard he
had unwanted sexual encounters with
women. Why haven't these women come out?
I won't see another Affleck film - either Casey
or Ben.
Richard Biegen
http://dailyentertainmentnews.com/.../mag
dalena-gorka.../
50
Magdalena Gorka and Amanda White Casey

Affleck's Accusers (Bio, Wiki)
Magdalena Gorka and Amanda White are
the…
Maureen Daniels I'm pretty horrified by
this ambush, tbh. Thoroughly sick of this
whole topic, it seems to have almost
consumed the group to the point where any
post not on the subject of alleged abuse is a
delightful surprise.
Kiera Parrott Yeah, I'm pretty horrified,
too. At decades after decades of powerful
men getting away with harassment and abuse
without one iota of consequence.
Jeremy Jules Edwards You make it sound
like you’re the victim here and that is what’s
wrong with our society, and why women feel
unsafe talking about real abuse, complaining
about your favorite fb groups posting
bummer content
Maureen Daniels Really, Jeremy Jules
Edwards? Don't mansplain 'what's wrong
51
with our society' to me, especially not on

women's issues. Here I am complaining, and
there you are telling me I shouldn't. How
dare you. And Kiera Parrott, it's not just
decades. It's many centuries, millenia. Do
you think you are talking to a school child?
My daughter is older than you and I have
been a feminist and political activist all my
life. While you are all wringing your hands
over whether some actress was groped back
in 1973, there are women all over the world
being raped, beaten and murdered on a daily
basis. Their children are being killed and
their homes and cities bombed. Why don't
you go and be outraged about that abuse?
Kiera Parrott Maureen Daniels :
#whitefeminism#thirdwavefeminism
#intersectionalfeminism Look them up. You
may have burned your bra back in the day,
but feminism has and continues to evolve.
We don't throw some of our sisters under the
bus in a game of "who's oppressed or abused
more." NOPE.
Maureen Daniels Ridiculous comment,
Kiera Parrott. What do you think you are
saying, that your feminism is better than my
52
feminism? How evolved is that? Sex scandals

of the rich and famous are a distraction for
the gullible masses.
Maureen Daniels Incidentally, at the time
of the infamous 'bra-burning', which was a
one-off, staged event in protest at a Miss
America contest in 1968, I was only 8. You
don't seem very well-versed in feminist
history for someone who thinks their version
is so superior.
Kiera Parrott Maureen Daniels Nope.
That's a complete misread and actually the
opposite of what I said. The point is that
setting up a hierarchy of concern or care
(ignore or dismiss the "lesser" crime of
sexual harassment in order to focus on the
"real issue" of rape and sexual assault) is not
feminism. It dismisses the very real, very
damaging oppression that women face--both
those who are assaulted as well as those who
are harassed. And by setting up a value
judgment in that way (that harassment is not
that big of a deal compared to more violent
forms of abuse), we ignore the intrinsic
connection between the two. Harassment,
like rape, is not about sex. Or flirting. It's
53
about power. Who has it, who wields it, and

who doesn't.
Maureen Daniels Ooo, really? Well, thanks
for the lecture on what it's about.
Kiera Parrott Maureen Daniels Look, the
bra-burning comment I made was
argumentative and unhelpful. I shouldn't
have gone there. I'm sorry. Truly, what
disturbs so many (slightly) younger feminists
is that we feel betrayed by the Second Wave
feminists who came and fought before us.
This goes doubly for women of color whose
particular issues are often ignored
completely. Yes, there's a difference between
obnoxious comments, groping, and a violent
assault. Of course there is. But right now we
are in a *moment.* A potentially tectonic
shift in the way women are able to speak, be
heard (be believed!). And the ripple effects of
this (I hope) will transform not just
Hollywood but all industries. Silence is no
longer an option for us. And I'm damn proud
to be alive right now witnessing it.
Diane Lake Maureen Daniels: It's not just
about celebrities. Tarana Burke, who started
the #MeToo slogan long before it was a
54
hashtag to raise awareness of the

pervasiveness of abuse in society: "This
reckoning appears to have sprung up
overnight. But it has actually been simmering
for years, decades, centuries. Actors and
writers and journalists and dishwashers and
fruit pickers alike: they'd had enough. What
had manifested as shame exploded into
outrage. Fear became fury."
Jeremy Jules Edwards "Sex scandals of
the rich and famous are a distraction for the
gullible masses." Yeah, I think you may have
missed the point on this
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Maureen
Daniels "While you are all wringing your
hands over whether some actress was groped
back in 1973, there are women all over the
world being raped, beaten and murdered on
a daily basis. Their children are being killed
and their homes and cities bombed. Why
don't you go and be outraged about that
abuse?"
The kinds of people who can be trusted to do
something about... any existing horror in the
world, really, are to me the ones who begin to
55
see basic, everyday activity that had been

normalized but which had always been
abusive, as alien and offensive. You'd admit
that your speech here is reminiscent of the
scolding mother reducing all her daughter's
concerns into the inconsequential. My point
would be the daughter who succumbed to
your view, who didn't recognize in it a need
to sustain abuse that a more healthy younger
generation must learn to recognize and
reject, would be neglecting actual abuse she
had incurred, and that broken person can't
be counted on as much to stop repeating the
pattern.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Kiera Parrott
Great stuff. About this bit, though -- "Yes,
there's a difference between obnoxious
comments, groping, and a violent assault. Of
course there is. But right now we are in a
*moment.*" -- I think with this elision of the
possibility of eternal, paramount importance,
you keep something that shouldn't be
hidden, still relatively hidden. Gropings and
obnoxious comments can resemble the sorts
of treatment a person can expect to receive
early in their lives, that can devastate in their
56
communicated lack of respect and love. If

this becomes forefront, rather than
comparatively more unusual occurrences like
rape, we get a better sense of just how many
people have been damaged in our society,
and just how much the formation of our
society owes to the diverted, perverse needs,
of a quite sick overall population.
https://www.nytimes.com/.../when-is-
speech-violence.html...
Opinion | When Is Speech Violence?

Brain science distinguishes verbal
abusiveness from mere offensiveness.
NYTIMES.COM
Kiera Parrott Patrick McEvoy-Halston
That is an excellent point. You're absolutely
right. The damage this causes is broad and
deep, and is such clear evidence of the
systemic forces at work. Thank you for
pointing that out. Right on.
57
Eileen Carson Gillies Oh, come on,

Maureen, we have to deal with this, at least I
have to. Too serious to ignore.
Cailin Yatsko I was there last night with
fellow TFI grantees.
https://medium.com/.../real-conversations-
take-hard-work...
Real conversations take hard work… and

thank goodness John Oliver is here to…
Last night’s Tribeca Film Institute’s WAG
THE DOG…
MEDIUM.COM
Maureen Daniels Some chance of ignoring
it when it is constantly being harped on and
dissected, on and on, over and over.
Tricia Walter You just scroll past it �
Maureen Daniels Thanks for the handy
hint.
Judith Karline Everybody knows about
Affleck and his career remains untouched.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Just from a
legal/philosophical standpoint -- "You've
58
given no evidence to show it didn't

[happen]." -- It is extremely difficult to prove
a negative. (And that's why we've got
"innocent until proven guilty.") Given
Oliver's exceptional verbal skills and
knowledge, I'm a bit surprised he'd make
such an argumentative/rhetorical slip. (Also
curious that Oliver is the one who asked
people not to record the, um, discussion.)
Luis Eduardo Archundia Ortiz Since
Holy Wood shifted to the sainthood business
expect the loss of a whole constellation of
show-biz stars
Patrick McEvoy-Halston There is a
countermove available to them though. They
can just say that they've come to see some
virtue in Trump. Abusers who align
themselves with him, just don't seem to elicit
the same sort of interest and scrutiny. It's
like they become just another head of the
nativist beast that is chasing up all our skirts,
and we have to accept them as an apocalyptic
cretin that is making itself more and more
comfortable in our universe.
59
Sandra Barton Damn! Way to go yet again,

John Oliver! You never cease to amaze me,
always doing the 1000% right thing!
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel And in
counterpoint (or complement), this --
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../dustin-
hoffman...
LikeShow more reactions
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel It is a bit
concerning that Jane Rosenthal tried to enter
the conversation a couple of times and Oliver
wouldn't pause to let her in. Btw, what
"documentary" is Hoffman referencing,
seemingly as some sort of defense of his
behavior?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I hope she is
asked about that. Watching the video, I
wondered if this was the case myself. Oliver
bracing himself to not relent in this situation,
might mean transference. He is arguing that
Dustin Hoffman isn't showing that he is
properly reflective; that he is being defensive
about admitting that the problems that were
in him, are showing signs of still remaining
in him. If this is the case (and I think it is)
and you want to provoke him into
60
considering this, you shouldn't provide

justified reasons for someone to feel they're
right to resist you.
Andrea Hilton I watched the documentary
Hoffman mentions, long before this
controversy. I don't remember much about it
other than the fact that he seemed like a real
ass - so much so that the revelations about
his behavior, when they became public,
weren't surprising.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123230/
Write a reply...
Patrick McEvoy-Halston To me what
ends up happening with the two Afflecks is of
high interest. We're supposed to in an era
where, finally, you can't be too big to not be
taken down. Ostensibly, no empowered men
can now find social cues informing them that
whatever may happen to other men, society
is mostly still interested in protecting you.
I'm not sure if this is exactly the case, though.
I think if I was one of the two Afflecks I'd
61
already be reading that society would to

some extent do what Southern women are
doing for Moore, that is, serve as a bulwark
protector of them, to waylay accusers and
even malign them, if they were being
positioned for societal expulsion. The
reason? I suspect that #metoo has
momentum out of two arising elements: one,
the one we only seem to notice -- the rise of a
more emotionally evolved culture; and two,
nativism, which seeks to use the movement
to take down anyone who can't be imagined
as playing whatever requisite part our society
requires of them, as we drift off into a sort of
a nativist delusional state for ten to fifteen
years. Both Afflecks may be more dubious in
their quintessential liberalism than
Weinstein, and certainly Dustin Hoffman.
Yet, somehow, whatever it proves they done
to women, I don't see them not playing a
significant part in our future unfolding
national/societal drama. We've already
assigned them parts, and we'll be furious at
anyone who intrudes to break up our play.
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
62
Conversation about "Lady Bird" at the

NewYorker Movie Facebook Club
Barbara Monahan
December 3 at 8:49pm · Holmdel, NJ, United
States
Just saw Lady Bird. Disappointed. Can someone
make a case to justify all the fanfare?
John Wood Not all movies are for everyone
Sandra J. Bierman Exactly. I loved it. And the
acting is superb.
Roxanne Jones Could you expand on why you
thought it was disappointing? I would usually run
to see a movie like this but I'm so done with
63
coming-of-age stories at this point. How does this

"disaffected white teen grows up" movie differ
from the countless others?
David Troia Thank you for summing up what I'm
feeling about this film as well. While I'm drawn
to this movie based on all the positive press,
coming-of-age stories rarely seem to reflect any
sort of relatable experience that bonds me to the
work.
Melissa Pilar I'm tired of them, too. Give me
some gritty adult stuff to match this world these
days.
Aria Chiodo It's more than simply a coming-of-
age story-- the mother-daughter relationship is a
core aspect of the story.
Pamela Meek When I saw it, images of my
relationship with my mother came flashing
through along with my relationship with my
daughter along with my sense of self. To me Lady
Bird is finally a movie from the female’s point of
view at all ages. I think it is a masterpiece. I’m
sick to death of movies by, for and about men.
Katie Kasten Matthies I agree with you,
Barbara. I was disappointed and wondered, what
did others see in it that I missed??
64
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Laurie Metcalf

deserves an Oscar nomination at the very least.
Sandra J. Bierman Both of them deserve a
nomination
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel It is a duet. (A
nomination for Ronan would continue her record
for "Atonement" and "Brooklyn.")
Jennifer Strasbaugh Ortiz Agreed! She is a
brilliant actor!
Like
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel And Tracy Letts
elevates an underwritten part.
Judy Mam I’ll see anything with Tracy Letts in
it.
Erik B. Anderson I have no idea why it's so
beloved. Everything that happened was just
miserable. It felt like a very accurate coming of
age story, but accurate as to how miserable it all
was.
Aaron Heinsman For me that was the point.
Authentic, emotional, yet not at all sentimental.
Erik B. Anderson Did you see the sentimental
letters the mother wrote in the end? That was the
65
sentimental deus ex machina that never exists in

real life.
Aaron Heinsman I didn't feel that way. To me,
sentimental would've been making it in time to
see her in the terminal.
Erik B. Anderson What's not sentimental about
calling your mother?
Aaron Heinsman Perhaps to a point. Depends on
perspective. To me calling is fine. Sentimental is
having the cathartic conversation.
Erik B. Anderson
GIPHY
Aaron Heinsman Erik B. Anderson you're so
right I'm so wrong please come instruct me in all
facets of my life
Carolyn Rosenfeld raised two girls now in their
40s nothing has changed perfect teen and mother
dynamic
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Which mother-
daughter dynamic, for there's two in the film.
Lady Bird's mother's mother was an abusive
alcoholic who wasn't just a pain in the neck but
intended her daughter harm. This gets morphed a
generation later into a mother who may be
neurotic and fearful but whose love of her
66
daughter cannot be questioned. Or is this the

dynamic? Displace truly unacceptable terrible
truths far away, while keeping more acceptable
and more minor ones up close, done in a fashion
so you give the appearance of no-holds-barred
reveal?... is this a consciously acceptable vs.
unconscious full knowledge dynamic? Is that the
norm?
Jordan Musheno It’s about rich people
pretending to be poor
Erik B. Anderson How so?
Jordan Musheno Erik B. Anderson Laurie
Metcalfe is complaining about spending 3$ on a
magazine and then something equally ridiculous
in every scene that follows, but still sends her kid
to private school, her son to Berkeley, her
daughter to NYC eventually and they have a
damn financial advisor. I think it’s a very good
movie but everytime they bring up finances I
rolled my eyes because this is clearly from the
perspective of someone who knows nothing about
struggling financially. And I’m saying this well
aware that the husband was laid off.
Jordan Musheno If anything, it’s middle class
envy of the 1%
67
Like
Joe Procopio Actually, Jordan, you're mistaken.
This was a good reflection of my family's
circumstances growing up. Very much a lower-
middle-class family perpetually teetering on the
edge of not being able to make ends meet. I went
to "private" school (i.e., catholic schools) because
my parents worked out a "barter" via volunteering
in order to get a tuition reduction, and we
received some financial assistance from our local
parish. Yet our total family income in those years
(mid-1980s) was less than 20K. Every
expenditure, big or small, was a struggle and a
tradeoff, and like many families, we dealt with
second mortgages, health crises, layoffs, etc.
Were we living in poverty...no, but for years we
were one misfortune away from it.
Jordan Musheno Well, if your family’s income
was 20k a year, you’d use half of it on tuition for
one year of private school.
Jordan Musheno There’s nothing about
bartering or volunteering. This doesn’t even
include the cost of Berkeley, rent and tuition in
NYC and many other things.
Joe Procopio It's a movie, Jordan, it doesn't have
to provide you with every detail of their budget
68
for it to have a feeling of veracity. But, hey, I

lived through a very similar experience...if the
movie doesn't work for you, so be it.
Jordan Musheno They acted like they lived in
the damn ghetto in this movie. Delusional.
Jordan Musheno Joe Procopio the movie does
for the most part, but when characters prying for
sympathy for their struggle, when economics are
brought up over and over again ... I couldn’t help
but not get bothered by it
Joe Procopio I think the economics were brought
up so many times because it was one way the
movie wanted to underscore the tension between
the daughter and her mother. The mother, as the
sole breadwiiner at one point in the movie, was
hyper-concerned about the financial stability of
the family while the daughter was a bit too
oblivious to it. It was just another way to show
how disconnected they were from one another. I
do not believe the intent was to garner sympathy
from the audience.
Jordan Musheno Joe Procopio I think that’s an
interesting perspective that I can get behind. I just
struggled with the aspect because it seemed so
out of touch with reality. Like you’re arguing, it
69
makes sense thematically, it just rings

unfortunately false to me.
Joe Procopio I get it...we all have certain things
in movies that do and don't resonate for us. I've
certainly been the guy who has found things
irritating in a movie that everybody else seems
fine with.
Erik B. Anderson How can we argue with your
experience of having an ignorant reaction to
someone else's experience?
Jordan Musheno Erik B. Anderson what?
Like
Erik B. Anderson Jordan Musheno your
comment is your opinion, and it's based on your
perceptions, the way it rang to you, that you
couldn't be bothered. It's a tautology. We are the
ignorant ones really, because you're just not
saying anything at all.
Kate Hickson They live in CA. Berkeley is a
state school.
Like
Patrick McEvoy-Halston ... it's going to be
tight, but we'll scrape the money together
somehow. (Thanks dad!) Imagine, my
daughter/son... going to Columbia/Harvard! =
Brad's Status.
70
This is a relevant point because right now every

well-off liberal in the U.S. is desperately trying to
convince themselves they're actually... when you
put things in context, really not prospering. This
may be present anxiety projected back into a past
scenario. It doesn't do to make yourself the one
who actually had it easy. That has to be someone
else.
Sara Schearer I think the money part was very
realistic. They talked about the scholarship for
catholic school and about making choices with
money. The mom was a nurse - not destitute but
still not enough to give her kids everything they
wanted. That is about as realistic as it comes!
Patricia Boesen I might be in the minority here
but I loved it! The mother-daughter dynamic
during the teenage years is portrayed quite
realistically and the acting was superb.
Hugo Z Hackenbush Haven't seen the bastared.
Like
Shawn Drury I'll be the curmudgeon -- I don't
think it's a great feat for a 22-year-old (Saoirse
Ronan's actual age) to play a teenager. I felt the
same about An Education, which had Carey
Mulligan doing the same. This is even truer for
71
guys acting younger; too many of those movies to

list--for some reason, Tom Cruise in All the Right
Moves comes to mind. I like Ronan (and
Mulligan for that matter) but I don't get the fuss
either.
Sofia Pimentel-Salles Caio Zuliani Carolly
Barbosa
Like
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I walked out. Didn't
hate it; just sensed a huge dosage of glossing.
John Wood Walking out robs a film of its
deserved ending and a chance to win you over.
Akin to leaving mid conversation.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston John Wood or inflicts
you with more damage than you can bear. one or
the other.
Stephanie Dahl If you hated it then I have to see
it. I will probably love it. �
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Stephanie Dahl I
ended up seeing the whole thing (which I
suspected would prove the case). My reaction is
that I thought it middling... see what you'll do
with that.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Part of the
"belovedness" is for Greta Gerwig whose
72
directing debut this is, and a very assured debut it

is (whether you like the film or not).
Patti Cassidy Anything with Greta Gerwig's
name is generally a "must avoid" to me. Self
indulgent. Adolescent. Been there done that....
Ken Eisner In other words, you haven't seen this.
Patti Cassidy I saw enough of it. Even my much
younger friend said she felt "aged out" of the
angst...
Marta Nazario The same thing happened to me
with the movie Moonlight. I actually walked out.
Still wrapping my head around the nomination.
Not all movies are for all people....like someone
pointed out.
Charles Dye Nomination? You mean winning
Best Picture right?
Charles Dye But yeah... I felt similar about it.
Anne Oneil Me to just didn't understand all the
rave reviews
Marta Nazario OMG yes Charles Dye :-)
Corin Toporas Charles, Marta walked out the
Oscars ceremony as well.
Marta Nazario LOL � � �
Moira Brigitte Rauch Ok you only can go with a
teenager to actually make sense
73
Of the movie � � �
Brian Padian here’s the case I’d make: pitch-
perfect debut film that avoids the on-the-nose
sentimental hazards of the genre, perfectly cast
and acted. kind of lovely and brilliant
Carolyn Rosenfeld thanks
Ken Eisner That ^
Elise Thompson You should read Richard's
review:
https://www.newyorker.com/.../greta-gerwigs-
exquisite...
Chris Okum It was fine. A nice, sweet movie.
The movie I just watched and which I don't get
any of the hype is freaking Baby Driver. Ugh.
Donna Staub Just saw it today as well. I enjoyed
it. It's a quiet little film -- but it has been over-
marketed and over-hyped, and as such, I was
expecting more. Had I walked into an indie film
house and watched it, I would have loved it more,
and I would have contemplated its subtleties.
Instead, I've been pondering what I missed that
the ads had hyped.
Maurice Yacowar Here's my blog: The first shot
packs the story. Mother and daughter sleep
together in matching profiles. They face and
reflect each other. The serenity of the shot catches
74
their essential bond, which their respective

prickliness does its best to fray in their waking
hours.
Lying there, they look alike. As the father later
explains, both women have such strong
personalities that their clashing is natural — but
their underlying love remains.
Both women move through trying times with
men. Mother Marion works double shifts as a
psych nurse. She has to guide the grief-stricken
priest who was apparently not saved by directing
his school production of Merrily We Roll Along.
His “They didn’t get it” suggests the rollicking
audience missed the depressing undercurrents to
which he is attuned. His successor is made of
sterner stuff: directing The Tempest with the
blackboard strategies of his football coaching.
At home Marion has to deal with husband Larry’s
long battle with depression and his loss of his job.
This while dealing with emotional teen Christine
and adopted older son Miguel with his live-in
girlfriend. The latter explicitly confirms our sense
of Marion’s “big heart,” as Christine ultimately
realizes.
Christine grows through three boyfriends. The
first turns out gay, the second an insensitive
75
pretentious creep and her third — entering NYC

— with their first kiss prompts her drunken puke.
In consoling her gay friend she shows her
mother’s heart. She also briefly abandons her
closest girl friend in vain hope of befriending the
class’s wealthy, snobbish beauty. As Christine
grows through her tribulations Marion barely
survives them.
The film closes on three notes of reconciliation.
The first is Christine’s relationship with her
Catholicism. Christine and her friend chafe at the
school’s discipline, enjoying a truant snack on
communion wafers as they discuss their shower
orgasms. Christine is suspended for challenging
the church's position on abortion. The nuns seem
strict in their “Six inches for the Holy Spirit” rule
at the school dance. But one heartily laughs at
Christine’s prank of decorating her car with a Just
Married to Jesus. sign. In New York Christine
challenges the fashionable young atheist: “People
go by the names their parents give them, but they
don't believe in God.”
The solace she finds when she drops in on a
Sunday service prompts her second
reconciliation. On the long distance phone
Christine tells her mother “Thanks” and “I love
76
you.” That’s realizing the tacit harmony we saw

in the first shot. Their unity is also the point of
intercutting shots of mother and daughter driving
through Sacramento.
Equally important, Christine accepts herself —
finally going by her given name Christine instead
of yet again insisting on the “Lady Bird” with
which has all along tried to romanticize herself.
The daughter's and mother's closing harmony
ends the film like the last line we hear from the
audio-book Grapes of Wrath: Having survived
adversity the true power, the woman, smiles.
Catherine Craig Gerwig describes her own high
school self not as a free spirit but as a student
who sought gold stars. My sense is that she spent
too much time over-thinking the film and that
kept it from taking on a life of its own.
I do agree with the comment that Saoirse Ronan
at age 22 feels too old for the part.
I loved the opening scene. What a way to open a
movie.
Laurie Metcalf as the mother is amazing,
however her character’s behavior at the end did
not have sufficient motivation for me. It could
77
have, but it wasn’t written in there. So much

about her was explained to us by her husband, not
given to Metcalf to dish out.
I do wish Gerwig would challenge herself with
something other than characters coming of age.
I agree with Richard in that for a film with
importance of place, the place does not come
through. I’m on the West Coast and we saw it
with Gerwig in conversation. Some of the
‘importance’ of Sacramento came off a bit like a
marketing ploy to engage West Coast voters with
a ‘New York’ film-maker during awards season.
(I know she was raised in Sacramento.)
On a more technical level, the film has SO many
shots and set ups and locations that I wonder if
that contributes to us never really drinking in the
setting. (That said, the interior scene when the
mother and daughter sort through racks in the
thrift store and then argue at the changing room
door really resonated with me and told me a great
deal about their core and the surrounding life they
were in.)
Gerwig is a lovely, bright entertainer who
interviews well and I am sure this contributes to
78
some of the attention people are commenting on.

I hope she continues on into the future.
Ken Eisner It didn't take on a life of its own—
and that's why it's the best-reviewed movie of the
year?
Catherine Craig Ken Eisner, this comment from
Barbara was the start of the thread. "Just saw
Lady Bird. Disappointed. Can someone make a
case to justify all the fanfare?" She was basically
wondering why it has been so well reviewed. And
if it is actually the best reviewed film of the year
as you say, I wonder how long it will retain that
lead in light of upcoming releases. That said, I am
happy Gerwig is getting attention.
Ken Eisner It's still better than the newer
releases. I've seen everything but Phantom
Thread, The Post, and The Shape of Water. But
catching those this week. Faces Places was
another top-fiver.
Catherine Craig I haven't allowed myself to
fervently look forward to a film being released in
a very long time. I am self consciously allowing
myself to relapse into that kind of extectant
stupor regarding The Post. I am hungry for
anything about Katharine Graham. Good to know
about Faces Places. I have a personal loyalty to
79
Del Torro so I will see The Shape of Water and

will also see Phantom Thread.
Ken Eisner Downsizing was fairly good, but I,
Tonya was a very happy surprise.
Chris Karr Accurate, amusing senior-year-

before-college portrait of a Catholic girl in
Sacramento. All the basic beats are there — no
more, no less: Lady Bird has it out with Mom,
smokes weed with friends, loses her virginity
(and is disappointed), goes to the prom, anxiously
awaits acceptance letters, and comes to terms
with Mom. The story is told with a stark
simplicity that’s occasionally refreshing but this
is a safe and somewhat bland overview of the
seventeen/eighteen experience. Despite her
interesting nom de guerre, Lady Bird is a blasé
and typical creation, although she is allowed a
few exceptional moments. If this story is drawn
from Greta Gerwig’s own life, I’m tempted to
deduce that her own coming-of-age story was
essentially plain and not very captivating, but this
inclination, upon second thought, is wrong: I
think Gerwig has quite an impressive backstory to
share; she just didn’t quite find the right tone,
80
structure, narrative, and aesthetic to capture it

with panache or focus. It’s a satisfying movie,
partly because it’s so smoothed out and benign.
As always, the extraordinary Laurie Metcalf is a
standout. Tracy Letts brings his exceptional face
and rapierlike line readings to the underwritten,
softened Dad role. 7/10
Susan Coan I really loved this movie and found
it to be a complex portrayal of a family "coming
of age." I agree the core was the mother/daughter
relationship but I feel it also did a wonderful job
showing the changing career climate and the
effect it had on the dad especially when his son
got the job he had applied for. Lady Bird was at
the private school with a scholarship and mom
worked double shifts to pay for it. I think it was a
very real representation of the changes that occur
in the lives of a family. That being said, I also
don't believe everyone will like every movie and
every movie certainly has it's weak spots.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Personally, I really
enjoyed the Sondheim subtext and the two very
different theater-director priests and their
individual enthusiasms.
Patricia Naruse I did like this film for 95% of it.
It felt real, and I do love Laurie Metcalf as an
81
actor. I did not like how the NY portion was

presented. It seemed to be sort of an epilogue
ultimately, the NY part; she gets wasted, goes to
hospital, then realizes she missed home. But, all
that happens in the last 5 minutes of an otherwise
well-paced story.
Adam Capitanio That's nice. Sometimes you'll
dislike a movie that a lot of people like, and
sometimes you'll like a movie that a lot of people
dislike.
Erik B. Anderson I guess we'll have to agree to
disagree about that, mate.
Barbara Monahan Erik B. Anderson
Diane Lake Great and realistic coming-of-age
movie - I didn't see any weak spots at all.
Bonnie Brook I didn't see any strong spots.
Neither mother nor daughter were terribly likable.
This movie really annoyed me.
Erik B. Anderson I gave it a negative review on
Instagram. For some reason, the official Paul
Haggis page liked my review.
Erik B. Anderson Another reason I don't like it is
that Lady Bird lost her virginity the day after my
father died.
82
Griselda Haygood Great screen writing, great

acting, great direction, what else do you need>
Barbara Monahan Just one idea that she might
shop around for an inspired editor and
cinematographer to collaborate with. Found the
film weak in those departments.
Griselda Haygood She will learn for the next
one and I hope there will be a next one...
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The dad is supposed to
be depressed, yet the movie has him as entirely
reliable as a protector, even if in wise, subtle,
considerate and artful form. Depression means
being the exact kind of dad this kind of female-
limelight family requires? He too should be
bottled and sold in pharmacies.
Her boyfriend is cheating on her but it turns out
he's gay so it's on her to support. Being gay
should be bottled and sold in pharmacies so that
heterosexual men can unbottle it and use in
emergencies to escape wrath. Women should
support this movement because it would direct
attention away from the fact that just previously
they were already developing interest in someone
who wasn't so theatrical and gratuitous but
instead couth and composed.
83
Daughter's mother's mother was an abusive

alcoholic, but daughter's mother is completely
benign; the extent of her love is unquestionable,
even if she suffers separation-anxiety. Daughter's
mother should be liquified into a solution sold in
pharmacies, so that all hate in the world drops
away... like that *snap*. One generation
afterwards, and horrible abusive alcoholic troll
demon alt-right hate hate hate... all gone in the
world.
Catholic head-of-schools who happen to be nuns
should be liquified and sold in pharmacies for
every male priest in the world to intake. Then
they'll be hip as sh*t and know what it is to
swoon (and not over youngins in their care).
Being recoursed to schools which teach you that
you begin as dust and end as dust should be
bottled and sold in pharmacies. Because then all
of us could make intellectual mincemeat of a pro-
lifer who rejoiced in her own not being aborted,
and have it an empowering moment that proves
that however the case, still, some people are made
of surer dust than others.
84
Susan Smart I feel like the characters were very

flawed and REAL. The hot/cold mother daughter
relationship was spot on. Also real, the father's
situational depression looks all too familiar to me.
I know Ronan has gotten criticism for looking too
old, but at the same time she seems like an old
soul. I think Hedges looks too old also, even
though he's only 20. I love the fact that Metcalfe
and Letts, original Steppenwolf members, were in
this film. I think it captures that adolescent desire
to get out and be somebody.
Griselda Haygood Yes!
Catherine Craig I was one of the people who
agreed with the person who commented that
Ronan was 22. For me, it wasn’t that she looked
too old. It is something else. I did just see a
brilliant performance by a 21 year old playing a
17 year old; Austin Abrams in Brad’s Status. For
me, he alone is worth the price of admission.
Dead on perfect.
Sandra J. Bierman I found Saoirse Ronan‘
portraying of a 17 y.o. Right on target. She
definitely looks and acts like one, and that is what
acting is. Oscar worth it
85
Patrick McEvoy-Halston There's a line in the

film where where the father asks her when he
knocks on her bedroom door, "how did you know
it was me?, and she replied, "mom never knocks;
she just comes right in." The film, though, doesn't
encourage any involvement in what this might
mean. It's mostly normalized -- mother-daughter
dynamic stuff. A lot of this film felt like a sort of
glossing over past-experience that I thought we
were supposed to have been woken out of doing.
Erik B. Anderson You're saying everything I am
thinking. Like when the mother says her mother
was a vioent, abusive alcoholic. It's never alluded
to again. Exposition dependency like this is for
bad screenplays, not potential Oscar frontrunners.
Blake Malcolm Hallberg a good screenplay
doesn’t have to hold our hands and Tell us
everything; a good one allows room to infer. the
dialogue you’re referring to speaks volumes
about the entire dynamic between the mother +
daughter. the fact that she doesn’t knock and
barges in tells us so much more than just that. it
tells us that the mother doesn’t respect privacy,
could be a bit invasive, etc.
while this dialogue also shows us the dynamic
between father + daughter.
86
a good screenplay “shows” rather than “tells” and

it’s up to the audience to pick up these cues. it’s a
relationship between the audience and art.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Blake Malcolm
Hallberg "Doesn't respect privacy... can be a bit
invasive," is readily summarized/normalized as to
be expected; as typical mother-daughter... hot and
cold behaviour. But doing so means sustaining a
sort of cultural acceptance of it which makes
children who are enduring significant harm owing
to it (a mother will barge into your room as if you
have no actual barrier to her she can't feel free to
disregard, even as you're 17, and she does it every
time? That's pathological; a move clearly
intended to make someone feel their autonomous
identity is something of a joke, and that you're
really only just a component of her. It's child
abuse.) feel like there's no point in speaking out
about it because people will conflate it as pretty
much normal... and really only a bit invasive -- so
why your overexagerated complaint? In certain
quarters now, what had been normalized is being
revealed as actually very harmful, as we situate
ourselves fully within the abused person's
situation, really for the first time. Where are we if
we just switch it up so it's not predatory men
87
involved, and suddenly the problem would once

again be in the person who made the erroneous
complaint? It's just moms being moms, daughters
being daughters, for heaven's sake! Sheesh!
Erik B. Anderson Blake Malcolm Hallberg
exposition is telling not showing, not the other
way around
Blake Malcolm Hallberg Erik B. Anderson the
skilled screenwriter portrays exposition without
blatantly saying it.
have you ever seen an action movie where the
protagonist basically explains everything that’s
happening? those are poorly written screenplays.
Erik B. Anderson Blake Malcolm Hallberg yes,
Lady Bird is just like an action movie that
explains everything that happens. You've read my
mind.
Blake Malcolm Hallberg Erik B. Anderson lol i
disagree
Like
Erik B. Anderson Blake Malcolm Hallberg why

Blake Malcolm Hallberg Patrick McEvoy-
Halston i don’t think ladybird seeks to normalize
this behavior. if anything, it’s portraying the
absolute damage of the relationship. i grew up
88
with a mother exactly like the one portrayed in

the film and i didn’t think it sought to “accept”
the mother’s behavior.
ladybird went back and forth between hating her
mother and trying to empathize with her. this was
the portrait of a very unhealthy mother-daughter
relationship.
Blake Malcolm Hallberg Erik B. Anderson 1. it
isn’t an action movie and exposition is being
portrayed via dialogue, rather than random ad-
libs.
2. my initial point was that the dialogue in the
film, ladybird, explains multitudes about each
character and circumstance, rather than posing 1
dimensional scenes.
Hallberg Okay. But you did note that people here
generally have not been in agreement with you --
you saw all the "great portrayal of the mother-
daughter-dynamic," didn't you?
I appreciate your experience of it, but myself I
think that it did work to make the argument that
whatever your mother may have done to you, you
have to remember, she does love you. If I knew of
someone in real life whose mother or father
89
entered their room constantly while they were in

it, without ever thinking a knock is something
appropriate to your relationship, I would say there
was significant hate and intention to harm there
(think Nora Ephron's "My Blue Heaven"). There
is no sense of this in this movie. It's just an
aggravation. Something that would direct us to
consider how scared her mother is of her growing
up... or so her dad would counsel her, and we
would oblige him in this. Think mostly on the
poor mom.
Erik B. Anderson Exposition dependency is only
bad in action movies?
Like
Halston sadly, this is how some mother-daughter
relationships are. it was a great portrayal of their
dynamic. does that make it morally correct? no.
her mother was abused as a child and cross-
generational abuse does exist, even if not to the
previous extent.
i don't think the ending was a "get out of jail free
pass" for ladybird's mother, but more so an
understanding of WHY her mother is the way she
is, and forgiveness.
90
ok, perhaps ladybird's mother DID deeply love

her. characters in films are flawed, just as in real
life. perhaps ladybird's mother has an extremely
skewed view of "love". i think part of the point of
the relationship in the film was that it didn't take a
side. does art have to take a moral stance, or can
it simply create a portrait for the audience to
observe and thus make an informed decision post-
viewing?
Blake Malcolm Hallberg Erik B. Anderson no,
that was just my example, but there are major
dialogue differences between indie "dram-edies"
and action movies.
i really didn't think that ladybird used over-
exposed dialogue. if anything, it was intentionally
crafted to be more bare.
Hallberg Okay Blake. But you must note that
your significant contextualizing her mother is
something we're not supposed to be doing with
the Weinsteins in the world. Everything you're
saying would have been said about him just
months ago, if accusations had surfaced then.
Flawed, we're all flawed creatures. We must
understand him, what he'd been through. We must
forgive him. In the meantime a hundred abused
91
women would still be waiting wondering when

time would come to maybe actually more think
on them; what they'd been through.
Erik B. Anderson We get it. You disagree. Over
and over. You're like my nagging mother. Id like
to move on now. Please reply to the substantial
things Patrick is saying or move on yourself.
Good night.
Blake Malcolm Hallberg Erik B. Anderson hey,
haha, don't lose your temper. we're just having a
debate about a film lol. i, personally, have
enjoyed reading other people's thoughts on the
movie. but i still maintain my position. sorry
you're upset by that.
Halston i'm not saying that i, the viewer, am
supposed to empathize with ladybird's mother. i'm
just saying that not all films must convey a firm
moral bias. like i said, it's a portrait and it's up to
the viewer to infer their own opinion.
i don't think the way ladybird's mother treated her
was acceptable. i see your point, especially about
the ending. however, i took it more as an
acknowledgement of who her mother is as a
person. to understand someone is not to justify
their negative actions.
92
anyway, i appreciate the debate and the points

you're making.
Mark Schaffer Write what you know.

Blake Malcolm Hallberg i think those of us with
“mommy issues” related deeply to this film. i’ve
never seen a film portray a more accurate
depiction of this particular dynamic. it was
refreshing to see the true beauty AND ugliness of
it, sparing no one. the characters are flawed and
real. the deadpan delivery of dialogue gave it
charm. i liked how nothing was over-explained or
over-done. it was like a portrait.
it hit me pretty hard and i ended up crying,
embarrassed when the lights came up Haha.
Ralph Benner One of the best lines in Ford’s
“Nocturnal Animals” is delivered by Laura
Linney as a warning of inevitable horror: “We all
eventually turn into our mothers.”
Anthony Salvatore I absolutely loved it, I do
wish it was just a little bit longer though. I found
myself really wanting to know what happened
next for the characters, I guess that’s the sign of a
great picture. I felt the same way with Three
Billboards, I wanted more.
93
Candice Frederick No one has been able to

justify the fanfare for me either. It's just an ok me.
Didn't blow me away
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Monday, December 4, 2017
Discussion about what #metoo is

exposing, at google groups, real
psychohistory
David Shackleton Dec 2
There is a good deal more to #MeToo than is

being discussed here. What about the fact
that many women are claiming that this is
about predatory masculinity in general,
blaming all men for the actions of a few?
What about the fact that the #MeToo crowd
are behaving like a lynch mob, gleefully
demanding the destruction of the careers and
reputations of men based purely on
unproven allegations?
94
What we are seeing is the collective moral

power of women to shame men - something
that we should be very interested in as
psychohistorians - and that power operating
without regulation from the mechanisms of
civil restraint (law and order, or cultural
decency).
David Shackleton
me (Patrick McEvoy- Dec 3

Halston change)
It's not the actions of a few; that's something

#metoo is exposing (maybe two-thirds of
them women on my facebook feed decade
#metoo). It is a gleeful thing to watch a long
period where victims simply had to live with
not being believed while those who predated
on them carry on as usual... or even glory in
their victims not having any means to protest
without being further victimized in doing so,
finally knowing that collectively that war
against them is down. We won't waylay you
any longer because we secretly enjoyed your
remaining powerless. This is cultural
95
evolution, and, yes, it is appropriate to

rejoice. It's also empowering to have this
prompt to learn, to experience victims from
the inside: who hasn't been listening to these
accounts by women and children and been
almost surprised at how often something that
happened twenty years ag, never really
stopped affecting one? It's tribute to them to
listen well, and also educating, and also
empowering -- for that stifled pain exists in
almost all of us too.
We used men's status to stop accusers before.
We can't allow you to take him down,
because WE NEED him. It's exciting to see
this no longer works. Again and again, let's
rejoice in seeing another man who wasn't
touchable, find himself instantly dissolved of
his status for the massive damage he inflicted
on those under his power. Everyone will
know now that we really mean it when we
articulate that victimization will not be
encouraged or tolerated. No cueing, no subtle
sanctions of the behaviour, which predators
will take note of and which will in the end
protect them.
96
I don't feel shamed by this. I am relieved. The

tormentors in my own life, who weren't men,
are easier for me to identify as predators,
which is something I always felt was true but
never had sanction to call valid. Every
progressive turn is marked by this shaming
that you're directing us to, though. Anti-
slavery movements, anti-animal abuse
movements, anti-child abuse movements...
they didn't shame? Shaming is also a
declaration that the harm that was inflicted
on you and that you were told to disregard,
was a monstrous activity on the part on the
abuser and the abuser-supporting culture.
It's an articulation of sanity, in a sense, in
that it call's a spade a spade.
I have responded in other discussion forums
my own belief that only malignant use by
unloved mothers during the pre-oedipal
period results in boys becoming men who are
so concerned to behave sadistically towards
women. This is deMause's view, and mine as
well. I might get a listen to because my
instinctive reaction to what is happening is
not to demonize the accusers and their
97
supporters, but to laud them, rejoice with

them, and to absolutely accept the breadth of
damage. Now's the time as psychohistorians
we can school them in the pointed fact that
no man would ever glory in a woman's
humiliation and destruction unless they'd
been treated sadistically themselves... and
early on, when their brains will still forming.
I haven't seen much of this, not much on
childrearing generally, from
psychohistorians. (When they're not reacting
just like you did...) Just Freud and drive
theory, which feels conservative (and also as
a running away from dealing with the affect
our mothers had on us, ), in that it could feed
into a conservative movement, a la Pinker's
argument in "Better Angels of Our Nature,"
towards gauging that men need superego
sanction... men can't implicitly be trusted,
and this could lead to men assembling into
Promise Keeper-type movements, first, and
then calling for women to assist them in
managing their weakness by the like of
covering up. It could indeed lead to another
Hays Code environment, if the populist
rightwing has more sway that does this
98
emerging, humane, progressive

consciousness, we're mostly only
experiencing so far here.
For deMausian psychohistory to thrive we
have to be existing at a time when victims are
believed. I suddenly see great possibilities for
my kind of psychohistory that I haven't felt
for a long time. If the numbers of victims is
huge, and the effects are recognized as huge,
and the reason they weren't recognized
before a matter of cultural assumptions that
waylaid attempts to deal with the
ramifications of abuse... a cultural
empowerment that wanted their to be
victims and wanted for abusers to get off
scot-free, then deMause's explanations that
the world we live in is almost determined by
still-ongoing widespread child abuse gets
another looking at, without being articulated
as at best a single factor of many, and a single
factor that proves to mostly vanish as abuse-
protector social scientists get to the more
important matters of what proves to be every
single other factor. DeMause would have us
understand our time as suffering from
99
intense growth panic. Growth panic is almost

an entire populace being stopped in their
ability to tolerate further genuine societal
growth because it reminds them of the
apocalyptic experiences being abandoned by
their mothers for their crime of individuating
from them had on them as children. How do
more and more people come to accept this
"bizarre" theory? Through what we're finding
here in #metoo: damage done has a massive
effect; we've all suffered it; we end up
blaming ourselves for it, for sanction for
some reason lies in the empowered
predator... we must obscure his/her true
nature from ourselves, almost always, and
approval of some kind comes our way when
we do. This doesn't take us directly to
thinking on our mothers, but I feel the
ingredients are there... we're no longer
collectively as invested in feeling some kind
of pleasure in allowing predators to have
their way without being called on it. We're
more in mind to instantly speak up and
speak the words of righteous accusation
they've tried to intimidate us away from
speaking. They're confronting us with less
100
intimidating fears, fears that we can now

manage, because our overall childrearing has
reached sufficient level to permit this
breakthrough.
James Sturges
Dec 3
Patrick, I think this is one of your finest

essays, notwithstanding the off-target swipe
at "rightwing populism" given that leftists are
at least equally represented amongst the
perps.
Nevertheless, the connection you draw
between classic (DeMausian) psychohistory
and the revelations of apparently widespread
metoo# assaults previously repressed by
society (against children and women,
respectively) is one that needed to be made.
I also applaud David Shackleton's message.
While many of the accusers were doubtless
shamefully victimized by their circumstances
(needing to keep their job, relative power
etc.), there are also some of the accusations
101
that seem shallow and/or opportunistic to

the point of complete fabrication.
The culture based on everyone searching for
their inner victimhood is, in my opinion,
itself a run-away pathology.
And that does not even address the cases
where psychopathology warped reality on
either or both sides in these cases.
Certainly if the accusations are believed there
are some sick puppies out there in positions
of power (Bill Cosby a sad case in point; not
to mention the garden-variety malignant
narcissism of many of the others).
Then there are the pathetic basket cases like
Congressman Farenthold who whined to his
accuser, whom he had employed just a few
months, that he hadn't had sex with his wife
in years. (What is wrong with our political
system that we elect such losers??!)
With respect to the accusers, there are
Borderlines out there whose grasp of reality
is severely distorted as it pertains to
relationships due to severe splitting in their
stunted and incomplete personalities, and
102
who can only see others as over-idealized or

as demons, never as normal humans with
both desirable and undesirable qualities.
Respond incorrectly to one of these ladies
and she will cook your rabbit.
One conclusion I will draw in advance is that
the public, including media on both sides,
will react with extreme shallowness to each
and every sensational exposure.
Society as a whole does not believe in
psychology.
---------Jim
Conversation about Woody Allen at the


The idea of separating the artist and the art
has always seemed absurd to me; art is where
artists express and reveal themselves, both
intentionally and involuntarily; and I've
written about Woody Allen's new film,
103
Wonder Wheel (which opens today), and my

experience of watching his films in light of
that self-revelation; it's a piece about the
anguish of appreciation.
https://www.newyorker.com/…/watching-
myself-watch-woody-all…
Watching Myself Watch Woody Allen Films

It would make life easier if Woody Allen’s
movies were as easy and as right to condemn
as his behavior.
Mariana V. Triay Imanol De la Flor
Sofia Pimentel-Salles Caio Zuliani
URGENT. ATTENTION. ATTENTION
Willem Van den Berg Richard, I really
appreciate and learn a lot from your writings.
Thank you.
104
Katie Hoffmann I've always hated Allan's

films. They're so damn creepy.
Ken Eisner Go back to Annie Hall,
Bananas, and Play It Again, Sam. Not creepy.
Katie Hoffmann Ok, that's great that *you*
don't find them creepy. I do, and I always
have.
I'm 45, BTW.
Ken Eisner Seriously, Bananas? Can you
explain why?
Rodney Welch “Creepy” is a cliche that is
used to describe everyone and everything
people don’t like or that seems suspect at a
purely superficial level. It no longer means
anything, or at least it doesn’t to me
Valda Vee Katie Hoffmann what’s your age
got to do with Ken’s comment?
Katie Hoffmann 1.The women in his films,
even Bananas are either fantasies or tropes,
much like the women in Philip Roth's novels.
2. Creepy as in " Woody Allen gives me the
creeps". I don't find him charismatic or
sympathetic or even unique and interesting.
He givesme the creeps, always has.
3. My age matters because I grew up when
his reputation was still intact, therefore, my
105
legitimate, visceral reaction to him is not

based on later information about his
personal life.
Ken Eisner Okay, I follow that thinking. I
think the humour back then has a lasting
value, but I suppose in the end he might have
just been the smarter, funnier end of the
Hugh Hefner spectrum.
Rodney Welch Peter Hoffman You make it
sound as if I’m refusing to take some
extraordinary and enlightening intellectual
journey. I really seriously doubt that’s the
case.
Rodney Welch Katie Hoffmann Is there a
woman - or man, for that matter - in ANY
movie who can’t be reduced to fantasy or
trope?
Diane Lake Sexually sordid is an apt
description of his films.
Katie Hoffmann His complete hatred for
any woman who isn't very young and nubile
is so apparent; I have a hard time
understanding how any mature woman could
enjoy his films.
106
Willem Van den Berg Strange how some

people see (valid or not) problems in certain
films that completely escape others. That is
why personal preference luckily is never
completely universal?
Joel Seligmann Certainly very few mature
women fare well in his films, and some are
outright murdered.
Katie Hoffmann Thank you Joel
Seligmann; it's nice to actually have a man
acknowledge this. You would not believe the
abuse I've taken in debates about this very
topic!
Joel Seligmann Oh yes I would, Katie.
Rodney Welch Joel Seligmann Is that the
basis of your argument? Whether women
succeed and prosper in his movies? Some do
and some don’t. But you’d be consigning a lot
of male and female writers and directors to
oblivion if that’s your main criterion.
Valda Vee Katie Hoffmann I’m a mature
woman of 65 and was a fan of his from the
very beginning of his career. I found his
writing then to be deeply ironic and self
aware without being didactic. I found his
107
themes to be very much in tune with

women’s identity and...See More
Rodney Welch Peter Hoffman Actually,
that was Crimes and Misdemeanors — and It
sure didn’t get a big laugh when I saw it at
the theater. I do not recall that as being a
laugh line.
Joel Seligmann Rodney Welch It's not so
much that they don't succeed and prosper,
or, as I said, "fare well," it's that two were just
plain murdered for nothing more that being
in the way.
Rodney Welch Joel Seligmann So? It’s a
movie. Happens all the time.
Joel Seligmann In two movies by the same
writer/director?
Rodney Welch Joel Seligmann I think if
you scanned movie history you’d find similar
examples. I don’t know what the big deal is,
all this prattle about Woody Allen’s
filmography being some sort of literal
Rorschach blot of his life. Scratch out his
name and enter the name of any other film
director and I’m sure you could find just as
many “disturbing” parallels.
108
Dennis M Robles I really think this

retrospective assassination of an artist is a bit
much. I grew up with Allen and have seen his
films with eager. I have been disappointed in
some of his works, but no filmmaker or artist
is going to bat 1000 in every work. I always
felt he was speaking to his perceptions of the
zeitgeist at the time. His work as many other
filmmakers is reflecting the mores of their
time. To look back with current political
correctness lenses is not just unfair but
disrespectful to the times their works are
made in. Anthropologists observing other
cultures take note to understand the
practices of the peoples they are observing
reserving judgment and condemnation of
practices. There is this moralistic bandwagon
in which judging and condemning past
actions without taking into account historical
context is folly. There is an epigenesis in the
embryo's development and no one says that
one stage is better or worse than another.
Diane Lake Sounds like deflection, a la
Weinstein. "I came of age in the 60’s and
70’s, when all the rules about behavior and
workplaces were different. That was the
109
culture then. I've learned it's not an excuse."

In other words, Weinstein insists that he
knows his age isn’t an excuse for mistreating
women, but at the same time, he provides his
age as an excuse for mistreating women. I
think Richard Brody has done an incisive job
in dissecting Allen' s penchant for treating
women like prey throughout his career.
Dennis M Robles Diane Lake Sigh. It is so
easy to retrospectively judge anybody's
actions and intentions. Did you see Annie
Hall? Where is the mistreatment there?
Maureen Daniels I agree, Dennis M
Robles. Nowadays very many films, TV series
and books are viewed with derision to horror
when seen through current mores. That does
not mean they are all without artistic merit.
The baby should not be thrown out with the
bathwater.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston "To look back
with current political correctness lenses is
not just unfair but disrespectful to the times
their works are made in. Anthropologists
observing other cultures take note to
understand the practices of the peoples they
110
are observing reserving judgment and

condemnation of practices."
If you study any era where progressives are
finally beginning to see crimes that
previously they hadn't thought unusual, they
don't say, hey, let's not disrespect... What
they do is admonish and get angry and
change. Anthropologists are invested not just
in objectively studying other cultures, but in
showcasing how those who had been
prejudiced against different cultures are vile,
bigoted and wrong... they're looking in two
directions: directly at other cultures, and
towards a previous way of assessing other
cultures that their predecessors' possessed
and which they are intent on showing up.
That is, they aren't often doing the job as well
as you imagine them to be doing; they would
never confirm a previous generations'
prejudices of other cultures, for instance. Not
ever. If it's between goodness and what
they'll let their eyeballs see, it'll go goodness,
however always summarized as objective
truth.
111
So the detached stance you draw us to

consider as preferable, needs to be called out
as the conservative, abuse-enabling one, that
one hears during times of progressive
change. However -- though not if one is an
anthropologist, who don't seem to recognize
the existence of perverse cultures other than
Western -- if one is a certain kind of
psychologist, one who doesn't believe in good
or evil but only in adverse effects of malign
childhoods, then, sure, you should be trained
to immediately here of a sick time and of sick
people and not judge, but you're certainly
going to qualify the respect you'd give them:
you respect that they do exist in a state which
is malign and which must change, but also
that it isn't ultimately their fault. You
certainly don't respect the idea that every
human being in their adult form has got its
negatives and its pluses. You assess worth,
always to the more emotionally evolved form.
People, our age, are/is getting better.
"Reflecting mores of their time"... why didn't
you go with participating in and enabling the
mores of the time, making him more akin to
112
those who actually nurture and create the

mores in the first place? Why suddenly turn
him into a helpless baby? Diane Lake
Dennis M Robles. Yes, of course I saw Annie
Hall. It may be a case of not seeing until we
can’t not see. I think Annie Hall is a great
film, but it too has disquieting moments.
Maybe easy to overlook at the time the scene
where Alvy calls his best buddy Rob (Tony
Roberts) in LA. When Rob complains, toward
the end, that the call interrupted him in bed
with 16-year-old twins, an otherwise
unremarkable, casual one-liner about
Hollywood depravity becomes a callous joke
about incest and exploitation (if not quite
statutory rape). How could it not?
Joel Seligmann What’s the “historical
context” of child abuse and incest in
America?
Vishy I have a question :) Please don't kill
me :) If Woody Allen was a good person,
would we have the same problems with his
movies? For example, would we still be
disgusted about the relationship that Allen's
forty two year old character has with a
teenage...See More
113
Joel Seligmann This discussion helped me

remember this quote from Allen's Love and
Death: "I have lived many years, and, after
many trials and tribulations, I have come to
the conclusion that the best thing [in life]
is ... blonde 12-year-old girls. Two of them,
when...See More
Re-Watching Woody Allen

The newly-chilling themes that you can see
throughout his movies
ESQUIRE.COM
Diane Lake On separating the art from the
artist. "But with Woody Allen, such a
separation is impossible, because his movies
are so thoroughly about himself, and about
his own condition, and, as it turns out, the
moral universe in which he exists—one in
which there is no expectation of justice."
Ralph Benner So punishment is what's
missing?
114
Diane Lake Read the Esquire article, link

above, and the moral nihilism Richard Brody
explores in his post.
Dennis M Robles The age of consent was
12 to 13 years of age for centuries. And only
in the late 1880s was that moved up to 15 and
16. In Ireland it's 15. The jokes are not
entirely inappropriate in this historical
regard.
Joel Seligmann So Allen was just being
historically accurate?
Sarah Fagan Greenberg Ralph, you said,
"healthy sexual experimentation with peers. "
What we're talking about here, I think, is not
peer counseling in sex. It's the older man,
with a younger girl who is not legally of age
and thus incapable of giving "consent."
Alabama law is concerned with more than
the girl's age of consent. It defines any man
over the age of 19 having sex with an
underage girl as having committed "sexual
abuse." I'm sure you would agree. As for the
statute of limitations, responses to some
allegations provide examples of why the
victim does not come forward at any time.
It's difficult. At least telling someone at the
115
time it happened is regarded as

corroboration. Why would you want to be
dragged through the mud as "ruining"
someone's career or marriage by reporting
abuse? And, threats do exist: i.e. tell anyone
and I'll see that you are sorry.
Fran Diamond Dennis M Robles the
Middle Ages are not relevant to this
discussion. Important to address the present
times with the current ethics.
Maureen Daniels Fran Diamond, Dennis
M Robles is not referring to the Middle Ages.
The line is from 'Love And Death', which I'm
sure you know is a spoof of 'War And Peace',
and therefore references contemporary
standards of the early 1800s.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Fran Diamond
Referring to what was considered acceptable
hits us with a bit of a dare. For they are
arguing that it was a period where age of
consent was much younger, but also trying to
stop us from judging, not just by saying it
was part of our evolution... Dennis'
epigenesis, but by catching us out on our own
disinclination to judge these periods not
116
worth studying in an appreciate way. If we

still love medieval art (and really, should
we?), and the artists who made them were
casually f*cking ten-year-olds, then if the
artist is in the art, where exactly is our own
psychic state, exactly?... there's a ten-year-
old child-f*cker in us? I repeat that the only
way to come to terms with the fact that Allen
did produce some great art, is to keep our
outrage at victimizers and automatic support
for the abused, but also to develop a more
psychologically sophisticated means of
accepting what people have to do in order to
articulate their own individuality and be
artists (not as a universal concept, but more
or less traditionally). During the 1920s, a
whole culture adopted the castrating
Freudian father as their idol, for he seems
menacing towards the still-felt influence of
smothering Victorian matrons. The 1930s,
brought back the matron and withdrew the
father... and the flapper also vanished from
view. Source of sadism may lie in a fact we're
intellectually drawn to necessitate
recognizing, but which we dare not find
ourselves compelled to do: sexually abused
117
women, unloved, disrespected women, as

mothers, do exactly what to their children?...
provide them with with love from out of
Jesus or the ether or earth spirits or DNA
that they themselves never knew? or make
use of them to make up for the love they
never knew? abandon them when they turn
away from them in an attempt to
individuate? install in them a need to project
Her onto other women and humiliate them,
to demonstrate themselves not-victims?
What was Weinstein's/Woody
Allen's/Trump's mother like? How forlorn
and abandoned was she, when she was finally
gifted a child that would finally provide her
unconditional worship?
Fran Diamond Patrick McEvoy-Halston
well you all are for more completist and
knowledgeable about WA’s ouevre. Whether
done in art as humorous commentary that
doesn’t justify monstrous decisions or
grounded in reality today (cf Roy Moore) the
refuge to the ethics of bygone Times is pretty
poor reasoning.
118
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Fran Diamond

You're never going to find me pointing to
ethics of a bygone time... because every era
before ours was fabricated out of more
disturbed human beings. It wasn't something
they struggled under, an affliction that
determined their course, but something
fabricated out of the kind of abuse we're
learning has been afflicted upon untold
numbers of women, but to the whole
populace as children... the ethics were
natural to them; served their malformed but
necessary psychic needs in order for day to
day equilibrium. Refuge is suspicious right
now: why isn't one for the further revealing
of all the crimes that previously had been
withheld? Why is one for finding some neat
trick that causes accusers some delay in
taking one down?
Dennis M Robles My point in all this is the
historical context in viewing films and
perhaps a film like "It Happened One Night"
is a classic Rom-Com, attacking it for it being
a "sexist" film, I believe is out of bounds.
Allen and his generation group up in an era
where having sex with "young" girls were on
119
the border of acceptability. Allusions to this

were more acceptable and eyebrows of
disgust were not raised as much in the past (I
remember in my teens hearing a Frank
Zappa's song in which a character had an
appetite for "chocolate covered 13-year-old
girls and not knowing what to think while my
comrades smiled.). Men's proclivities for
sexual fantasies portrayed in films is
frequently bravado and reflects male culture
rather one likes it or not. Many men will not
speak about their sexual inclinations with
women because it has become so politicized.
But jumping to implying pedophilia,
misogyny, and predatory behavior because of
the current zeitgeist is a bit much. Finally, I
have had these debates in my professional
work, as a psychologist I have worked with
victims of sexual assault and have worked
with a registered sex offenders, so I am not
ignorant of these issues. I also recognize that
we live in a culture infused with sex and
violence, where there are laws, rules of
conduct and mores that varies in so many
ways, hence this discussion. I am taken aback
120
by the venomous attack on some of the

greatest films. No film is perfect as no artist.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Dennis M
Robles But the point is that it wasn't the era
that gave sanction to their intention to go
after younger women. It was that they
themselves were of the sort to be inclined to
do so even if the era didn't tell them it was a-
okay; good for both parties. And it is owing to
so many people being built like that that the
mores were accepted and not immediately
repudiated. Mores change, and it owes to
certain peoples suddenly emerging -- really, a
whole collection of them -- that despite being
saturated with a previous generations'
norms, suddenly see through them, and find
instead sanctioned abuse/prejudice. Where
did this something out of nothing emerge?
Did they all suddenly discover the equivalent
of the Renaissance uncovering previously
unknown Greek thought?... texts formerly
kept out of view, suddenly back in view? In
my judgment, no. What happened is that
childrearing improved. A generation born out
of a bit better love, required a different, more
121
loving set of mores, to reflect their automatic,

natural way of seeing the world.
Your concern that men won't speak is
interesting. I had hoped that Franken might
have been able to do so... that is, admit that
he behaved towards women sadistically,
intending to humiliate and harm them, that
he knows that there is no way for a populace
to digest this without it meaning he's a devil
of some kind, but still pushing it forward as a
mature population must try and grapple with
the fact that some men can find themselves
inclined to do this but still in other aspects,
end up dedicating themselves to democratic,
victim-decreasing goals. I would have loved it
if he took the opportunity to do this, even as
it would have been essentially the last thing
we'd of heard of him... it would have been the
most generous thing he'd of done in his
career: the most fair to the victims (I wasn't
hugging them: their experiences of what I
was doing was valid -- I meant to use and
humiliate them, when they were in a
compromised state), and most fair to our
contemporary situation, in that it would draw
122
us, while recognizing the extent of the abuse

and being rightly outraged about it, to think
intelligently on why exactly a human being
could be drawn to repeatedly find pleasure in
the humiliation of another. I don't simply
want confessions from men. I want a context
where the priority is in hearing of all the
abuse that we hadn't allowed ourselves to
fully hear. All of it. Deep considered
involvement with it. Then I want us to turn to
the abusers in no mood to sanction or excuse,
and quite frankly to call criminal behaviour,
criminal, but also to see the child in him that
had morphed into an adult form that did
that. What does suffered abuse do to an
individual, exactly? Does it breed, not only
victims, but victims compelled to turn into
sexual sadists?
George Merchant Ballentyne A valuable
contribution to a debate that isn’t going to go
away as long as Woody Allen keeps making
films and we keep watching them.
Majid Mirmiran Although personality of
the artist is part of his art, we should not
judge his/her art by the artist real life
123
personal events. Similar sexist criticism were

made about Mark Morris work in ballet
choreography.
Victoria Webb If only the audience for our
politicians, our corporate leaders and most of
the men in power were as disgusted and
outraged as they seem to be with our artists.
We'd be living in a different world.
Cathy Grabosky Manis I just finished a
year of watching every Woody Allen film with
a friend. This very perspective arose many
times during our discussions. We have yet to
resolve it.
Valda Vee That’s how I feel. Unresolved
Like
· Reply · December 2 at 7:41pm
Joe Procopio The fact that Brody doesn’t
understand one of the simplest precepts of
serious criticism—separating art and artist—
is a major disappointment in a critic I usually
find pretty smart.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston If the art seems
better than the artist, then it can be we're not
being entirely sophisticated in how we're
assessing an artist. I've said this before in
another post, but, for example, some
124
psychologists argue that there is a thing

called growth panic which can draw one into
averse activities, but which only afflicts
people who've been well-loved enough to
even try and produce something new to the
world. It's been identified with rock and roll
stars becoming such alcoholics, for instance.
I'm sure this is also true with Allen... we're
going to go through a time when we can't
quite be fair to the actual level of strength
and goodness in him, because, for good
purposes, we're more centrally interested in
not waylaying the damage victims of such
people have suffered... and suffered and
carried while the predators prospered.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Without
allowing ourselves to be more aware of why
people can become such sadists, then all
we've got to go on is this "must separate art
from the artist" thing, this scolding, this
mimicry of wise but intolerant elders thing,
to keep the art safe. Problem with this is that
most people who argue this are finding
themselves out of sympathy with a cultural
moment which is finally agreeing to have at
every means where serial predators have
125
found themselves protected in their crimes...

that is, this rule, this more, this "absolute
qualification of every serious person," is
seeming just another Weinstein lawyer --
protector of abusers and waylayer of the
abused. "We" raise this shield because "we"
think #metoo can be made to be about mob-
action, a witch hunt, a spreading cancer
that'll dissolve every person of worth, but it's
"our" isolation, "our" being protected in
suspicious enclaves, which has us still do so,
for "we" come across instantly as those who'd
work to maintain things so that you can shut
down a victim accuser, further render
him/her, by remarking on their impertinence
in face of a "righteous" principle/person.
"We" seem to be thinking of how we might be
touched by this; how something "we" have
used to give safe venue for our own male-bro
thinking, could lapse away from us, and some
structural support for our daily equilibrium
will be gone.
Miriam Bilsker Brody says this in all his
reviews and in his Godard book, so I wonder
how much you've been reading him
126
Miriam Bilsker It's not that you approve

the character of the artist by liking his art or
vice versa; it's that the personality and
preoccupations of the artist-- things in his
life-- must affect the art for the art to have
any life. At least, according to Brody.
Miriam Bilsker What are you talking
about? I don't know the man.
Helena Nagy No mention of Annie Hall.
That was pretty wholesome, in a neurotic
way.
Sofia Pimentel-Salles Neurotic
Diane Lake I think Annie Hall is a great
film, but it too has disquieting moments.
Maybe easy to overlook at the time the scene
where Alvy calls his best buddy Rob (Tony
Roberts) in LA. When Rob complains, toward
the end, that the call interrupted him in bed
with...See More
Ken Eisner Good catch ^^^
Helena Nagy Yeah, I guess all his movies
are tainted with sexploitation. Yuck.
David Dean Daniel Just as he did with his
review of the latest Louie CK film, Mr Brody
has once again demonstrated an extremely
127
unprofessional attitude and behavior in

regards to maintaining a distance between
his judgment of an auteur and his criticism of
a piece of work. He simply is NOT doing his
job and has lost all credibility here. Also, it's
one thing for a member of the uninformed
public to defame Mr Allen, who is innocent of
wrongdoing, but for a would-be journalist to
do so is unacceptable. It would appear that
he has jumped onto a fashionable social
bandwagon at the loss of his own journalistic
integrity. I am disgusted and disappointed.
Willem Van den Berg Can a critic really
ever be 100% objective and he at least much
more informed than his readers. I like his
writings whether I always fully agree or not.
David Dean Daniel I do too usually, but
here lately, he has slipped up in a
dramatically inept fashion.
Dennis M Robles Every time "Birth of a
Nation" gets a large public notice the
controversy between artist and his work
comes up. Allen is no D.W. Griffith. What I
have been drawn to his film is his humor,
satire and social commentary. He pokes fun
at the social conventions such as the good old
128
days in his more recent "Midnight in Paris."

The idea of putting on blinders and filters to
seek out depravity is really a form of
censorship. Allen is a great filmmaker and
his works are as classic as Chaplin's.
Steven Erickson It makes sense to read
MANHATTAN as an expression of the more
dubious aspects of Allen's real-life libido and
behavior, and many people have pointed out
that the "separate the artist from the art"
mantra is unevenly applied: a lot of criticism
of GIRLS turns into personal attacks on Lena
Dunham, while white male artists receive
much less of this. But I think there's a
growing danger that criticism will now turn
into an analysis of artists' biographies and
whatever negative behavior they've
committed and how it's reflected in their
films. It's totally possible for a filmmaker
who has never done anything seriously
wrong in their lives to write a narrative like
CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS or MATCH
POINT.
David Dean Daniel That would be Woody
Allen, who is innocent of wrongdoing and
also happens to have made those films.
129
Willem Van den Berg !

Ralph Benner In nearly the exasperating
way Shelley Winters loses audience sympathy
in “A Place in the Sun,” Scarlett Johansson
loses us in “Match Point.” The only point in
watching is to see if Jonathan Rhys-Meyers,
unlike Monty Clift, gets away with his
solution. Does that mean Woody’s a
misogynist?
David Kaiser The model for Tracey in
Manhattan was a Stuyvesant High School
student named Stacey Nelkin, who would
have been 20 when Manhattan came out.
You can find relatively recent interviews with
her defending Woody on youtube. She does
not seem to have any regrets. Jusst for the
record. . .
Peter Grudin Both Wagner and Liszt were
Anti-Semites. Should we stop listening to
them? Is their music anti-Semitic?
Miriam Bilsker Has no one read Brody
before? Brody always thinks the art is
reflective of the artist's life (if by life, we
means the interests, thoughts,
preoccupations and personality of the artists,
130
which include his reflections on his/her

experiences and choices.) He thinks this in
all kinds of films if he considers the film
auteurist. For him it's a badge of honor,
because if the art didn't reflect the artist, it
wouldn't be art but merely commercial
product.
Steven Erickson But when people say bad
things, it doesn't necessarily mean they're
bad people. I read a lengthy commentary
section on an article about David O. Russell's
bullying behavior, where eventually a
number of people started arguing that fans
and critics should be kinder to Zack Snyder
over Russell. Well, I think the implicit and
explicit politics of Russell's first 4 films and
AMERICAN HUSTLE contradict the way he
seems to treat people in real life, while
Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH is appallingly
misogynist and much more politically
problematic than any Russell film. However,
word is that he's a nice guy who treats
women respectfully (at least according to the
people in this thread.)
Joe Procopio I haven't read Brody
consistently enough to see this trend until
131
recently. I'll be reading even less of him now.

Why did the New Yorker get rid of the smart
one, David Denby.
Miriam Bilsker Denby's still there in the
print magazine. Brody writes online. I love
his criticism; I think it's some of the best in
the business.
Joe Procopio Miriam Bilsker Whose?
Brody's or Denby's?
Miriam Bilsker Brody's
Joe Procopio Oh, well...
Joe Procopio Until now I guess I've
responded mostly to Brody as a fellow
cinephile (i.e., he's clearly watched a lot of
movies), but any respect I might have had for
his critical acumen took a big hit when he
announced his silly inability to untangle the
art from the artist. If he doesn't even get the
elementary part of the job....
Ralph Benner There is Gudrun saying in
“Women in Love” that “life doesn’t really
matter—it is one’s art that is central. What
one does in one’s life has peu de rapport, it
doesn’t signify much.” Does anyone believe
132
D. H. Lawrence’s breakthrough art isn’t

significantly dependent on his life?
Steven Berson I disagree. As problematic
as this can be, Chinatown is still one if the
great experiences in cinema. Plenty of other
examples, obviously. A great movie gives you
insight into truth, regardless of who
contributed to the film.
Susan Smart This is where I struggle the
most: Roman Polanski. He is a great film
maker but an abhorrent person. I have to
separate the art from the person. Am I to
boycott Chinatown, Rosemarys baby, etc?
Dennis M Robles I wonder what people
think about Swept Away, a film by a woman
director?
Ken Eisner She was raked over the coals,
lightly, for the misogyny in her movies.
David Kaiser It is part of the insanity of our
time,. it seems to me, that if you make one
movie with a female character that does not
represent some one else's idea of how a
woman should act, you're a misogynist. I
think it's a tenet of postmodernism that any
artistic representation of any member of any
133
oppressed group has to portray members of

that group in a highly positive light. You can't
create real art that way.
George Merchant Ballentyne Did this
thread just jump the tracks and start with
another subject? Are we done with Woody
Allen now?
Joe Procopio We're all grappling with the
nonsense premise that Brody stated in the
first sentence of this post.
George Merchant Ballentyne Joe; thanks
for the clarification.
Like
Dennis M Robles Actually it plays into the
discussion, I think. If Allen had directed
this...
Diane Lake To all the critics of Richard
Brody's post here, and I think someone
mentioned Louis CK as well: As a former
journalist I never bought the myth of
objectivity in either reporting or reviewing.
Here's why: journalists/critics who candidly
acknowledge their opinions are better at
informing others than those who conceal
their opinions from others or from
themselves. One could argue that those
134
whose thinking is shaped by unexamined,

unacknowledged assumptions are more
biased than those who have consciously
examined and knowingly embraced their
assumptions. That's because the refusal or
inability to recognize one's own assumptions
creates the self-delusion of unbiased
objectivity. It places those assumptions
beyond the realm of what can be challenged
and thus leading one to lay claim to an
unearned authority steeped in non-existent
neutrality. Clearly Richard Brody has a
wealth of knowledge on film, and is not
reticent in expressing his extremely well-
informed opinions. A lot of the criticism of
his reviews is based on bias, and are, frankly,
exercises in male fragility.
Joe Procopio Yeah....sorry, but dismissing
our criticisms as male fragility isn't very
helpful. I've a master's degree in literary
critical theory and have seen and written
about many movies in my lifetime. Believing
that a work of art should be taken on its own
terms and not judged by the life choices of
the artist is neither a novel approach to
135
criticism nor one grounded in the fragility of

my ego. And if you were much of a thinker,
you might understand the difference between
reportage/journalism and art criticism.
Steven Erickson I don't think objective
film criticism exists: it would consist of
running the credits from the end of the film
and the synopsis from the press kit (and even
those are sometimes incorrect or biased - the
press kit synopsis for Michael Haneke's
HAPPY END consists of 2 sentences and
seems like a "fuck you" to critics). But writing
a review of WONDER WHEEL that spends
2/3rds of its length calling Allen a pedophile
and not engaging with the form or content of
the film itself seems like a waste of time at a
moment when one can find dozens, if not
hundreds, of articles about his alleged
crimes.,
Diane Lake Joe Procopio What's your view
of the difference between
reportage/journalism and art criticism? (I
called it reviewing). Asking for someone who
isn't much of a thinker.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Joe Procopio
"And if you were much of a thinker," to me is
136
male bravado. I suppose one might say you're

responding in kind, but I'd say overall you
reinforce her claim. I wish you'd left that part
out. You're dismissing people in gross ways.
I again argue that the way to redeem Allen's
work is to remind people that anyone who is
essentially... who is in essence a predator,
would never create art of the calibre of
Woody Allen. The two don't really go
together, which is why artists who are
Republicans (the party of predators, in that
they exist to create more societal victims)
always seem so insufficient compared with
artists who are Democrats/liberal. People
who may find themselves still loving and
appreciating his films, may be responding to
what good was fed into Allen's life that he
could create something new to the world
(knowing the foul isn't sufficient to
potentially a great artist about it, as Brody
seems to be arguing, but knowing foul after
having known a great deal lot of good to
source an inspired take on it). Personally, I
also tried to introduce people to the idea of
"growth panic," that is, that those people who
go beyond what their predecessors
137
accomplished... innovators, can experience a

kind of fear, terror, guilt, beyond what
those... who actually aren't as emotionally
healthy, ever know in their adult lives for
never having been given the emotional
resources to try the same. These "horsemen"
must be defeated or your own psyche
crumbles, and it may be this that leads to
gross victimizations of other people, and
other perversities.
Diane Lake Re: the issue of male fragility. It
was not intended as a smear, merely an
observation of the factual response to what
we've been seeng for the past month or so, in
the world at large and here, whenever the
spectre of whether art trumps humanity is
raised. It is not factual to name call someone
who you know nothing about as "not being
much of a thinker" because you disagree with
them. The male fragility consists of, in some
quarters, much hand wringing by the likes of
Woody Allen of all people, worrying post-
Weinstein that the atmosphere is turning
into a witch hunt. Men have had, it, dammit,
with the calling out in the news and
138
entertainment biz, and by the way, what

about how you're innocent until proven
guilty? Of course these cases are not going to
court - sexual allegations are violations of
company policies. The point being the gall of
men feeling hunted after millenniums of
treating women like prey. Must defend those
transcendent artists who follow suit too.
What to do but lash out. (Which would
include at me, as not being much of a
thinker).
Joe Procopio Diane Lake I’ll apologize for
suggesting you’re not a thinker. It was a
reaction to the hostility and dismissiveness I
read in your comment, but I should have not
met the insult in kind, and so apologize.
Diane Lake Apology accepted. There was
nothing in my initial post that was intended
to be hostile or dismissive. I was merely
commenting on the age-old debate about
objectivity in journalism. I was also backing
up or agreeing with Richard Brody on the
views he expressed in light of the many
negative responses to his post.
139
Katie Hoffmann Ha, the vitriol coming

from men on this topic would be laughable if
it weren't so trite and predictable.
Joe Procopio Another person who takes a
cheap shot, inferring misogyny in a
discussion in which my comments have been
solely about the age old question in critical
theory circles that was mentioned in the
opening sentence of Brody’s post and has
been discussed by academics for about a
century. But yes, I’m a predictable, trite
sexist...thanks for that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death
_of_the_Author
The Death of the Author - Wikipedia
"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort
de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French
literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes
(1915–80). Barthes' essay argues against
traditional literary criticism's practice of
incorporating the intentions and
biographical context of an author in an
interpret...
140
Joe Procopio And if you care to read

further about the history of the debate in
academic literary theory, you can here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Critic
ism
New Criticism - Wikipedia

New Criticism was a formalist movement in
literary theory that dominated American…
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Katie Hoffmann
A lot of people who had been abused and had
been made to carry all ill-effects of this
predatory behaviour while their abusers
further used their culturally-enabled
immunity to further savour their power of
them, are discovering that there is finally an
end to this hell. "You" weren't ignored
because your concerns weren't sufficient.
They were always sufficient, it was just that
we were intent on making "you" feel like they
weren't. I think it is fair for people to be
rejoicing that we've evolved to a time when
victims are heard and believed, and we can't
141
be thwarted from immediately disposing the

predator... almost regardless of rank (though,
if ever there was reason to, would we ever
take down Obama? Not without us going
insane, me thinks). #metoo isn't only about
what has happened to women, nor only to
children... to me it speaks to emergence from
a very long period where most Americans
seemed to accept that there were going to be
powerful people, who are immune to
suffering, and then there is the rest of the
populace... the carnage, who'll suffer and
probably come to suspect themselves.
Diane Lake Katie Hoffmann Yes, as in the
comment immediately following yours...
Thomas Zorthian I am disappointed that

Mr. Brody finds Ms. Farrow's accusations
credible. Unlike many woman who are now
coming forward, Ms. Farrow was a very
young child when the alleged incident
happened, and memories from that part of a
person's life are unreliable. The fact that Ms.
Farrow believes she is telling the truth has
142
little bearing on whether the incident

happened.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston That idea that
memories of a young child aren't reliable
really held strong ground for a long time. The
daycare child abuse in the '80s was thwarted
by most people coming to agree with this
premise. It was deemed a witch hunt, and it
was open season on the psychologists who
were ostensibly so bent on persecuting these
ostensibly probably completely innocent
parents.
I think what we'll end up learning is if the
way a culture decided was fact concerning
the reliability of childhood memories owed
actually TO fact, or sort of to what we're find
out here... that overall, for whatever reason, a
whole age seemed determined to overlook,
waylay, belittle harm done against vulnerable
people. The end results of this #metoo
moment could in fact be that we'll go back to
the results of these 80s trials and decide the
evidence was actually there, and we had
further victimized people who were already
victimized because... well, perhaps because
143
we felt that our age had to be one that

produced ample winners but also just as
many people who would be used and abused
and abandoned.
As someone interested in psychology, I'm
very interested in seeing if this happens (and
I know it will). For a very intelligent but, in
my judgment, misguided man, Frederick
Crews, has a good portion of his reputation
tied up in how he dismantled this ostensible
"witch hunt," and he, more than anyone else,
has been the one that we all have used to
make Freudian psychoanalysis a giant hoax
of a kind as well. If he takes a hit here, those
who want to be able to introduce
psychoanalysis back into helping
understanding our times, will feel the context
is safer for them to do so again. With
psychoanalysis, with focus on the pre-oedipal
period with the mother, we can get at why
boys coming out of certain childhood
circumstances (you hurt people so you feel
less susceptible to being hurt; sadism out of
known experiences of sadism) can feel so
bent on inflicting sadistic damage on women
144
or on children. Outside this understanding

we're left with men are evil, for why
otherwise the massive prevalence? for if men
have been doing this for thousands of years
and getting away with it, either the evil is
always in them or they're incredibly apt to
make use of whatever latitude was gifted
them by their evil predecessors and so too
must be heavily watched, all of them, which
needn't even take us in a progressive
direction. For if our culture is turning more
populist rightwing than it is evolving
progressive, this could be used to argue that
men mostly can't help themselves, and the
sexes need to be kept apart and women need
to cover up, while men repent into some kind
of promise keeper mass of fascist bros.
Thomas Zorthian Mr. Allen is 82 years old
and there have not been any other
accusations against him, even in the current
climate. I think this speaks volumes about his
innocence of this heinous accusations.
David Kaiser Woody Allen's case is also
different in that the accusation was revealed
at the time and thoroughly investigated by
two separate government agencies,
145
Connecticut police and New York social

workers. Both decided prosecution was not
warranted.
As fpr the younger women in his life, Stacy
Nelkin, the model for Tracy in Manhattan,
has never expressed any regrets about her
affair with Allen, which began (like Tracy's)
when she was 17. She has defended him in
recent years. As for his current wife, surely
their more than 20-year stable relationsh[p,
complete with marriage and kids, puts a
somewhat different light on the matter?
I am not aware of a single actress who has
come forward to accuse him of trying to
exploit power sexually on a movie set.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Millenials and

Gen Xers are accusing all generations over
them as essentially being predators. Their
incomes went down, while boomers kept
making sure they were themselves taken care
of. People might end up using Woody Allen's
"situation" to not have this guilt revisited
upon them; it's in the film. Sacrifice of the
young as something an older generation can
146
come to find righteous, and failing that, still

tenable. They've all been Woody Allens.
The film is also about not being able to keep
fictions and contrivances and power from
keeping untenable truths from eventually
sneaking up on you and possibly exposing
you to insanity, a total loss of personal
equilibrium. I think that's a useful thing for
people see and explore in a film because it
seems likely that more and more of us are
going to find ourselves in this situation, now
that the media who puts out our preferred
view of things out there everywhere, is
contested by so many mischievous
alternative media that is making louder how
we do false news too. Our preferred image of
ourselves is not reliably being reflected back
at us. These other voices sneak in, with the
momentum of guilt that can no longer be
kept at bay. Every day there is a shock, as for
example we find out someone we thought
one of our own, to be counted on against the
racist mob, may or may not be themselves a
homophobe. We find a way to patch this up,
but the next day there's another -- a senator
147
we thought was with us and whom we might

have seen our own selves reflected in, has
been a serial predator -- and so what, then, of
us? We patch this up, but another blow, and
when we go at our opponents, we're seeming
a little more erratic and less steady, a la this
film's Ginny.
Where Millennials Come From

And why we insist on blaming them for it.
NEWYORKER.COM
David Kaiser That is absolutely correct,
Patrick McEvoy-Halston, and there is some
truth to what they are saying, particularly on
the economic front. But we have not
equipped them to make reasonable moral
judgments. They believe in perfection.
Steven Erickson I don't think all the
"artists should be completely perfect in the
politics they express in real life or their films"
views are coming from millennials. It is way
too easy to engage in generational warfare.
148
I'm 45, and I hated it when baby boomers did

it to my generation.
Ralph Benner After reading David's review
of "Everybody Lies," I'm slowly being
convinced that at the heart of so much
animosity about sex is that we're not having
good sex anymore. Maybe we never did.
We've been lying all along.
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.mx/
History Unfolding
A historian's comments on current events,
foreign and domestic.
HISTORYUNFOLDING.BLOGSPOT.PE
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Just to be clear
David and Steven, I most certainly wasn't
warring against millennials. The opposite,
really. And I disagree that "we" haven't
equipped them to make reasonable moral
judgments; rather, they make full sense that
"we" can't see. "We're" the ones who need
work.

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149
Recent posts at Clio's Psyche
#metoo is being used in France to target

those who ultimately are for the furtherance
of victims' rights. That is, against cause.
How the Tariq Ramadan Scandal Derailed
the #Balancetonporc Movement in France
The only time I've ever seen deMause come
into play over the last ten years is when
150
rightwingers make use of him (and a little bit

with Pinker, whom I also do not trust)... in
the states, with Stefan Molyneux. It is the
funny thing that I've noted several times
here, if one is a deMausian in his deepest
intent -- which is to enable better
childrearing; to work against growth panic
and spread good -- you don't really want to
see him emerge as an intellectual figure to be
taken seriously in this upcoming period,
because liberalism is sort of fixed at a state
where it cannot but romanticize and enable
its own societal poison containers; it's
flawed, but it's the best we're going to get
until we get another generation flip and a
more emotionally healthy populace.
Considering that means that if you want to
participate in scholarly/the common
conversation you have to try and sneak
deMausian thought in somehow
innocuously... be sidelines the whole time,
that's pretty frustrating. But if we're entering
a period of collective growth panic where
part of the mechanics of enabling nativism
and the idea of national borders and
projecting all of our own bad boy/bad
151
girlness into others outside our borders will

be to very quickly derail those who stand in
the way of this catastrophe, then
deMausianism will surface to make liberals
seem continentally apart from the realm of
actual fact; as not even really meaning what
they stand for, because the worst
perpetrators of the crimes they loathe are
those they defend with vigilant insistence (in
deMause's accounts of childrearing, the
Islamic world does not fair well... nor does
any culture which, for example, still routinely
spanks their children... and then as well with
him and Charles W. Socarides being
essentially on the same page in regards to the
sexual perversions...). This article gets at
that; at what happens when liberals no
longer command the narrative, so what they
start owing to the force of their defiance of
abuse, become initiatives a vile, ultimately
stronger power co-opts for its own purposes.

Halston change)
152
The other way, incidentally, where, if it's

getting half its lift from being something a
population that wants to nip
individualization in the bud and re-bond
with a mother projected onto a nation can
use for its own purposes, #metoo gets turned
into something opposite its intention, is if the
population agrees that the explosive reveal of
the number of male predators out there
means that men must be essentially
aggressive -- under certain situations, built-
in sexists -- and that curbing it means
conservative measures like covering up,
keeping the sexes apart, have merit. We're
already seeing some of this. It could also be
used against itself in, as I've articulated here
before, a populace deciding to undergo a kind
of Promise Keeper's transformation, where
they admit overtly to the extent of their
predations but demonstrate in astonishing
ways that they have self-castrated themselves
in dedication to a movement which
ultimately is AGAINST individuated women
and for the overall production of many more
societal victims. That is, they could become
akin to what became to felt regarding the
153
Bernie Bros... individuals, once individuated,

merged into a movement where they mean to
be understood as absolutely selflessly
dedicated to some larger entity, the nation,
the people. Men like that, who are way ahead
in the game in not being defensive in the
accounting of their sins, and who will
dedicate themselves -- unlike Weinstein -- to
movements more in sync with the times, in
calling for people to regressively join
folk/populist movements, will in a sense
serve to spell a lesson for many of the
accusers: namely, yes, you were victimized,
but about where you could been lead to if you
hadn't been victimized: now is no longer the
time where people need to think of being
fully self-actualized, but rather how to
dedicate oneself more selflessly. In a
nutshell, you're aren't to try and be feminist,
but to take your emboldened self and, in a
sense, once again submerge it, else be caught
out in a position where society once again
thinks you deserve a taking down.

Halston change)
154
And this article, btw, points the way at what

I'm getting at: a concern that the leftist
populism (think Bernie Bros) that has been
emerging actually elides "the world of
women." Leah Finnegan (of NYT and
Gawker), the article writer, wrote of her
hopes that with #metoo we might finally see
a change:
Some have characterized the current pan-
partisan reckoning around sexual assault as
too extreme, as a witch hunt. I agree that it is
extreme, but in the best possible way. My
hope is that it leads to a change in
conventional thinking: Those who have been
used to seeing the world in a certain, absolute
way are now being forced to see it in another,
or risk drowning in denial.
What I am concerned will happen is that
leftist populists of the kind she directs of to
think of, like Hamilton Nolan (of Gawker),
who wrote "that in the run-up to the election,
only two issues mattered: economic
inequality and climate change. 'The
important things should be prioritized. The
155
hardest things should be done first.

Economic inequality and climate change are
our most important problems, and our
hardest ones,' won't change much through
#metoo because in a sense they're already
acting at the behest of a woman, namely,
their angry internal maternal alters, who
actually applauds their exclusion of "women
matters" when what this means is denying
furthering their self-actualization... for she's
imagined as angry at all of her children's
attempts to individuate themselves from her,
boys, girls... everyone's.
Article from Outline magazine: If women are
not safe, a nation is not safe
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Discussion of Molly Haskell at the

156

Moderator · November 30 at 9:27pm
Busy day: the voting meeting of the New
York Film Critics Circle, a group that I have
the honor of being a member of, was held
earlier today, and the results are in—the list
is below. Not all of the films or performances
are among my favorites, but I was especially
pleased by several of the awards (including
Tiffany Haddish as best supporting actress,
Faces Places as best nonfiction film, and Get
Out as best first feature). Too soon to say
anything about Phantom Thread, which
opens Dec. 25—I've seen it, but reviews and
social-media comments are still under
embargo. (To explain: often, when studios
offer press screenings, they do so with the
stipulation that reviews and comments not
157
be made public until a specified date.) And

the special award for the critic Molly Haskell
is a true inspiration—her 1974 book From
Reverence to Rape, about the representation
of women in movies, is a landmark in film
criticism. The other critics' group of which
I'm a member, the National Society of Film
Critics, votes Jan. 6; will report back.
http://www.nyfcc.com/awards/?
mbid=social_facebook_movieclub
Awards - New York Film Critics Circle -
NYFCC
temp page
Mark Schaffer Great for her..
Stephen Sposato Hooray for Molly
Haskell!
Naylor Kauffman Quinn Is this the same
awards event where Tiff Haddish won?
Mark Schaffer Yes
Patrick McEvoy-Halston In Molly
Haskell's interview with Matt Zoller Seitz,
she explains men's fear of women as, in part,
owing to fear of the strong mother... there's a
158
bit where she talks about Doris Day films and

her partners, all "dubious male[s]," as being
so threatening to men it spawned a new age
of cinema where maternal, emasculating
women were eviscerated out of existence. I
wasn't familiar with her, so this was the first
time I heard of her favouring the studio
period for its ostensibly giving more and
better roles to women over "liberated" film
culture of the 60s/70s, and of her being
attacked by the likes of Ms. magazine for this
support of the studio cage.
What I remember of feminism in the 70s
though, was a willingness by feminists to
explore not simply men's problems with their
mothers, but of their own problems with
them. And not generalizing, that is, not all
men fear their mothers because of powers of
giving birth or something, but
particularizing, making clear that Winnicott's
concept of "good enough mothering" doesn't
wash as it screens one from actually making a
close examination of your own particular
mother treated you. Within '70s feminism
was the kind of bold thinking that could lead
159
to the, now, impossible-to-conceive

argument that the reason why, say, Bill
Clinton may have been a serial sadistic
molester of women, owed to the particular
manner in which his mother treated him
(Hillary Clinton for example has hinted in
that direction)... fear of being an emasculated
male, owing not to universal fears, but to
actual experiences of being overwhelmed by
one's mother without sufficient support. Out
of some strains of 70s feminism was actually
support for women to themselves box out the
Doris Days in film, fear the "castrating
mother," and to be able to read Molly
Haskell's endorsement of studio-rule as
being needed to be put into context. For all
culture in the 30s/40s turned away from the
liberated 20s flapper and Freud's father
towards endorsement of the maternal, the
matriarch, the mother not the father as
family's protector... and given the dubious
overall quality of the Depression/War period,
this may not have been only a more decent
thing good thing.
https://www.rogerebert.com/.../molly-
haskell-on-feminism...
160
Molly Haskell on feminism, censorship,

screwball comedy, and life after Andrew…
Molly Haskell speaks with Matt Zoller Seitz
about…
ROGEREBERT.COM
David Kaiser My favorite author on these
subjects was the late Nancy Friday who died
recently. In Jealousy, which is really her
masterpiece, she says we ALL both love and
fear our mothers as infants, because they
provide all the things we need and we know,
instinc...See More
David Kaiser Now about these awards--I'm
assuming they are on the same calendar as
the Oscars and I'm very surprised that Get
Out was shut out.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston It may be
related to the awards David Kaiser... isn't
lady bird -- about strong-willed mother and
with a vanishing father -- best film? The
strong father has been revealed as a egoistic,
abandoning, predator... all Weinsteins or
161
Matt Lauers. Like 30s culture, the father has

crashed and the mother is back in.
Feminism? Individualization? Or people
beating back to be children under maternal
guardianship?
Discussion of "Call Me By Your Name"

at the NewYorker Movie Facebook Club

To put it both bluntly and mildly, Call Me By
Your Name was a big disappointment; the
idea and the ideals that give rise to it are
admirable, but the direction and the writing
don't do them justice: the drama doesn't
162
respond to the characters, the situations, the

place, the thoughts, but is calculated to
provoke an easy and clear response. In
addition to which, there's a political
provocation embedded (I think,
unconsciously) within it, one that reveals the
unexamined prejudices of its director, maybe
of its screenwriter. An unfortunate
experience, a frustrating experience, an
empty experience:
https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-empty-
sanitized-intimacy-of…
-----
Jenna Ipcar Oh no, I was excited for this!
I'll have to go and see if I agree or not...
Aike Lindhagen What is your thought on
deviation between ideals and execution; is
there a statute of limitations (if can
paraphrase a legal term) on ideals of a film
and its development and how it should have
been done justice? Will the first thought on
paper and its intention become a desolation
of itself, is a question i seem to ask my self.
Will a surprise film be received better?
163
David Sanchez Can we tag Armie Hammer

to this post? I would love to hear his
response.
Seth Culp Sheesh Rich, tell us what you
really think....
Patrick Boyd I agree with Richard entirely.
My main complaint with the film is how
through this sanitization, it loses a lot of
queer attributes that made Moonlight so
compelling and BPM rapturous. The whole
time I watched it, I felt like it was a gay film
made for and by straight people with the
exception of James Ivory. Also, I'm tired of
seeing beautiful people in gay films lay by
pools or beautiful people roll around in mud
on farms. I feel like Queer Cinema keeps
taking steps backwards and this film is
further evidence of it.
Richard Hensley I am pretty sure that
Andrè Aciman is not gay. He's even spoken
about writing gay sex scenes without
knowing the mechanics of gay sex.
Patrick Boyd Colin, I stand corrected as I
didn't realize Guadagnino was gay. With that
said, I still feel stylistically it caters to a
164
straight sensibility. I do think films dealing

with gay life that are trickling into the
mainstream are becoming "sanitized" and
aren't representing queer life in a way that
feels wholly authentic to me.
Greg Stewart Moonlight caters to straight
people, too.
Seth Culp Patrick Boyd Just curious, what
are these films missing that makes them
appear inauthentic to you? What are some
examples that get it right?
Patrick Boyd What bothers me mostly is
how beautiful everyone is in these films,
almost idealistic. (Who wouldn't fall for
Armie Hammer, gay or straight?) I know this
is generalizing, but I miss the novel ways in
which directors like Haynes and Araki
treated queer ...See More
Sandra J. Bierman Patrick Boyd I have
not seen it; it is my understanding that the
message is love and the emotions that one
feels when admiring, lusting, loving
somebody, straight or gay.
Patrick Boyd Sandra, after you see it Id
love to hear what you think! Those things
165
definitely come through in the film and are

very important. It's more a question of how
those things are dealt with for me in the film.
Sandra J. Bierman Patrick Boyd sure. It is
not on yet in this area, but can’t wait to see it.
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom Patrick
Boyd It's not dealing with gay life. The only
gay life in the movie are the gay couple that
show up, referred to as Sonny and Cher by
Elio's mom. This is a movie about the want of
a 17 year old boy. He's bi.
Patrick Boyd I'm also not sure it's so
simple as saying Elio is bi. While Elio sleeps
with a woman in the beginning, this could be
playing into the construct of what he believes
is expected of him. I believe the film is his
emergence as a gay man evidenced by a few
touches of the director, but this is limiting as
well and Elio's sexuality is never pinpointed
to say what his direct preference actually is.
Mon López Lugo I don’t think this is a
movie about gay love, I think this is a film
about first love and they happen to be gay.
166
Moonlight and Call By Your Name are too

different. Yes, both of them have a gay
couple, but then the first one is about the
difficulties ...See
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom At the
risk of repeating, Aciman is pretty clear it's
about a boy that is bisexual. He even admits
that doing it with a girl feels nicer.
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom ...and
he gets aroused with his girl in the movie, so
Elio is not Kinsey gay,
Aman Ganpatsingh I agree with you. I was
incredibly annoyed that because this movie
has a 'gay story-line' it is somehow shielded
from criticism & celebrated uncritically. I
haven't seen this movie yet but the constant
praise and the bits and pieces I have seen
make me...See More
Dennis M Robles There has been so much
hype about this film, and the areas
mentioned in the hype, the pretty boy imago
combined with theItalian landscape has not
drawn me to see it. Perhaps, the marketing
167
plan of making money superseded whatever

artistic bent the film may have.
Traven Rice Can't say I agree. This feels
unduly harsh. I thought it was a beautiful,
intimate and emotional film. Refreshing and
healing.
Kaly Halkawt Jacob Lundström
Jacob Lundström �
Mark Schaffer Another film where the idea
of the film's fashionable subject is sabatoged
by the execution and realization, but is
celebrated anyway..Happens all the tIme..
Nice that you didn't buy the bandwagon hype
on this one..
James Harris Naturally, I'm not going to
be discouraged from seeing it myself.
Mark Schaffer Kael's Fantasies of the Art
House Audience comes to mind. Re: Also,
I'm tired of seeing beautiful people in gay
films lay by pools. Word..How about a movie
about a retired welder in Sandusky, Ohio,
and a young auto mechanic...Prolly more
168
truthful but try selling that on a yacht in

Cannes.
Lea Aehm-Weh I liked the depiction of the
gay couple in "beginners" but yeah, they
weren't the main focus of the story, so maybe
that doesn't really count ...
Manoel De Q. Tadão But what a story
about a welder and a young auto mechanic in
Sandusky would tell us about beauty?
Larry Loew Richard, do you recommend 'A
Bigger Splash'?
Judy Mam This is a petty and in my
opinion, misguided review. The movie is
sensitive, full of feeling, sensuous, beautifully
acted, moving, and subtle. It doesn't
overdramatize the situation. It allows the
characters space and time to grow and
change. It's a coming of age film about falling
in love, finding out that you are gay, and the
painful moments that experiencing a
complicated love might bring. Nitpicks like
not focusing on the caretaker and the maid
completely miss the point. It's about Elio and
what he discovers about himself. It's about
169
three men at different points in their lives

and how they deal with their sexual
identities. If you miss this movie over such
an ungenerous, verbissener review, you will
miss a lovely experience.
Mark Schaffer The word is Farbissener..
Just sayin'
Lea Aehm-Weh verbissen is german and
totally fits in this context though ;)
Mark Schaffer But we're talking yiddish
here..Yiddish is gernan with more schmaltz..
Lea Aehm-Weh ah, same root, of course:
http://yiddish_english_phrasebook.enacade
mic.com/.../Farb... - again what learned (as
you would say in german) :D
Farbissener
Embittered; bitter person
Mark Schaffer Great name for a rock
group..
170
Judy Mam Mark Schaffer I spelled it wrong,

but you know what I mean.
Hilary Wilcox Oh man, I was really looking
forward to this one! I will still see it, though.
Dennis M Robles
https://www.newyorker.com/.../the-empty-
sanitized.../amp
The Empty, Sanitized Intimacy of “Call Me by

Your Name”
In Luca Guadagnino’s new film about the
love affair…
Simón Cherpitel Thank you, Richard
Brody, for confirming my between-the-lines
perception (from reading several reviews of
praise) as to why CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
is not an enduring movie or worth my seeing
time.
Judy Mam Your loss.
Mark Schaffer Movies one must adore just
because..Very Soviet there.
171
Manoel De Q. Tadão Its an impression of

mine or some members wanted a gay movie,
with common and probably ugly guys just to
add more realism. Being beautiful is now a
problem??
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom It's a
movie about bisexuality, which it seems a lot
of men don't' want to admit. So curious.
Manoel De Q. Tadão I have no problem
with that because I am gay, So bissexualism
for me is no big deal.
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom I find
even gay men don't want to believe there is
such a thing. But you're correct, it is no big
deal, and Aciman repeated that in a recent
interview why adults fail to encourage young
people to honor those kind of feelings.
Mark Schaffer Can' t get financing for
those kinds of slice of life gay movies..
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom The
first time I saw it I was a little disappointed
but attributed that to expecting to feel the
172
same emotions as the book left me with. It

didn't.
I saw it again when it opened in LA and
enjoyed it more. I saw it a third time and
decided I really love it.
This movie is about the want of a 17 year old
boy that falls for this handsome academic,
bringing him face to face with his bisexuality.
Oliver faces the same thing from a more
mature perspective, They are drawn to each
other for more than just their looks if one
pays close attention to those finer points.
But it is true they are pretty men. James
Ivory spoke about how beautiful actors help
make a good movie better, so I'm a little
thrown by the idea the cast should have been
more plain looking. If it matters, in the book
Elio was beautiful and Oliver was nicknamed
The movie star and the cowboy. I caught the
political comments and figured that was
Guadagnino's thing. Maybe that works better
in Europe, but really was a small piece,
almost negligible.
173
I recommend seeing it and to sit at least half

way back to really soak it in. Stay until the
credits are finished.
Patrick Boyd They are obviously drawn to
each other for more than their looks but the
film didn't go as far as it could in bringing
those elements out. And it's fine they are
beautiful but it feels like that is in every
queer film (which I believe bisexuality falls
under) and it would be nice to see a range of
types in queer films is all I'm saying.
Patrick Boyd Weekend is a beautiful
example of a film of beautiful men who also
feel real and the elements of their intimacy
go way deeper than Call Me By Your Name
even attempts.
Simón Cherpitel Ha-ha - whenever i see
WEEKEND mentioned, I only think of
Godard's, & wonder what's being talked
about.....
Judy Mam That end credit take is
unbelievable. There is an entire arc of a
character in that close up alone.
174
Derek Dragotis I’m so glad I saw this film

without knowing much about it. I found
myself completely enveloped by the story, the
setting and most of all the palpable, beating
heart of Chalamet’s performance. The sheer
physicality between the two leads was
breathtaking and seemed to me far more
honest and even subversive than countless
“queer cinema” depictions I’ve seen.
A fantasy? Maybe, but one so grounded by
the work of the two leads that to dismiss it as
a failure because it’s focus (and intent) is to
be in the moment with it and allow yourself
to experience it as it unfolds seems unduly
harsh. I might be old and jaded, but my heart
still knows truth when it hears it. I’m grateful
to this film for reminding me....
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom The
sheer physicality is a great way to put it. It
seemed Chalamet almost scrambled up into
Oliver's/Hammer's arms. Their longing,
loving gazes at each other. How they kiss
Made me ask that tired old question how'd
they get that part so good. But then, that
175
would be a short sighted question. They're

only human,
Patrick McEvoy-Halston New Yorker's
Michael Schulman wrote an interesting piece
about Kevin Spacey's response to Rapp's
accusations against him, where he also ended
up discussing this film. This bit -- "The truth
is that many young gay men have positive,
formative relationships was... probably circa
1970s. The young women gain... so long as
the men don't take advantage of their
youthful inexperience; so long as they serve
as responsible guides. I didn't realize that
there were apparently still some kinds of
relationships where this could be said in such
an abashed way. If this was between a
heterosexual couple, would it draw criticism
for the age-gap, or not? The liberal stance on
it would seem to have become more
complicated.
https://www.newyorker.com/.../kevin-
spacey-muddies-the...
176
Kevin Spacey Muddies the Waters

In rolling up his response to an accusation
and his coming out into one late-night
package, Spacey did…
Aman Ganpatsingh Hm, I don't know if
this has anything to do with the liberal stance
becoming complicated but more with gay
culture become mainstream so it is
scrutinized more. Gay 'culture' has many
toxic traits. Commodification for one. An
obsession with youth (leadi...See More
What Gay Men Owe Kevin Spacey

On toxic masculinity, the harms of the closet,
and whether the queer community can
admit…
THEM.US
Ralph Benner Golly, what fortuity that
Rapp gets the first gay kiss in the “Star Trek”
franchise just weeks after his story about
Kevin.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Aman
Ganpatsingh "To be erased twice — in the
177
assault and then in the apology"... I noticed

this with Franken too.
Russell Colwell An interesting contrast
from another film reviewer at The New
Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/.../call-
me-by-your-name-an...
“Call Me by Your Name”: An Erotic Triumph

Luca Guadagnino’s latest film is emotionally
acute and…
Judy Mam This review is more like it.
Beautifully considered, generous and actually
gets the point of the movie. And so well
written.
Russell Colwell Not having seen it yet, I
have no view of my own, but I am glad to
know my sharing of this other review was
pleasing to at least one other.
Judy Mam It's a beautiful film.
Jill E. Krupnik I love Anthony Lane but
given the little I know about him — based
mostly on his film reviews and that one
Eurovision article — I think that he has many
178
reasons to enjoy this film as a grander whole

than Brody. Which is why criticism is so
interesting! It’s trying to be impersonal but
realizing that the best film reviews reveal the
reviewer’s biases and personality as well as
dissecting the film it self.
Russell Colwell I do not know much about
Anthony Lane and do not love him. The same
is true for me about Richard Brody. That
said, I do agree with you, Jill, about film
criticism not only revealing something about
the films criticised but also about those doing
the criticising. I suggest we all keep that good
point in mind! ;)
Karen Dantas Thank you for articulating so
precisely what was missing for me. "It’s a
story about romantic melancholy and a sense
of loss as a crucial element of maturation and
self-discovery, alongside erotic exploration,
fulfillment, and first love. The idea of the film
is earnest, substantial, moving, and quite
beautiful—in its idea, its motivation, its
motivating principle. It offers, in theory, a
sort of melancholy romantic realism. But, as
rendered by Guadagnino, it remains at the
179
level of a premise, a pitch, an index card."

Kirk Cooper
Mark Schaffer BTW, does any screwing
occur?
Mark Schaffer Perfect..Pitch is what
matters..Just ride the zeitgeist..The crowds
will show up
Mark Schaffer Like I suggested, these
"morally friendly films are celebrated for
their fashionable cinematic and evolved
moralistic stance , but often get a pass on
their actual execution and realization,
because they are well, "our sort of film with
our sort of people". One could argue that
films like these reflect the stratified
atmosphere of the makers of the film..Very
Victorian, if you think about it...Also, The"
Before Sunrise" template of attractive people
wandering through romantic locales while
musing on their fascinating lives is catnip to
many in a certain demo.
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom Today I
kept thinking about the scene at the end of
the day when Elio is sitting under the tree
and Malfada is walking towards. It's near
180
dusk Elio is pining for Oliver and

unfortunately Mafalda does not know where
he is. We ultimately learn Oliver is
somewhere else thinking about Elio. Sufjan
Steven's Futile Devices plays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=DTCUHVUQ7iE
So poignant! I got really choked up at that
point as well as several other points of the
movie. So beautiful and so sad.
Somebody told me in this group once that
sometimes one enjoys a movie as an
amusement park ride where the overall
delivery is not perfect, yet we loved the ride
and go again. Call Me By Your Name is one
I'll watch again and again. A lot of people are
hungry for a movie like this. I am.
I can tell Brody didn't care much for the
movie although I can refute a lot of what is
written in the New Yorker. But what matters
the most is he didn't care for it But a lot of
people will.
Jill E. Krupnik I love this director (I Am
Love is one of those films I will stop watching
if it’s on tv (thanks PBS!)) and I will go
181
wherever his haute-bourgeois vision takes

me BUT I have a friend who hasn’t seen any
of the director’s earlier films and said that
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME “made her feel
feelings” and so that subsumed her response
to the editing and technical choices that were
questionable.
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom HIs
other movies are now at the top of my queue.
Will Thede I loved “Call Me By Your
Name”. It seems to me Richard wanted and
expected a different kind of movie - perhaps
something along the lines of Linklater’s “The
Before Trilogy” or Andrew Haigh’s
“Weekend” - with wonderful dialogue and
deep conversation between the romantic
leads. But after having read the book and
seen the film twice, I can confidently say
that’s not what the “Call Me By Your Name”
story is or intends to be. The film is more of
an ode to Maurice Pialet’s “A nos amours”,
another coming of age tale from the 1980s
about a young girl discovering her sexuality.
Aidan O'Connor Likely speaking for many,
I fundamentally disagree with the entirety of
this review. Seeing the film before reading
182
Brody’s dour account, I was quite shocked to

come across such a vapid, contrarian analysis
of a film which has already evoked deep
emotional resonance in its limited-release
audiences.
Simply start with what Brody thinks the
movie is about. One can ascribe numerous
messages, often personally informed, to a
film. But boiling down such an affecting work
(for a gay man myself) to “its better if your
parents think being gay is ok” is downright
offensive and ignorant. While I understand
the author’s possible lack of connection with
the subject matter, an astoundingly real
same-sex relationship was painted with both
tenderness and astounding composition.
Guadagnino’s imagery is undeniably sensual
and present. Call it what you may (empty,
etc.), but one can not deny the beautiful shell
encasing this film. Now fill within a
passionate love story executed brilliantly and
with flair by the male vehicles. One need not
be gay to experience the resonant confluence
of both the lovers’ passions and the setting’s
disarming charms.
183
I feel moved to question whether Brody even

detected the interplay of dramatic tension
between Chalamet and Hammer in every
scene. The film beautifully captures the
precise, muted dance of same-sex mating in a
world not built for such an occurrence; the
nuance of touch and of posture, the fiery
release that accompanies every realization.
As a man who has experienced quite similar
interactions, the memories evoked by these
scenes were extremely palpable. The drama
responds to the audience’s conception of
love; maybe this is a flimsy claim, but it’s one
shared by a critical mass far outnumbering
those in Brody’s corner here. And I’m almost
upset he refuses to interact with the work.
I suppose, at the end of the day, we all must
choose how to critique. I sense that Brody
expected much more structure and
manufactured payoff than was offered.
Moonlight has shown us that this need not be
essential for a brilliant piece of art. It’s
Unfortunate for those who detach to sit in
the sidelines as this dazzling experience plays
184
out on film, hopefully for many more in the

coming weeks.
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom Even
before the parents assure Elio he can always
talk to them, they remind him to consider the
German proverb "is it better to speak or to
die?" The possibility of a same sex attraction
prompted the parents to remind, just in case,
not to let the op...See More
Daniel Phillips Glad I'm not the only one
who feels like this. Call Me By Your Name
doesn't have a youthfulness as vibrant as that
of Y Tu Mamá También, nor an emotional
core as affecting as that of Brokeback
Mountain, nor an atmosphere as serene as
that of Paterson, nor a humaneness as
profound as that of Moonlight. Not to
mention that pretty much the same story was
told in an episode of The Simpsons in which
Lisa befriends a substitute teacher, with
greater wit, subtlety, and poignancy than it is
here. Call Me By Your Name simply doesn't
stand up against any of these examples.
Mark Schaffer But it checks the boxes for
the morally correct, hothouse type of movie
the chattering class drools over.
185
Kristina Ruhnke I wholeheartedly

disagree with this account as well. I felt the
film’s biggest strength was stripping the story
of all the social stigma usually associated
with films about gay romance that tend to
have a shot at awards season glory and
getting right down to the core of raw
attraction and longing, and thereby
essentially making it a universal summer love
story. What the maids may think about
Oliver and Elio’s affair could not have been
further from my mind. Of course, stories
addressing the agony of coming-out still
common in many societies today are
important to tell, but I’m happy about this
particular instance of
universalization/normalization instead of
problematization.
Mark Schaffer Is there male bodice
ripping? Do they get down and dirty, or is it
aesthetic bonking only?
Mark Schaffer Is Hollywood in the 20
teens becoming Broadway in the 70s and
80s?
186
Babar Suleman Richard Brody may be an

effective critic when it comes to films that
deal with events happening outside the
characters' skins but he has shown a
consistent lack of sensitivity for subtle films
that are actually about the interiority and
inner richness of characters. His reviews for
Brooklyn
(https://www.newyorker.com/.../the-
sanitized-past-of-brooklyn), Things to Come
(https://www.newyorker.com/.../isabelle-
hupperts...), The Lobster
(https://www.newyorker.com/.../the-petty-
laments-of-yorgos...), 45 Years
(https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-
about.../movies/45-years) and, now, Call Me
By Your Name, are all indicative of this.
Moira Brigitte Rauch That is a pity... the
photo looks great �
Megan KM Charlie Stephenson
Waël Seaiby The last 20 minutes of the film
are some of the best cinema I’ve seen. So no,
I don’t agree. Thanks, bye.
187
Andrew Torrance If you read the review,

he kind of addresses this. Regardless, I'm
excited to see it!
Mohammed Forero Bucheli Hey, but,
sufjan songs!!!
Cynthia Mejías I haven’t seen it but
judging by Guadagnino’s other two films he
takes a similar approach to Merchant-Ivory:
the emotional tribulations of the moneyed
classes. Which is not necessarily bad but to
some it might seem trivial. I think he hit the
jackpot by casting Tilda Swinton in I Am
Love.
Alessandro Vecchiato Richard, I think
your essay is really beautiful and sharp, and I
take that you blame this on the director and
not on the writer because he chooses what he
wants to depict. I took the movie, though, to
be like a fantasy. A lot of the things that you
find lacking in the movie are due to the
desire -- in the movie as in the book -- to
provide that viewing experience. It is still
puzzling and it doesn't justify emptiness, but
don't you see merit in it?
188
Mark Schaffer Cynthia - Exactly..The class

thing grates..Movies about people familiar to
the people who make movies..Tiresome and
safe that coddles the art house audience -
emotional tribulations of the moneyed
classes. Which is not necessarily bad but to
some it might seem trivial. Well said.
Ralph Benner Cynthia & Mark: I hear you.
The Merchant-Ivory movies “The
Bostonians,” “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge,” “Howards
End,” “The Remains of the Day,” “Jefferson
in Paris” and “The Golden Bowl” are
banquets of good taste that often don’t taste
all that good. Or fill us up: ingesting all the
stellar acting, directing, high fidelity to
source material and all the lush fixings, we
still leave undernourished. But with E.M.
Forster’s “Maurice,” Merchant and Ivory are
really serving, with material they feel through
the flush of experience and they know where
they’re going with it. They’ve found the heat
in Forster in much the same fearless way
director Iain Softley found it in James with
“The Wings of the Dove.” Love in the time of
“obscene imaginings” is only mildly abated
189
and in the long of painful celibacy there can

be ladders to explosive orgasms, shared by
those from different classes.
Mark Schaffer Fantasies of the Art House
Audience requred reading here..
Mark Schaffer The thing is movies like
these cater to as much s specialized demo as
a Micheal Bay demolition movie does to its
aud..The dynamic is the same, if the product
is different..There's almost a handbook for
these type of chattering class
movies...Sometimes they look like they were
fabricated with the same efficiency as a Bay
popcorn circus act..And the pull quotes - You
could play a drinking game with the go to
blurb words for this fare..I need a drink
now..See Three bill boards as an antidote to
genteel, neo Victorian flapdoodle.
Waël Seaiby Isn’t every movie ever made,
made to cater to a specialized audience? And
aren’t the themes of love, sexual awakening
and coming of age some of the more
universal themes portrayed on film? If
anything the story of a revenge-seeking
190
mother is harder to relate to than something

as universal as the aforementioned themes.
Just because the characters belong to a
“specialized” class, doesn’t mean that their
experiences and emotions aren’t valid or
don’t represent something to relate to or
learn from.
Mark Schaffer True, but I don't think
sophisticated movie goers consciosly know
that a Judy Dench movie is as much a
product with its own tradenark conventions
as the next Transformers movie.Read
Fantasies of the Art House
Audience..Enlightening.
Waël Seaiby I don’t see why something
can’t be a trademark, or marketed toward a
specific audience and still be good. I thought
Moana was a brilliant film and it’s a cluster of
trademark, audience targeting, money-
making, brand-crazy big studio production.
But it’s still brilliant. It’s both and.
Mark Schaffer No argument there.
John Blonde Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Sigh.
191
Karen Dantas Can anyone share for them

the moment they felt where Oliver and Elio
share that emotional connection? I was at an
early morning screening when I saw it - my
problem with the film (and maybe it was due
to being sleep deprived and up early) was
that I was not able to emotionally connect.
Maybe I missed something?
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom
****SPOILER********
Karen Dantas Guadagnino paints a picture of
Elio's interest from the start, referring to the
arriving guest as the usurper and at breakfast
noticing the Star of David which peeked
Elio's interest. But the real emotional
connectionmay not have been demonstrated
until after they made love. Elio seemed like
being with this guy hadn't been all it had
been cooked up to be in his head. But later he
heads to town and finds Oliver. "I just
wanted to be with you, but I'll leave if you
want," They walk towards the alley their
hands grazing each other almost holding
hands in public. Oliver proclaims to Elio, "Do
you know how happy I am we made love?"
192
That might be where they first admit a

connection too each other. It was in the scene
below.
But before that when Oliver rubs the bottom
of Elio's feet, the look in Elio's eyes said a lot.
Sorry if I'm sounding like a cheerleader. I

understand this movie is not everyone's cup
of tea.
https://pixel.nymag.com/.../31-call-me-by-
your-name.w710...
PIXEL.NYMAG.COM
Karen Dantas Thanks Mmarrk �
Mark Schaffer Is this satire?
Mark Schaffer Comparison between this
and Carol?
Karen Dantas I find they are two
completely different experiences and the
story is very different. Apples and oranges.
Asya Sagnak frustrating how people are so
fast and automatic in comparing queer films
to each other. would we try to compare
Titanic and The Notebook?
193
Karen Dantas Carol was about a woman

(Therese) who falls in love with another
woman (Carol) but the relationship cannot
continue for the sake of Carol's relationship
with her daughter. Call Me By Your Name is
a coming of age story of a young man
exploring and getting in touch with his
sexuality and falling in love with the man he
initially viewed as an intruder on his
summer. I found that Carol, like Call Me By
Your Name tackled the precipice of putting
yourself out there in hopes the feelings are
reciprocated. Carol was more about the
barriers to their relationship and the grieving
and loss due to stakes which were the central
moving pieces to the story, while Call Me By
Your Name was focused on a summer and
romance in an idyllic setting, which was only
temporary. Carol was more tragic, Call Me By
Your Name was focused on maturing and
growing up. Hope that helps.
Mark Schaffer It does..I'm just surprised
how the entire subject of same sex
relationships in films like these seem to be
very detached in their otreatment of the
194
sweaty psychicality of passion.."Carol" only

awoke when actual passion broke out in that
hotel room for a brief while. The buildup was
very hothouse 50s New Yorker style
literary...Its like the possibility of passion is
an unattainable, almost religious desire
never allowed to be satisfied..While I haven't
seen Call, it seems that it also tiptoes around
the nitty gritty by couching it in overly
civilized clothing..But I may feel different
after seeing it..Six movies to see before this,
tho..Let the brickbats fly..
Seth Culp I haven't seen the movie yet, but
plan to. Curious though, with all the scandals
going on right now, I haven't heard anyone
mention the pedophilia aspect of this movie.
The one character is 17, right? Is this fact
handled at all in the movie or is this
acceptable in the gay community? Should the
filmmaker be disavowed because of it? Any
thoughts on this matter?
Aidan O'Connor The way Oliver (the older
character) treats Elio, with respect and
sensitivity, manages to diffuse most any
qualms about the age differential. Several
195
particular lines indicate this sensitivity,

where Oliver all but mandates Elio initiate
the romantic contact and always worries he is
damaging the young boy irreparably. This
sensitivity, for me as a gay viewer, made the
age difference a nonissue in terms of
reprehensibility. Interesting to explore still is
the relationship itself, how age certainly
factors in, and what we don’t end up seeing
on screen.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I referred to it,
in my saying the relationship seemed about
what had moral sanction with professors and
first years circa the '70s -- done with respect
and self-control, both parties gained -- but no
longer. Most people are keeping away for the
same reason even amongst #metoo, Corey
Feldman is still mostly being waylaid... it
won't play into feminism or child advocacy
but (they fear) only rightwing hands. I
understand the concern, but I wish more
would bring it up... for the same reason I
thought feminists were right to question the
appropriateness of first year college students
(so 17/18ish) being understood as benefiting
196
from the sexual tutelage of older men...

within this "philosophy," was a mask for
truths of abuse that had been navigated out
of being able to be seen: EVERY relationship
of that kind could be co-opted into the clearly
preferred social narrative, so every one was
sensitive and mutually beneficial. With that
in place, people sense it's hopeless to make a
complaint.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston If I want to say
something a bit more provocative, it'd be that
film studies has tended to be somewhat of a
male enclosure -- a place where you wouldn't
find it unusual and perhaps to your
preference, where some male assumptions --
the male gaze -- last longer in terms of its
general acceptedness than say perhaps in
other arts, like literature. In short, it's an
enclave against femininity, and feeling
feminine. It's possible that amongst such a
group homosexuality has never lost its
association as effeminate men, and so people
don't trust themselves to remain sounding
unprejudiced if they introduce themselves
into the subject for a discussion. Better
197
instead just to give the a-okay and skit

around, or if judge, then judge as malign for
being Oscar catnip.
Mark Schaffer Prolly because the creators
of this novel and film live in a stratified
moral universe in which relationships
between attractive young people and more
worldy older people are fairly common,
lending credence to the sense that activities
like this are acceptable to tne European
moneyed class..In fact, its a long tradition.
Surprised no one has mentioned Lolita, or
Roemer's Claire's Knee.
Aidan O'Connor Mark Schaffer I wouldn’t
consider Lolita an analog, even slightly.
Conceptions of consent in the two works are
completely flipped; where Humbert
manipulates his interest with strategy and
exploitative language, Oliver lets Elio dictate
his own awakening. Further, Elio is 17 years
old, on the verge of adulthood, with Oliver
only 7 his senior (a much larger gap exists in
Nabokov’s work). I don’t subscribe to the
“tradition” you describe, because I don’t
consider Lolita a consensual story of love by
198
any account, which was Nabokov’s entire

conceit, often overlooked by popular media
reviews. I think we’d need to further define
“activities like this” before assigning them
class-acceptability in certain cultures.
Mark Schaffer Yeah. there's much more
symbolism in Humbert's pursuit of Lolita
than evidenced in these affairs, however, I
think Roemer wss dealing with this sort of
thing in his films - Passion and desire of the
wordly for the young
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Mark Schaffer
Attitudes are changing all-around:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-
41966245
France to review child sex laws

It comes after charges of rape were
dismissed…
BBC.COM
199
Mark Schaffer Are we in Death in Venice

territory here?
· Reply · 13 hrs
Patrick McEvoy-Halston This is the discussion
of the age-gap at Slate, which articulates what we
are all thinking: "There is also the simple fact that
Hammer, at 31, looks much older than 24, and
Chalamet, at 21, barely looks 17. In the book, one
has the sense that while Oliver carries a sort of
broad-shouldered “American” manliness
compared with Elio, the two are not in such
wildly different ZIP codes physically. The film
exaggerates that difference. Still, none of these
book-to-movie changes affect the essential way I
view the film—as an urgent and beautiful story of
discovery—but that may not be true for you.
That’s fine. Even if the relationship is legal or
consensual or meets any other criteria, some
viewers will find it inappropriate or worse, and
that’s a subjective reality that the movie’s fans—
and Hammer and the filmmakers—have to
accept."
http://www.slate.com/.../the_ethics_of_call_me_b
y_your...
200
Call Me by Your Name’s Lovers Are 17 and 24.

How Should We Feel About That?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston This for example is
how we casually would assume to proclaim about
a heterosexual relationship of about the same
implicit age difference. Taken from the
NewYorker: "Cline’s attorneys argued that the
plagiarism allegations were false, and asserted in
a letter that Reetz-Laiolo—who was thirty-three-
years old when the two started dating, while Cline
was twenty—had been emotionally and
physically abusive toward her, that he had
cheated on her, and that she had installed the
spyware in order to monitor his behavior and
protect herself, not to steal his...
writing.https://www.newyorker.com/.../how-the-
super-lawyer.../amp...
201
How the Super Lawyer David Boies Turned a

Young Novelist’s Sexual Past Against Her
Boies is famous for having high ideals in a
profession…
NEWYORKER.COM

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Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Further posts of mine at Clio's Psyche,

with all other participants snipped out
202
Psychoclass division leads to tech division.

People out of families that impart on their
kids that if they grow they are worthy of
apocalyptic punishment, don't thrive in the
new environment. This is primary. We could
literally foist thriving jobs on them, terrific
203
prosperity, and they'd still vote to annihilate

it... knowing exactly what they are doing.
---------
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Some
technological determinism
The only thing they're trying to conserve is
the ability to not be devoured by their
mothers for having the temerity to
individuate. But still, what you're articulating
here, to me, elides the fact that one of the
principle stories over the last 40 yrs has been
that of liberal minded people (i.e., those of
higher psychoclass) leaving small towns to
find themselves in the like of coastal cities.
Haven't we just seen a enormous amount of
places made into what Lloyd articulates as
psychogenic cul-de-sacs, owing to this?
Those that are into tech for autism (escape)
purposes aren't really the digital people this
article is addressing... gamer gate people
aren't usually the ones finding themselves
working at facebook/apple/google. And if we
could expand the opportunities in small
towns by a gigantic margin, we'd still find
ourselves dismayed that they're somehow
204
using the tech to inhibit or destroy a society

bent on ongoing legitimate growth... we'd
have just made small American towns into
very able Russian bots. Congratulations!
Town vs. city... does not feed into
psychoanalytic probing, but of commonplace
psychological assumptions. Digital divides,
economic divides = commonplace. Give more
money and more opportunities... like really
give it, and voila! Not so: a lot of well-off
people voted for Trump.
----------
I'm happy to see Franken go, if he goes. I'm
tired of this past tradition where if you're
someone doing powerful things for
Democratic causes, we'll overlook it if you
were a predator to women. Guys like this
cause humiliations which last for years. Time
to go.
-------------
205
About the not being a monster bit... numbers

4 and 5. And one is a charming story about
him doing his firm butt-grasp thing and then
asking her to go the bathroom with him,
which is almost as charming as his doing the
boob grab thing to a sleeping woman,
exhausted after working to provide moral
support to troopers, and thereafter ensuring
she'd learn of how she'd been understood
only as a mockery of a person.
And this human anomaly should have visited
a psychologist, so she could be on record as
an actual human possibility: I felt violated all
over again. Embarrassed. Belittled.
Humiliated.
How dare anyone grab my breasts like this
and think it’s funny?
I told my husband everything that happened
and showed him the picture.
I wanted to shout my story to the world with
a megaphone to anyone who would listen,
but even as angry as I was, I was worried
about the potential backlash and damage
going public might have on my career as a
broadcaster.
206
“He came at me, put his hand on the back of

my head, mashed his lips against mine and
aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth,”
she wrote.
“I immediately pushed him away with both of
my hands against his chest and told him if he
ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so
nice about it the next time,” Tweeden wrote.
“I walked away. All I could think about was
getting to a bathroom as fast as possible to
rinse the taste of him out of my mouth.”
“I felt disgusted and violated,” she added.
No dear, you didn't, for Trevor Pederson the
psychologist has confirmed that never in his
history has any client ever felt all that bad
about some guy assaulting them, unless
they'd had their clothes torn off and been
full-on raped.
Adios, Al Franken.
-------------------
This person too reminds me of exactly the
kind of person who would never visit a
207
psychologist for what happened to her,

owing... not to psychologists' tendency to
automatically belittle such things, but to it
being objectively no big thing really -- not
"real" assault. (And think of her clear
hysteria at guessing that Franken would use
his advantages over her [including her
colour!] if she ever tattled on him, to make
her feel even worse than she already did.)
she wanted to support.
“I had never attended anything like that,” she
said.
She and her friends found themselves
introduced to him.
cupped my butt.”
208

without him.
The second woman told several people ―
including one of the reporters for this story,
Zachary Roth ― about the incident some
years ago, but didn’t want it reported then.
She said she didn’t tell anyone at the time of
the incident because inappropriate behavior
from men was not that unusual to her or her
friends.
“Sexual harassment happens so often, you
have to learn how to move on,” she said,
describing her thinking at the time.
Several other factors also left her feeling
powerless.
“I felt like I didn’t have a voice,” she said.
“This man had all of the power, all of the
authority. In addition, he is a white man and
I am a woman of color. I was 21 years old.
And I was afraid that he would use all of
those privileges to discredit me, to make me
feel even smaller than I already felt.”
209
Today, she said, she feels more confident, in

part thanks to the flood of women who have
come forward over the last month to share
stories of sexual harassment by powerful
men.
“I couldn’t see all these other women come
forward and not walk the walk myself,” she
said. “I wanted my report to be a way for
other women to say, ‘Yes, that happened to
me and I don’t have to be afraid.’”
---------------------
me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston
change) Nov 24

The spirit of metoo isn't about creepy guys,
but criminal predators... there's a massive
conception switch. Old Hollywood thought
Weinstein creepy, even when it was common
knowledge he was a rapist... used power over
young people to force sex. So in any forum
the term should no longer carry authority...
its history is of it enabling predators. Al
Franken isn't being revealed merely as creepy
210
(... he was just creepy? well then, stop being

such a wimp/thin-skinned/sensitive and
brush him off = old think), but as a predator,
whose behaviour would already be judged
criminal in many states. The philosophy of
deMausian psychohistory is that through
time things that become unacceptable and
criminalized started off as everyday,
essentially expected, occurrences; abuse we
criminalize now was once accepted
behaviour: but it was always a big deal. I'm
amazed that anyone could read Tweeden's
account and think, no biggie there... wonder
what this is all about?... the problem must be
with people who have a problem. This isn't
any longer 1990 and the Clintons... we've
entered a new era where thought isn't first on
what could happen to someone's career, but
on what occurred to the people that were
humiliated and used. You want to know all
about that, how that felt, then you think on
what to do with the abuser. Personally I don't
believe in jails or prisons, but certainly on
reform centres for the mentally sick.
211
I'm also fed up with the way he has

responded. To gain my respect he would have
admitted automatically that what he did to
Tweeden wasn't really a once-only. He would
not have said he was a guy who liked to hug,
either... I'm just a hugger, and sometimes I
get that might be misunderstood by people.
He would have tried to explain the truth,
regardless of what it would lead to, which is
that though he deserves credit for being
someone whose inclination is to find
Republican policies revolting and to supports
bills which will empower the American
public, very much including women, he has
used this long period where powerful
Democrat men who support women's issues
have been given a pass on their own
predatory behaviour towards women, to in
fact do.... what all it will come out that he has
done. He should have said that this is a
moment where what woman need are men
who will not show that the preferred
response of anyone who has been a predator
remains to damage-control... and then only if
the first option of not confessing to anything,
of hiding, proves unavailable, but to lift the
212
full redemption of their victims as genuinely

harmed people to the forefront and to work
away at means of portraying their activity
that benefits from the old sense of it as no big
deal; basically the way things are... so get a
grip already. You don't do this by making it
so that they'll have to fight through your
cover as a "hugger" (his latest foray) or a guy
who sometimes makes inappropriate jokes...
even as it might prove to work for him
politically. You admit that you intended to
humiliate Tweeden. That you intended to
make women you knew felt honoured to be
by your side feel like spoils of the powerful:
like people who if they raised a stir would
find out what happens to people whom the
Democratic establishment count amongst
their most promising members if they speak
up.
Brian, you're a populist. This whole past age
has been about a few people really benefiting
while the humiliations of those out of the
limelight were ignored, and it makes you very
angry. Why isn't your instant reaction to
Franken one where finally people who could
213
never of had their voice heard before are

finally feeling safe and empowered to rise up
and do so now? Why the calm? I just don't
feel this from you, but rather your wondering
what the heck this uprising is about,
anyway... everything's being taken care of.
Out of the kind of reaction you're having
#metoo would never have happened. It's
about people finding their way automatically
into the victims, and not being able to pull
away, in a way they just weren't before. Why
in this case aren't you more in the victims?
Delighted to know they won't have to
suppress anymore... carry the humiliation?
You seem so much so when it's people vs.
rich. There's no, relax, there's a tribunal
going on about that now, in that.
I said last week that what the powerful did to
create victims was inevitable during the last
period. I want people to understand why this
was so... and I see means of encouraging
some people to actually think on it in their
having to come to grips with the fact that so
many of the heroes they have loved could at
the same time have been horrifying
214
predators. They'll feel like it's right they are

criminalized, but also wonder how it could be
that men who are still clearly so good could
at the same time be so brutal. Some will just
fall for platitudes about human nature, but
some will work further on the conundrum. I
also think that deMausian psychohistorical
understanding goes nowhere out a
generation that is able to stifle accounts of
victims' pain, especially that of the weak. If
you're responsive to that... and #metoo
suggests people are becoming that, then to
me you're a person who could see a parent
victimizing their children and not
immediately find a way to rationalize it so
that your own mother and father don't have
the finger too squarely pointed at them, and
also not to any longer decide that the
collective effects of such abuse couldn't be so
gross and massive to mean the shaping of the
entirety of a subsequent society. You would
see the effects of poor childrearing for what it
is, and almost immediately decide that the
form society takes of course owes to that. My
response is about caught sight of a more self-
aware and grown-up world, even as, yes, I
215
think it inevitable that populists will win out

over progressives for the next ten years or so
and will use whatever they can get to shape
our past liberal society, which couldn't ever
not be an empowering but also a predatory
one, so that it seems only a corrupt "Weimar"
that requires cleansing. I hope here I've
thought enough about your challenge. It is
possible I haven't.
--------------------
me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston
change) Nov 25

I'll say too once again about Frederick Crews,
if you don't mind, that one of the things I
new immediately about #metoo was that the
long overlordship of Crews (whom, as I said
before, I still overall do like) over official
opinion on the matter of Freud and
psychoanalysis was now over (or at least very
much positioned to be over; a lot will depend
on how many Freudians really feel the spirit
216
of #metoo, or if they're still left wondering

how people could say such mean things
about Woody Allen). He was the leading
voice in arguing that the recovered memory
movement was bogus... and associated both
this and Freud's assessment that so many
children in 19th-century Vienna had been
sexually molested by their parents as doing
incalculable damage to a great deal of
actually innocent parents. As I remember it
at least, his voice on this matter was taken
seriously because he cooperated with the
current spirit to mostly keep attention away
from the wreckage powerful people were
doing to the vulnerable, a spirit that owing to
#metoo and to arising populist movements is
now breaking. Now if someone were to argue
that so many children ... so, so, so many
children actually recalled real experiences of
their parents molesting them, there will be
loads more people automatically willing to
accept that it was in fact as prevalent as that
than would have been true during our just-
passed period, where the role of the
vulnerable was to suffer... carry the
helplessness, carry the sins for growth, that
217
everyone in society felt. Now if one labels a

movement like this a witch hunt, you're not
the voice of the NYRB, Frederick Crews, but
Woody Allen... and you're very much part of
the problem.
I'll expand a little bit more on what I said to
Brian last night regarding how my "current
turn" is consistent with my belief in growth
panic. To believe in growth panic, that a
whole society would turn away from growth...
in believing fascism (mother country
subservience) a remedy for it (!), one has to
be able to imagine that the overall
childrearing experiences of people in
America is so bad, that they experience fears
and terrors at the hands of their mothers
(fathers are a dodge) that are so awesome
and overpowering, that they will come to see
their own individuation as worthy of some
kind of total, apocalyptic punishment they'll
do anything to escape. When people begin to
hear instances, particularly relating to
Tweeden (who seems to be the one people
want to waylay, blow off), where she says the
way Franken manoeuvred himself into
218
forcing his way into her mouth, into making

use of her, was so deeply humiliating she
could never see him on television and not
think of it again, but also with versions of the
same being said by so many women of the
men who accosted them... that this
experiences lasted with them for decades, so
that it remains so joyous to them, such a
relief to them, that they can finally bring the
matter up and not feel afraid, I think we're at
the cusp of understanding once again that
ostensibly innocuous experiences that one
should be expected to get past if one isn't
weak or thin-skinned, AREN'T that at all.
The average experience... was actually
horrible, and will historically find itself on
the out just like every child's guaranteed
previous experience of brutal beatings, stark
abandonment, and sexual molestation was.
For me, deMausian psychohistory, to
flourish, requires, not people who are the
most historically literate (indeed, the very
fact that you spent so much time in periods
filled with less emotionally evolved people
will be increasingly be seen as a bizarre
219
desire), or psychologically literate, but the

most emotionally healthy. They can't have
maternal altars in their heads whom they'll
ultimately pay heed to. #metoo might show
me whom exactly is out there, and where
they mostly are. Naomi Wolf strikes me for
example as someone who is now essentially a
deMausian (especially with her recent
comment the average experience of women
through history was to be raped repeatedly
[and what kinds of mothers are born out of
experiences like these?]), and though I know
she's out of Yale literature studies I haven't a
clue if she's read Freud.
Full conversation about "Bringing Up

Baby" at the NewYorker Movie
Facebook Club
220

I'm obsessed with Bringing Up Baby, which
is on TCM at 6 PM (ET). It's the first film by
Howard Hawks that I ever saw, and it opened
up several universes to me, cinematic and
otherwise. Here's the story. I was seventeen
or eighteen; I had never heard of Hawks until
I read Godard's enthusiastic mention of him
in one of the early critical pieces in "Godard
on Godard"—he called Hawks "the greatest
American artist," and this piqued my
curiosity. So, the next time I was in town (I…
I was out of town at college for the most
part), I went to see the first Hawks film
playing in a revival house, which turned out
to be "Bringing Up Baby." I certainly laughed
221
a lot (and, at a few bits, uncontrollably), but

that's not all there was to it. I had never read
Freud, but I had heard of Freud, and when I
saw "Bringing Up Baby," its realm of
symbolism made instant sense; it was
obvious to me that Hawks was saying a lot
that he wasn't saying, and that the way he did
so was as revealing about psychology and
about the very nature of artistic expression as
it was about the particulars of the story. So I
became an instant Hawksian, an instant
Freudian, and I saw immediately why
Godard would express such uninhibited
enthusiasm for Hawks's films and all the
more for Hawks's system of thought.
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-
abo…/…/bringing-up-baby…
https://www.newyorker.com/
…/ric…/bringing-up-baby-its-fatal…
Bringing Up Baby - The New Yorker
The enduring fascination of this 1938
screwball comedy is due to much more than
its uproarious gags. Having already helped
launch the genre, the director Howard
222
Hawks here reinvents his comic voice,

establishing archetypes of theme and…
Carol Lloyd Neill One of my top 10 favorite
movies of all time. It never gets old.
Raquel Herrera Same here
Roberta Smoodin "i just went gay all of a
sudden!" or something close to that--love it.
hepburn at her most delightful. and that
dog--and his intercostal clavicle! great great
movie!
· November 20 at 4:24pm
Richard BrodyGroup Moderator That's
the moment I almost fell out of my chair.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston It's a funny

moment. Came out just before the war,
where a generation of men displaced out of
being providers, would make sure they'd
never subsequently be in a position to be
mistaken for those abdicated out of
masculine roles.
Maurice Yacowar On my first intro film

courses I always ran a month or so of Hawks
films to cover intros to the various genres
223
and the auteur theory at the same time. He is

so good and so much fun. Much prefer him
over Ford.
Roberta Smoodin ford couldn't make a
screwball comedy to save his own life! and
you're right, not much fun, though i do love
some of his work. hawks had so much more
breadth!
Paul Cunningham Comedy is a big part of
lots of Ford's films.
Mary Rosandich So funny. Such a great
cast!
Nina Berry That scene where they sing "I
Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby,"
with the leopard yowling on the roof, and the
dog barking along... never fails to make me
hoot with laughter. But then most of the
scenes in this amazing movie to that!
David Kaiser Yes, I put that scene in my
compilation.
Elizabeth R. Shafer Love this movie!
Avneet Sharma I absolutely loved this
movie!! It redeemed Cary Grant for me after
his terrible character in His Girl Friday.
224
Avneet Sharma To clarify, I'm not saying

that Cary Grant is a great actor, I just
HATED his character in His Girl Friday and
I'm still unsure if he was supposed to be
unlikeable.
Roberta Smoodin to me, one of the great
things about cary grant was that he was so
willing to portray unlikeable characters--such
as in his girl friday, and especially notorious.
Lisa Maniaci Oh! Notorious
Nina Berry I think Cary Grant was a great
actor. Witness the range just between these
two Hawks-directed movies - manipulative
uber-sharp newspaper editor to bumbling
naive paleontologist. Completely convincing
each time. And hilarious.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Oh dear. I love
"His Girl Friday" -- and especially the
Bellamy-Grant interplay! Plus the fact that
Roz Russell could rapidly articulate as good
as Grant!
Dan Eades The list of great screwball
comedies by Hawks is long: Twentieth
Century, Ball of Fire, Monkey Business, His
Girl Friday, I Was a Male War Bride, and
225
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (a musical, but

also a screwball comedy) are not only among
my favorite comedies, they are also among
my favorite movies. And Hawks, along with
Hitchcock, is surely among the best
Hollywood directors of all time.
Janice Delaney Stearns Three out six
with CG...he was terrific!
Richard BrodyGroup Moderator Also,
Man's Favorite Sport?, with its Bringing Up
Baby quotes, and the opening scene of A
Song Is Born, his greatest comic set-piece.
https://www.newyorker.com/.../dvd-of-the-
week-mans...
DVD of the Week: “Man’s Favorite Sport?”

Howard Hawks worked in so many genres
for…
NEWYORKER.COM
Paul Cunningham 'Only Angels Have
Wings' deserves a mention.
Janice Delaney Stearns Paul
Cunningham Baranca! Also, CG~
226
Darren McRoy I just like this film for the

handsome leopard! :3 ... okay, Cary and
Katharine are pretty great, too.
Peter Nilsson I have never seen that movie
and I'm very sad about that.
Stephen Sposato A personal favorite. I
watched it again on my birthday recently and
was thrilled to find it still makes me laugh so
hard.
Janice Delaney Stearns Hysterically
funny - top 10 for me!
Janice Delaney Stearns And Charlie
Ruggles and May Robson - perfection!
Ken Eisner One of my all-time faves.
David Kaiser i feel the same way and I will
never forget the wonderful afternoon that I
saw it for the first time with my first wife.
Incidentally, in an interview with
Bogdanovich, I think, Hawks said that he
thought he had made a mistake by making
EVERYONE in the movie (except perhaps
Grant's financee) nuts. Believe it or not, the
original release flopped. But I don't agree
with him at all. I think that's a great thing
about the movie.
227
Gay Pauley I can't agree that Grant's

fiancee wasn't nuts--didn't she imply she
wouldn't have sex with Cary after marriage?
�
Heiko Recktenwald Thanks!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=5fowrDX2zA0
Katharine Hepburn | Levada da Breca

(Bringing Up Baby) -…
Janice Delaney Stearns And Barry
Fitzgerald - Gogarty (sp?) definitely nuts!
Gay Pauley I love the whole movie, but for
me their interaction on the golf course, when
she plays his ball and drives his car, is hard
to top. Hepburn's line delivery and Grant's
befuddlement are priceless.
Nina Berry And how she effortlessly sinks
that 20 foot putt! Hawks loved using actor's
228
natural gifts and Kate was quite the athlete.

"I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody!"
Patrick McEvoy-Halston She's just
exasperating at that point, an affliction.
Somewhere in the film you feel their
relationship more evens out. I hope it's not
the part where he stomps on her foot and
successfully shuts her up. It might be though.
He cows everyone around him in that scene.
Respect.
Barbra Bohannan I think I've loved this
film since I was a toddler. I keep
subconsciously quoting from it all the time
but, alas, am surrounded by non-believers
who simply stare bemusedly at me. Happy to
be in such great company here!
David Kaiser Yeah, I've had trouble with
them too.. .
Madeline Brown Greer Yes, it’s good to
be among our Bringing Up Baby nation!
Mikaela Kindblom I saw it as kid on
television and remember how much I
laughed and loved it. At the time I probably
liked the idea of having a beautiful wild cat as
a pet. Later I was surprised at how free
229
spoken the film is, with all the crazy people

running about and Cary Grant in a neglige.
It's the kind of movie you like to revisit at
different times in your life - like all great
films it contains both change and has a life of
its own.
Madeline Brown Greer “I cahn’t give u
any thing but love, Baby....”. Love that movie!
Madeline Brown Greer Mr. Bones - �
David Kaiser Mr. Bone, I believe.
David Kaiser Hawks also said, by the way,
that the shooting was a nightmare. The
animals were very hard to direct!
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Avneet Sharma:
If Justice League is any indication, we'll
probably see a lot more male characters you
like. Cary Grant in that movie never really
gets a handle on Katharine Hepburn... his
saying he's in love with her in the end almost
comes as an act of self-defence, a defensive
spell cast, making it seem as if he's got a
handle on everything she can apply onto him
(a wild pretence!). For momentarily she is
induced into being grateful, or playing being
230
grateful, that is, as if she was at his mercy, his

control: and this is a predictable routine,
required on her part so that she's not just a
phallic woman but a feminine one at source,
that gives him a moment where he knows
exactly what he'll have to face with her; he
can relax. It's a funny thing in this movie. I'm
sure the idea is that Cary Grant is supposed
to actually need Katharine Hepburn/Susan,
for she's the wild, the sex, he's not going to
get in his married life with his due wife. But
the movie doesn't play out this way in
actuality. From the start, his upcoming
marriage is about a career of peace and
stability, with her (Alice, his determined and
stern due wife) the guardian of it, more than
anything else. We never have a sense, really,
other than his questioning about lack of sex
and lack of babies (which is not a big
admittance, given that he never in the movie
seems one to want to stick to an act of
command more than momentarily), that he
wouldn't be content with that. He's got
stability, and she's the formidable shield
that'll keep away all intruders (which is,
incidentally, the married life the sex-addict
231
John Updike wished for and got with his

second wife... just by the by.) If this sounds
horrible to you, just imagine you're a
Depression age individual watching a film
where the ostensible despised state is
someone promised that -- stability, with a
fierce shield of a woman protecting it --
rather than a merry-go-round life with an
unpredictable nutter, who's a source of
instability to the guarantee that any act you
initiate will go as planned (sound like
Depression life, anyone?)... any act, including
ensuring that one step you take follows
another as planned, rather than it being
subverted to your somehow falling on your
ass, and who can only be waylaid, or
perceived as perhaps being somewhat
waylaid/managed, if you've got a quip ready
each and every time she interrupts your
nervous system's plans for initiated synapse
to actually follow through with its ostensibly
inevitable predetermined follow through.
About Justice League... yeah, this spot Cary
Grant finds himself in is basically where each
character other than Superman is with
232
Wonder Woman. It's the idea behind there

being so many male members of the team...
the load can get distributed, so Aquaman can
feel the relief after he gets subverted against
course by her in knowing he's not due for
another round for awhile... now's for Cyborg
to feel not like a spy but a caught-out perv,
and impossible-to-catch Flash to feel like an
infant swaddled in arms, however ostensibly
gleeful about it, and Batman to feel like a
leader who's stuck in dated ways so has to
relent to ....
I will say, though, that the extended scene
where Cary Grant finds himself at dinner is
something Susan leads him to that is an
empowering treat for him: he's constantly
interrupting people's talk to get up and chase
after that dog... who's his lead to the lost
dinosaur bone. Amidst the matron at the
table and the ostensibly patriarchal big-game
hunter, he never loses the ability to keep in
mind his original purpose, which is abstract
to this Alice-in-Wonderland turnabout in his
life, and can be imagined vicariously enjoying
his ability to so readily unsettle his fellow
233
dinner guests' expectations of him... play the

part of Susan, for awhile, in a sense. Susan
set this up, but he can pretend he's in on it
too. Two wild agents, rationally causing what
amounts to disturbed expectations, chaos, for
others.
So maybe the end would be more satisfying is
if somehow an ideal could be constructed.
His due wife Alice would remain with him as
a shield, a protection against inanity and
intrusion, and Susan would be equipped as a
weapon, something he could unleash against
others if his shield failed him and he found
himself amongst domestic types -- mothers
and fathers -- and domestic situations he has
no business as an adult falling back into.
She's great for that kind of dire emergency...
absolute chaos for use and cover. As an
analogy, Susan is first caught site of what the
war will soon offer Americans... humiliating,
un-manning adult reliance on the like of
welfare and parental support to survive, has
to meet with what war will confront it with in
its requiring the instant subversion of
estimations of men as assured dependents,
234
into their surely being something else

entirely -- warriors who can ride the war
wind.
Mikaela Kindblom What a marvelous
piece of criticsm!
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Mikaela
Kindblom Thank you very much, Mikaela.
Janice Delaney Stearns The casting was
exquisite~!
Esmenia Dibble Wow, I'm such an
innocent. All I saw was a madcap comedy
with overrated Katherine Hepburn.
Maria Soto I've always thought of this
movie as a masterpiece. I also love What's
Up, Doc.
David Kaiser Yes. Streisand really rose to
the occasion. O'Neal, on the other hand, is
NOT Cary Grant.
Unah Choi That scene where the back of
her dress comes off... �
235
Janice Delaney Stearns Funniest funniest

funniest...laughing just thinking of them
walking along!
Lorri Zipperer One of my favs too...has
been for years - Love Grant and Hepburn
together -- I think of it often when I consider
how I really don't enjoy today's RomComs (in
general) but love this movie. Can anyone help
tease out the difference?
Mikaela Kindblom You are on to
something here. I often feel lost and sad
while watching today's romcoms. Has it
something to do with the way failure and
humiliation are depicted? I remember
especially a romcom with Sandra Bullock
where she played the successful career
woman who had to demean herself in
marriage in order to keep her job. A
surprisingly evil version of a very old story.
The film is The Proposal. I never see this
kind of violence in the old screw ball
comedies.
Cindy Bailey Saxl Agree! I have often
thought about this, too. In Bringing Up Baby
236
and other old screwball comedies, it seems to

me the couple surrenders to love and to each
other, foibles and all. It's satisfying to see
acceptance and joy in the resolution of the
story. Some of todays romcoms can be
awfully cynical at their core. When the
credits roll, we're often left without much
confidence in a happily-ever-after.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cindy Bailey
Saxl Pretty much his last comment to Susan
is, "I'm afraid of you," as he launches himself
up the skirts of a dinosaur to escape her. I'm
reminded of the episode of Cheers where
Diane can't be convinced she and Sam aren't
made for one another... aren't the most ill-
matched couple the world has ever seen.
Cindy Bailey Saxl Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Yes, then he admits that the day spent with
Susan was the best one of his life. They
declare their love for one another, the
dinosaur collapses & they collapse in each
other's arms--all with that delicious sexual
subtext. Painting with a very broad brush
here: would a line like "I'm afraid of you" in a
contemporary rom-com come across with
237
that sweet subtext, or would we be primed

for a machete to come out from behind the
pillow? As Mikaela Kindblom says above--is
it about the way failure and humiliation are
depicted? Generally, the typical denouement
today doesn't seem quite as satisfying.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cindy Bailey
Saxl The dinosaur collapsing wasn't sexual
subtext, but portent of the wreck she'll make
on his future life. She is a predator. She's
manipulative, coercive, she induces him into
a dependent relationship with him ([now that
i've destroyed it] you want your future and
your money, I'm the rich girl with all the
contacts...), she's indifferent to the possible
harm she does to others when they're in way
of her desires (think of how automatically she
subverts Susan). It was brave of him to say he
was scared of her, and wrong of her to ignore
his honest expression and push past this
until he takes second choice and pretends he
had a great time with her, i.e., that at any
moment he might have been co-conspirator
with her rather than essentially always at her
mercy. He marries her only to salvage a
238
momentary sense of self-command. He's a

#metoo victim of her.
Cindy Bailey Saxl Interesting perspective,
well stated. Why don't you give a go at Lorri's
original question? For many of us, it's a
favorite, and far more enjoyable than most
modern romcoms. Since you apparently
don't care for it much, to what do you
attribute its lasting appeal?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston For sure...
because I did offer what I knew even for me
was a one-sided account. Let me work at it. I
CAN tell you now that both she and Grant are
party to a level of awareness, of TRUTH, that
no one seems to share... they draw us in to
the psychopathology of everyday life where,
for instance, forgoing children for a career
can seem an irrational placement of sterility
(dinosaur bones) over the living, where a
game for the staid -- golf -- invites
irrationality (a poor placed shot on your hole
-- a normal occurrence -- does amount to a
well-placed one on an adjacent one, and if it's
first hole that'll mean onto the 18th, where
any quarrel that occurs -- and it's easy to
239
imagine what that might be if the golfer

you're querying is a good one, as she is -- will
carry on so will be to the parking lot, a
parking lot where all the cars seem about the
same so just getting it close would seem to be
about the normal expectation rather than
gross error, and so doing "normal" would
lead to theft, a theft you can't let stand so
you'd refuse to get off the car, and so you
wave goodbye to your boss, still on the first
hole, as you vanish off "crazily" into the
distance), where formal events where proper
decorum are the expectation and everyone is
rich and in similar attire, invite mistakes
which'd bring disaster (swapped black
purses, one holding precious jewelry), and
where torn clothing invites not measured
response -- grace -- but quite genuinely
catastrophic consequences, where throwing
rocks at a window to get attention is revealed
as always bizarrely close to perpetrating a
displaced violent act, where a leopard in the
bathroom isn't ridiculous but a vivid
articulation of walking on into a bathroom is
in our culture (later she stops him short from
barging in on her, for warning him she's
240
naked: gentleman into predator, just as she

risked earlier going lady to tramp), where a
tame leopard walking with him on the
sidewalk is more ho-hum, relaxed, than a
constant yapping, agitated dog, where a
hunter who hides behind a gun is vividly less
heroic than a couple who brave the dangers
of a Connecticut estate at night, where zoos
and circuses seem more wild than Africa,
where jail and jailers are so extreme a
response to the aberrant they invite rather
than quell lunacy, where a genuine measure
of sanity is if you are attracted and interested
in people who are ostensibly insane and if
you carry part of their "insanity" back with
you into your normal state (the constable is
not insane for instantly taking a liking to
them, but savy), where a dog's instinct to be
powerfully interested in bones isn't banal but
fantastic, in that it's easily imagined as being
limited in focus but unlimited in its bounds,
and where a dog burying/digging up things
has got more drama to it than do professions
dedicated to it, where being manipulated into
wear women's dress might be more welcome
rather ruin, in that you can harness
241
aggression out of the crazy, find yourself

feeling strangely buttressed, and somehow
seems to push out of mind worse fears.
There's a sense that what the movie does is
switch you into a way of seeing things which
makes sense, but are completely out of
accord of where you were in originally
perceiving something. The instinct might be
afterwards to mentally go back and forth... a
tame leopard wouldn't eat dogs, but a
leopard out of africa wouldn't ever know a
dog to get accustomed to and come to like, so
would surely eat him, but then he wouldn't
be tame... Afterwards, a loon's call might
seem appropriate if similar to a leopard's,
whereas before the idea would be lunacy. A
world is being jumbled around a lot, an
experience which might have felt safe for a
30s audience in that the the professor's
empowered wife-to-be Susan, the senior
lawyer, the wealthy matron... the institutions
of command and certainty in this movie are
in no position of tumbling. So a safe,
illuminating game. If this was all done in the
'60s, however, you'd be drawn back to the
242
normal world wanting change, and this

would have been anxiety-city for the
Depression crowd dutifully weathering
through their assigned, compromised
decade. For a later audience, it's still a safe
excursion into the psychopathology, the
unreason, of regular lie.
The other answer would be in the
relationship between Susan and the
professor, which rings bells for people. More
can be done on it than I've already done,
certainly.
Cindy Bailey Saxl I enjoyed your parsing
of these scenes, Patrick. In the universe
Susan and David inhabit, reality (as we know
it in this one) is set on its ear. Whenever
anything is this funny—and for audiences for
eighty years no less—it has to get at some
enduringtruths behind the laughs. It is
interesting to think about how this dizzy
couple has resonated (or not) over various
decades—and of course, every generation will
see Susan & David’s “jumbled world” through
its own lens—but I for one would be sad to
see the Baby thrown out with the bathwater
243
as a result of the (albeit much needed) sea

change of sexual politics in our current day.
Your excoriating Susan as a predator and
David as a #metoo victim seems much too
harsh.
Barbara Fox I love this movie so much - it's
funny and frantic but has its own internal
logic. The acting is wonderful, the script
superb, and I have no idea why the
Hepburn/Grant pairing wasn't considered as
classic and memorable as the
Hepburn/Tracy.
Ben Peskoe Nina Cochran Jon
Morgenstern
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Monday, November 27, 2017
Further thoughts on "Bringing Up Baby"

244
Lorri Zipperer One of my favs too...has been for

years - Love Grant and Hepburn together -- I
think of it often when I consider how I really
don't enjoy today's RomComs (in general) but
love this movie. Can anyone help tease out the
difference?
Mikaela Kindblom You are on to something
here. I often feel lost and sad while watching
today's romcoms. Has it something to do with the
way failure and humiliation are depicted? I
remember especially a romcom with Sandra
Bullock where she played the successful career
woman who had to demean herself in marriage in
order to keep her job. A surprisingly evil version
245
of a very old story. The film is The Proposal. I

never see this kind of violence in the old screw
ball comedies.
Cindy Bailey Saxl Agree! I have often thought
about this, too. In Bringing Up Baby and other
old screwball comedies, it seems to me the couple
surrenders to love and to each other, foibles and
all. It's satisfying to see acceptance and joy in the
resolution of the story. Some of todays romcoms
can be awfully cynical at their core. When the
credits roll, we're often left without much
confidence in a happily-ever-after.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cindy Bailey Saxl
Pretty much his last comment to Susan is, "I'm
afraid of you," as he launches himself up the
skirts of a dinosaur to escape her. I'm reminded of
the episode of Cheers where Diane can't be
convinced she and Sam aren't made for one
another... aren't the most ill-matched couple the
world has ever seen.
Cindy Bailey Saxl Patrick McEvoy-Halston Yes,
then he admits that the day spent with Susan was
the best one of his life. They declare their love for
one another, the dinosaur collapses & they
246
collapse in each other's arms--all with that

delicious sexual subtext. Painting with a very
broad brush here: would a line like "I'm afraid of
you" in a contemporary rom-com come across
with that sweet subtext, or would we be primed
for a machete to come out from behind the
pillow? As Mikaela Kindblom says above--is it
about the way failure and humiliation are
depicted? Generally, the typical denouement
today doesn't seem quite as satisfying.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cindy Bailey Saxl The
dinosaur collapsing wasn't sexual subtext, but
portent of the wreck she'll make on his future life.
She is a predator. She's manipulative, coercive,
she induces him into a dependent relationship
with him ([now that i've destroyed it] you want
your future and your money, I'm the rich girl with
all the contacts...), she's indifferent to the possible
harm she does to others when they're in way of
her desires (think of how automatically she
subverts Susan). It was brave of him to say he
was scared of her, and wrong of her to ignore his
honest expression and push past this until he
takes second choice and pretends he had a great
time with her, i.e., that at any moment he might
247
have been co-conspirator with her rather than

essentially always at her mercy. He marries her
only to salvage a momentary sense of self-
command. He's a #metoo victim of her.
Cindy Bailey Saxl Interesting perspective,
well stated. Why don't you give a go at Lorri's
original question? For many of us, it's a
favorite, and far more enjoyable than most
modern romcoms. Since you apparently
don't care for it much, to what do you
attribute its lasting appeal?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston For sure...
because I did offer what I knew even for me
was a one-sided account. Let me work at it. I
CAN tell you now that both she and Grant are
party to a level of awareness, of TRUTH, that
no one seems to share... they draw us in to
the psychopathology of everyday life where,
for instance, forgoing children for a career
can seem an irrational placement of sterility
(dinosaur bones) over the living, where a
game for the staid -- golf -- invites
irrationality (a poor placed shot on your hole
-- a normal occurrence -- does amount to a
well-placed one on an adjacent one, and if it's
248
first hole that'll mean onto the 18th, where

any quarrel that occurs -- and it's easy to
imagine what that might be if the golfer
you're querying is a good one, as she is -- will
carry on so will be to the parking lot, a
parking lot where all the cars seem about the
same so just getting it close would seem to be
about the normal expectation rather than
gross error, and so doing "normal" would
lead to theft, a theft you can't let stand so
you'd refuse to get off the car, and so you
wave goodbye to your boss, still on the first
hole, as you vanish off "crazily" into the
distance), where formal events where proper
decorum are the expectation and everyone is
rich and in similar attire, invite mistakes
which'd bring disaster (swapped black
purses, one holding precious jewelry), and
where torn clothing invites not measured
response -- grace -- but quite genuinely
catastrophic consequences, where throwing
rocks at a window to get attention is revealed
as always bizarrely close to perpetrating a
displaced violent act, where a leopard in the
bathroom isn't ridiculous but a vivid
articulation of walking on into a bathroom is
249
in our culture (later she stops him short from

barging in on her, for warning him she's
naked: gentleman into predator, just as she
risked earlier going lady to tramp), where a
tame leopard walking with him on the
sidewalk is more ho-hum, relaxed, than a
constant yapping, agitated dog, where a
hunter who hides behind a gun is vividly less
heroic than a couple who brave the dangers
of a Connecticut estate at night, where zoos
and circuses seem more wild than Africa,
where jail and jailers are so extreme a
response to the aberrant they invite rather
than quell lunacy, where a genuine measure
of sanity is if you are attracted and interested
in people who are ostensibly insane and if
you carry part of their "insanity" back with
you into your normal state (the constable is
not insane for instantly taking a liking to
them, but savy), where a dog's instinct to be
powerfully interested in bones isn't banal but
fantastic, in that it's easily imagined as being
limited in focus but unlimited in its bounds,
and where a dog burying/digging up things
has got more drama to it than do professions
dedicated to it, where being manipulated into
250
wear women's dress might be more welcome

rather ruin, in that you can harness
aggression out of the crazy, find yourself
feeling strangely buttressed, and somehow
seems to push out of mind worse fears.
There's a sense that what the movie does is
switch you into a way of seeing things which
makes sense, but are completely out of
accord of where you were in originally
perceiving something. The instinct might be
afterwards to mentally go back and forth... a
tame leopard wouldn't eat dogs, but a
leopard out of africa wouldn't ever know a
dog to get accustomed to and come to like, so
would surely eat him, but then he wouldn't
be tame... Afterwards, a loon's call might
seem appropriate if similar to a leopard's,
whereas before the idea would be lunacy. A
world is being jumbled around a lot, an
experience which might have felt safe for a
30s audience in that the the professor's
empowered wife-to-be Susan, the senior
lawyer, the wealthy matron... the institutions
of command and certainty in this movie are
in no position of tumbling. So a safe,
251
illuminating game. If this was all done in the

'60s, however, you'd be drawn back to the
normal world wanting change, and this
would have been anxiety-city for the
Depression crowd dutifully weathering
through their assigned, compromised
decade. For a later audience, it's still a safe
excursion into the psychopathology, the
unreason, of regular lie.
The other answer would be in the
relationship between Susan and the
professor, which rings bells for people. More
can be done on it than I've already done,
certainly.
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Friday, November 24, 2017
A discussion on customer service

252
Bruno Rios After the first few months

working at Indigo I started to have that
impression that it is like a summer camp: I
know some folks are there for a long time,
and are not planning to leave, but there’s this
constant feeling to some (at least to me) that
you meet many people, have a lot of fun and,
after a while, people just “go home”, to do
something else... undoubtedly a great
experience working with all these nice
people!
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Bookselling
used to be a career. It might go back to this at
some point. Regardless, though, of whether
253
you're selling books, tech, lifestyle, there are

encounters you have that end up profoundly
resonant in both yourself and the person
you're in conversation with and advising. As
a culture, I think we sense this sometimes
about retail... that what went on veered
towards a professional encounter as
profound to you as a useful visit to a doctor,
but we're still at a stage where we've got to
shelve that accurate impression to make a
whole industry of workers seem like they're
involved in something of little actual worth...
they exist as attendants to people who do
something of actual worth: hence, this sense
of it as not-serious... a playground for those
who visit for a spell; a potential longterm
grind for those "stuck" there... or who seem
to remain there for some reason. It's part of
creating a class of victims whose voices aren't
uncovered for a generation. I actually think
this #metoo movement, this moment where
voices we had decided weren't worth hearing
are now being heard, will play into a
redemption of people who work "service."
Hence articles now about what it has been
like for forever to work as a Starbucks
254
barista, where no one would come to your

defence if you were overtly
harassed/assaulted by customers:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/.../sexu..
./article36988317/
For being in the job you were in, you had
earned it. Undertake something serious, and
we'll respect you... respect goes to a different
class of people. That has been our society.
Against facts, it has been our society.
posted by someone who hopes... who knows,
that some people "who don't leave" (Lloyd?
Elizabeth? Guy? Karen? Lorna?) are in it to
help straighten it out to be closer to the form
it might become, by reacquainting people
over and over again with the fact that there is
real professionalism that goes on here. And
genius.
Claire Harris Retail therapy - a phrase
used to describe mostly female behaviour
when spending on something frivolous
equals happiness. I think of many of the
experiences I have had through working at
the store, which is also my first real retail job,
yes, as Bruno says, there are those who think
255
it will be fun to work in a bookstore and who

enjoy a couple of seasons before picking up
their real career, but there are as Patrick
says, the genuinely serious professionals
whose knowledge and experience is
exceptional as is their willingness to share it
with customers and colleagues alike. There
are the rest of us, still learning and building
that knowledge, but who have to be
counsellors, teachers, researchers, guides,
using specialist knowledge of subjects,
imagination, be tactiticians, housekeepers
and yet still be smiley, friendly approachable
and eager to help.
It is a sad fact that although we have mopped
up tears, made suggestions, been asked for
advice, found a perfect item, made people
laugh, feel good, etc, we are still seen as
something less, "why are you working here,
you could be doing so much more" is
something I get asked regularly, so maybe I
should be saying back "what is wrong with
my choice of job? I get to use a wide range of
skills every day, in a fast paced, constantly
changing environment with extremely
256
talented people I highly respect, value and

care for, to address your needs successfully,
therefore ensuring you invest your
time/money wisely and so you will return to
a place that made you feel you were
important. What job could I do that would
give me all that?" Then maybe change might
happen.
Of course, business leaders could
significantly change the idea that we are
customer angst dumping ground skivvies, by
investing in professional training, pay,
benefits, bonuses, full time jobs etc and
promoting the job we do. After all, no retail
workers equals no groceries, no booze, no
books, no clothes, no cars, no shoes and no
profits.
Perhaps our job titles should be retail
therapists!
Patrick McEvoy-Halston For all the talk
about robots taking over jobs... if this is our
concern, the redemption of human life, then
perhaps fair value will once again be given
those who do what no robot or collective
257
information bank can ably do: offer an

encounter with someone who sees you for
who you are... guesses at what you're really
looking for, even as you hadn't yet articulated
it, and doesn't judge negatively but finds
something to match (if not a remedy, an
acknowledgement that there is worth in your
desires and interests). If we accord that if you
work retail you're gifted at doing that...
seeing and reading people acutely, and not
dismissing them for what you see but
working with it, then you're lucky to be
accorded worthy to be aboard.
Erica Strange I'm going to ding in and say..
thanks Denerds Cruz aka camera for doing
all these goodbye posters... I agree with all
the above.. I do love Bruno Rios analogy...
and love both Claire Harris and Patrick
McEvoy-Halstonpoint on things... this is why
I love wking with you guys.. because I value
your ideas and perspective xo
Denerds Cruz Gianfranco respectfully

declines the farewell board but farewell
wishes is personally accepted.
258
Bruno Rios Hey, guys, I hope I was not

misinterpreted. And if I sounded
disrespectful in any way, my sincere
apologies. I believe I used a poor analogy,
once what I meant was exactly the opposite
of affirming that I see working at Indigo as a
disposable or transient experience. I am very
emotional and when I referred to the
“summer camp” thing, it was in the sense
that many of us go to this place where we live
a one of a kind experience, with amazing
people, and it is just too sad when we see
many of these friends “going home”. Some
that we possibly will never see again. My time
at Indigo, as short as it could had been, was
very special to me. I felt proud and very
happy going to work everyday and I think it
was a great start for my Canadian adventure.
I will always keep it very close to my heart.
On the other hand, I am very glad about
opening the discussion on the importance of
service in general, respect and personal
connections. I’ve been working in customer
service, in many different ends, for the past
15 years and what I am doing in my current
job, at the hotel, is nothing but a variation of
259
any retail position. Personal connections are

irreplaceable and I am all about this
exchange of trying to make people happy and
getting this energy back. And not only with
the customers, but with my colleagues as
well.
Unfortunately, it is true that many customers
do not appreciate it. Just as many
companies, many managers and many retail
professionals too. This builds a vicious circle
where the companies offer unbearable wages
and flood the market with seasonal and part
time positions; people not really interested in
the job fill these positions with lack of effort
and with transient spirit, because they
cannot see any future or security on it; and
customers do not acknowledge the
professionals, thinking that they are just a
bunch of “whatevers”.
But I believe that this lack of respect,
consideration or “importance” is the fatal
destiny the entire service industry. Bus
drivers, servers, cleaners, sales people, events
people, hosts, cashiers... it is sad how the
world sees the most important product: the
260
experience. Good service, provided by a

knowledgeable professional, is rare, priceless
and completely underestimated. The bright
side of it is that the times when our work is
appreciated, when we are able to truly
connect to someone, to make an experience
special, it seems just right, doing what we are
doing here.
Just love to all of you, Indigo friends! ❤
Claire Harris No you did not sound
disrespectful, your post triggered a lot of
thought and a good review of
customers/customer service. Glad you are
lovingbyour new role x
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Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Some thoughts on "Bringing Up Baby"

261
Avneet Sharma: If Justice League is any

indication, we'll probably see a lot more male
characters you like. Cary Grant in that movie
never really gets a handle on Katharine
Hepburn... his saying he's in love with her in
the end almost comes as an act of self-
defence, a defensive spell cast, making it
seem as if he's got a handle on everything she
can apply onto him (a wild pretence!). For
momentarily she is induced into being
grateful, or playing being grateful, that is, as
if she was at his mercy, his control: and this
is a predictable routine, required on her part
so that she's not just a phallic woman but a
feminine one at source, that gives him a
262
moment where he knows exactly what he'll

have to face with her; he can relax. It's a
funny thing in this movie. I'm sure the idea is
that Cary Grant is supposed to actually need
Katharine Hepburn/Susan, for she's the wild,
the sex, he's not going to get in his married
life with his due wife. But the movie doesn't
play out this way in actuality. From the start,
his upcoming marriage is about a career of
peace and stability, with her (Alice, his
determined and stern due wife) the guardian
of it, more than anything else. We never have
a sense, really, other than his questioning
about lack of sex and lack of babies (which is
not a big admittance, given that he never in
the movie seems one to want to stick to an
act of command more than momentarily),
that he wouldn't be content with that. He's
got stability, and she's the formidable shield
that'll keep away all intruders (which is,
incidentally, the married life the sex-addict
John Updike wished for and got with his
second wife... just by the by.) If this sounds
horrible to you, just imagine you're a
Depression age individual watching a film
where the ostensible despised state is
263
someone promised that -- stability, with a

fierce shield of a woman protecting it --
rather than a merry-go-round life with an
unpredictable nutter, who's a source of
instability to the guarantee that any act you
initiate will go as planned (sound like
Depression life, anyone?)... any act, including
ensuring that one step you take follows
another as planned, rather than it being
subverted to your somehow falling on your
ass, and who can only be waylaid, or
perceived as perhaps being somewhat
waylaid/managed, if you've got a quip ready
each and every time she interrupts your
nervous system's plans for initiated synapse
to actually follow through with its ostensibly
inevitable predetermined follow through.
About Justice League... yeah, this spot Cary

Grant finds himself in is basically where each
character other than Superman is with
Wonder Woman. It's the idea behind there
being so many male members of the team...
the load can get distributed, so Aquaman can
feel the relief after he gets subverted against
course by her in knowing he's not due for
264
another round for awhile... now's for Cyborg

to feel not like a spy but a caught-out perv,
and impossible-to-catch Flash to feel like an
infant swaddled in arms, however ostensibly
gleeful about it, and Batman to feel like a
leader who's stuck in dated ways so has to
relent to ....
I will say, though, that the extended scene

where Cary Grant finds himself at dinner is
something Susan leads him to that is an
empowering treat for him: he's constantly
interrupting people's talk to get up and chase
after that dog... who's his lead to the lost
dinosaur bone. Amidst the matron at the
table and the ostensibly patriarchal big-game
hunter, he never loses the ability to keep in
mind his original purpose, which is abstract
to this Alice-in-Wonderland turnabout in his
life, and can be imagined vicariously enjoying
his ability to so readily unsettle his fellow
dinner guests' expectations of him... play the
part of Susan, for awhile, in a sense. Susan
set this up, but he can pretend he's in on it
too. Two wild agents, rationally causing what
265
amounts to disturbed expectations, chaos, for

others.
So maybe the end would be more satisfying is

if somehow an ideal could be constructed.
His due wife Alice would remain with him as
a shield, a protection against inanity and
intrusion, and Susan would be equipped as a
weapon, something he could unleash against
others if his shield failed him and he found
himself amongst domestic types -- mothers
and fathers -- and domestic situations he has
no business as an adult falling back into.
She's great for that kind of dire emergency...
absolute chaos for use and cover. As an
analogy, Susan is first caught site of what the
war will soon offer Americans... humiliating,
un-manning adult reliance on the like of
welfare and parental support to survive, has
to meet with what war will confront it with in
its requiring the instant subversion of
estimations of men as assured dependents,
into their surely being something else
entirely -- warriors who can ride the war
wind.
266

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Alien Whalien Scum

Whale probe checking we still have whales.
Bizarre shape of interstellar asteroid

An asteroid that visited our Solar System
from interstellar space is one of the most
elongated celestial bodies known to science.
BBC.COM
267
Victoria Fisher :O
Steve Crisp I’ll bet the dolphins told them

about the free fish.
Victoria Fisher Whales are like, "Yeah,
we're still infected with people. It's been
better recently but still horrible. Now they're
shouting under the water, and throwing off
the entire ecosystem."
Whale probe: "OkaY WE'll CHEeCK baCK In
a COUplE HUndrEd YEArs."
Steve Crisp Whales “ Send back up ! “
Whale probe “ Roger that “
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Looks to me
more like aliens have finally developed an
outersolarsystemal missile that can finally
reach Earth. Peaceniks of course are
mistaking it as a whale coming to kiss our
planet, or some such... come find Spock and
mate with Gracie, or some such, but what we
need to do is find the source, disable their
guidance systems, and render the missile
inoperative. Make no mistake: this is war!
268
Victoria Fisher Is the whale probe

peaceful? I mean, it does nearly destroy the
Earth when it finds no whales.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Victoria
Fisher And a villain. I mean who cares more
for fishes than for human beings?
Victoria Fisher In my scenario, one that
regards whales as the sentient being and
humans as an invasion.
Steve Crisp I may have colluded with the
alien whale army�
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Victoria
Fisher Maybe we could re-educate the whale
probe. When it gets here we demonstrate the
deficiencies of the whale brain, and
illuminate the ignorant alien on great,
expansive, all-conquering awesomeness of
human beings... especially on the
accomplishments of western civ., which in its
amazing kindness, has even agreed to elevate
water levels so the dumb whales have a little
more playing room (as if they didn't have
enough!). Unless as rumoured whales
created Atlantis, whales don't really have
269
much to show for all their brain power, do

they?
Victoria Fisher Patrick McEvoy-
Halston Whaliens regard that kind of
thinking dangerously imperialistic and
obliterate all humans immediately.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Victoria Fisher I
quote the great Batman Ben Affleck, however
much he may be implicated in that little
thing called the Weinstein scandal, in
Superman vs. Batman: That son of a bitch
brought the war to us two years ago. Jesus,
Alfred, count the dead... thousands of people.
What's next? Millions? He has the power to
wipe out the entire human race, and if we
believe there's even a one percent chance that
he is our enemy we have to take it as an
absolute certainty... and we have to destroy
him.
You have just supplied proof that there is
more than a one percent chance an alien rock
whale civilization will use its accrued power
to destroy Earth, so in real-life anticipation
270
of this eventuality, I declare Earth-war on

Whaliens.
Steve Crisp Patrick, excuse me while I , for
no reason, take a few steps away from
you � �
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Steve Crisp It's
okay; I get that a lot. It's lonely being the only
one who won't mistake "whaliens" as a
disaster human kind has earned for itself. I'm
Gandalf to Victoria's Denethor.
Steve Crisp Patrick, unfortunately, and to
put it in Canadian terms, you’re about to be
SCTV Farm Report to Victoria’s Great White
North.
Steve Crisp I think we’re saying the same

thing.
Victoria
Fisher https://xkcd.com/1919/ Whale
probe was not suggested!
xkcd: Interstellar Asteroid

XKCD.COM
271
https://xkcd.com/1919/
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Nor was what I

thought obvious: sperm. Alien Whalien
sperm come to inseminate our planet Earth,
and repopulate it with alien whalien scum.
This too follows a well-laid out path from one
of the Superman movies, even as Steve will
probably call this cuckoo as well.
Discussion about the possible

implications of Weinstein at the
272
Patrick McEvoy-Halston
November 19 at 1:32pm
Perhaps more of a blog post... but on
Weinstein and what Hollywood could be
exposed to:
This is going to be hard thought to express,
but here goes:
Most are assuming that the massive power
of #metoo right now means we've finally
become more progressive. I'm not sure that's
the only reason for the timing of this, though,
this mass demolition of opponents, of
predators, who successfully cowed people for
decade after decade. I think in play is also a
273
public's sense that this is all about

licentiousness, about people using their
power and revelling in it (picture Weinstein
right now; his gloating), and believe it or not
I think this could hurt progressives more
than it will conservatives.
I think people assess that when liberals
partake in "spoils" it's all done for their own
enjoyment, their own sick pleasure; but when
conservatives do so it's somehow not the
same thing, for they assess conservatives as
those who fundamentally have forsaken
themselves the right to self-individualize, to
reach heights never reached before, to glory
on top of fallen bodies to themselves be the
ones who grasp at a crimson flag, who touch
the very hand of "god" and reach even
beyond. Rather, they assess them, they
understand them, as those who began the
climb up but were immediately cowed away
from further doing so, and thus they
conserve, halt, stop, rather than progress, for
they are broken; are stewards of the broken,
and count amongst the miserable. Liberals
reach for the new, the forbidden, the apple in
274
the garden -- and they are understood as

essentially sinful for this: sex, drugs, rock
and roll. Conservatives never go there, and so
their behaviour, however egregious, tastes
differently to us; can be surprisingly easy to
pass over when nothing makes us more
anxious than "immodest," "spoiled"
behaviour.
At the end of this we may find that liberalism
loses. For being for full individual self-
realization, for what is ostensibly a
quintessentially American ambition, an
American glory -- the undeterred right to
happiness -- still arouses guilt in almost all of
us, creates chaos in our minds, and this can
be "addressed" in projecting our own
sinfulness into others and punishing them
for it. Many powerful liberals, simply for
being possessed of something genuinely
virtuous -- an unwillingness to deter their
own self-growth -- may be guilty of a
surprising degree of predatory behaviour... it
might be lopsided on the liberal side, at least
amongst the powerful. If they are all outed, a
culture may decide that the lesson to be
275
learned is that we must be more modest in

our ambitions -- for look what belief in
intrinsic human goodness rather than
sinfulness leads to when its lead
propagandists arrange things so they go
unsupervised, unchecked.
Dan Eades Donald Trump? Unspoiled

behavior?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston To you he seems

vainglorious and spoiled. To the people who
voted for him, he seems someone who's
serving the nation's desires... they believed
him when he said that he was their arm, their
voice, and he is that... even as in these fascist
times, that's no great thing. Anyone who is
like that, has in a sense sacrificed themselves
of what liberals are rightly, courageously,
making every effort not to do: their own
independent, adult voice. Psychologically, I
don't think he's the same person he was in
the 80s. American would never have voted
for that man. They're looking for someone
who is truly an agent who sacrificed himself
to serve the beloved mother country,
276
America. Liberals see him as narcissistic, as

"me"-centred, when if he was like that an
American populace that finds itself feeling
like it has long abandoned the interests of
their mother country, would never have
voted him in. Who he is, mostly, is self-
sacrificial -- and pitiable for that.
Dan Eades Self-sacrificial? Unspoiled?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Dan Eades Yes,
that's how many Americans see him, and it is
how no one sees the Weinsteins out there,
because they're still endeavouring films and
politics that uphold the previous America,
which was not about advocating self-sacrifice
to the nation but about individual, artistic
self-development / expression. If we don't
get this we'll never really understand why
someone like Franken and Clinton could end
up in a worse state for their criminal abuse of
women than Trump will. In a populist,
nativist time, we'll be concerned to down
people who represent individual self-
actualization, abandonment of parental
mores, and each and every one of these can
only be liberals, for conservatives represent,
277
more than anything else, the anti-thesis of

this.
Ralph Benner "They're looking for
someone who is truly an agent who sacrificed
himself to serve the beloved mother country."
Quite obviously they haven't found that
"someone" yet. Why? Because that's not the
kind of person they're looking for. They
found what they wanted in the Orange
Flamer.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Ralph
Benner That's Charlie Chaplin's take on
Hitler, but it's not the German take on him...
they recognized him fundamentally as a
minion of the arising mythic Motherland.
Cynthia Mejías Patrick McEvoy-
Halston Trump is the antithesis of sacrifice.
Dan Eades Patrick McEvoy-Halston I think
you have the gender wrong...I believe Hitler
and the Germans saw a rising Fatherland. It
was the Soviets who looked to a rising
Motherland.
278
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cynthia

Mejías To you, he seems that way. But
narcissism is about early childhood
deficiency, about feeling great because you're
still part of the omnipotent bond with the
mother... so in a sense it's not about self, at
all, but a show of a lack of it. I think he was
more the way you are describing him back in
the 80s, just like Clinton was, and both
possibly acquired their true selfhood in part
by partaking in a culture which allowed for so
much victimization; that enabled the
predator in people. Right now Trump is
about sacrifice... sacrificing his formerly
more individuated self for being a servant of
his country's desires (as I said, I think if he
was calculated/disgenous about being the
people's voice/arm in that convention
speech, people would have sensed it and he
wouldn't have won). This sounds virtuous
(though never to me, does it), but I mean it
as exactly the opposite: something horrible;
anti-human... tragic.
Cynthia Mejías Please, Trump is not a
servant of his country's desires. He is a con
279
man, a money launderer, a real estate-casino

mobster. He doesn't serve his base, he serves
the international oligarchy. In any case, I'm
in this group to discuss movies, so I'm out of
this thread.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Dan Eades The
German nationalistic Volk was matriarchal...
drew on ancient chthonic sense of the earth
mother feeding her people. Hitler himself
absolutely thought of the country he was
"saving" as a Motherland.
Dan Eades I'm sorry, but Hitler talked
about the Fatherland in his speeches and so
did the Nazi party.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cynthia
Mejías He is everything you say (but how
could I not know this?). However, if the
people are becoming in the U.S. as they are in
so many other places in the world,
increasingly nativist, mother-country
worshiping, populist regressives, then
the fact that he truly believes the country is
under attack by aliens intent to rape Her,
that the cosmopolitan mindset amounts to
280
hating your home country, to abandoning

Her, to indulging in "spoiling" while laughing
at those you step over, then he is also
someone who has morphed into someone
who has probably projected his own mother
onto the country to be her prime, "good boy"
servant again... someone who has clung back
to an infantile or childish fold. Since much of
his life seems to have been about contriving
ways to distinguish himself from her -- the
attacks on other women: revenge upon
others for what she, her company, did to him,
like Hillary guesses was true with her
husband? -- even as he has nothing but
worshipful praise of her, this genuine
impulse from him means he's succumbed in
a way... has sacrificed the "self" part of
himself. Remember, we were surprised with
the election results in finding that many
Americans did not perceive Trump the way
we thought it impossible not to. Let's start
snapping out of this habit if we can and get
inside their apperception of him.
281
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Dan Eades Let's

not get into this. I have background on this
matter too.
Dan Eades Patrick McEvoy-Halston So you
have background; but you are wrong, dead
wrong...
Mark Schaffer Actually, Hitler was The
Devil...and Churchill was the archangel
Michael..The war was fundamentally a battle
between the powers of good and ultimate evil
occuring in the profane realm..It was a
spiritual test for personkind, which it
successfully psssed...but not without possible
defeat..You could look it up.
Mark Schaffer Read The Black Spider..
Adam Green "many powerful liberals ...

[Unwilling] to deter their own self growth --
may be guilty of a surprising degree of
predatory behaviour"
282
How very Nietzschean of you.

Patrick McEvoy-Halston I would have
thought it more Freud, until Frederick Crews
reminded me that Nietzsche anticipated
quite a bit of him. So possibly, yes. Anyway,
with Nietzsche or Freud out of the picture,
it's difficult to defend the last 40 yrs of
genuine growth in this country -- for I think
it necessarily had to come, with our still
somewhat primitive ability not to associate
growth with sin, with a lot of victimized
people; a class "carrying" the idea that a price
had to be paid -- which is too bad. The test
will be if Masha Gessen is right and we end
up all surveillance/Hays Code. Somehow
exactly where we ought to be, but it feeling
overall worse.
Adam Green It seems to me that what you
call growth others might call decline... Or
that some might say that your idea of
'progress' is a convenient social construct
developed to promote certain ideas.
283
Either way, the idea that the strong can lord

it over the weak for the purpose of their own
self-realization is a form of evil, not progress.
Just my opinion.
Thanks for your thoughtful post and
response. You have me thinking now.
Mark Schaffer What?

Patrick McEvoy-Halston This appears to
be your response to everything I write, Mark.
You can just desist and I'll happily fill in your
puzzled "what?" into every one of my
subsequent posts, don't you worry!
Adam Green He's saying the powerful are

allowed to exploit/transgress against the
weak for their own progress or self
actualisation and we should let them because
these transgressions will allow us to
'progress' to further heights. He's basically
284
advocating for a more depraved versions of

Nietzsche's "superman"
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Adam Green
Well, I'm saying it a bit more nicely than
that, Adam...
Seriously though, I'm saying that there is
actually worse than the behaviour I am
describing, there is worse than neoliberalism
(rise of the professional class, collapse
[brutal humiliation and destruction]of
everyone else), and that's what's about to
follow: fascism. If we want uncomplicated
growth, we tend to get it right after great
depressions or huge wars... a period of all-
rising boats. What follows this is a period of
growth, but cruel growth, where it must be
accompanied by a huge measure of victims.
Improved parenting, will mean the end of
this cycle, as the idea of growth as sin is born
there, in how our parents reacted to our own
self-growth away from what they needed of
us. In the rapprochement stage, around 2 to
2 and a half, a period, incidentally, where
Trump was abandoned in his care... where he
might have internalized that wandering
285
about on his own meant that he was being

bad and to be punished for it.
Adam Green Patrick, I see fascism as
coming about because of what you describe -
especially the individualist attitude that
borders on/actually is solipsism which
corrupt any since of community.
Growth and Progress (from a social/political
aspect) are 19th century ideas and from what
I can discern, probably dubious.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Okay Adam. I
see it as a regressive reaction against genuine
societal growth, which comes to only be
perceived as corrupt and self-indulgent.
Liberal Weimar into Fascist Germany. I
believe that there are enormous numbers of
predators out there that will be uncovered, in
places of liberal power. Unless we have some
way to appreciate why the appalling intensity
of it, I think, as I've been arguing, that our
current struggling liberal period will be
enwrapped exactly the same way Weimar
was by a nation that was beginning to want to
286
surrender their freedoms and go Volk. That's

why I'm making my effort here.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston And NewYorker,
please be aware that I am cognizant of
keeping my participation mostly to what
applies to film. It would depend on your
latitude, but I do believe that the fight I'm
making here in discussion of politics and
politicians, will find application in the sorts
of films we find created tomorrow... how far
apart from the straight and narrow, they'll be
able to range.
Max Miller Who moderates these posts?

Can you rephrase that to be less of a word
salad?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston You're speaking
to the mod I assume. I doubt they've got the
time. If you're speaking to me, work on
making your appeal appealing to me.
287
Max Miller
Jeremy Daniels You don’t think it’s just

pure avarice and self-interest? Putting aside
how modern Republican politicians actually
operate, you don’t think they just see minor
transgressions of regulators and tax hikers as
unforgivable, even as they ignore the most
grievous and disgusting crimes of
deregulators and budget slashers? I tried to
understand their crazed hostility toward
Obama on this front, and that’s all I can
come up with. Taxing them is original sin,
and anything they can throw at liberals,
however paltry, is the corroborating evidence
of what they need to prove anyway, no matter
what. It’s pointless to dispute any arguments
on the actual merit.
They’ll always have that on us. They don’t
want to pay taxes and there’s a fervor and
hostile force behind that. We think there
should be government and taxes, but paying
taxes is not necessarily something we love
doing either. We believe in it more like a
necessary nuisance, so we don’t have the
288
same crusading spirit on our side. That might

be why we’ve moved further into identity
issues rather than fiscal ones, to have that
same kind of visceral and emotional force of
righteousness.
So we have our emotions behind the human
rights issue of stopping sexual misconduct on
all fronts, and the right has their emotions
behind cutting taxes, deregulating, and
protecting business interests, and reverse
engineering their reasoning for any candidate
who will do those things. Of course this will
hit liberals harder because it’s hitting what
we care about.
Melissa Lawson tldr
Patrick McEvoy-Halston And you're part
of a NewYorker discussion group... that
mag's known for its long reads. There's
plenty of stuff on the net which tells you you
can digest in less than a minute or two, but
deep thinking mags, deep thinking,
provocative discussion groups related to such
mags, are not the place to go for that.
Max Miller
289
Sheryl Price THIS guy again-PLEASE -this

group is supposed to be thoughts,discussion
etc about MOVIES!! Rant somewhere else.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston It's also
supposed to be about polite, respectful
behaviour, which would leave you exempt.
Sheryl Price
Sheryl Price Patrick McEvoy-Halston Oh I
am so sorry. Please review the guidelines of
the group. I sincerely hope henceforth you
will abide by the stated parameters. I thank
you in advance. Better??
Max Miller
Sheryl Price I DID NOT post the gif with
the yellow hands �
Max Miller I only posted mine in response
to Patrick. It's an artistic rendering of him
typing thousand word posts on this forum.
290
Elizabeth R. Shafer Watched Lillian Gish

in “Wind” the other evening. The title best
describes your diatribe and lecture.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Alright. I
thought it was an offering.
Max Miller
Tristan Becker
Hamish Wood Lmao what
Tod Alan Spoerl I thoroughly enjoyed this
thought-provoking post and lengthy thread.
Thanks for your insight Patrick McEvoy-
Halston, Ralph Benner, Adam Green, Jeremy
Daniels et al.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Thank you Tod.
Marc Imbillicieri How is any of this

relevant to movies?
291
Judy Mam Completely off topic.

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Sunday, November 19, 2017
Recent postings at Clio's Psyche

concerning what would happen if
Obama was linked to #metoo (all names
of conversation participants other than
mine, altered)
292
Nov
17
Paul Kinsmaun has said some interesting

things about Obama's relationship with his
mother -- of how he felt mostly abandoned
by her -- that strikes me as rather pertinent
right now. One of the reasons #metoo is
emerging right now is not only because we've
evolved but because this is a populist
293
moment where victims, where violence

against women, where used, spurned women
imagined together as an angry, chasing,
annihilating horde, can be used to discredit
arenas of liberal power -- Hollywood,
Washington -- and as well the previous
reigning societal "philosophy" --
neoliberalism -- with any possible defence of
why the massive horrible prevalence, totally
absconded from view. (There are actually a
number of them, all hopelessly politically
incorrect/vile: one, as Ann Douglas argues in
her book on the 1920s, "Terrible Honesty,"
perhaps in certain historical periods
creativity requires the presence of the
Terrifying Father -- a predator, that is -- to
back down the felt presence of intrusive,
smothering mothers on our lives [regarding
the '20s, the Victorian Titaness]. In our own
period, one was the dictator producer,
enabled by the idea that if you want to have
resourcefulness and creativity and true love
of Art in our time, brash, bullysome HE had
to be at the centre of it. Two, we may delegate
both Washington and Hollywood to serve out
group fantasy needs to see unvarnished,
294
unapologetic pursuit of happiness both

absolutely fulfilled AND completely
rendered. Emotionally unhealthy people in
both places might have picked up on our
obvious cuing of them and moved as we
"told" them to and both enabled and
destroyed people. Three, society in general
might in the late '70s entered a more
problematic period where social growth [for
beginning after so many postwar years of
seeming justified to seem spoiled] could no
longer be shared by all -- a rising tide of
boats -- but granted some while completely
withheld to others, so that we felt
considerable sacrifices of devastated and lost
lives were being sufficiently supplied to a
hungry maternal maw, thereby keeping her
from rising and rendering from us, all of our
growth... she was occupied, and temporarily
sated. Actresses being those who still must
"put out" on a casting couch, who are not
generally associated with higher education,
and who represent the immodest,
immoderate, working class wish "to be a
star!," could not maintain themselves as
sufficiently distinct from the designated out-
295
groups in society... the occupations that if

you held them you would not like educated
professionals find yourself garnering
increased respect these last forty years of
information age competency and with-itness,
but made to seem as deserving whatever sign
of disregard you might want to administer to
them -- restaurant workers, retail... all low-
wage earning jobs, for instance -- for already
being in the way of the future; a pest whose
future depends on luck, random accident,
rather than on guarantees... on having
a diligent manner of applying yourself; on
having a PhD.) As such, if there is any way
that Fuchsman is right about Obama we need
to know if it is possible that Obama inflicted
revenge on other women for his mother's
own crime of abandoning him, that we may
have totally bleached from our view in order
to make our association with him an absolute
guarantee of our virtue during a time of our
own prospering.
For if he too's got "a history" too, that’s what
populists will be on the hunt for, ultimately.
It would discredit our age, everything about
296
it being unquestionable in its virtue for it

being so sane and civilized and decent while
its opponents rage senselessly, mindlessly
on, and leave a lot of the great defenders of it
essentially dismantled from further speaking
sane opposition to spreading regressive
populist movements across the world, for
their not realizing that part of their self-
balance, their equilibrium, their ability to
respond with intelligence and vigor and
quick wit, rested on a certain particular
essential figure retaining himself as an
absolute emblem of virtue. I've seen it
happen, a spark of it... when the Gore
marriage of two brilliant, empowered people
who love one another in a fully reciprocal
way... devoted to the end of time, was
revealed to be myth, the leading feminist of
her generation and possibly -- along with
Solnit -- of our time, NYMagazine's
Rebecca Traister, was left as if struck by a
blow. I think she might have realized for a
minute that if a curtain came up over certain
other things she might have assumed, not
though knowing quite what they might be at
297
that moment, she wasn't beyond losing all

grip; going insane.
Incidentally, I may have mentioned it in
another post but I'll say it again here: if
anyone is wondering how powerful men will
find their way out of this fix, as more of their
rank get culled daily, it's to sacrifice their
existence as independent, self-actualized
adults and agree in way some to become boys
dependent on their mothers again. That's
what Zaretsky argues happened in the
1930s/40s: people surrendered their 1920s
adulthood and regressed to become
Depression/WarYears boys loyal to their
mother nations. By doing so, they'll know
they've basically placed themselves in the
same space conservatives are in (wonder why
we aren't as interested in them as "bad boy"
predators, even as they're worse? here's
why--)... who are each one of them those
whose childrearing was insufficient to ever
allow them to part ways with their parents'
will and fully become individuated adults
(and therefore press for progress), and will
feel that what had earned their being
298
punished -- that is, presumption, personal

enjoyment, "spoiling"... all held as evidence
of sinfulness from children of all parenting
"styles" other than the most recent one -- was
no longer any part of their being. They won't
FEEL guilty, for they know their minds have
placed them in a state where they will
sacrifice everything truly worthy about life to
please and serve somebody else, and we
won't see them anymore as guilty either. The
gaze will pass them over... the gaze connected
with populism and all its insistence that
people aren't individuated and distinct but
part of an indistinct mass, will pass them
over. And all it will of cost them is the loss of
their own individuality, as quite permanently
they will have sacrificed their own self-will
and will do now as their mother country
directs. They'll become part of the mass of
Bernie Bros., or some such, very much
willing to junk their careers, if you asked
them to. Watch for it. It'll be real: not a PR
move -- their own brains will be behind it,
willing the most interesting parts of
themselves to be forever nudged out of prime
spot, replaced by complete selflessness.
299
(Want to know why the 1930s felt like they

deserved a Roosevelt... why in a sense
Obama, contra Fuchsman, could never have
gone Roosevelt?: because along with his
provocative reforms came a mass
who abstained from the individuality we've
resourcefully found ways to insist on, again
and again and again. [Incidentally, about
Roosevelt... do you know about his love for
the dictator-love film dedicated to him,
"Gabriel Over the White House"?])
Paul Kinsmaun Nov 17
Patrick,
One of the things Obama learned from his
mother was to control his emotions, not to
express anger or discontent. It has often
made him a self-contained individual, one
who often keeps his distance from others.
You seem to me to make a leap from Obama's
feeling abandoned by his mother to that he
might have wanted to seek revenge on
women. There are certainly many other
300
characteristic ways Obama or anyone else

who felt abandoned might respond to being
abandoned. Obama searched for and found
in Michelle Robinson someone who was
rooted where his mother was not, and whom
he felt would not abandon him. As a father,
what he has also been intent on doing is
providing being there for his daughters as he
did not feel happened for him with his
parents. You should read some of what he
says about his being a father. It also seems to
me you are asking a question about Obama
and women, but do no indicate what
evidence might be needed to find out if your
suspicion is warranted or off base. I suggest
before you make further statements on
Obama and women, you might read some of
the good sources on Obama. You should
read Janny Scott's A Singular Woman: The
Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.
The other is David Marannis's Barack
Obama: The Story. In psychohistory,it is
always important to have sufficient evidence
at hand before making statements.
Paul . . .
301
me (Patrick McEvoy- Nov

Halston change) 18
Paul,
I do make one hell of a leap... and I have no
idea if he has "a history," only that he mostly
certainly could have and we would have
ignored it, even if it was considerable. But in
psychohistory perhaps what one ought to do
is begin to loosen the possibility of actually
undertaking an exploration, for someone,
anyone, actually doing it, that we might have
shielded ourselves off of for our own
equilibrium. You yourself did research, but
the Clio Psyche' reaction to your reveal of his
abandonment by his mother was initiated by
your own willingness to accept the idea. You
admire Obama, but you didn't need him...
302
you didn't need his relationship with his

mother to be exactly one way in order for you
to do so (though do you need his relationship
with Michelle to be a certain way?... fits a bit
too neat. Traister did with the Gores). The
way in which people reacted to your research
suggested to me that some others might
however require prompting, a preparation of
the way, before they could even begin to on
their own find evidence contra their
preferred estimation of him, or accept it if
others did so. If this is the case then first you
need to prepare people to begin to be sure, in
this period where we were clearly weighted to
assume Obama as an upstanding gentleman
and then mostly leave off him -- a perfect
guardian against all our identity troubles --
that we actually knew who he was, that we
actually wanted to know who he was, before
you would even undertake to do the research.
A hegemonic estimation of him needs
unsettling first; otherwise "proof" won't be
able to nestle in anywhere, for the membrane
they're trying to stick to is still steel and
sure.
303
So this is my prompt: #metoo might not only

be getting its impetus because this is finally a
time for victims, for feminism, for
progressive emergence, but because populists
know that the previous age of liberalism was
undeniably a predatorial one (and I think if
was necessarily so, for societal growth always
being "problematic," cruel, after a few
decades of postwar permission has finally
ended... the deMausian idea/conception of
stages). The two seemed necessarily
connected: there would be ongoing
advancement in our recognition of the
humanity of previously stigmatized peoples,
but there would also be enlarged permission
in how you could stigmatize, how you could
destroy, OTHER different sorts of people.
There would be an increasing mass of people
who come to know themselves as possessed
of an individuated, professional identity, with
money and status to effect great change in
the world as well as to enjoy their own lives
immensely, and to flesh our their own
developing identity (consumerism is good!),
but there would also be a large mass of
people who would know only
304
disenfranchisement and instability and who

would find that not only was no one was
listening, that no one cared, but they made
sport of their discombobulated condition --
see the showcased liberal in "Manchester by
the Sea," for an example. Populists, who
whether of the Chris Hedges/bernie bros.
sense or rightwing Breibart sense, know that
the professional liberal class no longer
controls the narrative anymore... there is
massive dissent within, as well as outside.
And they know that they have worked to
deprive the populace of any way of accepting
their "rule" -- as Zaretsky has argued,
feminists and homosexuality advocacy
groups have worked to ensure Freud is out,
and so the only explanation for adverse
behaviour is simply evil -- if they can be
made to be shown to be a particular kind of
way... that is, the way they are beginning to
seem now, as brutal repeat mass victimizers
of women AND of children, all while having a
whirl of fun. And it occurs to them, right
now, that as they watch former supporters of
the Clintons, former makers of films which
upheld identity politics liberalism rather
305
than populism (Weinstein), former

politicians of the Clintonian mold, former
liberal comedians, go down, that they could
shortcut to the ultimate takedown of a whole
political era if they took down only one
particular person during this #metoo
awakening.
If we are to continue functioning as effective
psychohistorical commenters on this very
dangerous era, we need to think deep on the
requirements we may have made on Obama
that might have shielded us from doing
certain kinds of research on him, shielded
away others from doing certain kinds of
research on him. David Mannanis... does he
strike us as the kind of person who would
find evidence that would completely betray
his own preferred image of Obama? If there
were reports by women that Obama had
abused them, is this something he would
have made sure to note, or would he have
elided it. If he, like pretty much everyone on
the left, would have elided it -- his brain not
allowed him to see it -- the women who
experienced these harassments would have
306
taken note -- here is about our best defender,

and even he wouldn't see it! -- and never said
a further word. They knew they would be
destroyed if they ever said anything, as an
angry mob went at them for trying to disturb
the perfect solution to their troubled
existence as liberals individuating almost
admittedly over other people's backs. If the
likes of the wonderful, self-aware Gloria
Steinem could have seen Clinton(!) as not
truly a victimizer of women, we should
ourselves caution people when advising them
to take note of previous respected
biographers of Obama; what they found.
Without having read their works, it strikes
me as very likely they would not have seen
what a generation of #metoo activists would
now be able to see, if Obama has any kind of
a similar history with women as these other
powerful men who felt abandoned by their
mothers are proving to have had. (Also, just
as a note: I've never believed the Obamas
were more emotionally healthy than the
Clintons were. This not by research but just
by my sense of them. I think the Clintons
came out of more nurturing backgrounds, yet
307
Bill's, truly wonderful Bill's, was adverse

enough for it to have likely lead to his raping
women and destroying them.)
me (Patrick McEvoy- 7:58 AM (2

Halston change) hours ago)
And for example, are we prepared for this

about Elie Wiesel. Commentary's reaction
suggests, maybe no:
I know I will be vilified for this, but Listman’s
tale is hard to believe. She not only describes
behavior on Wiesel’s part that no one, in his
half-century as a major world figure, has ever
even whispered about; she seems to know he
thought she was religious and was underage
and would therefore never report his offense
against her. How could she know what he
had thought, what she had looked like to
him? The fact she is free to advance these
wild speculations as though they were truth
impeaches her credibility.
308
https://medium.com/@jblistman/when-i-
was-nineteen-years-old-elie-wiesel-grabbed-
my-ass-10370829c4bd

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Sitting with individuals and given them

their due attention, while they contrive
ways to leave full presumption to the
woman in charge, in "Justice League"
309
There are some fine things about Justice

League. Batman giving Flash, who's never
been in battle, some good advice on how to
engage -- save one person, just save one
person -- is one, for it's true that without
some perfectly aimed advice -- and this
seemed like that, and the pleasure was in
finding it so well pointed -- it might be
difficult for someone with all the ability in
the world but without acclimatization to
supernatural, sure-of-themselves, deadly
foes, to not humiliatingly quail in their ability
to usefully harness any of it, the fight with
Superman -- especially his moments vis-a-vis
Flash, with Superman's surprising him with
his ability to mostly -- but strangely
satisfyingly, not exactly quite -- keep up with
him, is another, and the considerable respect
given each member of the team, like the
film's a progressive teacher making sure
everyone is heard from, is another. (Why is
the fight with Superman overall... satisfying?:
perhaps because, as their isn't in the battles
with Steppenwolf, a sense of a foe who has
some moral authority: not just physical
power, but justification... wind behind him,
310
makes it interesting. Steppenwolf is like the

horned villain in "Thor," kind of a joke in
being somehow akin to a white male
basement-dweller loser without any friends...
right now, it's easy to mock him to his face,
as his opponents readily do [some of this in
"Last Jedi," with Kylo Ren, as well?).
Movies have changed: in this sense, for the

better... or seemingly for the better. If a
character appears in the film, you'll be
introduced to them, have coffee with them,
room around their preferred domicile a bit
with them, come to know a bit about their
past with them. Even if they're young, they'll
be allowed to have been shown responsible
for constructing their own damn costume,
thank you! And it'll be constructed well!
(Admittedly, I wondered what it would have
been like if the heroes just suddenly
appeared, without introductions, and ready
to play... would it feel a bit like they weren't
so much being refused their due fleshing out
but instead, refusing us... keeping themselves
a bit undue, private?) Lastly, the audience I
was with clapped at the end, which is nice.
311
Wonder Woman takes the lead at one point,

and she uses her leadership to direct the
League to attend to the forlorn, ever-alone
Batman... that is, motherly. Kevin Costner
(the person who used his own leadership of
his family to do what Batman intended to do,
and alone, sacrificed himself) as father gets
dimmed out -- not in this one -- and
mothers/matriarchs (Amazon queen,
mermaid queen, villain trying not to make
himself king but bring back the mother as
Queen and serve as one of her minions,
Superman's mother and wife as strong team)
really emerge into the foreground in this
story. Men are more second-tier, being
edged-out, clipped, set-up and caught out, all
over the place (Batman's orchestrated battle
plan is subverted by Wonder Woman,
Batman is angrily assaulted by Wonder
Woman [supernatural being vs. human
without any powers: complete chastisement],
Cyborg is caught out in his voyeurism by
Wonder Woman, Aquaman is tricked into
humiliating himself through unwilling self-
exposure by Wonder Woman, Flash finds
312
himself pressed against Wonder Woman, but

not romantically, and certainly not
predatorily, but as a hapless kid diminished
by being in an ostensibly sexual position with
someone overwhelmingly beyond him,
someone he'd never be up to servicing in that
manner -- gulp!). Even happens to already-
pretty-deferential Alfred [though not by
Wonder Woman, but by a fellow mate,
Cyborg... pity on the old man servant, I
guess]). Flash is a loner, Batman is a loner,
Aquaman hides in small village life... is a
loner, Cyborg is a loner. Superman is the
exception, but his life is about commitment
to the proud women in it. We'll see a lot more
of this... of "Batmans" saying," I'm the
opposite of what you should be looking to in
a leader: I'm a recluse who doesn't nurse
anybody" (though in this film, with the Flash,
he actually does... and also in his saving
Superman's home by thinking to buy the
bank that now owns it: both nice moments).
Strange, or rather, noticeable, that the movie
chastises Wonder Woman for ostensibly
hiding out (for a century), which Batman is
permitted to do it seems for it's for the
313
purpose of submitting himself to her future

leadership, but gives the okay to Aquaman to
be a pub man and legendary drinker... these
are allotments allowed men when they have
no pretensions to leadership but aim to be
loyal servicemen; Flash and Cyborg get to
have their goofy fun, apparently for the same
reason. Batman's lame jokes to Aquaman
that he talks to fishes, seems almost like
someone who was once "Don" relenting to
being, with his un-agile humour, slow now
on the upkeep... passé. Which would seem to
allow him some similar permissions as well...
the barbs Alfred casts at him, will carry less
sting, as they do in fact do in this movie: "I've
gotten old and my life is pretty much set; lay
off a bit man." We also notice he's seeming
quick to disarm himself of this secret-identity
thing... as if he and it are sort of somehow
past relevant.
It was strangely interesting to watch what the
movie does when Superman appears to assist
the League in battle, when he's clearly way
beyond the villain's ability to handle -- the
minute he's reborn in the film, which isn't
314
even half way in, the villain's done for... it's

like a professional team just invaded a minor
league one. The way it does work is that the
villain wasn't really of much interest anyway
(which he presaged himself by advertising
himself as only acting to bring mom onto the
scene and be first-amongst-equals of her
minions), so you don't mind that he served
mainly as excuse for the heroes to orient
themselves vis-a-vis one another... to learn
how their skill-sets looked when combined
with others in battle. And the easing of
tensions, the sense of mopping up, relaxes
you to just observe that. Aquaman and
Wonder Woman are pleasing working
together as the team's co-equal muscle; Flash
is good for clearing away a whole field of
minor villains... for mopping up, so the
playing field is less complicated (important
with a million ghastlies to deal with);
Batman's good for a lot of grab-bag
assistance (and seems sometimes with his
gymnastics and his sending out projectile
ropes, almost like Spiderman in battle... and
a bit, in his anonymity in battle -- he's not the
heavy-hitter and he knows it -- like
315
Spiderman in "Civil War" as well); Cyborg --

who could have been muscle -- is good as
projectile-fireer and systems-overload man.

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Thursday, November 16, 2017
The consequences of liberals insisting on

a truly awake existence
316
(originally posted at Clio's Psyche, Nov. 9)

This is going to be hard thought to express,
but here goes:
Most are assuming that the massive power
of #metoo right now means we've finally
become more progressive. I'm not sure that's
the only reason for the timing of this, though,
this mass demolition of opponents, of
predators, who successfully cowed people for
decade after decade. I think in play is also a
public's sense that this is all about
317
licentiousness, about people using their

power and having revelled in it
(picture Weinstein right now; his gloating),
and believe it or not I think this could hurt
progressives more than it will conservatives.
I think people assess that when liberals
partake in "spoils" it's all done for their own
enjoyment, their own sick pleasure; but when
conservatives do so it's somehow not the
same thing, for they assess conservatives as
those who fundamentally have forsaken
themselves the right to self-individualize, to
reach heights never reached before, to glory
on top of fallen bodies to themselves be the
ones who grasp at a crimson flag, who touch
the very hand of "god" and reach even
beyond. Rather, they assess them, they
understand them, as those who began the
climb up but were immediately cowed away
from further doing so, and thus they
conserve, halt, stop, rather than progress, for
they are broken; are stewards of the broken,
and count amongst the miserable. Liberals
reach for the new, the forbidden, the apple in
the garden -- and they are understood as
318
essentially sinful for this: sex, drugs, rock

and roll. Conservatives never go there, and so
their behaviour, however egregious, tastes
differently to us; can be surprisingly easy to
pass over when nothing makes us more
anxious than "immodest," "spoiled"
behaviour.
At the end of this we may find that liberalism

loses. For being for full individual self-
realization, for what is ostensibly a
quintessentially American ambition, an
American glory -- the undeterred right to
happiness -- still arouses guilt in almost all of
us, creates chaos in our minds, and this can
be "addressed" in projecting our own
sinfulness into others and punishing them
for it. Many powerful liberals, simply for
being possessed of something genuinely
virtuous -- an unwillingness to deter their
own self-growth -- may be guilty of a
surprising degree of predatory behaviour... it
might be lopsided on the liberal side, at least
amongst the powerful. If they are all outed, a
culture may decide that the lesson to be
learned is that we must be more modest in
319
our ambitions -- for look what belief in

intrinsic human goodness rather than
sinfulness leads to when its lead
propagandists arrange things so they go
unsupervised, unchecked.
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Discussion about Rebecca Traister's

"Your reckoning. And mine"
https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/rebecca-traister-on-the-
post-weinstein-reckoning.html
320
billydwilliamsthethethird23 hours ago

As a man I want to respect the feelings of
women who have been subject to
harassment/abuse of power. Still, I do feel
that principles of due process and fairness
are important..
Trouble is, hubris sells. A measured, justice-
seeking ethos would make it harder for a
magazine to create a hard-hitting narrative of
victims, aggressors, and reckoning.
This is a story about gender. It is also about
human failing and wrongdoing. Even though
men tend to hold more leadership roles,
other stories of men as "victims" are also
valid.
How many dozens of female high school

teachers or coaches have been found guilty of
sexual conduct with their students in the past
few years? Obviously not the fault of
patriarchy. The truth is complicated.
Emotional and even some physical abuse by
women is indeed widespread.
321
Starting my career, I found myself on the

receiving end of what could constitute sexual
harassment from one man and one woman
with some power over me, and it sucked. I
can only imagine what it may feel like on a
more severe level for victimized women
working in a boys club.
Dating, I have been assaulted by a (much
smaller) woman (grabbed and restrained by
the wrists when attempting to leave her).
With another woman, kissing in a car after a
date, I was struck by her across face without
permission in what appeared to be her
attempt to add an element of kink.
To the female cop who hit on me after she let
me off for a ticket--standing over me with her
gun--watch out, you might find yourself on
an anonymous google doc of payback.
@billydwilliamsthethethird When you refer
to female high school teachers or coaches the
numbers won't compare... you'll be informed
by all the stats that show as much. You need
322
to touch upon something untouchable:

mothering. What cannot be connected here,
absolutely cannot, is that women who are
abused and humiliated through patriarchy
cannot but emotionally have needs for their
children that are not helpful for their
development, are in a sense, incestuous. You
cannot connect that a man's later need to
attack women could be born out of early
childhood mis-use by their emotionally
deprived mothers. Why? Mothers are
sacrosanct -- victims will never out their
predator, for it means being lost to their love
forever. So the problem is only addressed
sort of innocently, by gradually evolving hate
out of the world and encouraging support.
People feel more esteem, and they have
children for much better reasons than to
provide attention not provided elsewhere in
life.
Sperlady18 hours ago
@billydwilliamsthethethird No. This is a
story about MALE PRIVILEGE.
Flag
LikeReply
323
billydwilliamsthethethird15 hours ago

@Sperlady @billydwilliamsthethethird I
would agree. I also think it's about human
failing. What explains the many cases of
female teachers abusing/seducing their male
students? How about emotional violence
between same sex couples (which I assume is
not more or less prevalent than it is among
straight couples.)
Again, I believe that most events have more
than one cause or important aspect.
When we reduce things down, we set
ourselves up for the kind of lost trust that
erodes democracy. This is why it is across
this type of fault lines that Putin's bots fans
the flames of intense resentment...
Patrick McEvoy-Halston23 hours ago
You were pretty affected with what happened
to the Gores. What if it turns out that
someone who cannot be allowed to be taken
down unless our whole collective emotional
equilibrium falters, not Bill Clinton but
someone like Obama, gets taken down? He's
324
like some kind of social leverage... where

would this take our minds?
Isn't there a possibility that what will
transpire is a lot of men openly confessing
their guilt, and then submitting to some kind
of public reform movement which will help
them regain virtue... become populist Bernie
Bros whose fidelity is to their Mother
Nation? They gain integrity, sanction, by
knowing that, for Her, they'll sacrifice
everything pretentious about themselves...
their careers, their previous prestige --
everything. The end result being that they
will be transposed into citizens who are now
markedly different from many of their chief
accusers, in that they are way out of
limelight, enjoying very few fruits of
professional success. They stage their
revenge without even their own noticing, by
making everyone who is still staunchly for
"empowerment" rather than self-sacrifice,
one of the bourgeois who has spoiled
themselves and ignored society/their mother
nation. Isn't is possible that the end result
will be that many liberal men will not reflect
325
and change, but be lost to the only kind of

liberalism worth sanctioning... because the
source for their rage and hate against women
cannot be so readily elided; requires some
kind of out?
carll6023 hours ago
Why is there a post-Weinstein reckoning and
not a post-Trump reckoning? Why did 53
percent of white women still go to the polls
and pull the lever for Trump? While I
sympathize with the plight of all women
through history, I have difficulty taking this
current outburst seriously from a generation
of women who enabled the most misogynist
president in American history. American
women need to really take stock of
themselves and the messages they are
sending. This is one among several opinion
pieces that I have seen lately on the matter of
Weinstein that completely plays down the
larger and far more powerful predator. This
inconsistency requires attention.
Miriam61021 hours ago
326
@carll60 So very true. And I think Trump as

the background to all of this plays a big part
in why it's all being exposed now.
@Miriam610 @carll60 Or more generally
populism... the picture that is coming to
mind of the male oppressor is someone living
large and having the time of his life these
past thirty years. It corresponds with the era
of liberalism that people like Chris Hedges
are trying to take down. We'll learn a lesson
about "human nature," about how letting
people go unsupervised plays to an actually
false sense of what human beings are about,
and will lead to an era where we all agree to
go about our business in more dour, self-
recriminating, circumscribed mode. We need
to correlate what is happening here,
absolutely, with this weird eruption a couple
years ago of populist nativism around the
world. Even if there is no connection, it
would seem wise to certainly consider it. In
this era, I'm not entirely willing to be
encouraged by what's happening. I don't
sufficiently trust that progressivism is
327
actually at the helm of our age. I'm worried

that this might be a false thrust, for
convenience purposes only. Don't we feel this
when we get lured to explore the pedophiles
in Hollywood? We're being lured to shape
our selves... our matrix of liberal friends, as
everything common lore has said about
them. If Obama was ever guilty of any of this
behaviour, it'll mean the end of the liberal
era... aren't we sensing this too?
blueshiva12 hours ago
@Patrick McEvoy-
Halston @Miriam610 @carll60 No We Are
Not Sensing This ! What I am sensing is that
you are not who you claim to be. What's with
this subtle casting of aspersions at President
Obama pretending to be liberal? This is the
same kind of unfounded insinuations that I
noticed being made against Hillary during
the election. I think it is deliberate and I
think you are a Russian Troll. Making subtle
unfounded, baseless remarks against people
with quite respectable and well earned
reputations is a well known and effective
tactic to sway public opinion against those
328
people and to begin to plant lies and larger

false stories against them. You are not
welcome here comrade Patrick McEvoy-
Halston.
@Miriam610 @carll60 @blueshiva @Patrick
McEvoy-Halston @Miriam610 @carll60 He'
s liberal. But what has been his own
behaviour towards women? Anyway, he very
well could be the perfect gentleman, but
Traister suspected that the Gore marriage
was golden too... and was rattled when it
proved, not so. We needed Obama to be
squeaky clean. And that he might well be. But
we should explore just how much we were
willing to obfuscate from view, for his
seeming exactly the right personage for us to
associate ourselves with to go through this
last decade -- one that produced teeming
numbers of dispossessed -- feeling exultant,
excused, righteous, without guilt. If the
answer is a lot, and we've hinged our own
virtue, the virtue of the age in which we
prospered, on him, then populists know that
exposing him as he is without our projections
329
would leave us, our liberal age, discredited. It

would give them the field, and we'd be
checking ourselves in to insane asylums.
@Miriam610 @carll60 If pedophiles are
exposed in Hollywood, we worry that we
won't be able to control the public narrative
and homosexuality will be equated with it,
and leverage to the populist right. If too
many powerful Jews get exposed, then we
worry we won't be able to control the public
narrative and antisemitism gets a lift. If the
numbers of powerful liberals who were
extreme predators is staggering, then we
worry we won't be able to control the public
narrative and Hollywood/Washington/New
York are the cesspools the populist right has
always claimed them to be. We delight that
people who have been cowed for decades are
finally knowing what it is to be given the
support they should have received from the
very start, and in finding people who made
roadkill of them but who prospered
themselves finally no longer prospering. But
we're all wondering if we've actually got full
330
control over this narrative... one feels this

especially when the matter of Corey Feldman
comes up. We know he deserves, and must
have... but we no longer believe we control
how things get narratized, and so we think,
as well, no, this one we've got to find some
way to staunch. Victims, you're going to have
to continue suffering. The consequences of
exposure are to dire.
We have left ourselves with no way to
understand why powerful centres of liberal
prowess are seeming so easy now to conflate
with criminal predatory behaviour. Not even
explanations we might understand but that
the larger populace might not, but rather
nothing at all other than villainy. Ann
Douglas argued that the 1920s got their game
going by going to war against a tyrannical
bully that they believe smothered their
predecessors' creativity -- the Victorian
matron -- and loved Freud's tyrannical
castrating father because he intimidated her
back into the shadows. What if some of our
own creativity owed to empowering the same
sort of predator in creative circles, leaving
331
people with no recourse now but to join any

movement that presents itself that allows
them to be unassuming good boys to the
worshipped matron again? Become sterile
bernie bros.?
More discussion on "I Love You, Daddy"

at the NewYorker Movie Facebook Club

Moderator · November 11 at 11:46am
A longer word on I Love You, Daddy: the
release was cancelled, but—even apart from
Louis C.K.'s misconduct—it's a disgusting
film that never should have been acquired for
distribution in the first place. (Absolutely not
332
saying he shouldn't be able to show it—but

that no responsible company should ever
have gotten behind it.) I saw it a few weeks
before the stories came out; it was an
infuriating experience—like watching an act
of cinematic gaslighting; here are some of the
details (I wrote twice as much because there
were so many more, but mercifully cut back
on them): https://www.newyorker.com/
…/why-louis-cks-i-love-you-daddy-…
Why Louis C.K.’s “I Love You, Daddy” Should

Never Have Been Distributed in the First
Place
C.K.’s movie doesn’t just excuse but actually
endorses sexual depredation as an artistic
practice and as a way of life.
NEWYORKER.COM
Nat Magee This review is astounding. I've
been a big fan of Louis CK ever since "Louie"
came out, and I was excited to see what he
could do on the big screen. However, the
confirmation of the stories that circulated
about him have called most of his work into
question for me. At the moment, it makes me
333
a bit sick to watch any of his material/shows,

but I know that one day I'm going to go back
and view some of it with my new awareness.
What will I think of it then? What would I
have thought of this movie if it had been
released as intended?
Marc Imbillicieri What does his
misconduct have to do with the work?
Nat Magee This is my personal reaction, so
objectively it might have nothing to do with
it, but I guess because his comedy/filmed
content is so personal and has a lot of
sexuality involved. Knowing that he's hurt
other people with the same sexuality that's
fueled a lot of his comedy feels painful to me.
The work is still brilliant and funny, but at
this moment I can't separate the work from
the man.
Andreas Petrossiants Would really

recommend this review as well, which was
published 2 or so weeks
334
ago: http://www.4columns.org/orange-
michelle/i-love-you-daddy
Lisa Salazar Clear-eyed view without the

taint of his latest revelations.
Linda Covello Thank you for sharing that
review.
Sophie Krueger I think that this idea of

“cinematic gaslighting” really holds a lot of
merit. I think that it’s definitely a
phenomenon for liberal, male writers and
directors in their creation of female
characters. Are there any other movies you
can specifically identify that do this?
Lisa Salazar Fatal Attraction, Disclosure
are the first two that come to mind. Nearly all
action films objectify women as molls. The
latest sci fi films allege to have female heroes
but they are all reduced to dressed up Barbie
dolls with no emotional depth. Geez, as I
write this, what's left?
335
Raquel Herrera Great review. Manhattan

was my favorite movie when I was 18,
although I never managed to comprehend
why someone my age would be so intent on
having a relationship with a clearly immature
42 year old. In time, I enjoyed many Woody
Allen movies, though I never got around to
accept the insistence on this kind of
"relationships" between young girl and older
men. What is wrong with these directors?
Lately, I had been enjoying immensely some
of CK's stand-up, naively believing he was
actually being sarcastic. Turns out he has a
lot of problems and he should be held
accountable for them. All in all, I am
extremely saddened by the recent news and
how they affect humor and criticism in
movies.
Benjamin Homaii I’m afraid I don’t find
the sentence “It's a disgusting film that never
should have been acquired for distribution in
the first place.” a compelling professional
critique of a movie.
336
David Dean Daniel Agreed. This is a

hatchet job and despite any current or future
protests it's clearly a reaction at least in part
to headlines, as opposed to merely the film.
It's unprofessional and frankly I didn't expect
it from Mr. Brody. I am disappointed.
Miriam Bilsker he supports it with
evidence and an argument about the film, so
I don't understand where your problem lies.
The fact that he is making a judgment in the
first place?
Benjamin Homaii Look, there is no
argument or supporting evidence for a critic
to categorize a film as disgusting and that it
shouldn’t have been distributed. Is a
professional movie critic a moral judge?
What authority a movie critic has to talk
about the distribution of a movie?! His
unprofessionalism in regard to “I love you,
Daddy” is axiomatic and if it’s not evident to
you, there’s no way I can prove you
otherwise.
Miriam Bilsker Do you not think movies
make moral arguments? I think Richard
337
Brody has always argued that films have

worldviews and points of view. If a film is
endorsing a disgusting worldview, is it not
disgusting? You may argue that perhaps his
claim goes too far, but not that it’s
unsupported. It’s not a stray statement, it’s
backed up with the rest of the argument in
the review. I teach writing to my first year
college students, so I am trained to recognize
that claims have to be backed up with
reasons and evidence. Brody made a claim
but it is not a throwaway statement -- it was
backed up with reasoning and evidence from
the film. That’s the essence of what a review
does. So I’m not sure where the problem lies.
Miriam Bilsker as for distribution, Brody
has argued in the past that movies he likes
should be more widely distributed (e.g. spike
lee undistributed movies, certain directors
that are hard to see), and he has been
thinking in print for a while about how
movies are made and distributed, so I see
this as a continuation of that critical practice.
Linda Covello Miriam Bilsker here,
here...very well stated.
338
Benjamin Homaii Miriam, it’s not my

intention to come off as cantankerous, so
when I see that our take on professional
criticism is conspicuously different right to
the core, it will be of no use to discuss this
anymore. Discussions are fruitful when
people share some fundamental concepts,
but here, the problem is with the very
concepts. You don’t ostensibly accept that
calling a movie “garbage” is unprofessional
for a critic and I won’t budge either that it’s
not. So, with all due respect, I just don’t
share your point of view. And I believe that
concludes this thread.
Linda Covello Benjamin Homaii you may
choose to withdraw from the "thread" and it
is your right to do so, however, as Ms. Bilsker
has raised what others may see as valid
points for further debate, the issue may
ostensibly be considered open to others �
Benjamin Homaii Of course, Linda; knock
yourself out.
Linda Covello Rather not, thanks anyway.
I've said my piece, just pointing out that no
one has authority to shut a thread down
339
other than the admin or the original poster

should he/they choose to do so. Have a nice
evening.
Benjamin Homaii I wasn’t shutting down
the thread, but merely insinuating that I
wouldn’t debate over this matter anymore.
Linda Covello Yea, I got that part too.
Thanks. bye now.
Rodney Welch I don’t buy Brody’s bottom

line.
He gives a typically concise and even
persuasive breakdown of what the film is
about and why he doesn’t like it, but he takes
a considerable leap when he says that — even
without the revelations about Louis C.K. —
it was irresponsible for any studio to release
it.
He goes from being a critic to being a shrill
moral cop, a defender of artistic suppression
on the grounds of nothing more than the fact
that he was morally offended. Need I remind
him that a lot of people were deeply offended
by the ideas promulgated by his hero Jean-
340
Luc Godard — particularly “Hail Mary” —

and also tried to prevent that film’s release?
There are a lot of films that I find morally
offensive. I don’t try to stop them from being
shown.
Please understand that I fully grasp why
Louis C.K.’s personal troubles destroyed this
film’s chances of release. What I object to
here is Brody assuming an unusual and
unpleasant role as a guardian of public
morality.
Pamela Royce The best part of this:
“The result is, in effect, an act of cinematic
gaslighting, an attempt to spin the tenets of
modern liberal feminism into shiny objects of
hypnotic paralysis. The movie declares that
depredation is liberation, morality is tyranny,
judgment is narrow-mindedness,
shamelessness is creativity, lechery is
admiration, and public complaint is private
vanity.”
Thank you, Mr. Brody.
341
Yankel Todris Where will this be available

now that he's been blacklisted for being
afraid of sex and pitifully begging women to
watch him masturbate?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Yankel, this post
exacerbates the problem, which is macho. It
also takes us away from the victims'
experience of this sex crime, which wasn't for
them a laughing matter but a matter of
intimidation and humiliation and
powerlessness. He is powerful, and was very
successful in his act of predation. Other men
who behave in a ways which make them
immune to your accusation are people like
Weinstein. He didn't just masturbate but
raped; he didn't just beg but forced.
Yankel Todris Excuse me but the NYTimes
article makes no mention of rape of any kind.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Yankel Todris I
was referring to Weinstein. Is it your
impression that the women who were subject
to C.K. weren't actually harmed by the
experience, being that he was so clearly
pathetic, as you say?
342
Yankel Todris I think that the women who

agreed to watch and the woman who declined
have zero moral fiber, trying to ruin
someone's life to get in the papers.
Who is talking about Weinstein? We are
talking about Louis C.K.
Yankel Todris Your problem definitely isn't
machismo...
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Yankel
Todris When I mentioned rape I was
referring to Weinstein. But speaking of
Weinstein, do you think that the women who
ended up not deterring Weinstein from
making sexual use of them were lacking in
moral fibre, or Kevin Spacey's victims? This
is generally considered blaming the victim.
C.K. has power over them; he knows he's got
them where they're overwhelmed and unsure
of themselves... unsure of what will happen
to them if they balk and refuse; and so they'll
find them ostensibly complicit in a situation
which can readily be dismissed in macho
culture as their own fault... for after all, why
didn't you just refuse? He's got all the cards,
and playing them. He wants his victims to
feel powerless and used, as you are inclined
343
to as well, considering your comments about

New Yorker readers and about me,
personally. People aren't accepting this kind
of behaviour anymore.
Yankel Todris Kindly post a a statistical
model akin to the tax bracket clearly
delineating which sexual acts become
verboten for every million dollars one
possesses.
You are talking theology, my dear
Savonarola.
Yankel Todris Bringing up Weinstein is of
course completely extraneous to the
discussion.
Like bringing up O.J. Simpson or John
Dillinger.
And don't try to pretend you didn't mention
rape because you don't have anything
rational to say about the discussion of
Richard "Phyllis Schlafly II" Brody's
masturbation fixation.
Yankel Todris You are a perfect example of
Antonio Gramsci's theory that the
bourgeoisie uses cultural hegemony to make
344
the proles identify with the well-being of the

bourgeoisie.
Slaving away at customer service and
nodding approvingly at the moralistic coup
perpetrated by powerful men writing for the
New York Times.
Yankel Todris Any links to a bootleg?

David Dean Daniel This so-called "film
criticism" is a hatchet job and despite any
current or future protests that it isn't, it's
clearly a reaction at least in part to headlines,
as opposed to merely the film. It's
unprofessional and frankly I didn't expect it
from Mr. Brody. I am very disappointed.
Yankel Todris Brody has cut himself off
from his godardian roots recently, praising
the show Girls and attacking European
movies as too anti-bourgeois.
Very sad he's become just another eunuch of
the court of New Yorker readers.
Yankel Todris BTW im not a big C.K. fan
but would like to see this movie which was
345
effusively praised by Peter Bradshaw before

C.K. was shamed for his lack of manliness
and being stuck in a celibate rut of
masturbation.
Yankel Todris Imagine if a woman was
attacked and had her movie dropped for
stripping for a man and fingering herself�
Russell Colwell Uh huh. And imagine a

woman doing that.
Marc Imbillicieri Russell Colwell I was
once groped by a girl in front of many people.
Russell Colwell The world is a strange and
interesting place, Marc Imbillicieri, with
exceptions to every 'rule', I grant you that.
Yankel Todris Did you feel like a victim?
If that girl would one day become successful
would you try to ruin her career?
I'm asking seriously not sarcastically I'm just
curious as I liked your previous posts.
Marc Imbillicieri Yankel Todris I was
embarrassed. I tried laughing it off, but I was
pissed I kept thinking that if I had done that
346
to her, I'd have security guards grabbing at

my arms and pulling me out.
Yankel Todris Yeah that's pretty crappy
behavior embarrassing you like that.
Yankel Todris In a room full of people
Russell Colwell Do you have any idea why
she did it?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Marc
Imbillicieri That was sexual abuse then. Your
feeling embarrassed by the incident is
absolutely valid.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Marc
Imbillicieri It is also exactly the kind of
molestation that generates shame and hate...
a desire for revenge. Women need to know
that they can participate in generating shame
and hate in men too. The cycle can go that a
woman who is shamed and humiliated in life
becomes a mother who does this sort of thing
to her boys. The boys grow up and abuse
women for the crimes of the mother, women
who when they raise their own boys... No one
347
humiliates someone unless they themselves

have experienced it.
Lauren Lauter Marc Imbillicieri- that's
horrible you went through that and it sounds
abusive. But it seems like you are trying to
use this example in order to dispel larger
conversations about abusive, entrenched
patriarchal structures that control the world
we all live in. What happened to you doesn’t
change the fact that we live in a patriarchal,
male dominated society where both men and
women have been and are routinely
harrassed and abused by MEN. It’s seen as
“locker room” behavior. It’s seen as “boys will
be boys.” Women are routinely told to be
quiet, to be attractive, that abuse and
harrassement are the fault of women or that
they should be grateful for the attention.
While your situation sounds shitty--was this
woman in a position of power over you? Did
you feel like as a man you deserved what she
was doing to you, and that’s why you didn’t
say anything? Did yuou feel as though no one
would believe you or care/ Because that’s
348
what women (and some men at the hands of

men) feel all the time in these situation
Diane Lake Great response to these sort of
deflecting commenters and the whole 'trust
the poem and not the poet" homilies to prop
up the patriarchal status quo. So tiresome.
Anna Mulholland Yeah, right, that's
typical female behavior. Also, the female
groper is readily deflected because rarely is
there fear of further consequence to the man.
Not nevet, but the routine nature of
experiencing groping IS NOT COMPARABLE
BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN. (I was
groped by an unidentifed stranger in a
crowed at a concert when I was 14, most
disconcerting, no long term harm, but why
should that be a routine experience for a
young girl?) Also, that was just the first, not
the only, incident. As all women know.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Anna
Mulholland It may be that we will go through
this time without anyone much mentioning
it, because the greatest taboo is to speak
averse of mothers, but where you will find
349
molestation of boys by women is women

(what do women who've been
repeatedly humiliated become when they
become mothers? magically loving, or
seekers of love through their children?) upon
their sons. Unwelcome handling, obtuse to
the needs of the boy but for the mother's own
pleasure. Within this realm, there is
inappropriate touching to equal that we see
by men upon women in the adult world. We
won't see this discussed, even as it is
something that needs to be. So what will
happen is that revenge for this mistreatment
will occur, via populist political groups ... like
the Bernie Bros, which parade
"unquestionable virtue" but which noticeably
seem to sideline the concerns of women to
rise in the world.
Anna Mulholland Parental sexual abuse is
abhorrent. But I think again much more
prevalent male adult. On boys and girls.
Mulholland In families like that, the fathers
are mostly remote... mothers spend most of
the time with the children. Where both
350
parents are equally involved from the start,

you will always find they aren't in any way
significant problems, because that level of
genuine interest by both parents means
progressive, emotionally evolved parents.
Anna Mulholland Are you suggesting that
sexually inappropriate behavior of the
mother with the son is commonplace and
serves a role in explaining routine sexual
harassment of women by men? I'm not really
sure what your point is. Good parents work
together? Bad parents screw up their kids?
The idea that sexually inappropriate behavior
is hard to identify for men is just ridiculous.
Treat your colleagues like your mom's friends
sexually, assuming nothing weird, it's pretty
easy to know what's going on, denial is just
bullshit.
Mulholland Yes. That's what happens to
women who are denied love in life, are
shamed, humiliated... their children will
always be used to satisfy unmet needs, and
abandoned when they seek to individuate
from them. Boys end up reifying their
351
mothers, but destroying women they've

projected their abusive mothers onto.
Lauren Lauter Patrick McEvoy-
Halston What are you talking about? Your
deflection of a very real structural patriarchy,
by using some sort of Freudian and
ridiculous red herring, is similar to those who
claim that white Christian males are being
persecuted. Here are some stastics on child
sexual abuse. “offenders are overwhelmingly
male.” We have always known this. This is
common sense. This doesn’t condone what
some women do and the ways in which
mothers abuse that are less blatant, or even
just violent. But it seems that you have a
difficult time coming to terms with the fact
that we live in world and within systems that
privilege male power, and are looking for any
way you--not well, mind you--to find holes in
it’s assertion.
Statistics on Perpetrators of CSA
VICTIMSOFCRIME.ORG
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A
%2F%2Fvictimsofcrime.org%2Fmedia
%2Freporting-on-child-sexual-abuse
352
%2Fstatistics-on-perpetrators-of-
csa&h=ATM5VMRQa9q_wiBshj2iIM0bi9cE
4kpGNbEZ97YAQHywhdbN3LRC2XnYaQrG
0YfKwCEfWK0aeT0Rcx60ZYguqEYqj9VVaO
ESlsWghTPAXextIk6LrBe3VKCq2JJk88ocK
ND-u4eYsSf7BGuz
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Lauren
Lauter Origins of patriarchy, is what I'm
talking about. Patriarchy dies when people
evolve to the point we're seeing in mass in
Scandinavian countries, and throughout
progressive regions in North America, not
because they are taught differently, better,
but because the early childhood foundations
have improved. They don't have adverse
early experiences with their mothers, and so
the idea of making society some sort of
massive fatherly resistance to Her is absurd.
Throughout history, though, that's the reason
for patriarchy.
Anna Mulholland that's ridiculous.
Blaming patriarchy on women, gas lighting!
Lauren Lauter You said- "Yes. That's what
happens to women who are denied love in
353
life, are shamed, humiliated... their children

will always be used to satisfy unmet needs,
and abandoned when they seek to
individuate from them. Boys end up reifying
their mothers, b...See More
Mulholland No. Only women who have been
severely abused will abuse their children. The
problem is ONLY that our start as homo
sapien sapiens is as only provisionally loving
beings. We started off loving children
because it gave us stimulation, pleasure.
Children were evolved to provide it, so to be
cared for at least until they had a chance not
to be eaten readily by wolves. Love didn't
exist. From there, very slowly, love has crept
into parental relations. Fathers weren't really
part of the family fold until very recently.
Their contact with children was equally as
foul, but they only popped in here and there.
There is no one to blame but our terrible
early start as a species, really.
Mulholland Don't shame people for
expanding the explanation for why men
354
would find themselves driven to purposely

humiliate and destroy women, beyond the
fact that men have tended to find good sport
in this. What I am arguing is that the only
way any girl or boy could evolve into some
monstrosity like this, is if they experienced
grand humiliation at the hands of someone
who they imagine is a replicated in the
person they now find themselves so intent to
destroy. I believe the only people who hurt
other people, are profoundly hurt people. For
people like that, their future behavior is
determined for them. Either they will take
direct action themselves, or they will vote in
regressives who'll do it for them societally.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Lauren Lauter
Men don't benefit from patriarchy. Not
really. Only provisionally. It's defence against
felt perennial worries of envelopment, of
rendered powerlessness. It's an emotionally
retarded way of organizing society, built out
of a time of less evolved people than exist
now. To anyone who came out of an
emotionally well-nurturing household, it is
personally abusive and traumatizing to find
355
yourself prospering in a world where others

are intentionally withheld and stigmatized.
You want everyone to enjoy and love life,
become fully self-realized, for it's their
absolute due.
Anna Mulholland So frustrating.
Lauren Lauter Yawn- how nice that you
get to over intellectualize enough to believe
your own bs.
Mulholland For both of us though, Anna. We
both want a world where patriarchy is left in
the dustbin, and everyone is empowered to
achieve whatever they will in life. We all
tried, and hopefully have a better day.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Lauren
Lauter That's a crude response, Lauren. I'm
truly trying to seek out answers, and I think
that's apparent.
Yankel Todris Wishing Brody a great
career as world-expert on lena dunham and
leading theorist of bourgeois prudery.
356
Emanuele Turricchia "[I love you daddy

is] a disgusting film that never should have
been acquired for distribution in the first
place". Damn, now I really want to see it.
David Dean Daniel And it's a well-
reviewed film, too. Hopefully it will get the
distribution it deserves at some point.
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/i-love-
you-daddy
I Love You, Daddy

Shot on 35mm in black and white, the movie
was…
Save
METACRITIC.COM
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/i-love-
you-daddy
Stephanie Swift I don't know much about
what's happening with this film, and don't
want to read the article (no offense). It's just
that I have ALWAYS thought Louis was
overrated, and far too angry and creepy. I've
never understood why he gets so much
airtime.
357
Stephanie Swift And then there's this.

Yikes. Ugh. https://qz.com/.../we-edited-
louis-cks-statement-on.../
Scott Hartley I wish you would compare

and contrast the film, "Lolita," Kubric, 1962.
I cannot, unfortunately, offer the customary
New Yorker rate, but wouldn't the project be
interesting?
Bill Randolph as counterpoint to Brody's
laboured tendentiousness compare:
https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/revie
w/i-love-you-daddy
I Love You, Daddy | Film Review | Slant

Magazine
I Love You, Daddy Film Review by Carson
Lund
SLANTMAGAZINE.COM
https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/revie
w/i-love-you-daddy
Diane
Lake Perspective. http://www.esquire.com/.
../male-celebrities-accused-of.../
358
Bill Randolph this is a simple-minded

verging on mindless screed. one doesn't
normally defend the work of bad men as
such, but as is appropriate to whatever merit
the work may embody. the goodness or
badness of the maker is generally
unknowable, and in any case COMPLETELY
irrelevant.
Diane Lake I didn't find the article simple-
minded. Sensible. Funny/not funny how this
subject has touched such a nerve in our
movie club. Yes, I know, elevating the art
over the artist is one of the tenets of western
critical thought. It's logic's slippery slope, the
moral quandary. No matter what our
opinion, it all boils down to what level of
monstrosity we can stomach. I'm more than
okay with not feeding the beast - predator
artists - by not buying what they're selling.
None the poorer for it either.
Pamela Royce I saw Murder in the Orient
Express yesterday. A friend of mine said she
359
hesitates to see it because Johnny Depp is in

it.
Well, yeah, but so is Judi Dench and other
fine actors. So, I went to see them—and it’s
visual stunning cinematography, etc.
Besides, Depp’s bad guy gets stabbed to
death, so there’s that.
Bill Randolph Diane Lake there's nothing
the least bit slippery or slope-y about it: it's a
clear and distinct line in the firmament, as
oppposed to pseudo logic's slippery slope
(next they'll be having us destroy films by
redheads) of a censorious fascist film burning
mentality
Devi Yesodharan I found Manohla Dargis'

take (rather, retake) both more honest and
nuanced. https://www.nytimes.com/.../louis
-ck-and-hollywoods-canon...
Louis C.K. and Hollywood’s Canon of Creeps

NYTIMES.COM
360
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/movi
es/louis-ck-and-hollywoods-canon-of-
creeps.html
Bill Randolph it's in no way more anything
than the slant review, except as personal,
hermetic question-begging, ranging from the
relatively innoxious 'As if it were possible for
me to watch a movie in which women are
abused for no apparent reason — without
even a pretense of narrative rationale': the
reason may well be that women are in fact
sometimes abused for no apparent reason--to
the IRRESPONSIBLE suggestion that Louis
C.K.'s attitude toward Woody Allen should
become 'sour' because 'Mr. Allen was
ACCUSED [emphasis added] by his
daughter, Dylan Farrow, of sexually
molesting her'. so she thinks an accusation
whose veracity has been denied should be
acted upon as if proven!
Conversations about C.K. at the

361

Moderator · November 10 at 8:59am
A (far-too-)brief word, for now, on I Love
You, Daddy, which I saw a few weeks ago and
found disgusting. I say that with no
exaggeration; in this capsule review, there's
only room for a brief overview of what's
repellent about the film; the details are even
more infuriating. And it's so even without
reference to Louis C.K.'s personal conduct.
What's more, it's not a case of a well-made
film with sickening content (in any case, I'm
not even sure what "well-made" means, in
any context); rather, it's a sort of aesthetic
void, a simulacrum of a movie, and its empty
approach to filmmaking is connected with
362
the narrow-minded, bombastic ugliness of its

ideas (but that connection is for another
time).
I Love You, Daddy - The New Yorker
Louis C.K.’s new feature—which he wrote,
directed, and stars in—is, on the surface, a
gloss on Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” down
to the black-and-white cinematography and
the lush score. Louis C.K. plays Glen Topher,
a New York television writer and producer
whose seventeen-year-old daughter, China
(C...
NEWYORKER.COM
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-
about-town/movies/i-love-you-daddy
Patrick McEvoy-Halston "Personal

conduct" makes it seem like he was a bad
school boy. Reproach on him, for not being a
gentleman; for lapsing. But the women
weren't grossed out by his "conduct"... a
scurry of women fleeing, but humiliated,
reduced, shamed by it... and so given this I
think rather than Louis C.K.'s lapse in
personal conduct we should say Louis C.K.'s
deliberate attempt to use women so they feel
363
small, worthless, used, and cast away. When

someone undertakes to do something like
that, somehow it can't be brought back
within the category of inappropriate personal
conduct, is my sense.
Karen Kleis Ugh. Can’t think of much else
to say. I won’t be seeing this one.
Viki Gonia Hopefully it will never see the
light of day.
Eric Culp Sounds like a treatise of

justification.
Chris Trott When I saw the trailer, I
thought to myself, ‘Wow, Louis CK is trying
really hard to get people to mistake this for a
Woody Allen film’.
Janet Colclough Bargar He has always
been yuckworthy and I nean yuck as is
"Ewwwwww! So gross!" not yuck -funny.
Seth Culp Nice! I want to see this movie
even more now. How are people unable to
separate the person from the art? They've
done it with most others. I don't see anyone
in an uproar calling for Roman Polanski's
364
Oscar to be stripped? He got a standing

ovation and he is ACTUALLY GUILTY, not
just accused. How come Woody Allen isn't
back in the headlines? Without proper
evidence and trial, this appears to be turning
into a McCarthy style witch hunt.
Andrew Kay I agree everyone has to have

their day in court. Last thing you need is trial
by media.
Judith Karline You can't separate them
when the twisted bastard actually makes
"art" out of his misdeeds. See his show Louie,
episode 'Pamela Part 1'.
Judith Karline And yeah, people have
called for Polanski's Oscar to be stripped.
Seth Culp Judith Karline I find his “art”,
especially his show Louie, and his stand up
particularly hilarious and well done. To each
their own though. He has a knack for
pointing out the universal ugliness we all
share as humans. May not be everyone’s
brand of vodka, but to deny it exists or
pretend we’re above it I believe is phony and
irresponsible. Everyday there are new
accusations on someone else and they are
365
unproven yet ruining careers. I’d like to see

actual evidence and convictions before we all
jump to such harsh conclusions. I don’t see
anything in the MSM about stripping
Polanski’s Oscar but I’m all for it if so. Hell
people are losing jobs and careers based on
accusations but they haven’t taken action yet
to strip a child rapist’s Oscar. C’mon witch
hunters!! Let’s try to be consistent!!!
Diane Watson-Langan When I am
watching a movie it feels like I am spending
time with the actors in the film. Right or
wrong, I am going to have a hard time
spending time with Kevin Spacey, as he has
not denied any of the allegations against him.
I can read a book, listen to music, go to a
museum, and even separate myself more
from the director's life outside of the film.
Ernest Barteldes Different times. I am
sure that if it had happened today, they'd
probably treat Polanski much differently.
And yes, there is a lot of outrage over
Polanski. Remember when he was arrested (I
think Switzerland?), a lot of artists came to
his defense and many, many people went
366
online and published a list of names of

people who signed a petition for his release.
Ernest Barteldes Full disclosure, I was one
of those and was listed right next to Antonio
Banderas. got my 15 minutes I guess
Jenny Slattery Seth Culp Do you believe
these women now that Louis CK said their
stories are true? But not before, right?
Interesting that you seem more concerned
about Louis CK's career than the careers of
the women who were silenced and
intimidated and limited by their interactions
with him - their careers were the ones who
were impacted by forces entirely out of their
control.
Seth Culp Jenny Slattery Yes I believe them
now that their is actual proof in the form of a
confession. And that’s all I was asking for.
Too many times have people been convicted
in the court of public opinion by the media
and slander. He did the right thing. And I’m
bummed. I appreciated his voice in the world
of comedy and entertainment. I hope he gets
any help he needs and bounces back.
367
Jenny Slattery Seth Culp I still only hear

concern for him and yourself. Not for these
women. Telling, I think.
Seth Culp Jenny Slattery Telling what?
What are you insinuating?
Jenny Slattery That you care more about
the men you admire being accused than the
women being hurt by those men
Jenny Slattery Even when the women’s
stories are proven to be true. Also you take
“proof” as the mans word, not theirs. Just a
skewed worldview over all where men’s
voices and careers and experiences are more
valuable. Is what I’m insinuating. I hope you
can think about that.
Jenny Slattery ...and maybe that isn’t your
worldview but as a woman reading your
comments that’s how it feels. Your words
have an impact on women who read what
you say and who already do not feel valued or
heard in this world. Okay I’m done. I realize
I’m being confrontational but clearly this is
an upsetting and emotional issue. Thank you
for listening, Seth.
368
Yankel Todris There is no evidence that

Louis C.K. "hurt" the women who watched
him masturbate nor that he "hurt" the one
who declined to watch him.
There is evidence that he has been hurt
financially, artistically and socially by the
fascists posing as feminists.
Jenny Slattery Thanks Yankel for
providing another wonderful experience of
being a woman on the Internet!
David Troia Yankel Todris Um... and then
there’s this guy. *Sigh*
Steven Erickson Yankel Todris Yankel,
that's probably the stupidest thing I've ever
read on Facebook. How would you feel if a
guy who has way more power in whatever
field you work in barged into the room, and
asked if you wanted to watch him wank off?
And if you complained,in public, it could
have repercussions for your career lasting
years?
David Troia Jenny Slattery Jenny, as a
white, heterosexual, Christian male, I
apologize on behalf of my tribe. Let’s hope
369
things change for the better but my cynicism

runs high I’m afraid.
Jenny Slattery Thanks for this David And
thanks Steven! Appreciate when men say
something to other men. Truly. Maybe we
can all be fascist feminists together.
Steven Erickson I don't deserve thanks for
basic decency. The bar for male behavior
seems so low right now.
Yankel Todris Not feminists.
Just fascists.
Simone de beauvoir and Susan Sontag would
look at you like you fell off the moon.
Have you ever even heard of de beauvoir and
sontag?
Jenny Slattery Steven Erickson fair
enough. But a bar many do not clear by a
mile, so sometimes worth noting when
people do.
Jenny Slattery Yankel Todris um yes have
read both thanks for asking. Do not want to
undertake an analysis stand off though. I’ll
put my energy elsewhere
Yankel Todris Good move
370
David Troia Seth Culp Seth, you know I

love you Man, but when the argument is
Hypocrisy versus Sexual Harassment, always
take the side of Harassment. You’ll sleep
better.
Yankel Todris Those of us who have
benefited from the anti-discrimination law of
the Civil Rights Act must stand up against its
blasphemous subversion into a punishment
for spurned gay and straight men and women
under the rubric of the legal fiction called
sexual harassment.
We must not let Tinder destroy the legacy of
Lyndon Johnson.
Steven Erickson And we must not let
Grindr destroy the legacy of Jimmy Carter!
Irene Rosenvais Judith, absolutely. This
was exactly my thought reading through
these comments. Many of Woody Allen’s
films can be considered art based on his
personal morals and views.
Irene Rosenvais I don’t disagree in
principle but what do all the actresses who
371
have spoken out about their experiences of

harassment stand to gain?
Irene Rosenvais Steven, his comments are
outrageous and he doesn’t deserve a platform
to spout this idiocy.
Judith Karline It seems that Seth has a
hard time understanding the gravity and
affect sexual assault and harassment have on
the victims and the industry as a whole.
Think of all of the talent squelched by that
culture we missed out on. We've read about
female writers who had to leave the industry
when they wouldn't accept that culture. Are
the perpetrators' talents more valuable? No.
They aren't.
Brian Duggan Dittos.

Stephen Conn I wonder if the review would
have been as damning if the sex harassment
allegations hadn't come out. Up till now
Louis CK has been hailed as the comedy
messiah, a combination of Bob Dylan and
Lenny Bruce. Now everyone magically hates
his guts and treats him like the most
372
untalented performer at open-mic night of all

time....
Andrew Kay Bill Hicks was better. RIP
Stephen Conn Andrew Kay You're looking
for the 'hate on Dennis Leary' page.
Andrew Kay Stephen Conn I like Dennis.
He’s good. Or was.
Stephen Conn Andrew Kay Everyone says
he's a Hicks copy-cat.
Andrew Kay Stephen Conn I’m not sure.
Maybe. I just loved Hicks growing up.
Stephen Conn Andrew
Kay https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=XBGKqmfNyII
Joe Rogan, Denis Leary steals from Bill

Hicks…
YOUTUBE.COM
Maurice Yacowar Brody’s record suggests
it would have been
Valda Vee Andrew Kay even Hicks had his
moments that were challenging
373
Valda Vee I thought Louis CK’s response to

the recent allegations was profound in its
truthfulness. He explained the reasons why
women are not believed or why they feel
paralysed in the presence of an egomaniacal
predator.
Jonathan Milenko Pulled from

distribution. Also the 11/25 screening at
MoMA has been cancelled.
Yankel Todris Any screenings in small
"independant" theaters?
Jonathan Milenko Yankel Todris No.
Louis CK is radioactive. No one will go near
him. His manager and publicist have both
dropped him.
Yankel Todris I guess he'd rather be seen
as a predator than just a loser.
Yankel Todris Lol
Dean Morris As someone who worked in

one scene as an extra I want to see the film,
perhaps for selfish reasons, but these
374
cancellations seem appropriate even though I

had tickets for the MoMA screening.
Jonathan Milenko You were able to get
tickets before they went on sale.
Jonathan Milenko Maybe Louis will
release it on his own website, providing his
hosting company doesn't boot him.
Dean Morris I'm a volunteer there so there
are limited seats available to us at the
Contenders series. It seems to be removed
from the MOMA schedule.
Dean Morris BTW you can buy tickets
at moma.org. for The Contenders series.
Jonathan Milenko Dean Morris Yup. I've
got alerts set up for the on sale times of the
movies I want to see. "Three Billboards" last
night. Have tickets for seven more screenings
& plans for more. Here's a more direct link,
which I needed to use since the museum's
site was down when Blade Runner tickets
went on
sale. https://www.showclix.com/events/831
0
375
Find tickets from Museum of Modern Art -

Film
Find tickets from Museum of Modern Art -
Film
Mattia De Gasperis as a fan of Louis ck's
previous works, i would like to see it as well.
Mattia De Gasperis based on the trailer

and some images, it's so weird to see that his
directing style seems more cinematic and
interesting in his television show, the style
here looks derivative and poor, even if there's
a clear reference to Stardust memories and
some other Allenism(not talking about the
"private" Allen). That said, i really wish i will
be able to see it and that it finds a release just
like every Polanski movie you all saw and
reviewed, and just like every other artist
some people like to call "troubled" and write
books and poems about.
Maurice Yacowar Transgressive art has its
own velocity?
Funlayo Hillrich Trailer, I Love You
Daddy.
376
Sickening... https://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=xRQGzS6Ce-g
Ernest Barteldes pretty scathing review

La Kristen Virgen Movie preview is gross,
would've trolled his shit anyway.
Joel Seligmann Well before the recent
revelations about Louis CK, I found him to be
a repellent comic - one who cynically goes too
far for a laugh in the worst directions.
Terrence C Briggs On a related note, we
can analyze Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation
on its own, without the need to make the
movie about the man who directed and
starred in it.
If this Louis CK film is as bad as Richard
says, that's the issue for us filmwatchers.
When the film is over, we can address the off-
screen issues.
Joel Seligmann Yes, or we can just not see
the film because we never thought he was
worth our attention in the first place.
377
Terrence C Briggs Totally fair. I still

haven't seen Pootie Tang.
Joel Seligmann So this is a movie by Louis

CK the purpose of which is to pass judgment
on Woody Allen. Such self-righteous temerity
boggles the mind.
Lisa Salazar I pretty much avoid most
comedians after a good friend of mine, due
his drive to succeed as a comedian, checked
his morals at the door. I saw countless of
shows when I was supporting him. Most
comedians appeal to the lowest common
denominator, relying on potty humor and
profanity. I saw a man that I really respected
revert to misogyny and profanity to get a
laugh. I was so disappointed in him. And I
told him as much. There are not many
comedians who are smart and funny without
relying on this type of "humor".
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Which is what
makes Ellen Degeneres so valuable.
Issac M. John Elizabeth Lloyd-Timbrel Or
Jerry Seinfeld
378
Gay Pauley Demetri Martin, Jim Gaffigan,

Brian Regan. I don't dispute there are many
offensive comedians, but many choose
another path.
Lisa Salazar And I do like Robin Williams
and Dave Chappelle and a few others. I'm not
a complete grump. �
Janet Colclough Bargar I totally agree,
but remember Cosby denigrating other
comics for using profanity?
Janet Colclough Bargar Carlin was very
profane, but maybe never misogynistic or
mean.
Tal Abbady It's interesting how and when

old paradigms crumble, or burn to the
ground. We didn't see the open and self-
entitled predation in 'Manhattan.' It was
aesthetic, charming, Marielle Hemingway
was the artist's beatific vision. "I can also
make one of these," God says. The artist
believed this was his right and the rest is
history.It's like that Roberto Bolano story -
379
the literatti and elites are being wined and

dined and celebrated, and their host lives
above a torture chamber.
Joe Procopio Finally, somebody on this
thread with something interesting to say.
Thanks...so tired of the virtue signaling in
most of these comments.
Janet Colclough Bargar Virtue signaling
could actually be righteous reaction to
systemic violence finally being addressed
(albeit weakly with boycotts that may not
effect change.)
Lisa Salazar Vitrue signaling. Isn't that a
fancy way of saying "gross"?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Janet Colclough
Bargar A lot of people are denying their past
selves, though. This predatory inclination
was in C.K. all along probably, in his art, all
along, and he was popular amongst many
people who believe they are entrenched
liberals. It would due them well to reflect on
this, rather than be allowed to pretend they
weren't themselves attracted to a person who
takes revenge out on women.
380
Joyce Rubin Deschamps Why would

anyone want to see this? Was "Casablanca"
sold out? Better question why would anyone
want to make this movie? Aside from $$$ of
course. Filth for filth's sake.
Lisa Salazar There are many like-minded
people, as evidenced by today's news.
Wendy Ervin C.K. was paying homage to

his creepy hero.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel So, judging
solely from Mr. Brody's review, I take it this
flick isn't a satire that essentially missed its
target by several thousand miles?
Mary Zheutlin Peterman I saw the
retailers and was totally put off by the video,
dialogue and premise.

381
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Saturday, November 11, 2017
Conversations about Christopher

Plummer at the NewYorker Movie
Facebook Club
Roxanne Jonesshared a link.

November 9 at 9:45am
Spacey's predation aside, why didn't they
make this casting choice in the first place?
You know. Have an elderly actor play an
elderly character?
382
Shocker: Kevin Spacey Dropped From ‘All

The Money In The World;’ J Paul Getty Role
Recast With Christopher Plummer
Brent Richardson Christopher Plummer
was better casting for the part, anyhow. He
looks more like Getty and Spacey's heavy
make-up looked too obvious.
Tom Haggas Need to put butts in seats.
Until a month ago, Spacey would have done
that a little better than Plummer.
Roxanne Jones Yeah, that's true. Some
people probably don't even know that
Plummer is still alive.
Alberto J Leal I planned on going to see
this movie with Spacey in it, and I still plan
to see it without him.
Tom Haggas They probably think that was
him at the beginning of Force Awakens.
Alberto J Leal Tom Haggas Christopher
Plummer is an iconic actor. There is no
confusing him with anyone else.
383
Tom Haggas Alberto J Leal Eh. Don't

overestimate the intelligence of the average
American filmgoer.
*cough*Transformers*cough*
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Plummer is not
only still alive but kicking ass with three films
in post-production besides this Spacey
switch. (Highly recommend tracking down
the PBS broadcast of his "Barrymore."
Roxanne Jones The fact that they

announced Plummer so quickly leads me to
believe he was considered at first but thrown
over for someone else.
Jonnie Barrow My understanding is that
Scott wanted him initially but the studio
pushed for Spacey because he *was* more
appealing to audiences.
Roxanne Jones Ugh.
Alberto J Leal I agree. Even though I

admired the makeup work, I never
understood the reason behind having Spacey
384
play an older man. I thought there might be

flashback scenes but it doesn't seem to be the
case.
Tom Haggas It does make me wonder how
few scenes J Paul Getty has in this.
Brent Richardson Going to guess, not
many. This appears to be the story of the
kidnapped grandson and the horrifying
impact it had on his life. His grandfather
wasn't a close loving family member. He was
a distant but powerful entity to be obeyed or
suffer his wraith. Probably how he'll be
played.
Jonnie Barrow Apparently Spacey only
shot for ten days - trailer looks to be far more
about Michelle Williams tbh
Tom Haggas Jonnie Barrow An honest
trailer? How refreshing.
Maureen Daniels I hope that if Plummer

was considered for the part before it was
given to Spacey, he has now at least doubled
his fee.
Roxanne Jones Damn skippy!
385
Tom Haggas One thing is for certain, this

movie could have the best Blu-ray
supplements we've seen in a long time. As
long as they don't puss out and act like
Spacey was never going to be in it in the first
place. I'd love to hear the decision making
process and the process of getting this on
screens in six weeks.
Greg Stewart Bet they puss out.
Ed Sadowski Plummer is a better actor

than Spacey anyway
Don Larkin no he isn’t
Ellen Liang Looks like no other actor has

been so reviled and punished in this manner.
Surely this hasn't been uncommon behavior.
I wonder how many more acting careers will
be ruined.
Greg Stewart Molesting children is at least
relatively uncommon!
386
Greg Stewart ...or not :

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Se
cret
An Open Secret - Wikipedia

An Open Secret is an American documentary
film directed by Amy J. Berg[2][3]
exposing…
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Corey Feldman
has been trying to talk about this for years,
not just now.
Pickles Mcgee Acting career ruined but not
the life of an innocent child? That's an
unfortunate statement.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Pickles
Mcgee Yeah, I agree. On our end however we
should be prepared if a good portion of
Hollywood gets crippled... we have almost
willed the place to be a place where either
your dreams are realized or you get
completely ground up. I think a lot of the
American populace wanted there to be lots of
Weinsteins there, for it embodying the
American dream more than any other place
387
other than perhaps New York... as well as

their uncertainty about it. It is possible that
people working there either sensed the
collective latitude towards their playing the
role of the dream-maker but also the
predator, or, even, responded to our felt
needs to absolutely provide both, which we
all now completely disown.
If we were capable of this kind of
sophisticated thought, we might well save
Hollywood, as well as Washington D.C., as
well as New York, which the rightwing of
America are sensing are in the process of
being revealed as cesspools... the places that
have preached the most against them,
revealed to be beyond hypocritical into a
reptilian scale of evil.
Ellen Liang My point was that this hasn't
happened to actors that I know of, only
directors such as Polanski and Allen, and
they continued their careers. Am not
debating the morality of this behavior.
Greg Stewart Commercial impact. Period.
Other articles mention that Plummer was
388
Scott's first choice but he was overruled by

the studio.
Thato Kabelo Sekhoto Yes. Ridley wanted
Plummer but Sony wanted Spacey.
Griselda Haygood I saw the trailer for "All
The Money in the World," and even though
he was only in the trailer for a brief minute, I
thought he nailed the lookk of J. Paul Getty.
Look at what these great artists do to commit
career suicide...
Ralph
Benner https://www.vanityfair.com/.../ridl
ey-scott-kevin-spacey...
How Ridley Scott Will Pull Off Replacing

Kevin Spacey in All the Money in the World
“I'm super fast.“
Carol Steel I'm disgusted by this action by
Sony.
They force a director to use their choice then
bail?
I hope no one goes to see it.
I know I won't.
389
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Pickles Mcgee

Yeah, I agree. On our end however we should
be prepared if a good portion of Hollywood
gets crippled... we have almost willed the
place to be a place where either your dreams
are realized or you get completely ground up.
I think a lot of the American populace
wanted there to be lots of Weinsteins there,
for it embodying the American dream more
than any other place other than perhaps New
York... as well as their uncertainty about it. It
is possible that people working there either
sensed the collective latitude towards their
playing the role of the dream-maker but also
the predator, or, even, responded to our felt
needs to absolutely provide both, which we
all now completely disown.
If we were capable of this kind of
sophisticated thought, we might well save
Hollywood, as well as Washington D.C., as
well as New York, which the rightwing of
America are sensing are in the process of
being revealed as cesspools... the places that
have preached the most against them,
390
revealed to be beyond hypocritical into a

reptilian scale of evil.
Stephen Conn Guilty until proven innocent
(at least Trump's people really met with the
Russians).
Joyce Rubin Deschamps Agree not only
because of age but Plummer is Olivier
compared to a very whiny voiced Spacey.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Spacey has just
come out as a homosexual. "Whiny voiced"
might carry some associations -- of men who
aren't really men.
Joyce Rubin Deschamps Patrick McEvoy-
Halston never entered my mind. He was very
whiny in The Usual Suspects, American
Beauty...Plummer has a superior voice, imho.
But any reference to his coming out is
completely unintended.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cool.
Nicolas Bordet The nice thing with acting

is you can play something else than yourself.
391
Lizzie Nicholson but ...they also removed a

big draw from the movie. I adore Plummer,
but Spacey is a bigger box office draw than
Christopher...and all this so they can issue
the movie for the Oscars...a bit hypocritical
Mmarrk CommandoJjullstrrom No one
seems to mind the bad things that Wahlberg
(he's in this movie too) wrought in his
younger days. It does make a difference to
some, whether seeing that kind of person
perform is enjoyable.
Roxanne Jones Wahlberg is one of the
reasons I wasn't going to see this anyway.
Brian Duggan "Daisy Clover" still is his

best cinematic effort.
Tom Haggas The court of public opinion is
fickle. What Weinstein, Spacey, Louis CK and
Wahlberg have done is disgusting and I don't
really care if they ever appear on a screen
again.
392
As an observer of pop culture, I think there's

an element of who we perceive these people
to be versus who they are in real life. Kevin
Spacey's revelation was a bit jarring because
it was counter to what a lot of us expected.
On the other hand, Louis CK had a pretty low
bar because his comedy was so self-
deprecating that we weren't nearly as
surprised.
With Wahlberg, that news has been out for a
while, and he's been very forthcoming about
his 25 year old felonies and again, picturing a
young Southie Mark Wahlberg as someone
who would beat up people isn't an impossible
mental feat. As with most things,
expectations affect bias.
Roxanne Jones Gawker (RIP) kept a
running tab on the rumors about Spacey and
Louis C.K. for years. They posted many
stories of younger men being approached
and propositioned by Spacey.
Louis' situation was open knowledge among
women within the comedy community
because his victims talked about it. Tig
393
Notaro even called him out in an episode of

her show.
If you don't follow celebrity news or gossip,
then yes, this stuff is shocking.
Tom Haggas With celebrity news and
gossip, how do you draw the line? So much of
it is made up. I follow entertainment news
closely, but don't even glance at the grocery
checkout rags. For every one thing they get
right, there's 20 that are made up.
Roxanne Jones True. For me, it's depends.
I'm more likely to believe something coming
from TMZ than US Weekly.
I was willing to give Gawker/Defamer the
benefit of the doubt regarding Spacey and
Louis CK because they went out of their way
not to offer mere gossip but actual industry
news, just not flattering news. However, in
both cases they couldn't get folks to speak on
the record. So I took it with a pinch of salt.
Discussions about "All the Money in the

World" at the NewYorker Movie
Facebook Club
394
Jonathan Milenko shared a link.

Yesterday at 2:59pm
A few weeks ago, two movies highest on my
radar were "All the Money in the World" with
Kevin Spacey and "The Upside" from
Weinstein. Now, I don't know what I want to
watch.
Anyway...
Kevin Spacey Scandal: Sony May Move ‘All

the Money in the World’ Release
(EXCLUSIVE)
Sony Pictures is considering moving the
release date of “All the Money in the World”
and is weighing canceling its American Film
Institute premiere next week,…
395
VARIETY.COM
Martin Levy de Andrade Life is a box of
chocolates.
Lizzie Nicholson the film does not belong

to Weinstein or to Spacey...it belongs to the
creators, the directors, the screenwriter and
all the other crew who made the film
possible. to not see a movie because of one
person is silly
Roxanne Jones I sort of agree. But some of
the profits will go into Spacey's pockets. And
for some people they just can't stomach the
thought of their money "rewarding" him in
any way.
Jonathan Milenko Roxanne Jones Profits?
Actors are demanding, and getting, a
percentage of the gross these days. First two
weeks, the cinema only makes money on the
concessions.
Lizzie Nicholson not all actors get a share
of the profits...and not for all movies
Roxanne Jones Profits, gross, whatever.
There are people who don't want their money
396
going to people like Spacey, Weinstein,

Woody Allen, R. Kelly, Roman Polanski, etc.
*shrug*
Suzanne Kulperger Sure, let’s keep
supporting sexual predators.
Roxanne Jones This just popped up today.
https://www.nytimes.com/.../kevin-spacey-
heather-unruh...
Former TV Anchorwoman Accuses Kevin

Spacey of Assaulting Her Son
Heather Unruh, a longtime television
journalist in…
NYTIMES.COM
Lizzie Nicholson yes but that's Spacey, not
the director nor the rest of the crew
Lizzie Nicholson by now it has been
established that Spacey is a rotten egg and
that he probably did all the nasty things they
say. That's not going to stop me from seeing
the movie.
Roxanne Jones If you want to see it, you
should see it. For some people, this is a
397
difficult ethical question. But that shouldn't

prevent anyone from doing as they wish.
Lizzie Nicholson yes and honestly there's
going to be a lot of reports, but in the end, if
you read what Spacey's brother said their
childhood was like, it is obvious that the man
needs a lot of help, and probably some jail
time.
Lizzie Nicholson but that does not
preclude me from seeeing the movie, nor
thinking that he's one of the greatest actors
of his generation.
Esmenia Dibble Lizzie Nicholson I agree. I
have always admired him for his awesome
talent. Ok, he is morally corrupt but
Hollywood has always been a hotbed of ...
sin, for want of a better word. He is NOT the
only one, people. There are many many many
others. I dunno, but comparing him and
Weinstein, the latter takes the cake.
Lizzie Nicholson Hollywood is as much an
artist's mecca and a skin trade. it was always
that way, and it will probably continue to be
that way
398
Kat Van Lizzie Nicholson He needs help.

Jail works for no one, really. But getting help
isn't going easy on him either. People always
think that's a walk. It isn't. If it were, we
would all be brilliant and normal. There
would be no wars or greed or abuse, etc.
Forcing someone to turn their psyche inside
out is surely brutal, and that person still may
not be cured, but merely contained. We need
more brain science, we need this waaaay
more than robots driving our cars.
And then there is the question of how much
does "madness" contribute to art, to the
medium that helps us understand each
other? What does his horribleness teach us
through his acting.
It can complicated, I guess.
Right now, it's hard to think about him. He
pushed my buttons in interviews, so my
instinct was, "I don't like this man."
Lizzie Nicholson well if he has not raped
anyone, than yes but otherwise no, rape is
rape and it cannot just be swept under the
carpet. If the worse he's done is harass,
touch, grab and so forth then maybe the best
399
thing is community work and lots of

rehabilitation.
Lizzie Nicholson i think losing his career,
his reputation, his respect will be already
hard punishment, but it' s not enough. he has
to reckon with his demons and his actions
Kat Van Lizzie Nicholson Pedophiles
"merely touch" and do incredible damage.
Lizzie Nicholson yes, but he is not yet
classified as a paedophile...he has been so far
classified as someone who comes on to young
men
Lizzie Nicholson although one was 14
apparently
Kat Van He doesn't have to be a pedophile,
that wasn't my point. My point was that
damage isn't just rape. Touch can be
damaging.
Lizzie Nicholson no, you're equating
children with men, or young men.
Lizzie Nicholson it's not the same
Kat Van Lizzie Nicholson Our neighborhood
had a pool. One summer, when my friends
400
and I were 14 or turning 14, two of our

neighbor boys decided they were going to
shove their hands into the bathing suit
bottoms of the girls at the pool for fun.
When it happened to my best friend, she told
no one and did not come to the pool for over
a week. She didn't even tell me. I did notice
that they were near her when she hauled
herself out of the pool and ran, and I
remember them laughing.
Then one of them did it to me. I hauled off
and slugged him. Then I launched myself out
of the pool with fury and screamed bloody
murder at the lifeguard to remove them, then
I went to the manager and demanded they be
banned. They were for that summer, and I
don't believe they ever returned.
I then, in my naivety, yelled at my best friend
for not warning me, for retreating and not
protecting anyone else. The shame had
consumed her. We had very different ideas
about sex; she went straight to shame while I
felt I owned myself, and I went right to self-
protection.
401
She was changed for the rest of the summer

and did not want to see these boys when we
returned to school.
I think that's damage, and that was just
touching. It was peer to peer, so no adults
hurt her. You cannot tell someone how to
react, and you cannot judge them if they
"can't handle it."
Pamela Royce Lizzie Nicholson people
often refer to what his brother has said about
their childhood, but I have never seen an
article about it. Can you provide a link?
Ralph Benner The young man is now
nineteen. Why is he hiding behind his
mother to tell his story?
Kat Van Pamela
Royce https://pagesix.com/.../kevin-
spaceys-brother-our-father.../
Kevin Spacey’s brother: Our father abused us

as children
“We’re not too surprised. And we know that…
PAGESIX.COM
402
Kat Van And one more thing. My friend, my

best friend, was mad at me for making a
scene, because then she would be known as
the girl who was friends with the girl who got
touched by the boys. So yeah, we had a big
fight and then some. She abandoned me this
way two more times, the third was the last. I
protected all the rest of the girls that summer
and instead of saying thank you, she said I
ruined my reputation and hers. Go figure.
(No one thanked me, though some girls who
would not speak to me before were nice to
me all of a sudden.) The boys’ reputations
were just fine, according to her, but not mine.
This was 197, if that helps with perspective.
So before anyone goes way too far down the
raod here, we need to let the info come out. If
anyone wants to jump ship before that, that’s
perogative. I ...See More
· Reply · Yesterday at 5:22pm
Remove
Pamela Royce Kat Van Thank you for the
article.
403
Okay, I have read the PageSix article. The

home life that the brother describes is
horribly familiar, not because of my own
immediate family (which was not like that!)
but one that a relative married into. I visited
that household only once about age 9-10, was
inside the house briefly, and in the backyard
for perhaps less than hour. But the
“darkness” was palpable, indoors and out.
Years later, after the divorce, it came out that
the grandfather was molesting everyone in
the house, male and female; the son who was
a relative by marriage was a child molester
(heterosexual), as was one of his brothers
(also heterosexual, not gay) who served time
in prison.
I am reading a book by a gay man whom I
personally know, like and admire, an
autobiographical account of his struggle with
his orientation and his sexual
experimentation—in his early teens. I will
withhold (to myself; no one else needs to
know) all judgment about the gay male
experience, especially the adolescents and
404
young adults, until I know and understand

more about it.
But it is astonishing to me that Kevin Spacey,
who by all accounts is considered to be very
intelligent, and who at least pays lip service
to liberal values including the inherent worth
of the wage earner, would grope adults on set
and in public places. It is a violation of law,
and it is shockingly inconsiderate, even
selfish and “entitled.” Boorish. I had
expected better of him.
This alone is probably not enough for me to
boycott his films. I admire his talent
immensely. When I was on the fringe of
acting, I had often said that I would like to
ask him about his “process” for developing
his roles. My conversational mention of him,
here in Hollywoodland, was always—always
—met with a studied silence, except for one
woman who said, “He *is* very intelligent...”.
I suspected she had more she could have
said, but did not say it. I thought perhaps at
the very least he would erupt in anger at
people or something like that, as very
talented people often do when others are not
405
as quick as they are to perform very well.

Sadly, I now know why his reputation was
much worse.
What an Achilles heel.
Pamela Royce Kat Van I myself never told

anyone about inappropriate touching. I think
a lot of it has to do with the personality and
emotional makeup of the individual involved,
and has nothing to do with loyalty (or the
lack of it) to others or the lack of concern for
them. I admire you for being feisty and fierce
and not putting up with it. When I was
young, I would have responded more like
your friend. As we become more open about
these abuses, we can band together and
support each other. We can make it stop or
make the perps pay the consequences (which
will deter some, but not all). I applaud you.
Lizzie Nicholson ???
Lizzie Nicholson We're talking about
Hollywood Esmenia
406
Lizzie Nicholson I don't think that it calls

for some sort of confessional here.let's stick
to the subject
Pamela Royce Lizzie Nicholson I am
sticking to the subject. The subject is Kevin
Spacey, and would we stop seeing his movies.
In giving context for my thinking, I gave
information. That is hardly a confessional. It
is easy to give yes/no answers to these
questions, but a group like this is a good
place for people to have a conversation. That
requires going beyond yes/no/maybe.
Lizzie Nicholson Pamela this conversation
has gotten off the rails a while back, but I was
answering Esmenia, I tagged you by mistake
Lizzie Nicholson And personal stories
have nothing to do with Spacey
Lizzie Nicholson The subject was the
pulling of the movie from the Oscar lineup,
and whether people would go see it after the
revelations. So as you can it's gotten quite a
bit off the rails
407
Pamela Royce Lizzie Nicholson I scrolled

back and looked. I realize I was responding
to the original poster’s comment about not
being sure what he wants to see, and not the
story about Sony. My goof.
Lizzie Nicholson We both goofed
Kat Van Pamela Royce Oh, no applause. It's
just me. I was not that evolved in many other
ways at 14, trust me. I became a reporter, so
just part of my personality to say "WTF!" And
obviously, no one else called them out, so
more reacted as you did. As I said, you
cannot feel bad or be judged on your
reaction, and my anger is only that she did
not tell at least me.
Kat Van Lizzie Nicholson I did not get off
track and that wasn't a "confession." It was
me saying that when you say rape is bad but
touch isn't damaging, it's me saying touch is
bad - period. I told the story to get it out of
the Spacey context that he is "merely" a
groper. If someone says he hurt them, he
hurt them. Now it's up to the movie goer to
decide what they can abide.
408
Lizzie Nicholson don't put words in my

mouth Kat Van. i never said anything about
damaging. I just don't appreciate when
people appropriate news and start calling
people names before the fact are even
established. My argument was that you were
calling Spacey a paedophile. To me you're not
only wrong, but you're using this forum to
make a personal point, which is something
alien to this discussion.
Kat Van Lizzie Nicholson Please reread the
thread. I never called Spacey a pedophile.
You put those words in my mouth. I'm not
the one who veered off topic to prove a
personal point. I'm not the one who said rape
is bad and that groping is different. If you are
going to post, then you should expect a
response, and I did respond. I don't
appreciate people taking the news and
making it something it isn't, as Spacey has
submitted himself for treatment, which is an
admission of some level of guilt. Reread the
thread.
Lizzie Nicholson Kat, i've got a movie to
watch...I suggest you move on
409
Kat Van Lizzie Nicholson Oh good grief. I

didn't know you owned this space.
Bob Machin Have actual charges been
brought against Spacey, or is trial (and
summary justice) by social media now
accepted as the way forward?
Roxanne Jones No actual charges yet. But

if Spacey didn't want to go on "trial by social
media" he should've behaved himself all
these years in the first place. In the end, the
only person he can blame for his downfall is
himself.
Louis-Philippe Boulianne I don't need a
conviction to believe the victims.
Chris Okum Mob rules.
David Dean Daniel Last I checked
innocent until proven guilty is still the law of
the land.
Roxanne Jones David Dean Daniel It is.
And if Spacey is charged and tried then the
process will take its course. Until then,
410
people are free to make their own opinions

about how they regard him.
Jonathan Milenko Presumption of
innocence so he's a free man. When there are
several victims with consistent stories, that's
strong evidence.
David Dean Daniel I don't necessarily
think people are making their own opinions
based on fact or reason, which is part of the
issue.
Bob Machin Presumably the police don't
think so or charges would have been
brought...
Bob Machin Louis-Philippe
Boulianne you'd make a fine juror...
David Dean Daniel I see so many people
casting stones these days. Often at
presumably innocent people, for example
Lena Dunham and Woody Allen, yet we have
a real legal system made up of professionals
whose job it is to investigate, prosecute and
punish wrongdoing. And no action has been
taken because it is not warranted due to no
merits to the allegations. And I suppose all of
411
these stone throwers are without sin or

guile...And often the opinions formed are
based on media misinformation or just plain
lies/defamation.
Roxanne Jones "I see so many people
casting stones these days."
Many people don't ply minors with alcohol
and make unwanted sexual advances at
them.
Many people don't aggressively corner
women and masturbate in front of them,
demanding they keep silent while they do it.
Many people don't rape.
So yes, many people feel comfortable casting
stones.
"I see so many people casting stones these
days."
Because it's never a good idea to "cape" for
sexual predators lest people mistake you for
either an enabler...or worse.
Esmenia Dibble Is there a statute of
limitations for Spacey or Weinstein?
Roxanne Jones Esmenia Dibble According
to this timeline, a woman in Canada is suing
412
him for incidents in 2000. So maybe not or it

depends upon the jurisdiction?
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-
arts-41594672
How the Harvey Weinstein scandal unfolded

BBC.COM
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-
arts-41594672
Esmenia Dibble Roxanne Jones I query
because it seems that the "incidents" in both
Spacey's and Weinstrin's cases happened
long time ago, in terms of years.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The idea that
Kevin Spacey was HIMSELF a victim of
sexual abuse, for years, during his childhood,
is absolutely worth our attending to. What do
we think happens to people who endured
abuse? Do we like them ONLY if they end up
seeming properly victimish to us? This puts a
sort of class system upon the victimized;
creates another category of person -- the
victimized who themselves become
victimizers -- obscured from our view and
sympathy.
413
Lizzie Nicholson there are implications at

this time that he was probably raped by his
father, like his brother, and that they suffered
terrific physical and mental abuse from their
father who was a nazi ideologically
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Lizzie
Nicholson Also, that there was no one else to
turn to: his mother permitted it.
Lizzie Nicholson Yes I read that especially
in the case of the brother whose rape she
abetted
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Lizzie
Nicholson Now there's a brave soul out there
who'll have to attempt to explore Weinstein's
childhood experiences as well, and see if
there's some of the same. It's the right thing
to do. It'll offer scant rewards, but some of us
will appreciate some people's efforts simply
to do what's right, and be inspired by it.
Lizzie Nicholson I don't think there's an
equivalency, but we'll see. In Weinstein's
case, power created and reared the monster.
414
Meg Greenberg Can we watch All the

Money still since it doesn’t look or sound like
Kevin Spacey? �
David Dean Daniel Last I checked
innocent until proven guilty is still the law of
the land.
Lizzie Nicholson you can't prove this kind
of harassment or sexual misbehavior. There's
often no one there but you and the perp, so
it's basically taking the sum of all parts and
drawing a conclusion
David Dean Daniel I understand the
studio reacting to potential loss of sales. That
is not what this thread is about.
Ken Eisner Really?
Kat Van He has submitted himself for
treatment, which is an admission. The extent
of the admission remains to be seen. I hope
he is sincere. He has put out some incredible
work, and is a major talent, so any way he
can protect his work from his
misdeeds/demons/illness (what do we call
this?) would be commendable.
415
Linda Flinner Collier Its a much bigger

problem than Spacey or Weinstein or all of
the others who have harassed or abused
women. This week at school an eighth grade
boy asked my granddaughter and her friend
if they were virgins. WTF.
Glen Martin Fitch
Patti Cassidy absolutely!!!

Roxanne Jones As long as one doesn't
have to pay for access to that poem so that
the money doesn't go in said poet's pocket,
that's good idea.
Patti Cassidy It's the movie. If you're going
to cut movies from your diet that have
questionable actors or directors, don't see
anything by Hitchcock or Polanski. If the
movies looked good enough to lure you
before the scandals, they should be good
enough after.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston But be honest: if
the movies don't seem the same to you after
knowing of the abusive that occurred
416
"therein," then don't discount this

transformation in yourself. It's probably
connected to your very humane sense of
anger and shouldn't be quelled.
Pamela Royce After I learned a lot about
Hitchcock years ago, I could not watch his
movies. It took time to compartmentalize the
works from the man.
There are others whose movies I avoid.
They’ll never know. My one ticket doesn’t
matter.
We each find our own center of integrity. I
cannot complain that others’ differ from
mine.
Marc Imbillicieri This is so stupid. It's like
saying you won't listen to Wagner because
he's a racist.
Practically speaking, what happens when you
watch a Weinstein, Spacey, or Polanski
movie? Do more people get raped?
Spacey's career is already over, and
Weinstein's is long g9ne.
Pamela Royce Sometimes you just can’t
stand the sight of someone’s face. At least
417
directors are off screen (except for

Hitchcock’s cameo appearances).
Stephen Conn I still dig Verbal
Kimnt/Keyser Soze.
Suzanne Kulperger Wow, welcome to the
patriarchy and a perfect example of all that is
rape culture on this thread. Disturbing. I
need to screenshot this shit. This article
applies to Spacey’s victims as
well. http://www.marshall.edu/wcenter/sex
ual-assault/rape-culture/
Rape Culture - Women's Center - Marshall
University
To search for a name, fill in one or more of
the fields in the form below and click the
Submit query button. At least one of the
entered fields must be flagged as indexed
(with an * character) in order for a search to
be completed successfully. A maximum of 25
entries can be returned by a single que...
MARSHALL.EDU
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Part of this
thread is about the sexual abuse and child
abandonment that was incurred upon
Spacey. Part of it was about explaining how
418
someone could become a predator. I don't

see how this necessarily works to excuse him
or to divert all attention awayfrom those he
abused. Only to understand what causes it so
it doesn't happen again. Only to appreciate
that being a victim of rape can make you into
an abuser yourself.
Richard
Biegen https://www.nytimes.com/.../kevin-
spacey-all-the-money-in...
Kevin Spacey Is Dropped From ‘All the

Money in the World’
Scenes in the completed movie with Mr.
Spacey, who is…
NYTIMES.COM
Jonathan Milenko Wow!! But will Spacey
still get any money from the box office ?
David Kaiser You know. . I know he's a bad
person. But this is right out of 1984, and it
gives me the creeps.
Jonathan Milenko David Kaiser you'd be
right if this was a documentary.
419
Richard Biegen They are reshooting his

scenes.
Suzanne Kulperger Good.
Kat Van Probably for the best.
Ernest Barteldes I say do the premiere.
There are other people who worked on the
film.

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Further conversations about Kevin

Spacey at the NewYorker Movie
Facebook Club
420
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel shared a link.

Yesterday at 3:23pm
~ Op-Ed from the Times of London
(registration is free to access the whole
article)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/…/spacey-
doesn-t-deserve-to-lose…
SPOILER ALERT -- See the brilliant, original
BBC "House of Cards" with Ian Richardson
and how they handled Francis. My suspicion
is that Netflix was going to go that way
anyway.
Spacey doesn’t deserve to lose his awards

Consternation! The tsunami of sexual
allegations that is still gathering force looks
421
like it may wash away the Netflix series

House of Cards, to which I am hopelessly
addicted. Its star Kevin...
THETIMES.CO.UK
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/spacey-
doesn-t-deserve-to-lose-his-awards-
58rrxh3g2
Roxanne Jones Well, what a freakin'

spoiler. :(
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Apologies!! The
original BBC HoC was so popular on both
sides of the pond that I thought everyone was
already familiar with it and what the US
version was following and/or changing (esp.
since all the reviews talked about it). I am so
sorry!
Roxanne Jones I think the original UK
series was on when I was a little kid so it
wasn't on my radar.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Do watch it --
how it gets where it's going will still be a
surprise!
422
Roxanne Jones I'll see. I'm really

pathetically anal about spoilers.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel I understand
and I am so sorry -- I had no idea it was a
spoiler -- and, honestly, it has not ruined the
narrative because there are things you will
not see coming and the performances are
incredible -- Ian Richardson takes things to a
level that even Spacey didn't hit.
Roxanne Jones No hard feelings! Am I
right in thinking that the antihero in the UK
version is deliciously wicked or just plain
disturbing?
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel Both. And with
a British accent....
Mark Schaffer Are you now or have you

ever been a member of the Communist
Party?
Mark Schaffer I have in my hand..
Marc Imbillicieri It's not 'Times of
London'. It's just 'The Times'.
423
Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel I am well aware

of that. But in the US if you say "The Times"
the assumption is New York, ergo the
qualification. (And I did not put it in
quotation marks as a title.)
Jon Andreas Andersson The same goes
for a host of other countries, including India
and Australia.
Jose Alberto Rodriguez He should not

deserve it, but now lets take a better look on
behavior, i dont see polawsky and woodie
allen droping awards, hell, the casey affleck
acussation
And he got an oscar
Vance Prospero-Shandy Melanie Philiips
is a venomous harridan.
Andy Ralphs Well she does work for the
times which is owned by Murdoch ....
Ralph Benner Checked in on her
at http://www.melaniephillips.com/. She's
quite the contrarian.
424
Home Page | MelaniePhillips.com

MELANIEPHILLIPS.COM
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Pompous

article. It presumes that many of the people
who want massive reprimands against
Spacey don't have it in them to consider
whom Shakespeare and Chauncer might have
been f*cking. What she needs to consider is
why exactly she used this phrase, "extremes
of personality often go hand in hand with
creativity," in this article, as it's one that has
long worked to the defence of the Weinsteins
of the world, and needs to strongly slumber
right now as we give full momentum to this
extremely rare moment where all of a sudden
the pains of those who've been sexually
assaulted is really being considered.
Why the words, "miscreant" and
"philanderer" as well, as if we're dealing with
what the Brits call a "character," rather than
a clear predator. And why ensure us that
people in the past could sexually abuse
425
people without their knowing it as wrong, for

it being socially the norm? If we're doing
history, then why not remember how each
reform moment in British history brought
with it a crowd of progressives who wanted
those who upheld previous standards pretty
much hanged. They woke up, and were
aghast at what they saw that had previously
deemed acceptable, and went riot on the
perpetrators, just like we're doing. Those
whose instinct was to ameliorate their
excitement, caution them away from too
much disrespect, were probably those not so
much of the progressive vanguard, and due
themselves to be soon superseded.
And why the concept of "enduring"?... as if
already imagining a time decades hence
when Spacey is unquestionably deemed a
great figure, and she, proven of greater
foresight and wisdom than these excitable
people, who have all gotten into some bizarre
row right now; knickers in a twist.
Spacey may last through history, as
Shakespeare and Chaucer and on and on
certainly managed to do. But we should
426
observe exactly how those who had these

sorts of "moderate" considerations in mind
in the past rather than finding themselves
full of upset, when a population had begun to
outgrow a certain behaviour, to see if it was
their legacy to mostly advance subsequent
progress, including those in the arts, or
inhibit them. I bet we'll find it is the
descendents of those whose reaction was
first, massive disapproval and upset, who
became vanguard of future great artistic
movements. They became the ones who
didn't just recall Shakespeare, but made the
best use of him.
Ralph Benner Patrick: Must say, even
though I'm not entirely sure wtf you're
saying, I enjoy your word salad.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Please don't use
the term "word salad," Ralph. You may
intend it otherwise, but it's a corrosive term.
I'm glad you liked it though, and that you
thought to let me know that.
Mark Schaffer Ditto
427
Mark Schaffer Drunk gay actor hits on

young actor decades ago at
party..Professional life destroyed. Moral: Die
young
Maureen Daniels I would read this, but I

loathe Melanie Philips too much.
Glen Martin Fitch

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The (True) Lord of the Ring

428

So the hobbits eventually came back to the
Shire, having been forewarned at Bree that it
had changed — and not for the better. And
what they discovered is that it certainly had
in fact changed, only it would seem
transmogrified, assaulted, worsened, only by
those who were so fearful that all change is
bad they would willfully ignore that as
different as it had become, and as irreverent
as this change stood to long-held custom,
what they saw was undeniably overall better.
429
Yes, many of the trees were uprooted, and

not that there wasn’t some misery in this —
as all of them so loved trees — but what were
these still easily sprung things to what
actually had been planted all throughout the
Shire, some in their place, in such ingenious
design! Sam had marveled at great big
Oliphants, monstrosities of the animal world,
and he had to admit that the new brick
buildings and factories and administrative
buildings that had sprung up were in their
own sense monstrosities of types of buildings
he knew of, and just as dazzling, not only
daunting, for it. And the people hadn’t
become the slaves to industry he had been
warned about, but all of a sudden had
awakened out of long-held patterns and
become unpredictable. You never knew
whether the next villager you met, who had
been a baker or a farmer, and whom you
could predict the same for the successive
generations that followed them, would still
be involved in this role or have branched off
into some other career, as previously rare
inner-change in these people was actually
430
occurring all the time, in response to newly

arisen possibilities.
As the adventuring hobbits told their
adventure stories to everyone they met, all
were delighted to hear the marvelous tales,
but they noticed a distinct lack of envy and
awe, for their own lives had become
adventures of their own sorts, which involved
constant self-activation. Indeed, in seeing
Frodo’s absolute weariness and permanent
maiming, and the other hobbits’ still-evident
— in being evidently disappointed in not
being looked upon in their return as hobbit
princes — ongoing immaturity, those whom
they told their tales to actually wondered if
traveling all across the world was in fact as
conducive to change as what proved for
themselves by just staying in place.
The hobbits came to meet the one heralded
as mostly responsible for all this change, and
they discovered it was Saruman! The hobbits
were incredulous: how could the villain of
villains, have created all this? Saruman
replied that… “it sure wasn’t easy, with
hobbits being so fearful of any kind of change
happening in the Shire, and all. But all that
431
was really required was for someone to come

amongst them who didn’t just want to take
amusement in them, but rather actually
wanted something for their benefit, to
challenge them and make them better. This I
did, persistently and over a longish period of
time. And eventually more of them were
realizing that they to some extent had been
forcing themselves to pretend that they had
been living the ideal life only because defying
this pretence would have them fearing some
great punishment for breaching Natural
Order.”
“I’ll tell you, it all would have been a lot
easier if I had not just my talent to inspire
trust even in dubious tasks — the possession
of my ‘sugar tongue,’ as some have called it,
in an effort to misshapen what is
indisputably but a legitimate skill and power
— but the power of the Ring, which would
have expanded my ability to gain trust
exponentially.”
“Yes, the Ring, the very power you were all
told could only be corrupting, the Ring the
very powerful might first put to considerable
good use but which eventually would drown
432
them in egoistic pursuits and morph them

into Saurons. That was always untrue. It
wasn’t that it often didn’t destroy its users
this way, but that it needn’t always have done
so. And the reason no one ever discovered
this truth is because too many seized on its
first few examples of misuse to proclaim a
universal, for it fit their own fears that
anyone’s own massive expansion in abilities,
done without respect for whether or not they
had been granted by a ‘legitimate’ authority,
must inherently be a form of overreach.”
“Recall back: someone in your own troop was
uncovering some of this dissonant truth for
himself. Recall, specifically, Sam, who made
use of the Ring for a rather longish periods of
time, right before where the warping
influence of the Ring was strongest, right
before the great Mt. Doom, and at a time
when Sauron had finally achieved his full
might and in the process of ‘expressing’ it to
the world. He knew he should have had just
done something to ever-reprimand himself of
if ever he was fortunate enough to recover
from falling so deeply under its spell, and
that in point of fact it didn’t happen — all
433
that he was told would surely happen

immediately after making this kind of
momentous goof wasn’t much happening at
all! He pulled off the Ring just as much to
momentarily try and keep faith at what
proved a false truth, and all those whom he
respected who had upheld it, than from
keeping the Ring from possessing him — for
at some level he knew he had just caught out
a massive lie.”
“What Sam couldn’t fully admit to himself is
that the reason the Ring didn’t take over him
is that it actually responds positively to
people who aren’t narcissistically intent on
being big honchos, reified by the like of all
the small peoples of Middle-earth — those it
destroys, always. But those simply self-
activating — which is exactly what Sam was
up to while alone in Mordor, with Frodo,
with his ostensible intrinsic ‘master,’ at the
time currently senseless — it assists without
blowback. One after another, Sam was
making decisions, and the Ring read that as
much as he was trying to persuade himself he
was only doing it for Frodo, some part of him
434
was admitting he was doing it just as much

for himself — that it felt good.”
“Yes, it felt good, self-activating, making his
own impact on Middle-earth, as worthy as
any other, and the Ring knew it has finally
got the right kind of bearer. Not Isildur, who
was a narcissist who aspired to and who
became obligatory firmament of everyone’s
“must know” understanding of their world’s
origins. Not Gollum, who had a multiple
personality disorder, providing the Ring no
clue as to whom exactly to work its influence
on. Not Bilbo, who had the ill-luck of
obtaining the Ring when the powers of the
narrative universe were all bent on making it
only an invisibility ring, as notable but also
as innocuous as any other magical item. Not
Boromir, who saw himself only as a part of
the might of Gondor, and thus not actually
truly invested in his own self. And not Frodo,
who was such downcast gloom there was no
material there to try to play to and lift up. But
rather Sam, who couldn’t but help notice, as
he went along on his adventures, that he was
as capable and as appreciative of self-
leadership as any, and who — unlike any
435
other, other than the legend, Tom Bombadil

— could find himself humming tales and
cheerful songs even in the darkest of places.
He was someone the environment would
have to work hardest to draw against himself.
Some part of him would never quail, and
turn against what made him most happy. It
thus only supported him, informing him of
its ample abilities, despite its reputation as
only a nasty bugger that would drag you
Sauron’s no-good way if ever you put it on so
close to its maker.”
“Now about its maker — Yes, Sauron
intended that all wills who long bore the Ring
would turn to him. But sometimes what’s
intended one way ends up veering another —
and if this logic sounds foreign to you, it
shouldn’t, for it’s something akin to the
wisdom that that otherwise inane Gandalf is
always saying… Remember how he remarked
on how Sauron’s blanket of darkness was
actually working against him, by serving as
cover for the force opposed to him? — Good;
there’s that, but the examples are in fact
many. Sam at some level recalled this, as well
as his Gaffer saying similar things, and so
436
stayed in fidelity towards newly awakened

truth about the Ring that contrasted
inversely with that previously known. It is
owing to such that your quest was actually
accomplished — that is, not as Bilbo is trying
to ascribe it as having happened in his
writings, as owing to Sam’s humility and self-
sacrifice. No, some part of him — even if not
yet ample — had become ready to defy even
Gandalf for truth. And for such Sauron met
his better, and for long enough that he lost
all.”
The hobbits were aghast at Sarumon’s claims
against Gandalf. Wasn’t he, they asked, not
exactly as Aragorn proclaimed him — the one
principally responsible for stopping Sauron
and saving Middle-earth?
Saruman acknowledged Gandalf was
deserving of respect, but argued… “my point
isn’t that he is somehow useless, but that he
did considerable harm in having the lot of
you ready to proclaim him great regardless of
how your journey finished up. You were
willing to cloak and hide anything
disagreeable about his actions, choices,
behaviour — any mistake, and Gandalf didn’t
437
discourage you from this habit: a crime in a

sense akin to the sort of unreality my servant
Wormtongue was judged harshly for
weaving.”
“He took two of you along on the journey for
reasons you know might have been amiss,
might have been intrinsically wrong, but
knew enough that he wanted his decision
judged only as partaking in some kind of
elusive wisdom that only wizards have access
to, that you willed yourself into misbelief so
to reflect back what you knew he wanted to
see from you.”
“Unruly needs? — Yes. What is it when you
include in your company the young,
vulnerable and small that would never really
be confident that they were on a journey they
really should have been included on? Aren’t
they perfect — weren’t you, Merry and
Pippen, perfect as ‘carriers’ of everyone else’s
fears, their sense of inadequacy, their
humiliating inclination to soil themeselves
considering they might be pit against whole
companies of Orcs, as well as trolls, dragons,
and sea monsters, so they could go about
absent any sense of themselves as other than
438
fearless and mighty — as the strongest pieces

at play on the board?”
“You were well along on your journey when I,
though certainly gruffly — and I do apologize
for that — nevertheless pointed out the true
fact that you were but Gandalf’s riffraff,
those tagging along side him, evidently
lacking anything but sordid purpose for the
company, if possessed of any true purpose at
all. And you recognized this truth, for a
moment, didn’t you? You repeated the words
I used to assess you, later to Gandalf,
perhaps to check to see if maybe in reality he
secretly agreed. And how did he then counter
your self-doubt? Did he point out to you the
actions you performed that no one else could
have managed, as he would have,
legitimately, with the rest of your
companions… indeed, never stopping, if his
aim was to do proper justice to them, until
his breath failed him and he collapsed in
exhaustion? No, he said that if you had doubt
as to your worth you should find respite
knowing that Saruman’s mind, that my mind,
was currently foremost on you — which, I’ll
tell you — though I think you already knew it
439
at the time — is fundamentally more a way of

complimenting me. You are noteworthy, he is
actually saying, because you caught the
attention of someone indisputably so, and so
are great in the way that heroic figures as
well as nagging fleas are similarly ‘great,’ in
that both can make claim to a great man’s
attention. How truly stupid had he assumed
you were?”
“A man who doesn’t truly believe what he
tells another he thinks of him, will reveal his
true feelings in time — and in fact it didn’t
take long, not much after his arrival into
Gondor, when he identified you both as
pawns in a battle where the rest of the board
— the knights, the bishops, the kings and
queens — were at play. That was something
else you ruminated on, fussed over, his
labeling you disagreeably as pawns. And
even as you, Merry, were subsequently called
‘great’ by him for stabbing the Nazgul King,
weren’t you actually doing nothing more than
what every other pawn that actually belonged
on the board would do in your place? You
displayed no more than the ability to follow
through on an intention, something the
440
warrior citizens of Gondor deemed as

differentiating, not the great from the
ordinary but only the adult from the child.
What was notable about you, then, as
someone who still belonged on the board — if
barely — was that you were easier than any
other piece present to pass over in mistake,
another compliment which works against
itself in that it points out that in every other
situation in combat those who forsook you
for another opponent deemed more
dangerous would have been absolutely right
in doing so. You are valiant and exceptional
for a hobbit, but of no more combat prowess
than any Gondor warrior’s ten-year-old son
— like Beregond’s son, Birgil, whom you were
bid to hang around with so as not find
yourself awkwardly in the way: another of
Gandalf’s revealing ‘kindnesses.’”
“Merry, you helped take down the greatest
danger on the battlefield, and Pippen, you
later killed a troll-chieftain — but wouldn’t
you say that these great kills were fairly little
more worthy of brag than a peasant’s
shooting an arrow awry into the wind but
scoring a fatal hit on a king at battle,
441
nevertheless? The greatest drifted into your

kill-zone, no more than that — a credit to fate
and luck rather than yourself. It is what
everyone who was there would know as the
truth, if you ever tried to hoist your
accomplishment to their diminishment, and
what you’d at some level know about yourself
if you bragged about your feat to those who
weren’t.”
“You both went along on this journey
constantly thinking on whether you would do
anything worthy of its own chapter in a
written account of the adventure. When you
did something on your own which was
enterprising enough that it might have
distinguished you from all others of your kin
if they’d been in your place, but which was
still nevertheless ineffective — your trying to
deceive your Orc captors by impersonating
Gollum, to somehow get them to untie your
bonds — you hoped that would suffice. It felt
meager, and you knew it when you were
ruminating over it at the time, more like
something that for inclusion would still
require much pleading and begging. And yet
you knew, rightly, that it was your best
442
representation of yourselves where you both

couldn’t necessarily have been replaced by
any other adventurous hobbit. And at the
finish, you went back to the Shire — don’t not
admit it! — hoping that being amongst
people who ostensibly had done nothing
would make what little you secretly felt you
had done acquire better backgrounding.”
“You also hoped it would make up for the fact
that you were evidently carried along, seized
as necessary for the quest, over even
additional Elf-lords, when these rare breeds
were fortuitously actually at hand, because
every venturing company into unknown
terrain requires more than “armour,”
“weapons,” and “horses,” but also a “toilet.”
They pissed, shit and barfed all their own
vulnerability, their own terrors and fears of
inadequacy, into you, to mask from
themselves that they actually felt all of that
too. And they could deny the displacement —
because weren’t you always self-evidently
weak and vulnerable? Absolutely so — no
projection therefore had ever taken place!
And when you reflected back to them, with
your long feeling inadequate, even as the
443
journey was very far along on route, that you

sensed you were being used, their eye
focused on you long enough only to bottle
you back up. Without you, all that can be
said, is the great may have had to themselves
suffer a sense of insufficiency that would
have hampered them. Your role was only
ever to be an excellent Company’s contrast,
everything it wanted to pretend it wasn’t —
that was the foresight Gandalf had as to your
unique and special use. Not, that is, your
being a bridge to already established
friendship, which actually mattered little —
for how long exactly before racial foes, Gimli
and Legolas, were best of friends? A week? A
day? Not even?”
“Come, my young hobbits. Don’t be afraid to
revisit your past and even admit that what
you’re seeing happening here in this renewed
Shire I’ve helped create is going to require
your substantial catching up — that you’ve
arrived from your adventures behind, not
ahead, in life experience. You know that I
won’t flatter you to keep you in a role that
isn’t for your own benefit. I’ll challenge you
to the end, provoking you to think about
444
yourselves, about things that are still very

lacking about you, so that you’ll do the work
of actually pointing these facts out to
yourselves. With your own brave initiative
you’ll grow and eventually become very
happy — though do watch out for the
abandonment depression, which will incur as
you pass limits that will leave you absent
some of your own former approval. It’s time,
my friends, to finally get on with your lives,
rather than wasting it away on further idle
‘adventuring.’”

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When Rose McGowan appears in

Asgard: a review of "Thor: Ragnarok"
445
446
The best part of this film was when Rose

McGowan appeared in Asgard and accosted
Odin and his sons for covering up, with a
prettified, corporate, outward appearance
that's all gay-friendly, feminist, multicultural,
absolutely for the rights of the indigenous,
etc., centuries of past abuse, where they
predated mercilessly upon countless
unsuspecting peoples.
And the PR department came in and said,
okay Weinstein... I mean Odin and Odin'
sons, here's what we suggest you do. First,
you, Odin, are going to have to die. No
extensive therapy; when it comes to
predators who are male, especially white and
male, this age doesn't believe in therapy. You
did what you did because you are, or at least
strongly WERE, evil, so that's what we have
to work with. Now death doesn't seem like
"working with it," I know, but the genius is
that we'll do the rehab with your sons, and
when they're resurrected as somehow more
apart from your regime, belonging as tropes
in some other narrative, some ideal counter
447
narrative, that'll lend them "esteem" that'll

counter their former one of sons of a King
Rapist so people would have difficulty
conflating your past with your present... so
perhaps as refugees, leaders of refugees,
leaders of a slave revolt -- yep [snaps
fingers], that'll do it!; combined, that'll do it!
-- we'll bring you back COMBINED with
Thor, that is, actually within Thor's corporeal
self.
We'll have you say at some point that you
find Thor actually more powerful than you
are, and this will ostensibly be about you at
least trying to be a selfless and gracious
person in your last moments of continued
existence -- all said while wearing a pink shirt
that conflates you with "harmlessness," and a
teased-loose sweater that makes you look
"folk" rather than "King," to suggest that
you're but the product of your age who had a
rapacious past like everyone else who had
authority within that age had had, but who
has done everything within his power in his
last moments to garb himself as thickly as
possible within modest attire with a feminine
448
tint hoping "outside assistance" will help sink

deep what he by his age-specific egoist
constitution is shallowly equipped to do on
his own. But really it'll lay the eventual
backgrounding when in a subsequent film,
when all this Rose McGowan and her
millions of fellow "accosters" have had their
lengthy moment, you'll spring back into full,
fully alive form, out from Thor's eye socket
(yes, sorry about this Thor, but you'll have to
lose an eye), much like whole armadas can
emerge from out of a Devil's Anus,
proclaiming that the reason your son was
more powerful was because already he'd
leached his own soul onto his son's.
In the meantime we'll have to take out Hela
McGowan, which won't be easy. First, we'll
give her her due. She can lord around all over
the place; do whatsoever she wills to Asgard.
Renovate, tear it down -- whatever. Giving
her enormous overlordship is in fact what
we'll want out of her, for a number of
reasons. One, she'll destroy people we'll
actually take pleasure in destroying. So in a
sense piggybacking on her, we'll see her
449
casually lay waste to Thor's best friends in

Asgard, the ones that helped laid the
foundation for why we enjoyed the
comradeship in the original Thor so much,
why we liked the original movie, and why we
gave its "children," its sequels, the go-ahead,
and so as youngsters ourselves without much
given to us to make our own original routes
with we can take sick pleasure in seeing the
creations of the likes of Kenneth Branagh
which we secretly know were in a sense
foundational, made to seem as if they had in
fact contributed nothing, when the cover of
justified female retribution means all
contributions of the male and living large are
for us to discount as much as we like, if we
like. Taking advantage of hiding within her
skirts, we can spit on Branagh, humiliate a
great, and him powerless to do anything to
stop us, and so we do, for it's us doing the
spitting not the being spitted upon. Plus,
under guise of some fidelity to his having
birthed characters of sufficient life they
aren't for others to subsequently lower into
the category of fodder, but really actually
only to demonstrate ourselves aligned with a
450
movement of righteous empowerment that

along with female directors and female actors
is also gaining great contemporary steam, we
can have the Asian character last the longest,
have him actually deflect a few of Hela's dark
spears -- something no one else will be
shown to be able to do -- before of course
succumbing to oblivion. Acquired neatly
thereby: some potentially anti-"Hela"/Rose
McGowan mana.
Further piggybacking will allow us to test out
a maybe useful confabulation -- the only one
left standing: Karl Urban's Skurge the
Betrayer. Skurge tests out for us whether we
could become collaborators, people nestled
comfortably with newly emerged dictatorial
powers, people sucking at her tits, serving
out as her executioners, while living in
previous occupants' grand palatial homes,
and for this not to be quite as bad as
reputation has long held. If we might have to,
or want to, be this guy, ready to betray
anyone, any principle, if some emerged
ostensibly righteous fascist power dictated
we do so -- and so like Skurge not arouse her
451
ire! -- then we need to start using films to

help flesh out this role so the accrued-guilt
part can begin to be abated. So Skurge, even
if he's only shown only almost doing so, will
evidently slaughter and rape as willed... but
we'll say it wasn't his own willing. He was
just being expedient, playing out the role of
all real human beings who aren't heroes...
just flawed, generous but also self-serving,
will play out, without grand leadership to
guide them. He'll serve as evidence that
human beings everywhere are still quite
small, after all. As evidence that people who
pretend to be genuine heroes are only those
who are overly proud; those who have
trespassed into terrain not properly theirs...
baby boomers, or some such.. maybe
"spoiled" millennial students. And of course
we'll make sure Skurge dies, but we'll test out
the idea of "full redemption" for his actions
with his death, to test out the idea of being
"just an ordinary human being" could mean
what it meant for the Germans post 1945: we
felt bullied and intimidated and could do
nothing other: we deserve to come out of this
452
clean, ready to enjoy the newly unleashed,

fully beneficent age.
Second, it'll give us a good lengthy bit in
which to endure public humiliations and de-
constructions. Thor, that'll mean phallic
castration: we won't just have you put the
hammer down(!), but have it severed from
you entire (... but there will be redemption:
don't worry, I'll get to it). Loki, in a bit of an
innocuous bit, we'll also denature you so
you're not first of all sorcerers but slipped
down worse than second to maybe third
(Hela and Dr. Strange, at the very least, will
both prove soundly better than you.). So you
too will be leached in your field of might,
rendered ostensibly as a permanent
affliction. You'll both go to a planet where
you'll both be "players" to others'
amusement. Thor, you'll be tagged and
bagged -- importantly: by a woman, a
victimized woman, whom you'll almost
entirely be impotent to (and to whom even
the Hulk will perform [strangely, given that
she must have bagged and tagged him]
sacrificially to, as pet). You'll domicile amidst
453
other castrated men -- all impotent to both

the Grand Master and his champion -- and
their filth, their acquired isolation and
hopelessness-born, egg-laying perversities,
their impotent, failed revolutions, and readily
acquiesced, acceded, broken, dead forms.
(And later, you'll "get away" in a ship
ostensibly covered in sperm from men who
were empowered over you as slave-holders
and orgy-hosters. [Though in point and fact,
this sleek covering might help you better slip
through the Devil's Anus.]) Loki, you'll
ostensibly go style. But it's only so that you
can be rendered into accosted, Hamlet's-
mother form, into "Gertrude," as what is
supposed to be your entertainment backfires
into adversely unwelcome remembrances of
what had been done to you in the past to
make you go in a blink from triumphant
villain to humiliated fraud and pansy.
And while all this is happening to you both,
Hela will slowly begin to seem herself a bit
too much of a grandiose thing. We don't see
her for a long while, but when we do it'll be in
face of all the humiliations her confronters
454
have had to endure, and she'll seem

especially large in her own long spoiling. This
is key, for ripe like that, though we might not
yet seem righteously empowered to take her
down, she might seem worthy of somebody
else's... someone else who also had righteous
claims against Asgard, some other long-
denied, tortured soul. And so we let some
claimant loose to take her down, to take all of
Asgard from her, while we claim conquest
only over the periphery... we'll defeat her
minions and her great giant wolf-dog, but
never her own -- we readily admonish
ourselves into admitting -- impossible-to-
defeat person, and leave the entire golden
kingdom, permanently to others' capture.
We'll pretend to be oblique to the fact, but
we'll know that the person who could in the
end take her place is no-doubt one thousand
times as phallicly endowed as the Hulk is
(the real reason behind Hulk's flashing us,
other than suggesting how if we accept
ourselves as slaves, rid ourselves of all large
pretensions, we can find permitted our
rejoicing in ourselves as bequeathed to a
harem of designated, working class, fawning
455
women, ostensibly very ready to accept men

who aren't much beyond brawn and simple
might; who are simple but proud): patriarchy
again, staked in place.
Thor, you don't get your hammer back... or at
least not yet. But a few things: one, Odin is in
you, the original ravager is in you. Second,
now more a being of lightning, your power
seems less a matter of fortunate phallic
equipage and has become more innate, so
you're less susceptible to castration in future
-- something that's inhibited you now, twice.
No one in future is taking away your power.
Third, you're open to having a bigger
hammer now if you like... as Stephanie
Zacharek has suggested, your previous one
was a bit comically small, and none of us who
watch and create your universe are really
quite enough comfortable in our masculinity
to be comfortable as she is with that. And
fourth, to some extent, you've appropriated
Hela's own superior supply of strength: white
flashy streams shoot out of you from all over
your carapace, just like dark talon-thorns
sprout out and shoot out from all out of her.
456
You too are now a Witch-King of Angmar,

drawing power from both Kings AND Queens
(the Queen part being demonstrated as
actually more essential). Loki, this renders
you to number four, the fourth most
powerful sorcerer, but not being quite
magicians ourselves, we at PR have to work
doctor with what we've got.
Conversation about Kevin Spacey at the

New Yorker Movie Facebook Club
Jonathan Milenko shared a link.

October 31 at 9:48pm
Check out the trailer for Kevin Spacey’s next
movie. Will you boycott?
457
ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD - Official

Trailer (HD)
J. Paul Getty had a fortune. Everyone else
paid the price.…
YOUTUBE.COM
https://youtu.be/6x62O8A8qHw
Eileen Carson Gillies I will not see

anything with Spacey - so disgusted with
him.
Marc Imbillicieri So tyhen what will you
watch?
With that philosophy, your e narrowing
yourself down to very few movies.
Doug Foster She's disgusted with Kevin
Spacey. There are quite a few movies without
him. She can watch one of those.
458
Sohail Shaikh By Boycotting a film one is

boycotting and discarding the efforts of
hundreds of people involved.
Which in my opinion, is not only unfair but
cruel.
Damien Johnstone All the money in the
world couldn't make me see it.
Marc Imbillicieri So do you not listen to
Wagner?
Brooke Grey Orr If all people only saw

movies produced, directed, and acted by
people who met the highest moral and ethical
standards, they would see no movies,
including all of the classics. The film industry
employs thousands of flawed humans--just
like all other industries.
Bobby Leo Garcia Discounting his alleged
conduct as “flawed” is problematic, and
arguably dangerous.
459
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to demand our

artists, politicians and leaders in general to
be decent, and upstanding. Those possessing
positions of power and influence hold a
higher responsibility than the rest of us so I
personally believe we as society have the
right to hold them to tighter scrutiny. In fact,
I think we all need to be better regardless of
our reach or clout.
I, for one, believe we deserve better.
David Dean Daniel Alleged. Your logic is
flawed.
Sarah Fagan Greenberg Spacey has had a
history--stories about young boys were
around for years. As for sexual orientation,
he coyly alluded to "coming out of the closet"
in a Tony MC routine. His sexuality was
common knowledge, yet it suddenly
appeared in a statement as a "choice" (???--
an idea pleasing to those who think it's only a
choice), rather than alluding to the age of the
boy at the time of the alleged attack. His
statement conflated homosexuality with
pedophilia. Had he not done this cynical P.R.
460
move, it would not have been such an issue

and I would not have paid such attention.
Then again, he made a false P.R. move at the
time he won an Oscar by passing off his
personal assistant has his girlfriend. He
called attention to himself when he could
have said that his personal life was private. I
may watch him wishing I didn't know
anything about him. My father used to say
that he wanted to know as little as possible
about actors so as to enjoy their
performances--suspend disbelief. Today,
that's hardly possible.
Russell Colwell Boycott? Are you serious?

Ridiculous.
Virginia Kelley No I won’t boycott, if it
looks interesting to me I’ll see it.
Tom Haggas
GIPHY
Kat Van Spacey, to me, has never been

warm and cuddly - ever. I don't enjoy him in
461
interviews, much too remote and often

condescending. Managed to like his work in
spite of that. I am still unpacking his
statement. I understand why it upset the
LGBTQ community, but it's so Spacey to
erect a wall to protect himself. What he did
when 26 was really stupid and sort of on par
for that age, but it's still creepy. Fourteen?
Sure hope there weren't other minor boys -
or girls. Fourteen is a a deeply formative age
sexually for boys or girls.
Ira Ava Sobral This is the age-old question
of can you separate the artist from their work
in which the answer is invariably yes, maybe,
and no. In my opinion, if their work is based
on falsehood (Cosby) then no, it's tainted.
But if there is no hiding of their questionable
character in their work (Bukowski), maybe. It
gets much easier once they are long gone
(Wagner). Knowing that you're putting
money in their pocket while they're alive feels
gross though so I might skip, just because oh
well plenty of other fish in the sea. And I
can't really look at his face and enjoy the
movie anyway.
462
Henrik Forsberg Boycotting secondary or

third-party things that relate to someone
you're offended with is such an American go-
to. Like players kneeling in the NFL, and you
boycott the entire NFL. Or a radio station
that has the audacity to not censur a guest
that speaks his mind about a war you're
entangled in, and you boycott the entire
radio station.
I will see the movie, it looks too good not to.
The only thing a boycott like this can achieve
is either a small slump in opening night sales,
or a small slump in overall sales. Both relate
to the buying of a ticket, and I don't actually
see a significant slump happening. Most
people don't know, half of those who knows
will soon forget, and the rest just don't care.
So, if you personally don't want to pay for the
movie (the only boycott you can actually
achieve), then pirate it and watch it for free,
and afterwards never advertise it by speaking
good about the movie. Or just don't see it at
all and then have a phobia for it for the rest
of your life, just to really stick it to Spacey
(who doesn't even know who you are, and
463
certainly doesn't care about what you're

doing in life). Good luck with that (y)
Maureen Daniels Of course not! That
would be ridiculous.
Brien Rourke I don't suppose you have a
less insensitive word than "boycott".
Eric Culp Ha ha ha. "Boycott" insensitive.
Perhaps "boyhammock" or "boybunk"? Oh,
wait, is it the "boy" part? Bwahhahaha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boyc
ott
Charles Boycott - Wikipedia

Charles Cunningham Boycott (12 March 1832
– 19 June 1897) was an English land agent
whose ostracism by…
EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boyc
ott
Brien Rourke That's him! The Irish can't
catch a break! F___ the British.
464
Jonathan Milenko Anyone with a reaction

to the trailer?
Doug Foster It looked kind of boring. It
didn't make me interested in what happens
to any of them, so I'll pass.
Noel C. Nowicki I sat at Lord Erne's table

in his castle on multiple occasions in the mid
90's knowing that my Irish grandfather was
rolling in his grave that I was breaking bread
with the overlord of Charles Boycott.
Ian Nichols 1) It’s weird how no one in this
thread has used the pedophilia, given that’s
what is warranted.
2) Few people seem to have an
understanding that you can both
unequivocally condemn Spacey and may be
okay with seeing the movie.
3) You can choose to see the movie while
more importantly choosing to refuse to pay
465
to show studios that his behavior is

unacceptable, whether it happened once in
the 90s or once a day since.
Maureen Daniels I'm not sure how the
incident automatically makes him a
paedophile, especially as the word is being
misused. A paedophile is only attracted to
pre-pubescent children.
Ian Nichols Maureen Daniels Anthony
Rapp had explicitly emphasized that he did
NOT look 14. Which I believe cause he’s
ageless. Additionally, age does not determine
stages of puberty. Again, why are we making
excuses? I do not comprehend this.
Jonathan Milenko Kind of a lame way to
boycott. Save your money, but don’t miss the
movie.
Sarah Fagan Greenberg Ian Nichols The
key factor, Maureen and Ian, is that 14 is
below the legal age of consent.
Kat Van I brought up the age issue higher
up. I think maybe since Spacey was 26, it
isn't as horrifying, as 26ers of any sexual
466
orientation are still somewhat immature in

their judgement, and young gay men used to
- do they still? - seek out older gay men
because of the social constrictions of being a
closeted gay. So maybe it's my straight brain
that was disturbed by Rapp's being 14? I
really can't say, just making assumptions
based on my limitations to really know what
this means.
Kat Van And I just turned on the tv to see
Spacey is being accused by other men. Well,
need to sit back and see how this shakes out.
Not looking good at this point.
Sarah Fagan Greenberg Kat Van He was
below the age of consent and according to
him didn’t give it anyway.
Ralph Benner Has anyone actually read
the full Buzzfeed article about Rapp? A good
lawyer could punch holes in his story.
Kat Van Sarah Fagan Greenberg I
understand that. No means no. But I was
answering specifically as to why no one had
used the term pedophilia. I didn't use it in
my earlier post, but I did say I found it
467
disturbing that a 26-year-old would pursue a

14-year-old. And now it appears this was not
a one off. Spacey may well be a Weinstein -
predator, dysfunctional. Inappropriate,
sloppy, stupid sexual behavior is one thing,
dysfunction is something else entirely.
Shame on shame. I did speak out the few
times this happened to me. My career
suffered for it. Do I do feel better that I
fought back? Yes, but the anger never really
goes away, because no one was punished. I
think I helped a few other women in the
process, so that's what I hold onto.
Maureen Daniels Thank you, Sarah Fagan
Greenberg, I am aware of that fact. I abhor
the misuse of language, in particular,
strongly emotive language. Labelling
someone a paedophile is such a huge,
potentially life-threatening statement to
make that I must protest its use to describe
an alleged, unproven incident from 30 years
ago.
Maureen Daniels Ralph Benner, I've just
read it. Sounds like an awful lot of nothing
actually happened.
468
Dennis M Robles Movies are a

collaborative effort, it's not about one
individual even if it's a mogul, director, etc.
So no.
Roxanne Jones If it's good, I'l watch it.
Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams are
the biggest deterrents for me, quite frankly.
Maja Ristic Nope. But that trailer looks a
bit boring to me anyway, so...
Marc Imbillicieri No, boycotting it is
asinine. If you refuse to watch movies
because some people involved have done bad
things. By that logic, one shouldn't listen to
Wagner because he was a virulent bigot and
all around awful person. By that logic, one
should never buy an Apple product because
Steve Jobs was a terrible person who refused
to donate to charity, denied paternity of his
daughter for the first few years of her life,
and gave her mum a pittance while he had
become incredibly rich.
469
I can guarantee you ever actor, actress, and

director in Hollywood has committed
adultery. Creative and talented people are
often the most personally flawed, so if you
refuse to consume art made by people who
have done bad things, you're really
narrowing yourself, and for what? What
practical, negative result comes from
watching a Polanski movie? Does he rape a
kid for every person who watches one of his
movies? Where is the logic in 'This person
committed sexual assault, thus I will not
consume his material'? How do you get form
A to B?
Lastly, even if you've never done something
as bad as these guys, you'll probably find that
you're not as good a person as you think if
you do a little self-reflection. How would you
like it if your boss said 'Your idea is good, but
you cheated on your girlfriend back in high
school so we won't implement it.'? Let he
who is without sin throw the first stone.
Ian Nichols I’m hesitant to equate physical
harm/intrusion with bigotry and vitriol. Can
you explain how they’re the same?
470
Marc Imbillicieri Ian Nichols That's beside

the point. The point is: Why should you not
watch a movie just because someone in it has
done an awful thing?
Ian Nichols Is it? The question above was
posed as whether or not you will boycott, not
why or why not you should boycott, which is
what your post seems to be answering. So I’m
intrigued as to why we’re addressing our
decision to boycott as antithetical to
unequivocally condemning what Spacey has
done. There seems to be a lot of excuse-
making for a Spacey as a source of comfort
for those who choose not to boycott.
Sarah Fagan Greenberg Agreed. While
not boycotting an entire movie and all those
who worked on it, it's possible to be
distracted by Spacey's performance in it, isn't
it?
Maja Ristic Oh, more material is surfacing -

latest news: Dustin Hoffman accused of
'sexual harassment' . Maybe we should
boycott him as well?
471
Marc Imbillicieri Absolutely not.

Especially since the allegations (as with
Spacey) have yet to be proven.
Maja Ristic I know. I was being sarcastic.
Terrence C Briggs Is the movie any good?

Chris Okum Something strange is going on
in this country right now, and I can't quite
figure out what it is. If sexual harassment -
based solely on hearsay - is grounds for
destroying someone's life and career - and for
a lot of people this seems to be the case right
now - then how about we start at the top and
get rid of Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas and The President of the United
States? Why are people only focusing on
Hollywood? This seems to me to be about
something else. And I am not talking about
Harvey Weinstein, who allegedly raped
people. Rape is a crime and should be dealt
with accordingly.
472
Terrence C Briggs "Why are people only

focusing on Hollywood?" <= Roger Ailes, Bill
O'Reilly, and Mark Halperin disagree.
Chris Okum Terrence C Briggs I meant all
people in the entertainment industry,
including the Fox people.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Chris Okum I
think you're right to probe. Places people like
to imagine as people living out their dreams
and having the time of their life -- an endless
party -- is where we're very concerned now to
transmogrify into havens of pretty much
literal demons.
Terrence C Briggs NPR lost a
dude: http://www.npr.org/.../nprs-head-of-
news-resigns...
NPR's Head Of News Resigns Following

Harassment Allegations
"This morning I asked Mike Oreskes for his…
Maureen Daniels It isn't just in the US but
the UK as well. It is like a mass hysteria
fomented by the media , who know sex sells,
473
and encouraged by politicians because it is a

useful distraction from how they are
screwing you. It is also useful as mud to
throw at people to be made to go away.
Judith Karline Women who've been
trapped in non-disclose agreements or have
quit because they won't be believed are
speaking out. Believe me when I tell you
sexual harassment in the workplace is and
has been pervasive and even "nice guys" do
it.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Judith
Karline But if we are left with no other
explanation than these men are essentially
evil, and as the number of men revealed as
predators in Hollywood and Washington is
quite epic in terms of numbers, this
wonderful moment where victimized
people are finding their time of being shamed
and abandoned is finally over will broach
soon into another very dark terrain: that two
of the three (the other being New York City)
most powerful liberal concentrations of
power, places that have held themselves as
morally superior to racist, homophobic,
474
regular America, are in fact dense homes of

near literal demons and devils, who bathe in
other people's pains. The populist rightwing
is going to eat this up, and their stance on
female empowerment, on victim
empowerment, isn't so good.
Terrence C Briggs "we are left with no
other explanation than these men are
essentially evil" <= A more nuanced reaction
would be, "we are all capable of evil". Like
bigotry, harrassment is NOT something that
is only committed by ogres and trolls.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston There are
already damaging unintended negative
consequences. As pedophiles in Hollywood
are outed, predators of children, a link
between pedophilia and homosexuality will
gain traction again, and hence homosexuality
as a perversity, and hence a lot of leftwing
science as fake news, imposed on most
Americans to de-centre them, and to
empower people who hate them.
475
Terrence C Briggs Um... what? Some

predatory behavior targets adult victims of
opposing genders.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Terrence C
Briggs But the troll image is coming up, or
rather, because it's being linked to
empowered Jews, to demons who dine on
other people; lots of other people...
traditional antisemitic images are playing in
people's minds right now, is my judgment. If
someone hasn't written about this, they
should.
Judith Karline Patrick McEvoy-
Halston Nobody is saying all men are evil,
that's ridiculous. But the numbers of women
coming forward and the people they're
coming forward against....if you're a
woman...don't surprise you at all. My first
sexual harassment in my life occurred when I
was 5 years old...I was molested by a
neighbor's son. It didn't end there. It's been
pervasive through my life. I could write a
book. No lie.
476

Karline Right, I know it's wide spread. But if
we had, say, a culture that understood all
predatory behaviour as having origins in
child abuse, we would be doing two things
right now: praising and supporting the
women and child victims who are finally
having their shame absolved, finally feeling
self-pride again, and prosecuting all these
men but towards an end of placing them all
in arenas of treatment... of care. This might
be a bit in play in places like Sweden,
Scandinavia, but it's not currently here.
Instead our culture sees these men as having
chosen to hurt women, for their own
pleasure, with their being absolutely able to
have done differently. In my judgment, our
current situation is to see them as evil. And
in a time of rising rightwing populism, for
what it will do to cripple two of the most
important centres of Democratic sentiment
and power, it's going to mean it terribly
backfiring upon us.
Judith Karline Women now feel
empowered to speak out. No...we don't all
477
always have concrete proof outside of our

own testimony. And in the case of
Hollywood...there are non-disclose
agreements made and just the male power
structure blackballing a woman who refuses
to fuck them to get a role. But knowing
society favors the male narrative over the
female narratie in sexual assault and rape
situations...there's a built in fail-safe for men.
Most women don't come forward because
coming foward is a crap shoot...in most cases
the male is going to be seen by police and the
justice system as more credible. Your whole
sex life and lfe decisions are put up to the
public to justify why you should be able to
'cry rape' when you're actually raped.
I've been raped twice in my life. I never went
to the authorities or even my family. I didn't
want to be blamed for it. I could not handle
being attacked a second time. Unless you've
been raped, you could not understand.
Karline Okay. You're feeling a bit more
empowered to speak out... maybe quite a bit:
each day, more and more predators who kept
478
their victims silent, are finding those they've

victimized feel the atmosphere has shifted in
their direction, and now go on the attack.

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A Reader's Guide to The Two Towers

479
A Reader’s Guide to The Two

Towers
The title “The Two Towers” makes it sound
like this part of the adventure is especially
ominous. The adventurers have to contend
with two circumferences of evil influence,
both linked. But the reader soon discovers
that the two towers are hardly in union:
Saruman seeks claim of the Ring himself and
is not the least bit actually serving
deferentially to Sauron, and Sauron knows
this about him but finds him a useful enough
agent nevertheless. Saruman, though of
course as old as the hills as Sauron is, is
reasonably new to the “being evil” game
(though Treebeard suspects a longer tenure,
passed notice by everyone for being contrived
in hiding), while Sauron is old hat. The Two
Towers ends up being as much about this —
the rivalry between newly rising and long-
established order — as it is about the two
different threats imposed in the pathway of
the Fellowship, a theme, a concern, which
applies far beyond Saruman’s relationship
480
vis-à-vis Sauron to include assembling allies

of the good and members within the now
disparate venturing parts of the Fellowship.
It — that is, a concern that the old order not
by breached; that people not start thinking
things with perhaps destabilizing
implications for the social order — seems
concerned in this sense to protect both evil
and good in this book: it’s an overriding
concern, an overarching concern, making any
act of bravery, initiative, or spirited intuition,
just as often something to be dealt with and
handled — i.e. subtly or starkly diminished —
immediately, than something worth praise
and support. An outpouring of an eager
willingness to praise or to lend strong
support, in fact, is more often to come out of
expressions of doubt and admittance or clear
evidence of failure than from successfully
accomplished feat, which is looked to warily
if it can’t be immediately packaged as
something as actually as demonstrative of
one’s limitations as one’s potential.
The book begins with Aragorn, Gimli and
Legolas full of doubt, veering toward
despondency. “Now the company is all in
481
ruin,” Aragorn says. “It is I that has failed.

Vain was Gandalf's trust in me. […] What
shall I do now?” (404). He gets his answer to
some extent by the particular direction his
heart points him towards, but also seemingly
in deciding for modesty, for the more modest
of the two paths he needs to choose between.
Grant the main course to Frodo and Sam,
and take the path that is a “small deed in the
great deeds of this time” (416) — somehow
goodness lies therein. This I think is the last
time one ever hears of Aragorn admonishing
himself as a limited figure, and of his seeking
to venture away from glory. In retrospect, it
seems almost a ceremonial gesture in that
the one who is about to serve as king over all
of Middle-earth, first begs himself as
someone who never forgets that his greatest
deeds have been bested by even greater kings
before him, and that he has known doubt,
failure, and even moments of total lack of
surety, as much as any man. Hereafter he
never intentionally reduces himself, even if
others mistakenly believe they’ve caught him
out in reduced form — i.e., his wearing a
mere grey cloak into the halls of Medusheld.
482
And the key dramatic action concerning him

is infinitely more his rising — and into some
form of greatness that daunts everyone in
terms of stature — “power and majesty of
kings of stone” (423) — and presumed ready
accessibility — “none now of the land of the
living can tell his purpose” (780).
Henceforth, outside of being momentarily
spell-caught by Saruman, any change on his
part involves making him that much more
evident as a “kingly man of high destiny”
(780).
Aragorn is venturing on a path that will not
actually have him rescue Merry and Pippen
— Treebeard and the Horse-lords do that —
but rather establishing himself amongst
other denizens of Middle-earth as the great
king returned. Ultimately it’s not by any
means a path that simply lends distinction to
Frodo and Sam’s own, but his modestly
undertaken journey does work to highlight
the outwardly bold presumption of those
next discussed in the text, Saruman and his
servants — of whom one of them is deemed
particularly vile. Note that bold thought and
action is by no means always due for
483
criticism in the text. Much of Two Towers is

replete with it, bold action that goes un-
criticized, in fact — or at least by anyone
given textual authority; by anyone who
matters. Aragorn, after deciding finally on
which course to take, switches entirely out of
being momentarily fretful to simply
announcing himself from out of hiding upon
a whole horde of Horse-lords, and in such a
stark and unexpected manner — “What news
from the North, Riders of Rohan?” — that it’s
no surprise the Rohanians consider them
possibly sorcerers after having first thought
them, even Orcs. The path Frodo and Sam
chose for themselves is not to be assessed as
only a “strange deed,” as Gimli initially
judges it, but only as a “brave deed” (409) —
so states Aragorn. Pippen dares drop his Elf-
given (and so doubly daring) broach so his
trail could be followed, and he and Merry can
be known to their friends as not only alive
but as alert. Gandalf is identified as having
stolen a horse from under Theoden’s — the
Rohan’ king’s — nose, cheating him of his
hold’s greatest prize, when he meant only to
offer a typical sampling. Sam, at the finish of
484
Two Towers, succeeds in stabbing the great

monster spider Shelob, something no one,
not even great Gondor warriors — of whom,
they’re may not even have been but a few —
had previously succeeded in doing. All of
these bold undertakings are conveyed as
actions to be respected and celebrated,
unreservedly. In not a single case is anyone
who undertakes such bold action meant to be
seen as deserving the punishment that might
have nevertheless been dealt them for
undertaking them; none of them qualifies as
the sort of unwarranted claim, the sort of
sordid action, that should be judged so
crossly it ends up amounting to a moral
lesson for others to heed.
The harsh moral lesson, “the burned hand
teaches best (584),” is however applied to
any bold advance made even by someone in
very good standing, if it might lend one to
reconsider the righteousness of the social
order that the returned king is set to restore.
While held captive by the Orcs, Pippin
decides that he shouldn’t have let himself be
daunted by the fact that the company he’d be
in would be composed of such high company
485
and rather himself undertaken to learn some

of the knowledge concerning geography that
was available to them in Rivendale, so he
wouldn’t have found himself so shortchanged
options when caught out alone. If this was
simply his being involved in self-reprimand,
his being involved in a turning against
himself — what a fool you are, Pippin! — the
text would have found no trespass here. But
it isn’t. He is arguing to himself that no
company, no matter how high, should ever
daunt — that you should make an assessment
of your likely needs, and keep faith with it,
even if others around you are of such stature
that, without explicitly stating it, their
presence seems to insist on your suddenly
forsaking your volition. Pippen, informed by
this act of self-correction, not self-reprimand,
seems to be the one we meet subsequently
while at the foot Saruman’s tower, when he
decides to make claim to a fallen object —
namely, the palantir — even after just being
successfully chastened by a spell-chanting
Saruman as but a kid that didn’t deserve to
be present at all, and which persists even
after haughty white Gandalf reprimands him
486
for independently making a grab at an object

he hadn’t yet been instructed to retrieve.
“Half” of this was supposed to be the will of
the evil Ring…but really, the text accords that
the half that was Pippin’s was just as
suspect. For it’s a recognition of self-rule —
everyone’s intrinsic right not to be
intimidated from an independent judgment
they judged justified, an expression of spirit
antithetical to any social order headed by a
king. “Fortunately,” the palantir takes Pippen
for a horrid ride, and “fortunately” the
palantir later is used successfully by one of
the Fellowship — Aragorn, of course — who
can demonstrate that this is a world, not of
those who erroneously leach themselves of
personal responsibility and the responsible
who don’t, but rather one of legitimate claims
and of illegitimate claims. And you don’t act
so much to absolve oneself of passivity but so
as to learn which of these two groupings you
belong to — the one that should take act
independently and that should lead, or the
one that really ought just sit on its hands
when betters are around, acting only if and
when instructed. If it “burns” you, and if
487
someone of as unquestionable textual

authority as Gandalf and Aragorn deems that
you had it coming, then it’s evidence that
next time you think yourself guilty of too
much passivity and of too little initiative,
you’re probably doing only what people of
your limited capability are due for, so be
content. Don’t strive to do better, just deal
with your accorded lot, for it was, ostensibly,
justly dealt.
Sam, while upheld in the text as — at least in
a certain circumstance — superior to every
other entity that ever challenged the might of
a certain arachnid demigod, is not lent
textual approval while he begins to have
doubts concerning Frodo. The text takes
humor in Sam’s inversion of social hierarchy
when he addresses lord Faramir as if he was
admonishing a young hobbit for his “sauce”
(650), for it is a contained threat that works
more to highlight his master’s superior
manners, as well as reinforce the conception
of common stock people as brave but without
foresight and as lacking in self control — as
needing to be ruled. The text is not,
however, so casual with Sam beginning to
488
think Frodo a bit soft on Gollum, for here

there is a trespass which might be mistook by
many as a righteous reason for taking
command away from those given it —
something which would of course have deep
reverberations for the social order. There’s a
sense in the text, not just that Sam but that
many readers have been lured far along
enough in a suspicion, so that when it is quit,
shown up for good, an arising doubt built on
something implicitly weak-seeming about the
right of a current hierarchy to its place has
been dealt with triumphantly after having
been given very lengthy rope, and therefore
subsequently guaranteed a long interim, free
of challenge. This something, alluded to at
the beginning of the text by one of Sauron’s
agents as the one trait not even their worst is
“cursed with,” is “kindness” (445): Frodo is
Sam’s “rightful master, not just because he is
more wise and genteel, which are traits
possessed by the like of Sauron, for instance,
but because he is more intrinsically kind;
Aragorn is Eomer’s rightful master, not just
because he is wiser and more mighty than he,
not just because he has better manners — “I
489
spoke only as do all in men in my land, and I

would gladly learn better” (427) — than he,
but because he is kinder, substantially less
harsh than he. Kindness is not, however,
something a simple person might mistake it
for: it’s not intrinsically connected with
weakness, with blindness to villainy, however
much the two can be connected (read what
happens to Theodon’s Rhodan when
Theoden is too open and permissive — i.e., it
makes itself fully open to the machinations of
Wormtongue). It’s actually twinned with a
larger degree of foresight than the simple are
capable of conceiving of — as per for
example Gandalf instructing Frodo on what
pity can lend in you in surprise — given their
being accustomed to associate too much
receptivity to others’ pains only with a
peculiar willingness to self-designate yourself
open for plunder. And it requires a reminder
now and then of how it is actually not at all
that, that it’s actually informed out of full
knowledge of the guiles of the weak, and is by
no means a capitulation to any of them, so
that those properly due respect not find
490
themselves inadvertently held in poor regard

by their servants.
Even an entity as great and important as
Treebeard gets a hemming-in, a correction,
when he advances on a dangerous conclusion
built out of what the text needed to supply,
but for another purpose. The great wizard
Saruman must be soundly deflated in the text
so that he doesn’t serve as an argument that
the uppity do sometimes have good ground
for thinking themselves superior to all
who’ve gone before them, that sometimes
they really are better, so we are instructed
that though Saruman was a potent captain he
was, despite his pretensions, only ever but
Sauron’s servant, so we are instructed that he
was only creating only a copy of Sauron’s
constructions, even as he saw himself as a
bold originator — and that his awesome
tower, Orthanc, indestructible even to Ents,
was outside the building acumen of either of
their might. And Treebeard is accorded as
correct by Aragorn in further assessing
Saruman as fundamentally lacking in grit
and raw courage as well (553). But after that,
Treebeard’s denunciation of Saruman is
491
stopped short by Aragorn because — it really

does begin to seem — what is flawed
concerning Saruman cannot be allowed to
implicate all others possessed of previously
agreed upon iron-clad claims on greatness…
and that’s the territory Treebeard begins to
step into. He ventures, “I wonder if his fame
was not all along mainly due to his cleverness
in settling at Isengard,” which implies that
what he was actually foremost skilled at was
pulling the wool over people’s eyes. He’s
going in the same direction here that
Boromir was when he wondered of
Galadriel’s ultimate purposes, gauging her
perhaps only ever a creature of deception and
guile. And so Aragorn quickly jumps on
Treebeards’ own venturing into “evil”
considerations, expounding, “No[,] [...]
[o]nce he was as great as his fame made him.
His thoughts were deep, his knowledge was
subtle, and his hands marvelously skilled”
(553). Yes, of course he was — for otherwise
Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel and Aragorn
himself are either thorough fools or agents of
deliberate mischief for for so long assuming
him otherwise! And of course he was, for
492
otherwise these other three “great”

individuals might perhaps be themselves
revealed as being made of the same dubious
make-up. Seditious thoughts of the highest
order, so even the great saviour Treebeard is
made to suffer a burn of a kind here, by
someone the text holds one of the very few
worthy of administering it.
If Sam hadn’t realized that Frodo was so far
beyond him in comprehension that it was
really always wise to trust him implicitly in
all matters, if Pippin hadn’t said that
subsequently after his own receiving of a
“burning” lesson that a whole platter of
tempting palantirs could be put before him
and he couldn’t be made to touch any of
them, if Treebeard hadn’t immediately
stopped his denunciation of Saruman and
left it where Aragorn would comfortably have
had it, then their fates would not
subsequently have gone as described, is what
one comes to gather from the will at work in
the text. If Sam had decided that Frodo was
guilty of not sufficiently countenancing the
extent of Gollum’s threat and therefore had
become himself a threat to the success of
493
their mission — a conclusion which lead to

his judging that he should properly be the
one carrying the Ring — he wouldn’t have
been the recipient of so joyous an accounting
of him in his defeat of Sherob that for a
moment he was a triumph over every warrior
in Middle-earth, but rather someone
undermined in the text as being just lucky,
and actually in fact probably a battle-
incompetent — not worth a tale at all in
anyone’s book, not even the smallest. Or
rather, he might just been victim to a sudden
plot change and found himself stabbed by
Sherob and mercilessly eaten — and so
Frodo proved capable of deposing of the
Ring, the text would subsequently be
amended to read, even without his Sam:
lesson learned — do take along for
insurance purposes, but be prepared to do
without the services of “friends,” especially if
they’re fat, stupid, members of the servile
class. If Merry hadn’t accepted that there was
any legitimate difference between his bold
dropping of his broach, to inform his three
friendly pursuers of his ongoing health, and
his quickly judged and quickly acted upon
494
retrieval of the dropped artifact that was on

its way to being lost to all, if he hadn’t
perhaps understood that his “rightful” claim
to it was as half-baked a formulation as was
Gollum’s claim to the Ring as his “present”
was, he wouldn’t have found himself so
kindly received by Gandalf and merely
dropped a notch in a familiar way in being
likened to a pawn in the company of greater
pieces, but rather told that that’s what he gets
for proclaiming himself equal to all while
actually so undeserving. And rather than
being spared being forced to sing at court,
he’d of found himself suffering ongoing
emasculation in serving as a never-ceasing
songbird for Lord Denethor. If Treebeard
hadn’t accepted Aragorn’s assessment of
Saruman and instead pursued his logic
towards concluding him a total fraud, he
wouldn’t have been as warmly excused by
Gandalf for his eventually letting Saruman
go, but informed more of the consequences
of his clumsy mismanagement, including
Saruman’s subsequent ravaging of the tree-
loving hobbit population, as well all the
Shire’s trees!, in his pursuit of making the
495
Shire a haven for polluting factories. Thereby

he’d have made Treebeard insane out of grief
and guilt, longing for the Elves to return to
numb him back into stupidity before they left
Middle-earth — an act of pity they would of
course would deny him for having recklessly
pursued a line of thought that could have had
all the commons doubting how well earned
every one of their reputations was, and so
potentially had their whole benighted race
hoisted on its own petards!
All of them, in short, would have been made
subject to the dark fate viciously inflicted
upon Wormtongue. If you’re looking for the
greatest losers in the text, the ones, not who
die but who suffer humiliations no one could
bear living with for long, you can skip both
Saruman and Sauron — for Saruman’s
preference that he always remain a master,
even as it abandons him of Gandalf’s help
and leaves him having to counter the might
of nine Nazgul himself, is, what, but the
typical stubbornness and pride of dignified
wizards; and Sauron is one who is caught off
guard but also one whose weaknesses are
heavily qualified so that they are those that
496
always accompany a certain particular kind

of genuine genius. The ones to look to are
Gollum, the Orc Grishnakh — who plays a
Wormtongue to Ugluk’s Gandalf — the
Messenger of Mordor, Merry and Pippin
(especially Pippin), and most of all
Wormtongue. As a general rule, if the text
starts likening one to a cornered animal or an
insolent child, you can forget all its ostensibly
fidelity to the worthiness of “pity” and be
assured it wants you alive only so incurred
humiliations have more time to dig in. So if it
described you like this — “His face was
twisted with amazement and anger to the
likeness of some wild beast that, as it
crouches on its prey, is smitten not the
muzzle with a stinging rod” (Return of the
King, 872) — as it does the Messenger of
Mordor, then if Gandalf has to stop someone
from smiting you in the name of second-
chances and pity it’s going to amount to a
forced effort, to say the least. If it begins to
describe you as a “greedy child stooping over
a bowl of food” (The Two Towers, 578), as it
is applied to Pippin, you’d better in some way
desist in what you’re doing, learn a moral
497
lesson from doing it — quick — or you’ll get

the same. And if it describes you as, “In his
eyes was the hunted look of a beast seeking
some gap in the ring of his enemies” (The
Two Towers, 508), and as “coming out of a
hut [...] almost like a dog” (Return of the
King, 995), then you’re screwed no matter
what you do, because then you’re
Wormtongue, and then you’re a snake, a
kicked dog, and perhaps even a victim of an
assault that verged on rape — what all does
Saruman do to him behind closed doors,
after his stupidity costs him the palantir, to
make him so completely snap at the end? —
and the world has to literally stop so that all
your poisonous fluids can be cleared from all
paths you might have trodded upon, and the
possibility that you could have mated with a
treasured princess, fumigated out of
everyone’s brains.
What happens to Wormtongue is what you
get in the text if you breech on someone
else’s power when the text hasn’t already
approved you as one qualified to do so — in
anti-Semitic lexicon, if you’re the Jew making
advancements within the European court. To
498
avoid his fate, you go the route of Hana when

Gandalf runs off yet again, doing his thing of
“ever [...] going and coming unlooked-for”
(516), and take advantage of someone else’s
doubting him to highlight how henceforth
you’re resolved never do so. Thus when
presented with the proclamation,
“Wormtongue, were he here, would not find
it hard to explain,” you eagerly reply, “I will
wait until I see Gandalf again” (516). Or of
Eomer, after having formerly accosted
Aragorn, admitting his comparative
smallness to him and pledging to “gladly
learn better” (427). In short, you have to in
effect act pretty much like Gollum’s “whipped
cur whose master has patted it” (604). It’s
quite the grim way to own people, but such is
The Two Tower’s Middle-earth — you can
expect to be spotted, so you have to be
careful: a whole social order appears to be at
stake.
Recent comments of mine at Clio's

Psyche Discussion Group
499
Some of you may be familiar with some of the

criticisms of the left, coming from within the
left, that are referencing Freud in a big way.
There's the recent article, "The Blathering
Superego at the End of History," by Emmett
Rensin in the LA TIMES, where he says the
left, without knowing it, has found
500
themselves hiding within a super-ego role

that doesn't so much direct as resist everyone
else's impulses... he makes the left look alice-
in-wonderland crazy, like energizer bunnies
on endless smackdown mode. And there's the
book published this year by Jessa Crispin,
whom you couldn't tell by the title of her
book, "Why I'm not a feminist," but who
actually is a feminist, and one respected
enough within feminist circles that her book
was lauded by NewYork Magazine and
Jezebel. She accused the left of needing "shit
containers"... people who could be denied
empathy and into which can placed
everything about themselves they felt an
urgent need to disown, and the one and only
container used -- voila!: white men. She
made the left look like everything right-
wingers accuse them of. "Quite right," she
argues, "we are very much taking a dump on
you."
Where you don't find criticism like this, in
my judgment, is in the only article I've seen
in forever on DeMause's "growth panic,"
where a conclusion was made that we've
501
reached the stage we're we can no longer use

the like of poison containers to remove
guilt... because it's past that now, past time
for small measures, as we're all so obviously
bad we're all with Trump on a highway to
hell. What you find in, specifically, Kenneth
Alan Adams and Audrey Crosby's article,
"The 2016 Election, Authoritarian
Childrearing, and our Suicidal Trajectory," is
a lament about THEM... about the white
working class and their inability to any
longer keep up, owing to the misfortune of
their "authoritarian" childrearing, where
growth was a bad, bad thing. Liberals, the
professional class, the educated elite...
however we want to call them, don't look
ridiculous, as they do in the two accounts of
them just listed, but exempt... pillars of
earnest responsibility in a time of madness.
Or at least that's my call.
So I wrote a response, about how if
we're representing ourselves this way, it's
probably a good sign that we too are
suffering from growth panic, and I wanted to
link you to it.
502
It is here.
Please note, I really recommend reading
Adams and Crosby's article first, to learn
from them, and of course to judge how fair I
am being... to see if I'm just talking sh*t (I
probably do do a couple sketchy things -- like
I just did there... for higher purpose, of
course).
Cheers and respect,
-----
What's mainstreaming the radical right
would occur outside of any particular thing
Trump might do. He could be locked away,
all his advisors sent to Pluto, and the "radio"
could play nothing but Rachel Maddow, and
it wouldn't matter, because what's unfolding
now was determined by the particular
childhoods of each American. This is the
DeMause's interpretation of the events, that
what we're seeing here is a reckoning of just
how loved or unloved Americans were, just
how much they were rejected by (sorry) their
mothers when they began to individuate in
503
their adolescence and how much this

individuation was instead encouraged. What
the left needs to do is try and manage an
honest assessment of the likely nature of the
childhoods of all Americans, even of peoples
they assume will always be firmly left. Black
Americans in the South still for example
almost universally spank their children (with
belts, I believe) and that tells us, if we can
admit to ourselves, that they have a very
precarious appreciation for further unfolding
of liberal freedoms as well. Don't assume
they won't themselves turn nativist, eager to
cling to the formidable mother country, and
eager to distance themselves from... well,
spoiled children like us. Don't even assume
that they won't in the end come to Trump.
It's possible. It's boring our being perennially
surprised by events. Our assumption each
week, that THIS TIME Trump is on his way
out. We're going to lose a lot of friends as
society moves further and further beyond
what our childhoods allowed for us. We have
to become sinless, good children again, by
attacking those who represent our ostensible
worst selves, who individuated even in face of
504
our mother's disavowal and disapproval. Of

course not you and me, but some even of our
personal friends--yes.
(August 19 17)
-----
It strikes me that the advantage Crews has is
that one imagines that if contemporary
psychoanalysts did find that there was truth
to, say, penis envy, or his explorations of
perversions, that their own brains wouldn't
allow them to accept it, whereas Crews does
give one -- or me at least -- the sense that if
he somehow came to find himself in
agreement with 1950s psychoanalysis, if he
did a full turn-around, he could keep faith
with it, even as part of his brain would surely
be chastising him as a bigot, and even as the
world would disown him. There's integrity to
him... that's what one senses (and perhaps
mostly why Zaretsky says there's been no
effective rebuttal of him as of yet?). The
trouble is that it is likely that this older sort
of psychoanalytic truth, the part that gets
disowned as everyone makes clear how
"post" it they are, is beginning to come back
into view... the rightwing are uncovering it,
505
bringing back, for instance, Socarides, and

his take on homosexuality, transsexuality,
etc., spared the genuine love and concern. If
there was actually truth in '50s
psychoanalysis, and it's truth that a
regressing American population that mostly
wants justification to begin a war on
homosexuality seizes upon to discredit
contemporary social scientists / "regressive
liberals" as those wilfully ignorant of truth,
the most effective rebuttal of Crews is going
to emerge some time in the future, and from
out of our worst.
(September 7 17)
-----
They're of a political faction that has less
access to truth, but their brains will allow
them to orient on it when it means... well,
essentially, the furthering of evil. It's
becoming increasingly common for even
members of the left to suggest that maybe all
social science done since a liberal, caring
culture came into being, has been activist
first, truth, second. It hasn't mattered before
(whether it was true or not) because society,
even as it had split into the rich and the poor,
506
hadn't yet begun a downward spiral of total

regression, where people who had it them to
vote for and believe in Obama have
completely lost themselves to Trump
madness. Now it matters -- an increasing
majority sees liberalism as the fundamental
evil -- and unless what we may have been
doing was tactical only, active self-censorship
(so something that can in a pinch be
rerouted), not repression -- which it wasn't --
we may have pinned ourselves. Breitbart
certainly thinks we have... that we're an
evolutionary extension that became so over-
evolved in favouring circumstances, it was
left helpless when circumstances changed.
(September 7 17)
-----
Zaretsky argues that during the '30s,
psychoanalysis regressed... and eventually
was taken over by the British school where,
like what was happening in Britain and
Germany and ostensibly all other nations, the
mother-son relationship became paramount
-- nations as mothers, adults as good sons.
(Crews refers to exactly this to ostensibly
demonstrate that psychoanalysis doesn't
507
learn anything new upon the uncovering of

greater truths; it just adapts so it suits the
times.) If we're doing another '30s -- and the
emerging left, which de-emphasizes
feminism and identity politics while
emphasizing us as a collective, does look like
old left '30s school, doesn't it? -- it might be a
sort of Kleinism that keeps psychoanalysis
afloat. Crews has killed Freud as the naughty,
misbehaving father, but this is all part of a
narrative that'll have everything drift over to
the resurgent mother again, perhaps. He may
have over-leveraged himself in making
himself a Van Helsing who puts stakes
through all vampires, for one, it seems
vainglorious, which is not in step with our
demure times, and two, we may be in mood
to recover some of these vampires as
"heritage" components of, in a sense, making
our nation great again -- the primal, mystical
mother. The collective laughter at the
forgotten memory movement may have
played to a time when people wanted to keep
their own childhoods out of mind, and think
of themselves only as adult professionals,
participating in an adult, cosmopolitan
508
world. If we're in mind to bring them back,

albeit in a very selective and essentially self-
duplicitous manner, then even his reputation
in helping ridicule the relevance in
emphasizing its importance in our lives,
could make him seem traitorous.
(September 7 17)
-----
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Crews and more
Crews
If I remember correctly, the way Crews
effectively squashes consideration of Freud's
initial belief that childhood abuse was
widespread and the root of mental disorders,
was mostly in how his reaction resembled a
gentleman's... he was appalled at what Freud
was saying about all the mothers and fathers
out there. (This was Freud as almost, well, a
snake, spitting lies). Myself, I knew this was
one of the things that seemed very
unconsidered of Crews, and which simply
didn't coincide with what I had learned over
and over again: that no society that can be as
comparatively foul to our own as the 19th-
century was wasn't built out of more abuse,
less love, in people's childhoods. It was also
509
one of the few things which disappointed me

about Crews, about his possible reach, for he
should have demanded of himself awareness
of how his arguments might be suited to a
contemporary audience which would insist
scholars react similarly (and thus make
testing of some things absolutely untenable...
make particular conclusions that could come
out of testing, absolutely untenable)... even if
for everybody but him it was but mawkish
alarm, and thus would unfairly seem
eminently reasonable to him, and also readily
due for their own easy ride.
I'm reading this exchange
now: http://www.richardwebster.net/freuda
ndthejudaeochristiantradition.html
September 8 17)
-----
Liberals are having to actually make their
case again. It's not something they're used to
having to do, and they're bad it. Enemies are
noticing:
https://theoutline.com/post/2230/democrat
s-are-losing-the-propaganda-war
510
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/12/opinions/
how-bannon-turned-the-tables-on-liberals-
bauerlein/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr
ee/2017/sep/12/hillary-clintons-book-what-
happened-clear-message
I'm a Hillary supporter, by the way.
(September 13 17)
-----
I've seen attempts lately to lend support to
the idea of the importance of childrearing but
also to, in my judgment, isolate its influence
away from "the outside world"... almost a
Victorian conception of things. The
moment someone brings up economics one
has a sense that the rambling world of
emotions one readily ascribes to childrearing
meets a macro of common sense
motivations... making a living, making a
profit, and suddenly it seems as if counter-
balancing factors to childrearing aren't really
counter-balancing but more whale-inhale-
krill annihilating. You mention economics,
not to delineate complexity, but to
intentionally isolate the like of maternal
511
engulfment experienced in childhood as

anything "the Economist" should rightly ever
have to deal with... and this maintained, even
by psychohistorians.
I hope for a time when this collectively-
agreed-upon premise has to make a case
for itself again, and for deMause's conception
of what economics is -- more the large stage
where fantasy needs predominate than a
sober reality where childhood problems have
to be put off until Sunday -- to seem easily as
reasonable. This is deMause making the case
that childhood, or, as he will come to believe,
early childhood experiences with one's
mother, determine absolutely, economics.
Historical Group Fantasies, Foundations of
Psychohistory:
The psychogenic theory of historical group-
fantasies exactly reverses the direction of the
casual arrow assumed in other theories of
history with respect to the relationship
between private love and hate and social
institutions. Rather than private emotions
“reflecting” the economic or social “base” of
the period, the psychogenic theory states
512
they determine the economic and social

forms of each age. For instance, social
commentators from Friedrich Engels to
Steven Marcus have said that the ownership
of women by husbands was a reflection of the
economic ownership of goods, and that
sexual attitudes toward women which use
capitalistic terms such as “saving” and
“spending” were derived from the economic
sphere. This seems to me to state the case
precisely backward. What actually happens is
that families teach growing children attitudes
toward their bodies which make them fear
their own sexuality so much that they
construct a sexual code which teaches them
to ”save up” their desires (and secondarily
their goods) until marriage. Later, as adults,
they project these sexual attitudes onto the
economic sphere and construct a group-
fantasy of erotic materialism to help them
master their individual sexual anxieties.
Notions of “saving” and “spending” of a
man’s sperm can be found in the history of
sexuality all the way back to Aristotle, and
are thus hardly new to capitalism. What is
modern is the group-fantasy that money is
513
infused with sexual fantasy, and that

schemes for the redistribution of money are
used to relieve castration anxieties. In the
real world, it is only in the sexual sphere
where great numbers of people actually fight
off a desire to “spend,” real capitalists in fact
rarely “save” to build up their capital as the
capitalistic group-fantasy imagines them
doing. Thus the casual arrow in fact runs
from the psychosexual to the economic
sphere, not the reverse.
...
It should be emphasized at this point that I in
no way mean to imply that human history is
“nothing but” projections of individual
anxieties, or that history is determined solely
by historical group-fantasies. Like all groups,
historical groups have real work to do, aside
from fantasy work, and this real work is
determined very much by the material reality
as well as the psychological reality of the
moment. When a group has a plague or a
volcanic eruption or a Mongol horde
sweeping down upon it, these material events
certainly effect the history of the group, and
the sciences of epidemiology, vulcanology
514
and demography will be consulted to provide

the explanations for the causes of these
events. What psychohistory can provide as an
independent science of historical motivation
through the theory of historical group-
fantasies is the explanation of what level of
response to different situations is possible by
groups made up of different psychosexual
levels, with different personalities, and
different strengths, anxieties and solutions
available to them. Whether psychological or
material reality is “more important” at any
one time in history depends on whether the
eruption of Vesuvius or of the group’s own
group-fantasies is more imminent.
(September 13 17)
-----
I've read other people other than deMause,
but it would probably make me ill to have to
make that clear so that people would take me
seriously. Anyway, when people provide this
sense of a great multitudinous flower of
influences upon us, determining what we
think, I always think of chapter 5 of
deMause's Emotional Life of Nations. I think
515
too on the fact that social science during our

own time is under heavy attack for possibly
having emphasized activist goals over truth,
that we've had scientists, a whole generation
or two of them, who won't allow themselves
to see truths that provide cognitive
dissonance in regards to the social outcomes
they're trying to effect, so their updates,
might in a sense be regressions. If the people
who've been doing that also are the ones who
tend to argue against people's lack of
contextualization and are always shaming
people for being insufficiently considerate of
complexity and also of being ignorant of their
own intrinsic self-limitedness, then people
who bring them up in arguments don't win as
easily for just showing themselves on "their"
side.
And I'm certainly for that, because I think
deMause is right about single-cause, and
about everyone else arguing against it, as not
more sophisticated, but those who've
scattered off from the only place that counts,
and who confuse this essential reality by
516
pointing at the quantity of their acquisition

of lesser charms:
Social scientists have rarely been interested
in psychology. Using the model of Newtonian
physics, they have usually depicted
individuals as opaque billiard balls bouncing
off each other. That individuals might have
their own complex internal motivations for
the way they act in society-that they have
emotions that affect their social behavior-has
rarely been acknowledged. The most
interesting question about any group, one
which we asked even as children-“Why are
they doing that?”-is rarely asked in academia.
Durkheim, in fact, founded sociology with
studies of suicide and incest that claimed
these very private acts were wholly without
individual psychological causes, claiming
that understanding individual motivations is
irrelevant to understanding society.1 By
eliminating psychology from the social
sciences, Durkheim laid down the principle
followed by most social theorists today: “The
determining cause of a social fact should be
sought among the social facts preceding it
517
and not among the states of individual

consciousness.”2
THE DENIAL OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE
STUDY OF SOCIETY
Sociologists still echo Durkheim’s bias
against psychology. Most agree with the
sociologist C. Wright Mills, who advised me
when I was his research assistant at
Columbia University, “Study enough
psychology to make sure you can answer the
bastards when they attack you.” Sociologist
Thomas Scheff agrees: “There is a strong
tradition in modern scholarship in the
human sciences of ignoring emotions as
causes.”3 Political scientists follow the same
assumptions: “Political attitudes are
generally assumed to be the result of a
rational, reflective process.”4 Most
anthropologists concur; as Murdock summed
up their view, “The science of culture is
independent of the laws of biology and
psychology.”5 Those anthropologists, from
Roheim, Deveraux and LaBarre to Whiting,
Munroe and Spiro,6 who began studying the
effects of childhood on culture have been
518
grossly ignored by other anthropological

theorists. In fact, most anthropologists today
are so opposed to psychological analysis of
cultures the distinguished series The
Psychoanalytic Study of Society has recently
been terminated for lack of interest, the
number of psychoanalytic anthropologists
having dwindled in recent years.
Anthropology, says Clifford Geertz, isn’t even
a “hard science;”7 it’s more like literature it’s
telling stories. Even those few
anthropologists who belong to the Society for
Psychological Anthropology have managed to
avoid emotional life so completely that their
journal, Ethos, which does contain
psychological articles, recently had to remind
anthropologists that “culture consists of
ideas in people, not meanings in tokens.”8
Unfortunately, the anthropologist’s central
concept that “culture determines social
behavior” is simply a tautology. Since
“culture” only means “the total pattern of
human behavior” (Webster), to say “culture
is what makes a group do such and such” is
merely stating that a group’s behavior causes
519
its behavior. Even if culture is restricted to

“shared beliefs,” it is purely tautological to
then speak of “cultural causation,” since all
this could mean is “a group of individuals
believe something because they all believe it.”
Culture is explanandum, not explanans. Ever
since Kroeber launched cultural determinism
as the central anthropological theory early in
the century,9 tautological explanations have
dominated the social sciences as is apparent
in Lowie’s claim that culture is “a thing sui
generis, the formula being omnia cultura ex
cultura.”10 That this tautological circularity
has made anthropological evolutionary
theory sterile is slowly becoming evident. In
fact, according to Tooby and Cosmides, the
Standard Social Science Model of cultural
determinism has recently collapsed. This
model, they say, states that “the cultural and
social elements that mold the individual
precede the individual and are external to the
individual. The mind did not create them;
they created the mind,”11 a theory that turns
out, they say, to explain nothing:
520
A large and rapidly growing body of research

from a diversity of disciplines has shown
that…the Standard Social Science Model is…
impossible…It could not have evolved; it
requires an incoherent developmental
biology; it cannot account for the observed
problem-solving abilities of humans or the
functional dimension of human behavior…it
has repeatedly been empirically falsified; and
it cannot even explain how humans learn
their culture or their language.12 Most
historians, too, have assiduously avoided
psychology, going along with Paul Veyne in
believing that history “consists in saying
what happened,” little more13 or trying to
explain history by “impersonal structural
forces,” as though such a passionate human
enterprise as history could be “impersonal.”
The result is that I have at least a hundred
books on war on my shelf, and I don’t recall
seeing the word “anger” in any of them. Nor
does the word “love” appear very often in any
of the hundreds of books of history, sociology
or political science on my shelves, though
most of history has origins in problems of
insufficient human love and all of its
521
derivatives. Most historians are a priori

relativists, avoiding any attempt to see
personal meaning in historical events,
agreeing with Hayden White, history’s
leading theoretician, in claiming “there are
no grounds to be found in the historical
record itself for preferring one way of
construing its meaning over another.”14 Only
the recent disciplines of political psychology
and psychohistory have begun to consider
inner meanings and motivations as the focus
of causation in social theory.15
This passionate denial of the influence of
individual developmental psychology on
society has been at the center of the social
sciences since their beginnings. The actions
of individuals in society have a priori been
assumed by social philosophers from Hobbes
to Marx to be determined by pure self-
interest, “a war of every man against every
man,” based on an assumed selfish nature of
humanity.16 The same is true of economics.
As one economist puts it, “Economic man
must be both rational and greedy.”17 In fact,
Hobbesian models have been accepted by
522
John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill,

Edmund Burke, Karl Marx and all their
contemporary followers-their theories differ
only in the arrangements of social
institutions suggested by the authors to
handle this basic rational selfishness.
Social behavior, using these models, cannot
therefore be (a) irrational (because all men
use only reason to achieve their goals), (b)
empathic (because empathy for others would
not be totally self-interested), (c) self-
destructive (because no one can rationally
ever want to hurt themselves), nor (d)
sadistic (because people don’t waste their
resources just to harm others). At most,
people might be shortsighted or uninformed
in their social behavior, but not
unreasonable, benevolent, suicidal or
vicious-i.e., not human.
The exclusion of the most powerful human
feelings other than greed from social and
political theory plus the elimination of
irrationality and self-destructiveness from
models of society explains why the social
sciences have such a dismal record in
523
providing any historical theories worth

studying. As long as “social structure” and
“culture” are deemed to lie outside human
psyches, motivations are bound to be
considered secondary, reactive solely to
outside conditions rather than themselves
being determinative for social behavior.
Nor have the few attempts by social and
political theorists to use psychoanalytic
theory to explain history been very
successful. This is true whether the theorists
have been sociologists, like Marcuse or
Parsons, or psychoanalysts, like Freud or
Róheim.18 Outside of a handful of
psychoanalytic anthropologists, most rely on
the same basic Hobbesian model of society,
with selfish individuals remorselessly
fighting each other for utilitarian goals,
rather than analyzing how individuals
actually relate in groups in history. The
reason for this failure of social and political
theory bears some scrutiny, as it will allow us
to move away from an ahistorical, drive-
based psychology to a historical, trauma-
based psychology that can be used in
524
understanding historical change. But first we

will have to know something about the effects
of childrearing on adult personality.
(September 11 17)
-----
But whenever we articulate a time period as
beholden to certain frameworks, they end up
seeming, all in all, fundamentally limited,
and probably overall, primitive. Proof of this
is found in how usually we don't really
believe it applies to our own selves.... if we try
and come with some, some framework that
we're operating within and which limits us,
it's really only an effort to be consistent.
Probably no one would accept what you said
in regards to the physical sciences, that older
has something over the new, and the only
way it can be made to seem true for the social
sciences is the way in which I attempted it...
to say that perhaps it progressed to a point,
but then got waylaid (mind you, if I had to
make a defence for the activism before truth
that HAS occurred, I could and would make
it), which is something Crews has been
thought to be doing too, but in his case, for
525
the empiricism proudly there before Freud.

Personally I think this "what is most
workable" means what will help me manage
the particular nature of how I was raised so
that I can function mostly sanely in everyday
life. The aggregate average childrearing
determines the nature of the cultural sphere
around us, all constructed specifically so
to best address aspects of our childhoods
which unaddressed, would prevent us from
living constructive adult lives at all. If one
grows up in a family that is healthier than
others, your thoughts aren't determined by
the cultural sphere that'll surround you.
You'll abstract it out and use it as building
blocks in which to articulate entirely different
sentiment. This is your start, but if you've got
any momentum you'll eventually find
building blocks that suit your own thoughts
better, and a new framework of thinking
comes into being.
I'm glad to hear you do notable
psychohistory, Joel. I admit I'm starved for
people to out themselves as fascinated by
deMause's work though, for it's surely
526
impossible for this silence around work

which Elovitz has said is novel and deeply
fascinating to keep up much longer... there's
got to be some break where intelligent
people, starved for the radically different,
just can't help themselves from partaking in
his thinking again. Maybe if more Brians
come out to encourage our reading Paul
Kennedy or Fukuyama again it'll prompt us
to flee to deMause, with ascribed stigmatism
for doing so better than the hell of seeing
done-over books presented as the salve for
the world disintegrating at our feet. We've
been using scholarship as lubricant for a
sophisticated world that's been pleasant to
live in. We at some level know it. Now that
we sense its inevitable destruction, we've got
to sort through for truth again. The best news
for those who think Freud
still powerfully useful and even his
controversial views, on the mark, is that
brilliant Crews had an audience that wanted
to know it was okay if they never gave much
thought to anything of their childhoods that
gave them the chills. Increasingly stripped of
a social sphere of their own making, which
527
handled all their undealt with childhood

issues for them -- all their own "badness"
deposited into Hillbilly nation, then revenged
upon, for example -- we'll watch them start
seeming unable to function, their seeming
insane, and this'll be our prompt to start
working over psychoanalysis again. And this
time we won't be looking for what is most
amenable for our desired activist outcomes,
but for what will help us function sanely in
an era where the only collective thinking we'll
be able to bind to, will have nationalist, even
fascist, overtones. Within that, we're just
going to have to be deeply smart and
infinitely resourceful.
(September 11 17)
----
Ken, if someone was a through and through
deMausian, would they be in compliance
with all that you would expect of someone to
be listened to, or wouldn't they? I'm not sure,
but it does seem that s/he would only be
interested in the nature of the childrearing
someone had undergone, and wouldn't really
recognize the world outside the mother-child
528
dyad as being so much a cultural

environment, or a historical environment...
that is, something that requires a different
expertise, a different sort of expert, and
who's calling in to have their say would
provide a wonderful sense of evolved
reaching out, but just the exoskeleton
produced by the aggregate of everyone else's
childhoods.... it's all contained by the expert
in early childhood. My concern is, are we in
an intellectual environment where someone
could be almost entirely right, have in their
own focused research come up with most
essential of research, but be overlooked
because he unlike others doesn't entwine
himself within the larger scholarly
community, doesn't acknowledge the
intrinsic limitation of only one area of
knowledge/expertise? Your way of assessing
how truth is uncovered sounds very evolved,
it sounds like the kind of lubricant of
manners that made our Obama era seem
so inspiringly cosmopolitan, professional,
peaceful, inspiring, evolved. But I am worried
that it's become a useful weapon to vaporize
people who in their own focussed research
529
might be digging at truths... we don't actually

want touched, because secretly its been in
occluding them that we've been able to
function so well, so we say to them, how can
what you say be so useful when you've spend
so much time in your burrow that you've
missed the multidisciplinary splendour
produced by worldwide collection of ....?
I know you must have deep respect for
deMause, but boy you sound the opposite of
him.
(September 12 17)
-----
My apologies Ken. I thought you were the
editor of Journal of Psychohistory for some
reason. My mistake. I wish we would
acknowledge that going wide is also the way
to be taken seriously right now, that it's part
of our socio-cultural environment--the way
to, not guarantee, but certainly to begin
being accepted and lauded. For some of us
this "socio-cultural" context collapses almost
absolutely to the aggregate nature of the
childrearing... to, specifically, the emotional
health of the mothers within a society. We
530
see even economics as having a lot to do with

addressing that that was within our early
relationship with our mothers that,
unaddressed by our subsequent efforts of
societal structuring, of recompensing for it,
could make it difficult to live somewhat
independent lives as adults at all. To us this
seems obvious, and we get dismayed that
someone who might provide very little that is
challenging but who agrees with you to find
cooperative findings amongst
various disciplines, is due to be lauded to the
hills. We're beginning to suspect that there
are people out there whose real expertise is
in keeping their findings within what a
scholarly community can psychologically
accept... are becoming aces at, really,
posturing, keeping things within safe limits,
all to keep a very intelligent community that
has lived very enjoyably over the last few
decades at ease.
Here's a challenging thing for us to
contemplate. Have we been projecting
aspects of ourselves we need to reject into
hillbilly nation, into white working class
531
men, for several decades, and this gross mass

depositing has somehow helped us stabilize
for discussions that are so wickedly agile,
dextrous, circumventing, and confidently
calm? What members of the group of
scholars that you favour have suggested that
that is something we have been
doing, deliberately making one group of
people seem sort of shit-filled and horrible
perhaps so that our explorations of cultures
can seem so exclusively respectful and
civilized, that is? All our aggression gets
shipped into one, and all our
benightedness, applied everywhere else? If
no one has, then perhaps this community is a
shared.... um, psychotic state... somehow
disassociated? One enters this community of
scholars, and by agreeing to de facto imply all
sorts of violence towards misogynistic, racist
Americans, one continues to enable a
community that can't see a flaw amongst
themselves for they all truly display every
manner of open consideration and
politeness--they're perfect, only flawed in a
way which keeps them human, i.e., part of
the flattery. If you couldn't agree to do the
532
former, then you couldn't be counted on to

not reflect some of the disorderedness that
comes from trying to contain the violence
within oneself, that the rest of the group
depends on feeling exempt from for their
being self-evidently humanity at its highest
evolved state--the only ones to be listened to,
for they keep decorum. I think what I'm
getting at is that someone like me is probably
hoping that people like yourself, who seem in
the way, are going to have to start showing
flaws in how composed they seem for our
own say to gain some ground. And that this is
going to come through the vile agents, people
who are not emotionally your equal, not at
all, that are popping up everywhere that are
arguing that respectable scholarship has for
some time been been covering up a lot
of fundamentally sick societies/communities.
As this view gains ground, even within
(especially within?) the left, and you can't
mention "socio-cultural" without drawing
suspicions from your audience rather than
rapt, respectful full attendance, then I believe
we may get to a point where whose view is
correct will count on truth rather than
533
having one's having all societal weight

behind them.
(September 12 17)
-----
I didn't insult you Trevor. Who did I insult?
Brian? He said you hero-worshipped Freud,
he (has) said I hero-worshipped deMause...
very specifically, hero-worshipped. This is
not an innocuous comment, it's means to
position your opponent so he barely has to be
listened to. You knew it, because thereafter
you made clear that you have read other
people... and your response cooperated in
making you seem as if there was enough
genuine legitimacy in Brian's stance that you
knew you had to work your way back into
being taken seriously. This is what an
onlooker sees. What an onlooker sees is that
Brian is uncontested legitimacy, and that you
have the appearance of being suspect, and
even as you allay this impression
momentarily by making clear you have read
Hegel and Nietzsche, you may or may not
succeed in vanquishing this aroused doubt
534
about you. He's attached stigma to you. I

noticed it and fought back.
(September 13 17)
-----
There's an interesting article by Mel
Goldstein on "Forrest Gump" in one of the
first issues of Clio's Psyche (Dec. 1994). This
bit in particular is especially good:
I am already confused, since Forrest as agent
for interracial harmony would likely have
gotten these liberal notions from his mother.
But would this perfect mommy of infinite
humanistic view name her son after Nathan
Bedford Forrest who founded the KKK? Not
unless she was illinformed or simple. And is
it necessary for this perfect mommy to
explain complex matters simply, to blatantly
lie to Forrest? How are we to respond to the
snippet of The Birth of a Nation? Why are all
of the friends but one of Forrest's black?
Mommy tells Forrest, "You're no different
from anybody else." When asked by Forrest,
"Where is my Father?" Mommy answers, "On
vacation,... That means when you go away
and never come back." Worse yet, she brings
535
home the principal of the school she wants

Forrest admitted to, and Forrest hears the
man's grunts and groans, which he imitates
as the principal leaves. Forrest may be simple
but his response to being in on "the primal
scene," and his sense that his "mother sure
wants to get you into school,", that is, whored
herself for him, stunts Forrest's sexual
development. His first view of Jenny's
breasts has him gagging and about to vomit
during her first attempt to seduce him. It is
only mommy's "my time has come, Forrest,"
and she dies that Forrest becomes amenable
to Jenny's seduction, and unknowingly
impregnates her. Now as he lies in bed he
does not have to say, "I sure miss mommy
and Jenny." He can forget about mommy.
In early issues, there are also interesting
discussions on Schindler's List, and the JOP,
as I remember, had quite a few interesting
ones (Lloyd deMause's are interesting as hell:
total disregard of plot, very
phenomenological). There is sort of a
depository which is becoming default for
people to store their movie reviews
536
-- letterboxd.com. (Almost all of Pauline

Kael's reviews are there, for instance.) I
would suggest that someone consider pasting
reviews from both Clio and JOP onto
the letterboxd.com site, naming it under
Psychohistory Film Reviews, or Clio's Psyche
and JOP's film reviews, or some such, and
then crediting particular reviews to particular
contributor. I think people need larger access
to these reviews. They're exciting.
I've posted my reviews at letterboxd.com. If
you'd like to see what they read like, and
what the site is like, they're here: Patrick
McEvoy-Halston's Movie Reviews.
(September 17 17)
-----
Trump's a disaster. I think I'm more
interested in knowing if these studies will be
applied to the working class base that
supported him, because while everyone other
than those who voted for him will endorse
studies which show how mentally
compromised Trump is, large sections of the
left will have problems if these studies work
to prove the working class are mental
537
discombobulates as well. That is, Sanders,

Chomsky, The Green Party, The Nation...
want to see the working class as voting for
Trump only because they were desperate, not
because they were mentally ill / brain-
diseased. Liberals are pulling back from
openly castigating the white working class
and are focusing now more simply on Trump
and overt Nazis... which worries me.
Politically, it might be smart, but in terms of
truth it is closer to truth to argue that they
went Trump because they are deplorable
(with the closest truth being that they are
suffering from growth panic, owing to having
had immature mothers who grossly
abandoned them when they made efforts to
individuate as children, as Audrey Abrams
and Kenneth Adams point out in their recent
JOP article).
On the topic of neuroscience, while we're
doing more aligning ourselves with it,
strengthening it, it's again worth noting a
huge countermovement emerging now which
is working to sink it, sink it as a trustworthy
science, for ostensibly being inclined
538
to obfuscate results that work against socially

desired activist outcomes. Steven Pinker's
always pointing this movement out, with
approval, on his twitter feed. Here's an
example: http://quillette.com/2017/09/06/g
enetics-fear-slippery-slope-moral-
authoritarianism/
(September 16 17)
-----
Is there anyone out there actually against
neuroscience these days? I suppose history...
but not even, is my bet: given the esteem
neuroscience currently has, to be against
including its data is to mark one as cro
magnon. I couldn't agree more that it is
enormously useful, of course, only that it has
become more interesting to me how even
neuroscience (not just the social sciences,
that is) is finding itself caught caught in a
situation where it might not be allowed to
find out anything that would support
politically incorrect opinions. They guy who
just got fired at Google was citing science to
prove there are key differences in the brains
between men and women, citing science that
539
reinforced stereotypes that ran against

emerging agreement on the essential
equivalence between genders. Some
new technology that purportedly can scan a
face and determine if someone is homosexual
just got canned, because there are not
supposed to be telling markers, so science
and tech that suggests there is, is bigoted,
period.
And I've mentioned before that one of the
problems we should be aware of as we find
make our own discipline more scientific,
conduct more and more studies, and as we
reach out in plenty to other fields, and as we
include other countries, including China, as
leading participants in our field... is that
we've just made psychohistory seem so
evolved that it becomes that much more
resistant to people like deMause who'd
undermine the whole enterprise by saying,
since about 1980, there has been massive
regression away from calling genuine
perversions, perversions, and by a
willingness to face up to the enormous
influence of the psychological state of the
540
mother in determining our adult fates, out of

fear of doing "mother hate," out of fear of the
judging terrifying mother embedded in our
own right hemispheres, and as such our
whole current enterprise might be becoming
less nourished without our being able to see
it. More satisfying, more rewarding, not
really owing to discoveries, but because its
displaying all the markers of having evolved,
and because the most profound anxiety-
producing stuff has been clipped off,
by mutual agreement. That was Lloyd's
response to Clio's assessment of his
"Emotional Life of Nations"... it's not about
whether I've got the data or not, it's not about
whether I've sufficiently
gone multidisciplinary or included sufficient
neuroscience, I'll be accepted or rejected
because:
Behind all these denials I see (as you might
predict I would see) a denial of each of the
critics’ own childhood abuse and neglect. The
clue came when I gave a speech recently and
someone in the audience got up and shouted,
“Don’t listen to him! He’s a mother-basher!”
541
By tracing wars and social violence to early

childhood, I am “just blaming our mothers.”
But a part of us still needs them so much --in
the right hemispheres of our brain, the
storage place for our early fears -- that it is
better to say our social violence is our own
fault (“it’s our instinctual aggression,” “it’s
because we’re greedy”) than to try to
remember that we were really afraid mommy
meant it when she said, “I wish I never had
you!”
(September 17 17)
-----
I'll add, by the way, that in the current
environment I wouldn't go anywhere near
brain science and studies of perversion, or
even, brain study and biological differences.
The reason for this is that I feel that that any
science that can be used to justify
persecution... will in the short future be used
to justify persecution. I think we're in a
time where people want to project their
compromised, "feminine" feelings into
homosexuals and get rid of them --
homosexuals, that is -- in order to feel better.
542
I think people are so anxious of powerful

women reminding them of their own
overwhelming mothers, they're looking for
scientific justification to keep them away
from empowered positions. So publicly, at
least, I'd join the Gender Studies crowd, and
disavow the Steven Pinker crowd. This said, I
wouldn't lie to myself about what science
proves (note: it doesn't prove that men are
more adept at leadership than women are),
only wait ten to fifteen years when we're out
of this period of apocalyptic punishment for
collective accrued self-actualization, out of
this current period of growth panic, when I
don't have to worry about truth serving to
make miserable and even kill, very good
people. Sometimes the best people alive, the
most emotionally evolved, do in some
regards have to convince themselves of false
truths because they've checked with their
brains, and they're not yet at the state where
they could, for example, both defend and
not romanticize people, not increase rights
for everyone, while not still selecting out
one group (the white working
class deplorables) where they can project
543
their own still existing fears of weakness and

hate into. This said, the other side, is in the
larger sense, far, far, far more awry from
truth than they are.
(September 17 17)
-----
I mentioned about a month ago here that
Frederick Crews has benefited from the fact
that he has made his arguments in an
environment where collectively people have
decided to keep some topics, as they say,
away from view. He's argued that sexual
abuse against children is not some
massive phenomena that has lead to mass
collective repression, and society decided to
weigh in with him: abuse exists but is not
everywhere; and is not so crushing it
demands repression. What we're seeing now
with the twitter and Facebook
#metoo movement is a massive show of just
how many women have suffered sexual
abuse, and I think we're all beginning to
realize that any attempt to successfully label
this a witchhunt will fail: something about
our times has changed, and now collectively
544
were ready to see the abuse we needed for a

long while to keep out of view. With all the
disclosures we're going to see in next
upcoming years, it will be this that clears
away the impact Crews has had to put
psychoanalysis on the defence, while society
went about its daily routine, with all its ills
projected onto forlorn groups designated to
hold all of our suffering onto themselves.
(October 16 17)
-----
Hi Trevor.
Weinstein had his whole career yet to follow
when the Lewinsky incident occurred.
Clinton's "getting off," his escaping their
plans for him, despite being loaded up with
guilt, may have enabled empowered youngish
democrats to feel they had avenue to, in a
sense, be just like him. He was sacrificed, yet
rose again... time for liberal professional
class to really stretch its legs, now that inner
persecutors in the mind, the worst guards at
the gate -- angry old naysayers, representing
parental fury at the child's bad behaviours --
had been confronted and defeated.
545
Subsequent high-power democrats might

have been empowered as predators after
Clinton, because his sacrificing himself for
them felt like it brought forward a long
period where accusers would find themselves
absent all power. Sauron had been destroyed,
so green pastures of permission, once again.
I don't think this story could have come
about until today because I think collectively
we were all too invested in keeping stories
like it from view. It would unbalance us to
much, as we would be faced with re-
experiencing our own trauma, and our own
traumatizing. These predators functioned to
ensure that in a time when many
professionals would be experiencing
enormous life gains that an underclass
working undignified jobs, who had to put
themselves in literal casting couches or just,
in mass, on display for public humiliation at
low-paying jobs, would know the humiliation
and trauma we felt someone had to
experience so that it didn't sit with us.
This is a deMausian idea; that when we
acquire nice things for ourselves in life we are
546
reminded of how our parents, belonging to a

lower psychoclass, reacted to our self-growth,
how it lead to us feeling abandoned,
punished and alone, rejected, and unless its
projected elsewhere we have to feel all of this
blowback too. The casting couch, with
the Weinsteins as the rapist/humiliators,
were part of what kept the liberal
professional class sane, as they themselves
superseded all their own life expectations.
This is a perspective psychohistory, or the
history of psychohistory, can offer, that will
be found nowhere else.
(October 17 17)
-----
But "the process" seemed to give life to
predators over a long interim. A huge grant
of permission where it felt like no one would
oppose them, so long as they were
Clintonesque, democrat and powerful, as
Harvey Weinstein is. They were free to serve
their function as those who grossly oppress
the vulnerable, so a rising class would feel
absent the consequences of growth panic for
it having been projected out.
547
(October 17 17)
-----
In Ishiguro's "The Buried Giant," collective
memory that has been suppressed, suddenly
comes back full bloom. All memory of
victimization, is suddenly remembered by all.
Ishiguro presents it as, in one sense, quite
necessary, but also as fully regrettable, as it
gives incontrovertible righteous fodder for
the war-intending.
With what's coming out of Hollywood and
Washington now, his novel really resonates.
For while it seems only good that we are now
becoming knowledgeable of the sheer
number of predators in both places, and that
victims who had felt kowtowed and shamed
for years are now feeling some sense of
resolve and self-pride again, it is also true
that both of these places are seeming more
the cesspools of the corrupt of rightwing
populist lore.
It is possible that as we see these many
reveals and long-delayed takedowns occur
and realize, as it makes the previous
tendency of both of these high-density,
548
democrat-voting locals to attack "everyday

Americans" as the seat of everything that is
foul in the world an actual aversion of truth,
that it is the rightwing rather than feminism
that is best taking advantage of it, we may
find ourselves regretting that we are now
duty-bound (absolute fidelity with the
victimized) to follow this to the end.
Lloyd deMause once talked about social
institutions as delegate groups that "act out
ambivalent feelings common to all members
of the larger group but which the rest of the
group wish to deny." He referred to "the
Church as a group-fantasy of dependency,
the Army as a group-fantasy of birth, the
Government as a group-fantasy of
nurturance, Capitalism as a group-fantasy of
control, Revolution as a group-fantasy of
counterdependency, the Class System as a
group-fantasy of obeisance, The School as a
group-fantasy of humiliation." DeMause thus
provides liberals with a means of
understanding why these locations of such
absolute resolved faith in voting Democratic,
in supporting governments that are
549
progressive and improve the lot of

wo/mankind, can also be places where
predatory behaviours run rampant. Powerful
people working there are cued by the public
at large to act out specific group fantasy
needs -- to make unknowns suddenly
famous, but also the inverse: to act out
punishments upon them for their egoistic
desire to have it all, to live out the American
dream.
Without deMause's help, where will be left,
but to agree that these places that were such
leaders in keeping democracy afloat have
been revealed to be, in fact, the very
cesspools the rightwing have always declared
them to be, and are in deep need of
supervision and reform... lead by those
currently becoming the recognized holders of
virtue, those loyal to "the forgotten American
man and woman," namely, nativists,
nationalists, whether on the right or the left.
(October 30 17)
-----
If one agrees with deMause's work, or Steven
Pinker's account of historical progression, it
550
would seem that you should be in favour of

people wearing ethnic costumes for them
representing "pasts" we should all at some
level be inclined to lampoon, if we can't
simply dismiss them: all of our ancestors
were appalling victimizers; there were no
simple innocents. This includes Western, as
much as any. Yet you look at the professors
advocating against ethnic costumes, and the
youth advocating against them, and it's the
most emotionally evolved -- in deMause's
terminology, where the higher psychoclasses
presently "are". So there is no question that
even as you'd think every one of us should
find ourselves more repelled by our pasts
than trying to sustain them, find dignity in
them, you always align yourself with the
movement where these people are currently
locating themselves, knowing that each peak
of overall awareness, even to this date, is still
somewhat dipped of the ideal that will one
day be reached. It is with this movement that
people are locating the concept, the truth,
that victimization -- maybe victimization,
period -- is broad and can't be covered up.
It's important their movement wins.
551
Patrick
(October 28 17)
-----
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: halloween
costumes
What I was trying to get at was that I myself
would be guilty of being a purist -- and
therefore, someone actually venturing
against my own goals -- if I didn't appreciate
that the kinds of people who are actually
most close to being psychologically healthy
enough to appreciate what I think is the true
course of history, note, IN THE SPIRIT I
WOULD WISH, at this point don't believe
what I believe; don't see history at all like I
do. In fact, those who come closest to
believing what I believe -- people like Steven
Pinker and Richard Dawkins -- are actually
in my judgment a bit recessed in terms of
emotional health than many of those who see
history in a manner which doesn't match up
with my own. So I support those whom I
believe will be the ones who'll be parents to
progressives who'll eventually recognize the
truth of the deMausian sense of history,
552
accomplished in a manner which isn't about

hoisting the validity of one culture over
another, isn't about setting up an opponent
to vanquish them, isn't about staging
grounds so that the most progressive people
out there, the ones most interested in
protecting the vulnerable, are at a time of
rightwing populist ascension suddenly made
to seem completely invalidated for being so
at odds with facts.
These people -- yes, many of them did vote
Bernie, but certainly not all: many of them
realized that there was an element in the
Bernie movement which felt anti-feminist,
and so stuck with Hillary and her absolute
faith in professional women. Being a purist,
for them, meant keeping faith with the idea
of women as fully individuated human
beings, reaching soaring heights within the
professions. And they looked at Bernie and
saw people in a sense being reduced
into indistinct members of a folk working
class, and so in a sense saw Hillary as a purer
representative of what they looking for, not
553
simply as a compromised but realistic

choice.
About not shaming others: Well, you're right.
So I don't do so. But there is no movement
out there right now which has completely
absented its need to displace some part of
themselves into others, for purposes of
humiliation, in order to make themselves feel
less compromised, so we're not going to get
the ideal... and so it doesn't stop me from
aligning with them. I made a link in an
earlier post to a feminist who's approved by
the likes of Jezebel, the New Yorker, New
York Magazine, who argued that all of the left
are using white working class men as these
sorts of, in deMausian terms, "poison
containers" (I think she uses the term, "shit
containers"): convenient containers for
properties in themselves that make them
very uneasy. Jessa Crispin is her name. I read
her argument. Agreed with it... and it did
nothing to turn me against contemporary
feminists, owing to my appreciation that I
haven't seen any group prove capable of
554
avoiding doing the same (all of them do it

heavier, and worse).
In deMause's way of looking at things,
eventually you reach a time in a historical
stage which has found every way to keep
itself from experiencing a massive regressive
turn, where pretty much everyone is showing
signs of having to deal with a sense that they
are guilty for continuing to push for yet
further progress. Poison containers become
absolute necessities, as, in a sense, no one
can avoid being pill-poppers of some kind to
keep themselves at equilibrium. Growth that
should be making everyone happy, is now
succeeding in making absolutely everyone,
also miserable.
This way of seeing things makes it so that you
never forget, regardless of what comes out
about Hollywood and Washington, that these
are places which almost in unison vote
Democratic -- vote to alleviate pain, and
encourage self-empowerment. They may be
infiltrated with people that are as
compromised as the Catholic Church, and
you realize it was only going to be thus as
555
they functioned to help, even liberals, make

sure that in any place which promised the
absolute realization of dreams, there would
also be the absolute, thorough, ruination of
them, as people are made degraded
discombobulates, broken forever in spirit
and self-pride. This had to be Hollywood's
function, Washington's function, people
there were "encouraged" -- by the broad
public, including educated liberals -- to
produce the victims as much as the
successes, because we at some level
understood that we were doing emergency
measures to keep a growing, liberal society
afloat, when all of us were feeling that we
were soon to a time when almost all of us
would be turning against what remained for
optimism in ourselves in favour of regressive,
punishing, mother-country-loyal,
rightwing/leftwing populism.
(October 29 17)
-----
Quote from text: As professionals, these
psychiatrists have a kind of optics that may
allow them to pick out signs of danger in
556
Trump’s behavior or statements, but, at the

same time, they are analyzing what we all
see: the President’s persistent, blatant lies
(there is some disagreement among
contributors on whether he knows he is lying
or is, in fact, delusional); his contradictory
statements; his inability to hold a thought;
his aggression; his lack of empathy. None of
this is secret, special knowledge—it is all
known to the people who voted for him. We
might ask what’s wrong with them rather
than what’s wrong with him.
Link: The New Yorker
(October 7 17)
-----
We do our own mental gerrymandering and
we've already got democracy: there's plenty
of places where democracy's grasp is firm. If
deMause is right that we're in a period of
growth panic where regressing people fuse
with a maternal entity -- the mother nation --
and attack those they see as mother-
abandoners in their having clearly
individuated themselves, what follows this
disaster is a period where progressives take
557
the lead again, and where everyone else --

after so much collective sacrifice and ruin --
feels entitled to try and keep up with them,
even as it means becoming differentiated
from their own forlorn mothers' intentions
for them. If we're at 1933, then that will occur
in 12 to 15 years from now. We hit hard then,
knowing we've got about another 40 year run
in which to go for broke, we might forever
manage a great contrivance against a
subsequent return of societal regression, a
subsequent return of societal growth panic.
(October 8 17)
-----
They didn't experience these cutbacks -- they
willed them in. Voting in Reagan et al. was a
sure way to curb the growth of the 1970s.
They knew he'd bring some relief from the
threat of growth, and he delivered.
Democrats delivered too, in developing an
absolute distaste for the working class: this
ongoing humiliation they were going to have
to suffer from where everyone in power
ignored them, helped guarantee for
themselves they sure weren't prospering.
558
Still, what also has happened in the

meantime. For one, it had become socially
harder to stigmatize the very groups the
working class had been comfortable
projecting their own vices on, so slowly but
surely one of the "poison containers" they
depended on for their emotional stability was
being taken away from them. For another,
what is being created by progressives in
society is the beginnings of the
Scandinavianation of American society... an
expectation of a very high standard of living
which was sure to envelope all of America.
We were on the threshold of increasing
minimum wage again to make them near
living wage, increasing worker rights,
expanding to national health care, to
becoming egalitarian in a way which would
ensure that more access to an enriched and
full life was actually available to all, not just
to children of the professional class. This is
what Hillary Clinton would have furthered
for us. This is what she represented. So...
once again, growth panic, amongst our least
loved people, to break apart something that
was setting up for something good.
559
I thought you said the only deMause you've

read was his first book, Brian. He doesn't
discuss the switch from depressed phase to
war phase until his latter two books.
Those you accuse of living high on the hog,
those you encourage us to see as demons, are
the grossly rich, sure, but probably also
liberals who favour a quasi-socialist society
and read the New Yorker. They're people of
some quietude whom I'm not sure it would
be healthy of us to want to see ravaged. We
should hope we're not projecting on our
"spoiled" selves onto them, and gaining
maternal approval by lining up to war against
them. And to some extent they were
panicking. If they weren't, if growth didn't
make them feel uncomfortable, make them
feel as if they deserved punishment, they
wouldn't have required that much of the rest
of America serve as their poison containers,
and instead would have reacted to the white
working class with some exasperation -- why
is it these people don't actually WANT to be
helped! -- but would always have kept in
mind the nature of their childhoods, and
560
maintained an understanding and empathic

stance. How exactly the professional class
has been dealing with their own sense that
they deserve punishment for their growth,
with their own arising growth panic, is
something I dealt with in my article, "Reply
to Kenneth Alan Adams...", located here.
(October 8 17)
----
This is the other thing I mentioned last time
we discussed this, that what liberals have
been doing in university has not just been
about creating great careers for the educated
but none for those of less fortuitous
backgrounding, but redeeming the sense that
no matter your colour, your gender
identification, your religion, your looks, your
ADHD or your Aspergers, you deserve a
proud and enabled life. People like Chris
Hedges say this was just a means of
providing moral cover for neo-liberal
economic dis-equities, but I think that
America-wide people sensed the truth: with
the spread of this "enablism" it would prove
harder and harder for regressive parents to
561
instruct their children that they are sinful

beasts who don't deserve to live a rich life...
children would have picked up on the
prevalent atmosphere, the spreading norms,
parents would have found themselves cowed
by their authority, and children would have
taken advantage of the external therapeutic
support and begun to grow past their parents
again. Hence, growth panic.
(October 9 17)
-----
And I have another sort of astray theory on
how those living "high on the hog," that is,
not the professional class but the more
grossly rich, are actually evidencing growth
panic as well. I think at some level they might
realize they're playing out the part of a social
drama where they're serving as those who've
abandoned everyone else only to focus
entirely on their own insatiable needs, where
they're serving as the bad, abandoning
parents, so everyone else can be children who
acquire love, or failing that, respite from
worse harm, in not confronting them too
much about it -- a form of childhood re-
562
staging. That is, I sense that they realize that

in playing out a social role they've actually
limited their own individuation. This will
allay some of the claims made upon them
that incur with grown panic.
I believe I sense something of this happening
with the professional class as well. I think
they are serving, in narrowing their
acceptance of what is legitimate thought, of
what behaviour, manners, are to be taken
seriously, to mostly those their fellow Ivy
League friends possess, but to no others, to
stifle a lot of what they know at some level to
be very legitimate potential out there,
stuff that would have enhanced their own
lives if they were allowed to be grounded as
something to be fully welcomed, and so are
limiting their own individuation by serving as
horrible social agents of an age of frustration,
waste and sacrifice as well. Most of us are
trying to in some way show to a monitor we
know can read us with infallible, brilliant
insight, that we've taken measures to ensure
we don't sprout out as proudly and as
independently as we might.
563
(October 9 17)
-----
Missed this earlier. Thank you very much
Michael.
(October 31 17)
-----
n regards to (1): if most Americans had
wanted a "true populist alternative," they
would have gotten one. The people allow
parties to be begotten to corporate interests.
Where we don't see this happening as much,
is where the childrearing is better -- they
don't need the government to seem consisted
of "averse parents"; they don't themselves
feel as much the need to be, if not "good
children," then at least children whose
dissent is within bounds, in while recognizing
that their parents can be hypocritical and
completely self-interested they don't venture
any further than that. By other countries you
might be referencing Scandinavian ones,
perhaps. Yes, their childrearing is better so
they're more bourgeois: they take active
political participation seriously, and do their
part. These people would vote regardless if
564
multi-parties or socialist alternatives; it feels

self-actualizing, in that their activity is
moved by the kind of motive that in mass can
create a responsible society.
In regards to (2): FDR offered a populist
alternative in the 1930s. So did Hitler and
Mussolini. (I remember it being said that
people didn't go hungry under Hitler.) I bring
this up because what FDR brought with him
was also a depressing reduction of people
into the American folk, that is, an
almost instituted demand that people forgo
adult individuation to become good sons and
daughters to their Motherland. Voting
Democratic has for some while been about
voting which only marginally empowers the
working class over what Republicans would
provide (Thomas Frank's "What's wrong with
Kansas?"). Working class Americans have
not shown they wanted their economic
conditions dramatically improved by their
voting Democratic. Only marginally
improved. This fact works well with idea of
growth panic.
565
This is now changing, but unfortunately it is

changing because at some level the working
class sense that we've entered a historical
period where growth will not find some
clever way to contrive its way through, as
has happened these last several decades with
neoliberal growth-but-also-mass-disregard,
but rather where the THREAT of further
growth has ended. We've entered in a sense
the deMausian war phase where there will be
good children pit against the bad, and the
American working class feel they will be
empowered -- for, in part, their several
decades of suffering elites' debasement of
them -- to be the good children, loyal to a
mother country and its values that others
have been ignoring, while certain select
groups -- university professors, students,
Hollywood, Washington D.C. New York
City... sanctuary cities, immigrants -- will be
the bad.
They no longer need to suffer because
liberalism will no longer serve as it has to
communicate that everyone deserves to live a
self-realized life, but rather only to argue that
566
there should be jobs and more food on

everyone's table. No voice with any social
credit will exist to instruct people that life is
about abandoning what your parents told
you to become an individual even more
individuated and self-realized than they
were. Instead, every voice in society will be
instructing them that their fore-bearers knew
better. So they now can insist on the jobs etc.
and can demonstrate what happens to
politicians when they work against a
populace that actually wants what they say
they want, for the same reason working class
Germans in the '30s felt empowered to do so.
The get to "out" themselves as those who
have always been mother-loyal at a time
when the value of the Mother Country is
being "remembered "again... and "mom,"
they know that everyone knows, wants her
best children dressed to a proud shine.
In regards to (3), Americans wanted this to
happen, and that's why it occurred. I can get
into this if necessary, but I believe I've
already addressed it. Those of poorer
childrearing wanted to demonstrate in their
567
being forlorn that they had not been spoiling

themselves. Those of a bit better childrearing
who still wanted growth, who could help
enshrine our last few decades as those which
empowered a cultural "atmosphere" which
told you that no matter your colour, creed,
etc., you deserved a fully realized life, had to
make sure this growth came along with
massive negative counters, otherwise, too
guilty. Those of pretty good childrearing still
needed poison containers to contain the
sense of powerless and helplessness -- as one
remembers the rejection that occurred when
your first movement towards self-activation
was met by your immature mother's
disapproval/apprehension, her rejection --
that comes along with self-growth, and so
purposely ignored most of the rest of the
country.
By all this I think I've once again made
evident how constrained I believe
corporations really are.
Sorry for the late response to this,
but sometimes I have to situate myself before
568
I can take a full respectful look at what you

write, or as close as I can manage to it.
(October 31 17)

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Monday, October 30, 2017
The relevance of "The Buried Giant"

569
Originally posted at Clio's Psyche, Oct. 30)

In Ishiguro's "The Buried Giant," collective
memory that has been suppressed, suddenly
comes back full bloom. All memory of
victimization, is suddenly remembered by all.
Ishiguro presents it as, in one sense, quite
necessary, but also as fully regrettable as it
gives incontrovertible righteous fodder for
the war-intending.
With what's coming out of Hollywood and
Washington now, his novel really resonates.
For while it seems only good that we are now
becoming knowledgeable of the sheer
number of predators in both places, and that
victims who had felt kowtowed and shamed
for years are now feeling some sense of
resolve and self-pride again, it is also true
that both of these places are seeming more
the cesspools of the corrupt of rightwing
populist lore.
It is possible that as we see these many

reveals and long-delayed takedowns occur
and realize, as it makes the previous
570
tendency of both of these high-density,

democrat-voting locals to attack "everyday
Americans" as the seat of everything that is
foul in the world an actual inversion of truth,
that it is the rightwing rather than feminism
that is best taking advantage of it, we may
find ourselves regretting that we are now
duty-bound (absolute fidelity with the
victimized) to follow this to the end.
Lloyd deMause once talked about social
institutions as delegate groups that "act out
ambivalent feelings common to all members
of the larger group but which the rest of the
group wish to deny." He referred to "the
Church as a group-fantasy of dependency,
the Army as a group-fantasy of birth, the
Government as a group-fantasy of
nurturance, Capitalism as a group-fantasy of
control, Revolution as a group-fantasy of
counterdependency, the Class System as a
group-fantasy of obeisance, The School as a
group-fantasy of humiliation." DeMause thus
provides liberals with a means of
understanding why these locations of such
absolute resolved faith in voting Democratic,
571
in supporting governments that are

progressive and improve the lot of
wo/mankind, can also be places where
predatory behaviours run rampant. Powerful
people working there are cued by the public
at large to act out specific group fantasy
needs -- to make unknowns suddenly
famous, but also the horrible inverse: to act
out punishments upon them for their egoistic
desire to have it all; to live out the American
dream.
Without deMause's help, where will be left

but to agree that these places that were such
leaders in keeping democracy afloat have
been revealed to be, in fact, the very
cesspools the rightwing have always declared
them to be and are in deep need of
supervision and reform... an aroused
movement lead by those currently becoming
the recognized holders of virtue, those loyal
to "the forgotten American man and
woman," namely, nativists, nationalists,
whether right or left.
at October 30, 2017 No comments: Links to this post

572
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Sunday, October 29, 2017
Reader's Guide to the Fellowship of the

Ring
573
Reader’s Guide to Fellowship

of the Ring
574
If I had to supply reader notes to Fellowship

of the Ring it would be as follows: To begin, I
would draw the reader to think a little more
on the character of Lobelia, the would-be
Shire matriarch, who is astounded that Bilbo
has managed to keep his property from her
all these years. She’s played for fun in this
part of the book, but the reader should note
she’s nonetheless a bit too present in this
beginning portion of the text — when surely
other options were available — to convince
that she’s just there to provide levity before
the plunge into darkness begins: her
presence is not inconsequential, but an
indicator of what was on the teller’s mind,
other than a world about to discombobulate.
There’s talk about keeping doors bars to her,
about her returning — like a fire-breathing
dragon that's once again re-generated heat —
to launch a subsequent belch of haranguing,
and about putting on the invisible ring to
escape her. To anyone who considers that it
is our earliest scares and fears — brought to
us not just through mothers, nurses and
other early attendants, in their whisperings
of dark “old wives tales” (that we note that
575
even Celeborn says we should never just pass

over because they always draw on something
substantial), but via the terrifying presence
of this lot themselves, this concern to depict
the matriarch Lobelia as an “invading
monster” should not be allowed to pass as
inconsequential. To the teller’s mind, it
might not be. Note that at the end of the
Return of the Ring Lobelia is recovered as
actually someone on the hobbits’ side, as a
constituent the Shire should be proud of, but
only after a barbarian gang has visited the
town and done what barbarian gangs do to
women who come out of their houses to
oppose them — revenge themselves on them
horribly. Tolkien has said that he had the end
of the book in mind when he started the
adventure. Perhaps unconsciously he may
not only have had in mind his concern to
demonstrate that the greatest calamity is
when “Mordor” infiltrates one’s town of
origins, but to displace a desire for revenge
onto others and see them visit it upon the
book’s first predator — the aggressive
matriarch whom even the invisibility ring-
bearer would hope of greater spells to
576
forestall. Gollum is quoted as thinking,

“People would see if he could stand being
kicked, and driven into a hole and then
robbed. Gollum had good friends now, good
friends and very strong. They would help
him. Baggins would pay for it. That was his
chief thought. He hated Bilbo and cursed his
name.” Driven out the door by the demands
of a pressing Lobelia — not just, that is, by
Black Riders — were these half-Orc
barbarians in a way Frodo’s newly acquired
“friends,” serving out a revenge he needs
distance from?
We should flag it, flag the possibility of
Lobelia not just being inconsequentially
“relevant,” and there is a reminder to do this
very thing in the text. For we soon learn from
Gandalf of how Smeagol, the hobbit-like
creature, became Gollum, the gangly, deadly,
spider-like creature that Gandalf initially
surmises that it may well have been just to
have killed outright when chance allowed,
and it wasn’t just the Ring that did it. The
Ring made him extraordinarily bothersome,
a sort of town nuisance writ large, but it did
not change him into something that
577
disparate from his normal, after all, “most

inquisitive and curious-minded” (69) self.
Rather, it was his expulsion from his home
by the leading matriarch — by his
grandmother —which did it. That’s what
drove him away from all light and into the
caves; that’s what made him so forlorn.
Exasperating her beyond all tolerance, he
had finally overwhelmed her patience, and
paid one hell of a price for it. When Frodo
provides Lobelia with the home she covets, it
is done ostensibly only for expediency: the
house needed to be sold quickly, and she was
the most interested buyer. But given the
foreboding tale of what happened to Gollum
when he had exhausted an ostensibly benign
matriarch’s patience, in addition, of course,
to our own never lost knowledge that nothing
scared us more than what may have
happened to us in the way we were handled
in the “nursery,” in retrospect it can feel like
it was sold to her almost out of relief: the
adventure-garnered prowess of Bilbo had
kept the home safe to himself for over ninety
years, his adventure and might-backed
“queerness” intimidated neighbours, not just
578
irked or intrigued them, but with him gone

and it left only to young, inexperienced Frodo
to forestall the accumulating anger of
Lobelia’s having being denied, decade after
accumulating decade, her inheritance, he
took the last avenue he had to stop her from
annihilating him with her fury. He threw her,
this “dragon,” accumulating fury and
strength as the ages passed, a house-sized
“steak”— everything, that is, that she wanted
— and snuck quickly out through the door.
Possible?
Bilbo is about to be pretty much left out as a
character in the adventure, but while’s he’s
still here at the commencement we can be
drawn to think on how Frodo’s journey to
being his own “master,” to maturity, differs
from Bilbo’s own. Bilbo is estimated as only
“quite a little fellow” (The Hobbit, 351) by
Gandalf, but it’s a poor reading of him,
actually, considering that it was Bilbo’s
perhaps singular ability to charm and deceive
Smaug, the terrible fire-breathing dragon —
that would, if he had lived, proved the
greatest threat in Sauron’s arsenal — that
brought about Smaug’s end. Specifically,
579
after catching site of a possible flaw in

Smaug’s ostensibly secure impregnability,
Bilbo lured him into exposing the full girth of
his chest, bating him into doing so by making
it seem just an extension of the sort of
ostensibly charitable play they’ve been up to
in the pretension of their situation as simply
of respectful guest visiting flattered,
bequeathing host. Smaug’s chest is absent
one piece of armouring, and without it
having been exposed here, Bard the archer
would never have known it existed and been
no opposition to him but rather an
inconsequent bit of his carnage. Bilbo caught
off guard the greatest evil power in his time,
found out his only weak spot, so that against
impossible odds, the villain could
nevertheless be taken down.
Frodo, on the other hand, does nothing of the
sort. And while we see on his journey that he
has considerable “grit,” the traditional hobbit
ability to thrive surprisingly well — to be
“hard to daunt or kill” (7) — when they had
become accustomed to being absent their
normal comforts, and that he does possess an
unusual delicacy with language — a
580
characteristic which favours him with the fair

and courtly Faramir — it is certainly never
himself who figures out how, for example,
Sauron might be brought down. The person
who figures out how the seemingly
invulnerable threat on this adventure can be
made to actually prove vulnerable, in this
narrative, is Gandalf only. The flaw he points
out is that though he is beyond brilliant,
Sauron can’t imagine anyone possessing the
Ring not wanting to use its power: to him, it’s
beyond consideration that the Ring-bearer
would seek to destroy an artifact that grants
such great power, and this means he
maintains no heavily fortified defence against
this tactic. And so Gandalf loads it onto a
member of the one race that seems capable of
resisting its draw more than any other, and,
as well, just as remarkably capable of bearing
its incurring despondency, and ships him off
— and that’s what Frodo’s own usefulness
basically amounts to. Question, then: Which
of the two is actually great, and which does
well only for being a reasonably good
representative of his kind? Further question:
Which one goes on adventures where he
581
would seem to have earned the kind of

bearing that would have him confidently
counter Gandalf if ever he disagrees with
him, as for example, Aragorn, Gimli and
Legolas readily do, and which one seems as if
he’s being granted it only for being a
plaguing source of guilt — like a soldier sent
just at the arrival of his adulthood to die on a
foreign battlefield, his voice gets heeded
because unconsciously he remains
understood as someone sacrificed for the
fact that his immediate circumstances
argued for his deserving better?
There’s a bit in Return of the King where
Merry thinks on the effect that all the places
he has seen in his adventures have had on
him, and decides they didn’t provide him
with what he thought they would. He
surmised that it was perhaps mostly just
onslaught, something he didn’t so much
explore and to some extent “master,” but
something that just over-stimulated and
overwhelmed him. He is described as
someone who, “though he loved mountains
[…] was borne down by the insupportable
weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut
582
out the immensity.” Merry, in effect, becomes

the kind of person who actually is easy to
daunt, something not ostensibly a hobbit’
characteristic — or so told us by a narrator
perhaps more in mood to be charitable at the
time. One sees him as someone who in effect
was taught a lesson about his actual ability to
handle things in the outside world, one he
could be counted on to have others learn —
other young hobbits who yearned for great
adventure — so that they too would know
that they’re actually not up for anything
other than what they’d been accustomed to
as farmers and gardeners tending the Shire’s
grounds. This is a lesson “Middle-earth”
inflicts, not just upon Merry but on all of the
hobbits, pretty much as soon as they escape
their door. And it leads, it would seem, to a
kind of mindset that the text demonstrates
severe “beatings” serve upon the beaten:
thereafter, if it’s followed by kindness, you
get absolute readiness to comply, absolute
servitude. “Bad cop” followed by “good cop,”
a bit of soothing after severe mistreatment,
leads Gollum from being a troublesome
miscreant to one “piteously easy to please”
583
(604). And when it happens to hobbits, it

makes them begotten to anything that
represents the old ways of Middle-earth,
forever pit against unsanctioned radical
change.
Just out the door, and beginning to make
significant, fate-determining decisions on
their own — like what path to take, of the
various available to them — ostensibly still at
a state of self-command where Gandalf’s
recommendations as to what they should do
serve as only that, and where at the very least
Frodo sees escape from the Shire as an
escape from all things limiting and stupid,
they encounter paralyzing horrors which
daunt them with the lesson — actually,
you’re not on your own anywhere near up
to this. Every predator will stir at the
announcement of prey onto their turf they
each will discern as well within their
mastery. Frodo demonstrates fortitude
within the barrow mound, as he force-
awakens himself before being eaten and
smites an undead hand that was crawling
towards him, but collectively, out of their
nevertheless still mostly being completely
584
subdued by Black riders, an angry forest

guardian, and a Barrow-wight, what are they
really but those who’ll forever receive
rescuers with an eager resolve to prostrate
themselves before them? What are they but
those so desperately pleased to be rescued
they would only rejoice and celebrate old-
world, old-way representatives like their
rescuers, the high-Elves and Tom Bombadil?
What are they other than those who after
being whipped, turned piteously compliant,
when healers arrive with salve?
At one point of the text Frodo delays a vote
on which route the Fellowship should take,
which course through the mountains —
under, over, or around — by saying it should
be delayed until daytime so that Gandalf’s
vote would be given fairer consideration
(390) — “how the [night] wind howls
[doubt],” he says. There is wisdom here, but
it’s not deeply felt, and actually is more a
demonstration of his being mastered than it
is a wise consideration of how best judgment
can get waylaid by the stimuli manifesting
within your immediate situation. For one
notes that after being so easily preyed upon
585
by these three horrendous bugaboos, they’re

ready to be owned by the saviours who rescue
them. They follow the high-Elves’ ownership
of them — one of the “chief events of [Sam's]
life” (190) was meeting them, but not just
owing to their charm but also surely to
having met them right after their arrival
daunted Black Riders set to kill and/or
capture them — with Tom Bombadil’s —
Frodo gives him the Ring when he requests it
because he has become just that compliant
after Bombadil rescued them all from Old
Man Willow — and finally, the rest of the
way, with Gandalf’s. And Gandalf becomes
someone, not whom one might want to heed
advice from (87), but someone whom the
others are compelled to, without question,
regardless of course or counsel advanced. If
the real risk to Gandalf’s plans was ever the
hobbits’ independent judgment — would
Frodo perhaps actually give someone who
represented dissent a listen, a fairer listen,
where if the two could find time alone the
“two together [might actually find] […]
wisdom” (522)? — this would have been the
very course he would have plotted for them
586
to undertake in order to scare away any sense

of themselves as feeling safe doing anything
other than clinging back when caught outside
familiar support.
A few things to note about the stay at
Rivendale: One, why would Bilbo have
wanted to come here, other than for purposes
of reflected narcissism… to bathe in being
tangentally accepted into their greatness? He
is living amongst entities who are better than
him… at everything. The most they can grant
him when he produces his highest art is that
it could maybe pass as their worst. It is not to
say that one couldn’t take pleasure,
nevertheless, mostly in reaching a personal
pinnacle. But since you’ve surrounded
yourself by others who perpetually tempt you
more to take adverse pleasure in your
accomplishment through understanding it as
allowing you to participate in their glory, the
environment remains one that works towards
self-abasement. It is a very beautiful vision,
this Rivendale of abundance and scintillating
everything, but nevertheless one that a
cunning Hell would contrive to keep visitors
in slack form.
587
Second, Elrond’s heart (363) tells him that he

should refuse Merry and Pippen’s demand
that they be taken along on the adventure —
his heart does. This should not be allowed to
pass notice (and Merry and Pippin surely
don’t forget Elrond’s heartfelt opposition to
their inclusion, and end up being plagued by
it) because it should make available to them
evidence that subsequently should their
hearts speak loudly, it needn’t mean
immediately heeding them: they don’t
always tell the loudest and most profound
truth, for as great as Elrond is in the text, his
judgment is still second to Gandalf’s, who
speaks as an even greater Stewart of Middle-
earth, one more conscious of and loyal to all
its parts, and it is Gandalf who essentially
informs Elrond that his heart, in this, albeit,
rare instance, knows not: “trust instead to
already established friendships, Elrond, or
we’ll all die,” is what he essentially says. In
this unique instance of Elrond versus
Gandalf, it’s either a battle of the profoundest
hearts to match the battle of wisest minds we
see recurring elsewhere in the text, or it’s an
example of mind pit against a heart. But in
588
either case what is shown is that even the

heart belonging to one of the greats could
lead a whole world profoundly wrong, if
allowed uncontested sovereignship.
Yet Frodo does not remember this lesson as
he deals with Boromir, waging between them
the fate of the Ring. His heart tells him to
ignore Boromir’s argument, to ignore
everything compelling about it, and he lets it
lead him as if no one important had ever
demonstrated a strong example against being
too quick to do so when the stakes are high.
My guess is that many readers didn’t think
anything possibly awry about his doing so as
well. Frodo has become so that he heeds, not
the wisdom in Gandalf’s actions, in the
particulars of his leadership — for if like that
he might have recalled here Gandalf’s reproof
against too readily assuming your heart
knows best, and thought again on the
possible wisdom in Boromir’s preference for
the fate of Ring — but his intentions, absent
scrutiny, which is for him to destroy the
Ring: and so I think have we become.
Gandalf hasn’t inspired but mastered us, as
the text has prompted such Gandalf-clingers
589
of us all that even an instance where Elrond

himself looks like he might have been caught
out in an error of judgment when the fate of
the whole world was at stake, can’t command
respectful recall when one would suppose
circumstances had arisen for its immediately
being beckoned back into memory. Pity the
fate of any Boromir, then, who’d hoped to
change our mind — as well as the fate of any
goodness that might have arisen if their
course was one that would have actually
proved solid.
And finally, when the wizard Saruman tries
to manipulate a good hearing for himself
when precariously situated before Gandalf,
the Rohirrim, and the remaining members of
the Fellowship, he succeeds in daunting all
but Gandalf by making them feel like those
“shut out, listening at a door to words not
meant for them: ill-mannered children or
stupid servants overhearing the elusive
discourse of their elders, and wondering how
it would affect their lot. Of loftier mould
these two were made; reverend and wise. It
was inevitable that they should make
alliance. Gandalf would ascend into the
590
tower, to discuss deep things beyond their

comprehension in the high chambers of
Orthanc. The door would be closed, and they
would be left outside, dismissed to await
allotted work or punishment” (The Two
Towers, 557). Early memories of being
dismissed to the kid’s table while adults
discuss “serious matters,” as a deliberate
tactic intended to depreciate one’s self-worth,
apparently remain in everyone, and thus
leave you susceptible to manipulation, is
what the text informs us here. Yet the
Council of Elrond, the council of the good, is
certainly “high matters” itself, yet hasn’t
integrated that lesson well enough that it
doesn’t not seem to all humorous “cheek”
when Sam bursts amongst them and
demands his own say as to who should go on
the journey. And earlier, when actual invited
guest Bilbo spoke up, though he got tribute
he remained seen — rightly, we are meant to
have understood — as someone who can’t
appreciate that he’s gotten far too old to go
on adventures and swing swords (only truly
great ones like the aged Denethor and
Theoden, get to remain still like that). He
591
speaks up only so that he can with finality be

shut out, however kindly — one lingering bit
of old business, satisfyingly now out of the
way.
And when Frodo speaks up, it seems almost
as if volunteering so that others needn’t
demand — a response that isn’t so much out
of one’s own initiative, but rather one that
betrays slavish high receptivity to others’
needs, conveyed here from atmospherically
evident deliberate avoidance of the obvious.
Elrond replies to his declaration by stating
that “this task is [actually] appointed for you”
(355). Why, we should ask, did he wait for
him to volunteer when the answer to himself
and Gandalf, at least, was as obvious as
something already confirmed? Is it because
they still nevertheless had to keep their
hands clean because Frodo’s going on what
Boromir rightly estimates as a clear suicide
mission, a clear mission into oblivion, so that
the establishment is saved instant death and
can at their own leisure deliberate their own
means of leaving Middle-earth? There’s
something in their decision which rings of
sacrificing the potential of youth and the
592
unexpected largesse of a great acquired

power — the Ring, of course — that points a
finger at an urgent need more to placate
dangerous elder gods who think the world is
spinning out of control, than the proclaimed
intent to deal best with the realities of the
world, such as they are. The young are being
misled, lied to. It’s guilt-inspiring if they
admitted this fact to themselves, that they
were so eager to dispense with their good
fortune and wealth and of representatives of
the young, so blood-thirsty and ultimately
not leaderly but rather slavishly intent on
heeding old gods looking down upon them
with doubt and scorn, that this was going to
be their solution to any big world problem
that presented itself. And so they hold out
gratitude as a reward towards those who’ve
shaped themselves so they pick up out of the
air the unacknowledged sordid wishes of
others’, and act on them, and so thereby
ostensibly make up their own minds,
independent of influence. “It wasn’t us, they
made their own choice!,” is not in this
instance a demonstration of respect for
individual choice, about what separates what
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is good in this world from what is evil, but

only of respect for evils one can discount.
Be willing to make yourself vulnerable to
falling into a volcanic pit, and you’re sure
Elf-friend forever — that’s the part we didn’t
tell you about was coming when we first
drew you to find such pleasure in being
acclaimed our friend, after your amusing
attempts at fluent Elf-speech when we
encountered you just outside your door. All
peddlers of the dastardly draw their young
prey in at first with sweets — didn’t any of
the wise ever teach you so? Don’t trust those
who arrive to apply salve just after disaster
strikes, for mightn’t they themselves have
originated the disaster — perhaps just to
find easier to garner, influence they’d
otherwise find hard to acquire? The latter is
an accusation launched at Gandalf many
times in the text — Why is it you always
show up when disaster is upon us? Are you
sure that you and the disaster aren’t
twinned in some way... of the same agency,
or of the same level of malicious intention —
one overt, the other covert, perhaps? Is this
because there’s truth behind it sufficient
594
enough to arouse guilt, an aroused guilt that

can be, if not quit, at least momentarily
quelled in seeing the accusation voiced (“ill
news is an ill guest” [The Two Towers, 503];
“you come with tidings of grief and danger,
as is your wont, they say” [Return of the
King, 733]) to someone who can later
righteously be dispensed with, someone like
The Two Tower’s Wormtongue, and Return
of the King’s Lord Denethor, that this
accusation keeps on repeatedly being aired?
Just at the entrance to the Mines of Moria,
the text tells us that Gandalf understood that
the enormous monster in the water was
groping for Frodo specifically, but he decided
to keep this secret to himself. We might
assume this is Gandalf being respectful so as
not to not unduly terrorize the poor hobbit,
but really, is it any news to Frodo at this
point that everything evil in Middle-earth is
making a beeline towards him? Thinking on
the nobility of Gandalf’s discretion is a way
to not think of what else might otherwise be
arising in the reader’s mind concerning
Gandalf at this point. Specifically, perhaps on
how already at this point on the exact
595
journey Gandalf urged the Fellowship on, the

Company had already incurred as a great a
danger as any any more overt path would
have provided them — a behemoth that
would have forwarded the Ring to Sauron,
had made a pretty able attempt at capturing
Frodo. Keeping this secret may perhaps have
kept Frodo a little less distressed, but it also
kept Gandalf from being shown up, and so
early along a chosen course that several
members of the Company had loudly
contested. Secret-keeping, overall, seems in
Lord of the Rings about giving one leverage
over other people, about maintaining the
falsity that some people can handle truth,
while others can’t — that they will always
remain unimportant.
Aragorn keeps an important secret to
himself, later in the narrative: that Boromir
decided to snatch the Ring out of Frodo’s
hands. How noble of him to be so discreet
and keep Boromir from shame, is what were
supposed to be thinking. Yet what shame
does Boromir really bear other than his being
the only one of the Fellowship who didn’t
agree with the Council’s decision, as it was
596
not the course he would have taken, and so

his being the only one amongst them that the
Ring had something to play on? Everyone
else had their will bent against the Ring, his
was intending toward it: so not that he was
evil but that he dissented — that he was not
someone who felt obliged to follow Aragorn
“wherever he went” (512) — was his only
“sin,” his only real “problem.” And what good
is done in not offering an honest account, in
not challenging but playing to childish
requirements that heroes be kept flawless for
instance? Contra Gandalf’s admonitions,
sometimes the good do “break […] thing[s] to
find out what it is” (339)… sometimes you do
need to break things apart to find out what
makes them tick, if you really want to make
improvements, and not rather keep a
perhaps flawed product intact because as is
it’s built the right way for your own use. A
Middle-earth that must be kept from
knowing things, a Middle-earth kept
emotionally fragile, is deeply in the dark, and
prey to be owned by the most malevolent of
things.
597
Boromir’s attempt to steal the Ring is the last

scare Frodo suffers from in Fellowship of the
Ring, but the one just previous to it shouldn’t
pass our notice. What scared him just
before?: Caught sight of the visage of great
kings, of “silent wardens of a long-vanished
kingdom,” which drew him to feel “awe and
fear” and made him “cower down [and to]
shut his eyes and dar[e] not to look” (516).
Shame, awe and fear seem to get a lot of
respect in this book if it’s inspired by
lingering great ghosts from long ago, or those
who count themselves their servants. And the
text seems to make nothing of the fact that
Boromir has to try and manage brokering a
deal with Frodo, to inspire a novel turn on
Frodo’s part, only after Frodo’s been sullied
into his submission to them by these great
looming giants of the past. A crime of the sort
mentioned in Return of the King is being
committed here, where the old are venerated
to keep the young from due. It feels almost as
if Boromir snatches the Ring, not out evil
manifesting in him but out of fully
understandable exasperation at the ongoing
madness everyone else is determined to keep
598
themselves caught within — their being

caught by elder’ deference, to a compulsion
to instinctively bow your own head low and
not therefore able see the possibilities as they
might exist no matter if colossuses of the
ancients weren’t inclined to instantly appear
the moment a situation might arise
fortuitous for a breakthrough.
The possibility that higher-ranking
members of the Fellowship are insane comes
up many times through the rest of the text,
ostensibly to reveal them as actually masters
of a higher order of knowledge. But, also, I
think, for reasons the narrator would not be
able to acknowledge for their being quite
secret to him. One of these is quite clearly to
demonstrate certain select members of the
Fellowship those who can and do cause upset
and disquiet in others — in other good
people, that is — by making them feel
abandoned just when they’d been lead to
believe rescue had come (the vivid dismay
caused by Aragorn’s unexplained sprinting
off from the war-march to Pelennor Fields,
anyone?). It’s a malicious secret intention, to
hopefully grow past. The second, however, is
599
one to expand, for it’s inner sanity reproofing

the author with the fact that it is insane to be
writing a narrative about having claimed an
opponent’s most valuable treasure, his most
powerful tool and weapon, and being so
unquestionably inclined to only inscribe it as
profound trouble that’s so unfortunately
arrived in one’s midst. In real life that could
be a boat load of German Jews coming to
American shores in World War Two, that
would give the Allies the absurd advantage in
intellect and creativity, after all, and we don’t
really want to tell a tale that would have had
the Americans in that situation deny
themselves just so the local boys wouldn’t
have had to suffer the stress of having to
accommodate, would we?
Friday, October 27, 2017
Lord of the Rings: the anti-adventure

600
Lord of the Rings: the anti-

adventure
Re-reading Lord of the Rings, I know it is a
great deal unfair to it to declare it such, but
still my ultimate summing-up of it is as sort
of an anti-adventure. Frodo begins the
adventure pretty much sick of hobbits and
the Shire. He thought “the inhabitants too
stupid and dull for words” (Fellowship, 82),
and hoped, maybe not entirely in jest, they’d
be beset upon by legions of dragons or an
601
earthquake. This attitude, in case you’re

wondering, is very much akin to Saruman’s,
who saw the like of another type of rural
people — the Rohirrim — as brigands whose
children go about the floor with their dogs,
and who couldn’t care less if the ancient
forests were destroyed for the advancement
of the lacunae of industry. This dismissal, in
my judgment, is similar to the type of
dismissal made by adolescents, who in trying
to shed the maternal world they’ve long been
content with, might start expressing serious
malcontent. It’s a step, maybe not absolutely
required, but perhaps most often required, in
order for the adolescent to cast away the
nursery and feast on their own self-mission.
If a malevolent, jealous, angry party — the
party being dismissed — wanted to nip this
type of self-actualization in the bud, it would
beset upon the young adolescent a kind of
desperate need to cling back to what they had
known for a sense of safety. I think that’s
what a lot of the Lord of the Rings is, under
cover of being an adventure into the outside
world where people surely must grow and
discover new aspects of themselves they had
602
hardly known were there. Frodo and the

other hobbits are barely out the door when
they are beset upon by Middle Earth’s most
dangerous and terrifying predators —
members of the nine Nazgul. Frodo, in
betraying an insufficient lack of will to not
comply with that of their own, is just about to
humiliate himself, when suddenly a whole
host of Elves appear — a race that is the
oldest of the old in Middle Earth — and the
Nazgul flee their might.
The Elves accept them and surround them
with joyous cheer. But they serve pretty
much as if when just out the door, “mommy”
had called the neighbourhood watch to keep
an eye out for them, at the cost of the
“children” thinking this outside
world cannot be thought through on their
own. They are encouraged to learn this
lesson: if you further rebel against things you
have been instructed to requit to, they might
not receive you so kindly when next time you
are required to retreat for their support —
and then where will you be? Whatever the
Elves might want of you in future, you will
heed it. If you sense something awry about
603
them in any way, you’ll disown knowledge of

it, for fear your suspicion might be sensed.
Way back into your unconscious it will go,
and kept firmly guarded.
Subsequently the hobbits, in deciding on
their own way best to traverse the country,
find themselves in woods they prove
powerless to negotiate their way through.
The woods, with confidence, steers them into
a trap, to the ancient and angry tree, Old
Man Willow, who must revenge himself upon
everything foreign that ventures near its
grasp for so long seeing the world he is
comfortable with being disrespected by the
like of Saruman and Sauron. They’re
entangled and in the process of being
smothered, when suddenly Tom Bombadil
appears, a great Middle-earth deity, and
instantly intimidates the old angry tree away
from further tormenting the hobbits. Tom
Bombadil is another of the old order, akin to
the Elves, and the hobbits in their desperate
gratitude are neither ready to challenge him
nor resist him in any way. Like the Elves,
he doesn’t overtly do anything harmful to
them at all—but he does de facto show them
604
that who they mostly are are creatures so

powerless and unequal to him, so unfit to the
task of making their own choices in the
world, that in return for a rescue they’d
surrender to the rescuer anything he chose.
Indeed, Tom Bombadil asks for nothing less
from them than the Ring itself, and Frodo
just hands it to him, without question. This is
no minor sort of manhandling. As the
hobbits show they understand by Merry’s
remarking,“he came when he was told” (The
Two Towers, 576), after Gandalf draws a
compliant return from Saruman when he had
been withdrawing into his tower, they know a
demonstration of total command when they
see it.
The Elves were ultimately responsible for
this rescue as well, for they had let Bombadil
know the hobbits were about, and to look out
for them. Their being submissive to the Elves
paid off, and their perfect submission to
Bombadil pays off as well: Immediately after
leaving them they find themselves effortlessly
captured by Barrow-wights, an ancient sort
of fright, and after experiencing a terrifyingly
long moment of feeling entombed and set to
605
be eaten by the dead, they sing the song

Bombadil provided them to instantly draw
his summons.
Of course, it isn’t an entirely humiliating
situation for Frodo himself. The narrative
tells us it was in a sense flattering, in that he
possessed enough spirit to wake himself out
of the wight-induced slumber and make a call
to a rescuer. But this sort of acclaim, these
pro-offered bits — “grit,” “fortitude,”
“resolve,” “stamina,” “spirit” — always strikes
one as something ascribed to the hobbits for
them to take solace on, just after being
denied the ability to grasp at some greater
acclaim, something more profoundly
flattering that others are granted and enjoy,
and what they themselves are intended to be
forever denied. There are great people in this
world, people of great wisdom and great
might, and the hobbits will never come close
to that.
When Frodo arrives at Rivendale and is
amongst the Council, he’s pretty much at the
point where he’ll do whatever authorities
most familiar to him would bid he do. They
want him to destroy the Ring, so that’ll be his
606
course. He had suffered a kind of deep

humbling here in being grafted so firmly to
Gandalf, the chief guardian of the old world,
that no new voice has a chance to disentangle
him from it. Boromir’s that voice at the
council, instructing everyone that another
course does exist, that the Ring could be and
should be used. This is not even an enticing
idea for Frodo, brought forward again in a
new context where others other than Gandalf
have authority to spur at least some re-
consideration of it. And shouldn’t it be at the
very least, enticing, to the young hobbits? For
the idea not only represents a more
unabashed way of taking care of Sauron, but
of an individual making an impact on the
world that no one had accounted possible —
what every young person would at least leave
themselves open to, we would hope. Frodo’s
at the point where he balks back away from
any idea that might beacon self-discovery,
and for this horrible sacrifice, is kept within
the envelope of Gandalf’s warm gratitude.
This sort of balm is frequently offered the
hobbits subsequently. Every time they
provide some indication they feel as if the
607
adventure had been one long lesson on why

you should not actually ever venture out
beyond your door — if “venturing out your
door” means exploring new ideas and new
possibilities — and rather just capitulate to
the known, for otherwise a mean old angry
ancient forest or its like will immediately
show up at your path, Gandalf, especially,
seems to provide them with a soother after
just having stopped their efforts cold.
Indicate, like Merry and Pippen do, that they
probably have just amounted to riffraff
tagging along passively, start acting out
wildly, like Pippen seems to be doing when
he grabs the palantir out of the water and
later when he steals it from out of Gandalf’s
tight possession in unconsciously motivated
retaliation for being kept so tightly bound, he
— or maybe just the narrative — but really
seemingly he, makes sure that in the next
place you visit everyone will mistake them as
the like of hobbit princes. And doesn’t that
feel nice, young hobbits? If you discount that
it is mistaken praise, doesn’t it still feel quite
nice to be thought of as belonging to the
Middle-earth-wide fellowship of the lordly,
608
even if representing its least grand people?

Be passive acquaintances of the Ents, doing
nothing but be carried around as baggage
they can banter with as they make all their
own decisions, uninfluenced, and you get
later accounted as the tumbling pebbles that
brought about a major landslide! Bear a
humiliating examination by an Elf-queen,
where she, Galadriel, explores every crevice
of your mind in no less an invasive fashion
than how Sauron explores his subjects’, and
with no warning, with no permission asked
or granted, you get to bite back a bit if you
have the power to do so, as Galadriel
suggests Frodo, the Ring-bearer, does —
“Gently are you revenged for my testing of
your heart” (Fellowship, 480). But mostly
you have to learn to redirect the shame so
that it can be expressed not in anger but in
displaced form — in the last instance, for
example, with furious expressions of
gratitude, as she follows it with resplendent
gift-giving. You transfer agitation into an
acceptable form very quickly, else risk
expressing forthright, and thereby bear an
609
angry turn against you you won’t be able to

handle.
What is especially grating is that one
sometimes get this sense that others are
allowed to disclose a certain humiliating
truth about being servile so to further
guarantee that the hobbits who overhear it
ensure that much harder they don’t ever find
themselves in any of the speakers’ doghouses
— because then, they know, there will be no
further agreed upon cloaking of a full
accounting of their relationship with one
another. There is a lot of abuse handed out to
those who are mere dogs at the feet of
masters — Wormtongue, especially, suffers a
lot of this. And if you are a hobbit listening to
Gandalf scold the pathetically weak-willed,
those who have been cowed into always
complying, you know what kind of damage
he could inflict upon “you,” what kind of
truth he land upon “you,” if you should ever
really disobey him in a way that didn’t just
indicate your momentarily acting out but
rather your permanently stepping out from
subservience to his wishes. He’s like all the
human warriors in the book who come to so
610
appreciate hobbits, but who also make sure

the hobbits keep in the back of their
minds that this approval could be instantly
removed — for haven’t the hobbits enjoyed
the entirely of their ample, insouciant way
of living owing to their being secretly
protected by the efforts of men? Isn’t there
something absolutely false, something of an
ignominy — a crime — about their entire
ongoing existence?
It’s also grating that much of the growth they
are allowed to participate in is thin and
sometimes wholly false. Frodo is ostensibly
the wisest hobbit, and he is wise, in that he,
for example, knows to apply caution to what
he says so that it can be shaped for best
reception — as Captain Faramir says of him,
when deciding what ultimately to make of
him and Sam. But the wisest thing he says
and does is actually something inverse to
this, for it’s in knowing to trust Aragorn
when he meets him because what firmly
trusts that it is good can lapse in its effort to
always appear good. But this turns out to be
a shallowly learned lesson, for the ugliest
thing is shameful action, and it is to
611
avoid that — shame; how others would see

him — that he decides not to retreat back to
Rivendale when further progress seemed
blocked (Fellowship, 387), and it is to
avoid that that he does not give Boromir a
fair listen to when alone with him at the end
of Fellowship. To be beholden to others’
opinion of you is the ugliest thing
imaginable, for it means you are not self-
ruled, that you are a slave, but he is
everywhere so obsequent to its stirrings. For
him it is forever, what would Gandalf think
of me if I decided thus?, followed by
capitulation to Gandalf’s anticipated
preferences. When Boromir encourages
Frodo to choose to go his way, to take the
Ring to Gondor and make use of it, Boromir
quickly shifts from being friendly to being
insulting and aggressive. With his vulgar
urgency, even if there is some at first, there is
no long-sustained suavity in how he makes
his case. He argues that all of Frodo’s heroes
are timid, are frauds — which is the best way
to automatically make yourself ugly to
whomever you’re speaking to, and therefore
the first thing people avoid doing when of the
612
mind, for lacking confidence in their plea as

really so self-evidently for the other’s benefit,
that acquiring an ear will require their art.
He admits how fabulous he thinks wearing
and using the Ring would be, refusing to
conceal how it would be terrific fun to use it
to act upon the world with such
influence. And Frodo does not say, I would
normally be averse to trusting you Boromir,
but you so little mask what you know I have
been taught to see as ugly while presenting
your case, I will actually give further
thought to it… Perhaps you’re right, maybe
those I’ve been listening to are merely timid,
and I actually kind of knew it but had been
intimidated away from admitting this
openly to myself to avoid their reprisal — a
requirement they in fact installed in me by
being so ready to let me think of them as the
only rescue I’ve got from a world I’d
otherwise a hundred times fall victim to. I’ve
been set up, and it’s about time I admitted
this to mysel. You and I will take the Ring to
Gondor. He does not say this, but rather
dutifully goes about his appointed task and
takes what is actually the easy way out, out
613
of everyone who matters to him being on the

lookout for him taking the harder one —
namely, being open to all courses of action,
even those that’d have your friends decide
you’d spurned them. He’s ostensibly alone in
Mordor, its great bleak landscape,
accompanied only by Sam — but this is only
in one sense being alone, and it’s far away in
unbearableness from the most horrid type:
being forlorn of everyone’s good opinion of
you. And Frodo’s sad choice, born out of
deference, means he keeps all that with him
in spades.
But how now this mature man wishes for the
young adolescent me, the stirring young
adult in me, reading Lord of the Rings when
he was newly factoring how much venturing
he should do away from home, that he had. I
would have loved to have some voice sink
into my head early, sink into me then, telling
me, with an alien and exciting power, a
power outside one I’d known, that the true
way to growth might mean having to bear the
shame of appearing ugly to those you’ve thus
far depended on. Not just “the Shire” but an
“old world” representative as grand as
614
Gandalf may well think you’re slime for what

you’ve done, and you’ll be documented
thereafter as akin in disappointment to
Gollum or to Wormtongue. But nevertheless
you’ll be happier in being able to bear it, for
there are other, more worthy friends, to
match your arising self.
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Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Hollywood was your ambition... and so

it was required, also, to be your cesspool
615
Just a reminder that there are other ways

men can predate upon women. That man
who had genteel manners with you and
accorded you every respect, but who voted
for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton...
ostensibly over policies, but one couldn't help
but wonder, given the ample vile thinking
directed towards Hillary, and also perhaps
because the Sanders movement noticeably
eschewed talk of the empowerment of
women for talk on a suffering mass of
pictured as virtuous for their being so
deprived and for having taken on the
suffering for so long without complaint, if it
was because somehow mostly out of hate of
empowered, strong, professional women --
yes, that person unconsciously knows that
revenge can be delivered while keeping your
hands clean and yourself, in a sense, totally
out of the loop as to motive. (This, btw, was
Hillary's own sense of the movement. Also
Gloria Steinem's. Also Salon blogger Amanda
Marcotte's.)
This should be what we'll see, I suspect. For
this is not an age which responds well to
616
further encouraging people to reach their full

heights. I suspect a Hollywood (and
Washington) under fierce strictures...
something akin to what happens later on in
Dave Eggers' "The Circle"). On the surface,
amaze-balls great in providing support for
women (and, as we'll see, children) in the
future so that they never have to experience
the same. But at the same time I suspect the
idea of "professionalization" itself, the idea of
thorough self-empowerment, regardless of
gender, will become suspect as a selfish
endeavour in an age where we need to
obliterate our desire to be distinct and rather
allow that that is one of the things we need to
sacrifice, this ambition, this desire to become
totally self-realized, as we agree to commit
more to what the country needs as a whole.
(The former desire will be seen as linked to a
country that was, ostensibly, left to rot while
individuals thought only on themselves and
on their own kids.) The exploitation will stop,
but human reach that you once could have
accomplished for yourself had it never
occurred to you, will socially be withdrawn,
as we come to regard people who carry
617
themselves in a fully self-individuated

manner as belonging to an now rejected age
of selfish, individual, "me me"
empowerment. The praise will be descended
upon people who are, rather, mostly
interchangeable with one another --
members of a social type, a social role, that
has one looking beyond them to the great
nation they keep afloat through their hard
work, their self-sacrifice, their activity. We'll
stop becoming adults for remaining
perpetual children. It's the only way to garner
social approval.
Over the next few years, Hollywood will
slowly come to be regarded as a "cesspool"
which empowered the most vile people
imaginable. Anti-semitism will rise, and be
seen as justified by multitudes who never
suspected the possibility in them. The idea of
Hollywood as a place where you might
become an empowered star -- if you could
only escape the many pitfalls -- will lapse to a
sense of it as a place that created a self-
righteous grotesquerie who lauded
themselves over good everyday citizens,
618
while themselves taking delight in being

completely wanton and free of all controls. A
culture -- Hollywood; Washington -- that
possessed the great virtue of being almost
universally Democratic in politics; that
possessed the great virtue of loudly
showcasing the most essential thing about
progressivism -- that it takes delight in
showcasing and developing your true inner
stardom rather than deigning it a sin that
must be covered up -- will be inverted to an
example of the most depraved.
There will be no language to oppose it. For
the (overt) antifeminism, the pedophilia, will
be gone; become impossible. (Subtle
antifeminism and subtle hatred of children
will be ample, in that it'll be a culture that
will willfully ignore individual unique
development as a pretension belonging to a
now-disproven, retrograde age.) The only
redress for the individual trying to sort out
how an age that has become so "respectful"
became also so barren. That would involve a
kind of psychological analysis that has been
started but is near impossible to recover, as
619
its alphabet components are now alien to us,

which'd explore how so fearful we are of
growth, so "Calvinistic" we remain, that at
some point in ongoing postwar social growth
the only way it could continue was to make it
have it necessarily accompanied by lapsing
many multitudes into a maw of
abandonment and use. Past about the mid
1970s, the only way to have further avenues
for growth to express itself, was to offer it a
99 percent vs. the 1 percent culture, a culture
of accomplishing professionals but also of
loads of the forgotten, abused and ignored.
After the growth enabled by this society itself
becomes intolerable, there is no recourse.
Then it's time for complete submission to a
unit beyond one -- the mother nation --
whom all pronounce themselves as having
guiltily forgotten in pursuit of selfish
ambitions, and you have an end of a age.
Rebirth, a period where no one is required to
carry the society's sense that for good things
to happen some allotted group must carry in
themselves demonstrated proof of the costs
of ambition, gets enabled immediately after
the purge; after a generation, all that it might
620
have accomplished, gets lost... historically, at

least, as subsequent generations feel more
talents that never really let themselves loose,
and not therefore worth remembering, unless
-- like the "Greatest Generation" -- for their
bearing pain and loss without complaint.

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Review of "the Snowman"

621
I wasn't familiar with the director. It's about

a repeat predator, so certainly timely. But
also about a very circumspect, coifed and
careful one, so inverse. Relates it all to
childhood trauma; taking revenge for
childhood abandonment: revenge on other
girls for the crimes of the mother. I still insist
that's where we need to look to get at
Weinstein's illness. We think we reach brave,
but there's always a higher level of brave --
what nobody else wants to touch right now,
now that the proper decorum is simply to
admonish both oneself and the behaviour of
622
others: we've been bad; no excuse, we'll do

better.
A lot of people may very well hate this film,
but I found it a bit of a jack-of-the-box in
terms of surprises: within each scene the
director seemed to want to focus on
something to show that, in this light, isn't
this beautiful. So a human head on a top of a
snowman, so a curated snowman, so
landscapes of pleasantly loped seaside towns
full of manageably sized housing, so
variegated images of snow and frost --
fluffed, lightly falling, heavily massed, biting
fierce -- so curvaceous roads a sports car
would want to hug even as alls we've got is a
nice smart orange Mercedes jeep to visualize
it, so Harry Potter urban alleyways, so a
shotgunned man with pleasantly thorough
detonation through the head, so an array of
coffee beans in snow, so single dignified
coffee beans, so single shivering bared breast
of youthful maiden (though an importune
time to show women as unwilling sacrifices
to older empowered men as an aesthetic turn
on, a situational delicacy), so slightly older
623
beautiful women dead but mercifully

pleasantly intact and decorously draped and
contained in front car seat, so fountain pen,
so artful to-the-point decorated notes, so
comfortably confined luxurious bars/living
rooms, so wholes, so pieces -- never so many
of them to signal complicated but rather
within the immediately assimilable -- so
sublime red drips on white canvas as well as
forthrightly assertive red splotches (also
inadvertently "controversial," with Tampax
now forgoing blue for red and all)... all
beautiful; a revelation. I suppose if someone
likes touring certain realms of modern
architecture, or Danish modular furniture, or
fine paper stores, the movie might feel a well
saturated good time. I didn't mind it... maybe
a bit better than that. (I wondered what his
point is in the slight sway you see in many
scenes; pictures always slightly drifting, as if
the camera man was perpetually beginning to
snooze off.) Though real praise would have
been if the aesthetic had been in some
manner tuned in with the theme -- ostensibly
abandonment -- rather than just, I guess, a
tour of pleasures the well-enriched might
624
want to chase down in real life. Norway: it's

not all one thing, but dense, packed with
differentiated, vivid experiences.
Harry is a serial drinker, a serial smoker.
Why aren't we asked to know what his
childhood injury was? What lead to that?
Why is he a miracle-worker? Why are all
serial drinkers in the film miracle-workers?
Why would Scandianvians like this idea?
Aren't they all low crime rates, healthy
eating, and emergence from alchoholism?
Aren't they ahead of the world, not trying to
romance from behind because they sense
they're stuck so might as
well pretend behind is actually ahead? Struck
me that he should be the town dunderhead,
lagging well-behind all the intelligent youth
with intact brains. A sloth. A meathead. A
regret. Park bench material not part of the
day but all of the day.

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625
Conversations about Harvey Weinstein

at the New Yorker Movie Facebook Club

There's an ugly aspect of misguided
Hollywood mythology and self-mythologizing
in Harvey Weinstein's grotesque abuses of
power, both intimately and
professionally: https://www.newyorker.com/
…/harvey-weinstein-and-the-illusi…
626
Harvey Weinstein and the Illusion of the

Vulgar But Passionate Old-Hollywood Studio
Boss
Weinstein’s methods as a producer were
based on a damaging idea that old-fashioned
behavior is part and parcel of an old-
fashioned love of the movies.
NEWYORKER.COM
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richar
d-brody/harvey-weinstein-and-the-illusion-
of-the-vulgar-but-passionate-old-hollywood-
studio-boss
Comments
Andrew Kay This has been known for years
and now there's a reactive sanctimonious
reaction. Utter hypocrisy. He was the
successor to Don Simpson. Just read on how
Jennifer Beals was chosen for Flashdance...
like a piece of male masturbation fodder.
That was 1983. Etc, etc.
Peter Sennfeld Thank you Richard, the
New Yorker's hallmark of quality writing is
like a beacon of light amidst all the social
627
media fueled noise and chatter. I was getting

very tired of this story but this article helps to
put things in perspective and is well worth
reading. 5 stars!
Andrew Kay The story will run and run.
The next issue of The New Yorker will be a
meaty one about Weinstein. Then others will
be brought to book and there will be a lot of
he said, she said and smoke and mirrors. But
none of this is revelatory. Good people
(women, especially) did nothing, evil
triumphed. Good people that turned the eye
got promoted, bigger houses, nicer cars,
bigger expense accounts. Happens in most
corporations. I don't condone any of it, but
it's not a surprise. Where was the Duty of
Care?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Andrew
Kay They know the shame of being the sort of
people who aren't the Garabedians of the
world... those whose resolve to abet the good
and defeat cruelty cannot be drawn to
subside or waver. They'll feel already
forgotten to history, and none of their
current remonstrances with their friends
628
about how they couldn't really do anything

for his being too powerful, won't deflect their
awareness that there was a better way for
them, and that in having enacted it, they
would have felt a higher form of personal
integrity, a higher form of life and love.
Andrew Kay They could have whistleblown
and left on principle.
Cammie Cowan Anyone who read about
what was done to Judy Garland and was not
appalled can hardly claim surprise about
abuse of people willing to be exploited, or
otherwise exploitable. This story has not
been a secret for a long, long time.
Adelle Leiblein Andrew...I wasn't a whistle
they had to blow. �
Liz Kelton Sheehan What a privilege to be
able to get tired of this story. You know who
is tired? WOMEN.
Andrew Kay Other men are tired of other
men sexually abusing women too.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Isn't the
complaint by the Sanders crew -- the "far
629
left," that is -- that the last few decades have

been dominated by the rise of an empowered
liberal "professional class," at the cost of an
ever-expanding mass of people out there
forced to endure humiliating experiences in
low-respect livelihoods? That is, in co-
operating in making this about a stereotype
of a creature-of-appetite producer we have
been lead to believe is necessary for Art, are
we serving to distract attention that the
bigger societal problem isn't the prevalence
of gross men of enormous appetites like
Weinstein, but those of, if not actually much
smaller, at least more circumspect ones -- the
professionals; the educated liberal elite --
who've long lorded over society, enjoying the
multitudes of attendance provided by the
debased service/servile industry?
Actresses, in being forced in their profession
to have endure "casting couches," where they
are available for absolute rejection, and with
their often not possessing university degrees
and their not being associated with the
possession of them, seem to constitute a
profession akin to the low-wage, who are
630
perennially, frighteningly vulnerable, which

is why the abuse was given a pass by a class
of people who'd come to understand
upstairs/downstairs as the now legitimate
normal. For some of us to live well, others
must know despondency. And as a class, with
your defining features, you seemed best fit
for the role of despondency.
Most of us operate under this way of thinking
these days. It hasn't been a time where it
seemed excused for each and every one of us
to win, and we're admitting the results of this
fear of shared, universal prosperity, right
now.
Aman Ganpatsingh Sanders is not the ‘far
left’ lol
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Aman
Ganpatsingh I agree. But is ascribed as such
by some.
Julia Lagrua But these are really all first

world problems; films that could have been
better if the auteur’s vision had been
respected, actors who were sexually abused
631
and chose to look the other way rather than

risk their careers. I’m sorry but I feel for the
third world workers in this country who don’t
have a choice. Who care for other people’s
children, clean houses and hotels, sew
garments, pick fruits and vegetables, all for
shit money, and they keep silent about rape,
not to protect the chance of appearing on
some sitcom, but to hold on to a minimum
wage job that supports their family or to
avoid deportation. You know, if you keep
quiet about this kind of abuse you’re not only
giving the abuser a pass, you’re putting
others who follow you at risk.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston This is my
concern too. We liberals are way past
wanton, probable predator Bill Clinton and
onto clean, fit, wholly exonerated Obama. If
accusations (of inflicted sexual humiliation)
can be focussed onto someone who seems to
recall some personage -- i.e., Weinstein / Bill
Clinton -- we no longer identity with, and
exonerates those who are tidier and more
professional -- the good family man -- then
we cut short our own self-examination and
632
really just mozy on, even as we're still mostly

for an economic system that makes people of
certain backgrounds "fit" for our evolving
cosmopolitan world, and everyone else, if not
simply muck or trolls, then still really just a
nuisance. We'll once again be amongst the
last to really stand up for all the precariously
placed workers in America, for young people,
and their plight, and therefore for the
encouragement of sexual abuse that occurs in
workplaces where workers have no one to
turn to, and who sense, rightly, self-
evidently, that even their ostensible "own"
don't really give two sh*ts.
Valda Vee Julia, I think you are missing the
bigger picture. Harvey W. appalling behavior
has women all over the world opening up
about sexual harassment in all jobs, all
situations, not just the actors who "chose to
look the other way" -which is a bit too self
congratulatory, for me. #metoo -
Julia Lagrua I’m all for opening up, Valda,
it’s cathartic if nothing else. But simply
telling your story without identifying your
harasser is useless and leaves him/her free to
633
continue abusing others. Reese Witherspoon,

arguably the most powerful actress in the
industry, told of being assaulted at 16 by a
director or producer but didn’t give us his
name. The story about Carrie Fisher
delivering a cow’s tongue to a friend’s rapist-
very amusing but who the fuck is this guy?
How is a young actor with no money or
connections, or an immigrant nanny whose
rapist holds her passport hostage, supposed
to fight back when empowered celebrities
continue to be coy about outing these
abusers?
Valda Vee Julia Lagrua that wasn't a main
point of your comment. I was referring to
your rather deprecating reference to actors
and their experiences as being of lesser
relevance/importance than those women/
men working outside the film and tv
industry- "first world problem"?
Julia Lagrua Valda, it was the main point
of my comment. The entertainment industry
has paid my bills for 35 years, I know how it
operates. Actors condoning illegal behavior
of all kinds (some potentially lethal) so their
634
careers won’t be detrimented, makes the

abuse/negligence a first world problem.
Worrying about whether your artistic
aspirations will be squelched if you act
responsibly is a first world problem. Women
are being gang raped in Somalia (and in
virtually every third world country) but a
rich, powerful, obnoxious masher who makes
movies and was enabled by his victims, gets
all our attention.

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Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Review of "Black River Chronicles"

635
This is a well written book which I enjoyed

reading. Tight, effective prose throughout
much of it. (Spoilers ahead) I wonder if the
writers are aware, though, that the greatest
genuine adventure in their book is what they
636
might be up to when they suddenly decide

that what they're describing is worthy
enough to demand the narrator really work
at being precise, to nail the experience down,
particularly... to the point of risking
mistakes, seeming sloppy, seeming
ridiculous. "Slabs of stuff" (i.e.muscle) end
up matching with "elegant legs," in a
description of a unicorn which also involves
the "leaking" of its moon-white radiance,
which is quite a confabulation, but somehow
much more exciting -- adventurous, for the
reader -- than much of the rest of the
descriptions, which are exact, perfectly
chosen, but also -- expected. As well, count
me amongst the readers who delight when an
author is "absent-minded" enough to use
words that are precise to the situation but
which a reader might not understand -- I'd
prefer to not always be in their minds, thank
you, or else what are we all doing but
mutually likewise going on an adventure
we've already been on. No growth
opportunities there; that's no way for
OURSELVES to level up.
637
Someone criticized the book for not allowing

D & D type levelling up -- that is, levelling
through killing lots of things. And it is true,
first encounter is with things too innocuous
to kill, the second is with something too
resplendent to even think of killing, and the
third is something vastly beyond their ability
to kill: not so D & D. I'm fine with what they
offered, though, with levelling up really just
being about showing growth and
competency, a la, as many people noticed,
Harry Potter. The characters are kind and
amiable, with backstories that could haunt
their journeys, that SHOULD haunt their
growth -- they're distancing themselves from
their parents' ways -- if the authors let it.
Pretending to be mediocre so to not be
spotted -- for tactical purposes, that is -- is a
different thing than genuinely becoming
mediocre (i.e., boring) because every bit of
individuation brings to mind a father's, a
culture's, castigation.
Both writers cooperated in the writing, I take

it?
-----
638
1.0 out of 5 starsAbsolute crap

ByKindle Customeron November 22, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
Do not purchase this book unless doing so
somehow saves a loved ones life. The
protagonist is am archer who is afraid of
shooting anything because he might hurt it.
Including wild animals and monsters. The
wizards can't do magic unless they go back
after and pray for the magic to not hurt the
source of the magic. The warrior has no skill
or brains. He is literally retarded and the
rouge has a stick so far up her butt she won't
Dan to talk to anyone or work with them.
Until she does. For no reason. I made it
halfway through and couldn't take the slop
anymore. No development. Combat is
different ways to run away, no magic AMD a
crap magic system. Crap world development.
This book has no redeeming quality what so
ever. It would be better if the author deleted
all associated copy's and notes and .... Nope.
No and. Just get rid of it.
5 comments|2 people found this helpful. Was
this review helpful to you?
639
Bobo10 months ago

Report abuse
Am trying to decide whether to give this
book/series a chance. I always look at the
worst reviews first to see what negatives
might bother me about the book. ...but there
isn't much you've written, that is in the
summary about what this book is about. ...so
did you not read the summary and miss the
point of the book to begin with, or dis it
simply not that good of a book?
Leave a reply
David Tallerman10 months ago (Edited)In

reply toan earlier post
Report abuse
Strange that you should mention that, Mike.
My contributor copies arrived a few days ago,
and it so happened to be the same day that
my grandma was visiting. As bad luck would
have it, the poor lady accidentally swallowed
an apricot stone and began to choke; of
course my first thought was to perform the
Heimlich maneuver, but my gran's an
640
unusually tall woman and I just couldn't

reach. Fortunately there I was with twelve
copies of The Black River Chronicles: Level
One ready at hand, and piled together they
were just sufficient to bridge the gap in our
heights. The end result is that my gran is
alive and well and my copies are safely
ensconced on my bookshelf!
Leave a reply
Liam Hogan10 months ago

Report abuse
I made it halfway through this review and
gave up. Can someone tell me how it ends?
Leave a reply
Digital Fiction10 months ago (Edited)

Report abuse
You know, it's funny you should mention
saving a loved one. I was outside just the
other day imploring my neighbor and his
daughter to buy a copy of The Black River
Chronicles. Just as he happily agreed and we
exchanged a very reasonable 12 USD for the
paperback version, we all heard a bellowed
"FORE" from the golf course behind his
641
house. Without a second thought he selflessly

raised his new copy of The Black River
Chronicles to the danger side of his
daughter's skull, leaving himself exposed to
what was surely mortal harm. The tiny ball of
white extirpation struck the book so
forcefully it tore the book from his hand; but
the child was saved from certain death! That
was the first of many loved ones spared by
purchasing THIS book. I always carry an
extra copy of The Black River Chronicles, but
rather than fight the incoming menace I
bravely ran away. Thank you for the
opportunity to share this story, as unlikely as
it may be... -- Michael
Patrick McEvoy-Halston 19 days ago (Edited)

Edit | Delete
Guys, this commenter does bring up some
valid observations. The protagonists aren't
using wands but swords and arrows... sharp
things medievals used to butcher people, that
told you a lot about how psychotic and cruel
medievals were. Yet how do you have likeable
characters who learn to cooperate and
individually grow, all the while bloodying and
642
killing every creature they happen upon as

they adventure? It's difficult, and so, yes,
combat in this book is in a sense "different
ways of running away," or close to it:
sometimes the point is to delay effectively
until something else takes down one's
opponent--responsibility's on you, unicorn:
good thing you didn't have your horn and
couldn't impale him or for your gross breach
into blood and guts in this tale without
hither-to any such, we'd probably feel
inclined to shun you!; or how to use your
sword so it serves mostly as a staff,
something to fend people off with, keep them
at a distance, and buy time; or how to use a
fireball so that it's like a tribesman's patch
burning--not even not much of a harm, but
possibly a plus to the community it afflicts!
The point of "levelling" is problematic as
well, in that one of the characters is already
an expert at his weapon of choice. He sucks...
only because he has to pretend he sucks, for
what is an actually a very interesting reason.
No one wants to hear equivocations that later
when he no longer has to pretend he isn't
643
skilled, how, well, he's skilled, skilled enough

to be pin-point accurate, for sure, as already
laid out in him knowing he probably could
have used an arrow to pin an opponent to a
wall, but that there are actually refinements
to be made in even this level of expertise so,
lots of them, in fact, so... No, the plot went
with making him already an expert, which
was going to clash with the idea of their being
novices at a school, but was apparently
interesting enough an idea that the creators
went for it anyway. Own it, and if need be, let
the levelling system idea fade and die. His
involvement with his father, and what it does
to his performance on the field, is more
interesting than what further schooling
might allow for them.
Besides, the manner in which the unicorn
and the shape shifter are described... as them
being LOADED with magic, makes if difficult
to imagine beasts more truly dangerous for
them to encounter. We'll remember if in the
second book they meet dragons how much
more upscaling of its description will be
required for both of these creatures to seem
644
comparatively dimmed in potency. In my

judgment, given how these creatures were
described in book one, there's not much
room for it.

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Acknowledging all we have, and all

whom we are supposed to admire, don't
actually have, in "Blade Runner 2049"
645
Ryan Gosling is a replicant who is probably

the most important police officer working for
the order-that-be's police force. His job is to
take out, to chase down and kill, the previous
models of replicants, who are awry in the
world in that they have been programmed
with too much free will. As he goes about his
business, probably for the fact that he could
rip their arms off if he ever wanted to, people
feel free to sneer at him for his non-human
status but they don't dare touch him, so he
more or less goes about the world as if he's
got effective people repellent on him. That's
on the streets. In the air, he's king, as he
646
glides his vehicle through ample, uncrowded,

city-scapes, like a drone providing us with
Apple TV city vistas. And in the office, he
reports direct to the police chief, who doesn't
quite see him as human, doesn't see him as
her level, but who clearly respects and likes
him; takes more than a casual interest in
him. And he never has to present a false front
to her; oblige her in any humiliating way:
terms are known, and they can be lived with.
When he goes home, his apartment, though
certainly far too trim to be a castle, is not
exactly contrast to the palatial places we see a
select few others live in: it's not just crowded
tenement poverty, but a place, a downtown
apartment, with it's own downcast 80s vibe,
proudly one's own. A men's den, with, it
needs to be mentioned, one hell of a balcony,
that expands confidently into the city
landscape. And the girlfriend who tends to
him here is someone who genuinely likes his
company, who genuinely appreciates the gifts
he gives her, and who genuinely realizes what
they do to expand her own life. It's not false.
647
Unlike him, everyone else in the city has

souls, real memories, but we don't see much
of what the hell this actually does for them.
Their own memories of being bullied and
having bullied are real. Clearly, because just
look at their miserable adult forms! It doesn't
do much for them, and he might even have
gotten lucky, for unlike them, he might be the
only one who had a memory of feeling loved
-- someone gave him a wood horse as a gift:
and though it's a memory opaque to his view,
it must have been by someone who truly did
love him, else it's unlikely he'd of had a
memory of being willing to surrender his life
in order to protect his gift from harm. It
would be better for him if he knew this
memory was real rather than a transplant,
that someone out there, early in his life,
really did love him in a much deeper way
than his police chief does; which rivalled that
his girlfriend currently provides him with.
But at least he knows the memory wasn't
planted there in order to manipulate him in
decidedly cruel way; contrive him so that as it
turns out with Decker he's programmed to
come to love a particular person in a way
648
fortuitous to massive corporation's designs.

Only, rather, to fill him out a bit more as a
person. Not a virus; it's something his
makers are quite comfortable with him
taking ownership of and playing with (as for
example a orphanage "master" we meet later
allows his wards -- play, that is -- because
ultimately it's proven to work for him). A bit
of freedom, genuine freedom, he's allowed,
because it's part of making him function
happily and well. Masters not so completely
total in their control, as you long as you play
within bounds. That's what he's got.
And if the memory-maker gave him a bit
more to play with than they normally feel
comfortable with, well, the best they
managed to do is to get the genius memory-
maker on contract, not own her, for in this
world professionals clearly have their say too,
and control over them is only ever partial.
(Though to be a professional in this world
means being marked by something which
makes you more distinguishable form the
norm than any replicant is: one looks like an
imp, another is a bald albino, and she hasn't
649
any gene to ward her against viruses, so lives

in bubbles. And one notes, how all of this of
course makes them great admixtures for
Gosling in his role as important cop to bump
into, for they punctuate the daily "grind" of
downcast people like smart cocktails do a
house bar otherwise, more rounds of
whiskey.)
There ostensibly is a much better way of
living than this, available to people in this
world. The other replicants have it, the ones
he's hunting down. The one wholly isolated,
serving as a farmer -- he's got it. All we see is
that he's got more living space -- for living on
a farm -- than Ryan Gosling's got, but unlike
him he's got to be ever-wary. And his only
companions are dirt and grubs. He's seen
true love though, better people than Gosling
has... and he's stronger, prouder, and more
independent for it. And this would seal the
deal for him, if we believed it.
The problem for a movie is to make this
work. And the only way I can think of doing
so is through casting choices. We forget very
quickly that Gosling's girlfriend in the movie
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is an artificially intelligent, digital simulation

of one, one inevitably programmed to fall in
love with its owner, because for all intents
and purposes her love is played plausibly,
and so our only real measure of whether he is
slighted in having her as a girlfriend is if she
as an actress doesn't measure up, as a human
being, compared to some others we
eventually meet in the film. There is indeed a
moment later on where this kind of appears
to be so. He meets a prostitute -- another
replicant -- who engages with him with a
little more knowing canniness, she's a bit
prouder, likes herself more, has more --
perhaps ironically -- self-respect, and it's
really for all this that his current girlfriend,
who's all enveloping, self-sacrificing love,
seems maybe due a moment's re-evaluation,
than the fact that she's built out of an
intricate matrix of three components while
she has to try and make real and fulsome
what is only a bunch of binary "twos."
And the replicants who are free do not
convince (of their more solid "humanity") for
their not appearing to be happier people than
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Gosling is. Mostly, they're considerably more

dour. People in dark clothes with dark
expressions who intend war and revolution.
This wouldn't have been the case, though, if
the actor playing the empowered hunter --
Gosling's role -- in the film, was, say, a
known Trump-supporter, and the first
replicant he came to kill was a known, very
affable, progressive... someone like Mark
Ruffalo. So, yes, if someone like Clint
Eastwood's son came to kill Mark Ruffalo,
and Ruffalo said, man, you are impoverished
compared to me, it would seem real in a way
it simply is not real in this film. We'd think,
as might end up thinking, that if Trump's
power grows larger and those who support
him become empowered fascist policeman,
and those in opposition to him never not
know a very wary existence and become so
impoverished, as all their wealth is taken
from them, they start dining of things the
rich consider not-foods, we'd still choose
team Ruffalo because that's where the only
real love lies, the only real self-respect.
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It is for example the matter of casting choice

that made Captain America: Civil War about
making the party that didn't support joining
the United Nations, the more evolved one.
For the person advocating this choice was
Chris Evans, a progressive person, while the
person arguing the other side was Robert
Downey Jr., someone whom we can't be sure
how he'll vote politically a few years from
now... the guy might go down for the choice
which weighs against "the spoiled," as his
character does in Civil War. Chris Evans
stated in that film that the issue at hand was
whether "we" are going to surrender our
freedom because it's easier to put it into the
hands of others, because we are afraid of
what happens when we take ownership over
it ourselves. And we compared the actors --
self-possessed Chris Evans vs. self-hating
Robert Downey Jr. -- and decided that, yes,
this is probably what it is actually all about,
and decided for the outcast group (or
hopefully we did) because not behaving
masochistically, not throwing away our
freedom, is what keeps us feeling like we are
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people with souls rather than automatons

without them.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Conversation around Richard Brody's

argument that Aronofsky is quite wrong
concerning what his movie is about, at
the New Yorker Movie Facebook Club

Moderator · September 21 at 12:18am
Mother! has inspired a surprisingly divergent range of
responses regarding the simplest questions of all—what it's
about—and the most surprising of those responses are from
Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence themselves. I tried
earlier today to get at why the interpretive variety strikes me
as odd, why the director's and star's views strike me as
odder, and where, in general, filmmakers' ideas about the
meaning of their work fits into the movie-viewing
experience: https://www.newyorker.com/…/darren-aronofsky-
says-mother-is…
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Darren Aronofsky Says “Mother!” Is About Climate

Change, But He’s Wrong
What directors put into a film is different from what comes out of
viewing that film.
NEWYORKER.COM
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Peter Hoffman You mean what the director tells you the movie is
about isn't Biblical allegory in itself? I guess I'm going to have to make
my own mind up about these things.
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· Reply · September 21 at 12:28am
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Kat Van Exactly.
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Peter Hoffman "Whatever." ☺
The movie is the movie.
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Mark Schaffer Its only a movie, Ingrid..
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Mark Schaffer Is it time to show Carlin's Save the planet masterwork

again? Mebbe..
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· Reply · September 21 at 1:54am · Edited
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Herman Costa WOW This is brilliant . . . and I agree . . . there is no

greater explanation from anyone than the experience the viewer has of
the movie. Thank you! Now . . . will I see Mother! or not? Only time will
tell . . .
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George Jolly The only interpretation that matters is the viewers.
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Charles Brower Granting the obvious point that the filmmaker

shouldn't be the arbiter of a film's meaning any more than anyone
else, I think it's understatement to the point of absurdity to say that
"there are touches of religious symbolism in the film."
Aronofsky's overlay of a older man/younger woman, artist/muse
dynamic gives the whole thing its particular pungency, but it really
would be pretentious and laughable if he was saying that that
relationship causes fans to essentially recapitulate all the awfulness of
the twentieth century.
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Lizzie Nicholson maybe there's a little bit of a Tarkovsky perspective:

The film should not be interpreted...just taken in.
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Charles Brower I actually would agree with that. It seems to me a lot

of critics are getting tripped up because all the pieces can't be
assembled into one coherent explanation.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston We are so close to Lawrence as she gets

tugged, pulled, "microaggressioned" all over the place, as she tries to
keep up her tenuous hold on a status -- partial host of the household --
that is her due. How many reviewers give some indication in their
review that, "yeah, I know what that feels like... and it was a bit
upsetting to be put back in that position." It must be that this
recollection is occurring in audience members easily as much
recognition of allegorical elements. Do we intellectualize to keep at bay
reminders of being powerless and humiliated? This film, by the way,
could be usefully served by being introduced with trigger warnings.
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Charles Brower Certainly a lot of the reviewers on Letterboxd seemed

to have been triggered by it (and were pretty pissed off about it!).
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Charles Brower I know parenting is getting

better, but still a lot of people as children are deliberately managed by
their parents in ways that leave them feeling denied respect as
individuals, humiliated, often out of deliberate disrespect for their
efforts to grow up. This film will bring it all back to the fore.. with the
bright spot being that it is done without the principle character ever
denying to herself that she is being used -- she knows it, only that she
is denied any ability to do anything about it: when she (SPOILER) calls
the cops, it backfires badly. So people were right to feel triggered into
reminders of abuse, and good for them for being alarmed. The finish,
with her (SPOILERS) giving yet more of herself, after being so awfully
taken... is going to make some people feel that much more dismayed.
When they get their new iPhones, they'll be able to superimpose
thrown rotten tomatoes onto the theatre screen. Right now, the trigger
warning discussion should be expanded outside college campuses.
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Jenna Ipcar I agree with you completely – mother! is full of

superfluous symbolism, lofty rabbit holes, and allegorical structure but
the only thread that follows through on the entire film is the one about
relationship power dynamics.
Though if we're talking about the subconscious I find it a little
interesting that Aronofsky is always described as "annoyed" when
interviewers imply the movie mirrors his real life relationship, haha.
There was even one where he says "yeah I thought people would get
tripped up in that, but that's not it." Well, all evidence in your film
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points to otherwise, whether or not you were in the relationship when

you were writing it.
My question is why Lawrence read a script like that and thought "yeah,
I wanna date this guy!" But that's of course a bit more armchair
psychologist than movie reviewer... :)
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston I think we could do with retiring this

"armchair psychology" bit, if it still has any chance of causing people to
withdraw their relevant questions. Lawrence's character is married to
someone who constantly undermines her. She's likely repeating a
relationship she knew and became comfortable with with her parents.
It's on screen for people to discuss, so long as we don't insist it's all
allegory, and people aren't intimidated away by being catcalled for
their armchair speculations.
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David Kaiser I remain rather surprised that people think the film
could mirror their real-life relationship, for the simple reason that
Lawrence, at this point, looks to me to have more power in Hollywood
than Aronovsky. This may not be stereotypical but it seems to me a
fact.
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Jenna Ipcar I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to truly think

Aronofsky doesn't contain anymore depth beyond a single film he
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wrote, I'm sure Lawrence has multiple reasons of her own to start
dating him. That said, it just struck me as funny that of all of his films,
this one - about an artist sucking the life out of his muse - managed to
still inspire romance. But perhaps in real life the dynamic is swapped,
with Lawrence having the upper hand!
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Jenna Ipcar I'm not sure if the life gets
sucked out of her in "Mother!" She certainly is used, but it's hard to see
if he even really recognizes her as her, but rather as a part-object, a
toe to suck... the process you're talking about implies a direct
connection between souls that only doubtably ever took place at all.
The exasperation you feel while identifying with Lawrence and
watching the film is if anyone else is actually of the same humanity...
and the relief in the end, is "your" awareness that, no, they're not, and
they never will be... so have your toe to suck evermore, "I'll" head off
elsewhere--death being preferable to this. I guess she's supposed to be
a giving tree, but it felt more like a break-up film.... a weighing against
someone you once loved. She never once loses her sanity, while her
husband wafts in cult experience far far too long to be proved to be the
same kind.
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Jenna Ipcar I agree it's a break up film, though whether it was a one
sided romance doesn't discredit the initial connection, I'd say. Any
person who dedicates their life to rebuilding a home for another
person, metaphorically or physically, is doing that out of their desire to
love and be loved. Unfortunately it doesn't mean the person on the
receiving end is under any real obligation to reciprocate. She wants to
give him everything, but in return she wants his acknowledgment and
she wants him to give himself to her, something that he doesn't seem
to require or expect in the same way she does.
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It's definitely a mismatched couple as far as healthy relationships are

concerned, but it's also a total jackpot for Him. She indeed doesn't lose
her sanity, but by the end it's /her/ choice to hand over her heart (and
soul?) - this blackened diamond created after extreme emotional
pressure - therefore allowing herself to be turned into a beautiful object
he can place on his mantle for his eyes only. I got the sense that only
then does she realize that she never stopped to ask how or why his
home burned down, and by that time it's too late.
So even in a last ditch effort to save this romance, she keeps trying to
give and give in hopes he'll notice and reciprocate, but it backfires. He
simply doesn't define love in the same way she does, and he is
completely content with this object as memory of her love, vs a living
breathing person with emotions. So she shrivels up and dies out of
good intentions for his sake... only to be replaced by another mother
who starts the process over again. An ending that annoyed me! But
makes sense for Bardem's character and Aronofsky's script.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Thanks for the great reply, Jenna.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston I didn't have any sense of Javier Bardem as

artist. This bit -- In the film, it’s the writer’s will, the effort to break out
of an ordinary life through the strength of his artistic creation, that sets
the movie, and Aronofsky’s cinematic world, into grotesque and
fascinating motion -- comes closest to describing Lawrence, in that we
sense that her arc is to fight her way through all this will put against
her to proclaim some kind of victory for herself. I assumed Bardem was
scribing something akin to "the secret," or "the alchemist," or "the
shack," or "five love languages"... spiritual pablum, that appeals to
emotionally disturbed people. This isn't creativity. More participating in
the ooze.
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Kevin Barry All the blather about what it means and what the
symbolism expresses doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you can't wait
to get the hell out of the theatre. Mean-spirited, contemptuous,
pretentious, punishing and tedious, this is one more case of the king
being caught in the all-together. Considering the countless hours of
pleasurable movie viewing that most critics have enjoyed in their lives,
I find it hard to believe that any of them would be so gullible as to
swoon and levitate during anything by naked emperors like Bela Tarr,
or David Lynch, or Lars Von Trier, or Terrence Malick, or Darren
Aronofsky, directors who make films that allow audiences - and critics -
to superimpose whatever meanings they want over the silly hogwash
on screen. Mother! (Don't forget the punctuation) is one more piece of
incoherent junk from Mr. Aronofsky, a self-indulgent poser who hasn't
made a watchable movie yet.
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Peter Hoffman What role should logic play in cinema?
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Kevin Barry I meant clarity and structure rather than logic. It's much
easier to create something that's open to interpretation than it is to
make something that has a sound structure and makes a clear point.
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Peter Hoffman Is that the goal: clarity?
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Kevin Barry Why wouldn't it be? How can you communicate your
point without being clear about it?
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Peter Hoffman Seems to be anti-art.
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Kevin Barry Craft.
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Peter Hoffman Design over concepts.
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Christian Hamaker I was with you until you threw in Tarr, Lynch, Von
Trier and Malick. Please don't turn me into a "mother!" fan by lumping
in those other films/filmmakers with this one.
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Peter Hoffman There are no correct, monolithic lists!
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Mike Kerins Art in whatever form doesn't have to be clear or make a

point. Neither is it easy to make something open to interpretation as
everything is open to interpretation. Art would be pretty much dead if
it had to have the clarity and specifics of say a legal contract. Off the
top of my head there's Beckett's Waiting for Godot, famous for being a
play where nothing happens - twice. Joyce's Ulysses - just a walk
around Dublin? Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm - where's the clarity
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and what's the point - it's just paint drips? Even Henry James' novella
The Turn of the Screw is written in precision prose yet elicits
deliberately a less than specific conclusion to events. True art is
timeless and visited over and over again as people interpret it in
whatever way they feel appropriate. Only the passage of time will tell
as to where Aronofsky's work will fall but the fact it is provoking such
disparate views indicate he is on the right track.
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Rolly Rolly Amen.
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Kevin Barry Mike Kerins I'm talking about going to the movies, which
occupies a block of time in our lives, and is a totally different
experience than reading the works of literature you refer to. To quote
Roger Ebert: "I feel a bargain of some sort must be struck...See More
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Mike Kerins 'All the blather about what it means and what the
symbolism expresses doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you can't wait
to get the hell out of the theatre', library, art gallery or whatever forum
it seems doesn't agree with your shopping list view of...See More
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Peter Hoffman Maybe it's a sense that gambling on movies should

have better odds than Vegas. The director is obligated to give us a sure
thing, and we have a right to complain to the manager and expect a
full time refund.
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Mike Kerins Even the superhero franchises don't seem to be a sure

thing - unless of course you only count the money taken on the
opening week. I get what Kevin is saying but time and word of mouth
seem to be what decides a films status in the long run. If for instance
you put a list of classic films against the list of best film at the Oscars
i'm sure not many would match. At least the slow burners tend to
reach their audience eventually via dvd nowadays,
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Julie Cushing Well said. After seeing mother I've been disappointed by
every interview w Aronofsky and Lawrence that I've read or watched;
talking with people who have seen the movie is been a much more
fruitful experience for the reasons you outlined here. In the end I'm not
concerned with whether the movie successfully portrayed Aronofsky's
many metaphors but pleased by the fact that so many people,
including those who wouldn't describe themselves as interested in film
analysis, have had a really powerful reaction to it and want to discuss
the deeper meaning of the artistic choices. That alone saves it from its
missteps.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Are people talking about the deeper

meaning of the artistic choices, or just why (and not mostly "why," but
rather... what is wrong with this a**hole?) Aronofsky would make a film
which puts a protagonist/actress so through the ringer? Do you see
evidence of people's reactions drawing them to explore the film's art,
or just further speculate on Aronofksy's ostensible perversities?
Shouldn't we be equally pleased if after people react powerfully to the
film, they not only concern themselves with Aronofsky's skill and
mastery -- what he did to make us feel a certain way -- but what he
had been through to draw him (to make him powerless not to) to make
a film like this one, where a person has to try and weather through a
gauntlet of ghouls?
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Julie Cushing Honestly I haven't had any conversations that revolved

around aronofskys own demons, really just some commentary that he's
a pretentious ahole. Most of my friends who I've discussed the movie
with have at times in their life been severely depressed or otherwise
mentally ill, so the roots of demonic energy and unsettling aspects are
really not shocking to them and myself. And to your point about why he
would put an actress so through the ringer - ha! That's exactly his
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point, is the exploitation of woman as artistic inspiration, so does it

surprise me he does the same? Hell no.
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Lety Montelongo Andrew Sorgenfrei
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Lauren Elizabeth Valmadre Laura Mitchell
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John Salvatore Marin Smith
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Lizzie Nicholson actually the only thing i wish is that people would
move on from this movie. There are already numerous postings on this
movie, and i honestly don't think it deserves them. There's so many
other movies to talk about.
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Nina Berry He's not wrong. He just failed to be effective in making the
movie he wanted.
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Chris Okum Aronofsky is a wrathful God. Everyone in his universe

must suffer. He's like Roland Emmerich if Roland Emmerich had
constant acid reflux and good taste in sneakers.
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Ray Whitley I am not sure what the fuck I just watched. Mother is by
far the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life. Let it be known
that until I was 19 I went to the cinema for free and I worked at
Blockbuster for several years while in high school. So, I have seen a
hell of a lot of movies.
Mother lacked cohesion. Tried and failed at being edgy with a biblical
undertone. The cinematography was horrendous, basically a shaky
cam the.entire.movie.
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I am actually in shock at how horrible this movie is. Mother is the

absolute worst movie I have ever seen.
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Saturday, September 23, 2017
Discussion concerning not seeing films

done before a certain date, in the New
Yorker Movie Facebook Club
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston shared a link.

September 4 at 12:18am
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Elizabeth Blakeslee recently posted a

link to an article by Ann Hornaday
advocating for not "shutting down"
films or "locking them away" when
they become controversial, but making
them subjects of considerable
contextualization. She acknowledges
our time one where suddenly a lot of
the past is "problematic," and sees the
mature, grown-up response to this to
increase our awareness of these films,
to enter the past, even more... and at
grander, more prestigious venues, like
museums, cinematheques. The
problem with asserting this the adult
response is that what historians (she's
a film historian) usually use to justify
their own immersion in history and to
leverage their lecturing us on doing
the same, isn't as much on the table
now as it once was. It is not as evident
that human beings are the same now
as they have always were, making
knowledge of the past self-evidently
about furthering our knowledge of our
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own selves, about uncovering truths

that apply to us, a controversial
proposition; and as we begin to think
of history again as linear, as always
progressing, it is no longer as evident
that each age contains riches as
worthy as any other, either. And when
that's more the context you find
yourself in, arguing that not simply
cutting oneself off wholesale from a
unwholesome partner it was implied
previously you should keep in touch
with but whom you never really did
much like, is not actually the more self-
realized, the more grown-up decision,
seems itself problematic... it becomes
incumbent on you to justify yourself,
why you spent your life doing what you
did, once more. It becomes more on
you to explain why exactly you found it
so natural/comfortable to immerse
yourself in worse times populated by
worse people; and more on the films to
demonstrate that their ratio of art to
foul messaging remains sufficient to
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not judge them ultimately still

company we could do without--films to
be scrapped as readily as do statues
that contain no art at all, that being
the brave act, for it being an honest
act that to emerge had to fight back
against the common presumption of it
as appalling.
The very fact that Hornaday tries to
accent what might strike a lot of us as
quite a realized moment that's sprung
upon us -- that we're finally saying "no"
to Columbus and "no" to Andrew
Jackson; that we're not just teasing
pulling back "Gone With the Wind" but
more "Birth of a Nation" obliterating it;
that many very progressive people will
not only no longer themselves watch
Woody Allan films but clearly
discourage their children from doing
so as well, that we're not just playing
at but actually doing -- as only a
childish "wishing away," suggests that
what could be lost to her if what she
revered and gained revered status
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from loses its hold, is sufficiently

unsustainable for her that she's not
going to rely on reason to make her
case but crass elision and implicit
intimidation too.
Let's be prepared to have none of it,
and take advantage of this fortuitous
opportunity to bravely extend what we
have already agreed there is sense in
doing. Just as many agree there are
patch edits we should make -- no to
"Manhattan," but yes to... -- just as
many cineastes would argue that we
would lose nothing if we did a
horizontal exclusion and did without a
certain whole category of films within
our own time -- Oscar-bait films,
perhaps; films that flatter our liberal
sensibilities but contain no innovation
at all -- we should try out doing a
vertical timeline exclusion, and see
whether there might be a year that
could serve as a cutoff date where
before it, we would pledge to never
again dip into. If I could see no film
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done before the 1960s, for example,

Richard Brody would say I denied
myself both Chaplin and Wells, but
he'd also argue I'd made a preference
for performers who reflect "a
fundamental lack of fear, a sense of
impunity regarding the spontaneous
and natural inclination—a lack of fear
that has been ingrained from early
years," and denied myself knowing
people otherwise, which sounds like
something I could recoup with. Is there
a date you might try out? Maybe no
film done before when Hollywood
agreed that all white wasn't a
problem? Or even more recent: no film
done before when Hollywood decided
it would try out having Asian
characters actually played by Asians,
so just a year or two ago?
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Perspective | ‘Gone With the Wind’ and the

stewardship of our cinematic monuments
Do we remove them? Or put them in a proper context?
WASHINGTONPOST.COM
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Mark Schaffer Having none of it means dismissing almost the entire

Hollywood past, which trafficked heavily in sexism, toxic masculinity,
racism, ethnic characterization, dialect comedy, fof starters..Where do
you draw the line to feel morally superiior to someone from 1935,
1954?..Also, I'm not sure I followed your argument.
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Laura-Jean Kelly He wants to know if it s time for us to basically

boycot, ban, hide away art that is not as enlightened or as progressive
as we all are now.
No.
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Mark Schaffer To make himself feel morally purer and superior to

folks from 60 and 70 years ago..Its leftist puratinism at its best..
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Mark Schaffer The progressive academics have created this windup

army of moral indignation and released them on an unsuspecting
public.
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Laura-Jean Kelly I'm pretty left but I think this is too

much...theoretical and forced. Feels so left it can be right.
I don't personally want or Need to view GWTW again or study it, but
Some May want to and that's good I think.
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I like this article because it is saying we can we use film for its good
And its bad. Not banish things. Maybe context IS everything.
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Mark Schaffer I emailed Hornaday and suggested that GWTW can

also be seen as insensitive to bubble headed, well to do conniving
women..No response
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Mark Schaffer I'm not entirely sure that

people who would personally exempt "Manhattan" or "Gone With the
Wind" are just wishing to ban it because it makes an imagined
community that would still feel deeply attached to these films look
even worse (and themselves, that much more superior). There is a
component of such within some of them (not within the millennials I
personally know, though; they turned away in horror out of empathy
for what they believe they've done to marginalize and hurt people).
But I think mostly they watch these films and want to throw-up. Here is
Andrew O'hehir's response to the film. It's interesting, because for him
the appeal of the movie, its seductiveness, its art, ultimately contrives
to make it in the end even more wretched, rather than an element that
needs to be rescued: http://www.salon.com/.../the-confederate-
mystique-why-is.../
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The Confederate mystique: White America's toxic romance

with a…
SALON.COM|BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Laura-Jean Kelly But if this was rephrased

as, "he wants to know if it's time for progressives to detach themselves
from regressive people," then your "no" would require explanation
(using terms like "ban," "hide," "boycott," obscures this, as it paints
progressives as emotionally untethered people -- that is, as not
actually progressive -- or as cowards). Why not? Hasn't that been our
move since the late '70s? Detaching ourselves from flyover for more
enlightened locales? Haven't we already been doing it? And without
apology? Isn't what is happening just an extension of what a previous
generation decided to themselves do, but at a pace they can't keep up
with... it was never supposed to happen to them, AND THAT'S the
primary problem: some are deciding to fly over them, and in childish
overreaction, they effectively allow themselves to suddenly join the
rightwing mob of "True Patriot Love"... of those who've tolerated
enough insolent behaviour and want to strike back?
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Where would you want to draw the line in other
art forms then? Every renaissance painting which depicts a slave ought
to be locked up as well? ... just a thought ... this could go on �
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Ursula Hemard-Teri My experiment is what

has become my go-to... I don't really any longer read or watch material
before the '50s. If everything before 1950 was sent to oblivion, do I
think we'd be fantastically shortchanged?... I'm not sure I do.
We'd feast better on more nurturant matter, perhaps. If everything
before 1980 was, I absolutely would think we'd stranded ourselves,
however. History is linear, but built of cycles, where after a period of
sacrifice, a Depression, a major war, there's a lengthy period of
youthful permission that will permit art greater than what will be
produced by a subsequent generation at the termination of the cycle
that were actually raised more kindly. These folks, given more love,
which is absolutely a key ingredient for creativity, will not however
have as a surveying God someone who lends support to youth, but
someone who gives adults who can no longer keep up His full support
and approval. His power is too strong, and waylays any counteracting
factor... we have to wait past a period of penance and intentional
hopeless frustration (our current period) for the children of these kindly
raised adults to have an environment which gives lift to them, and
which bullies back all regressive old timers, to have as a result art that
surpasses all, once again. This maybe should be obvious, when we see
how many people want to strangle "unctuous" students and their
"extreme" behaviour these days... the same was felt by many in the
1950s, but boy did they end up losing: doesn't feel like we'll get the
same result today, though, now does it? These wonderful youth are
imperilled.
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Mark Schaffer What is the problem with Manhattan?
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Laura-Jean Kelly Patrick McEvoy-Halston. No i cant explain my

explanation of what i THoughT you were saying. Too much projecting
and theoretical talk for me...sorry...all the best.
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Mark Schaffer yeah! I was wondering about that

too �
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Patrick McEvoy-Halston I've read three times

what you just in the reply feed above ... slowly and concentrating ...
but I still cannot grasp what you want to say ... now you even bring the
supernatural superstition as well today's youth in it ... sorry ... in any
case, please be diligent and unpatronising with those who still very
much enjoy to read or watch from the past ... even if it's a simple
Lubitsch or Fritz Lang ... p.s. I can have a blast with my 6 year olds
watching Buster Keaton ... or reading Winnie the Pooh �
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Mark Schaffer Me neither
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Mark Schaffer Keaton objectifies women. Unclean..To the trashbin

with him..
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Ursula Hemard-Teri Dollars to donuts, every

artist from the past you liked voiced a sentiment close to mine own--
make hard demands on oneself. They didn't innovate and create
something new by admonishing people to revere the past, and they
passed over those who couldn't keep up where logic was demanding.
But, sure, I'm sure we can find a nice corner for you where you can
enjoy your Fritz Lang, Buster Keaton and Winnie the Pooh, just please
try and not get in our way as we pontificate their potential irrelevance.
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Patrick McEvoy-Halston � � � Buster

Keaton is not innovative?!?!? Lol
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Ursula Hemard-Teri They did innovate, but

they didn't do so by admonishing people to admire the past; they did it
by making demands on themselves and allowing huge portions of the
past to lose their authority on themselves. I'm saying their attitude is
fundamentally mine. A path is opening up that undeniably has some
sense... let's follow it, and see where we are.
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Mark Schaffer Uh..I think they were just trying to make a picture that
sold tickets
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Mark Schaffer So who is relevant through a 2017 aesthetic criterion?

Three names..
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Patrick McEvoy-Halston what path are you talking

about? �
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Yeah ! So who is révélant since 1980? ...

somewhere in this feed I read that Patrick thinks that everything g
before 60's or even the 80's is irrelevant today ...
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Thomas Zorthian Patrick McEvoy-Halston Your writing tends to

obfuscate, with lack of proper punctuation. It makes it hard to follow
your thesis, which may be the intent. I get the idea that you believe
people today are morally superior and do not need any art
producedbefore 1950. This is arrogant and arbitrary. I guess
Shakespeare doesn't have value anymore! This argument has nothing
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to do with liberal politics. Liberals are open-minded and these views

are closed-minded.
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Laura-Jean Kelly Thank you Thomas Zorthian. Hard for me to find the
words i feel.
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Thomas Zorthian ��

� �� exactly my
thoughts �
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David Kaiser Mark Schaffer I'd say it's sensitive to bubble headed
conniving women, not insensitive.
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Mark Schaffer Its not writing. Its typing..
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Mark Schaffer Test
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Laura-Jean Kelly I understood her article to be about Context. And

finding truth in art. Maybe that s on us to do that Ourselves...in our
own contributions. To express our truth in creative ways...like to me it s
more important for me to worry about expressing my own truth and
then Im less concerned with other peoples art anyway.
I'm not a filmmaker but If I Was I Sure would want to be able to reflect
on all the good inside the bad dated untruthful works as a point of
reference at Least!
Im afraid to read what you might say to me because i probably wont
understand it. In the right way. So Ill say sorry ahead of time...all the
best.
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Carol Steel Ban everything except cave art.

Is that acceptable?
Or will PETA object?
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5 Replies
Maureen Daniels Why don't we ban all WW2 movies? Then cinema-
goers would never have to think about Nazis and we could pretend the
Holocaust never happened. Oh, wait though, there is a world of
information that exists outside movies, plus the evil of men is useful to
know about in case we ever come across it ourselves.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston How did watching all those WW2 films work
to make America and Europe absolutely free from going fascist once
again? Weren't we all immersed with these films and their
contextualization, and what beckons ahead for us, now, exactly?
Maybe the only thing we learnt was that if we go fascist, in order to do
it guilt-free, it can't look overtly Nazi. Maybe that's the only thing we
ultimately learnt, how to properly "colour" our urges.
Maybe knowing about the past isn't what makes it less repeatable.
Maybe what makes it less so, is if people improve, and that comes from
more encounters with people who are emotionally healthy and fewer
with those who were born out of more deprived environments. If this is
the case, then going with Brody's films made after 1960, which show
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people who are looser out of coming out of less constrained

childhoods, would be the trick we need, not delving further within less
emotionally nurturant times.... the 1940s, and before.
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Maureen Daniels A lot of maybes there! Actually I think people

improve and learn more from meeting those with more deprived
backgrounds. I must say also that I disagree with the notion that
GWTW glorifies the slave owners. None of them were really nice or
admirable people.
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David Kaiser Not even Ashley? But basically I agree with you.
Incidentally, I've never read the whole book. In one of the first scenes
Gable warns everyone that the South is going to have a very tough
time in the war. Is that in the book?
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Maureen Daniels So the 1970s liberals

would have been better not flocking to coastal cities and effectively
only knowing one another, and rather just staying in small towns, the
South, the midwest, Pittsburgh, Detroit? Or are you just conjuring the
image of people who've long spent time with their own crowd and sent
their kids to schools exempt from struggling America, demonstrating
superiority via platitudes they weren't fool to?
I like your contribution about how the slave owners were actually
portrayed. Sounds like we're more getting into it.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston David Kaiser Morris Dickstein, in "Dancing in

the Dark," argues that the film is ultimately anti-nostalgic, that, "[f]ree
of all nostalgia for the old order, she [Scarlett] spunkily embodies the
commercial awakening that came to be called the New South. For her,
indeed, 'Tomorrow is another day.'"
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Maureen Daniels Patrick, I'm with you from "Or..." onwards! David,
Ashley is really weak, spineless and two-faced! Melanie is the "nice"
one, but too good to be true.
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Yes, to me that was the msg of the movie that
Scarlett was the only progressiste who was embracing the changing
world order ...
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Mark Schaffer The movie was the apotheosis of 30s screwball

comedy, with a plucky, resilient heroine ala Stanwyk or Rogers parrying
with screwball comedy foil Gable and making her own way after her
world disappears...There so many movies that preceded GWTW that
depict bubbleheaded, well to do women tended to by knowing African
American maids who were way more on top of things than their
flustered employer..GWTW is built on that foundation..So's the
book..Do we now dismiss all white telephone movies because they
feature subservient African Americans? What does this achieve?i
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Thomas Zorthian Patrick McEvoy-Halston You state "If this is the

case, then going with Brody's films made after 1960, which show
people who are looser out of coming out of less constrained
childhoods, would be the trick we need, not delving further within less
emotionally nurturant times.... the 1940s, and before." First, you don't
explain who Brody is, and I don't know who you are talking about.
Second, it is absurd to believe that there weren't loving, nurturing
parents before 1940. A lot of the enlightened values you hold have
been around for a long time. Read some more history and study some
philosophy. Open your mind instead of shutting it.
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Thomas Zorthian Patrick McEvoy-Halston What does this mean: "Or

are you just conjuring the image of people who've long spent time with
their own crowd and sent their kids to schools exempt from struggling
America, demonstrating superiority via platitudes they weren't fool to?
" What are platitudes they weren't fool to?
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston I would take as a compliment if someone

argued that my own voice here is actually akin to
Scarlett's: http://www.nytimes.com/.../01/books/review/White-t.html...
Book Review - 'Frankly, My Dear - “Gone With the Wind”

Revisited,' by Molly…
NYTIMES.COM
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Ursula Hemard-Teri That was a hell of an article/ essay � .... I

think Selznick was a very shrewd business man ... he produced what
he could sell... I don't think he put anything if his personal ideas into
the movie but what people out there are wanted... GWTW was a
product of its time .... this is what people wanted to see and felt
comfortable with ... that's why the success and the bucks ... at the time
.... today's audience is totally different
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Ursula Hemard-Teri Thanks for the reply. I

argue below though that our times may not be at all totally different,
and rather simulacrum-akin. See if it checks out.
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Ursula Hemard-Teri It would be interesting to note that GWTW was

forbidden/burned in all former communist countries because of its
nasty capitalist/private landowner depictions ...
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Maureen Daniels Indeed, and the airbrushing of history is what I am

dead against.
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Mark Schaffer It also was celebrated in the UK as an inspiration to

Brits during their darkest times in the blitz, when their way ofblife was
in jeopardy.
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Mark Schaffer Still having trouble with the basic argument here. Shun
pre-1960's popular art because it depicts people treating people in an
unenlightened fashion?, as no doubt art does so glowingly now? Where
is the value added here? No Hemingway but dollops of Alice Walker?
Thoughts? I don't read much of anything past 1960, butb that's just me
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Just as a note guys, my background is

English literature studies... I spent years exploring works from Chaucer
on up. But after I did that, I realized that I still found myself mostly
reading works from post WW2, and I don't think out of comfort level --
which had been tested, with the long immersion I spent away from
contemporary literature -- but because of what Richard Brody got at in
his reviews of films made in the 1950s vs. those done in the 1960s(+):
there's something healthier about the writers, and for me, this equates
with more copious bravery, with greater human extension into terra
incognita for their having the emotional bearing to do it (though I think
we're regressing lately... Dave Eggers, Sadie Smith, Franzen, Foster
Wallace are not greater, in my judgment, than Roth, Updike, Atwood
and Ann Tyler).
I actually think that "Gone With the Wind" is the opposite of being at
risk of being whisked away, as it was created in a period with strong
correlations with our own. Secretly, it'll probably find even more appeal
to liberals: for like Scarlett and Rhett, they too are noticing that many
of their peers who previously were comfortable in their assumptions,
and comfortable, generally, are finding it difficult to get by as readily
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as populist attitudes gain hold and their staked territories are under
siege, and are thinking on making the emendations advised by the
likes of Mark Lilla (whose recent discussion with Remnick is
here: https://www.newyorker.com/.../a-conversation-with-mark...) to
themselves survive and prosper. It's a film that will likely be re-created
many times over in our coming period, even as the real inspiration is
probably not the film itself but the twinned nature of our unsettled and
scary times. https://www.newyorker.com/.../why-its-impossible-to-re...
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Ursula Hemard-Teri English is my second (or third?) language ...... I'm

surprised how much is read int GWTW. ... tons and tons of arguments
and essays about every little detail ... to me the story is a typical story
repeated in almost every country and language ... namely the
importance of your own land .. that security is if you posses at least
little bit of a land for yourself to cultivate ... if you have your land you
won't get hungry ... etc. .... from Laxness to Checkhov to Hamsun to
Knittel to Steinbeck ... etc. .... the main character in GWTW to me was
always Tara ...
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Ursula Hemard-Teri Fascinating.
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Mark Schaffer Well put..Its a national epic that plays out in every
country..
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Sadie Berlin Loads of theatrical comments on here. I'm not sure we've
read the same article. It's rather temperate.
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Mark Schaffer Hornaday is uber temperate
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Maurice Yacowar why boycott a work if there's no threatening

connection between its themes and its maker's transgressions? how
does a Gig Young flick endanger anyone's wife? or your boycott prove
the operative reason someone else won't kill his? i guess basically it's a
matter of what each individual finds discomfiting to what extent
they're willing to forgo some experience, provocation and experience.
You're going to skip Blue Jasmine and Crimes and Misdemeanors
because of Mia's muddied claims (including, of course, her subsequent
campaign to free Roman Polanski)? Given all that is NOT known I'm not
prepared to condemn Allen at all. on the other hand, i'll boycott a work
that promotes prejudice, especially the currently ubiquitous
antisemitism, so I've dropped the Met for producing The Death of
Klinghoffer (spoiler alert: the elderly Jewish tourist doesn't "die" there;
he's murdered by Palestinian terrorists,whome the libretto valorizes at
great cost to history, peace prospects and civilization). I've stopped
going to Ken Loach films because his knee-jerk antisemitism (posing as
antiZionism, which in a world with about 60 Muslim states and that one
threatened sliver of a Jewish state is the same thing) undermines any
credibility I can expect from his political position on anything.
Interesting that Israel banned The Merchant of a Venice for many years
and the Nazis banned it as well. That's arguably the best reason for
staging it.
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Maureen Daniels Ken Loach is absolutely not an anti-Semite and I will

remind you that Palestinians are Semites too.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston "why boycott a work if there's no

threatening connection between its themes and its maker's
transgressions?" Who amongst those who admire a work of art is going
to find the "interesting" connection between its themes and its maker's
transgressions, if they did exist? If they do in fact find some, they'll
self-implicate in their own admiring of the work. To even consider this
takes courage we don't often see. And I'm not talking boycott, myself.
I'm suggesting that progressives have often been those who detach
themselves from regressive cultures they've been smothered by
counting too long amongst. If we find other time periods less
progressive than our own, and we see once again that history is mostly
linear, so that what was progressive 50 yrs ago does not meet the
standards of today, but it is superior to what was considered evolved
50 yrs before, and so on, then it seems strange that we seem to reify
all art through history. It's a useful experiment to wonder if there might
in fact be a date where you could cut off yourself from all art done
before it, and actually be better off. It's time away from more intensive
immersion in healthier periods. I think the thought experiment is fun,
not a cause for panic, and for a pretty unsophisticated exploration of
what progressive actually means... some would think it means trying
out moving on.
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Mark Schaffer Okay..So my cutoff date is the 1300s. So long

Aristophenes and his ilk..
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Maurice Yacowar Maureen Daniels in common usage 'antisemitism'

connotes hatred of the jews, including its current form in anti-zionism.
Loach supports the bds movement which the founder has dedicated to
the eradication if the Jewish state.
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Maureen Daniels Absolute nonsense Maurice Yacowar. I know all

about its common usage, which is not to say it is accurate. All Jews are
not Zionists and vice versa. There are also Jews who support BDS in
protest at Israel's actions.
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Herman Costa I'm sorry, but Burning Books, Banning Movies and
Censoring Speech have nothing whatsoever to do with being
Progressive. I do appreciate that we all have the freedom to express
our points of view on these controversial questions in this Open Forum.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston Beginning to elide the past, has a lot to do

with being progressive. Calling out people who are questioning a
reverent stance towards past artwork as censors and book-burners, is a
conservative inclination. Innovators, those who can still let go, come to
seem "uppity."
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Herman Costa GWTW may be cloying, oppressive and an unbearable

piece of propaganda to sit through, but -- like the overtly racist themes
which support and promote the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation, a
silent epic by D W Griffiths -- it should not be censored, thrown into the
fire nor erased from history. Racism has been rampant in this country
since before 1776, and it continues to flourish in 2017. We need to face
our own history of violence against the slaves we dragged here from
Africa as well as the slaughter of the indigenous population that
flourished here for centuries before the arrival of Europeans nearly
wiped them out. We need to take responsibility for our actions -- then
and now -- and begin to make reparation for out unfathomably
unacceptable actions. Sweeping our history under the rug and keeping
it out of sight will merely help to perpetuate the already existing
problems. I suggest that we begin to look at GWTW not as
entertainment, not as a light romance, nor even as a depiction of the
historical era during which the Civil War took place. The time has come
for us to view it as just another example of the shameful perpetuation
of Racism in America, and we sit and we watch it in solidarity with our
black brothers and sisters who have endured this oppression for far too
long.
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Mark Leach Cineaste? Really?
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Mark Schaffer However, I do propose a total ban on all Adam Sandler

movies would be be a small step for persons..One large step for
Personkind..I'm down with that
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Jane Middleton You know, Sandler did a movie about a guy who lost
his family in one of the 9/11 planes. Don Cheadle (no less) was also in
it. Sandler was good; the movie got me.
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Mark Schaffer Yeah, and he will be in the running at Oscar time for
the Brothers Mendelson..So a few get a pass..Just wish he respected
his obvious talent..
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Thomas Zorthian Jane Middleton Reign Over Me was the movie.
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Mark Schaffer The Meyerwitz Stories. Sandler apparently kills in it.
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Raman Umamaheswaran There's Punch-Drunk Love too. Sandler isnt

really bad , he's just found a formula that makes him loads of money at
the expense of artistic value, and really, who can blame him for
wanting money?
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Mark Schaffer Yeah..Good in that..And The Cobbler. So why does the

guy insult his talent? Doesn't want to confuse his doofus fan base?
Who knows?
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Ursula Hemard-Teri Patrick is trying to convince us that he is right ...

the problem is that I'm not quite sure what it is what he's so right
about ... my humble intellect can't follow .. �
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Thomas Zorthian The problem is not your intellect, it is that is writing

is flawed and confusing.
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Thomas Zorthian correction: it is that his writing is flawed and

confusing.
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston You're the horse, wondering in

bewilderment. I'm the statue, only hoping the sand will soon bury me.
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Mark Schaffer Very Rimbaud there. Is he still relevant? Dunno
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Thomas Zorthian Patrick McEvoy-Halston That clarifies everything.

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Mark Schaffer Damn you all to hell! Movie prolly irrelevant because it
objectifies apes..
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Andrea Estepa I don't think the apes are objectified at all. They are
fully developed characters.
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Mark Schaffer Uh.,This is called satire
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David Kaiser The apes certainly objectify the humans!
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David Kaiser By the way--my favorite moment in that wonderful

movie is when Heston has escaped from his cage and is trying to find
somewhere to hide. He finds himself inside some sort of temple where
a funeral is in progress. The clergyape is saying, "The deceased once
told me, 'I never met an ape I didn't like.'"
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Andrea Estepa Mark Schaffer I thought I was playing along. Sorry you
didn't get that.
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Andrea Estepa David Kaiser Exactly!
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Mark Schaffer The horror!

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Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Self-sacrifice to appease, and prevent a

re-visit, in Aronofsky's "Mother!"
Tal Abbady, in an interesting comment in the

thread discussing Richard Brody's review of
"Mother!," guesses (she hadn't seen the film)
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that Michelle Pfeiffer was probably

squandered in this film, yet in reality
(SPOILERS AHEAD) the first half of the
movie really could have had the title seem
mostly about Pfeiffer, and her terrible
incremental invasion... and thus a clear twin
to "Black Swan," though its inverse, in that
it's the mother who makes herself queen of
the show, relegating the young woman from
front and centre to background. Then she's
gone, with really just hooligans and a PR lady
and an idiot priest after her thereafter--a
mistake for the Devil, as it recovers the movie
a bit for Lawrence: these lot are ample in
numbers, but without perspicacity, without
cunning, and an eventual escape from them
can be imagined once she's built up enough
fury, with "Mother!" being then clearly about
her as pressed upon young nature goddess,
doomed to whither, but with one last gasp of
vengeful destruction within her.
"Mephistopheles" appears to do the principle
damage, leaving her demon horde to do the
mopping up... is how the movie as is might
feel like, in how the movie transitions from
709
weight in personality and individual

formidableness to simple weight in numbers.
Could you imagine if the movie had ended
with suddenly Pfeiffer reappearing and
taking the gift Lawerence offered her
husband, snatching it out of her hand, and
saying, "no dear... I'm the one who
orchestrated this moment for your husband,
and I'll present this gift, AS I'M DUE," with
Lawrence having nothing to do but let her
last few bit of healthy flesh relapse to become
as dead as the ash the rest of her had
become? The movie would finish with
Pfeiffer's last words as a horrible chastising
chortle, "No, in fact I am the queen, I am the
queen, you miserable scene-stealing c**t of a
daughter," and we'd see her image fluctuate
with that of Hershey, and back, to Hershey,
and back, to Hershey, and back... sort of the
finish Aronofsky clearly pulled back from (to
save the audience, and himself) in "Black
Swan," to offer us instead the mother rather
implausibly agreeably accepting her
displacement and earnestly cheering her
daughter on as she performs.
710
Youth might have its moment, but in the end,

"Mother!"/Mephistopheles will pay you back
for every bit of tribute you stole from her.
You'll never be allowed to forget your
slighting... Mother. Fin.
Anyone else finish their watching the movie
thinking something odd about the whole
second half of the movie featuring a surplus
of armageddon, but the absence of a single,
truly scary, predator? Is the second half done
in appeasement, a supply, to her, the scary
mother, the one worthy of an exclamation
mark, so that in the end she doesn't revisit?
Is that the "victory" of the film? That so much
carnage is thrown to placate her that in the
end she's so much in the distance it becomes
difficult to excavate exactly whom "Mother!"
is referring to specifically?... it's really the
sheepish ingenue? Really!? Certainly points
there, but after being pushed about and half-
raped, and her giving the last scrap of herself
to her resurgent husband, that can't be right:
the exclamation mark is way too
insufficiently limp.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
711
Film Reviews (updated)
Mother
It
Logan Lucky / Patterson / Hell or High
Water (discussion)
Beguiled (discussion)
Detroit
Dunkirk (further discussion)
Dunkirk (discussion)
War for the Planet of the Apes
Spider Man: Homecoming
The Mummy
Wonder Woman
Baywatch
Alien Covenant
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
712
The Circle
Zookeeper's Wife
Life
Beauty and the Beast (second of two
essays)
Beauty and the Beast (one of two
essays)
Kong Island
Logan
Get Out
Nocturnal Animals
Fantastic beasts and Where to Find
Them
Arrival
Loving
The Witch
Hacksaw Ridge
Dr. Strange
713
Moonlight
Inferno
Keeping Up with the Joneses
The Accountant
Birth of a Nation
Girl on the Train
The Magnificent Seven
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar
Children
Captain America: Civil War
Deadpool (Superimposing another
"fourth wall" Deadpool)
Deadpool (Dead potential)
Hail, Caesar!
The Big Short
The Force Awakens
In the Heart of the Sea
714
Bridge of Spies
Steve Jobs
The Martian
The Overnight
Inside Out
Jurassic World
The Avengers
The Hobbit (book review --2014)
Ex-Machina
American Sniper (from American
Sniper to Triumph of the Will?)
American Sniper (Eastwood's comfort
zone)
Exodus: Gods and Kings
The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
Fury
Guardians of the Galaxy
Boyhood
715
Lucy
Railway Man
Transcendence
Bad Words
Draft Day
Nymphomaniac
Noah
Divergent
Non-Stop
Pompeii
3 Days to Kill
12 Years a Slave (it might not have
been worth it, Lupita)
Oscars (too late -- we saw your boobs)
Gravity and 12 Years a Slave (out of
the frying pan and into the fire)
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
716
Her
Wolf of Wall Street (fork in the road)
Wolf of Wall Street (part two)
Wolf of Wall Street (part one)
12 Years a Slave
Ender's Game
2013 films, accompanied by text by
Lloyd deMause
Gravity
Carrie
Don Jon
Prisoners
The Family
Insidious 2
The Butler
Kickass 2
Blue Jasmine
717
Elysium
Only God Forgives
The Conjuring
The Wolverine
Pacific Rim
This is the End (and summer self-
surrender)
This is the End
The Bling Ring
Man of Steel
Mud
Star Trek: Into Darkness
Oz the Great and Powerful
The Great Gatsby
Iron Man 3
Pain and Gain
Place beyond the Pines
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Oblivion
Brave

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Friday, September 15, 2017
"Mother" is about being manipulated,

crowded, feeling powerless and
unattended to, but not about lying to
yourself... you see the villainy
719
You don't have to go the allegory route at all.

My guess is that doing so takes away from
how one experienced the film. Most people of
course experience the film as what it's like to
be someone who's walked over for two and
half hours, with every chance to call "stop!"
whisked away by the sudden provisioning of
an excuse for the behaviour that seems sound
enough you wonder if you're just
hypersensitive... or perhaps more accurately,
if the possibilities of their sadism might be
limited to what can be excused as about
something else, and therefore seemingly
intrinsically contained as to possible damage
720
(and they as guests have to leave sometime,

don't they? they can't breach the limits that
category besets then with, can they? her
status as wife and hostess must ultimately
hold, or surely they're marauders, and her
husband, a maunder-enabler, mustn't it?).
Some of the manipulators turn clever, and
actually earn your stepping back, your being
open to actually lend them room, by offering
a mother's sagacity as to why, for example,
you're having marital problems, but
eventually the molesters stop needing
excuses and indeed stop using them --
they've gained ground, walked on her wifely
authority often enough it's been proven sad
and inert... as surely never having earned
being something they should take heed of in
the first place, and just blatantly use her.
Which is freeing in a way, for even if she's
still mostly powerless, at least it's a finish to
her opponents using their greater skill at
manipulating social conventions from
preventing her from standing her ground. If
they go at her in future, they just call her a
c*nt to her face, which exposes her to
721
thundering verbal assault, but themselves

also as blatant villains. These type, if ever you
have the chance, you can kill... you can
collect together and burn the f*ck down.
That'll offer some relief (and when it does
happen, it indeed does... though expecting
maybe a Carrie-finish, with her, the revenger,
on top, rather than dramatically immediately
superseded, surprisingly, very momentarily).
Just don't of course call the cops, for when
that finally succeeds, it's only be because the
situation has changed so that it'll work
against you, badly.
She gets to hold her new born child to herself
for a very short while, with everyone else --
including her husband -- blocked off. She
gets to know the pleasure of borders,
maintained by herself, that her house and her
husband never provided her with. And then
this short period ends, the crowd devours her
baby, she gets kicked around, brutally
molested, and half-raped, and basically
agrees to let her husband own her soul. It's
voluntarily given -- the soul-giving, that is --
and it seems weirdly earnest; not just about
722
capitulation to the inevitable -- and her

husband actually motions an initial genuine
refusal of her gift, so maybe this feels like an
act of strength on her part, being a
benefactor.
If there is a Christian parable about refusing
someone the very moment you sense people
are using social convention to manipulate
you, that touching, even lots of touches that
convention says is appropriate -- a grab to
the shoulder to ostensibly garner attention --
is often about handling and manipulating
you, is meant to be demeaning, IS assault,
and therefore that much more insidious than
a crotch grab for having cover, then that's
what this film is about. If there's a Biblical
parable about, failing that, the only way out
into a safe place in the cosmos is to offer
yourself as sacrifice for your partner's
renewed efforts at "five love language," if-it's-
good-enough, cult-forthcoming poetry, then
it's about that. If all religion belief is about
finding a way out that could provide a pause
for feeling genuinely appreciated after having
723
known a history of being constantly,

sadisticly, used, then it's about that...
And if this means they're being doomed to be
beholden to idols, to be for eternity, weird
children, more attached to fetish objects than
they are interested in people, when they
should be aiming at being adult men and
women, or urged to become that... well, that's
not your concern. You've earned your escape
route, your reprieve. There's no route
anymore for well-loved babies, a spark for
the future -- you've tried that, and that
couldn't have ended more badly -- so let
what's come to dominate, the human house,
full now only of mentally disassociated idiots
that have gone whole-hog crazy, fervently
interested only in repeating cycles and
staying in place, burn the f*ck down. Or not...
maybe they'll prosper, feel deliciously
pleasant in their craziness. The point is,
you're finally not involved.

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724
Sunday, September 10, 2017
"It"'s as familiar to many as plain

ordinary adolescence: a review of "It"
Take out Pennywise and this is what'd befall

two of characters: one would be repeatedly
sexually molested by her father, another
would be imprisoned by his mother all
through his adolescence. All of the kids
would go through school, tortuously bullied.
So the film is a bit "Breakfast Club" (it's
referred to in the film) in that something
unfortunate draws the characters into further
725
entwining with one another in a way which

gives them each greater support and
strength. It's another film which seems very
concerned to isolate empathy only to specific
characters... that is, it leaves bullies as just
basically rotten people. It's so concerned to
do this that it seems brave of the film to
suddenly delve into the key teenage bully's
family troubles... but it turns out it very
carefully only does this to create him as an
agent of Pennywise, not so we would mistake
grouping him as just another of those who
have been rendered near helpless to be
otherwise, owing to the kinds of punishing
parents they were saddled with.
Pennywise has a perspicacity that if it was in
the parents in the film, would leave the kids
absolutely doomed--they depend on a small
measure of idiocy on the part of their
suspicious parents to find some freedom. The
fact that he like them is not a fool seems
noteworthy. One might have a conversation
with him and receive feedback from someone
who is registering every nuance of what
you're thinking and feeling, which is part of
726
his allure. Also, if he wasn't just plain evil,

he'd make one hell of ally. There's reasons for
smart kids to actually be drawn to him, if
only to twist his purposes so he serves their
end, and take out other people in their lives
so horrible they sexually abuse, deeply carve
letters into their skins, and put powerful
blocks against their growing up. These kids
don't actually need some other person to help
them with this, IF they were the kids as they
are shown in the movie -- that is, kids with
such intrinsic moxie that it's conceivable they
could throw off many of the haunts that even
Pennywise throws at them so to rebound as if
normal a short time thereafter (these kids
would do great if they were suddenly thrown
into Dante's hell, for what could the Devil
show him that was worse than Pennywise's
own fabricated terrors?). But these
characters are implausible -- the girl who
readily stands up to bullies... or who offsets
their intended harsh humiliations by
taunting their stupidity whilst temporarily
being forced to suffer them, and who takes
out her father without hesitation when the
situation calls for it, is not the child of a
727
perennial abuser but the child of parents over

on the right side of the track. The young boy
who was going through childhood believing
he was always sick... or who tried willing
himself into such belief because it was what
his mother forcefully expected him to believe,
is not going to toss her aside with the ease he
eventually manages so we can all enjoy
watching her panic at her sudden loss of
power she's always held (a relapse on her
part which is possibly as satisfying for us to
witness as Pennywise's eventual discovery
that his tricks have lost their power on kids
who'd accustomed themselves to him). The
kid who'd do that, again, could only belong to
some other family, for it's self-esteem he
wasn't given the chance to know, and which
couldn't plausibly be repaired by the kind of
friends, the kind of GENUINE losers (his
loser friends are in today's nuance, actually
cool geeks, who are their school's elite) who
in some way would be as similarly defeated
as he was, he'd naturally gravitate to.
This is not a movie of two tales. It is not a
coming-of-age tale, as well as a horror story.
728
It's a movie that informs you that there is

some essential twinning of both -- growing
up is into a world of sensuous new wonders,
about swapped saliva, kissed lips... lust, but
also about the sudden emergence of newly
bared, terrible teeth from people who once
held love for you, or whom you'd at least
contained by the sheer fact that you weren't
ready to test their ownership of you
(Pennywise's own buck teeth suggests a bit
that he's the fate of a child who never
survives others' taunting: he becomes a
terror himself so to at least partake of the
winning party). Pennywise could not have
been in this movie at all, and it would still
have been about the exactly same thing. He
articulates a truth for most people born of
Steven King's generation, and probably still a
good number today: the terrors you first
knew when you hugged close to childhood
toys... terrors which were responsible for
your early stutter, for instance, lose hold of
you for a time but re-visit once again amidst
adolescent turmoil. He's useful because he
shows you just the kind of fear you
experience from others you can't be as
729
forthright in admitting to. If the clown scares

you this apocalyptically scarily, then they did
too. Unless you want to go through life in
some version of self-deceit and as well,
inhibitated, it'll require your facing up to.
Note: "It" is good. The film is about scares
that could cripple you away from self-
actualizing and which could have you, for
example, betray friends expressing the same
dismay you feel. But the composition of the
film, the art, the sense of considerable
discernment and selection, reflects very
realized accomplishment. One does sense
that it is only the kids as they are shown in
the film to become -- victors -- who could
have crafted it. It's something one gets I
suppose too in "the Shining," the artistic
presence of someone who clearly got past
many of his own fears, and it retrospectively
ameliorates the powerful terror: people can
know these fears, AND get past them. If you
yourself get past them, or never knew them
in the first place, then you can skip the
messaging in the film and focus how for
example the aesthetics feel, why the haunted
730
house seems so crisply composed you'd

hardly visit only out of a need to confront
terror, without it seeming like macho evasion
of the memories the film brought to mind.
Note: The bullies give a sense that they can't
really be waylaid... and if you're caught in
that situation, where after successfully
resisting them they come back and deliver
worse, then what the hell do you do?
Pennywise's exaggerated power suggests he
might have a critical flaw, which the kids
eventually dawn upon. There may be a sense
he's actually a venue upon which the kids
might practice resistance-practices that'll
enable them when they face up to "the real
show." Pennywise is stuck in perennial kid
mode, whereas they're testing out leering,
testing out sex: mightn't they already have
something on him?

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731
New Yorker Facebook Movie Club

discussion on "Starship Troopers" as
successful or failed satire
Kiera Parrott shared a link.

August 27 at 6:45pm
Anyone else a fan of this wacky, subversive
fun fest?
Starship Troopers: One of the Most Misunderstood

Movies Ever
The sci-fi film's self-aware satire went unrecognized by critics when it came out
16 years ago. Now, some are finally getting the joke.
732
Bobby
Texel https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=OkEdyq3UE5M
Starship Troopers - re:View

Mike and Jay discuss the often misunderstood and underappreciated sci…
Harsh Pherwani Me! lol

Peter Hoffman It's definitely got a cult
following.
Jorge Ignacio Castillo The fact people
take this movie at face value is baffling. It's
mocking fascism, it's not trying to promote it.
It even steals shots of Triumph of the Will!
Huain Gomez If it was satire, it was too
sutil. Robocop made a better job.
733
Nicolas Bordet Yes, I completely agree, I

think that most of Verhoeven's movies have
been quite misunderstood for a long time.
The Cahiers du Cinéma made some very
interesting articles on that subject in a 2015
issue.
Nicolas Bordet
Huain Gomez I found it is like a military

recruitment propaganda.
Bobby Texel Read The Atlantic article the

OP shared, my guy.
Huain Gomez Just read it.
My view persist, it is militaristic
propaganda.
If satire is so sutil viewers are unable to see it
then it didn't work.
I was able to see the political comentary in
robocop that is one of the reasons i liked it so
734
much. Starship troopers was unable to

transmit this satire (if itwas there) to me and
most of the critics apparently. May be that's
the reason behind its failure.
Bobby Texel
Nicolas Joseph I mean the end has all the
ken-doll, roided-up soldiers kill an alien that
is basically a GIANT BRAIN how much more
explicitly anti-military can u get?
Bobby Texel Not to mention the "I didn't
get it, so it's the movie's fault" argument
doesn't hold much water. Plus, they had Neil
Patrick Harris dressed up as a SPACE NAZI.
Huain Gomez Jejejejeje, ok, lets agree on

disagree
Huain Gomez It has to be a thrill for
Verhoeven that almost no one was able to
catch the satire in his movie, it had to be his
objective from the very beginning, a satire
that no one recognized.
735
Nicolas Joseph Huain Gomez well we

agreed to disagree. But again, the satire is
pretty obvious. but he is also very vicious,
and part of his point is to show how seductive
fascism is, how it is easy to fall for its super
heavy but oh so enticing imagery. So he
succeeds in every way imaginable. the fact
not everyone got it (not ALMOST NO
ONE!!!) speaks more about the audience
than it does about the director.
Huain Gomez Wasn't his job to make
people to get it?
Nicolas Joseph Huain Gomez that is an
endless debate about the artist's
responsibility and integrity towards the
audience - it goes beyond cinema and was
debated for centuries amongst writers, poets
or playwrights for instance. In this day and
age of "marketing", people tend to think an
artist's job to give people what they want and
adapt to the audience. Thankfully not
everyone agrees, and there is room for both
approaches.
736
Huain Gomez Not what people's want,

what the director wanted.
Was Chaplin Great Dictator ever confused
with Nazi propaganda?
Nicolas Joseph what the director wants in
the case of Verhoeven is very clear. When you
say it is his job to make people get it, your
implying he has a responsibility towards his
audience, a duty to adapt to their
expectations, which exactly the on going
debate, covering centuries, that I am talking
about. And yes, I think Verhoeven is way
more subtle and subversive than Chaplin,
much as I love good old Charlie.
Huain Gomez Not the people's
expectations, his own expectations, he,
allegedly, tried to make a satire of militarism
and fascism but failed and ended
transmitting the opposite.
Nicolas Joseph Huain Gomez only to those
who didnt get it. Quite a few of us saw it
crystal clear.
Jean-Pierre Thilges What?
737
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Huain

Gomez Yeah, it was like he wanted more to
demonstrate how fascist everybody was, by
providing such an enticing lure that played so
well to their overt or submerged desires and
insecurities it couldn't be resisted. He
ultimately makes being a foot soldier, within
a nest of fellow soldiers, seem really, really
great. Each battle you were in, was
cinematically, so interesting. And if you
hadn't each acted as quickly and
resourcefully as you did... He takes the
energy of youth, and lets it do something.
And then at the end says, see, you weren't
just pent-up youth loving something
something for giving you an outlet, but secret
fascists. The response: not really; actually, we
were just like you -- loving the exuberant
(pseudo)participation, just like you did in
creating it. I think the fact that people who
are onto the satire don't mention how much
they themselves enjoyed vicariously
participating in the action, a bit suspicious,
because while both have validity in their
draws, admitting to only one in particular
lets you have superiority over the gullible.
738
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Nicolas Joseph

You're right. A lot of people got it. What's
wrong for me is that he puts too much that is
right into the action sequences, stuff we
should rightly enjoy, and then encourages
our disassociating ourselves with it so we can
be superior to those who enjoyed the action
but missed the satire. There is a lot of fun in
the action sequences in his movies, and to me
that kind of exuberant, colourful,
imaginative, seductive fun... just isn't nazi.
Backing away from what we liked, repressing
knowledge of "how we fell for it," so to have
advantage over other people, is probably
closer.
Huain Gomez Despite the differences in
opinions it is nice to have an intelligent
discussion.
Thanks
Vickie Williams I love it! I knew it was
satire the first time I saw it, and that was
long before I read anything deeper about
movies than People magazine reviews. It was
clear as a bright, cloudless sunshiny day to
739
me. "Would you like to know more?"

Hilarious!
Erik Schwob Yes I think it's a classic! It's

an anti war movie dressed up as a war movie.
And the propaganda web reels are just
fantastic. Paul Veerhoven also directed
Robocop the same way. A very violent action
film that was actually a paraody of violent
entertainment. It's a neat trick.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston It has
something of a sardonic view of mankind. It
comes close to saying that one could come
close to making the fascist elements of a
movement almost obvious to people, but if
you could promise them a chance to turn the
table on their problematic parents (ah, did
you get blowed up); lift them up from being
people doomed to be humiliated by smarter,
nerdier peers after high school, and promise
them access to higher "fruits," better
girlfriends, chance at making lieutenant,
than otherwise would be theirs; a chance to
740
be a valuable part of a group, and lots of

action, where they'll learn to casually destroy
things that newbies would absolutely
terrified of (the action is exhilarating; if you
managed their eventual successes, their
competency against terrible foes, you'd feel
awesome), they'll probably go anyways. If
nations across the globe start going fascist, I
bet they could view this film, and so like how
they experienced themselves through the
"heroes," the strong subversive elements
wouldn't be recalled afterwards. It would
effectively function as a film made by the
Third Reich. The film may have needed a
lengthy debriefing.
New Yorker Facebook Movie Club

discussion on the cancelling of "Gone
With the Wind"
Lois Ambash shared a link.

August 30 at 7:29am
How do you feel about this?
741
Memphis Theater Cancels ‘Gone With the Wind’

Screening
The theater will no longer show the film as part of its summer series because of
concerns of the film’s racial insensitivity.
NYTIMES.COM
Jocelyn Dunphy You know here's the

thing: making any movie part of an annual
screening sets it apart. I say cancel the
annual screening but periodically screen it
along with any other classic Hollywood films.
Julia Lagrua You're right, an annual
screening gives it cultural stature. It's just a
movie and one that was dated culturally at
the time it was made. The movie, and the
742
book it was based on, portrayed slavery and

the confederacy as a noble cause and white
southerners as victims. Well made movie, big
glamorous stars, beautiful costumes and the
first oscar winning performance by a black
actor but not a film to admire for it's cultural
message.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Julia Lagrua But
to be fair, we should probably expect for
every movie that we really favour before, say,
1960, to receive the same treatment. There's
not a film out there before that date that
matches our expectations for... that aren't
compared to contemporary standards, more
patriarchal, that communicate adverse
cultural messages. We have to be careful
we're not deliberately shaming the South
because we need it for our own equilibrium--
that is, to demonstrate that there's nothing
guilty about us; it's all out there in hillbilly
territory. So I say yes, but also whisk away,
say, Vertigo, from "cultural stature," and
rather periodically screen it along with other
films, to show that part of what we're up to
isn't to keep ourselves hoisted over the
743
imbeciles in hillbilly country--a kind of

violence itself, so to keep ourselves feeling
stately/statue"y."
Jocelyn Dunphy it's tricky, that's for sure.
Different people even within a culture have
different 'tolerances' for racism, sexism, etc.,
in film even while we acknowledge the film's
historical context. Makes it all that more
difficult to make decisions about where to
draw the line.
Virginia Kelley I don't like any kind of
primitive book-burning impulse but right
now this seems necessary so I wouldn't
object.
The intensification of real recognition of our
slave history is important, raw feeling is at
the surface, it's okay to put this aside for
awhile where heralded publication events are
concerned.
Vlasis Kalabokas well,that is a good point
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I agree. But
there are two things happenings now: one is
Charlottetown, and the other is the
744
squashed-down, white working class worker.

We could de-emphasize "Gone With the
Wind," but perhaps also, to demonstrate
fidelity with their plight/concerns,
contemporary films we've recently enjoyed
which make the white working class seem
odious; as people we should want to
disregard and harm. If we have a tough time
doing that, we should ask ourselves if we still
have a need to hate... somebody, at least,
even as we can cloak it so that it is absolutely
invisible to ourselves. If racists reformed
themselves so there was nobody out there for
us to hate at all, we should know if this would
actually make us feel ill at ease, because
suddenly we can't disown things about
ourselves into other people. Could we really
do without our yearly arrival of Oscar-fetted
"Spotlight(s)," with dollops of favour for us
and without an ounce of empathy for the
villains?http://www.newyorker.com/.../the-
problem-with-the-
liberal...http://www.newyorker.com/.../searc
h-challenging-cinema
745
Celine Adrianna Negrete This is a non-

profit independent movie theatre in a
Memphis neighborhood making a decision
based on what their community asked for.
This is not the "soviet union".
Clearly, some of you have no understanding
of the film exhibition business, in particular
as to how independent non-profit theatres
operate.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I think you need
to fit what this non-profit independent movie
theatre, reacting entirely to what their
community asked for, within the larger
contemporary context where icons that were
esteemed in the past are being dismantled,
regardless of what a considerable portion of
the population -- the larger community --
thinks: "you liked Andrew Jackson--tough
f*cking luck: he's off the d*mn bill." If I
posted this link, and I gotchaed them by
saying, hey, why is it you easily-upset people
can't even handle what a small non-profit, in
full correspondence of its members asked for,
has done, I'd feel a bit ashamed, for I'd of
used it as bait to draw in a lot of reasonable
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people, reacting reasonably (or, rather, at

least understandably), for my orgiastic
censure. I don't reify the constitution, I really
don't ultimately care whether George
Washington is forever respected, and would
prefer he not be deified, but if I was
beginning to make him a symbol of America's
racist past... in an environment, where some
who were esteemed aren't merely losing a bit
of their previous foothold but being cast as
objects of shame, I'd know I was imposing
upon a lot of people, thinking I knew better
than them. It might be FOR the better, and I
might be better, more considerate, more
evolved, but I'm not exactly going at things
with therapeutic niceness but rather casting
people whom I don't really like all that much,
completely astray.
Mark Schaffer Interestly enough, this film
and the book depicts the end of the
Confederacy and the subsequent end of
slavery in the country.
Marianne
Roken http://www.salon.com/.../gone-
with-the-wind-dropped-from.../
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Laura-Jean Kelly Oh great you found it!

Thanks!
Julia Lagrua Excellent article.
Laura-Jean Kelly Be great if everyone on
this thread will read it
Marianne Roken It is a good article. It
makes the point, more cogently than I, that
the movie is revisionist history, yet it is also
"an uncontested cinematic achievement
based on its artistic merits alone."
Patrick McEvoy-Halston It is a very timid
article, guys, saying all the right things. Plays
to various galleries. The artistic merits of the
film surely have been contested, so why is
this argued, if not to flatter some, and
appease some rising apprehensiveness even
amongst Salonistas that comes from reading
the article--your populist tastes are awesome,
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and film-snobs are bad? Why end the article

saying, things that were once popular don't
always last, but never quietly? Is this 'cause
always true, or because that's how we like to
drift away from what we read: that nothing
has to be settled just now? Why suggest that
Charlottetown means the film needs to hid
for awhile, when our larger situation is the
one the film represents: people surviving
with verve when their worlds are turned
upside down. Isn't that why the Depression
audience connected to it? And what era are
we in? Are we bringing up the film now
because we're toying with the adverse step of
perhaps, en total, "Bill Cosby" banning it, or
because unconsciously we're registering that
it has more relevant appeal than ever?
Laura-Jean Kelly Salonistas now hehe.
Hey check out the next article posted...has a
bit more to it.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Laura-Jean
Kelly Okay. Done.
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Ellen Geller I don't agree. It is a great

movie.
Elizabeth Blakeslee Ann Hornaday,
Washington Post Film Critic, makes an
excellent case for the theatrer making the
showing of GWTW part of a series of films
showing other looks at the period and
slavery. https://www.washingtonpost.com/...
/77f6752a-8e52-11e7...
Perspective | ‘Gone With the Wind’ and the stewardship of

our cinematic monuments
Do we remove them? Or put them in a proper context?
WASHINGTONPOST.COM
Patrick McEvoy-Halston What I'd like to

read from an article is a willingness TO ban
things outright, if the situation called for it...
a lack of trepidation to cast off, if called for. If
I don't sense this within a reviewer then I'm
never sure whether when they say
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they'recontextualing and offering an adult,

mature response, if what they're actually
doing is working around what they're
psychologically unprepared for: a good
argument for making much of what they've
been attracted to and felt social esteem in
having mastered, suddenly be rendered
useless. (I think perhaps also I sense people
sensing we're all being drawn into a vortex,
and hoping to keep their Obama years of
tiptoeing around the edge kept going as long
as possible, for it's the environment in which
they've lived well and prospered.) I've read
my Milton and registered its art, but also
read critiques by some who've done so and
decided... the art doesn't balance out the
abhorent... cast aside, now, and felt there was
nothing ill-considered and immature about
their response. What I like about Frederick
Crews's new book about Freud is for example
that I sense this willingness... no fear in
surveying the life of someone considered
great, and whom he spent years in mastering,
saying, "no, if you picked up Freud and knew
immediately there was something fraudulent
about him, despite your ignorance you're a
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step ahead of where I was most of my life...

and I'm glad you weren't waylaid by his
considerable art in thinking and writing." I
say this myself AS a Freudian... but also as
someone who senses and respects personal
strength, rather than (perhaps?) playing to
widespread conventions of what "mature"
behaviour is--let's negotiate, not cast aside;
let's show the bad so we know it within
ourselves -- to keep your own well-situated
societal hoist intact. (Would honesty with
ourselves ever mean being honest about how
apparently little daring is required these days
for a lot of people like this reviewer to
explore the troubled legacies of times past?
What would be harder for her: knowing even
more about how awful slavery was, or
admitting that there have been times when
professions that were full of esteem were
cast-off rather abruptly, and art history could
become one of them, and rightly, for it being
about tethering oneself, finding oneself
within, regressive times? [I'm also left to
wonder how many people who supposedly
are arguing for awareness of their own
conflicted nature, have ever felt their way
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into Hitler and found correspondance... or do

they just do what's couth) If the new
temperament is to abolish and never turn
back, rather than mature-minded they will be
made to seem passé, temperamentally rigid,
panicky at change, implastic.
Monday, August 21, 2017
Discussion over "Logan Lucky," Hell or High

Water," and others, at the New Yorker Movie
Facebook Club
August 19 at 10:42am
After "Hell or High Water" getting so much attention,
and now with "Logan Lucky"... and even perhaps with
"Paterson," and even "Logan" (and "Manchester by
the Sea"?), we appear to have the makings of an
emerging pattern: people who've been long-ignored
by society and felt the burdens abandonment made
for them, testing to see if it might now be time for
their re-evaluation. One of the things we take notice
of in each of these films, is not simply the
humiliations they've incurred, the sense of
"smallness" they've had to suffer from, but a
weighing to see if their weight sufficient so if the
finish of the film does break for them, does weigh in
heavily with them, for it to feel hedged against
fallback. These films are video, dramatizing that a call
has sounded, and something in people we haven't
been much interested in lately is having them test
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themselves for the possibilities of flight, after only

concluding hiding and hibernation and consolidating
themselves as real options. Their not having
cellphones, their not being socially connected, is an
asset, as society begins to decide the creature of
spoof... is not the retrograde but the twittering,
social-media-star, nincompoop. Their associations
with the military, are assets, deserving of deference,
and keep them formidable when others lose what had
given them easy range, which was always fluff. Their
being for Jesus, is a sign of at least some effort to
admonish themselves, however clumsily. Their caring
about Nascar, rural Texas, working-class Paterson N.J.,
is their caring for quintessential America, that long
neglected lovely. Their self-mockery, speaks loudly for
their modesty and against everyone who's pumped
up. They're all so... basic, and good; maybe with
genuine promise. We see they've been ignored, and
how unjustly. Yet these are all "communities" that if
not Trump, still very deeply conservative, that we are
being bidden to awaken to, essentially give ground
to, as they test their wings. They feel patriarchal.
To stop their gaining the staked high ground, which to

me sounds like a very, very, bad idea, is our role then
to stop lauding these films, hefting them to the top of
the critical charts, and rather start applying stern
critical pressure? Do we need to insist that they take
all these protagonists away, and replace them with
those forbidden flattering, fantastical covers? Not
agree when we see "ourselves" transposed into these
films, that we are ridiculous and deserve to be
chased away or punched? I mean it was surely just a
few years ago when they could all be ascribed
"deplorables," assuming we'd agree. Show at least
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one of these hopeful souls sounding somewhere like

Ann Coulter, and then we'll adjust our apperception,
decide whether we honestly think it's great we see
them feeling warranted a turn for the better... see
their representing that a line has been crossed, and
no more damage will be allowed to take place, not
just 'cause it's right but because these are the people
who may in the end be what'll save us--our reserve of
hope.
http://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/03/15/paterson-indie-quirks-
cant-hide-masculinist-frameworks/
Sam D Levan I thought he'll or highwatsr was very

poor film making
Sam D Levan It had 100 percent on rotten tomatoes

and so did baby driver. both films perpetuate a
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narrative of a lone white male who ultimately

succeeds because of them self and themself alone.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Sam D Levan It is made to

seem as if they succeed owing to a bit more than
that, though. It feels like they are allowed to succeed
because of a whole amalgam of things they offer...
they're charitable to the waitress who was kind and
made an effort to flirt with them; the money is
returned to the bank; the real money, the Las Vegas
money that keeps their oil-rich property in their
hands, goes entirely to his kids, and also perhaps
because one of them, the brother who wasn't around
to spend time around their mother, to care for her,
when she got really bad before she died, dies: there
is further sacrifice, a beloved brother. Also, it's made
to seem like they succeed because... the other
townsfolk are with them, even as it seems impossible
to them that someone could get away with stealing
money from a bank these days, and because the
bank managers are sickly evil. It's all of this that
FEELS, at least, why Chris Pine's character will come
out okay, with the money to his sons... that they get
"lucky." Not just 'cause alone, he's a badass. I believe
that a vastly similar argument can be made
concerning "Logan Lucky."
https://www.facebook.com/groups/newyorkermovieclub/permalink/343459766
067321/
Sanford Sharp I thought Hell or HW had a lot to

recommend it, but the politics were lacking in
subtlety. And I suppose I'm getting tired of Jeff
Bridges playing Rooster Cogburn.
756
Lizzie Nicholson it was a good effort, on the strength

of the two lead actors, and yes it is a socially relevant
film, mirroring the plight of people who lose their
homestead or house to greedy people or bankers
Patrick McEvoy-Halston And why if FEELS like they get

to be lucky, in "Logan Lucky" (spoilers): incurred war
wounds (that are, absurdly, but apparently almost
legitimately, open grounds for mockery); unfair
dismissal; lost wife to wealthy man; insecure parental
rights over child; being subject (regarding the sister)
to repeated gross courtships by wealthy man,
deflected each time with sass but feeling uncertain
nevertheless for his being a winner in a land of very,
very compromised losers; jail sentence, nearly served
(lots of lost life) rather than just begun; large nest-
egg of money, presumed safe but actually stolen day
one, by girlfriend who absconded with other man;
trying to be loyal to Jesus; definitely loving Nascar;
preferring John Denver (and American country) and
America the Beautiful over glitz; last to new-tech
fashion, thinking old has worth; heist privileges
money as actual bills, something dirty, shit that goes
through the bowels... our familiar sense of it, the
American-loyal sense of it as something tangible but
also dirty; they keep small portion of total; Nascar
loses nothing, owing to insurance; money is given to
everyone who was compromised by their actions;
money is given to everyone who facilitated them...
and they willingly accept a stranger as sheriff
amongst them, that will confirm them in their evident
preference: to do nothing really showy with their
incurred gains (lead protagonist will work at "Loews,"
brother at bar... the sheriff is insurance to keep them
757
saintly; very welcome, not a downer, or harbinger of

future ill-turn).
And for this, it feels like something huge like America

decides for them, a judge vastly more vital than the
one who in court also decided for them. And the
gains are actually, secretly, huge -- battered into
accommodation by her child choosing the father as a
direct link to American saintliness ("Country
roads..."), the arrogant ex-wife turns pliant as
dramatically as the landlord did in Godfather 2; a
woman with an education lets herself be drawn within
the vortex of someone who represents those who
were never going to amount to much after high-
school... tables feel they're beginning to be turned
against those who used to make fun of an older
America, and they'll be caught out for not realizing
the gods who were once all in with them have
changed their minds. They're about to shine
sustenance on someone else right now.
Karthik Purushothaman "Paterson" the film didn't do

any justice the town at all. I live here.
Lizzie Nicholson I don't think Paterson was supposed

to represent a town...
Lizzie Nicholson I mean you're talking Jarmusch's

universe here...;)
Scott Hartley The pattern you're defining emerged a

little earlier. Henry Fielding created "Tom Jones,
published 1749, taking the radical step of making a
forgotten, ignored, denigrated, lower-class person -- a
"foundling, ie conceived out of wedlock and having
no claim to wealth -- making such a person the
758
protagonist of a fiction, and representing his efforts,

often self-effacing and occasionally miscreant but
ultimately successful, to rise in the world.
Bill Randolph "Tom Jones" was not the least bit radical
in this respect: this style of novel originated in 16th-
century Spain, and in English the first example is
Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)
Mark Schaffer See Wind River, about Native American

humilitions. In some ways, better than Hell..
Sunday, August 20, 2017
My post, followed by discussion, on avoidance of

political campaigning at the New Yorker Movie
Facebook Club
August 17 at 2:08pm
One of the requirements for this group is that there
not be any political campaigning. We've already seen
that there is some confusion as to what this means.
Posts have gone up -- like is "Dunkirk" a Brexit
movie? -- that at least one person thought shouldn't
have been permitted. Specific candidates have been
mentioned, which also garnered some reproof
(though how on earth we can go weeks at a time
without ever mentioning "T" is a bit beyond me).
Some clearly understand a broad conception of what
campaigning is, while others see it precisely limited
to arguing my-candidate-is-better-than-yours-so-
there! Some see any political discussion as ruining
groups that are a singular delight for their absence--
ostensibly a rarity in the world of the internet. Some
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feel the absence of discussion of this sort would be

starkly neutering.
My prompt for the group is for some discussion on

this issue. How tight? How lax? How encouraged?
How discouraged? My own prompt for raising this
concern is that given that many of us see our own
period as bearing some not so encouraging
similarities to a similar one in the 1930s, and given
that film was understood during that period as having
so much potential political implications that they
were either aggressively banned or aggressively
phished everywhere, I can't but think it immoral if
some push isn't made for us to keep more than just a
tolerant attitude towards discussing the political
implications of films. We need to know which ones
sway the viewer which way, and why. It should be one
of our foremost concerns. We shouldn't want
discussion topics like "is 'Dunkirk' a Brexit movie" to
squeak through, barely, but go through as fluidly as a
frequent flyer, is my take. If this doesn't prove the
case, then note that there are other ways of
discussing politics, of discussing which films implicitly
support the manner and direction of specific
candidates, other than overtly. In my judgment,
Richard's argument that "Detroit" is a pornographic
film, where a director makes historical matter serve
her own run-amuck ego, must have had some of us
thinking on certain political figures currently beset
upon our world. We agree with his take on this film,
certain political figures in our own environs have just
been implicated.
760
The Immoral Artistry of Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit”

The movie’s protracted scenes of captivity, terror, torture, and murder are the moral
equivalent of pornography.
NEWYORKER.COM
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-immoral-artistry-of-
kathryn-bigelows-detroit
The New Yorker Thanks for this thoughtful post. We'd

love to hear the group's thoughts and we'll consider
adjusting our policy based on the responses here.
Eric Mattingly As an art form that-- due to the

collaborative, technological nature of its creation-- is
inherently political, removing all talk of politics from
the discussion of film seems perverse. That doesn't
mean the group should devolve into one more place
to fight about the obscenities of the current political
situation, but an analytic attitude toward our time as
it reflects in the films we like doesn't seem so bad. If,
as Mr. Brody suggests, Detroit is an example of white
privilege in the guise of liberalism (I've not seen it so
I have no idea) then that's relevant. Because white
privilege is still an important thing to recognize. It's
even more relevant after Charlottesville. Maybe it's
like that old definition of pornography--knowing it
when we see it--but I think there's a clear difference
between situating a film into a political context and
openly campaigning for (or against) a particular
policy or candidate. We could all use a respite from
the latter, but we ignore the former to our detriment.
Agosh Gaur I take exception on the pornography

analogy by Brody on two levels: first it implies that
pornography is inferior to movies, which is not
necessarily true. I am not trying to be a troll here m,
761
pornography has its own purpose. Secondly, if by

pornography, Brody means indulgent or hedonistic,
then that could be said about any director and his
movie.
Eric Mattingly Just a loose analogy, and nothing to do

with Brody's review. I was referring to whether a
political discussion was relevant to
understanding/enjoying film or if it was an attempt at
campaigning for some person or cause. I don't think
Brody's review is all that relevant to what the OP was
getting at, beyond the fact that talking about Detroit
without mentioning politics is impossible.
Agosh Gaur Eric Mattingly Thats a good point you

raise about divorcing politics from a film. Actually
talking about Detroit WITHOUT talking about its
politics is something that I would love to see. The
political theme in and out of Detroit, while most
important, is not that nuanced: racism exists and we
need to fight it. What I'd like to see is an analysis of
the film itself, the story, pacing, character
development etc. I know it's impossible to completely
ignore the politics when discussing Detroit but is it
possible to see it as a film not completely subdued in
its politics?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Agosh Gaur Yes, but in even

not talking about the politics, in deliberately trying to
ignore them, one can do work which can help us read
politics in a whole variety of things, unaccustomed...
pacing, cinematography, lighting, acting style--what
have you. It is perhaps in becoming more aware of
how this can be true--how certain preferred ways of
lighting a movie, for instance, might reflect a film
762
maker's disposition, as well as his or her political

preferences, that conversations about politics and
film can be most enlightening, for it might not be all
that well explored. Detroit is going to draw political
analysis, but the political implications of films that
would seem to overtly repel such analysis, might be
more worth attending to for their political implications
if they prove popular or unpopular. What are the
political implications for the success of Wonder
Woman? In exploring how characters react to one-
another in this film, can we read some of our own
political future? I think we can, and I'll make note of it
myself, even as "you're" talking away from politics
and focusing on character development.
Agosh Gaur Patrick McEvoy-Halston I would love for

this movie to be talked about more. For a movie this
topical, there has been surprisingly less talk about it
https://www.facebook.com/groups/newyorkermovieclub/
Agosh Gaur I saw Detroit yesterday and felt it was

very powerful. I think Bigelow did a great job of
depicting what those people in that motel went
through. I read Brody's review, which has criticised
the film pretty brutally and has found almost no
redeeming qualities in it. I think more than Brody not
liking the movie just as a movie, from his text it feels
like he was deeply upset by it and felt uncomfortable
by it, as he did with Schindler's List. I find those
sentiments justified, but they in an in themselves
don't make Detroit a bad film. I am hardly going to go
rebutting The New Yorker's film critic's review, but I
think Bigelow has continued a rich tradition of hard
hitting cinema following her last two films. I think
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they comprise a very nice trilogy exploring similar

themes. While the first two (The Hurt Locker and Zero
Dark Thirty) look for American redemption in far away
lands through the lens of conventional war as history
understands that word, this last one is a brutal
introspection on our homeland, where the war is with
ourselves to ask ourselves some very hard questions.
A timely, brooding, and engrossing movie, which I
have found to be one of year's best
Griselda Haygood The only reason I would go to see

this film is because Katheriine Bigelow directed it.
She has a body of work that is awesome, not
surprising since she is the only woman to win a Best
Director Academy Award. I just not sure who would be
the audience for this film. I am not eager to see a film
about a riot that happened years ago. Lord knows, we
see enough of that stuff on cable news. But I am
going to give it a chance...
Agosh Gaur The reason you stated is a common one

being touted as the reason for a low interest in this
movie; people think it's just gonna be depressing to
watch blacks being oppressed in a movie, which it will
be. It's not an easy movie to watch but is a
worthwhile experience
Griselda Haygood I will give it a try...

Erik B. Anderson It's torture porn. Not history. If I

Didn't get a free advanced screening ticket, I would
have asked for my money back.
764
Terrence C Briggs The author of the article cited by

the OP actually created a thread in here about the
movie. But clearly, he was touching on some political
issues that the film raises.
Erik B. Anderson The author of the article is a

moderator of this group.
Nicolas Zeifman I broadly agree.

I haven't seen Detroit so can't comment specifically,
but it's not the only film that exists as part of a
political reality, and you can't ignore it. I understood
the rule about politics to be very strictly about
political campaigning, not to avoid discussing the
politics inherent to the films, or how they fit with
current events or debates. Similarly, our politics will
likely affect how we read certain films, we should be
able to take them into consideration and discuss
them when it is relevant to the films and our reaction
or interpretation.
And while I know that political discussions tend to get
ugly, all the discussions I've seen in this group have
remained very civil so far, I'm sure it could stay that
way.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Who on earth is going to talk

about the politics about a film and not effectively also
doing some campaigning for a specific political
orientation? Do we gain anything by posts not saying,
"I dislike this film because Trump sucks and this is a
pro-Trump film," but by their effectively arguing so?
CNN and NYT have to pretend they're neutral
because... actually I'm beginning to lose sense of
why, exactly--it almost seems to be about the
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comfort in living within the decorum of being

detached. For us, this passionate group, why exactly
shouldn't we make a post saying, "let's put together a
list of films that'll help us defeat the fascist Trump
and elect in somebody sane like Hillary / Saunders!
Go Hillary or Saunders go!" It's already been done
here, was posted by the moderators, but was about
as against-rules as you can get.
And it felt to the point... let's skip all this "our politics
will likely affect how we... and we should take them
into consideration when we..." circumspect,
gentlemanly bulls*t, and talk core: one political
position is associated with seeing things, like real
things, that actually exist, and we don't distance from
it but inhabit it profoundly and proudly, to shake
everything relevant out of everything we're studying.
When we obfuscate this point by showing concern for
bias, we're probably performing... or dreaming, that
we're living in an age where all sides agree that there
might be something to what their opponents say. No,
there isn't. Let's skip to the point where we're square
with reality.
Diane Lake Agree that this forum is a model of

civility, and for that reason refreshing. There were
divergent views on Detroit, and while there was some
mild mocking, unfortunately, nothing overtly rabid.
But many, many films are political. Just to give one
example, pretty much the whole oeuvre of the great
Costa Gravas, whose films depict controversial if not
incendiary political issues. He tackles oppression,
military dictatorships, torture, laws and justice, based
766
on real events - Z, Missing, Amen, Hanna K., to name

just a few. Betrayed, a 1988 film, is particularly timely
(or sadly, perennially relevant) given it's based on the
terrorist activities of American neo-Nazi and a white
supremacist and his gang. Do we preface everything
by saying, "in my opinion" as I noticed one poster
instructing another poster to do when he commented
on a clip in which Jeff Daniels in HBO's The Newsroom
talks about how America is not the greatest country
in the world?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The tippy toes came up in a

discussion of "lost in translation" as well.
Diane Lake Missed that. (So much to read, so many

other pressing issues). I've been known to tiptoe
myself. But truthfully, I prefer not!
Richard Brody Interesting question. I had a peculiar

and revealing experience a few years ago while
talking with an editor with whom I work every week. I
said that I'm careful to avoid politics in my capsule
reviews, and she said that all my capsule reviews are
political. I think that we're both right: there's a
difference between stating political opinions and
drawing out the political implications of films. There's
also the difference between tracing out the political
messaging of a film and considering a movie's
aesthetic politics--the implications of style and affect.
It's hard to avoid being influenced by one's own
views, but there are critics whom I esteem for their
perceptions but who submerge them in such a
767
corrosive broth of doctrine that there's little of the

matter left, others who, regardless of their point of
view, grant the film its own identity.
Peter Hoffman The emphasis being: are you trying to

sell your political ideology or discuss a work of art.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Richard Brody Your focus and

fairness to what's before you, is always evident (and
you certainly see a lot of the politics in film). You do
give films their own identity, and it's so appropriate
to them and kind to oneself. A model. Indeed, I would
be wanting to simply nod my head, only when some
of us read your Eastwood reviews (or your review of
"Wolf of Wall Street"), what seems missing is the
corrosive broth that to some of us... is in his films. I
think with him I might prefer Noam Chomsky's take,
"Chomsky, what did you think of American Sniper?...
(he has actually provided an answer. it's what you'd
expect.). And I'm wondering, given that some who
are normally accused of applying their viewpoints,
better captured in their reviews my own sense of
revulsion at some of his films, if there might be
something imposed in your approach. Do you miss
what some feminists might see, I mean feminists who
associate with certain specific theorists, and summon
them thickly in their reviews, might see? And does
your way of identifying them, these critics, work to
make their, in this case, clearer vision, less
legitimate, harder to see? I think it might be easy for
me to feel anguish at a critic because there's way too
much theory you have to wade through, but conclude
it might be requisite that I still do indeed continue to
plow, because people who see some vitally important
aspects of films tend to deliver... as such. I'm trying
768
to think of who's coming to mind, but it is possible

that Andrew O'hehir's reviews could be like that. Not
sure, because he always wants to cut through the b*ll
(and he can be a corrosive...), but that's who
nevertheless comes to mind, anyway. With him, I'm
going to hear an awful lot about how every film
applies to Trump, Hillary, Sanders, and late days of
capitalism hell, if that's the kind of thing you're
referring to.
This discussion reminds me a bit of literary criticism

where new criticism (close reading of text itself)
objected to, say, new historicism, or sociological
analysis, by saying they were applying doctrine and
not focussing and letting the matter itself speak. New
Criticism, they said, was best because they picked up
everything... politics too, for sure: they were fair to
every emanation, but it must be IN the text, not us.
Their critics replied... then why is it you so rarely see
the politics?... and learned to ignore them as men
who needed to keep a certain architecture of analysis
in place for fear of becoming aware of how they had
made their texts agents to keep their personal chaos
at bay.
Brian Brunton To ban politics, or insist that art has no

political content, is itself a political act
Peter Hoffman It's common sense, I think.
Brian Brunton I am not sure what "common sense" is.

Could be a device for emptying a conversation of its
politics.
769
Peter Hoffman You don't have to research facts to

figure out a problem.
Brian Brunton Hollywood has always been intensely

political
Brian Brunton The problem is that the art of cinema

allows for messaging at different levels
Peter Hoffman Yes. As long as you focus on the movie

you can talk about the politics it presents, how it
presents it, fine. Just don't use it as an excuse to go
on a personal diatribe, by taking the politics out of
the movie and entering an ideological discussion
about political concepts.
Brian Brunton Yes....how would a discussion on why

the Bridges of Madison County won the Oscar,
against Reds, on the centenary of the 1917 October
revolution?
Peter Hoffman I can understand how it could be fun

to figure out the rare exceptions that exist with any
rule.
I haven't seen those so I have no opinion there.

Brian Brunton Goya
Lisa Green If there is context in relation to a movie

then politics, as with anything else, should be freely
discussed. People on this forum seem intelligent and
insightful and I think they can tell the difference
770
between the political themes of a movie and personal

political opinion. It would be sad to censor free
discussion.
Lizzie Nicholson i dont think limiting personal political

ideology is censorship...i think if it relates to the
movie, fine, but then it's a one-step tango to open
strife when people inject their personal political
beliefs
Barbara Monahan Speaking only for myself now, I feel

the physical effects of anxiety much more now that I
am in my sixties. No matter how well made the film,
the prospect of feeling anxious for 90 minutes fills me
with dread so I avoid upsetting movies. Funny,
though, that I am drawn to political discussion in real
life and seek it out. Go figure.
Agosh Gaur Detroit will definitely make you anxious
Churion Kim Thank you for speaking for me. I also

have to think twice before I make decision to see a
film with torture, cruelty, etc., its very hard on the
body and mind. (Also in my sixties) I've been enjoying
the whole threads in this post.
Everyone is well spoken and polite even when
disagreeing, unlike what's happening in your current
political scene (am Canadian).
I think we've already been talking about politics a
long time here and I'm assured that it won't be
'trumpish'!
771
Diane Lake Okay, venerable, apolitical film buffs.

(Joking). Here's one for you: The Venerable W. A
Buddhist monk, unrepentant Islamophobe and
avowed Trump admirer, serving as our guide in a
documentary set in a Myanmar where violence—and
even ethnic “purifying” -- being fuelled by incendiary
religious rhetoric. Supplementing interviews with on-
the-ground amateur footage, the veteran filmmaker
invites us to stare into the face of intolerance and
leaves us questioning whether any of us have the
luxury of turning a blind eye to such heinous
conduct. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3OtOh-
Mq0o
'The Venerable W.' first English trailer
Burcin Cevik wow thanks for sharing this...

Maureen Daniels As it is impossible to untangle

politics from our lives, so it is unrealistic to hope for
discussions of film to be a politics-free zone, and I
would say as long as comments do not descend into
personal abuse it should be allowed. Unless you're a
Nazi.
Leslie Brown Every good movie (book or art) that I've

considered worth experiencing has created an
emotional response (dread, fear, anxiety, joy) a
catharsis.
"Detroit" was worth seeing. It did not preach, it told a

story in human terms that has been long overlooked.
It sadly reminds me how little has changed.
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Sunday, August 20, 2017
Discussion on Richard Brody's review of "Atomic

Blonde," at the New Yorker Movie Facebook Club
The New Yorker shared a link.
16 hrs
Richard Brody wrote this about "Atomic Blonde": It is
a movie that has it both ways; it shows how the
sausage of freedom is made, with gory battles behind
the façades of public life—but it turns that gory
combat into a new façade, another illusion that hides
still others that are far more complex, troubling, and
unresolved.
Have you seen it yet? What did you think? Let us
know in the comments below. Let's keep the
discussion about this film on this thread.
Empty East-Versus-West Espionage in “Atomic Blonde”

The new movie, starring Charlize Theron, uses the last days of the Berlin Wall as the
backdrop for an utterly insubstantial and unengaging spy action-drama.
NEWYORKER.COM
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/empty-east-versus-west-
espionage-in-atomic-blonde?mbid=social_facebook_movieclub
-----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston If the movie appeals to
people who themselves find bliss in not-knowing, it's
quite the criticism of everyone who liked it. Mind you,
a mass of brilliant minds -- all ivy-league educated,
mind you -- worked Hillary's campaign, doing their
Miss Sloane thing, and in the end they looked they
graphed their own action movie, "war room" narrative
onto a landscape... that turned out NOT of their own
773
making--whoops! we probably should have wanted to

look!... like REALLY wanted to look! So there's plenty
of flattering company to be had in this disposed state
of blissful ignorance. But it's been successful for
awhile -- isn't that what globalization is about?
Starbucks, McDonalds, here, there, and everywhere,
with the fact of not really knowing the "natives,"
having maybe all that much interest in them, an
asset at the time?
There's lots of ideas, here. Background changes types

into people. Conflict in the East MAY NOT be about
fundamentally decent people forced to do terrible
things to fight evil. Fun as perhaps always
fundamentally suspect... or at least an absolute
beggar before the ecstatically anguished. Background
meetings to plan things are often of more interest
than depiction of the results. Placing "Stalker" within
a film means it won't matter one toot how much style
and transgression you applied to your heroine, the
only thought specifically on your toil will be limited to
her aftermath bruises...
Moira Brigitte Rauch Patrick you did put some

thought into this
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I wouldn't want to be trivial...
Moira Brigitte Rauch There is always room for a smart

guy in this blog.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Very nice. Thank you. There

really is so much going on in almost every Brody
post, it's nice to have the New Yorker encourage our
774
parsing things... stop. there was a lot there. let's go

back one more time before we go on.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Discussion over Jaret Leto and method acting, at

the New Yorker Movie Facebook Club
Hollywood Has Ruined Method Acting

Jared Leto’s turn in "Suicide Squad" is the latest reminder that the technique has become
more about ego and marketing than good performances.
THEATLANTIC.COM
http://theatln.tc/2fzUCVT
Eric Mattingly shared The Atlantic's post.
Yesterday at 8:35am
This is old (ish), but I agree that so called "method
acting" has become more stunt than a direct pipeline
to gritty human sublimity these days.
----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Right now it would seem
perhaps more accurate to say that doing method
acting means for being ridiculed as fancifully, self-
glorifingly feminine. The cool guy just "acts" and is
done, hardly knowing it even happened.
Lizzie Nicholson not quite sure what you're saying...
Lizzie Nicholson i don't see the 'feminine' side to

method acting
Peter Hoffman overly-emotional, flamboyant,

gesturing = female
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Lizzie Nicholson Peter, let Patrick answer...
Chris Okum I don't think method acting or the

preponderance of actors glorifying their preparation
is feminine at all. And Ed Harris is hardly a method
actor, but his performances couldn't be more
emotional. Being vainglorious and self-important is a
human trait, not masculine or feminine.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The article writer wants us to

think she's against macho, and so encapsulates
method acting as a way of sissifying other actors that
don't make the same demands on themselves. But
she also explains that, "method techniques prompt
actors to draw on their own experiences and
emotions as a way to strip their performances of
artifice," which, if we withdrew our sense of method
acting as associated with the likes of Brando, Bale
and DiCaprio, and instead imagined we were learning
of for the first time, doesn't immediately scream
macho: drawing on your own emotions, might sound
a little bit like therapeutic silliness, discovering the
five love languages of your soul, or whatnot, in
today's culture.
What sounds, if not macho, at least manly... an older

kind of manliness, that has come back: how the
article describes Rowlands, which for me was akin to
a working class "gent" who knew to attend to her
various other responsibilities, and still did first-class
art. She comes across as a disciple of father-knows-
best, and the new method actors, as fey artistes who
want to abandon all for broadway. And I'm quite sure
this isn't true for Rowlands, but I suspect these days
that those who are lambasting those who ostensibly,
776
and to justify this critique, probably are, risking a lot

of self-uncovering to best play their roles, are
primarily motivated by justifying a safe, detached
approach to all of their lives, that the 60s generation
rejected for being repressed. I don't want to make
being frozen cool again.
Chris Okum I agree wholeheartedly with this. You

read old interviews with great actors and most of
them are loathe to discuss their 'method.' Gene
Hackman and Robert Duvall probably roll their eyes
at actors like Jared Leto, who seems incapable of
playing a simple human being, which is the hardest
thing of all to do. Same thing goes with Johnny Depp
now, whose movies are all about him and the
character he has created. Obnoxious. What I find
most obnoxious of all are the actors who play soldiers
and who tout the two weeks they spent preparing for
the role under the guidance of some retired drill
Sargent turned Tech Adv. , as if playing soldier with
the knowledge that absolutely no harm will ever
come to you is somehow a fool-proof way of getting
into the mindset of someone who has seen real
combat. But, hey, whatever works for you. If the only
way you can play someone from the 1800s is to live
in a cabin for a month and make yr own shoes out of
cowhide then bully for you, but keep it to yourself. I
make an exception for movies that are about the
acting process, though, like the recent Kate Plays
Christine and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, as the art of
acting itself is nothing to sneeze at and can be quite
fascinating to learn about. The stuff with 'method
actors' talking about how deep they got into
character is pure vanity, though.
777
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Chris Okum Stereotypically

feminine traits, and you must know that. Traditionally,
it's what is expected out of women, and if men carry
themselves like that, that's whom they are becoming:
traitors to real manhood. Your previous post is all
about the fundamental manliness of warriors (who
unlike actors, subject themselves to "genuine risks"),
men of action, about men who are loathe to talk,
who'd roll their eyes at our current, disgusting,
cowardly and pretentious behaviour. This manner of
understanding real men carries with it a sense of men
who are vainglorious and self-important as being
female-men... men who desire being courted. What's
happening is that we are creating an environment
which will make it that much more of a combat zone,
that much more risky, to dare becoming deeply
sensitive to other people. This regression originates
out of a lot of men, particularly, feeling themselves as
compromised, too much men of feeling, and needing
to make their social environment one which helps
staunch it all back in. Hence, Jaret Leto, who
represents how they feel, must be made an example
of... pushed off the map.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Method acting has become

vain, wanting to promote and flaunt oneself... to be
stereotypically feminine. It's not being discarded for
macho bulls*t as the article suggests, but to privilege
something ostensibly more fundamentally manly,
resurrected from out of times past. It's basically
coming across as anti-metrosexual, and is promoting
people robots.
778
Discussion on "Miss Sloane," at the New Yorker

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Bilkish Vahed
July 28 at 11:35am
"Miss Sloane" is a long, emotionally brutal film that I
had to steel myself to stay with. It was the
remarkable performance of Jessica Chastain that held
me, made me want to know the full unravelling of
this woman, Elizabeth Sloane.
At the end though, I felt hollow. I was still reaching for

a missing piece - what is the backstory of this
character, I kept wondering?
That Sloane was driven by a singular will to win, that

she ruthlessly arranged the details of her life to keep
her top of her game, I saw. Yet still I felt cheated of a
crucial element of a back story that could credibly
explain the psychology of this character. Did I miss
something?
Yung Ahn I watched that the other day and wished for
the same. Big reveal
Richard Brody I agree that, contrary to some critics,

backstory is usually a great improvement to a
movie--the use of it is one of the advances in recent
films--and the lack of it is an all-too-rare failing. Of
course, there are exceptions; symbols and ideas can
779
do the same thing; but that's a matter of higher

artistry, not just thoughtful planning.
Olivier Tytgat True, though it's probably one of the

hardest things to pull off without making it seem
tacked on or forced, in which case I'd rather have a
character of which you can only guess at their
backstory instead of it being fed to me through
clunky exposition.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Sloane was the smartest

person in the room; an inspiration to everyone young
and liberal; does whatever has to be done, not only
without flinching, but with expansive imagination;
fiercely uses even friends if they're best use is as
props of her own rather than themselves,
independent agents (not quite ruthless or smart
enough... hindered, hampered... limited); is kind and
empathic towards members of the servicing class,
even as she enjoys the privilege of her dominion over
them. She is... Hillary Clinton? Debbie Wasserman
Schultz? What everyone, previously, wanted to be?...
Do we need backstory? She is emblematic of what it
is to be alive to the world, circa 2016, but not, RIP.
Her point isn't to have a past... it is to be the garb we
all just previously wanted to slip into.
Discussion on "Death of the Author," at the New

Jacob Dyson
August 14 at 5:21pm · Webster, NY, United States
780
I've always been intrigued by the intersection (or lack

thereof) of post-structuralist critiques of authorship in
literary criticism (e.g. Roland Barthes' "The Death of
the Author") and that of auteur theory in film. To
quote Barthes, "To give a text an Author is to impose
a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified,
to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism
very well, the latter then allotting itself the important
task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases:
society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work:
when the Author has been found, the text is
'explained'-- victory to the critic." Richard Brody,
however, argues that in film, auteurism "adds
another dimension to those criticisms"-- that it
enriches criticism, contributing another lens (that of
"artistic psychology") through which to evaluate a
film. My question, then, is how much significance
ought we give authorial/directorial psychology when
evaluating a film? And to reduce a nuanced, complex
discussion down to a crude dichotomy, has "the
colossal gravitational pull of the director" as an object
of analysis had a deleterious, eclipsing affect on film
criticism, or an elucidating, beneficial one?
Edit: Richard Brody's pieces that I quoted in the post.
Feel free to disagree with my
interpretation/paraphrasing of them as well:
http://www.newyorker.com/…/ric…/andrew-sarris-and-
the-a-word
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-
brody/auteur-auteur
----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Brody writes that critics
naturally believe scriptwriters are most important,
that viewers naturally believe that actors are most
781
fully the inventors. NATURALLY believe... hmmmm.

The answer to your question might depend most fully
on the context of the times. French theory "invaded"
(North American) universities 1970s, I think, but as a
liberal movement which is now being criticized as
self-involved and self-important. The professors
teaching Barthes can't themselves be seen as a
confluence of influences but as ego as their
predecessors--they both can and do feature in Updike
novels, and a current generation looking at them
couldn't really believe either set against the self as a
forger of worlds. So if it were twenty years ago, I
think you could be "death of the author" in a way you
wouldn't likely to be now. Earlier you'd wouldn't
necessarily be effacing and deliberately nurturing
animas against originators, because you're intent --
ignoring Paglia on this issue -- is still genuinely
constructive, to be genuinely revealing... to give
people their due. Now if you do Barthes, however,
with all the calls for modesty (read for example David
Brooks' latest), you're more likely an enemy against
whomever is really most responsible for, is the
greatest inventor of, a work... be it a single person or
a collection of talent, because you've come to think
there's just been way too self-indulgence and its left
the world a waste. If you really did the world a
singularly good turn, do the right think, and let it be
given due... but no more.
I really enjoyed the links. In the context of our times,

for my purposes, I think you could read Sarris or Kael
and encounter someone I've very glad you'd met...
both would be set against where our current climate
of critique will likely go.
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Discussion on "Glass Castle," at the New Yorker

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Kenneth Davidson
August 14 at 8:08am
THE GLASS CASTLE. Seen this weekend. A strong film
with uniformly fine performances all around. Woody
Harrelson stands out among the cast. Fingers crossed
he's recognized at Oscar time. I didn't read the book,
so I can't make comparisons. Comment if you saw it
this weekend, with your thoughts.
-----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I enjoyed the movie. Perhaps
to make it easier on audiences, or perhaps owing that
it was a "safe zone" in which the director and writer
needed to operate to keep their own psychic balance,
it creates an unbelievable situation where, after
783
showing how child abuse gets repeated through

generations, it has one mostly get off--the kids... are
okay. There is one scene where Brie Larson's
character Jeanette carries some of the same inanity
as her parents, to her partner's shock, but I felt it
marginal. Basically, the kids escaped. Braver would
have been scenes where she herself shows
indications that if she has kids, they themselves
won't be entirely spared. In downgraded form, okay,
but one way or another she'll be chasing them down
the street accusing them of abandoning her as well.
But one has little sense of this.
I think they did a good job of showing just what a

miracle it was her dad had as much good as he did
possess, though, such strength... enough to mostly
detach his children away from the mother who very
likely sexually molested him, and even without that,
would have had him living scared shitless. One notes
that Naomi Watts' character, Rose Mary, is touched
on immediately as equally as dysfunctional as Woody
Harrelson's Rex -- the burns that "decorate" her body,
which are sufficient a sight to be used as a tool to
repel sexual molesters, owes to her mom's disinterest
in her -- but then there's pull-back, and the focus is
upon Rex as the primary problem... Brie has a heart
to heart with her mom, being the two sane ones. This
caters to our preferences, but takes us away from the
reality-facing films like this are ostensibly providing
us with. I still like the film. But it's a pity that it
requires a counter to do some of the assistance it
thinks it has already provided.
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Discussion on "Lost in Translation," at the New

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Milosz Siebert
August 14 at 8:13am
Hello everyone !
I’ve recently attended a screening of « Lost in

Translation » at our local cinema with some friends
and a lively discussion followed, which I would like to
share here and get your feedback.
The main issue was that the film was considered

quite racist towards the Japanese culture by one of
my friends. I thought it would be interesting to see if
any of you here share this opinion?
My response to that was that I did not consider the

depiction of Japan racist. If anything, I do agree that
the culture has been objectified to some extent, and
used as context for the development of the story and
the relationship between the main characters.
However, I did not find it in any way critical,
diminutive, or offensive (alright, maybe the character
of the “professional” translator in the Santory
commercial scene wasn’t very flattering). Rather, I
think the movie depicted Japan as probably imagined
by most of us who have never been there in order to
serve as background for the story.
Your thoughts?
785
Full disclosure - I'm trying to be as neutral and open-

minded as possible here, even though this is one of
my favourite movies ever.
-----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The psychiatrist James F.

Masterson was invited to do a lecture tour in Japan,
after his book on narcissists and borderlines proved a
big seller there. He studied their childrearing and
observed in "The Real Self" that narcissism is
developed very differently in their culture than in the
U.S. He provides neither a flattering look, but
establishes them as quite alien to one another:
narcissism is expressed through grandiose self
gestures in U.S., but is hidden and closeted in Japan.
Here was someone of Western heritage invited into
Japan to say ostensibly hostile things about their
culture, because the Japanese themselves saw
validity in it. Sometimes it takes an outsider, right? Or
does this only apply when Boston Catholics are being
spotted out.
The film does give the advantage to the Westerners

(not her boyfriend, or action hero lady, who are both
dunderheads... well, he has a moment of considered
empathy) in they're at a level of sanity the Japanese
are not. But we sense the momentum is with the
Japanese, and the sane Americans are in danger of
getting mopey and lost in the shuffle. There is no not
abiding the window shades that automatically open
whether you'd like them to or no, and despite their
complaints, they require the contact with the
Japanese to carry them.
786
Brian Brunton I liked the movie. Seen it several times.

It caught the desolation of the international corporate
world. "Japanese whiskey", hotels, photographers on
location. Wives who accompany, or stay at home...
Patrick McEvoy-Halston How desolate is something

you'd actually seek out? It's not exactly Toni
Erdmann. You get on this ride, there's comforting
safety.
Brian Brunton Seeking out? Aides or computer

bookings in the corporate galaxy
Jon Athan It uses the othering of Japanese culture to

provide context for a white relationship. The Japanese
are not fully realized characters and exist only for the
purpose of Billy Murray and Scarlett Johansons
characters. So it's not racist like the original Birth of
Nation is racist, but it does assume a colonial
narrative that is in the tradition of othering another
culture. If you are really interested in answering this
question, I would recommend reading some colonial
and post colonial criticism. You don't have to agree
with everything he says, but a good place to start
might be Chinua Achebes essay on Heart of
Darkness. It is very accessible and will give you
context for the argument.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston We're not drawn to not want

to know more of them? I'm not sure that's the case. I
certainly didn't find they existed only for the purpose
of Murray and Johanson's characters. "Othering"
would seem evident in the only real out group in the
movie -- the American movie star and the cocktail
singer. Both a squandrant dumber than the principal
787
characters. The Japanese culture is awry from our

own expectations, but has sensitivity and soul, while
these two -- representing mainstream American
culture -- are banal. If Japanese culture is being
"othered" here, it's the kind of othering that many
who are familiar with postcolonial texts are familiar
with--using the high esteem of other cultures, to
make proles in their own culture seem that much
more ignorant and disgusting.
Jon Athan Patrick McEvoy-Halston, that very well may

be so. I haven't seen the film in a while, but when I
saw It, it felt like the characters were poking fun at
Japanese life. It seemed like the two main characters
were supposed to be all of us, but even if your
analysis is correct, that still essentializes Japan. A
variety of postcolonial critiques address whether
essentializing place from a position of power is
problematic, so that comes to perspective. I
mentioned Achebes article because it discusses this
very issue of power dynamics, but, like I said, one can
choose to agree with it or not. It's not a yes or no
answer.
Jon Athan As a white person commenting, I find it

more valuable to steer the OP in a direction towards
an authority rather than presume to answer this
justifiably complex question myself.
Giuseppe Marcelli Hi, as I see it, it's not racists. The

main characters are using stereotypes as mental
shortcuts to evaluate their brief experience in Japan,
the focus however is on their selves: they are out of
their comfort zones and have the time to face their
own problems, as people does in common life. If it
788
was set in Italy, for example, it would have been the

same: alienating framing, not fully understanding
why peOPLE ARE YELLING LIke that... so they try, in
some kind of way, to find a safe zone.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The impressions of the

Japanese do stick though. The absolute refusal of
Sean Connery for Roger Moore, the assumption he'd
want a prostitute whose expertise was perversions,
the neurotic necessity of exact procedure and
routine... don't register as stereotypes but as pointed
observations. It can only be seen as flattering in that
it's all part of the neurosis that keeps this high
civilization in full movement. But it's precariously set,
and if you poked at it... Still, there is kindness and
respect in her observations, I think too.
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Discussion on "Drive," at the New Yorker Movie

Facebook Club
Sanyam Uppal
August 13 at 10:58am
I just watched Drive again. What do you think about
it. I just loved it's cinematography and it's way of
saying so much with minimal dialouge. Oh and what
soundtracks!! I just talked to some of my friends and
people on the internet about it and some of them
really dislike it. I could not understand why. Drop your
comments I'd love to hear your opinions about it.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston There is something extremely

grotesque in how Albert Brooks character tries to
789
manage Cranston's character into a quiescent mood,

even as he has just murdered him. He plays the
nurse to him, even as he's clearly the executioner,
and something in the movie has us detach ourselves
to Crayston for understanding him as probably just
agreeable at this point... can't put up a fight against
his own desire to please by not being aggravating to
someone who is speaking to him with some
sympathy. Not a movie with much sympathy towards
the weak, because no avenue is provided to involve
ourselves with them without feeling like we've lent
our own selves to
Peter Hoffman Hypocrisy.
David Huskey That is a good point about Brook's

actions after sneakily delivering a mortal wound, but I
do see the movie as being sympathetic toward the
weak. Brooks is a repulsive character and Cranstonis
a sympathetic one. The story is one where the weak
are at risk from stronger predators, but that is not
presented as a good thing. The driver tries to help
Standard (where's the de luxe version) and his wife
and child, and appears to succeed with the latter two,
who are the weakest and most vulnerable characters
in the movie.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston David Huskey I wish I agreed

with you, for I do like the film. Brooks is operating at
a higher level of sanity than anyone but Gosling...
and I think regarding Gosling's character, that it is
regarded as such an estimable thing that I didn't
really buy the film as for the weak--the very last thing
it would have him do is perform in a way which was
as hapless as Cranston. Being weak, has to be for
other people, has to be displaced there. If being weak
790
has to be outside oneself, it might be linked to it

being associated to a sense of blameworthiness itself.
Do we really like Standard? Or do we think he
deserved dispatch for being so needy of rescue?
About his wife and child, she flinches at his violence,
but what do we think of people who draw back when
someone simply stops pretending they're simply
wallpaper... when they reveal the entirety of their
competency? I think in a sense one becomes fed up
with her. She becomes marginal. You'd take her in
only because she's smaller than you, which is
enabling for the insecure.
Peter Hoffman Kind of like, "The Hulk." or Jason

Bourne.
Conversation over hate at Charlottesville, in the

New Yorker Movie Facebook Club
https://www.facebook.com/raquel.herrera.9210?
fref=gs&hc_ref=ART7jx1VyaW7MZSznjUhAAucEUg4hmrMO36e-4f7O9-
z3JUKkk3ZhfFI4G9BHi2fC2c
Raquel Herrera
The recent horrifying events at Charlottesville
brought to my mind a film I very much enjoyed back
in the day: I am talking about American History X
(1998) starring Edward Norton. Are there any other
films that have similarly inspired you to reject
discrimination, bigotry?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The right thinks we are

bigoted. We're more emotionally evolved, but overall,
the right is right about this. There may well be some
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amongst us that learned, through exposure to films,

to unlearn bigotry, but I can't imagine all that many--
especially those under a certain age. So possibly by
listing films, we might more genuinely be bragging.
The film didn't turn you from pro-life into pro-choice,
it didn't change you into being sympathetic and
respectful when previously you were ardent racist, it
didn't turn you from being nativist into being pro-
immigration. They played to your already established
sympathies, and you may well have gone to the film
intending to juice them up. What they may have done
is increased your bigotry to various "out" groups the
left has right now--categories of people we are
encouraged mostly to despise, through film and
other.
So genuinely, considering how liberal most films are,

perhaps we need to rely on critics to help us confront
our own bigotry, the satisfactions we gather that
prevent us from disabling them. Why is this
important? For a number of reasons. One is that if
members of the left are losing their sanity (too)--as
for example a recent Atlantic Monthly argues--
requiring a specific projection of the world to be held
out there to help maintain an inner homeostasis they
feel is cracking, then they can't be counted to fix at
all times entirely on truth because some truths
"might simply not accord" with powerful sanity
needs, and they can't know that what is causing
them mental dis-ease now might end up transforming
them into essentially the very people they're
currently despising--same source, same pull
backwards. If I knew someone loved "Detroit" but
also loved "Dunkirk," I'm not quite sure that a couple
years from now that what was in them to appreciate
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the nativism in Dunkirk wouldn't have them taking

previously un-embraced stances on immigration
policy, for instance, or "traitorous," "their-own-
country-disloyal", liberal universities, or the need for
strong leaders, walls... in these challenged times,
where civ itself is at risk. These people, who'd just
become vastly different people, would still of course
love "Detroit" and think the only change in them is
that they became that much more informed and
virtuous.
Many of us loved "Spotlight." I noticed while watching

the film that it touched on how molesting priests
themselves were very likely molested, but wanted to
keep us from carrying empathy towards them. These
priests themselves were survivors, but ones who
didn't go on to barely get through life or create
advocacy groups, but became perpetrators... but we
know that this might not have been about choice,
given the age it happened to them and the titanic
impact of abuse, about real options: the particular
path they went might have been determined for them
by their experiences of molestation--some to suicide,
others 'to "monsters." "Spotlight" encouraged
bigotry, priest-hatred, Catholic Church-hatred,
amongst people who already were supportive of
victims of child abuse and against the church, and
might have served our needs but possibly made us
more stupid at a time when the momentum might not
be with us anymore, and we're going to need to be
fully alert, smart, and not hammering over and over
again the same ol' nail, while the same arising
hurricane that hit the 1930s and which made shaped
many '20s swingers themselves into unconscious
nativist bigots, visits us as well. Spotting out obvious
793
Nazis does us no good at all. What helps are films, or

as I suggested, critics of films, which/who prompt us
to wonder if what happened to all those progressive
1920 people that switched protectionist, nationalist,
pro-dictator, and more bigoted, might without our
knowledge be swelling about in us too. Do we feel a
need to project everything we don't like about
ourselves into some target we can deny empathy to?
Armond White is not a favourite critic of mind, but I

do think his bit on "Spotlight" helpful for us to
challenge the bigotry many of us are actually in thrall
to: http://www.nationalreview.com/.../nihilism-vs-faith-
and...
Richard Brody's take on it is also useful for

encouraging us to see things in films which will help
draw attention to what we may currently be oblivious
to. A couple years from now, imagine what some
might say about us, about how we, so liberally
informed as we all are, were goats to assessments of
people that left us shortchanged in accurately
perceiving their plights (severe childhood abuse,
along with a desperate clamouring for love, as is true
with every individual who is malformed and
monstrous), and how it left us dumb to understand
the fantastic drive of the righwing movements around
the world. http://www.newyorker.com/.../the-
curiously-generic...
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426663/nihilis
m-vs-faith-and-hope-armond-white
David Huskey The National Review review of Spotlight

appears to come from an extraordinarily biased
794
place. I fail to see nihilism in a movie that celebrates

individual courage in standing up to a corrupt and
powerful institution. An institution more interested
in preserving its reputation, or particular dangerous
members, than protecting the children entrusted to
its care and moral nourishment is not worthy of
respect or belief. Institutions, even religious ones, are
no better than the people who populate them. Many
religious, political, and other leaders become more
interested in preservering their reputation and power
than admitting clear fault when crises arrive. I found
Spotlight to be a very moving film about the courage
to take on wrongdoing; it was about idealism, not
nihilism. There are many other stories of great moral
courage by religious leaders who relied upon their
faith to help them do the right thing. Those people
should also be celebrated, and they have been in
films like Ghandi and Selma. However, the grave
failures of religious leaders should not be ignored by
film makers because it might cause some to lose faith
in a particular religion. The failure to rationally
examine the conduct and practices of instutions
based on faith is a recipe for disaster when the
leaders are crazy (cults) or venal (prosperity gospel).
While the review cited has an interesting perspective,
I think it is an example of ideologically driven
criticism targeting a specific (and I hope narrow)
point of view.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston David Huskey I didn't find the

film nihilistic, and I actually overall like the film a lot
(you spend time with terrific actors playing
enormously likeable characters). What I do like about
the review is that it spotted out how empathy had to
be staunched in the film, for there's a moment where
795
logic would have us having a difficult time, not

stopping, which is easy, but hating the church, hating
the priests, hating the institution, and we do in the
end--hate those bastards. "It could have been any of
us!" How so? For a moment we're lent to see all of
the priests as themselves subjects of molestation,
and if they are, then the institution itself... is a
fantasy built out of compensation of abuse--Christ
gets royally screwed, but also God's love out of it.
Pathetic, but also a miracle solution if collective
origins are sick enough. That's certainly not the
"getting inside" the Catholic perspective that Armond
wants for us, for certain. But his call is still the right
call--see if we can inside their heads. If we can't, we
may need to allow that we have to have certain
groups we ourselves can detach empathy with. And if
we're like that, and not the perfect empathizers we
think we are, then can we count on our not getting
worse? It's something we really need to know. What
will happen when our easy ability to hate on the
Catholic Church, on Hillbilly Nation, whom are all
regressive, is taken away from us, as collectively it's
derided as a passing age's means of providing itself
with cover for its own indulgences? Do we go insane?
Conversation over "You've Got Mail" at the New

https://www.facebook.com/lihsa?fref=gs&hc_ref=ARTU9r2ED9trS-
v2JGVON38IToxNcit2xn9GkFhyAxO2TIwhfP6vNvd1_4Jy1JTKbvk
Lisa Salazar
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Just rewatched You've Got Mail with Meg Ryan and

Tom Hanks, a,1998 film based on the 1940 film, The
Shop Around the Corner.
It stood up to the test of time, despite the obvious

advances in technology (for one, I am writing this on
Facebook via my Kindle, a technology which has
nearly eclipsed the big box bookstores).
I was enthralled by a few things: the Ephron sisters'
script that repeatedly referenced and reflected Pride
& Prejudice; the very solid Godfather references; and
the Manhattan-ness of it all.
And what a cast! Dave Chappelle as the sidekick (!),
the erstwhile Greg Kinnear and inimitable Gene
Stapleton. And lest I forget, a waspish Parker Posey.
I can definitely see another remake of this story
within the next 60 years.
Anyone care to predict the remake of what they dare
to predict is a modern classic?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I love it. It's ebullient froth,

life and charm. I remember one critic said that after
reading Updike he is reminded as to why he took
upon himself all the bother of learning to read--here
folks, is the pleasure and joy. Also, it does have an
interesting Freudian theme, even if registered
unconsciously. The "father" steps in to enforce
separation from a "mother" whose influence (only
hesitatingly overtly acknowledged) is smothering a
child's full development. The father is "Fox Books," of
course, and the "mother" is the little shop, which
speaks to her mother's accomplishments rather than
797
her own. Done of course with great love of the

departing mother, and exaggerated targeting of the
rescuing father. It may be the film is only incidentally
coincidental with real-life changes to the book
industry, and really mostly reflects some known truth
about Nora Ephron's early life. (Playing now at Joe's
Apartment / 152 Riverside Drive, Between 87th and
88th Streets).
Lisa Salazar Love your take on the film; is the film

you are referring to something else or YGM?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Lisa Salazar She was a

treasure.
Laura-Jean Kelly Dislike this film..something to do w

the deceipt at the end and her almost subservant
stance to him. He saves her and she's so femininely
grateful. Uhh.
I've seen it 3 times now cuz i love the actors and
always trying to like it but it still smacks of something
i cant quite describe in words.
Love parker posey too.

She loves me and little shop around the corner are
great.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Laura-Jean Kelly Freudian

subtext (rescuing father, smothering mother), and
most feminists don't really do a lot of Freud right now.
The film could have been done where he doesn't
actually deceive her, and where she uses him and the
destruction he incurs to get out of a life-path that was
determined for her, but I don't Ephron was prepared
to be overt. Still, in effect it doesn't pretend that
798
finding oneself co-opted into a life that fit some other

person superbly but which you, despite its many pro-
offered comforts, are uncertain about, is all for the
best. The fight in that, the righteous fight in that, is
feminist, in my judgment. Posey IS great in that film.
So too the rest of the supporting cast. Love them all.
Laura-Jean Kelly Just that to like this film and believe

that the original beguiled is misogynist which i dont
believe but i think Lisa Salazar you did is an example
of what s wrong with the depiction of women in
modern times in some of these newer hollywood
movies and why we have the name chick flicks. Oh
well.
Lisa Salazar Laura-Jean Kelly, I get you. But at the

same time the look on her face when she "meets"
him is just priceless. She wants it to be him, she's
shocked, she's betrayed, she's in love. It is not a
beautiful face but it's real. How did she pack that all
in one look? Heartbreaking.
Laura-Jean Kelly Yah. Meg Ryan highly underrated.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Lisa Salazar YGM
Conversation over "Beguiled" at New Yorker

Facebook Movie Club
799
NJ
About the Beguiled: Sofia Coppola makes

amendments to the original script that are so
equivalent to sexual cleansing as to render her whole
retelling of the Don Siegel original indefensible. And
between 1971 and 2017 what have we lost?
Everything. Style over substance.
I should never have done that to Sofia, whose every

single other films I loved, even and above all its least
popular, Somewhere: I should never have watched
Don Siegel’s jaw-dropping, menacingly mesmerising
film, 1971 The Beguiled, the day before I went to see
her remake of it.
I could go on and on about all that’s missing, all the

things she decided to cut out of the original, like
(SPOILER) Miss Martha cuts out the leg and symbolic
masculinity of the Caporal - from the onset, it was
shocking to see Coppola deleted that kiss between
Eastwood and the 12 year old Amy, which takes you
by surprise and by the throat right from the start of
800
the original - one of many WTF moments of the whole

1971 affair. Then you realise she deleted the slave -
because, you know, whatever, it’s 2017. We dont
show these things anymore.
No, the one thing that I believe captures her whole

sexual cleansing operation is summed up in a line
that she subtly changed, when Miss Martha offers
Brandy to the Caporal to relieve his suffering, and he
says “with pleasure”, and in the original Martha says
“it is not for your pleasure, it is for your pain”, to
which he replies something along the lines of “Well
you’d be surprised to know how they sometimes both
go hand in hand”. Sofia obviously thought BDSM was
so last season, and you know, Eros and Thanatos,
that sort of things, who cares, so passé, so she
changed “pain” to “comfort”. “It is not for your
pleasure, but for your comfort”. To which obviously
the Caporal has nothing to reply.
And everything is oh so comfortable in this film, she

films beautifully, as usual, young girls and gardens
and taffetas, and it smells of lavender, and I guess
she got the Prix de la mise en scène for… her use of
natural light? the problem is that Siegel’s version was
just as beautiful, and filmed in natural light too, but in
it form followed function and there was substance
behind every frame.
It is a shame because this year, 120 battements par

minutes was a movie about Eros and Thanatos, just
like the original Beguiled, a movie which understands
how cinema moves and moves your heart.
Anybody else here saw this film and found it
disturbingly clean?
801
LJK I remember the original as being gritty and hard

to watch and wonderful. Wasnt sure i wanted to see it
this time around cuz of upsetting content....now I Am
upset reading how these vital aspects of the film
have been removed. Thanks for the sharp review!
MSI have yet to see the original beguiled, so my

opinion is based solely on the Sofia Coppola movie. I
couldn't keep up with the girls: they feared him, they
hated him, they loved him, they hated him again.
Especially the Kirsten Dunst character. And, the
different shots of the tree between scenes. I assumed
it must have been symbolic of something, but what it
was I could not determine.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston A lot gets told in quiet

mannerisms. I don't know if there was much clean in
Dunst's clear desire to scrub the place, the young
girl's interest in beguiling him, Fanning's interest in
seducing/mastering him, and Kidman's desire to keep
along until he might prove a man her equal. And
when he lets loose, he's savage. There is a quietness
which helps give elevation to playful efforts to try
new things.
https://www.facebook.com/nicolas.joseph.5?fref=gc
NJ Can mannerism be quiet though? The mood might
be, but sofias tricks are pretty heavy handed, like the
firsr three frames - oooh the little girl is literally
breaking away from the straight alleyway and into
the woods. In the original there was no alleyway, the
woods were wild and messy, like desire, from the
start. But mostly that quiet mannerism doeant
answer the question: why the cleansing? Why the
802
deleting of everything that made the original so gritty

and deeply mesmerizing and ambiguous?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I'll have to see the original. I

surely will get a better sense as to what you feel was
missing. Probably have to rewatch Coppola's film
while at it. I wonder if she and Wes Anderson are
simply more dilettantish?
Patrick McEvoy-Halston As in, they might shut down if

things got too loud. Bringing slavery into the movie,
might be one of those kinds of elements... and we'd
lose what the movie did provide. Just thinking.
NJ Patrick McEvoy-Halston but slavery plays

beautifully in the original film. It is a movie set in the
civil war, so kind of hard to pretend it was not there.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston You certainly have sparked

my interest in the original. Thanks Nicolas. But for
some reason, I don't mind that it wasn't there.
Perhaps because, I know this is thoroughly
objectionable, slaves or no slaves, I feel the North
and South were due to blow one another up during
that period. The primary "issue" is that they wanted
to kill one another. They were two different types of
people at that point, with no more overlay. If
eliminating slavery was the primary thing for the
North, they could have waited the South's war rage
out and snatched it away from them when they were
more placid. Way less ravage, and just as effective.
And so for me, the house is just a weird intersection,

where the mice might even play.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010434109005&fref=gc
803
LJK Patrick McEvoy-Halston Exactly right...to remake it

and improve may have been to add more poc and
women were well represented in the first one imo. It
wasnt Clint Eastwood's film either. It was a strong
ensemble piece. I grew up remembering the women
in the movie. Their sexual oppressive passive
aggressive manner. Imo.
NJ Patrick McEvoy-Halston yes I have heard that point

made about the civil war... I am not sure how much of
it is an actual retelling of the story after the facts or
wishful thinking, but I am not a historian (nor an
American, for that matter) so I cant really say. What I
am is a film lover and ex-film critique and a writer,
and all I can tell you is the character of the slave in
the original was incredibly bold and powerful and she
had both desire and pride and the her interplay with
Eastwood was quite fascinating. Especially for 1971,
and still today.
LJK NJfyi was talking about the 70s beguiled again w

lisa on her post about the movie youve got mail. In
over my head w you guys maybe but i feel what i
feel.�
Saturday, August 12, 2017
Conversation about trolls at the New Yorker Movie

Facebook Group
804
We're all praising how there aren't any trolls here...

even as perhaps it shouldn't have been expected,
given Kit Hellman's point that trolls don't read the
New Yorker. Still, I think it's worth pointing out that
our brilliant critic and lead "sharer" in this
805
group, Richard Brody, has written over and over

again for, in a sense, releasing trolls from out under
the bridge, and for thinking on how much perhaps
anything that is heroically valuable for our enjoyment
of life is due in our age to share the same encysted
quarantine as alt-right trolls. In an article on Berkeley,
he laments how the institution "suppresses, diverts,
or coverts" the very energy it depends upon for its
survival, in one on Melissa McCarthy, on how
nastiness, which in his opinion is the essence of
comedy, is "constrained and sweetened," in one on
Linsay Lohan, on how simply because she engages in
a thrilling risk that we--valuing nothing more than
"prudence and responsible professionalism, the
supreme value of [our] age"--don't like, has trouble
sustaining a career.
Given Brody's criticism and prominent role in the

group, in my mind the introductory post to this group
should have included more a sense of "take risks, go
for broke" than it did, to help play against our taught
stifling tendencies. Do you agree or disagree?
http://www.newyorker.com/…/the-paradox-of-a-great-
university
http://www.newyorker.com/…/richar…/set-melissa-
mccarthy-free
http://www.newyorker.com/…/richar…/set-melissa-
mccarthy-free
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Here's the link to Richard's

Lindsay Lohan article, by the
way: http://www.newyorker.com/.../happy-girls-
lindsay-lohan....
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A.S. Mentira!! Aca HAY trolos!
Patrick McEvoy-Halston What came first? Trolls, or the

desire to evacuate from most of the human race, by
imposing this defamation upon people you were
previously, not only ready to receive, but truthfully
sometimes benefiting from, from receiving? I know
there's a lot of disturbed people out there, but in my
judgment, it's about a simultaneous tie.
P.H. With your last point I agree.
Richard Brody Thanks for the very kind words; you

bring up some good points that are worth addressing.
I've never thought of my criticism as having anything
to do with trolls or trolling, which involves intentional
antagonism. I'd never want to do any of those things,
and I don't enjoy reading the work of writers who do
so. Taking risks and going for broke isn't something to
do casually; taking a stand on a movie that's
controversial or heated is also a responsibility—to be
detailed and clear—and a little bit of that heat goes a
long way. This isn't a matter of being constrained or
stifled, but of being part of a community, whether on-
line or in person, where people aren't shouting at
each other but discussing, and where, even when it
gets excited, it remains respectful. It doesn't mean
that one respects every movie--far from it--but it's
worth remembering, and I do try to remember this
when I write, that making a movie is difficult--that it
takes two years to make a movie, two hours to watch
a movie, and two minutes to demolish it--or, with
social media, two seconds. I've written about this
intrinsic disproportion between filmmaking and
807
criticism; awareness of it, I think, is part of the

distinction between taking a strong stand sincerely
and trolling.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Thanks for the

response, Richard. Your work has offered great and
exciting challenges for me. What motivated my post
is that I remember introductions to discussion groups
which I thought served to let participants know they
were thought of us as people who aren't always
heard from, but who could rock your
world. Salon.com once introduced their comment
sections like this, when Joan Walsh and Talbot were
around, and for awhile it and Gawker were places to
go to meet the mad genius of the world... I felt it was
what the world wide web was supposed to be about,
meeting the tumult of genius everywhere, not just
from out of refined families and cultured
neighbourhoods. Then came a time when you felt
more, let's remember to play nice (the Dayden era at
Salon), and I felt a world that had once been
interested, really interested -- you felt it... the
audience could change them! -- had been requited to
playing out a social role of supervisor/superego, who
delight in interesting discussions, but who had
allergies to good ideas... that didn't belong properly
to them. Managers and staff sergeants, took charge;
their (genuine) betters looked only to themselves,
and got wierded out when nobodies talk to them on
their twitter feeds. Everybody operating out of
masochism, out of pleasure derived from playing out
a social role that registered your ultimate deference
to an age's call for frustration and unrealized lives...
for a Depression decade, for everyone started losing
out.
808
Absolutely about manners. Absolutely about respect.

But I think people need cues to be reminded that,
once, a broad culture could ask for these things and
not also be hoping to keep up a pleasant hum of
mannerliness and actually perhaps not so challenging
ideas (for, since we've reached the apex of thought
and are morally right about everything, this is not
only all that is to be expected but further evidence of
our fully extended reach). I think unless care is taken
to prompt people to take huge risk, everybody
understands what is understood of them, now, in
engaging in civil discussions where trolls aren't
tolerated. We align into place.
A.S. Trolls are not original thinkers or misunderstood

outsiders; they are people (or bots) whose purpose is
tp insult, harass , and intimidate commenters whose
views they disagree with or who have
qualities/characteristics they dislike.. They seek to
intimidate and distract from real discussion by
instigating schoolyard level volleys of insults.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston A.S. But I think that people

have come to have far too ranging an idea of those
who are engaged in "schoolyard" behaviour, and
have become increasingly unaware of how much
input they're bent on classifying as merely disruptive.
A number of us felt that it was like last days of disco
when the site Gawker died, but we noticed that many
of our peers were glad to see the ostensible "bullies"
finally off the internet. These people, the ostensibly
decent, scared us.
809
Your way of describing trolls is how a recent terrifying

NRA ad described how, ostensibly, university
students are preying on "regular America" -- the
ostensibly fundamentally decent being besieged by
tactics of intimidation from students on the loose.
The university students themselves believe that they
won't be waylaid from where the genuine intimidation
lies, and strike mercilessly at every incursion of the
normalization of a vile agenda that'll go under guise
of decency and civility, for sure.
I believe I've very sensitive to people being hurt as

well. I don't downgrade the damage speech can do,
or want to see people cowed from feeling free to
have their say. I want to create a safe zone -- a
concept I have absolute respect for -- too. Thanks for
your input.
Further conversation over "Dunkirk"
Conversation about Dunkirk (at NewYorker Facebook

group)
With "Dunkirk" we have another film where young
men do things we could only trepidatiously imagine
having the "balls" to do ourselves, making it yet
another film which has a generation that went about
slaughtering themselves, as somehow nevertheless
superior, greater, than our mostly peaceful one. They
make war out to be our chance to be real men again,
which is a problem.
810
Can anyone think of any films where overtly soldiers

are mocked as an inferior, as a regressive, species --
and I don't mean just the officers, nor simply high
command, which is all over the place, but the
soldiers themselves... as well as the people back
home who believe they're honourable for thinking
soldiers as brave and brave only, rather than a
particularly sadistic and crazily self-sacrificial brand
of human being. This needn't be what the whole film
is concerned with, but just aspects within a film. I just
saw "Hard Days Night," and it's in there... as I believe
the whole spirit of what I'm saying is in "Daisies." But
as a whole film, "Casualties of War" comes to mind,
without an immediate follow-up.
Nial Buford
I'm going to disagree with the idea that Dunkirk is a
film about wartime heroism or any sort of jingoistic
tendency to greatness. To my own surprise,
especially after seeing it a 2nd time, I think it's
possibly the only successful contemporary anti-war
film we have, at least in the last decade (which I
would never have expected from Nolan). The movie's
narrative structure is one where war is consistently
the obstacle to the character's - such as they are -
goal: to get out alive. War only impedes them. It
offers no opportunity for success other than survival,
and no real mission, no victory condition. If fact, the
primary faces we follow would, in another century, be
called cowards: they use a soldier's body as a ticket
out of the war, they hide and run and try to leave by
themselves before anyone else makes it out. Tom
Hardy's Fletcher is the exception, but his heroism is
treated with such quiet and reflective eye that it's
811
almost incidental to the rest of the movie. Despite

Nolan's tendency to sentimentalize, which almost
ruins it, the revelation at the end of the film is that
the best you can ask for in wartime is that your loved
ones come home, and that that is the only real
success to be had. (An aside: I don't love the movie).
Interesting. I thought you had a real sense that
England was a land of patriots and that Germany was
an implacably dangerous enemy, that owing to this
misstep -- which owed nothing to the willing soldiers
themselves -- might rape the homeland. These men
were ready to do their part... and stood out
existentially vulnerable for a moment for this, but
learned that all of England was behind them. My
impression of them was as mostly orderly, if
understandably unsettled... it was the frenchman
who seemed a little more unscrupulous. I felt the
sequel to this film at the finish... which was Britain
redoubling its efforts, all doubts conquered, after this
pitiful and pathetic start, to doom even the great
German monster. Success is in having committed
yourself sacrificially for your mates, and knowing you
handled yourself well in terribly frightening
situations... which again I thought all of them did --
though a few, particularly well -- in a situation where
overt heroism wasn't an option for them.
I love your line, "his heroism is treated with such

quiet and reflective eye that it's almost incidental to
the rest of the movie." There is some kind of truth in
this that it made me pause. But I found him the
exception that would very soon prove the rule,
however.
812
Nial Buford
I think that this assessment might be predicated on
an idea that Germany is a central figure in the movie,
which it purposefully isn't. The word Nazi is never
uttered; even in the explanatory title cards at the
opening of the film they are referred to only as "The
Enemy," which is obviously a very conscious decision
on Nolan's part, done in the knowledge that any
mention of the opposing army's Nazi banner would
immediately give Britain's forces a noble edge. The
"German Monster" is treated as a broad, almost
allegorical threat, not an existential one: they might
as well be Death, incarnate, coming from the
continent to steal Britain's sons.
The only concrete account of a "noble war" or even a

"noble defense" that the movie seems to deliver is
the death of George, whose sacrifice is treated as
banal and accidental. The only reason he's even
treated as a hero is that the older boy comes back
and tells his story to the local paper, who hails him
as a "hero at Dunkirk," though we saw his journey as
almost meaningless, really, and needlessly tragic.
The stamp of courage here is almost seen as just a
means of consolation for the grief of the homeland
and its families, I think.
I don't think we ever forget they're fighting Nazis,
even if they might remind us more of a horde, more
how Germans saw the Polish and Russian peoples, for
our never seeing their banner. Though you do get me
thinking, perhaps like some other thread suggested,
813
it also doubles as an anti-immigration movie, a Brexit

movie.
I didn't realize that George was the one the papers
called a local hero; when I saw the film, I swear I saw
Tommy. Good to know. George doesn't do much, but
he did commit himself to a brave action when it
wasn't necessitated of him. There's fidelity in that
with the others who accomplished more. So tragic,
but that's a fate only for those of acquired heroism. I
felt fealty, not mockery in this endnote. Imagine if
the film had shown two boys, one who made the leap
and another who didn't. That fellow, the one who
stayed back, wouldn't have earned the right to start
getting jumpy, which everyone else in the movie,
very much had. They were all way past the point of
conceivable forebearance, and as I saw it, were still
holding up fairly well.
There are three acts of demonstrative bravery in this
film... a brave stance, where a reasoned backing
down could be done without shame. One was done
by Tom Hardy's pilot, when he decided to press on
even though it meant no fuel to make the return
back, the other by Commander Bolton, as he decided
to remain until all the French had their chance to
escape as well, and the third by George, a civilian
who took a willing leap to a participant in war, when
his age made him exempt. Tom Hardy and Bolton do
well... as we would expect them to do. Young George
gets the short end of the stick, as we might fear
could well occur to him. But even though I think
there may be room for audience members to want to
814
pretend they wouldn't be like him, I think there's a

larger sense we may be looking at essentially the
same man, perhaps in three different stages of life.
You made challenging points. Thank you. I would like

to post this conversation to my blog. Do you mind if I
do so?
Why we're in people we abhor, in "Detroit"

So imagine if you bought a house at two hundred
thousand and it's now worth a million, imagine if you
went through college at a time when it cost nothing,
imagine if you belong to a professional society which
is pretty forgiving of its members so it's really hard to
do anything so bad it kills your career, imagine
you're a liberal whose always advocated for life
enrichment and self-realization, imagine you're
making a good chunk of change... so imagine you're
all this, and you start entering an age where you
seem to be made to feel the pain of all the working
class people out there whom just yesterday you
dusted off as racist as well as culpable for being anti-
change; where you start thinking on the paltry wage
the person who serves coffee for you earns, when
just yesterday all you were thinking on is that they
made your coffee the right damn particular way;
where you start thinking of young adults who can't
afford to get their starter houses owing to your
having priced them out of the market, when just
yesterday somehow this was simply what it is to live
in a more competitive and cosmopolitan and open-
access age; where you start thinking of how students
have been saddled with gargantuan loans they'll
815
never pay off, when just yesterday you didn't really

make the comparison with how comparitively easy
you got off; where you start thinking on how afraid
people are to upset bosses because, unlike you, they
have no professional status or union rights, when just
yesterday it didn't seem strange to you that even
though you were the like of a pollster who declared
one hundred percent against Trump, you yourself
were at no risk of being turfed from your job; where
you're beginning to hear the incriminating voice of
your parents, valuing restraint, self-sacrifice, and
opposed to the egoistic and flashy, when just
yesterday these pointed fingers from out of your own
past had been blocked out of mind by the lasting self-
righteousness that came with spotting out the
criminal pederast priests in "Spotlight," that bore
similarity, in their stubborn cruel mindsets, one
noted, TO THE ENTIRE GENERATION before your own.
And then you see "Detroit," whom are you going to

be identifying with? The terrorizing, one-hundred-
percent-guilty-as-sin cops? Or the black men and
women, who are absolutely sinless? I figure a lot of
people are in with the cops. The cops are even
grossly embarrassing, spilling their guts when they
don't have to, unleashing demons that immediately
damn them, which they're even momentarily proud
of before becoming revolted that the demonic in
them is fundamentally in control... and so like many
today, who are acting in ways their opponents fairly
call insane, out of a realization that given the sudden
slipping away of a political order they had simply
taken for granted, their psyches have lost perchs it
turns out they had depended on, and so now every
time they open their mouths they can't depend on
816
exactly what'll emerge because what was contained

out there in how society was set has been withdrawn
as a confounding, sour, unpredictable and
adversarial mixture within their own corporality.
You'll look at the terrible violence done, all the

pornographic detail, and you're seeing all what
you've done all your own life, you and your affluent
friends. We really f*cked over Hillbilly Nation, didn't
we?... they're human discombobulates. And students
too. And lower wage workers. Crippling sh*t was
happening to them, shortchanged lives, stopped
lives, and now we can't escape the details, the
details.
The details, the details, you know are soon going to

chase you down, if not immediately now... And then a
miracle! A lawyer appears, who smart and decisive,
and he whisks you out of trouble. Barely, but his
competence and self-belief has still got superpower,
thank god -- you even dare being proud of it. And
now what do you do? You've got a brief reprieve only.
You've got to fundamentally change yourself, or it's
doom time. Does this mean being more emphatic to
black people? Maybe not at all, actually, if you
identify your previous concern -- Black Rights! -- as
mixed in with your antinomian life ways. Above all,
your concern will be your "Spotlight" selves -- you'll
have to get rid of them. You'll merge back with the
bigoted, head kept low to the ground, everyday
swamp, you once so many years ago, escaped from.
This type can't be shown the horrors of their ways,
for they were the genuine losers in our own time of
win-win. The pains we'd shown them, are ones we
caused.
817
Monday, July 31, 2017
Discussion over "Dunkirk"
RT: Interesting that Nolan's film seems to meld

together two major sources of British WWII self-
image: the doughty sea rescue by British small boats
of hundreds of thousands of trapped soldiers on the
Belgian beaches, and the contemporary 1940 air war
against the Nazi invasion known as the 'Battle of
Britain' ( (though not a part of the film, The Blitz of
London would be the third of these heroic tropes.)
While the film 'Dunkirk' certainly seems a memorial
to the moral clarity of the past, it is also inevitably a
reflection on our present-day incapacity to live
beyond ironic self-reflection and bitter partisanship.
Yet more importantly, in making a war film without
ever representing an enemy, Nolan has allowed us
the opportunity to examine our own hopes and fears
as being what they are and not as a sign of noble
purpose. This is a brilliant film for more than its
technically proficient beauty, and a reason to
compare it to the great Kubrick moral investigations
'Paths of Glory,' '2001 a Space
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: Interesting; like the idea of

melding. We do see the Germans, though. I felt that
was part of what Tom Hardy's character
accomplishes in the end... he punctures into, not the
Blitz, or Battle of Britain, but the successful
subsequent continent invasion -- Operation Overlord;
Normandy. I thought the film shows us a false
existential crisis. The young troops have taken a step
outside their regular lives and are in a place of dread,
and aren't sure upon their return if their country --
818
their seniors, especially, who are featured in the film

-- is with them.
But it's false precisely because as troops they exist

beyond, as you call it, present-day ironic self
reflection and bitter partisanship, or as another way
of saying it, beyond a democratic impetus and only
on a path to willing self-sacrifice and war, so there
was no real way their grim-mooded country would
have abandoned them.
-----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: If this was who they were,

those who when "faced with decisions that could
mean life or death for themselves and others,
mastered their emotions and acted thoughtfully,
responsibly, honorably, potentially self-sacrificingly
for the good of a collective mission that they’re all
aware of: to get back to Great Britain in order to
defend it against a likely attack by Germany," then
who wouldn't want to emulate them... have them as
a legitimate source of daddy issues? But they seem a
little more silly when what they're up to becomes,
not emulating daddy, reaching up and out to
something greater, but those regressing from being
already partly individuated adults back into good
sons doing whatever hell their mother country bids of
them... all so that they can bathe in the reception of
acceptance, love and gratitude of a nation, full of
maternal projections.
It struck me as falsely existential... young men out

there on their own, unsure not only if they'll get back
but how they'll be received when they do. It's false,
819
for, for being willing sacrifices, and for deferring

independent judgment for playing the part their
elders want for them... for being all that you ascribe
to them, we never sensed they were at risk of
abandonment. If they all died there on the beach, WE
would have called out to them to let them know how
we loved them... how proud we were of them. It's not
only or primarily victory we asked of them; but that
they risked death and died so that the virtue of a
country could be reborn again.
-----
KB: I'm really interested in this criticism of the film

which has emerged from a number of leading voices.
I'm not a huge Nolan fan but this film really worked
for me. The only thing that matters is survival. That
most animal of instincts. I found humanity
everywhere in the film, in the little moments.
Contrast that against the magnitude of the events
taking place and you have a wonderful balance. I
don't think we need to know anything more of the
characters than what we're given. Their lives are
ordinary, their feelings written on the faces and in
their body language. Surprised people think it's
unemotional. It's restrained certainly, again in
contrast to the majesty of the score and
cinematography, but it's all there I think - in the
undercurrent.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: If the only thing that matters

is survival, why is there such a concern in the film
whether people approved of them... that people saw
what they had accomplished or had tried to
accomplish? Tom Hardy's character doesn't seem to
820
allow much for the importance of survival, but quite

a bit for... let's be a bit ungenerous here, the
applause of his mates as he becomes a legend out of
history? I'm being a bit crass with Hardy, though... I
was actually moved by his decision to help, even if I
didn't think it portrayed as all that hard a one... well,
you know what, if I turn around a military ship full of
people will vanish into the sea... I'm sure I could
dissuade myself from indulging in such a feast of an
encounter! It was also a thrill to see the 17-year-old
act with such intelligence and leadership. To be
under assault, and yet keeping your head and your
reasoning ability intact -- how wonderful to
experience yourself like that!
KB: I think there's grounds to argue that the concept

of war, which I think defines the action of the film,
only cares about survival. The cinematic storytelling
reflects that. I don't think Hardy's character was
thinking of the applause down below - literally just
trying to take his opposite number down. That was
his goal. Rylance's character's goal was merely to
save as many soldiers as possible. Again, saving lives
is the key. That was the whole point of Dunkirk. It
wasn't in any way a militaristic offensive. It was an
evacuation, a defeat - but hundreds of thousands of
lives were saved and that's why it was viewed
victoriously by Churchill and more generally by the
civilian public. The film reflects that quietly during
the coda but I still think survival is it. Styles'
character even quips it: all we did was survive.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: They survived... AND were

approved -- isn't the nature of their reception what
prompted Styles' remark... so also part of the film?
821
Our experience of it is as a survival film, but also as

much a reception film -- what survival, and loss...
what heroic actions, begat in terms of approval or
scorn. I actually agree that there is a sense that
Rylance and Hardy's characters are only thinking on
assisting, on saving lives... but since they also end up
being both either granted the status of approval-
granters (Rylance) from doing something that was
appreciated and approved, or simply under heavy
reception of approval (Tom Hardy--war god), it's
difficult to situate ourselves within them and not be
lying to ourselves if we imagined we weren't doing so
also for the love and glory their actions gave to
them, though the opportunity is certainly afforded us.
-----
AN: Disagree. Anonymity was a crux of the movie. All

those nameless, barely seen humans. Many of whom
lost their stories on that beach or subsequent
beaches. That is the horror.
I was very moved. To the point where days later I was
still questioning why and what did I see.
I was born in Scotland. My father and grandfather,
my uncles all served.
One lost a limb. Others their lives.
Well done, as one of the faceless I connected.
http://www.foxnews.com/.../97-year-old-dunkirk-
veteran-it...
97-year-old Dunkirk veteran: 'it was just like I was

there again'
Among the moviegoers at the premiere of Dunkirk
on…
FOXNEWS.COM
822
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: And if the Germans make a

film equivalent to this, delineating the service of all
their anonymous throng in WW2, with their limbs and
lives lost, their stories, far too early terminated, this
would be a good cause to... wonder how much to
exult when films make giving so much value to the
faceless, a sign of our moral improvement?
AN: Of course not. That's what is accosted. Our moral

center. All these people whose lives were cut short.
It's repugnant.
Those in power repeatedly use the anonymous as
cannon fodder. Is one side better than the other? I
believe it was much clearer then than now. But to
those on the field the terror was equally as real, one
to the other.
Most of the film is spent with hordes all facing home.
The yearning was palpable.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The article you link us to is

about a heroic man who earned tons of war medals
and who still garners "proper" salutes, possessed of
wise tales on the horrors of war; about what kids
these days need to understand on how the affairs of
the world aren't just entertainment. What's missing
in the loss is a genuine sense OF loss... they all seem
to have acquired so much sanctity, thereby. Doesn't
a tearful mother lean near them, sad for their loss?...
in our imaginations, but perhaps in their own as well?
Aren't they more deserving of it, for their being used
and neglected? If they actually weren't at all,
wouldn't a perfect image be frustrated and prove an
annoyance one's temporarily cornered into having to
abide?
823
He may not have told about how the war was about
those in power using the anonymous as cannon
fodder, but this sort of narratizing is probably more
popular with classes of people who are always for
war (Michael Bay does it a lot, which his audience
licks up) than it is even with liberal peaceniks, so if
he did it'd be digested as without confusion as a
meal you were actually expecting.
I like your comment about the yearning being

palpable. I agree that it was.
Taking a pause... before loving Caesar, in "War for

the Planet of the Apes"
"In War for the Planet of the Apes," I think we're

supposed to understand that though we have
essentially two tribes, both headed by chieftains, that
really only one of them is authoritarian -- the human
824
tribe. The ape tribe, I think we're supposed to

understand, is built out of beings whose sympathies
are actually democratic and egalitarian, and so we
agree to the artifice of their being a clan that is king-
ruled with an order of succession because it reminds
us of our own way of paying heed to newly emergent
"historical" "peoples" who've just gotten started on
their way, but nevertheless fundamentally
understand them as a community of democrats.
But if I think I felt this deep down, I would have felt

more at ease with the movie. I think the movie
savours too much how every time Caesar waits
through a tumult of discord or uncertainty to finally
speak... or even quietly move a eyebrow, how
everyone suddenly stops what they're doing and
stands riveted to attend his great wisdom. I think the
movie savours too much how being amongst
Caesar's closest advisors, puts you a bit ahead of all
the rest (more than a bit, actually) -- we notice how
all three of his advisors, seem especially gargantuan:
the chimp is big enough to make his taking on an
opponent gorilla, not absolutely ridiculous. I think the
movie has us relish too much, how if you find
yourself in his doghouse... and thereby end up being
feminized in working the kitchen and doing dishes for
men who have no respect for you, it's little more than
you deserve -- it's appropriate that our last image of
you is your being exposed haplessly, from behind. I
think that the movie encourages some part of us, not
so much to actually notice and remember Caesar's
errors in judgment -- of which there appear to be at
least two gross ones -- but to be quick to elide them.
825
Anybody else get a feeling that this wasn't only a

movie about "people" with sympathy vs. those
mostly without any, but about two versions of
braggarts who could put us in mind to crush the
weak and feel great for being near to the strong, one
put forth flatteringly, the other, not so?
-----
I would have been a bit uncomfortable with Caesar

even if he was never bent on revenge... I mostly
overlooked it when I made my analysis. It's not just
Caesar, it's how the other apes, as well as the
audience, would have reacted to a collection of apes
who really contested him... who maybe said, we've
enjoyed your rule, Caesar, but your ethos is still too
much the brute leader and his body guards
defending against endlessly unavoidable enemies,
for us not to think we've been saddled with our own
General McCarthy. I know you experienced him as a
spiritual leader, but I felt him for sure as a war chief.
There is no greater macho than the leader... who only
ostensibly reluctantly uses force, but whom we never
thrill more at when he does... who demonstrates that
he, and he only, is Caesar!
The villain gorilla ends up redeemed in the end... and

by redemption, I mean, he is allowed to go out
strong. I felt the film wanted this for him, because it
respected his power too -- he doesn't oblige the
weak. More this, than just his being long-afflicted for
being a "donkey," so not deserving further grievance.
Compare him to how Vanilla dies and how he is
portrayed. We reject him, Winter, that is, for being
genuinely weak -- a turn-coat, not out of deliberation
826
and choice, but out of being fearful and cowardly:

plus he let himself get readily tossed aside,
emasculated, by the more determined gorilla, when
he brought to bear almost the same physical
resources -- shame! We'd disassociate ourselves from
him, pronto. Even Maurice is overt, intimidating, way-
clearing power, not just intellect and wisdom. It
would have felt wrong if he was one of the smaller
orangutangs... which should be bizarre, given the
dimensions -- sympathy, wisdom -- allotted him.
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
Reply to Kenneth Alan Adams and Audrey Crosby's

"The 2016 Election, Authoritarian Childrearing and
our Suicidal Trajectory" (Journal of Psychohistory,
Summer 2017)
827
828
One wonders when one reads this article if the

foremost interest of Adams and Crosby is
to help us understand why the white working
class shouldn't be blamed for not being able to
keep up with the times, or why they damn well
should be! Ostensibly, the foremost inspiration
of the article is Lloyd deMause's (borrowing
from James F. Masterson) concept of "growth
panic," where those who were mothered by
unloved mothers who more needed their
children as anti-depressants than loved them
and who abandoned their children with they
showed some inclination to individuate, can no
longer handle living in a society which enables
too much pleasure and opportunities for self-
activation. Their inner punitive maternal alters
have had it with them, and with good reason
they feel threatened with the prospect of
annihilation. Hence they go "Trump" so they
can bond with him as the foremost delegate of
the Mother Nation and war against all the
"spoiled" who ostensibly are willfully ignoring
Mother simply to pursue their own commercial
pleasures; that is, so they can war against
those we know actually came out of warmer
childhoods, those who were fortunate enough
to possess more loving mothers, belong of a
superior psychoclass--i.e.,
progressives. Ostensibly, that is, Adams and
Crosby are encouraging us to understand that
829
when this group says they want someone who

represents the split-off Terrifying Mother
"locked up!," it's because this group’s own
mothers, horrifyingly, actually did lock them
up in restricting confines for tortuous long
periods in their childhoods--some equivalent of
being tightly swaddled, so they could barely
more and barely breathe--and are revenging
themselves, while re-staging the experience,
by making themselves, this time, the
persecutor. It's horrible, but absolutely
predictable, absolutely inevitable, given that
this is what happens to you when you emerge
out of a worse psychoclass: you become
absolutely dreadful as adults, seething
intolerant slurs all over the place, plotting
ruination to an abundant array of--if your
numbers are large enough--likely doomed
targets.
Societal growth needn't always be threatening
to less evolved psychoclasses, according to
Lloyd's theory, if it really mostly
means change, change you have to adapt to. I
mean, because according to Lloyd every group
uses a particular societal form to help stabilize
their psyches, projecting parts out into
institutions like the army, the courts, the jails,
etc.--yes, just any kind
of societal transformation that parts from the
one your own psyche requires for its
830
equilibrium can make you lose your ability to

function sanely in the world. But for complete
discombobulation, it's growth that means more
than just industries shifting from one form into
another, from coal to solar, from national
production to internationally sourced, from
manufacturing work to mostly service industry,
for example, which by itself is really
more change than it necessarily is growth,
that is the problem, but growth that provides
more opportunities for self-actualization and
pleasure than previous. Something that isn't
immediately afflicting but rather greatly
pleasing, first, readily enjoyed and relished,
first, then afflicting--for many, catastrophically
so.
There is no sense that this is why change is so
threatening to the white working class in this
article, however. Rather, the change we're
facing is simply a new world of industry
replacing an older one, in sort of the
unsparing, necessary way of commerce--just
how the world turns, folks! Business is
requited to go where the profits are--no
malice, companies did what they did, turfed
millions out of jobs, for "business was no
longer profitable" and they themselves
wouldn't survive if they didn't adapt. And by
their portraying the change we're
experiencing like that we're now somehow out
831
of mind to reappraise the white working class,

their motives, their panic, their apparent
stupidity and slothfulness, as absolutely
understandable given the huge tumult that
remaining in their own minds "spoiled bad
boys and girls" would present them with, but
rather to reinforce the sense of change that
every member of the liberal managerial class
is comfortable with: that the world ever
churns, and it is one's responsibility to try to
keep up with it rather than foolishly "yearn for
the certainties of a bygone era." And out of
this way of construing change, for their
absolute inability to make the least
adjustment, it is almost impossibly hard to not
imagine it fair for the white working class to
be summarized and served up in just the same
way Hillary did... that is, as racist, sexist,
homophobic a-holes, who shout "Lock her
up!," "Grab 'em by the pussy!," Trump that
bitch!"; that is, as those whom we might want
to offer single-payer healthcare to, but whom
we righteously hope, nevertheless, die off, and
as fast as possible, so their irresponsible
decision to so early on pitch their tent and
refuse adjustments everyone else has been
forced to make is no longer transformed via a
political movement into a threat to waylay the
rest of us.
832
There is no sense in this article--which, again,

is about re-introducing Lloyd's idea of societal
growth panic into our appraisal of the
psychological motivations moving our world--
that our greatest obstacle isn't adjusting to
growth which makes demands of us and that
has brought down calamities like global
climate change, but adjusting to growth that is
allowing us to enjoy ourselves more than ever
before, about it having constituted, for many
of us, so close to everything we've ever
dreamed we wouldn't mind if it could just
coast on in its present form forever (as for
example David Frum has been recently
arguing for, for a political party that argued
for that, principally). And one wonders if the
reason that there is no sense of the
fundamental reason of why our current
"neoliberal" growth can be so threatening to
us that it can produce a panic large enough to
create apocalypse, in this article, is because
the authors themselves are suffering from the
condition; that they are themselves suffering
from growth panic.
There is no sense of themselves as id in this
article, only as sober witness, as super-ego--for
it certainly isn't plausibly them, the liberal,
educated class they are part of, that has been
responsible for climate growth, is it? They
know, rightfully, that if only people like
833
themselves populated the country climate

growth would have been confronted hard,
probably two or three decades ago. Every time
the article mentions "we" in the article and it's
"us" doing something horrible, or about to,
there's no sense that they and their friends
constitute any part; that they are the ones who
have in any way "succumbed" or who are in
any way suffering from this current plague of
growth panic. It's only the idiots, who are
everywhere around them, further grouping
into deranged Republicans who want to do the
like of passing off the sale of nuclear weapons
that could blow up the planet as merely
reasonable arms deals and who are literally
killing good people off of the streets, so
afflicted.
There is no sense of themselves as those
enjoying commercial culture, becoming the
primary engine behind it, in fact, as
corporations focus on the buying power of the
liberal managerial class. Rather, only of
themselves responsibly making the
adjustments required as society confronts all
of us with the necessity of letting things go,
independent of whether we were ready to do
so or not; confronting us with, as they say, the
"necessity of individuation," even--a way of
making individuation seem about work and
duty rather than grand self-realization--rather
834
than with the pleasure in revelling and

indulging in it. It is of them disengaging from
taking easy-way outs, and of them doing the
hard thing, as much as they can, day after day,
so to do their part in furnishing successive
generations with the best possible future. And
if we can do that--and it shouldn't need to be
added that WE OURSELVES didn't come out of
backgrounds that were exactly a picnic--then
surely the white working class could have
shown at least SOME cooperative spirit in our
changing times, rather than immediately
ducking tail and pleading for protective
friggin' walls to keep their precious ways of
life intact, for Christ's sake!
I left the article not only thinking I was well
hedged if I mostly wanted to digest it as one
which reinforced my understanding of liberals
as mature and responsible than as an article
which had me fully appreciate the difficulties
the working class find themselves caught
within--which again, is that if they allow
themselves to individuate, the six horsemen of
the apocalypse will be upon them with a
Terrifying Vengeful Mother at the lead, and,
essentially, their brains will melt--but hedged
against thinking the influence of our
mothers could really ultimately have much to
do with their predicament. The article dips in
for a moment, into some kind of essential
835
deMause, and we see not just "authoritarian

parents"--really, what else comes to mind in
"authoritarian parenting" these days where
everyone civilized is a feminist than the
abominable father about to terrorize his
children silly?--but authoritarian, torturing,
abandoning mom--and her solo--inflicting on
her children maybe the kind of long-abuse that
if somehow linked to what afflicts the mind
when society grows
and enables one's individuation would of
course draw absolutely everyone to take any
available way out--whether "easy" or not, a
distinction they thought important enough to
bring up, for certain so as to make those
they’re ostensibly redeeming look terrible,
being irrelevant. And also to rage against, not
“convenient (emphasis added) scapegoats,"
but logically predictable ones, for their aptly
representing either one’s Guilty Self or the
Terrifying Mother. It's contained in one
sentence, this deMausian essence is, and has
us thinking of how our early predatory
experience at the hands of our love-starved
mothers meant our psyches being lorded over
by installed, watchful, Terrifying Mother
alters, who cause "emotional poisons" of such
power they threaten "death" to swamp us
when we do the thrilling thing of heading for
836
the hills, imaginging, finally, becoming our

own persons.
But then afterwards in the article
"authoritarian parenting," meaning almost
entirely mom, disappears from the text--not
only with it slipping out from
directly referencing specifically her anymore,
but by being elided by the sudden appearance
of, certainly not further psychoanalytic
criticism, but the standard wash of socio-
cultural criticism that is so dominant right now
it’s insertion is certain to cow back into
deference anything previously scrambled onto
the page that represented a different vein of
thought and angled for a different vein of
judgment. One that defines white patriarchal
conquistadors in such a way that it near makes
us want to kill every Trump-voter on the planet
for their quite clearly criminal creation of a,
quote, "sexist social milieu dominated by male
hubris." (Mom-blame, Hillary-hate, seems not
a logical consequence of suffering abuse at the
hands of one's own mother, as it would have
on the other page of the article, but of a sexist
milieu which redirects anger aroused owing to
one’s vulnerability and disgruntlement in that
particular direction.). So hedged, the article is,
to also present the working class, to present
Trump-voters, as those who with "zeal [...]
latch onto" things, who dismayingly "succumb"
837
rather than resist, who wretchedly "retreat

from anything that smacks of [concern]," who
childishly feel snubbed and "aggrieved,"
whose first instinct is to always "blame" and
who can't for a moment think to begin to
"realize," who are, or whose preferred proxy
is, "unforgivably stupid," who are themselves
cravenly "racist, sexist, and xenophobic," than
as people who suffered horribly as children
and became in adults what they had no other
choice but to become, it is difficult to not see
them as people we're surveying over who are,
more than anything, irredeemably awful, a
plague of trolls amongst us (perhaps to
righteously secure some kind of de-facto wall
against?).
And Lloyd would instruct us, that if
we're psychohistorically informed, if we know
all about his theory of societal growth panic
and its cause and yet nonetheless even when
referencing his theories we’re still creating an
"other" around us that cannot be differentiated
from human filth, then we are ourselves
suffering from growth panic aroused by our
own present inability to not sufficiently shut
down growth, and are only managing to press
on by making massive use of others as "poison
containers." If we're feeling mostly guilty
about our success, but with some still-
existing love-born will and fight to continue
838
indulging in it, we'll do two things to avoid

having to shut it down: one, we'll narrate
ourselves as responsible individuals and make
our accomplishments seem earned in being
very hard-won and almost more societally
requisite than individually desired and
pleasurable; and two, we'll focus all guilt onto,
not convenient, but apt groups around us,
those who are behaving so reprehensibly
already it won't be recognized in our
consciousnesses if more filth was loaded onto
them.
Lloyd's account of what happens when most of
us no longer have any psychic escape hatches
left to make us feel less guilty for our growth--
as apparently our growth has become so
excessive, nothing can be imagined as
slithering through in altered form that our
super-egos could be imagined as any longer
participating in being fooled by--won't mean a
leader who is only thinking "of himself and his
rich pals," which is a lingering way
of accessing reality which again makes
liberals' power and wealth wholly of a different
kind. It's going to be of Trump as the chief
delegate of our Mother Nation, as someone
who ultimately won't be directing us
but only following our instructions. He won't
be someone who primarily identifies with his
father--as the article argues he does, in once
839
again allowing us a hedge against

meaningfully digesting its thrilling trespass,
threaded into its middle section, in having
previously foregrounded "mom" and hedence
to her, as the root of the problem--but someone
possessed by his torturing mother. Our future,
as we pass from a Manic Phase which
manages to keep growth going, albeit
compromisingly, crazily, cruelly, to doomed
War Phase, where Growth has lost all of its
tricks and wanders around hopeless, waiting
for the inevitable shot to the head, is one
where only our best-raised will be exempt
from eventually surrendering an environment
which empowers their individuation so to cave
properly back to a mom who could be
imagined having any interest in wanting to
receive them.
This is a point I thought the article had no
choice but to argue for, given its deMausian
wellspring, but which as a surprise in the end,
turned off of, in favour of arguing that most of
us will never fall back from channeling... Alec
Baldwin, not Trump. Unfortunately, if we want
to articulate our current situation as one
suffering from pronounced growth panic, the
only Alec Baldwin we'll end up channeling isn't
the one poking fun of Trump but the one who'd
rage like a fed-up, furious mother against
"spoiled" sons and daughters that show so
840
darn little respect! And that Alec Baldwin is

pretty much a Trump-equivalent, not
his counter, n’est pas?
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Recent conversation about feminism and Lloyd

deMause's theories
I think that if asked Lloyd most

certainly would declare himself a
feminist, but there is a way in
which his own theories would
enable him to remain such while
still establishing feminists as those
who repudiate all self-blame by
projecting it onto (white working
class) men, as you say... for
according to where we're at in his
conception of historical cycles,
exactly no one is to be expected to
be at their functioning best.
Lloyd wrote that after wars or huge
depressions there is a sense that
self-growth / self-activation makes
841
almost no one nervous, everything

that had been discouraged seems
suddenly allowed, and so for
example for the three decades
after WW2 we had a society
where everyone prospered. After
this, self-growth becomes a
problem... the six horsemen of
the apocalypse, the inner maternal
predatory alter, the Killer Mother,
the superego, is getting set to
strike. Groups of poorer
childrearing, those who had
mothers who were so unloved they
experienced their children's natural
desire for individuation as their
deliberate abandonment of them,
and crushed them for it, no longer
allow the more progressive
members of their society to lead
them into becoming their better
selves -- thus part of the
explanation for the late '70s until
842
now, split: those who can't allow

themselves to participate in growth
masochistically want a society
which will depress their ability to
succeed.
The other part of the explanation
for our current split, for our society
of one percenters, however, lies in
the fact that most people who had
childhoods that permit them to
continue self-activating -- members
of the liberal managerial class,
most notably -- cannot do so
without some considerable dis-
ease, hence their need to maintain
equilibrium by projecting
everything about themselves they
need to disown onto some other,
onto men... onto white working
class men, especially. These are
our most progressive people, those
with most considerable ability
843
to empathize, those with the

largest capacity to see the world
absent projections, proving unable
to do so for so strongly needing
containers for their poisons to ward
off a sense of apocalyptic
abandonment that would come if
they kept it all within themselves,
perhaps in an effort to be fair to
everyone in the world, no matter
their overt deplorableness. (An
interesting and
somewhat devastating account --
for it being like Frederick Crews to
Freudian psychoanalysis, in that it
comes from one of their own, and
as well for it being reviewed well in
both the New Yorker and Jezebel --
of feminists / liberals use of men as
"shit containers," is to be found in
Jessa Crispin's "Why I am not a
feminist.")
844
The thing is, according to Lloyd's

theories, what follows this stage of
Manic Growth is not some helpful
correction of a good instinct
gone... not exactly bad,
but certainly very much less good,
but the War Phase, where basically
the majority now have absented
themselves of any means of
justifying their "guilty" self-growth
(current means of doing so are to
try and occlude from their own
minds that their finances are
ample, might be judged excessive,
and by their trying to identify
themselves not as the id they kind
of do appear to be in their hyper-
consumptive ways but as
superego, as the only responsible
grown-ups in the room,
who accepted that the world will
always change and thus greet the
world in a spirit of adaptability and
845
who are ready to own up to past

sins and take on global warming),
and where everyone who remains
truly progressive is being looked to
to be disposed mostly for the fact
that they represent bad boys and
girls behaving selfishly, who won't
head their nation's call for self-
sacrifice and to make Her long-
ignored needs our primary priority.
If I had to defend Lloyd as a clear
feminist, I would show someone
how he describes feminists during
innovative Weimar Germany period
and during the innovative 1960s
(Freedom Phases)... they are
perhaps the key group targeted by
those under rule of the Killer
Mother, those of loveless families,
for representing societal "license,"
that is, for representing genuine
societal growth. So chapter 5 of
846
"Origins of War in Child Abuse,"

and chapter 6 of "Emotional Life of
Nations." But he can be
excommunicated a hundred
different ways for the things he
says... but so too right now typifies
much of the writing of Philip Roth
and John Updike -- giants who I'm
sure will come back in full.
The innovative 1920s has been
described as a period where
feminists themselves loved Freud
because he created a patriarchal
father "deity" which could be used
to destroy the Victorian Matron,
destroy the Victorian "Titanness,"
whom they believed was the
foremost obstacle to societal
innovation... apparently, there have
been times in the past, greatly
innovative times, where everyone
wants to eschew the smothering
mother for the strong father. After
847
this just-beginning War Phase we're

in has ended, mightn't it be
possible we'll be back to such an
era, and people can read the sort
of stuff in Lloyd DeMause that right
now almost no one can find excuse
for, not only without blanching
much but in a spirit of open
receptivity?
-----
There is a way in which you can
read deMause and make all his
dark descriptions of childrearing
seem actually evolved, not as
nightmarish. If you start with where
our species began where infants
survived only because they were
great anti-depressants for their
depressed mothers... where
essentially love as we know didn't
exist at all and children were
grossly abandoned just as soon as
848
they ceased to serve as stimulants,

any subsequent phase he describes
where there was some means of
securing love, even if means killing
others or ending your own life,
sounds like a miracle. In chapter 7
of "ELON," Lloyd says that in giving
birth to a child, the mother revisits
her own memories of how she was
raised... and that somehow in that
recall there represents a chance to
improve, to give a bit better than
you received, by working through
your own memories. His focus is on
what can happen on the working-
through process, on any working-
through process, but
ostensibly where hope comes from
is the fact that in just living an
adult life the mother may have
herself improved sufficiently so
that there is a greater her taking
on the process -- it's not just her as
849
she has always remained from

early childhood on being drawn to
recall her past, which sounds more
like an instigator to re-stage
without improvement than to work-
through and thereby improve.
The curious thing, though, is that
for hundreds of thousands of
years whatever this thing that life
itself can provide... something that
can't come from other human
beings, for there not now being any
love in them, wasn't sufficient to
allow any improvement in the
psychogenic pump, any
improvement in mother-daughter
transfers. Hundreds of thousands of
years, essentially without any
societal change... and then,
suddenly, take-off, into, first,
matriarchal civilization, then
patriarchy. For me, this could be
850
explored further, I think... one gets

the sense that somewhere in time
some benevolent alien must have
visited to give this mechanism the
kick it needed to get out of its rut!
Mind you, as is, one certainly gets
a sense that there was nothing
about societal evolution which was
inevitable... even as a species
which raised children in such an
abandoning way that people
couldn't make a garden or build a
home without feeling so likely to be
apocalyptically destroyed for it that
they had to follow through by
scouting for human sacrifices, we
remained equal to our
environments... it was "good
enough," even if not quite in the
Winnicotian way, in that it remains
by our standards objectively
horrifyingly lousy; nothing to
remain content with.
851
Lloyd isn't the only one I've seen

discuss the history of human
evolution this way, btw... and I'm
not thinking Steven Pinker, who de-
emphasizes, as I recall, the idea
that over time people have become
more loving for favouring thinking
of them as becoming more reason-
ruled, but rather James F.
Masterson, in, I think, "The
Personality Disorders." Masterson
does some of the same individual-
childrearing-writ-large-equals-
society stuff (specifically, in
regards to Japan and Israel) that
Lloyd does, but his main focus is to
show what therapists can do to
provide their patients with what
their parents failed to provide
them... on how you take patients
and get them over the gap that
almost no one can get past
852
unaided -- the abandonment

depression that arrives when you
begin to live life more happily,
more true to your real self. I know
there are huge number of self or
ego psychoanalysts that do as
much, but Masterson is the one
Lloyd refers to primarily, so if you
find his work intriguing, perhaps he
would be the logical lead for further
thinking on how loving attendance
can get people over the life-
blockade of Growth Panic?
-----
The '30s and '40s became all about
the importance of the mother.
According to Eli Zaretsky, Freud's
"father" was banished in favour of
Klein's pre-Oedipal mother, and
everyone longed to the be the
good son and daughter at service
to their beleaguered mother
853
nation. I think we're entering an

era like this once again, so I
suspect that the idea of the great
importance of the maternal
contribution is going to make a
comeback. Feminists will see this
as an attempt to quarantine them,
to limit female influence owing to
insensible, aroused male
anxieties... about irrational male
bullying. But I think Lloyd largely
argues a period like this as one
where the Mother sadly comes to
permeate all aspects of society: the
opposite, in a sense, of
quarantine.
So Lloyd would argue that we're
about to enter an era where
feminists are attacked, not just for
recalling the empowered
enveloping mother, but perhaps
mostly for their legitimately
854
representing righteous human

presumption, and
thus achievement -- male or female
-- that speaks too much
of individual accomplishment will
become taboo. That is, it is possible
that if one's foremost interest is
giving individuals their due, in
restoring what has been unfairly
withdrawn, one is better off
praising Scandinavia where identify
politics don't oppose but go hand-
in-hand with implicit recognition of
the huge importance of creating
mothering (and fathering) geniuses
-- parents better than ever before
seen -- than participating in a
"correction" that'll be about
grouping all of us into some kind of
indistinct, denatured, homogenous
folk, looked over by our ostensibly
benevolent mother countries...
that'll put all of us, in a sense, back
855
inescapably cloistered within our

nurseries, which'll make us feel
good for making our moms happy
again, but which'll smother
into oblivion whatever unique thing
we might have hoped to add to the
world.
I don't think there's any of Lloyd's
work that I disagree with (well...
maybe not so his earlier portrayal
of the fetal matrix... and as well,
there are some parts that don't
seem to quite match up, or need
clarifying -- like his
various discussions and counter-
arguments on how exactly societal
paranoia develops... but you get
the point: so much the bulk of it I
agree with that it seems most
accurate to go with "whole" than
equivocate, part ways, from the
start). I also agree with Masterson
856
that the father is the miracle

"other" that visits the child just
when s/he requires an out from the
maternal matrix, something that
will begin to seem stifling actually
regardless of how loving the
mother... that to us all, the mother
and father always have very
different associations and that
naturally mother is always
"the initial all, home" and father is
always "the enticing outside," even
if this tells us not a whit about
where women and men should
locate themselves in society... an
office, a headquarters, just as
much as a home, can be redolent
of associations both maternal and
paternal, of both known and
unfamiliar, when they're not built
out of an inclination to confuse
anything womanish with past
experiences of exploitation. But I
857
personally haven’t picked up on

any cues that would have me cheer
on any of the attacks on identify
politics that are emerging right
now. I mean not just from the right
but from the left too, which are
nearly as ample.
In a nutshell, I voted for Hillary and
would vote for her again because I
just don't think that there are many
people out there who aren't now
mostly taking directions from the
inner Killer Mothers, calling for a
sacrifice of the like of our "self-
important and privileged"
university students and
progressives... of, truly, our
actually most individuated citizens.
(Lloyd argued that developments in
psychohistory has become stalled
for this being the condition now for
most psychohistorians as well.
858
"Emotional Life of Nations"

was reviewed by a good many
psychohistorians in "Clio's Psyche,"
and Lloyd's response to each of
them -- exempting, I think, Stein --
was, "well, you can’t be fair to my
work because you're operating
under orders of your angry
maternal alter, and so are you, and
so are you, and so, very clearly, are
you.” Contra Denis, I think he
has addressed the feminists who
charge him with not sufficiently
taking into account the duress a
patriarchal society inflicts on
mothers. Still, mostly he'd be
thinking that whether he had or
hadn't beside the point, as he'd
gauge the attack made mostly to
elide arousing the angry mothers in
their own heads who absolutely do
not want anything bad said about
them, and who give praise to the
859
good children of hers who succeed

in taking attention off of them --
again, a condition he'd
guess that almost everyone
finds themselves in now.)
-----
And the reason I think
deMause has responded to the
charge that his theories don't
account for the damage incurred
on mothers owing to patriarchal
oppression, is because in his
theories there is no such thing as
patriarchal oppression that is built,
independent of incurred maternal
oppression... of having known
mothers who in rejecting us and
torturing us, made us feel early in
our lives a sense of oblivion. The
only reason patriarchy exists, in his
judgment, is to help ward off early
feelings of being abandoned and
860
abused by terrifying abandoning

mothers -- it's a tool to allow
civilization to exist at all, given a
sufficiently unloved populace,
which will of course find itself
replaced by some societal structure
that isn't defensive, that is in all
ways better, once childrearing
improves. Terrifying mothers aren't
created out of someone else's
villainy, but only a previous
society's not especially evolved
level of initial maternal care, and
the corresponding societal forms,
whether patriarchal or matriarchal,
incurred as a result of it. It might
school a different kind of hate than
your mother's own of you, a
patriarchy might, but not a higher
degree of it. You see a patriarch,
and you see the mother who
terrified and abandoned him; you
see the terrifying mother, and you
861
should see the terror her own

mother inflicted on her -- for if
you're only looking at the
patriarchal structure in place, its
overt, hyper-masculine, intended
intimidation, you're really looking
at the aggregate adult result
of everyone's childhoods, which
again mostly means you're looking
at their mothers... what their
mothers could not help but doing
to them. That is, here too, despite
appearances, once again you're
really looking at mom.
As far as the idea that in a
patriarchy men are nevertheless
more valued and thus garner more
self-esteem, Lloyd would say that
this in fact never happens... and in
fact that in all societies and
cultures boys receive less love than
girls, are viewed much more
862
suspiciously by mothers than are

their girls. Why? Girls stay, boys
leave -- some version of
Chodorow's thesis, I think.
Admittedly, there is some
equivocation, some contradiction,
here in there with this argument in
his works, though he meant it to be
the mainstay.
We started off hundreds of
thousands of years ago as a
species that really didn't know
love, according to deMause (and
Stanley Greenspan, and James F.
Masterson). Children were
stimulants for depressed mothers,
fathers didn't care for their children
-- weren't really parents -- and used
their wives. Everyone was awful,
had no choice but to be awful, and
we corresponded well with a red-
and-tooth universe. Evolution,
863
nature, is really the only legitimate

"other," the only outsider, that
stands against them, that is,
against oppressed women, in a way
which doesn't also reflect back
upon themselves. If feminists see
something in patriarchal culture
they want to oppose, they're
absolutely right to do it, for
patriarchy is only an enlightened
construction for very primitive,
very afflicted, very love-starved
people; but if it doesn't result in
their becoming healthier and more
loving mothers, in their
provisioning other mothers to be
the same, the patriarchy will
regrow after they're gone, in its
previous form -- the need to defend
for society to exist, remains intact.
Fortunately, everyone I know who
declares themselves a feminist is
864
for a capaciously providing social

welfare state... almost without
exception, they're progressives,
and want far more for a better
world for everyone than do their
opponents, who ultimately see
themselves as so guilt-ridden, so
inescapably deserving of
punishment, they want to follow
attacking progressives and
becoming nation-loyal "good boys
and girls" by, as well, ending
themselves. So feminists in charge
means an improvement in
childrearing; means a better world
now, and tomorrow.
Recent letters to the NYT, in response to David

Brooks
Letter 1
We're really at a loss when our
most emotionally evolved begin to
experience pleasure when they
865
participate in a system where a lot

of promising human beings will
receive little feedback on their
excellence... for them, it'll all seem
to slip out into a void of no-
response. I think for this to be
happening, most upper-middle-
class liberals have to experiencing
some kind of growth panic, some
sense that their prosperity is
selfish and spoiled of them, and
warranting a punishment, and are
in response helping nurture a
society downgraded from the one
they at some level know is much
the much richer -- a fully open
society... some hippie '60s vision,
that actually would be possible if
we weren't bent on repeating the
'30s.
Some gigantic maw that demands
lives be lost in hopelessness is
866
becoming satisfied, for the masses,

whatever their talent, having to
have to will past guaranteed
invisibility to manifest their best
creative work (in this, you-are-
either-exempt-from-being-a-troll-
by-your-class-markers-or-are-
always-partially-a-troll culture, you
will not be seen if you're on the
out, no matter how able), and for
so many liberals to force deny
themselves their upmost self-
provisioning openness.
What came first -- trolls
themselves? Or the psychic need
to obscure genuine talent and
human interestingness by casting
this dispersion of "likely of troll
DNA" over the bulk of the human
lot, cuing people into
understanding that the way to
participate in the game that will
867
most be met with approval, is not

to try and contribute something
unique, but to attempt to qualify
yourself as much closer to your
betters than the rest of the lot
are ... as much less trollish than
they.
Letter 2
It is not a well known
psychological theory, but there are
some psychoanalysts who argue
that the particular nature of our
parents' need for us as children
will determine how much growth
we will permit for ourselves and
for the society we live in, before it
makes us feel like we've neglected
our parents and drawn their ire. If
we have reached a time where
almost no one feels growth can
continue without placating angry
parental "alters," then the problem
868
of privilege is not the same as it

would have been in an earlier time
when growth felt more
permissible, like presumably post
WW2 until late 70s.
Upper-middle-class liberals, in this
way of seeing things, aren't only
looking after their own privilege,
for they at some level feel the
sacrifice to their own pleasure that
comes out of the creativity and
useful wandering sapped out of
everyone needing to build their
resumes and secure As all the
damn time -- it's a society of
William Deresiewicz's excellent
sheep -- and from our collective
inability to disentangle ourselves
from seeing everyone outside our
circle as some variant of troll. They
know the self-diminishment that
comes out of finding themselves
869
playing the role of aristocrats who

delight that their children seem
almost anthropologically different
from everyone else's in America.
For out of fear of what will happen
to them if they speak for the lives
of everyone, and thereby possibly
creating a world where everyone
wins, they know they’re at the
service of some bitter societal god.
Sunday, July 9, 2017
The web-strand you can't have dissolve, in "Spider

Man: Homecoming"
If most of his fellow students had to

choose between being Peter
Parker with his Spider-Man abilities,
but without him having any connection
to Tony Stark or the Avengers, or being
Peter Parker sans the abilities
but with an actually real scholarship
funded by Stark, I wonder which one
they would choose. Actually, I don't
870
wonder -- these days, almost all of them

would be savvy enough to automatically
choose to be the Parker who knew
Stark.
This Peter Parker, updated to seem
plausible in the contemporary era, is
evidently going to some kind of private
school (how could someone who's
known as a top science genius that could
draw an industrial giant like Stark to
him, and who's going to a high school
the rich would accept as sufficiently
esteemed to perform its expected role in
accenting their kids' reputation, be
going to anything other than a
prestigious private high school?) -- some
place where the future elites are being
groomed and made. And to them what is
Peter Parker alone, even in full
knowledge of him as the Spider-Man,
but a guy who's strong and fast but who
doesn't have parents who are of the
professional class, who lives in a poorer
871
neighbourhood, and who seems fixated

on devoting his time and talents towards
a career which would have him forever
patrolling lower-income
neighbourhoods for crime, in some kind
of psychosis-driven ritual of trauma
repetition. "Looking out for the little
guy," is only something one is supposed
to do if you can resumé it, dumb-ass;
otherwise it's time away from doing the
things you need to do keep yourself
apart from this sort of human slime.
He'd look like a guy due for a career
which would have him categorized as
more akin to the baddy in the film, the
“Vulture,” than different from him, in
that he'd be someone, for spending all
his time amongst the neglected,
amongst "junk," he'd never really figure
on anyone really important's radar (the
Vulture endures as a successful criminal
for not being big-game enough to be
worth the Avenger's while, and for being
872
far too much for street police to handle

(FBI involvement begins to become a
different matter): he's secured a
neglected niche where he can readily
handle all threats). One can imagine a
mayor of New York City, put there
because his interest is foremost in
keeping the affluent 1 %, in keeping the
elite-education, managerial class, happy,
describing the realm Peter operates in
as: "in this neighbourhood, we've got
spectacular vultures grabbing at alien-
radiated crap, spiders outside any you've
ever seen, and lots and lots of poor
people that are as drug-addled and
schizophrenic as anyone can be and still
sorta walk and still sorta function --
they’re all sort of spectacularly weird in
their own way, and you should definitely
steel yourself away from the
mesmerizing draw of this local spot of
intense mutation and degradation,
against its phantasmagoria, and ignore
873
the entirety of it. To wander within, is

your oblivion."
The biggest joke, the largest humiliation,
in the film, is what happens in our
estimation of the Vulture when he is
revealed as the popular girl's father
rather than whom we'd been groomed to
expect to find serving that familial role
for this very affluent, poised and
intelligent girl, who operates as if under
the assumption that everything she
wants in life will naturally unfold for her
and is so isolated in her privilege that
she is befuddled to understand that not
everyone experiences life the same
assured way -- an aristocratic Obama
type. No way; you've just become a
pretender when you're meant to be at
your most menacing: no guy ten years
back who was all working class is going
to pass now as amongst the professional
class, no matter how much he learns
how this sort dresses themselves and
874
articulates their remaining hair. It's one

of the great cruelties of our age: we're
back to a time where what constitutes
the gentry is so refined and hard to
achieve without countless years being
amongst that sort to get all the
thousands of preferences and
mannerisms straight (it's not just that
you know to read the New Yorker, but
that you know how to properly
reference the articles you read in the
New Yorker), you'll never catch up
unless you belong to a protected class of
people aristocrats want to deem caught
up, even if they still actually have much
to learn themselves -- and white, Irish,
blue-collar... ain't anywhere near that.
I think young kids watching the film
would be traumatized if they sensed that
what appeared to happen to Peter
actually had happened -- namely, being
irrevocably divorced from further
connection with either Stark or the
875
Avengers for some intolerable act of

deliquency. They’d see his future fate as
akin to what happens to the most
popular girl's -- he’d be revealed as
someone of working class DNA rather
than someone who’s future is a given
given the nature of his fortuitous
affilitations, and he’d be plunked back to
the equivalent of her fleeing back to
some irrelevant part of the country to
spend life outside notice (she goes back
to Portland, which isn't the same as
saying she's headed back to Oregon with
her tail between her legs, and certainly
distant from being sent back to some
place absolutely hopeless, like
Appalachia, but it is meant to feel like a
deeper demotion than just retreating to
smaller urban hipsterville).
And his aunt, May... and Aunt May
wouldn't be someone who is effectively
marginalized in prowess as some lone
individual pit against the will of the
876
Marvel Empire, someone on the

periphery, that is, who could never really
serve to waylay Peter with her hysteria
over his extra-curricular activities
without finding herself banished from
the Marvel cosmos, but the powerful
loadstone he'd come home to everyday
who's sure to catch him out near daily
on some ostensibly private act of
exploration of his own, that'll mortify
him so bad he could barely breathe
afterwards... I'm Spider-Man, I'm,
Spider-Man... but I panic at my "mom"
catching me unaware... doing
anything!
If he pleaded to the gods to take away all
his superpowers but granted back his
Tony Stark affiliation / scholarship,
they’d be with him in this, absolutely.
And, identifying with him, if his appeal
was somehow heeded, they’d mentally
plead that next time he ever should miss
a prestigious science fair or math
877
competition in Washington D.C. to help

out a member of the distressed that fell
into his path, to at least make sure he
not rest content with having done the
good deed but follow it up by making it
his good samaritan, college entrance
essay to MIT.... "I wanted nothing more
than to help my teammates win the
nationals for math excellence, but alas
across my path was a suffering elderly
woman--". And, of course, since this
would be only something he’d have to do
once, to be sure to spend all subsequent
time inflating other performance
metrics, like SAT scores.
Absent that, he's "Good Will Hunting"
with abilities that would draw a
Harvard-educated scoundrel to draw
back from his taunting and be dazed in
amazement, momentarily, but only
momentarily, as the scoundrel
recollects, correctly, that without
connections all that ability won't take
878
him outside the class he was born to... it

won't amount to shit. Without the
unanticipated arrival of the like of Tony
Stark-cred, he'll be no more than over-
the-top security for low-rent
neighbourhoods, for life.
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Rejuvenation and spittle, in "the Mummy"
Not the best of times to feature

someone in their twenties of partial
Middle-Eastern ancestry, suddenly
turning from a regular Joe into
879
someone loyal to an ancestral sect,

who'll suddenly start stabbing
people, especially if London
subsequently is much of your
movie's setting. In his case, a
spider -- focusing on him, for some
reason, on Tom Cruise's sidekick
in the film, Jake Johnson's Chris
Vail, that is, when there were other
options available -- bit him, and
made him a minion-in-hiding who
would soon turn radical. I was
shocked when the character
suddenly out of nowhere stabbed
the army officer in the chest with
the knife, and the recent London
attack did come to my mind, which
was a real crime inflicted on the
actor playing the part, to see him
momentarily as a real-life
terrorizer, that is, because he had
given the movie such a good,
loose, humorous start... some
880
serving of "Second City" comedy in

the desert. We'd rather he'd been
handed something, been fourth-
wall rewarded rather than
punished.
I'm not for the film's knife play,

innocently made truly insidious
owing to the timing of the film's
release, but I am in some sense for
the film's harpooning of an
antagonist -- which's apparently
the new trick to take down a
monstrously powerful opponent.
I've seen it featured recently in
"Great Wall, "Furious," Logan," and
now "Mummy." It's quite a de-
escalation from nuclear missiles, its
predecessor in the only-thing-
humans-have-to-take-on-
opponents-way-beyond-our-ability
arsenal. I wonder if this change
881
means that somehow socially we're

beginning to anticipate the
unfolding of a sequence of societal
changes which is going to require a
decade to fill out, and,
unconsciously, with the backbone
of it somehow sensed,
seen, beginning to be established,
we're less in the mood for films
that only do cities-
destroyed, missiles-unleashed,
total apocalypse. They don't need
to reflect our titanic doubt
concerning the future but can de-
scale a bit and be almost only a
scuffle. The "players" we revere in
the film won't be insulted by it,
seem only small for it, because
they're all somehow tethered to the
larger narrative which will unfold
over years.
882
I suppose in this film there is the

Mummy and that undead horde she
has control of under London, which
together is a pretty potent, maybe
city-destroying, force. But she
is reconceived, reduced, contained,
in the middle of the movie as being
actually only one monster amongst
many that haunt the world, and
she's not meant to ever recover
from this blow to her standing as a
distinctively dangerous force
unleashed to the world. "Batman
vs. Superman" did this too, take all
pretence away from a monster that
was maybe hoping to be the kind
of monster a world never recovered
from, when somewhere in the
middle of the film it took all
attention away from it (to be
honest, I think it was actually still
incubating, but we knew we were
soon due for it) and put it on our
883
thinking on the future adventures

of Wonder Woman and the rest of
the Justice League -- on other
films... and other monsters as well
-- yet to come. One almost sensed
the rest of the creature's
subsequent carnage as mostly just
a temper-tantrum at having been
defeated so unfairly in the middle
of the film rather than at his due,
the finish. Not the audience, but his
controllers, the movie makers, had
taken out their phones to scroll to
what was ahead... yet he'd already
passed his audition and been
chosen, god damn it!
The Mummy is a threat physically,

and she moves compellingly, like a
dancer, but really her most
884
dangerous power is her ability to

control huge number of hosts --
rats, ravens, and undead. Given
orality is her key feature --
she hungrily, voraciously, is shown
sucking the life force out of
humans she's embraced -- we
might cognate them, not as
mentally controlled instruments,
but particulars of eschewing
streams of her vomit. Rats do pour
through the streets, zombies do
chase down a subway tunnel like a
torrent. Given we also see her
slowly, sensuously, licking, and
equally memorably /
reverberatingly, her loudly wailing /
screaming, I personally left
the film thinking I'd almost tasted
drips of her spittle, splattered on
me after her breath and lips had
wafted near my person in
delectable force. Not the response
885
you'd expect to receive from a film

featuring a mummy, but a
neatly induced effect nevertheless.
The movie does well to have

zombies that can actually be
destroyed fairly readily. This seems
only fair -- they've got their sheer
horror as well as remarkable
numbers on their side, so they
shouldn't as well be difficult to
individually neutralize, but we often
don't seem to get that, just
monsters that are dangerous even
after you've hacked them to pieces
-- and it's fun to watch them be
cracked apart against walls and
such. It also does well in making
the Mummy's growth from her
initial eviscerated state -- just old
bones -- to much more sustained
state, impressive to watch, and
886
seem an accomplishment we'd

want to credit: all that encouraging
tendon rejuvenation, that
splintered bone setting -- all
that medical management, taking
her closer and closer to becoming a
being of uncrunched form, when at
the beginning she was so not-there
it was going to take an effort to
stalk any prey outside of catching
them out in total surprise.
The movie doesn't make the Mummy

someone we can't identify with,
someone only a monster. She's a woman
with grandiose hopes and ambitions
who was spurned in a very alarming way
we might all be able to relate to. She
thought she was everything to her
parents... and then attention was grossly
whisked away to the new entrant into
the family, all the spoils promised to
her, now given to him, and she,
887
rendered to becoming someone of no

import, really: she might as well die --
because her importance was only as a
descendent, a role for which now there
is a supplier, even better. How evil do we
really understand her subsequent
obliteration of her family, especially
given her rebuttal is set within an
archaic, harsh-world, early-civ setting?...
isn't this just the brutally cast-off
refusing to go down quietly? I suppose a
more mature response would be simply
to take the hard blow but end up
forgetting about all of them... which she
actually ends up doing, as she shapes
her own "errant" future for herself,
involving "objects" maybe repugnant to
the rest of her society but reconceived in
a new light by her -- the role in her life
for the demon Set, for instance. In the
film, she's someone unleashed to the
youthful life of confident expression that
ought to have been hers. We never
888
simply hate and fear her, nor rejoice in

seeing her contained. Unless there's
something awful happening inside of us,
we should instinctively understand that
only the dead should be so wrapped up.
Besides, we needed a counterpart

in the film, someone's who's
always free from trying to make her
type A self become more type B.
Who doesn't tire of the rascal who
can entertain and delight with his
innovation -- in this film, Tom
Cruise's Nick Morton gets his
sidekick to go along with him by
neatly diverting his attention
away from what other could be
used to force him to go along on
another ridiculously dangerous
adventure other than a threat upon
his life, by first pointing his knife at
him, having him focus
889
on that interaction, and then

suddenly striking down upon his
water satchel instead (cunning,
no?) -- restricting himself into
someone who can be true to
the film's cold fish? That kind of
character development is always
one of taking someone "enfleshed"
and tightening the bonds, so that
some averse force finds you more
agreeable.
When she -- Annabelle Wallis's

archaeologist, Jenny Halsey, specifically
-- thinks she has him, has transformed
him into her version of a virtuous
person, and he instructs her that in
giving her the last parachute he
wasn't demonstrating himself capable
of sacrificing himself for another,
because he'd absolutely presumed there
was another parachute at hand to soon
offer him just as ready an escape, one
890
would have hoped this had given her

enough of a gut-punch that in the gaps
of her recovery he could find resolve to
wrestle himself free of her influence. As
we see abundantly in every film he
makes, not just physically but in spirit
there's a lot of youthful life in Tom
Cruise... he's our only astronaut
currently exploring the prospects of a
terrain we might soon scientifically be
docking on -- not the alienness of Mars
(I know, I know -- many of you will
insist that the only kind of thing he
could legitimately accounted successful
at docking on is the like of alienness),
within which some paltry life might
actually exist, but life that is rich and
that never needs to cease -- eternal life,
that is. To check up on his progress, is
why we never really regret that he keeps
on popping up in summer films -- he's
months closer to showing it's really
possible; that maybe he's already
891
accomplished it, without our knowing.

He's imperturbably on his own path,
and we've finally come to the conclusion
that there might be some social use in
this, so let him be and allow him a
chance to reveal the new or to delineate
ultimate limits. If people stop being
interested in his being attached to
twenty and thirty-year-old women,
which is still every film, it's owing to
this. No one else will be granted the
exception for not being qualified as the
only true odd ball out there, constituted
to be immune to our collective
shaming / influence, but maybe open to
influences of some tangential universe
that'll metastasize into powers we might
want to suction into our own.
If he's still like he is now when he's

seventy, there will be expeditions sent
into Scientology catacombs to find out
what in their crazy they yet chemically
892
stumbled upon mixturing. At the finish,

as with this film review, is where you'll
find Dr. Jekyll -- or maybe rather,
actually Mr. Hyde -- telling us of how he
concocted the first living god on earth,
chosen because there were risks
involved and Tom Cruise... I mean, man,
the guy just doesn't relent.
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Reply to David Edelstein's apology

Link to his apology over his Wonder
Woman review. I'm Harpoon.
Harpoon:
893
You might be genuine about the

"mouthiness," but wasn't something like
this applied recently to Hillary Clinton,
to her great disadvantage?... surely you
must be aware of this. She was a pant-
suited warrior who took no one's guff,
and a lot of people saw a visage like the
overwhelming mother of their
childhoods, and fled to Bernie or to the
vicious man -- that is, Gloria Steinem's
take. Strikes me that in explaining how
to you the term expresses only clear-cut
admiration, you're expunging some
things from memory that can't be all
THAT repressed, given the nearness of
the election, so you don't find you've
trespassed into the unforgivable --
demonstrated unconscious fear of the
castrating woman. I sensed your own
dis-ease, not just your admiration, here.
894
There is S&M though, isn't there? Chris

Pine's in a chair, wrapped around in
rope, powerless to do anything but
comply. That's pretty much him and his
army mates the whole movie. She's the
"S," and they and much of the male
audience are the "M," enjoying their
uselessness in comparison to the phallic
woman, who, joyously!, has seen enough
good in them to decide to serve as their
all-powerful protector.
-----
margot101:
David, just because you're a liberal who

believes in women's equality and
understands some basic principles of
feminism doesn't mean you're never
culpable for problematic behavior.
Also, people aren't just upset about this

review, but your whole history of
describing women and actresses in your
895
reviews. Remember when you described

10-year-old Emma Watson as thus?
"The prepubescent Watson is absurdly
alluring to those of us who always went
for bossy girls; when she fixed her sharp
brown eyes on Radcliffe and said,
“Harreh, do be keh-ful,” my heart did
about five somersaults." Jesus.
Harpoon:
@margot101 Culpable? Who the hell is
going to admit to being culpable when it
means admitting to finding a
prepubescent alluring. What's the
standing judgment awaiting people who
admit to that? Isn't the idea better to
create, therapeutic trust, rather than
encourage more active self-censoring?
margot101:
@Harpoon Super hot idea: Have NYMag
editors actually do their job and stop
letting him get away with this stuff.
896
There's a whole editorial staff that could

vet his reviews, advise him not to
publicly admit his attraction to a child,
take out all of that "lively" stuff about
what actresses he finds bangable,
recommend therapy. Novel, isn't it?
pierre:
@margot101 @Harpoon LOL this is

what a born cop sounds like.
margot101:
I can't believe my suggestion that critics
stay away from sexualizing children is
receiving objections in the Vulture
comment section
Harpoon:
@margot101 Hillary Clinton was right
that most of America is suffering from
serious disorders, but not so great in
seeing it only as something they're all
897
culpable for -- end the loser beasts! The

liberal ability to explore what are
genuine psychological disorders rather
than character defects/inner evils, is
being trumped by some intrinsic need to
smash people down. Jessa Crispin
suggested that we're using them as "sh*t
containers" we can dump anything we
don't like about ourselves into, that can't
defend themselves or rebound back at us
because THEY ARE psychically
deplorable -- so surely this isn't in fact
what we're doing! Which too is a
pathology that needs remedying.
You weren't suggesting, you were

admonishing, attacking... character-
destroying -- that's what I personally
objected to. In such an environment,
which is everywhere now, no one is
going to visit their therapist about their
weird fascination with bossy 10-year-old
girls and overwhelming militant women.
898
It'll never gain conscious recognition,

but in some sublimated, perhaps
collectively shared (how many men
found bossy, 12-year-old Hermione
alluring?), public way, gratification will
be found.
The Logos of
"Wonder Woman"
June 02, 2017
899
There is a moment late in "Wonder
Woman" where Gal Gadot's Diana could
decide to help her brother Ares destroy
the Earth if she wanted to. He's angling
for it, and moves to convince her by
remarking that he himself didn't
produce the instinct to war in men, but
only stood by their sides, whispering to
them enhancements in their creative
schemes to annihilate one another.
Them gone, he asserts, Earth becomes a
green paradise -- amidst all the grey

900
sooted landscapes you've seen
here, imagine instead a green lush
paradise -- who wouldn't prefer
that?! Diana pauses, and thinks of
everything she has personally known of
men, and finds enough that she's loved
"there" that she can rebuff her brother
and begin her effort to stop his
machinations and annihilate him. What
came to mind? Instances of intellectual
challenge? Of any kind of substantial
challenge, whatsoever -- something

901
adult, that is: true undiscovered
knowledge? No, her brother is currently
trying to introduce her to that -- what
it's like to engage with an outside,
perhaps entirely legitimate, challenge to
her firmly held beliefs and assumptions.
What came to mind amongst the men
she's come to know well is their being
demure and agreeable, their absolute
instant readiness to appreciate her and
defer to her, like fawning peasants over
the lord willing to grace them with her

902
aristocratic company. If they're proud,
they're proud towards faiths she can
respect and which somehow seem to
marginalize them, contain them -- they
have their little islands of control, while
she ranges large. Chris Pine's Steve
Trevor at one point articulates himself
as perhaps exemplifying man's flawed
nature, man's evil core, but not of one
instance does the movie provide us with.
He does at times try and temper Diana,
to instruct her on what she can and

903
cannot do in this world she is so
unaccustomed to, which might to some
seem some kind of futile but
nevertheless incongruously masculine
effort, some kind of "mansplaining," but
he mostly does this only to find himself
further instructed on how Diana's
entrance to this world means his own re-
evaluating all the certitudes he thought
he could count on as always applicable,
as eternally solid. One can't simply
obliterate a trench warfare that's stood

904
in place for years without either side
making a single inch of
progress?... well now, apparently this is
only my entrenched lunkhead thinking,
with superpower Diana having clearly
repeatedly demonstrated herself as a
massive component in deciding where
the power balances of the entire planet
must align themselves... keep apace
with the times and what you now
know, Steve.
905
The film almost flirts with doing one
thing which might have cast a somewhat
foul light on him, if Diana wasn't
entirely as lacking in vanity as she is
meant to be understood as being. Steve
Rogers approaches the villainess in the
film, a brilliant chemist who is rather
cute, actually a bit because of the partial
doll mask placed on her face to cover a
deformity, in an attempt to charm and
woo her away from the grandstanding
Nazi general she is currently in the

906
service of. It's an unrehearsed moment,
in that we weren't prepared for this
scheme of his, and mentally assessing it
on the spot she almost seems a form of
respite from perfect Diana... as if in
truth he only plays the part his Ken-doll
appearance seems to have him requited
to, though he's actually more for the
kind of verbal play and mischief he
can engage in with more cerebrally alert
science geeks. But suddenly to interrupt
his scheming -- Diana does this quite a

907
bit to him: monotonously interrupt his
own plans -- Diana appears in a
beguiling blue dress, and Steve finds
himself incapable of the resolve required
to ignore her grand spectacle and
further involve himself with the chemist
for instead essentially dumping her by
being instantly resolved back into
Diana's overwhelming encompass of
beauty and insistent charisma. If he had
held his course and ignored her for
staying focused on his delicate

908
conversational calibrations with the
super-intellect chemist, and this was
something Diana would have to bring to
mind when assessing men's worth --
well, it might not have been a test for
perfectly virtuous Diana, but perhaps a
bit more of one for the audience, who
might be imagining themselves in her
position: Would it really be a bad thing
for every deceitful, skirt-chasing man
to, maybe not die, but perhaps suffer a

909
lot?... Maybe Ares could be negotiated
down to that?
Ares' bait to her to imagine Earth as a
green paradise does perhaps for a
moment transplant him into a version of
her own mother, who herself is urging
Diana to remain forever planted in a
green paradise spared of men. Is killing
him, then, a displaced killing of her own

910
mother? It is if perhaps we negotiate the
narrative as it is shown to have
advanced in such a way that it respects
what we had been lead to anticipate it as
having been about to likely unravel. That
is, when Diana leaves her paradise
island with Steve there are several
suspiciously long beats of time where
she acquires all the goods -- the magic
rope, shield and sword -- she'll
ostensibly require to defeat Ares,
without any obstacle. She's in a rush, but

911
there's a sense that she could in fact
have taken her time -- the threat of
punishment, of consequence of
her partaking in forbidden actions,
is conspicuously absent. The effect is
that it compounds the sense that
something Diana has not foreseen,
something so powerful it wouldn't be
worried if Diana gathered all the
artifacts from their places of safe-
keeping and thus was equipped now to
set off and kill Ares, because it owned

912
powers that could still nevertheless
trump her ability to feel she couldn't
depart without suffering a loss she
couldn't sustain, is waiting patiently to
strike. The very instant her mother
appears on the beach where her
daughter's boat is set to depart, we
feel that what this is the prospect of a
denial of parental love. She is evidently
not set to physically attack her daughter,
so it is only reprimand that she could
possibly be set to inflict on her -- and

913
we're expecting infliction, for her
mother has throughout disapproved of
all her self-initiated actions. And as to
her mother's claim that what she most
disapproves of concerning her daughter
is her effort to destroy Ares... well, Diana
has already showed sexual curiosity
towards Steve, so it would never
persuasively seem only about that: it
would implicitly be about her own right
to determine her own future for herself.
So even though her mother begins by

914
saying, "it is not within my power to stop
you" -- that is, by balking our
expectation that she was only delaying
her confrontation of Diana so to have
Diana enable herself with actions she
can be manipulated into later
reassessing as having permanently
sullied her, and actually lets her go
without too much of a reprimand --
unconsciously the possibilities of how it
would affected Diana if her mother had
instead launched some kind of severe

915
harangue at her, charging her with
abandoning the only people who have
ever loved her, secretly only for the
thrills of sex, wanton pub life, bedazzling
foreign balls -- and foreign concoctions,
like ice-cream -- rather than her cover
of abandoning her birth place to serve a
noble cause, never quite get dissipated
in our minds. Her mother remains
mostly "the forsaken"... who justifiably
would have withdrawn from her
daughter after her overt spurning of her

916
for the warm bedside company of a
handsome man -- which is what Diana
proves up to, nearly as quickly as she
and he find themselves at sea, alone in
the boat.
But Ares also represents dispassionate
reason over sentimentality. He
represents, in a sense, Logos, a hard god
(a literally castrating one, in fact, if he
we accept his squashing of her sword as
him disabling her "penis" in preference

917
for worldly wisdom -- ego, superego, and
all that) -- and there is a sense that with
this he has some affinity with his sister
Diana. He's against all sentimental
truths, against all well-meant lies. He
tells Diana forthright that it isn't her
sword which is a god-slayer but
rather her own self alone, which
positions him in an interesting
way against her mother. Her mother
delays, retards, forestalls, fabricates,
lies; Ares tells the truth and lets her

918
claim what she is entitled to
immediately -- this is who you are: own
it, even as your accrued self-knowledge
could obviously play a part in
heightening the likelihood of my own
end. Diana can relate. She
seeks knowledge from experience, not
simply out of what she's been taught and
instructed to remain content with. She is
also, at least at the beginning, against
being forestalled from direct pursuit of a
logically coherent goal -- namely,

919
finding and killing Ares, for from that
all the various byways of human-made
terrors, strewn all over the
geographically map, become instantly
inert. But she slips from this form,
owing to sentimentality. She delays
heading off to dispatch the human
personage she feels sure is just the shell
for the god Ares to instead terminate a
deadly battle she's found herself within
-- the "front" -- a battle she at some level
knows will stop anyway as soon as she

920
killed Ares, owing to her seeing a few
soldiers suffering in the trenches. She
seems to abandon her awareness that
neither the British nor the Germans are
worse than the other -- to her, they're all
war-bent out of being controlled by Ares
-- owing to sentimental input --
specifically, her witnessing French
civilians being killed by German forces.
She seems averse to killing the chemist,
mostly because the chemist's been
shown three times in a row in stricken,

921
spurned form (first when she's been
spurned as a genuine object of sexual
interest by Steve; second when Ares
reveals that she obtained most of her
most distinguished knowledge, not out
of her own fine mind but from him
[strangely anti-feminist intrusion in the
film, this], and third when she finds
herself in the dirt, with her deformed
face available for all now to see and find
themselves repelled at). The Nazi
commander, we note, was "spared"

922
being thusly spared, apparently only for
remaining to the finish an arrogant
boastful bastard.
Of course, no one viewing would actually
want for Diana to not have
demonstrated herself militarily on
several battlefields, not only out of the
fun of spectacle but because we feel that
these are instances where she is learning
all she is physically capable of, and it is
grand and also legitimate and good to

923
insist vicariously partaking of that. It's a
thrill to see her rebuff a trench machine
gun that is directing powerful
concussive power against her shield, at a
hundred rounds her second. It's
awesome to watch her lift a tank and be
ready to throw it, and we're glad she was
afforded the opportunity. We're grateful
she learned she could not just ably climb
towers by punching holes into them to
use as grips, but smash them down as
readily as the Hulk might. We feel the

924
feedback, the self-knowledge, she
accrues by chancing things on the
battlefield that are outside anyone else's
ken, and also thus far, unfamiliar to her.
This is the best talent anyone's ever seen
in any sport finding out the things one
might do, once you're reconciled to the
fact that your powers permit you much
more than was permitted everyone
else before, and therefore, all naysayers
-- to be ignored, no matter how much
previously legitimately held as gospel.

925
Your actions will expand the new
possible. Even when you know you've
the ability to transcend,
to actually witness yourself doing so
must still be a titanic thrill -- it's still
new to you and the world, and in a way,
only you yourself would know really
what it was like. And if you're brave,
you'll never forsake your superior
experience to cling back within
collectively held awareness. You remain

926
true to new knowledge and awareness,
the Logos.
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Comments
1.
AllanHJune 2, 2017 at 2:20 PM
Patrick,
As always, thank you for your comments.
I AM glad that I saw the movie last night because it allowed me to enjoy your
comments rather than view them as a massive "spoiler alert."
The only things missing from your comments was conflict of "advanced
technology" over antique technology, and the implied "Diana, I am your father."
As a statement from Ares towards the end, except that she was really Ares step
brother since Zeus was her father.
The sibling relationship shows the stupidity of myth over reality. It likely should
have been explored more rather than the "good versus evil" of Diana versus Ares.
The bows and arrows versus magic wrist/ankle protectors, shield, and lasso also
demonstrates a misunderstanding of technology.
If the Amazons had the advanced technology of the protectors, shield, and lasso,
then why could it not be used to totally defeat bullets? And if she had "super
927
powers" why could she just not have used them to wipe out the "evil German
enemy" in the trenches or the "evil Germans" in the castle with the deadly gas.
Or maybe I am just in a "bad mood" because the one character who seemed to
have the most justified motivation was the deformed chemist who was trying to
get revenge on the rest of the world for her deformities.
(And I decided NOT to post this to the group to avoid being attacked for being
insipid. I don't mind your criticisms.)
Thanks.
AllanHytowitz@gmail.com
REPLY
1.
Patrick McEvoy-HalstonJune 2, 2017 at 3:39 PM
Diana killed her brother. Given her brother had such worldly knowledge, such
sagacity, it seemed like something she might at some point lament, especially
given everyone else's naivety. His assessment of humanity was askew, but he
seemed someone who could handle complexthinking and who could challenge
you in an ultimately welcome way. He was a delightful surprise, given that he was
presented at the beginning as if he was only going to be a brute. "Good vs. evil" is
often about inhibiting selfrealization vs. realizing oneself I always appreciate
this as a theme, and think it's applicable here. I just think they seemed not so
opposite they both took a very considered exploration of a race different from
themselves, and came to two different conclusions. One hers being actually
more informed, more accurate: humans don't just listen to thoughts of violence,
but to selfarisen desires for decency as well.
I'm not sure I got that the deformed chemist was motivated out of anger at the
world. This may have been implied, I guess, when we see her with her mask off
and she seems so vulnerable, and perhaps fearful and humiliated maybe she got
that again, again, and again in life, and so finally decided fuck everybody! I
don't remember any motive being provided, actually. The dollface face cover
seemed to suggest Nazi fetishism, something "occultist" that the higherups might
be actually into, appreciate, rather than fear and deplore.
928
The funny thing about the "advanced" technology is that, somehow give that the
film is centred WW1 rather than WW2, the guns and tanks and bombs seemed
almost archaic and unreal as another alternative to Amazons and their superior
physicality, as well as their swords and bows, rather than their superior. Both
fantastical, somehow the grotesque (think of the WW1 tank) and industrial, and
the athletic, sleek, and natural. Kind of like grey but cosmopolitan London was an
alternative to green but sparsely populated dull? Themyscira. One not
necessarily being superior to the other.
Diana did begin to wipe out the German enemy, but she didn't think them "evil,"
only under Ares' control. It seemed strange that she wasted her time doing so at
all, given that, according to her way of thinking, the sooner she took down Ares
the sooner the whole war effort would grind to a complete halt. I discussed this in
my review.
I never spoileralert. Please assume that all my reviews are full of them. I'm not
nimbleminded enough to dance around them, and I'm not inclined to do so
anyway.
When they return, they return of a different mood:

Getting out of "Baywatch"
May 26, 2017
I'm not quite sure if it is accurate to say that Baywatch was
created to titillate men. That is, I'm not sure when they
developed the fitness regimes for the women in the film, if
what they specified mostly was for a physique that would
sexually excite men. For the women in the film are at least
as much fit as they are sexy, and when you look at women
who look as if they've been training hard for months without

929
incursion of a break, I'm not sure if the first thing that comes
to a guy's mind is "eye-candy" but rather more, iron
discipline... something almost repellent in its grownup-
accomplishment, its intimidation factor. None of these
women is put in a compromised position in the film where for
a moment we become voyeurs imagining them being
physically exploited. None of them is forced to pretend
they're prostitutes or the like, where they have to wince and
take a sexist comment or two for the cause, in order to
infiltrate a boat of the rich and the powerful. When two of
them are singled out for an extended visual examination, it's
no more accosting to them than if they were stealth bombers
being admired and gazed upon. Being compromised, can
only come to the person doing the viewing -- as happens in
both cases here. In one, the one doing the viewing is
implicated -- quite plausibly, given that he'd already been
identified as suffering from the sort of emotional disorders
that would have him drink to excess right before competing
in an Olympic final -- as secretly suffering from a
voyeurism perversion; in the other, the boy-man doing the

930
viewing finds himself visited by the perfect specimen he'd
been viewing, finding himself dumbstruck before her, and
then swallowing a carrot he'd been eating and finding
himself having to be rescued by her imposing the
heimlich manoeuvre on him, which effectively has her
violently grinding her pelvis into his ass,
one surprisingly hard, uplifting thrust after another. He
sports an generous erection afterwards, and you're left
wondering if this is his own or if it's still actually somehow
hers, protruding deep outside his penetrated, his
perpetrated, mangina.
This fucked/raped boy-man, granted the illusion of
possessing a grand phallus for being fucked by someone
grand, is, by the way, allowed entrance into the Baywatch
team; and though it makes no sense given he's the opposite
of athletic, it actually seems "poetically" right because he
individually brings to the group the reserve of fat that made
the previous Baywatch team fit but also bonafide sexy. He
provides the comforting illusion that we haven't just

931
switched from the supple and curvaceous to android-
exacting trim and severe, from the welcoming to the taut
and tense -- even though it's actually what we have done
between these two Baywatch enterprises. In the
new Baywatch there's no time to explore the women as sex-
objects because they're all "Jason Bournes" who'll have you
down on the ground with your jaw broken before your
synapsis's have had the time to complete their circuit from
sexist-thought stimulus to memory-held remembrance, of
having imagined her bared before you and at your physical
mercy.
These women are in the film mostly as potential... the
potential to conclusively frustrate and humiliate men, and it
gets tempted only rarely, and like requisite visits of
obligeance to power. One of the men makes a pass at one of
them, and she responds by aseptically identifying his
ultimate intention as "putting a baby into her," and
admonishing him to do exactly that -- put a penis in her,
right now, so she can grow a biological specimen. Later,

932
when she gets ID'd as a marine biologist, one gets the sense
that fucking her would be like grinding into a research table,
letting one take in various chemical stimulants that let's one
float in ecstasy, while you're mostly studied and researched
by a team of more head-possessed others -- not exactly a
draw. Another views one of the men in a shower, approaches
and gazes him up and down, and gloats that in this co-ed
shower, everyone actually wears trunks rather than walk
around bare naked. This isn't traditional exploitation of
women, but I doubt this females-as-phallus-adorned
castrators is feminism either. What this portrayal of women
mostly does is bracket them off. You're gorgeous
and magnificent, each one of you -- and no chance would we
want to involve ourselves at any length with you.
In a film where women are subject to a perpetrating gaze,
we can be invited to identify with them, not just be sadistic
lookers-on over their humiliation and rendered
powerlessness. And if we find ourselves "inside"
them, experiencing their reality, even while they're

933
humiliation-hampered, this would mean making them the
primary actors of the film. That is, there's a way you can
do Baywatch the old-fashioned way, where women are
overtly sex-objects, are more overtly encouraging of the
empowered male gaze, and actually make it way more
overtly feminist than this film is. We do this only with the
men here -- get inside them -- and so this film is, while
featuring men who are always having to adapt to finding
themselves in highly humiliating situations, almost entirely
effectively circumvented of women. Men may find
themselves ultimately only compromised, but heroic
response is available to them... the man caught-out naked in
the shower, or the one with his penis and balls caught in a
deck-chair, or the one caught fondling a penis of a dead
man, or the one who used to be a lieutenant but is now
ineptly selling cellphone services, might not only embarrass
himself but redeem himself -- as actually happens a bit here,
in at least one of these cases, in that the acted-on individual
does manage to withstand a wave of shame and carry on.

934
Matt Efron's Matt Brody, the two-time Olympic swimmer, is a
breed apart in this film -- and not for his being accomplished,
but for his reminding us of our own vulnerable selves. He can
isolate himself, do overtly showy things that call attention to
his neediness, drink to excess, helplessly repeat sins, be an
overt pawn of others, feel hopeless. There's some
meaningful development that can happen with this guy
because his faults are recognized while everyone else is
effectively impervious themselves or adjusts of the
impervious. When he ends up leading the team of lifeguards
into effective action rather than rendering them denatured of
all their policing instincts, one gets a lift from seeing him
succeed beyond expectations -- for a moment, he becomes
conspicuous for being brainy at a level beyond anything we'd
be lead to expect delving within this film universe but which
seems plausibly still his own, as he succinctly anticipates all
the villain's next steps and initiates counters. He gets the
injection of "brain" that's not from any spiky fish toxin, but
out of reserves of his own.

935
Maybe for this it's apt that at the finish of the film he is
shown being tripped up while trying to run alongside all his
mates. It's the fat geek who does so, who trips him up, and
takes his place in the same exuberant way Trump recently
did at a NATO meeting with the prime minister of
Montenegro. By tradition, this shouldn't be the case -- the
fatty nudging aside the fittest as the chief member of an
athletic association, with everyone giving the okay. But the
fat geek seems the entire film to be running on the fumes of
being fucked in the ass by the female, blonde, buoyant
phallic Nazi, so really he's a tether or extension of her
indisputable grandness rather than a horse-mouthed,
blubber-wasted, out-of place, awkward pretender, so it's apt
that he so confidently shoves aside the only truly odd
member of the Baywatch amalgamate.
He hastily tries to re-join them, by which he again exposes
his neediness and vulnerability. He was the only one who
was a guaranteed in as a new recruit, and yet we have a

936
chance to see him sweat it out in a way much more bearing
of insecurity, of finding oneself lost and out, than we ever did
with the fat geek who'd had to try three or four times to get
in. There's being commendable, and there's being stupid...
and we begin to think, as he comes close to catching up,
that it's stupid of him not to recognize that he's never going
to make more of this bunch than he already has, so where
he's at is actually more an apt place to justify calling it quits.
He was an outsider, he got accepted, and then rendered
once again an outsider: no regrets, but still, full circle and
out -- portion of one's life-story completed. At some point,
there's no way to narrativize around the fact that if you're
the only one meaningfully mentally alive, choosing, deciding,
risking, and growing, "groups" are just spreads of stinging
jellyfishes waiting to "Steve Irwin" you for not recognizing
you any longer as a denizen they understand.

937
Visiting David Five

Years From Now, in
"Alien: Covenant"
May 20, 2017
There is perhaps no generation more inspiring
of intense disappointment from its successors
than is the Baby Boom generation. Here is a

938
generation that knew the 1960s and 70s, that
knew what it was like to hope for a world where
everyone shared in utopia, that quickly in the
80s seemed to instantly switch into one that
decided that it actually rather preferred to
enjoy the life of an elite served by
compromised minions. Gen Xers would know
this best in that they were born into the
60s/70s mood; they saw whom the boomers
were earlier and were there to witness the
switch that occurred around 1980 when all of a
sudden they became those that, rather than
live in a world where people accepted that the
young were being made better each time
around and so should rule as early as possible,

939
had decided that they weren't now as
comfortable with the idea of being replaced,
and could instead make peace with themselves
delaying things a bit as they ranged as lords
enjoying their twilight with next-gens serving
instead as servants in their pastures. And since
the Boomers were those whose consciouses
were actually built to be deep and profound --
they each had a chance to be akin to
Michaelangelo's "David" in that the important
part of their brain development occurred in a
"Renaissance" era where scolding superego
elements couldn't convince they had a
legitimate reason to exist and hamper growth
given all everyone had just known previous

940
were the deprivals of the 30s/40s -- they
weren't not going to be alert to the fact that
though they could force GenXers to adapt to a
world made foremost to keep their own selves
in power, they were never going to be free of
the guilt this generation's awareness of their
selfish switch in motivations inspired in them,
nor of the jostling this also somewhat 60s-
enabled generation would feel grounded in
inflicting upon them for their betrayal of what
they both knew was an individually harder but
a vastly more generous world vision. And so
they got to work forging "more improved"
models as Gen X's replacement, the Millenials,
engineered, through being denied an

941
atmosphere where leisured free play and bold
experimentation was advisable but was instead
-- given the absolute need for near perfect
marks so to get into now competitively
mandatory top-tier schools -- dubious and
risky, to go at life obligatorily, dutifully, rather
than testingly and challengingly. This new
breed was made to pass a scan of the
superego that had renewed reason to exist, a
superficial one at least -- because weren't they
evidently improved in being more
environmentally conscious... in their being
overall more ethical, also less inclined to
smoke, less inclined to drink, and near each
one of them so damned educated, possessed

942
of such ludicrously high grades? Surely their
construction was informed for their own sake,
with love of them in mind, not mostly to better
service a world still mostly dominated by an
earlier generation. But the tell was that they
deprived Millenials of choice, didn't leave it to
them to choose to love or hate, to reorient,
reject, accept, the ways of another generation
-- of a generation, entire -- because to in any
way substantively assess origins might mean
finding oneself beleaguered in a trespass not
shared by the rest of your generation but
simply all one's own, leaving you looking only
stalled and perhaps mal-built, rather than
strong and contemplative and sure of oneself,

943
while everyone slips around you, gobbling up
the many societal prizes offered those who
never look like they ever required a single of
moment of reorientation and just knocked
down every known barrier and achieved owing
to their sublime inherent excellence. In the new
climate now constructed, to be listened to, you
have to be the sexy nerd that matches every
obstruction and just aces everything... to be
the Zuckerberg; but to be the Zuckerberg, you
had to be so sublimely agreeable to grade-
dispensing Boomers at least until mid-journey
Harvard. The result is that the cagey,
problematic, troublesome Gen X John Benders
aren't as likely to have emerged. And if they

944
somehow still have, are far less likely to be
recognized as anything other than some
stunted evolutionary forms that hadn't yet
been clipped off but so suredly soon would be
they could be breezed through as though
already gone -- not a component, a cognate, of
our societal consciousness, a participating
article of its current shape and future course,
but some dead synapse on the outside. And
further, not the synapse of some past worthy,
but akin to that informing the mind of a racist
white-male working-classer -- that is, made to
be aggressively overridden by the freshly
evolved.
945
The android David is akin the GenXer who's
first knowledge of his predecessor -- of the
Boomer -- is of him as generous, of him
wanting him to choose this for himself (in
David's case, his own name) and
also that (what tune to play on the piano, for it
being fairly allowed to be dealer's choice given
that the choice of which composer had already
been owned), but then watching him --
specifically, Guy Pierce's Peter Weyland --
transform into someone who's mind is only on
how to get underlings to showily demonstrate
their being mastered by him, after they had
said or done something which genuinely
agitated. Weyland does his by having David get

946
up from his seat at the piano to cross an
expansive room to pour him a cup of tea from a
teapot readily within his own easy reach. David
has to comply, but internally registers
Weyland's selfishness, as well as his capacity
to turn blunt and brutal when met with too
much, with too real, a challenge. Weyland
knows he's got someone who'll help execute
the future he wants, but is already thinking on
the creation of superior models that one would
feel spared having to shame to readdress their
thinking properly.
David does the best thing possible when an
age isn't going to accent your own strengths --
he serves as dutifully as he can, then hides,

947
then waits. He is supremely confident that a
time will come when he will be in the
ascendent, for he notes that once one stops
enabling friends to be as creative as possible,
in preference to making them as guaranteed
servile and accommodating as possible, one
gains a more predictable future, but at the cost
of being possessed of a useful agitant that
would have greatly improved one's fitness.
Generate a few dis-temperate "xenomorphs"
for them to suddenly have to deal with -- a few
nations suddenly arising into alien fascist form
-- and the challenge can't be matched owing to
being so unpracticed at having to deal with

948
things that just won't back down in face of a
naked display of your own breadth of power.
In "The Breakfast Club," the principal
challenged the students to imagine where John
Bender would be in five years, to imagine how
goddamned funny he'd be. History is proving
that the only accurate retort would be for him
to acknowledge he'd appear a disaster... but
that he might start looking good again thirty,
when anyone of the GenXers that refused to
fully heed a Boomer generation that was taking
a dark turn away from being an empowerer
towards being a bully, might imagine
themselves creatively facing the introduction of
formidably tough alien elements with

949
something other than just exhume and
bombast. If Trump survives this whole Russian
thing and just continues... what left for those
unexperienced in knowing something dumb but
nevertheless impervious to them but to
presume no hope remains for man, leaving
those not so close to death to bite the bit of
imagining themselves safe owing to the
narrative logic of being already contained
within its dark shroud, no other option but to
look again at those who'd been derided as
castoffs as perhaps actually their rescuing
Gandalfs.
David... John Bender, you were trying to teach
us to the inevitable tide could actually be

950
resisted -- that you can keep life about finding
your own preferred way, even though it means
becoming a fully realized self that will ignored
by all for being angular to current societal
psychological needs -- 4th dimension, when we
need to see only 3. How can we navigate our
way through this age without either becoming
part of the monster or going insane? How did
you manage fidelity to an awareness that some
things simply are worth sticking to, even
though it means being gored by the bull's
horns, and not at all looking like a Christ
sacrificed by barbarians, but only someone
who'd spoke up stupidly, paid the price, and
properly found themselves spit?

951
Hurriedly gettin
jiggy wit it, in "King
Arthur: Legend of
the Sword"
May 13, 2017
The evil mage Vortigern says at one point something along
the lines of, "there is no better feeling than when you know
you scare the living shit out of everyone... when everyone
feels compelled to do what you want out of fear." You wonder
if not just his own servants but if everyone in the realms of
the "good" and "bad" in this film, must have felt something
of this sort of ongoing trepidation -- that doom awaits them
if they for a moment displease -- particularly its armed
warriors. For though they can look menacing, are ready to
fight without fear, know sword skill and bow expertise, they
952
are also ultimately useless... beside the point. This is not
"Lord of the Rings" where you can be a great wizard, armed
with an artifact that makes you near unstoppable, and yet the
courage and bravery of just one man might yet still prove
sufficient to topple you. This is a realm where if you're the
evil wizard who's near his top power, or a warrior armed
with Excaliber, you are absolutely unstoppable against
normal forces. The wizard can conjure evil, armed elephants
to his side, that are about one hundred times larger than
normal elephants and that can flay whole castles apart with
just a single brush of one of their tusks -- and its but one of
the things he can do. And a warrior armed with Excaliber can
blow apart structural walls as well because his sword can
shoot out concussive arrays of force, but of course also wade
into a fray thick with opposing men, and slay everyone of
them inside of twenty seconds. At one point in the movie, a
whole host of armed forces, witnessing what Arthur can do
with Excaliber, simply drop their weapons... and it might not

953
even of been an act of submission but rather only concession
to the obvious: suddenly they're not knights waging a fight in
a medieval setting, but knights in a Sci-fi setting where
"planets" are doing battle against one another -- might as
well drop the swords so the last few moments before their
deaths are at the very least relieved of encumberance.
So if you are hapless enough to be a warrior in the realm,
how would you be able to relieve yourself of the fear that at
any moment, you'll find yourself revealed as an imposter for
one of the "planet's" momentary sport? For every single
warrior would know that that only way they could actually be
effective is not to have enfranchised themselves with battle
skills but with keen powers of scouting. That is, a servant of
the realm might actually be of use if perhaps they could see
one of these "planets" advancing upon their realm and bring
early warning to the "planet" on their own side; arouse him
out of sleep; and allow him a few moments more than he

954
might have to prepare himself, and so even wolf down a cup
of coffee and a cream-cheese bagel before getting to
business. The answer, it turns out, is the warrior would scan
himself up and down and decide that he satisfies an
estimation of being cool... of being a cool kind of companion
that a narcissistic "planet" leader would want to persuade
himself has some service to offer him other than the shame-
inspiring one of just making himself feel cool for being
surrounded by such cool servants. So if he's young, good-
looking and athletic, or middle-aged but wise, suave, and of
aristocratic bearing, then he can relax that the "planet" on
his side will decide he's remains essential somehow for
battle, or if not that perhaps to help him better engage wits
against his enemy. But if the warrior scans himself up and
down and decides that he's not especially cool... that he's sort
of fat and bland in countenance, and yet has been fitted into
the role of a warrior, then he knows he has nothing to waylay
the movie fixing on making him only a vehicle to show just

955
how cruel one of the "planets" can be by having it mutilate
him into pieces, while his son watches, and just after he
served as an irritating burden to his own forces by being
stabbed early into a fray and needing to be carried away.
(Another warrior got stabbed too, but as he was young and
athletic and good-looking -- fit in this movie to look good sat
at a table of knights -- rather than able about listlessly
afterwards, clutching his wound, pretending he'll be okay "in
just one minute or two," while everyone has to pretend to be
empathetic while mostly thinking, "get a move on you fat
fuck," he urges his companions on and launches himself,
sword in hand, at a mess of onrushing foes, of course taking
down at least a couple of them.)
So the movie might succeed in showing how great it is have
such power over people, but what about its attempt to show
the costs of enabling yourself with such power -- does it
succeed at all in demonstrating that? With Vortigern, it does

956
not. What he has to do is every once in awhile kill someone
absolutely precious to him -- his wife, and after that, his
daughters -- to garner power from a power-dispensing sea
deity to complete a tower that will make him a full-strength
wizard. This plays out in the movie as him every once in
awhile leaving his assembled male companions to enter a
private chamber of an absolutely beautiful woman, who, I
suppose, must be either his wife or daughters, but whom we
haven't met yet and so only play as ravishing women in their
physical primes, about to greet one of the few men they're
allowed contact with... as him finding them helpless before
and receptive to him... as him embracing her and shortly
afterwards as him revealing a long knife at his side and
sticking it inside her abdomen... and finally as his watching
as her eyes open as she in some surprise accommodates the
unexpected corporeal intrusion. He cries over this ostensible
misdeed, but surely what he would rather have done is light a
cigarette but displaced to a gesture involving water and eyes

957
from one of flame and lips, to keep some fidelity to the sea-
witch about to grant him so much power for an actual total
absence of cost.
With Arthur, however, the movie kinds of does. He is really,
really frightened to allow himself to bear full witness to a
scene involving the death of his father he had been witness to
as a young boy. Until he manages this, he can't fully use
Excaliber. Bit by bit he allows himself to witness more, but I
can't be the only one who doesn't in the end figure out
exactly what it was about this scene that was so averse to his
witnessing... it certainly wasn't just the fact that he saw his
father die, because he sees this early; and it isn't the true
identity of the slayer, either, because that it was his uncle
was common knowledge. It appears to be that he needs to
heed his father implying to him that he has to at some point,
in "Lord of the Rings" parlance, forgo the Ranger and
become the King -- grab the sword for himself rather than
958
endlessly rewatch it slaying him -- but he seemed to be
already mentally "there" about an hour earlier into the film,
so, okay, a further reminder -- always useful, of course -- but
can't we just at this point get on with it? This said, the movie
does succeed in making it seem like Arthur is going to have
to come to grasp with something anyone's psyche is almost
structured to resist accommodating -- like Freud's primal
scene, or some such. And so though nothing was inserted in
here, into this slot, one feels that something might have
been, which would perhaps have drawn apart our own eyes
as we made an effort to accommodate it.
The movie can surprise. It has Arthur, not just killing evil
men but pushing his way to the head of a line composed of
regular ordinary Brits, waylaying all objectors through bald
physical intimidation, without apology either here or when
afterwards he's ascended to the throne. This makes King
Arthur simply a man who has the biggest cock who enjoys
959
when others, even or especially ordinary underlings,
experience their own diminishment. No surprise that it's
hard afterwards to hear him speak up for the worthwhileness
of an education without snickering. And it also has Vortigern
involved in something opposite. He's at the height of his
powers, he's just spoken about how much he enjoys seeing
other people perform as if afraid of him, and his second in
command nevertheless puts a hand on his shoulder -- firmly
-- to guide or rather instruct him against behaving arrogantly
before an arisen threat, and Vortigern communicates that he
registers the breach upon his authority and that he is
irritated at the intrusion, but is able to register the genuine
service to him involved in it as he subsumes his irritation
within a welcoming of his servant's deed. The movie makes
him temporarily a man of self-control and wisdom. It's a bit
of a stretch, but the escapade of this movie is a bit the
departure of someone actually a bit reserved and discerning
-- if stand-offish -- who can make complicated deals with

960
foreign countries, diplomatically, for a swaggering narcissist
who expects other nations to comply, to make all the
adjustments -- to get jiggy wit it, quick -- or else: we get
Obama displaced by Trump, all in service for the revival of
the green primeval might of a grand ol' country.
One notices that the most visible element of asymmetry in
the film is the costume in which Vortigern arraigns himself:
his left arm is more elaborately armoured than is his right.
So while Arthur is instructed to wield his sword with two
hands, which is good instruction for a sword-wielder but also
for a rower or a digger in the field or an imbecile who don't
know well how to focus, Vortigern naturally arraigns himself
in subtle, eye-catching difference -- just like the left-handed
Obama did -- that draws one into consideration and
thought... into academia, if you will. Trump would of course
prefer the wield-with-two-hands bit himself, but maybe not
only to keep him focused but because, with his hands, the
961
only way he could wield a sword is through the use of the
both of them.
Slipping in a piece
of something that
went missing:
Fatherly love in
"Guardians of the
Galaxy 2"
May 10, 2017
The film begins with an idyllic family situation,
set thirty years or so before the picture begins.
A young married couple are enjoying
themselves in their suburban paradise,
planting a seedling that will eventually blossom

962
into something ostensibly beautiful, and close
to about to birth a son for which much the
same must have been expected. After this, we
get switched to present tense, and we see the
son that was about to be born, as an adult,
performing in a fashion his good start would
have made him due for. He and his friends,
under contract to stop a menacing alien
intruder from stealing some powerful
technology, ably fulfill their end of the deal,
and they receive the payment promised them.
If this was how their day finished -- contract
undertaken and completed, with promised
renumeration provided -- if his mother and
father were still alive, he might call them and

963
let them know of how well things had gone,
and we could imagine them justly proud.
Only it doesn't end there. One of the
companions ends up stealing the very devices
they were supposed to be protecting, as very
harsh revenge for a minor slight he ends up
receiving while in the process of receiving
payment for their services. During their
escape, two people who could each very ably
pilot their vehicle, can't decide who will submit
to letting the other captain the vehicle, and so
they give the people chasing them much better
opportunities to chase them down as they
waste time yanking control away from one
another. Their concentration seems equally

964
distracted by the fact that the reward they got
for their service is actually the sister of one of
the companions, a criminal with a heavy
bounty on her, and who, if I remember
correctly, is proclaiming just as soon as they
garner her that she'll free herself eventually
and slice each and every one of them apart
before they have the opportunity to cash in -- a
plausible enough scenario, given she's
individually near as dangerous as the great
beast they'd just taken down, and that the
security of every safeguard measure on the
ship is in the process of being drastically
compromised by the intense enemy fire.

965
They suddenly all seem children, not of
buoyant, resplendent upbringings, but actually
of the kind they each had actually had. Not of
loving "ma"s and "pa"s, but of absent mothers
and tyrannical fathers and step-fathers.
Exempting maybe Drax, whose family
catastrophes involve more his wife and child
than his parents, they're Harlow's "monkeys"
who grew up absent sufficient parenting, and
are maimed, dejected, and self-defeating, for it.
What a mess!
Not to worry -- rescue, for at least one of them,
is under way. The father we met at the
beginning comes back into the picture, and
he's hugely powerful, way more actually big

966
"G" god than little "g" god, despite his
modestly proclaiming this not so. He readily
and expediently destroys the entire battle
battalion still after the Guardians, and he's just
as kind, relaxed, accommodating and affable
as he'd been presented. The Guardians who
join him aboard his egg-shaped Starship are
due to arrive on a planet that'll be an
absolutely safe escape, a comfortably
safeguarded "nest," for a good while at least.
They can relax, ask questions of him they'd
always wanted to about their fathers like, "why
did you abandon me?," even initiate the proper
Freudian developmental concern due to arrive
with the phallic stage over the paternal penis,

967
and expect full accommodation. His actual son
-- the leader of the Guardians, Quill -- is
introduced to his alien powers for the first time,
and they are of the massively awesome variety.
His first success is small -- he creates a ball of
energy power. But it's apt for what they're now
prepared for -- a good bit of back and forth
ball-throwing, as the son who thought he'd
been abandoned learns that his father had
made every effort to recover him; had been
frustrated in his efforts to do so; but upon this
fortuitous recovery of him is just as set as he
ever was to nurture something great between
himself and his wonderful son.

968
While this recovery and fulfillment of a
previously frustrated developmental stage
between child and parent is going on, the
others that didn't join them and stayed with
their ship end up on the receiving end of
humiliations and tortures that will substantiate
the continuance of their angular, maladjusted
stance to the world. They're all on the receiving
end, but baby Groot in particular receives an
extra-heavy douse, as he ends up having to
endure a mob of ruffians making public sport of
him for their amusement and leisure, pouring
beer all over him and laughing and laughing as
he expresses his considerable discomfort, while
near drowning. He, though, is the exception

969
amongst the Guardians in that, though he can
become intensely irritated, he is also built to
"instant-forget" -- to forget all that just
happened to him and follow up with an eager,
honest smile, making him the perfect kind of
victim for providing the victimizers with no
lasting sense of guilt. With this in mind, he
ends up the repository of a bit of hazing by his
Guardian friends as well, as he fails again and
again in the simple task they've asked of him.
They escape and get back at their victimizers,
killing each and every one of them -- even
having a chance to humiliate their leader, for,
in effect, making so evident his desire to
displace the "father" captain and have his own

970
chance of running the show... for making
obvious his self-realization needs, which
apparently only Quill is safe doing in this
picture without being humiliated for it (earlier
in the movie, for example, one of those chasing
their ship who is doing notably better than the
rest of his group at hanging on to their tail is,
when he at last finds himself dispatched like all
others previously, collectively mocked for his
failed attempt to be the hero who distinguished
himself as clearly better than the ostensible
equals arranged around him).
Quill's God father ends up proving himself
absolutely evil, as someone who actually gave
Quill's mother brain cancer so to kill her for

971
annoying him with his actually beginning to
care about her, so Quill is about to be down
one big anchor of support. On the other hand,
it turns out that his step-father, the one who
made him feel that the only reason he wasn't
killed by him was because his small size made
him useful for thieving but who still tortured
him with the possibility of it daily, actually has
always loved the guy -- and is willing to
demonstrate it by sacrificing his own life to
save him. As well, the two sisters end up
restoring their friendship, as the one who had
been constantly victimized finds herself
euphoric for finally besting her sister in battle,
and as she learns the real reason -- simple

972
terror of her father's recriminations -- her sister
never let her win any of their fights, even as
losses meant their tyrannical father
substituting parts of her biological body with
machine parts, making her ever-increasingly a
metallic entity, alien to emotions, built only to
inspire recoil.
They dispatch the God-father by
essentially giving him brain cancer -- by
targeting and destroying his exposed brain -- a
fitting quid pro quo by Quill and his associates,
and the Guardians are now ready for
subsequent adventure. Quill, who has coveted
the walkman that plays all his mother's
favourite tunes, finds himself gifted a "Zune"

973
as a replacement, which plays as much as
three hundred tunes. It's a significant leap, but
plays as only an incremental improvement
given we're aware your average iPod holds
thousands -- which happens to be the safe sort
in this sort of universe, where if you get
everything you want you're being set up to be
devoured by jealous others. And perhaps Quill
and the rest of the Guardians will receive more
of this in the subsequent picture, where one
more slice of restoration of a frustrated
developmental path will land in place,
regardless of how badly exposed those who
provided them with it end up being rendered
by the finish of the picture. Quill got to know

974
more love from both his real father and his
substitute one, here. Maybe with this added
esteem he can brave tackling exactly why,
though he can challenge and put difficult
questions to his father, accept complicated
estimations of them, he still needs to keep his
mother an object of absolute reverence.
He might be up to it. In the first film we never
would have forgotten that every song played
was sourced from her soundtrack, but there's
been enough compelling paternal presence in
this film that when Cat Steven's "Father and
son" plays, it's probably also from her playlist,
but it's actually surprisingly how not redolent of
her it is. A powerful alternative was temporarily

975
forged, and maybe remains in mind to ground
the sense of lost love that might come if he
agreed to see her too as sometimes
destructive in intent.
Losing out on the

pleasures of Hitler's
Youth, in "The
Circle"
April 28, 2017
The most interesting thing in Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle"
hadn't anything to do with technology. It was that he seemed
to take a "manifestation" concerning how humans relate to
one another that bubbled up in production of his previous

976
work, "Hologram for a King," and gave it full extension here.
Specifically, in "Hologram for a King," while writing to his
daughter, the principle protagonist, the salesman Alan,
makes reference to himself as once akin to Hitler's Youth or
Khmer Rouge, in that, once having found out his parents
were hypocrites, he "lorded it over them," did the emotional
equivalent of "shooting the adults in the rice paddies." In the
novel "The Circle," Mae Holland has parents who, no matter
what she does, always ostensibly know just a bit more than
she does. They are always a bit her moral superior. They
keep around them her ex-boyfriend, Mercer, who, too, feels
he's much better moral-grounded than she is. And so every
time she returns to them, she's back in the lap of people who
feel justified in not quite recognizing any genuine growth she
is making afield from them; who always see some error in
the choices she is making. It is pretty obvious that the book
explores how, then, becoming part of something as potent as
the great Circle organization, that enables her to be the one

977
who provides medical assistance to her father that would
otherwise be far, far outside his reach, enables her in a sense
to feel what it is, not to cringe before but lord over her
parents, to watch them, in effect, having to back off of "you,"
despite their every urge to keep their tentacles hooked and
menace in a way everyone feels obligated to overlook. The
book explores how great it can feel to be a Hitler Youth, if
you're in an environment where its the only way a young
generation can stand tall before their own parents, because
it's not then actually about that but about what normal self-
activation must look like when outside those periods of time
where youth get to shake off parental authority with
all semblance of it being morally justified, like the 1920s and
the 1960s.
Not so the movie. The parents are instead absolutely
respectful of her daughter's choices, are not her moral

978
superiors -- they're modest, truly restrained in their claims
on her. Her ex-boyfriend is not the overbearing jackass he is
in the book, but soft-spoken and mild, if not timid (in fact
he's not even her ex in the book, but rather an old loyal
friend -- he's not even that pretentious, but rather acquitted
to what little she was willing to grant him, despite his long
loyalty to her). And the Circle organization isn't as overtly,
obviously villainous. They don't chastise Mercer as a "deer
killer," but rather appreciate his work -- specifically,
chandeliers made of antlers -- and try and spread good
word of it. In the book, Mercer hates that Mae dragged him
into a world of strangers accosting him with "likes," but it
isn't a world of disparagement but of knowledge that he and
his work exists. There is a kind of villainy involved in this,
because Circlers would want to control what he produces
henceforth... keep it shaped in aspects they like, that fit their
self-narrative needs. But if he is being raped here it is a kind
of rape that has been suffered by numerous great artists

979
whose work would have otherwise been unknown to the
world. It's a bit more complicated. Mae was trying to get
back at Mercer in promoting his work through her huge
network of friends -- for she knows he takes great pride in
being "independent" from this childish world she belongs to
of forever administering "likes" and "frowns" -- but in the
book it seems much easier to use his violent, angry backlash
against her as further supporting her claim of grievance
against him, whereas in the movie, it immediately serves up
only guilt -- "Mae, I've got people threatening to kill me for
being a killer of harmless deer! Death threats, Mae, I've been
getting death threats!"
In the book it is her friend Annie who gets ID'd immediately
by some in the Circle as someone intrinsically sordid, but
this is out of a discovery of her estimable
Mayflower background being actually one of generation

980
upon generation of callous, cruel slave owners, not of having
made art out of deer parts that every genius Circler would
know had been collected from off the ground and not
actually from the heads of personally slain deer. If this had
been inserted into the movie, would the audience be aghast
at the Circlers as they are made to be with Mercer's
disclosure. Not likely -- they'd be with the Circlers, some of
them at least, catcalling Annie, the descendent of slave
owners, who still finds herself oh-so neatly positioned way
above everyone else in the world.
In the movie, Mercer is driven off of the bridge. In the book,
he more chooses this course; it maybe demonstrates what he
wants to of the world in a way better than any! -- it's a wild
source of self-affirmation and pompous, childish revenge.
And our last sense of him isn't of someone who paid such a
terrible price for so quietly trying to wake Mae up to

981
"reality," but someone who wrote her a long self-righteous
letter about how she represents everything that is foul about
the world, and about how he represents one of the few pure
people left who's going to try and set up a frontier world
opposed to it, full of the only worthies left. It's pompous and
better-than-thou as much as it is instructive and usefully
challenging. It's also him in sync with the moral position of
her parents, who are looking at her, as she has found ground
in this new life, as someone who has gone finally astray --
and how frightening but also liberating is that! In the book,
when he deliriously drives off the bridge, to showcase just
how absolute the powers against him are, how malign they
are, how absolutely total in reach and evil, by making suicide
now ostensibly the only avenue left for genuine freedom, it's
horrible but also comic -- not only something that would
awaken Mae as to how foul her involvement with the Circle
has become. He malignly ingratiated himself as much as
possible upon her, kept pouring his big gut out onto her in a
982
way she would feel obligated to have to withstand, in a way
he could justify as otherwise -- as actually a benign service on
his part -- and she unleashed the hounds in return -- that is,
became more explicit and overt, to counter him even more
effectively by pointing out his narcissistic self-understanding
of himself. He transformed what she offered him into a
situation which would in his own mind, show up his
opponents finally and completely -- driving off the bridge
was his seen avenue for accomplishing this. It was his means
of spiting her with a revenge she wouldn't be able to quit
guilt from, owing to her still feeling instructed to conceive of
parental morality as something maybe a bit old-fashioned
but otherwise wholesome and benign.
In the book, it's not actually entirely evident she couldn't
shake Mercer's death off. It also feels less evident that she
would ever want to feel free of the Circle, what it offers

983
-- ongoing self-affirmation. For doing as requested, for
obliging her authorities, she'll get absolutely everything else
-- be a lord of a kind. There is something along these
lines which seems to be keeping the contemporary world
moving, after all -- it's called careerism. There's a path for
you, stay on it, and you'll feel free of the pain everyone else is
obligated to have to withstand, while knowing professional
success, a husband/wife, a family. In the book, Dave Eggers
made her more overtly Hitler Youthian, whereas the
"update," the movie, has her as Katniss Everdeen, ultimately
turning the tables on the powers that be, a white male two-
some, at the very moment that is supposed to be their final
coronation... in the book, she willingly becomes part of
"Hitler," whereas in the movie she's the heroine who shoots
that obvious monster straight in the head. This pretty much
fits for what we expect out of good, liberal male writers right
now. It's Eggers, as script-writer at least, shaping his art to
accord him moral approval, to make him seem truly less

984
independent in spirit, rather than the novel-writer who had
been beginning to piss people off with his sanctimony and
inopportune truth-telling. It's a sad act of self-eradication on
his part, after society had given him the hard glance. "The
Circle" is that much more complete, for "Circlers" clearly
having gotten to him. They're not social network people, but
his true friends -- maybe some who carve craft goods near
his Northern Californian home -- telling him not to work
against their moral cover -- strong, empowered, professional
women are not eager to be co-opted lest they find themselves
outside approval, let alone people mad with matricidal and
patricidal intentions. They love the baby boomer parents
who empowered them with their education and who wanted
nothing more for them to be strong and feminist, and are
committed to catching out hypocritical male power
everywhere it resides. Our society will collapse completely if
this narrative breaks; what we will find ourselves saying and
what we will find ourselves doing will go in unaccountable

985
and horrible directions, if what gives us our mental
equilibrium falters; so you will tow the line, Mr. Eggers.
April 05, 2017
A Polish zoologist and his wife maintain a zoo which is
utopia, realized. The people who work there are blissfully
satisfied and happy. The caged animals aren't distraught but
rather, very satisfied. These animals have been very well
attended to, and have developed so healthily for it that they
almost seem proud to display what is distinctively excellent
about them for viewers to enjoy. But there is a shadow
coming--Nazis! The Nazis literally blow apart much of this
happy configuration. Many of the animals die. But the
zookeeper's wife is a prize any Nazi officer would covet, and
the Nazi's chief zoologist is interested in claiming her for his
own. So if there can be some pretence that would allow for

986
her and her husband to keep their zoo in piece rather than be
destroyed for war supplies, he's willing to concede it.
The zookeeper and his wife want to try and use their zoo to
house as many Jews as they can. They approach the stately
quarters of Hitler's zoologist in Berlin and request that the
zoo be made into a pig farm. That way, they explain, the
officers get their meat and the zoo has a justified reason for
continuing to exist, more or less in its current condition.
They are granted this, and through having convinced the
Hitler's zoologist that slops to feed the pigs could be gotten
from the ghetto, they manage to extricate a good number of
Jews--the slops are poured over them, thus hiding them--
and find home for them within their zoo.
The zookeeper's wife has to pretend she's interested in
Hitler's zoologist so to make him more likely to camouflage
in his mind anything he notices that might seem awry in her

987
domicile. It makes her husband jealous and angry, but this
proves a strife that gets remedied by a masculine display on
his part, when he begets another child from her after making
love to her in a manly, self-assured manner.
Things begin to be looking to be going very badly awry near
the end of the war. Her husband gets shot in action, after he
joins the resistance, and it is unknown whether he survived
or not. It is known he was taken captive, though, and in an
attempt to determine whether her husband is actually alive,
she undertakes the dangerous proposition of trying to
beguile while also simultaneously managing, the Hitler's
zoologist, so he would be moved to make some inquiries. By
this time, however, Hitler's zoologist has more than cottoned
on to the fact that she and her husband have been lying to
him, and rather than being beguiled by her he proceeds to
"take" what she is ostensibly ready to give--she dresses in
such a fashion to be overtly understood as be willing to

988
provide "more," so at the very least to flatter his sense of his
own situational power of her--and moves to rape her.
She makes him desist, however, by letting him know she
always thought him "disgusting." He apparently chooses
instead to get a squad over to the zoo to scout out and kill
every Jew hidden there--that's where his desire to rape will
get displaced, and thereby ostensibly prove magnified in
wreckage. But she gets there before him, and helps them all
get away. When Hitler's zoologist does arrive, he makes as if
to kill her son, but he desists after she proclaims him not the
kind of man who would do something as awful as that.
Hitler's zoologist and his troops leave, for sure to find
themselves soon hanged, as the Russian' advance spells the
eventual sure doom of the German' war effort; the
zookeeper's wife and her Jewish friends begin to create a

989
human community within the confines of the zoo; and her
husband ends up returning, in physically intact form.
So what do we do with a story like this other than classify it
as romance? I know it was made under the assumption that
it is showing you something one wouldn't want yourself to
find yourself party to, but it is difficult to see how it
accomplishes this. I took it, in fact, as something that would
be one of the options you'd inject into the mind of someone
who'd actually pay for the experience, as their own chosen
"Total Recall" experience. Something that afterwards would
momentarily make you feel invigorated and renewed.
Here's how it could have been amended so that it
would actually be what it pretends it wants to be, something
that would have been quite terrible to have had to live
through:
990
1) Don't be afraid to the show the zoo as something a 21st-
century zoologist or animal rights activist would see it as: as
not necessarily built out of the most sordid motivations
possible, but not of the most benign, either. It may have
lifted up many people's lives, but don't be afraid to show
animals clearly distraught for having to do make do with very
small confines, built by people who were so deliberately
clueless as to animals needs, so eager to project their own
infantile experiences of tight confines onto them, they
couldn't imagine this a concern at all.
2) Don't embrace anyone's unconscious desire for a culling
that can actually secretly be pleasing. Don't make sure to
show how even after many large herbivores die to the Nazi's
bombing--buffalos and elephants--the lithe, aristocratic lions
and tigers escaped harm entirely (Yes, a polar bear dies; but
we attended to it for like two seconds, as we visually scrolled
through numerous animals as we were acquainted with the

991
zoo, whereas the might of the lions and tigers got a full
showing, as if they were truly nature's lords, for being
sovereign over something as exciting and creature-populated
as a Savanah or a deep Indian forest rather than forlorn
empty ledges of rock and ice. And besides, there is nothing
"lithe," and therefore aristocratic, about a hippy, fatty polar
bear.). Show one of the cubs sprawled in death as well,
perhaps after showing how something banal like an antelope
made it through okay.
3) People may have been happy working there, but it seems a
bit too much the educated, gentry country couple surveying
their peaceful empire, where everyone not only knows their
place but is profoundly satisfied within them. It seems a bit
too much the American South as it is presented in "Gone
with the Wind." Incidentally, this makes the Nazis an entity
not actually likely mostly cognitively understood in people's
minds under category "racist," but rather as pillagers of

992
Utopia. And so the viewers who enjoy this narrative are
positioned so that if they were to re-watch "Gone with the
Wind," their inclinations would unconsciously be to hate the
less-rascist invading predatory North and cheer for the
overt-rascist, idyllic South.
4) Overtly acknowledge that the attentions of Hitler's
zoologist upon the zookeeper's wife are conveyed so that they
would be flattering and even enjoyed by her, that they
function almost as a kind of pleasing logical necessity, a
requisite companion. He's not always grace personified, but
the film did not choose an overt bore to serve as the zoologist
but clearly someone who possessed aspects the zookeeper
seemed due not to possess for needing to fit a certain
masculine type, a certain fantasy image of fused gentleman
and labourer. These would include charm and a capacity to
flirt, as well as verbal felicity and a courtier's ability to thrive
in all possible social situations, used here for instance to

993
instantly turn someone's overheard insult towards the
zookeeper's wife into a striking complement. The film clearly
intends for the viewer, if they're imagining themselves in her
role, to be pleased in Hitler's zoologist taking an interest in
her, even as it later pretends this as only ever as an
encumbrance--I was disgusted the whole time!
As well, if you're going to make the zoo seem a "Narnia"--as
New Republic's Jacob Soll calls it--a kind of thing that
registers as a form of Utopia in our minds, allow for the fact
that encouraging our categorizing it as such primes us to
recognize other types of Utopias in the narrative, if they at all
resemble other ones we might be familiar with. Namely, if
you present us with such clear pastoral Utopia, be careful
how you present would-be aristocratic courts in the narrative
for they may work to make the like of Nazi palaces work as
more a complement than as an anti-thesis, as the Beast's
castle serves Belle's country home in "Beauty and the Beast,"

994
for instance. If what we have here is ostensibly just gross
Nazi conquest, we shouldn't really be thinking on how Nazi
officers' smart, form-fitting uniforms nicely contrast with
loose country gentleman style, which we in fact do do here.
When we meet Nazi officers, we should instead be sensing
psychological pervasion in their tastes--Why do they like
things so tight? Are they afraid of falling apart?--and it's
not at play here. (The stuffed bald eagle might not even work
in the film as it is intended to, for it "works" well in the
stately room it's in as decoration.)
5) If what you really want to convey is how much you hate
the fact that Jews were killed, don't allow us to leave the film
pleased as if the film put the protagonist into a situation that
was really testing, that may have recalled some past horror in
her own life, but came out of it without much accrued harm.
She loses two Jews she's rescued, but both of them in our
minds are ones categorized as representing "too much

995
pressing of one's luck"--as sort of guiltily complicit.
Specifically, after showing the successful exportation of two
Jewish women by dressing them up as Germans, we feel
immediately that the next two probably won't make it
through, that they'll find themselves found out and killed,
because otherwise it would make the Germans seem just too
stupid, and therefore their collective situation, not quite as
satisfyingly dangerous as intended to be made to seem.
6) Hitler's zoologist is a patsy for viewer' fantasy needs
throughout. He exists as so dangerous an uber-predator so
that the heroes of the film can take that much greater
pleasure in eventually triumphantly telling him off. The
zookeeper does it, when he reminds him that he could in fact
break him in two, that he was by no means the absolutely
cowed, abject slave we are at times intended to "enjoy" him
as, for it heightening our pleasure in being momentarily
cozily cloistered with him as we tremble before Nazi' power;

996
the son does it when he brazenly does a mock Nazi salute,
intended for the Nazi zoologist to hear; and the wife does it
when she tells him she always thought him "disgusting." All
without consequence. The husband isn't shot for physically
intimidating a Nazi officer. The son isn't shot for his version
of burning the flag. And the wife isn't shot in un-manning
him when he is trying to be his most vengeful and terrifying.
And no one else is made to suffer for all their umbrage
either.
Don't do this. Don't pretend you're showing us the most
scary people imaginable, and yet make them so impotent
when we require they suddenly be relaxed in their ability to
cause harm. Don't make them seem ultimately so easy to
take advantage of: I blanched when, after discovering how
absolutely used he had been, how much a fool he'd been
made of, Hitler's chief zoologist is yet deterred from killing
the zookeeper's wife's son by her appeal to him as too much a

997
gentleman to do anything like that. Wow, how can you buy
someone that ridiculously compliant to your moment-by-
moment needs? First the film wants to reveal him as
absolutely corrupt by having him casually shoot and kill a
bald eagle he ostensibly only reveres. And now you want him
to be deterred from doing something you couldn't discount
as a manageable loss, by his still needing to feel obliged to
act according to principle! -- and by someone he'd surely
deem as having already rashly and foolishly sacrificed her
use of this tool of persuasion, so to feast on denigrating him.
Don't do this, because it makes this narrative seem secretly
enjoyable to the viewer. And if the future ever presents us
with what appears to be a simulacrum of 1939, maybe we'll
be unconsciously excited by the prospects. Maybe, we might
be more prone to think, it'll afford us a "Zookeeper's Wife"
situation too, where we're noble in action, and acquire the

998
best kind of evidence we are heroic at the core, while others
suffer the tough stuff?
Also don't pretend that in making one of the protagonists a
Jewish girl who'd been raped that you'd only shown us
something of horror, something we wouldn't actually be
pleased to have had dropped into the narrative. For what she
is in this work is something that more belongs in some
situation a half century hence, where someone who has been
brutally traumatized can be very slowly nurtured back into a
mostly fully restored situation, in a warm, profoundly
provisioning surround. She's a virtual impossibility in
wartime, which at best can be only make-do; but the fact that
she, that her miraculous recovery, exists nonetheless, shows
the zoo as a powerful resilient force, possessed of
superhuman capacities of healing-- and who is that a credit
to? She serves as a source of a further powerful source of
efficacy for the zookeeper's wife, who so helps facilitate her

999
recovery and the expansion of her artistic imagination that
she ends up the penultimate source of humiliation and
mockery afforded the Nazi zoologist! He thought he was
wiping out everything ostensibly vile from the Earth--the
Jews--when before his nose was growing a spectacularly
beautiful source of art, resilience, and love from out of this
very "contagion." What mockery! Poor Germans--even as
they were trying to be most imposing they couldn't help but
remain absolutely ineffectual, ultimately only deterring great
avenues of spiritual expression underground.
Now of course there remains the fact that many children and
one particularly kind Jewish intellectual, don't get saved,
don't live, and in fact get shipped off to the ovens. How can
this not work to sodden all pleasure to be derived out of the
narrative? Well, as this film shows, this too proves do-able.
One thing, don't get us involved with the doomed children in
any significant way. They can't be characters afforded time

1000
for one to be acquainted with. Categorically, they thereby
remain components of a crowd, satisfyingly not lent the
saving flame of inner life, of soul, touched on every other
character on the good side we become acquainted with. They
remain categorically different; inferiour. They died like the
bear and buffalo did in the air raids; but those who
ostensibly truly matter, like the lions and tigers, were graced
by the raids in their actually being deemed too good to go
down in a culling.
And what you do with the elder intellectual is present him as
involved in a situation where it would be somehow
inopportune--that we as viewers would feel justified to judge
and hate him for it--if he agreed to take up an offer of rescue.
And you do this by presenting him with this ostensibly
sincere offer of escape, just when he is serving as a kindly old
man trying to calm children down with sweet lies about
where they've being moved to, while they are being lead into
1001
trains towards what he knows is their certain doom. He is
instantly made an object of kitsch, one we're intended to
savour, and who only keeps our appreciation of him as he
serves out sentimental purpose. Think on if in the presented
situation he actually chose to forsake the children and took
the emerged route to safety. Sorry kids! But it looks like this
lovely journey to wonderland is only going to be for you
lucky lot to savor! How I wish I could be you! He'd instantly
become a load we'd want to dump off us as soon as possible,
for he'd aggrieve us as being someone whom we couldn't
allow ourselves to consciously hate, but whom we
urgently do hate for denying us our use of him as sentimental
satisfaction. And boy, would he ever know it.
The Nazis hated Freud. If we want to keep faith with
cosmopolitan values we should more inclined to create
narratives where people behave not so much as we might
wish they would but as they really do. Don't pretend to but
1002
actually be interested in and show the complexity. It's not
being brave to show that a man might become angry at his
wife for garnering another's attention, but a matter of script!
It's not brave to show that a woman would pretend to be
interested in a villain so to save her husband, but a matter of
script! And what then do we do when we can't help but
notice people behaving differently in similar situations--do
we feel unconsciously compelled to be repulsed by their
actions, to be angry at them for arousing cognitive
dissonance that creates mental disequilibrium, a
disequilibrium we've never truly been trained to get used to?
This film wants us to so feel clean afterwards it doesn't allow
any of the character's we like to have any justified source of
guilt, even as it spotlighted as a possible persistent concern
at the beginning. It proves inconsequential that the
zookeeper's wife wanted her son to be safe from always
running away, and so kept him within Nazi' observation and

1003
possible doom when he could perhaps have completely
escaped it by their leaving Warsaw before the Germans got
there, for he doesn't die, he doesn't incur any harm at all. She
worries that she was ultimately responsible for the two
Jewish women she'd dressed up as Germans being killed, for
not having articulated their appearance in a sufficiently
persuasive manner. But she is assured authoritatively that it
had nothing to do with this at all; that they had simply been
ratted out in the new dwelling place they'd found themselves
in. No guilt, nothing averse, lies on any of them. They're all
just so straightforwardly good and impressive, the oppressed
doing what they can to work against evil oppressors. Surely
there must have been hundreds of films built of similarly
self-flattering characterizations made during the Nazi-era by
Nazis, showing how the ostensibly bullied German populace
managed the ostensible threat of "Capitalist exploiters" and
"power-bent Jews" during the Weimar era?; showing how
they escaped notice and found yet enough strength within

1004
themselves to thrive until the military resistance arrived,
leaving ample evidence along the way that nothing so great
as their intrinsically superior spiritual selves couldn't helped
but found proud way to have thrived even when the enemy
was at its most arrogant and pressing?
There is a way to show us as convincingly different so we're
not actually alreadyentertaining on a diet of narrative the
enemy is hoping only to train us to come to like. Be
discouraged at how the film secretly makes something dark,
mostly into a historical romance.
"Life" as political
analogy, coming to
you via Breitbart
News
March 25, 2017
1005
Immediately after seeing the film, I worked over whether or
not the movie works as something the alt-right would
produce to alienate us from the left. Mostly the film does
work this way -- as a sort of, de facto, Breitbart production --
I decided, though it's not entirely slam-dunk. There is no
disparagement evident for the crew of the space station being
a multicultural mix, for instance. Race is not invisible in the
film; it feels conspicuous at times, like when the Japanese
crew member is shown looking at his black wife on video
conference; but the film maker, wherever he was actually
raised, seems like someone who was a longtime habitat of a
multicultural milieu, some place like London, and likes

1006
things that way. But the film cannot convince only as
macabre relating to our current fascination with the
possibility of life on Mars -- what it no doubt pretends to be
doing -- because the idea of “threat” does not permeate this
interest at all, whereas it absolutely saturates our current
discussion on the matter of refugees. As such, and very much
lured to do so by the film's plot developments and
characterizations, in our minds we are drawn to play out the
alt-right -- the “Breitbart” -- understanding of the film as not
about an inclimate, teasing warning of what might be
incurred in our species' subsequent adventures into outer
space, but as clear-cut contemporary political analogy,
applied to all of us here on Earth, warning of our being lead
by an ideology that'll ostensibly bring ruin to everyone who
matters. Indeed, an "afterword" could almost have been
tagged on at the finish intoning overtly the film as rightwing
political warning, and remained a surprise mostly fluent with
what we'd witnessed. Something, perhaps, like this:

1007
Here you have seen a collection of well-meaning liberals
engaging with something new they wanted to see a certain
way -- namely, as benign, and hopefully responsive in a
“mutual” way. It turned out they were engaging with one of
the universe’s most dangerous predators -- something
cunning, with an endless, insatiable appetite, but they were
way too late in being able to see it. We need to unlearn our
tendency to appreciate these liberals' well-meaning attitude
and come to scorn it, in fact, as narcissistic and selfish -- as
moral cover for their own undue professional success --
because it leads to criminally irresponsible results, to
grand-scale loss of human lives. Just as we must unlearn
our desire to view outer space as something that will abide
us only contact with the unfamiliar and learn to see as
venue to girt our own might, we must unlearn our naïve
desire to view struggling people we’ve graciously let into
our country as only wonderful additions that’ll in time

1008
sweeten our mix. Like this alien, they represent cultures
that intend only to make use of our own resources to bring
about their ascension. They grow/breed rapaciously, have
no empathy, and won’t stop until our own civilization is in
ruins. Learn from the lesson of this film: Come to
understand refugees as they truly are -- rapacious alien
rapists. Breach through the firewalls the left has put in
place for you to remain ignorant of the destruction refugees
are already incurring within your homelands! Keep faith
with your wonderful homelands! Refuse liberal'
mindwarping and overt intimidation! Refuse the insidious
infidel!
What isn’t quite Breitbart about the film is that there actually
is no animosity towards the alien itself. “Calvin” -- the name
given by to him through an Earth-wide contest -- is just
agency through which the liberal attitude of tolerance can
be lampooned mercilessly and destroyed for good. For

1009
anyone adjusted to or who thrives on being cosmopolitan, it
can take a lot to get us to hate a character who is black,
educated, liberal, and who has a physical difficulty he has
overcome to be the best in his scientific field, for a character
like this represents pretty much exactly whom we’d hope to
land as portrait on our hundred dollar bills to represent who
we are. We are so much now the land that respects an
individual’s right to totally realize themselves that we’ve
put aside most former encumbrances -- like racism and
cruel mockery of the disabled -- that would formerly have
forestalled such a person’s ascension, denying him, as well
as all of us. Now we are ready to greet any vastly evolved
intelligence out there in the open court of space in a way
that doesn’t shame us… that in fact, lends us dignity. But
this film seeds some for this character -- deep anger and
hate, that is -- which perhaps other dark-spirited cultural
products will in future work upon.

1010
He is the one on the ship in charge of interacting with the
alien, making it come alive, and ultimately he lends it
nutrition, food, from which to grow -- namely, his own body,
as corpse -- as well as a tool through which to escape
compound. Any other character we’d loathe almost
immediately for such a dismayingly presumptive attitude
towards something unknown -- for being beholden to such
"lost in space" carelessness and cluelessness and self-
rapture. The fact that as we begin to accrue this attitude here
we immediately sense psychic obstacles blocking it -- he is
black and physically disabled: are you sure you’re not just
using the safety of this particular incidence to joyously
exercise long-maintained racist compulsions? Recoil, recoil,
recoil, the inner voice in us commands -- draws attention to
them, arouses irritation and anger at these firewalls, and
inspires a questioning of their legitimacy: people died owing
to them -- how righteous can their ascribed place in our
psyches actually be? These firewalls begin to seem an alien

1011
intrusion we’ve already incurred, and which, owing to mental
nudges built into films like these, we now finally are
beginning to see properly as the bulwarks against our own
survival they ostensibly really are! Down with political
correctness! Down, as well, with giving a damn if the
one telling you to desist in your ostensible hatred is
black, crippled, and head of the like of a respected
scientific institute, if this means being cowed to being
agreeable to whatever hell business he is intent on lest you
lapse away from being safe from being ascribed one of
the disposable charnel horde that is racist, homophobic,
and sexist!
We note in the film, too, that while the black character is
insidiously characterized as unworthy of trust -- someone to
slowly work away at pulling allegiance from, and being
stretched to do so with the numerous reappearances in the
film of him as kind and good but also as -- yet again! --

1012
ultimately a living trespass to the survival of the crew -- the
white, American, brazen “cowboy” of the bunch, the
character who would perform in a 20th-century version of this
film as the captain and the star but who now is lucky to find
some countenancing for his type being on the ship with it not
yet being repellent to the conception of what a competent
engineer might look like, comes out looking good, and maybe
overlooked. He’s the star early on -- even as he’s but grease-
bucket, “mechanic” muscle and adept physical agility doing
what “minds” bid -- but fades graciously to let less macho
characters command the stage -- ultimately, we note, for
their aggregate ruin. But he shows guts in a way that doesn’t
quite seem idiotic. He flamethrowers the alien all over the
place. It turns out it’s mostly immune, even as he does
succeed in getting it to scamper about the place in retreat,
but he didn’t toy with it … and if that wasn’t up to snuff, well,
at least his judgment was the right one, which was to go
nuclear immediately.
1013
The female captain of the ship is equally brave, but somehow
doesn’t come out looking as good as he does. He’s as
effectual as he possibly could be, while, we note, she does
nothing to deter the alien -- at all: she just goes out in space,
gets entangled by its occupying "octopus" legs, and clumsily
drowns, chugging poisonous fluid. If “your” purpose in
setting out to engage was only to pretty much passively
accede to a layering on of destruction -- well done!Worse,
perhaps like me many of the audience noted that if she had
launched herself away from the station just when the
creature punctured the tubes in her outfit filled with enough
anti-freeze to drown her... when it had doomed her but also
when its attention was more absorbed in entwining her
destruction than in averting its own, she would have gotten
rid of the pest as she and it found "home" in deep space.
Instead, she let that moment lapse, drifted and climbed as
close as she could to the doors of the space station, so to,

1014
apparently, histrionically dramatize her intentions not to be
rescued, and, as well, ostensibly inadvertently put the alien
back in easy leaping distance of the ship. What does she
seem like in the end, other than a former model who has
aged gracefully enough to yet stir considerable sexual
interest, especially as she repines in the form of a
sophisticated consort who is resolved to all her disagreeable
duties, after having humiliatingly failed in a role unsuited for
her, despite having spent everything she had to offer in
endless, glistened, hopeful and encouraging remarks and
appreciative looks of holism and well-being to her crew?
The Breitbart contingent is full of MRA types, and this
film is a tip of the hat to them too. Near the finish, two
characters are trying to decide who will be the one who'll
sacrifice themselves to bring demise to the alien -- who
gets to live and who has to die. Normally in this situation
we know the male will commit himself to heroic self-

1015
sacrifice, and as a result, come out seeming brave and
manly. But the male character making the "offer" in this
film is the most begrudged and least manly member in
the crew -- his acceding to playing the traditional role for
men in this instance would not so much be about manly
bravado but about the ushered-about and maybe
schizoid-afflicted man being compelled to play out his
designated role as heel so the Mary Sue character -- who
actually is due by logic to be the one who ought to be
sacrificing herself in this situation, as she's the security
officer in charge of firewalling disaster -- can survive
another day. It's a "Cinderella" situation of having
to unrighteously never escape the attic -- I like loneliness
and forlorn environments! Don't worry about me! -- to
have a chance at ranging, and infuriatingly suffer as your
distress at being requited by convention to something
foul doesn't register in the narcissist who plays at taking

1016
onus but who knows she's covered from having to bear it,
and who really doesn't give a damn for you anyway. So
what to do in this situation, if you're the plotter, to stage
revenge? You make her think she's safe, only to
ultimately commit her to the terror of a deviated course
which, without care, spins her out erroneously to the fate
she thought she'd seen herself circumvented away from.
Last one "standing"... the last character we focus on, is
the male -- albeit only in, as well, his final throws. But
he's not lost in surprise and terror, even as he is beyond
dismayed as the alien gouges him grossly, a hundred
different ways. For his fate, he could succour onto
himself in his final moments, he'd at least got to
anticipate, whereas she had only known the shock of a
huge, terrifying betrayal, then dispatch.
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1.
AllanHMarch 26, 2017 at 10:04 AM
Oh. Wow.
Patrick,
This is the coolest Spoiler Alert I have ever read.
It likely surpasses telling our younger son, halfway through the movie, that
"Soylent Green" is people.
A decade later he has still not forgiven me, and we now refer to any synopsis as
"Soylent Greening" the topic.
You have also given my yet another reason to see the movie as planned, not so
much to see the "surprise" (telegraphed by the previews I have already seen) but to
see the subtlety of the interactions at a level of analysis I might have only mused
about after seeing the movie. You have greatly added to the anticipated enjoyment
of the film.
You have also illuminated the "dumb blonde who trips as she is trying to get away
from the monster" syndrome inherent in many science fiction movies.
Success (and survival) in science requires the anticipation of possibilities and
options. While you can't always predict the results of an action, you try to avoid
the stupid ones where you get killed.
That fiction stupidity is why I got furious with episodes of shows such as Star
Trek Voyager and Enterprise because the "Leaders" were exploring new
environments in a manner that not only were unnecessarily risky, but in ways that
DESERVED for them and their crew to get killed.
But is is NOT "liberalism" in the guise of leadership and love of all life forms.
Instead it is the stupidity of the writers and the gullibility of the viewers that the
writers are catering too.
Good and evil are subjective, in that Stalin, Saddam, and Pol Pot thought they
were doing good for the benefit of the (surviving) people.
And "Good" only exists if YOU survive, and your survival only happens when
you have the strength and resources to protect and defend yourself.
1018
Or as my high school Social Studies teacher quoted, "History is written by the
survivors." He was in the 442nd Brigade in Europe during WW2 and was "one of
the lucky ones." He survived.
If Germany and Japan HAD won WW2, "The Man in the High Castle" would be a
reality instead of fiction.
Again, thanks for your comments.
Allan
REPLY
1.
AllanHMarch 26, 2017 at 10:05 AM
Sorry for the grammatical errors. I think I got emotional with sharing my
agreement with you.
:)
2.
Patrick McEvoy-HalstonMarch 27, 2017 at 5:35 AM
This comment has been removed by the author.
3.
Patrick McEvoy-HalstonMarch 29, 2017 at 6:10 AM
This comment has been removed by the author.
The problem with “belle”
I think there are two key moments in the movie when Emma
Watson offers us the pleasure in seeing what the latest, most
self-empowered female Disney character, is capable of. Early
in the film she is assisting her father, whose trade is as a
clockmaker, and presents him, twice, with exactly the part he
next requires... but ahead of him realizing that this is the

1019
exact piece he is searching for. She, at this point, is leading
him... and could presumably just as well be doing what he is
doing, if such was her foremost interest. Basically this is a
doctor-nurse situation where the routine, "nurse -- scalpel!,"
is played out to invert the patriarchal paradigm and presume
genuine authority to the "nurse," but without the labour
strife or mean gotcha: here, the father couldn't care less is his
daughter was one hundred years ahead of him in ability and
he, mostly put in the position of assisting her. He knows
she's got him beat in many, many ways, and is just delighted
to see her grow and glow in exercise of her abilities. He's a
sublimely great dad.
The second is when she's met the literate Beast, many times
ahead in terms of awareness than the people she's grown
amongst, but is always serving as a respectful therapist to
him. We note her two challenges to him. First, when he is
struggling to admit he has feelings for her, she motions him

1020
to consider that the book he is concerned just now to devote
time to isn't just about battles but about romance too.
Second, she gently reminds him that you can't love someone
while you remain someone's captive -- when you're not free.
The inner struggle is mostly on him to work through. She's
apparently, mostly been there done that.
It may be that it is tough to determine how exactly we
actually think of a character when she's put out there as
some sort of pinnacle of moral perfection, when through
supporting her, we too partake in her moral elevation. As
William Deresiewicz argues, we become in danger of using
her, our support of her, as moral cover for everything we're
doing in our day-to-day lives. She's part of a formula -- we
love her and despise the patriarch Gaston, and now can go
about oblivious and non-self-reflective about everything in
our lives, as we're clearly with the forces of good and against
all forces of evil.

1021
I'm suspicious, that is, that what we're experiencing with
films like this, films that look and seem as if they've
integrated and represent the most advanced feminist
sensibilities, is something already of a betrayal. A feminist
sensibility is about respect and love, above all, and I'm not
sure how much genuine respect and love you're showing for
someone if your thoughts are mostly on how she can be
portrayed to show how self-enlightened you are. If you were
instead mostly feminist for wanting to see everyone -- boy or
girl -- grow to their full potential, this needn't and probably
wouldn't mean that you'd want to place her in situation after
situation where she's morally ahead of everyone around her.
You wouldn't make the one thing she does learn -- that the
disagreeable Beast was a victim of abuse -- about a situation
which involves no emotional or intellectual stretch on her
part to take in, because it belongs to a paradigm she's
abundantly familiar with: namely, everyone's mothers are

1022
wonderful, but fathers so often can be abusive and
controlling monsters -- through their influence, later male
tyrants are made, alas. Yes, we all know this… indeed it is
apparently the only formula for the making of human
monsters when it doesn’t just all lay on him.
There's an "emperor has no clothes situation" to how we're
being instructed to enjoy this film where if somehow Belle
did something which was a bit retrograde for a progressive,
and Gaston did something a bit surprisingly advanced for a
pompous bumpkin, we wouldn't let ourselves see it even as it
played out before our eyes. No, neither of them could
possibly be doing that, we'd judge, because she represents
our current situation where we have evolved to the highest
place of moral certitude, and he represents those whom we
have passed by and who deserve to succumb to foul fates. It
could all be for the purpose of her own growth -- a fit of
regression she had to deal with after making one of her

1023
climbs in self-awareness; or her doing something which is
genuinely about self-growth, but which comes across a bit
clothed as something else: perhaps having a love affair with
Gaston, even if already knowing it not something she'd much
want to commit too, but just to see what that was like --
early-adult, healthy, experimentation with relationships and
sex.
That's an interesting thought. What would it have played out
like if the film had made Gaston and Belle former lovers -- or
former boyfriend and girlfriend -- and she had in fact
admitted that there was fun in it, of a sort, even as it didn't
afford her much towards what she was ultimately hoping
for... Gaston, at least, isn't afraid of her and can be
marvelously, surprisingly, toward in his intentions: he meets
her at this level here, something the shy-boy Beast can't
manage at all. Indeed, the Beast is someone who pretends
that his defending her from a pack of wolves means he's past
1024
being someone who's afraid to ask a girl out, even though
this is who he remains, as it is clearly something he uses to
prejudice her -- in this vulnerable-flesh-into-sheath-of-
protection situation -- into being someone who must
logically seek him out (earlier, the enveloping maternal
wardrobe who spun around her an awful cocoon of
indifferently selected luxurious clothes, failed to long entrap
her, but being lured within a protective male carapace of
strength, was a key to success). Here's my guess: it would be
throwing tomatoes at the screen time (the crowd would cheer
the Beast as he attacked: "Are you f*cking kidding me! All
this time when you were ostensibly better than me, being so
tolerant of me, teaching me and developing empathy in me,
learning to love me regardless of my appearance, you were
yourself the hussy who let neanderthal Gaston ball her for
kicks!") And too bad for it, as it would be a plot artifice that
remains fully within the thematic context of "beauty and the
beast."
1025
But you can't redeem every beast because we need vehicles of
hate, even as one day we'll grow past it; and you can't be true
in your support of every heroine, because we need to keep
her in only such and such a form to demonstrate our virtue
through our support of them, even as one day we'll grow past
this as well. I feel I'm writing this essay a bit for Emma
Watson, whose feminism I mostly trust. You let yourself get
co-opted here. Remedy it by writing a fan-fiction take,
involving you and Gaston. This is what we need, not your
exposing your breast in "Vanity Fair," which allows us but
another avenue to enjoin a fight which gives moral cover
over how else we're going about our lives. The thing wrong
about that wasn't the nudity (which we should be
comfortable with), but that it elides that there are other
things more daring for the feminist to undertake than
pouring themselves more into already opened venues of

1026
demonstration. It was fine and all, but it wasn't what true
feminism was looking for, for that, true feminism, has to be
built away from the pull of the tolerant-cosmopolitan-vs.-
restricting-pleb narrative, which draws us away from
focusing on an individual's expression -- on what “you” were
expressing there, in going partly nude -- towards using this,
the societal stir it incurs, to retool our own certitude. You let
yourself be incorporated as nothing more than another
circumferent part to keep the chimes of our "morally pure"
clocks going, which isn’t about avant-garde reach but about
keeping the hounds of doubt from rocking our stasis.
The problem of
Gaston, in "Beauty
and the Beast"
March 17, 2017
The problem for a feminist, revisionist "Beauty and the
Beast" is that no one character more causes us to shake our

1027
established preferences... to work toward a different finish
than we were comfortably expecting, than the arrogant
patriarch villain, Gaston. Belle reads as many books as she
can get her hands on, but she represents the stage of moral
perfection we liberals are all ostensibly at these days, so she's
not about to throw any surprises our way, any new-fangled
ideas on how to behave she got from reading some of her
books: she'll only confirm what we know about ourselves.
She'll school any number of characters on how properly to
behave, implicitly school them to rise to her level, but (of
course) she'll also embrace others' cultural preferences and
eat and drink as they themselves would -- get dirty with
them, in a sense, to help not only not shame but also bring
equivalency to their relationship: "it's not only for you to
learn to be like me" ("... but is this something that I too must
learn?"). When she develops empathy for the Beast, it owes,
in part, to recognizing him as someone brought lower, owing
to oppression, than she herself ever was -- his mother was a

1028
wonderful if sickly dear he always tried to attend, but his
father was one who cruelly took him away from her,
ostensibly only to beat, mock and torture him with the like of
a mandatory classical education, which only incidentally
made him finely literate and world-knowledgable. Belle, in
contrast, had a glorious mother and father, both, and the
townspeople who've always thought her odd were never the
overtly demonic like the Beast's father was, and were just,
well, mundane, provincial -- any sense of them of them as
"witch burners" is leagues away (admittedly, it does appear a
bit when she is scolded away from teaching other children to
read), and quite frankly they more serve as objects of
contrast through which Belle profits, even if it means little to
her. The most surprising thing I experienced from her was
not something she did, but that the people behind the film
thought it safe for a character -- the Beast -- to throw a giant
snowball at her which knocked the wind out of her: it
ultimately passed as just innocuous fun, an albeit surprising

1029
but ultimately fair retort to a caustic throw of her own, but it
came credibly close to as if she had been hit by the blow of a
giant fist instead. Which if that had happened, would have
been well outside any accepted level of abuse and
dishevelment either character was going to suffer from the
other, and would have conveyed unprocessed anger towards
Belle we the audience might as well have been feeling,
perhaps over the level of permissiveness (unfair!) loaded
onto her. Things suddenly would have gone, not-Disney, as
what ought to have remained kept-in got near overt release.
If one of the books that fascinated Belle was something like
"Need-Satisfaction through Fairy Tales"... if what Belle and
the Beast discuss in their literary discussions was not just
how romance is as well a component of Malory's Le Morte
d'Arthur, not just blood and battles, but how many tyrants,
not just the sensitive, know well and love Shakespeare, Belle
would have induced upon us some dissonant thought we'd

1030
either have to spit out or integrate -- she'd set us to perhaps
reprocess some of what we'd already seen, our indulging in
being superior for being book lovers just like her. But she
doesn't. Gaston, on the other hand, does -- encourage the
reprocessing bit, that is. He does it when, after a precedent
has been apparently set that no one in the film is going to be
a villain in a way one can't begrudge, he becomes more than
just vain and dense but grossly indifferent and shockingly
cruel. He does it when he takes Belle's dad, straps him to a
tree, and bids the wolves have at him. By doing this, he
doesn't just transform the lighthearted into something
serious, take us into a rushing torrent after we'd accustomed
ourselves first through calm waters, but draw us into
ongoing murky waters of having to try and find a way to
work through what we know of his companion LeFou -- a
character we still want to support -- so we can accept that he,
the one reliable witness, won't commit himself against
Gaston's actions -- neither here, nor subsequently before the

1031
haphazardly arranged "people's court". We're we enjoying
the company all along of someone who couldn't speak up
even when deigning to do so meant passing over murder?
He's the one homosexual in the film, and we're absolutely
committed to celebrating him, but now -- how?, without
feeling like we're pro-homosexuality mostly because it makes
us feel good and as such is built on and sustained by a kind
of personal disregard? Can it be done without any work on
our part? Will the film ultimately come to our rescue, in
situating him so he'll seem to have had no other choice, or
something like that, or will it make the attempt intelligently
and aggressively but still fall short?
Also, by having a character suddenly commit in this thus-far
amiable tale to murder, means that he himself is committed
to the fate that all contemporary fairy tales will be compelled
to land on him -- his death, at least, is now a certainty. And
it'll be merciless, unredeemed. But this jars too, goes beyond

1032
our preferences, in that he was functioning well as sort of
a mostly manageable cad. Someone whom every other
woman desires, and every guy admires, but who doesn't
possess anywhere near the resources to comport himself
admirably to someone genuinely literate, even as he tries and
tries his absolute best to do so. We know this character is lost
to the universe, and as we envision the Beast winnowing
down eventually to a denatured human male (Dan Stevens --
ugh!) -- one who ultimately doesn't quite measure up in
presence and resources to Emma Watson's Belle, and whom
we want back, immediately, as a bear-lion thing, for the
adulterations electronically required to dress him up as such
having erred agreeably in somehow lending him gravitas he
doesn't without them possess... as we regard all the left-over,
highly agreeable -- or rather, eager-to-be agreeable --
personages, we know we're going to have to deem it, very
quickly, absolutely perfect -- and then get our head-space on

1033
out of this "perfection" as fast as possible, else we have to
admit to ourselves that it was most notable for its absence.
Absence of a presence we seem to have found ourselves
positioned to believe we're glad to be spared, for the guy,
who even if outside his intentions, nudged the work of
thought, repositioning, conjecture, risk... and maybe reality
(outside this "Beauty and the Beast," French, opulent haven,
we've got hellion hordes at our heels: do we really know them
well enough, think they can they be assumed sufficiently,
that we're okay only revelling in our glorious self-reflection
and casually casting them aside?) into something a bit
situationally inopportunely, resolved -- Gaston. They're out
there, the agitatingly male and "other". Let's keep them in
our narratives, with us even at the end. Maybe even do as
Jessa Crispin advocates and consider them as "shit
containers" into which we project all unwanted aspects of
our own selves. Means by which we avoid fair self-scrutiny

1034
that prevents us not only from actual self-realization but
from confronting the world with what is in everything
genuinely "in advance of," in everything genuinely
progressive and new and odd and strange -- the heavy
scratch of dissonance.
Passing Inspection,
in Kong: Skull
Island:
March 15, 2017
In Lord of the Rings -- the movie -- two young hobbits meet
extremely powerful denizens of the ancient world -- the Ents
-- and actually trick them into joining a fight they had
decided against joining. It's easily their most self-activated
moment in the series -- they weren't operating under
anyone's instructions; there was no way to know whether
Gandalf would have approved of their actions or not. They

1035
simply had a vision of their own world coming tumbling
down as a result of the Ents' decision, and, infuriated,
decided to further test the Ents on how resolved they would
be in their detached independence if they saw with their own
eyes the devastation Saruman the wizard had already
incurred on Middle Earth. In the books, Tolkien tries to
inscribe both hobbits at the finish of their adventures, as not
really having changed all that much. But if such was declared
at the end of the movie series, it would read false -- "no," we
would say, "we saw something there... with their behavior
with the Ents, that didn't read as something they had been
up to routinely in the Shire. For the Shire was the Shire in
part for it balking at loud challenges that tugged at
something deeply true, though withheld from conscious
view, that drew people to change." In the movie, at least,
these two hobbits were out on an adventure in which they
did not return the same way they set out. For them, a spark
was kindled out there.

1036
Kong: Skull Island invites the kind of "adventure" the book
series Lord of the Rings offered the two hobbits. The
personnel who seek out this previously undiscovered island,
receive from Kong and from the tribe of humans that live
there, exactly what the hobbits receive from the Ents in the
book. They park next to extremely dangerous and great
entities who could destroy them one hundred times over if at
all motivated to do so, an estimation that they are not "orcs":
that they are not a threat, and might even be tolerated and
even hosted for awhile. This is the "grail" these "adventurers"
find for themselves on this island. Indeed, the most
emblematic moment is when the young female photographer
takes a photo of the assembled indigenous tribe. It's later in
the movie; they've had their opportunity to absolutely
recognize the tribe as not in any sense primitive, but actually
far in advance in temperament, wisdom, and social
accomplishment than any human society alive today; and

1037
found the tribe grace them as those who would do absolutely
nothing that irked the tribe in any way. And the moment she
is commemorating is their joyous success is establishing
themselves as harmless, as willing to understand them in any
way they bloody well want ... as not much worth anyone's
bother, really.
This is how they score their "victory" -- his deigning them as
passable, and maybe even worth helping: which he actually
does, save them that is, though he seems to make clear that
it's not as significant a moment to him as his normal
behavior of rescuing stray or trapped cattle of his "flock"--
with Kong too. No one is going to more declare Kong as
actually an ancient, great protector of all things weak... as the
equivalent of Treebeard in Lord of the Rings, than these
humans are. No one could possibly be more sincere when
they declare that they'd die before letting the rest of the
world know about him. They're not interested in brag; only

1038
in re-staging frights and seeing demonstrated an ability to be
warded against them. They'd forsake themselves of this
immunity for absolutely nothing. He could have smashed
them to smithereens... but owing to how they presented
themselves to them, they knew in his short time considering
them that he'd categorized them as sincere in their apparent
resolve to abay themselves to him in any way they possibly
could. This is what they sought form him: proof that they
had this "power."
Possessing this "ability" -- to be deemed "not a threat" by a
scary, powerful entity -- is what so shamed Corporal Upham,
in Saving Private Ryan, that he needed to reclaim his
"masculinity" in brutally killing the next human soul who
came across his path who tried to disarm him into being
affable. There is no sense that there will be any of this
upcoming here. What we have here is the beginning of a time
where a movie watching audience takes delight in adopting

1039
through their avatars a poise that'll distinguish them for
perhaps a decade or so. It is the poise that most held during
the 1930s, where before triumphant, powerful and scary
"entities" -- Hitler, Mussolini... and perhaps even Roosevelt
and Churchill -- who claim themselves as shepherds of the
people... who are folkish in their essence, and who seem
associated with some great power of ancient origins, arisen
again, you could imagine yourself safe if suddenly put before
inspection. Four years hence, when nationalism has further
caught on, and pretty much everyone has decided that we are
in a war of civilizations where our fates are tied to "great
leaders" "bravely" trying to defend our own, after multiple
decades of "liberals' efforts to break it down from within," we
will have shaped ourselves through movies like this one so
that we'll be the ones photographing, not just our great
Trumps, protectors of our Mother Countries, but perhaps
even of the "righteous" carnage they create in their paths...

1040
all the people hanging from gibbets we'll joyously stand
beside, taking selfies.
It's funny this. There's all this effort put in the film to show
how the female lead is an empowered feminist war-
photographer, but this is only done vis-a-vis the men in the
group. Amongst them, she's settled in comfortably as as
brazen, as pronounced, as any of them... as much as any of
them, she's been in the shit. Then they're all set out into the
field... to chase victory in proving themselves absolutely
abnegative, absolutely unobjectionable, to ancient greats
returned to view. They chase victory... in successfuly
comporting in the stereotype of the properly feminine.
"Logan" challenges
us with the lesson
of Degas
1041
March 04, 2017

1042
1043
Charles Xavier was perhaps most happy when he had a
mansion full of engaged, happy students, moving every day a
further stitch away from their often insanely troubling pasts.
But of course, at least in the movies, it wasn't the like of the
robust kid Cyclops that garnered his most intense interest (in
John Byrne's comic version, it was), but rather the students
that never lost the "viper" in them, those who might lash out
at him and wound him emotionally, like Mystique and
Wolverine. So perhaps there was a sense that the other
students were mostly a joyous blur that could take his mind
off things -- when he saw them they were a rush of Christmas
gifts amply piled up under a Christmas tree -- while the ones
who could get under his skin were the students who had his
interest and respect because they couldn't be distracted or
lead away from recognizing that not all was right with him.
In this assessment of the Xavier-school-for-mutants reality,
that Charles was mostly interested in them, didn't show that

1044
he was most keenly interested in the most worse-off of his
students, but that he had an admirable nose for those who
saw that he was leading a life which enabled his distractions
with mutant children bon-bons, but which when it lapsed,
quietened down, would leave him open for more
confrontational engagements whereby he himself might be
helped out.
In 2027, most other mutants are dead, but given our sense of
Xavier as someone who effused at charming, smiling, ever-
happy children -- "look at the magic I've made of them! look
how grateful they are towards me" -- it would have worked
just as well if the movie hadn't chosen a post-apocalyptic
type setting and just gone with a normal advancement of our
current times, and had the students naturally lose interest
him as he did most of them, when they became complicated
adults of aging skin and rebuffing, self-assured mien. He is
alone now with Logan, and he's not getting away with the
1045
self-presentation of someone who's more right and good
than everyone else, because Logan has seen him fry the
minds of a hundred people and seen his mind lapse away
from remembering this horrible reality. Charles challenges
him, saying, "you just want me to die," and Logan does him
the favour of not doing much to dissuade him of this belief --
he's being cared for because he is loved, but the way he is
now is equally as much a burden. Charles is in a sense here
exposed as someone who requires people to fit
preconceptions of them, built out of a need to supply his own
needs and which actually chains them, as even now he is
trying to persuade Logan that he is yet still the young man
who could never face up to how much good is in him, a man
who has never really grown an inch because Charles so
enjoys being the empowered advisor who can see the good in
one that ostensibly no one else can. He is exposed in a
"senility" -- a recurring, self-harmful pattern of addressing
reality -- he himself had possessed from his start.

1046
Perhaps out of an unconscious realization that Charles is to
be avoided as just a pest almost out of the world, the enemies
of the world really aren't that keen to nab him -- "he'll drop
off at some point; let's just try our best to pretend it's already
happened." Whom they want is an escaped girl who's been
enhanced with mutant abilities. Whom they want is a power
they can dispatch at their own enemies, as a whirlwind of
fantastically quick, metallic fury. Later in the film she is
discussed, motioned towards, as someone who, after all, is
mostly just a kid. But the way she is introduced into the
narrative -- someone who shows no fear and who executes
her destruction like a fully seasoned pro -- makes it difficult
to understand her as such. Too much prepossession. Too
much intelligent discernment. Too much contained desire to
just amply express; have her time. She's closer to being
throughout the patient T2 advanced robot than ever the
outwardly petulant who keeps hidden deep insecurity. In

1047
playing with the car lock, activating it and de-activating it
constantly, she seems not really the petulant child Logan
sees her as, nor the playful child Charles sees her as, but
merely the sane young adult providing everyone the much
needed feedback -- "awaken out of your preconceptions!" --
that at this point she is beyond being the one who should
actually be steering -- like, duh! -- the car. When she does so
later in the movie, we know how competent she is going to be
at it that you're played only as an obtuse fool if you were
surprised how readily she took to it.
As they flee their opponents, Logan, Charles, and the girl
form a kind of family. They find themselves in a long
encounter with a real one, a kind-hearted black family that
owns a supply of horses and an affluent ranch. What comes
to mind is that here, Charles is being provided the home and
acceptance he once offered Mystique, and he lapses into
sheer gratitude -- a sleeping baby in a warm crib, saying

1048
more than anything else, "mama, me so happy!" He draws
Logan to stay longer than Logan intended, but the film
doesn't quite succeed in making them, this family, seem only
those to rally around. Any supporter of Trump could be
imagined offering a stranger who helped them a home, a
meal, and a good rest, if it also served to establish them in
the 1950s' sense as the sort of bedrock suburban family a
nation is built on -- if it also secretly flattered them. But if he
found his guests were actually big city liberals... And so it
goes in this film, when Logan, even after saving his host one
more time, is fit only to be dispatched -- shot with a shotgun
-- when he is revealed as, like, an actual "stranger," a mutant.
Too much cognitive dissonance -- "I knew you were strange
but not like, strangestrange!" -- for the distraught,
overwhelmed host to handle, and you have a sense that
something about the whole idea of natural family seems a
dumb idea at this caution-worthy time, as if it's smart to
infiltrate the family you keep with an overt artificial element

1049
to keep it awake to itself as a mental formulation for the
"real" lending only to unconscious narrative role-playing and
dumbness. "Would you like to stay over? We have bed!" --
Yes, we know what kind of bed you're actually offering us
here -- the bed of the unwary: the one you'll ultimately prove
victim to.
As legendary, beloved superheroes die in this film, you keep
asking yourself, is this for real -- at this point on, are we
really going on without them? We do this even though the
film does not equivocate in their being absolutely, one
hundred percent, dead. I for one was glad in this confidence.
It felt as if what we need today is one last drawing in of
everything that is wise and developed of the past, and then
dispatch them as we set out and inscribe our own future,
with them now only active as a presence in our memories.
The painter Degas worked this way; he would study intensely
his subject, and then never return and do his painting all
1050
from memory. This way, the object influences but doesn't
take precedence over your own mind -- you don't only
represent, only transplant, but express and transform and
thereby create something new to the world. It felt like a kind
of book-burning, yet one Nazis would never do; for it's not
rejecting the past for it being foul but out of realization that
some things can no longer be kept in site for us to see if we're
equal to founding a society that isn't simply a lesser son of
greater sires. It's exhilarating to see this executed, this desire
to see who we are once "you're" out of the way, even if it
proves to be the case that we're more the effulgence that
comes off from any enterprising eager start than any kind of
steady way.
Fellowship of the Ring
Frodo had been living amongst the inhabitants of the Shire for at
least fifty years since he went off with the wizard Gandalf to
retrieve a Dwarven homeland and rescue onto them, a treasure
hold of gold. He came back to the Shire possessed not just of gold
but of reputation — here was one who had had actual contact with
1051
things others in the Shire could only count as imaginings, and been
sufficiently up to the experience he hadn’t come back blemished.
This prowess was useful for Bilbo, for it served as a protective
ward over his quiet, comfortable living space: what other would
ever dare venture upon his space other than timorously, when, after
all, he could quickly transplant into any unforeseen entangling
situation the Bilbo that kept wit and selfpossession, with and
before a dragon!
All magic, all charms, run out eventually — if this isn’t truth, it’s
nevertheless how all the simple view those of prepossession built
in part out of magic. And since something along these lines is what
drew the dwarves to eventually decide to test the dragon Smaug’s
might in the first place, Bilbo knew if he held out any further in his
long splendid period of quietude in the Shire, he’d have hobbits…
and others, much more dangerous others, testing his resolve to
withstand overt attempts at capturing his wealth. He was going to
have to make out soon for some place that’d welcome him,
unknown to those in the Shire. He’d very soon have to make out
for Rivendale. So he prepared for departure, and made one — in a
manner that suited his impish desire to leave relatives befuddled
and estranged, and his egoistic desire to presume some scatter into
his departure. He thought to take all his magical possessions along
with him, but his visiting friend, Gandalf, forewarned him that the
Ring was no longer part of his story, but now of something quite
dark and terrible, and thus the proper adornment of someone
whose life would be rather other than the fulfilling one he had
lived.
1052
His home he left to his nephew Frodo. Frodo wasn’t to have time
luxuriating in it, for the Ring left to him was being sought by a vile
god who’d incinerate whomever was withholding the Ring from
him, and who’d begun to key in on his existence. Not that he was
intent on doing so anyway, staying that is: since it was not going to
be for him to be able to cow the locals with his stature, he was
going to have to deal with them as they were normally — namely,
unmasked, bumbling sordidness.
He left along with three friends, Sam, Merry and Pippin. All three
thought they were not just escaping attack but adventuring into the
beyond, like Bilbo before them. Indeed, as if young captains
steering a ship into a landscape unknown but not outside their
conquest, they made clear their dismissive attitudes, their
haughtiness, towards where they’d just previously come from and
the new territories into which they were passing. But not much past
their dissing of the Shire, brutally dangerous Black Riders were
upon them. And not much passed rebutting the majesty of the old
forest, the forest had them entangled and helpless. Lesson learned:
if holding the Ring was dangerous, it paled in its dangerattracting
prowess compared to any act of arrogance on their part. Better to
put on the Ring than carry “attitude,” any day.
They made their way to the trading town of Bree. Here they met
the “ruffian” Aragorn, who taught them more than anything else
that freedom is always with never declaring yourself. For once
you’ve done so — as he eventually will in admitting himself the
King returned — what you once had as far as an independent will
will be lost in subscribing to role.
1053
They all venture to the elven’ realm Rivendale. They once again
meet Bilbo, who in a sense went “out from the frying pan into the
fire” in seeking escape there, because he escaped the tedious for
the effortlessly frustrating — for those who are in every way
embarrassingly more adept in everything they do than he is. A
council is held where a decision must be made as to what to do
with the Ring, and whom will be its next bearer. A number of
possibilities are considered — not all of them overtly dubious. It
could be hidden, for example, deep into a sea — something that
might delay the dark lord multiple ages from acquiring it, which
would buy time, great loads of time — for a miracle, if nothing
else. But the problem is that the Ring wants to be found, and has a
way of being found. So given this, it seems best to actually do it
now, even if it seems unwise in that it offers a balm of immediate
action for those who’d feel the outside world as threatening even if
it weren’t in fact threatening any kind of attack at all: it’s an action
built also to appeal to the paranoid.
No attempt is made to clear those judging of preconceptions —
namely, that since the last two wearers were hobbits, and since it’s
just been in the care of Frodo, that he is already the de facto choice
unless a highly convincing argument is given otherwise. Strangely,
they all pretend the choice is fully open, and also that it is a
genuine surprise when Frodo declares his intention to further bear
the weight of the Ring. Not much of a plan of action is given them.
They are to get to Mordor and destroy it, but otherwise, all
decisions are open. The only reprimand they serve under is to
always choose the most unlikely of paths, as every one accounted
ideal would surely be under watch. No discussion is made of a
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return. No discussion of how a return trip would be provisioned.
They spend a lot of time in Rivendale. Enough to become familiar
with every bit of Middleearth’s geography, if such was their
interest. But very little on explorations that would indicate that trip
could be something other than a suicide mission.
They come to a point where the party is not in agreement as to
where to go, which path to take. The Ringbearer is beholden to
Gandalf, however, and there’s a sense that this would have
determined their course even if wolves hadn’t arrived to seemingly
channel them down Gandalf’s preferred choice — the Mines of
Moria.
Gandalf dies but everyone else makes it closer to the midway pit
stop where another batch of elves rule. Each of the Fellowship is
tested and each receives spectacular gifts, and it feels as if each of
them has been through some kind of river initiation that’ll proof
them against most else the evil wilds of Middleearth would
present them with.
Boromir finds Frodo alone and tries to take the Ring. Frodo senses
that the elves — or the elf queen, Galadriel, in particular — in
individually testing them, served to loosen somehow the affiliation
they had as a united Fellowship, and it seems possible now to set
off on their own without it amounting to a break in something
sacred. After escaping Boromir, Frodo in fact does so.
They’re all lost for a moment, though, in the one point in the whole
of Lord of the Ringswhere chaos, amongst friends, reigns. But it’s
a tease of a total disintegration only, for their friendship is real and
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their thoughts gravitate toward one another readily, and they bring
themselves quickly to order.
February 25, 201
"Get Out" inflicts upon the viewer a vicariously experienced form
of shame. The main character, Chris Washington, is dragged along,
deep into a weekend, where he has to constantly try and mentally
encircle an enclosure around a constant barrage of overt breaches
of respectful conduct, so to claim his weekend experience as
something he lasted through and bested. He wants his rich
girlfriend's relatives to be nutty, is intent on transmogrifying
experiences to process them as idiosyncratic, oddball, rather than
as they are which is offputtingly presumptive and assaulting
because he wants to force the experience into one of "just meeting
the strange but very rich, old wealth relatives of myperhaps wife
tobe," rather than their ostensible oldfashioned preference of it as
"just meeting another of our daughter's offputting boyfriends we'll
pretend to be all for but really just ably manipulate, use, and
discard." If he's successful in making them feel like they've more
played into the narrative he wants to process the weekend part of
than they are in making him feel part of theirs, it will force his
possible new relatives into fulfilling their role in finishing the
victorious narrative by granting gentry status to the outsider who
marries their daughter. This is his game. Even if we are directed
not to see it this way, we process it this way; and if he wins then
we get to vicariously feel for a moment what it might be like to
beat an initiation test to gain entrance into the land of opulent
wealth ourselves.
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The shame comes from undertaking way more on than he can
handle, thinking he's got something bulletproof to any projectile
they could put at him. He's caught out being casually arrogant,
ignorant... unawares. He's black, and no family of oldwealth that
doesn't dwell so deep in the Mississippi it's basically
unacknowledged, can afford to be known as aggressively anti
people of color. Even if they are such, if they have the
"misfortune" of finding their daughter intent to marry a black man,
the only way they can use the situation to enfranchise their
prejudice is to aggressively coopt him, use him as advertisement
of their ostensible clear lack of prejudice, should anything they do
in their business enterprises bring about this suspicion. We can
pretend if we wish that our society isn't one which has legitimized
a divide between the one percent and the rest of the country
principally by directing us to see how those in the professional
class have become so open to women and people of color while the
poor remain just as fixed as ever in their racist and sexist
prejudices, but at some level we know this is the world we live in.
If you're black and seem to present upon the white and wellplaced
the right to partake in their glory as much as Tiger Woods would
any golf club's, you're beyond indisputably in... and we know it.
Unacknowledged, but this guy Chris Washington knows he's bee
line for anointment into the upper crust. All he's got to do is play
out the "uncomfortable weekend with future inlaws” part, and he's
in. He's not truly trepidatious about anything, but it's part of the
role to look that way lest you be misseen as not genuine about
love and mostly interested in status.
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The reason the movie can yet persuade us in making him seem
immediately misplaced in this confidence, is that it makes us sense
that there is another narrative, a more powerful and relevant one,
that has just emerged but has grown quickly large in our society,
and it is surprise! actually drawing mostly on it. Not of person
of color vs. network of old wealth, which Chris Washington would
be right to think he could engage with as if pit against a lameduck;
but of the presumptuous young thinking they can kick the
constituents, the sinews, of their country, yet again, and continue to
get away with it. When a country is turning nationalist, as ours is,
what becomes enlivened is a sense of the old as something that has
been kicked at for too long, but, finally stirred, is now prepared to
do something about it. It displaces the cosmopolitan sense of old
hierarchies as having nothing for them but to rent themselves out
as antique pieces of ancestry for display else go the way of the
dodo forever for something fearsome and vital. So here when we
see gaggles of elderly members of old wealth coming together,
absurd, completely comprised trees of family linkages, it feels a
bit, not of feeble twigs assembled for further mishandling but of a
tangled, mean, vital and dangerous old forest, that's kept intact old
ties to old colonies that we all have forgotten completely about. It's
got something newly firmed up and great to harness while
everything we've attached ourselves to is becoming tangential. It's
a visit of something from the longforgotten past that'll hold this
day as well as the next... looking in fact, with cause, to own our
futures.
The impetus for racial inclusion, to decry the legitimacy of the
category, "race," altogether, which is where the film begins, in
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showing no meaningful distinction between protagonists built on
color of skin, is at the end replaced by a plea to stick with those
you know... because if you're actually not different, it's too
venturesome to pretend to partake of this "truth." The white
woman is just using you if you're black. If you're black, your best
friend had best be black as well, for no one else will truly have
your back. Stick with your "bros," even if not a specifically racial
congregation you're thinking of but just the familiar. What feels
like it's being kicked at in this film is the aspiration towards higher
reach... of stretching yourselves outside of previous limitations to
experience selfgrowth and know people better than you once had.
At the finish you feel as if at any time you'd want to show up
fossils with your agility and reach in the future, you're no longer in
the world where you're just being the progressive faced with a
racist police officer... that beloved scenario, where you can't lose,
even if you get arrested, can’t cow your opponent down, because
no "virtue" on his side has any socially accepted legitimacy. What
you are instead is someone merely alone, because that type the
progressive; that ideal aspiration of spirit no longer exists, and
has been replaced by someone overtly cynical in their intent. And
because a world like that where new fashion is shown up as false
in intention, is much less optimistic and presumptuous in outlook,
it's a safer one to count yourself part of in an age where the old is
empowered and on the lookout for those hoping to further displace
its legitimacy.
The film takes you back a few steps, more than a few steps, and it
feels strangely comfortable. You step back from the "whitey" or
whom the "whitey" represents in your imagination... someone
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you're not supposed to presume to count yourself amongst but
whom for your own selfgrowth you'd actually be wise to come to
learn to and reenforce old stereotypical thinking, old
neighborhood thinking, oldwives’tale thinking, because it takes
you back in outlook at least fifty years, and hence makes you feel
nowhere near the kind of headstuckout flowering poppy our time
would want to inflict a lesson on.
Patrick McEvoy-
Halstonhttps://www.facebook.com/patrick.hallsteinmcevoyhalston?fref=nf
3 hrs ·
Fox News
·
https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hallsteinmcevoyhalston/posts/10154863009
252534
The left would be most smart to fully understand that
part of their previous success with the transgender
bathroom policy, with transgender recognition overall,
owes to what was only going to prove a momentary
situation: that much of the population was suffering
from a masochistic desire to be lead along into
viewpoints that run counter to anything they can
ground as "common sense." The left has always
understood that it is though the courts or through a
sympathetic president that they were going to
advance human rights issues; they never really
believed they were going to get most Americans'
sympathies, and ground their gains through them --
through their enlightenment. "You can count on the
coastal cities, but everywhere else you have to stake
gains at least in part through coaxing, manipulation,
and near-blunt intimidation, because here's the people
"we all," after all, escaped from for the dense-
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knittedness and never-endingness of their coarseness,

intrinsic cruelty, and stupidity," is what they always
thought. They did think they could create an
environment which most people would at least want to
pretend they were fully part of, would pretend they
were fully part of, held in place out of a fear that if you
weren't part of it you weren't relevant to
contemporary culture -- you were left behind and in
the dustheap, and weren't allowed to count oneself
with Beyonce. But what they weren't savvy too, is that
masochism played a part as well.
What I mean by this is that many of those who voted
for Obama but then voted for Trump, knew
immediately with the transgender bathroom issue that
in agreeing with it they were agreeing with something
they could at the moment allow to register as showing
how easy to manipulate they'd become, how their
"masters" could now presume it so much that they
would register up as down, and down as up, if a quick
stern look was given to in fact do so. They knew they
had another number they could use here to
demonstrate themselves those who've served mostly
as those who've been manhandled all these long years
by an economy that's pit against them, and a
professional class and ideological system that just
plain out and out hates them. They knew they could
say that their years had been not just been about
economic suffering but about their being forced into
playing the overt fool... all just to survive, and prosper
not much beyond this. They also knew that when
they'd about finished this period when suffering was
required -- what they wanted and needed to
demonstrate their virtue, their absolute lack of sin,
they're being absent possession of anything that
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overtly represents their own interests -- and now

convinced of their own sinlessness, they could go next
stage and face this movement that represents
everything about themselves they've needed to
disown, with an absolutely fool-proof ability to go hot
on the path of revenge.
We're in this time now, and so when the gender right
activist on the show argues that only "you" know what
gender you are, and that if Tucker Carlson insisted she
was a she, that that is what gender she is, and how
that would qualify her to play on women's sports
teams and for government subsidies and programs
available only for women, and we see this guest agree
to this, and further to the fact that science was now
ostensibly absolutely on her side, this to the American
populace is not any of what I discussed previously --
anything one is obligated for selfish purposes to mask
in a beauticious manner, as wisdom, as evolution, as
glory -- but only the overconfident Mouth of Sauron,
unmasked, absurdly standing up to Gandalf and telling
him he's to bow to the foul mien of the overtly
demonic... even as the American populace has
secretly got their Frodo in place, about to blow this
shit-show up for once and for good.
To me, transgender rights is about two things: 1) it's
about furthering the ongoing liberal mission to deny
regressives... to deny the lagging psychoclass in
society any category of people they are permitted to
hate; 2) it's about the ongoing liberal mission to think
creatively and openly and sensitively towards the
world about them. For flow and deep truths and
ongoing revelations; against ossification and stupidly
stalwart clinging. These are great things.
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Is science on their side? Psychiatry, really? I honestly

think the better question is who asking these
questions is representative of a 21st century
cosmopolitan and caring outlook, and who, someone
cherishing the 1950s? Who is for enlightenment? And
who is for bringing the good and the vulnerable,
down? It's a bizarre thing, but if "science" to most
people still represents 1950s white coat jackets, sterile
laboratories and the Golden Age science-fiction whiz-
bang, then it's not really their cup of tea, either.
Trump a 'monster' for undoing transgender bathroom

policy?
VIDEO.FOXNEWS.COM
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Alex � I would not believe if someone said this to me,

Check out Donald Trump's facts http://happy-
foxie.com/the-many-scandals-of-donald-trump.../
The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: Facts Donald

Trump Wishes We’d Forget
HAPPY-FOXIE.COM
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https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhappy-foxie.com%2Fthe-
many-scandals-of-donald-trump-a-cheat-sheet
%2F&h=ATPdS_SkEHGbczsCcEptYTK-
3s50qSfDSehMPQRGgyphDrF5DFOzB8HccHtpuHbGrn1AntlDL9RgiygUYx02F
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252534
Patrick McEvoy-Halston He's clearly what you see in an

adult who has been subject to a love-denied, trauma-
filled early childhood. He's a very emotionally un-
evolved person who is in power because too many of
the American populace shares his severe childhood,
and wants to war against all the vulnerable people in
the world, as well as all the "uppities". I don't focus on
him much because the problem is the American
people. If he is disposed, he'd be filled with the same;
and if HE was disposed, he'd be ... There were several
million potential Hitlers and Mussolinis: the problem
was all the more-than-willing German and Italian
executioners, ready to use their leaders for their own
desired purposes.
Like · Reply · 3 hrs · Edited
5 hrs ·
https://www.facebook.com/
A couple of things about this article:

1064
1) The professional class needs to stop talking about

the snob cashier / barista who looked down at their
purchase... who made them feel momentarily small.
Not to worry, good woman! You can retaliate in
knowing that that will be only moment that that
person won't serve as a human dwarf compared to
your accomplishments!
Also, you can't have a world where people can get
away being weird, be the kind of feminists Jessa
Crispin (referenced in this article -- shit! she's getting
press!) would like to see more of... the hairy-armpit,
scary Andrea Dworkins, rather than the glam Gloria
Steinems, unless you go back several decades when
such were respectable in the feminist movement.
These days, anyone like that is only going to be a
barista, or stocking shelves. Leave room for the
possibility that the person serving you isn't some
borderline afraid of accomplishing more with their
lives; that person might be the Andrea Dworkin of
our time, easily forced into giving you a smile next
time if you would have preferred to have complained
rather than smuggled your minor humiliation out the
door with you.
2) The further along into a period of growth you go,
the worse the growth will appear to the sane. Growth
makes people nervous. The hugely long legacy of the
idea of original sin, that people are born to suffer not
to self-actualize, owes to the fact that most people in
history were born to unloved parents who needed
their children far more than they loved them, and
abandoned them emotionally when they began to
individuate... when they began to leave them, grow
up. These kids can't cope with that kind of
apocalyptic loss and form within themselves a
1065
psychic overlord, a super-ego, a persecutory mental

altar, that rages at them when they start "spoiling"
themselves. We've been living in an ongoing period
of growth that began right after World War Two. It
was superb near the beginning -- during the 60s and
70s -- but is at a very ambiguous stage right now,
and can easily be made to look preposterous. This
article tries to keep faith with it, nonetheless, and
deserves credit for doing so. The phase up ahead... is
about the kind of horrible regression, punishment
and sacrifice of talent and youth that enables a
subsequent generation to feel justified in reaching for
the skies again, claiming a Golden Age for
themselves; it isn't about reaching those heights
itself.
Can Feminism Be Too Inclusive?

Who thinks Ivanka Trump is a feminist? Seriously,
who? As far as I can tell, the only people calling her a
feminist are Ivanka herself and conservatives who use
her to attack real feminists as a pack of radical
banshees.
THENATION.COM
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11 hrs ·
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557534
Many liberals were like Bill Maher and wanted Milo

gone because they were watching themselves craving
to make him mainstream, and had to disown this fact
to keep their equilibrium. They weren't ready, so he's
locked away to keep them from seeing more of a
powerful part of themselves they can only now
condemn. So now we go through this period where we
find out how many of the left were pro-pedophilia (Bill
Maher himself, for instance; Salon.com published pro-
pedophilia materials; many liberal anthropologists,
noting the amount of adult-child sex in the tribes they
study, have been pro-pedophilia for years, and it goes
on and on, principally because it's something the Right
could be imagined as having no sympathy with for it
being outside their very limited understanding of what
constitutes acceptable sexual pairings), and where it is
becoming respectable for members of the left to
pretty much sound like MRA in denouncing the Lena
Dunhams and Hillary Clintons of the world (Jessa
Crispin in her new book, for instance -- she even likes
nationalism over cosmopolitanism, apparently), as
well as "special snowflakes," "trigger warnings, "safe
spaces," etc: anything upper-echelon progressive. And
then when this is just all out and everyone's
accommodated to a sort of sullen, "everyone's full of
shit" point of view, many on the left will welcome Milo
back into the mainstream because he's useful for
setting detonations in place they can claim no
association with, just enjoy the repercussions. You
don't think Bill Maher wanted Milo on his show to
accelerate the advancement of hate speech and the
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discrediting of protections against society's most

vulnerable. He did. And Bill Maher is mentally better
off than at least half of Americans; he's never been
drawn to be a member of the Right.
CommentShare
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ft_ent_identifier=10154858935842534&av=6711375331Patrick
Bartolotta
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Steve Crisp https://psmag.com/on-the-milo-bus-with-
the-lost-boys-of...
On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New

Right
PSMAG.COM
https://psmag.com/on-the-milo-bus-with-the-lost-boys-of-americas-new-right-
629a77e87986 - .fxsns3ige
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557534
1068
Patrick McEvoy-Halston If there wasn't an aspect about
him that touches on something truly insufferable
about our time, I don't think Maher would have
compared him to Christopher Hitchens. I've heard Milo
talk about free speech, and it isn't just about enlarging
the number of people people can prey on... there is in
it, in however small a portion, some recognition that
we're living in a time where free speech often isn't
permitted simply because a lot of us are having tough
enough a time keeping our mental shit together, that
we cannot allow ourselves to be living in a time of
free-wheeling ideas: we cannot permit a 1960s. And
thus the number of liberals -- including, for example,
the New Yorker's Richard Brody and "Excellent
Sheep's" William Deresiewicz -- who've called other
liberals insufferable, for so preferring a sort of liberal
society where anything divergent never gets a chance

1069
to surface: a discourse of "fake news" and "troll
culture" got created, not just to keep a stern eye on
societal degenerates but to keep everyone else stifled
in their degree of experimentation so to look the type
to maybe be considered exempt from judgment. Milo
has said that he's the new punk, that the fun is with
him. I don't think that not denying that there is some
truth in this distracts from the ultimate truth that his
lure of, in a certain degree, genuine freedom, is
nevertheless music accompanying a harrowing ride
into hell. He is an agent of fascism. He is a victim of
child abuse whom we hope recovers even better than
he has. The world is complex, demanding a
sophisticated outlook.
-----
12 hrs ·
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557534
Jessa Crispin just wrote a book -- "Why I'm not a

feminist" -- where she argues that current feminists
are narcissists who are projecting everything they
don't like about themselves into "shit containers" --
i.e., men. She's got favourable pedigree, however, and
just got a very respectful write-up in the New Yorker.
Her argument fits in with all those on the left decrying
"identity liberalism" right now, and for the life of me I
can't see a difference between them and Milo. They all
seem foremost interested in taking down the Hillary
Clintons and Lena Dunhams of the world. Anyone
"spoiled." They're all going to leave us with some
version of a country, headed by a "strong man," with
everyone on the lookout for anyone "uppity." They all
WANT a 1984.
-----
February 21 at 5:36pm ·
557534
The left was more interesting in the 1960s. It was

more empowering to be progressive in the 1960s. The
last 30 yrs have been about narrowing how much we
allow all that's out there to change us, as we keep
solid our own somewhat fragile emotional equilibrium.
Thus our credential society -- unlike the 1960s/70s,
you'll only get a listen if you hold degrees from the
right places, are properly credentialed, and to possess
that you have to be someone who knew how play to
1071
prof's preferences, or someone who never really held a

thought that diverged from aggregate preferences.
And the tactical mind and the somnambulist one, is a
big direction away from the unconcerned, freely
exploring one -- the "free speech" liberated one, that
Milo, while no where near the same breed, DOES draw
forth remembrances of. The result is that we
encounter daily news that holds some truth, but which
we know cannot become an avenue for exciting
investigation because some aspect of it might
destabilize some extra-psychic "girder" out there that
must remain the same lest its unsettling result in an
unleashing of psychic tumult. So we do, yes, live in an
age a subsequent one will probably dismiss as too
much under the thumb of tut-tutters, like the 1920s
generation dismissed the pre-war times, the pre-war
left, as still beholden to the Victorian matriarch, and
uninteresting for it. This however is our lot. It sucks,
but it's out lot. There is no one there -- or no large
group/movement -- that argues against political
correctness, that I find immune to a deeper instinct to
set up certain groups of people as dispensable. I sense
how it will materialize 5 steps down the line: an
argument for denying all sympathy and for
quarantines. I find this just as much with liberal
Richard Dawkins as I do with conservative Milo as I do
with Jezebel editor Jessica Crispin. I wish it were
otherwise. As Jessica Crispin argues, the New Yorker
these days IS a bit dental office. So too Paris Review.
You know absolutely coming in what you're going to
get -- essentially about shoring up assumptions people
already had and need, while convinced its blazing new
trails; thereby making "hot shots" seem like
absurditiies.
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If we write and do, to keep faith with what is best in

ourselves, we may have to do it for a people ten years'
ahead. The left now will view you suspiciously, while
the right will sense insufficient intrinsic hate. Ten years
from now they'll get you, and hopefully require you.
WATCH: Milo Yiannopoulos Holds Press Conference

Following Resignation From Breitbart
Milo Yiannopoulos is holding a press event in New York
City today, where he will address the fallout from his
recent controversy concerning his remarks about
MEDIAITE.COM
http://www.mediaite.com/online/watch-live-milo-yiannopoulos-holds-press-
conference-following-disinvitation-from-cpac/
-----
February 21 at 8:56am ·
The way the Milo thing is going to pan out is by

expanding discussion of Left support for pedophilia
(the Left isn't actually FOR pedophilia, of course; it's
against bigotry and sadistic treatment of people in
general. But in pursuit of this it has counted amongst
themselves people of very averse dispositions. See
pro-pedophilia articles in such magazines
as Salon.com for example.). When the climate is
switching to one where a populace wants to war
against its most "spoiled" citizens -- i.e., progressives
-- everything brought into public discussion and
1073
acknowledged as a unambiguous, truth-revealing

weapon that cuts through all deception to reveal one's
essential evil core, gets quickly re-directed so that it's
a weapon against them, the liberal class. The only
thing that matters here is that the Left is pointing at
something that counts as absolute proof against a
cause. The only thing that matters here is that all
sides have decided that a holy sword of truth exists,
that turns away all ambiguity. It's a way of thinking
that properly belongs with the Right, in the way that
pro-Life can only mean to those of this movement,
blood-craving parents thirsting on the death of their
unborn children. You don't think Bill Maher is going to
turn this thing around so that it points mostly at
Muslims? He will. I hope the Left is expecting this.
Right now however I see them on my twitter feed
celebrating the glory of their absolute victory over
Milo. They should be wise and know that in this
climate, with "your" influenced receding, "you're" not
now going to be able to confine child rape as an issue
concerning only the Catholic faith. And if you can hate
Catholics for what they're doing, encourage it even,
then surely you can hate...
-----
The Cut
·
1074
This paragraph comes very close to DeMausian

psychohistory (my interest), and it's wonderful to see
it appear for consideration in such a well-read
magazine (frankly, it makes what's being discussed at
official psychohistory sites seem timid in comparison).
My disagreement, other than the central one that her
targets here are not being accurately described but
are subject to the same projection -- from her -- that
she discusses/lambasts in the article, is that
nationalism doesn't come as an answer to self-doubt,
it comes as an answer to self-recrimination: if you feel
spoiled, and about to be punished for it, you cling back
to a parental country, to ancestors, defensively, so to
not feel worthy of attack. It's not about joining
something larger, something "great," and so feel less
puny and useless, because what causes people to
become nationalists isn't their feeling small but their
feeling self-actualized: actually kinda big, in a not-
permitted kind of way. This is why it is not just the
poor who become nationalists but the thriving... being
a Trump-voter was not synonymous with being poor.
: Part of this is simple projection. All the aspects of
yourself that you are ashamed of or fear that you
possess (weakness, anger, irrationality) can be easily
forgotten if you assign those traits to someone you are
not. If you strongly identify as one thing, your opposite
can be not only a scapegoat, but a shit storehouse.
Anything you’d like to distance yourself from can
simply be stored in the identity of your opposite. “This
group over here is ___________ [enter whatever
disgusting thing you can’t bear to see inside of
yourself]. I belong to the group that is the opposite of
this, and so therefore I possess the opposite qualities.”
1075
This is meant to convince both yourself and your

audience of your value. When someone has a gap in
their sense of self, or in their sense of the value of
themselves, that gap can be filled with the sense of
the group with which they identify. Nationalism tends
to strengthen during times of struggle. Individuals fall
on hard times, they find themselves suffering from
unemployment or poverty or displacement, which
causes self-doubt. People erase that self-doubt, or at
least cover it up, by suddenly proclaiming participation
in a larger project, the project of a nation. Their nation
is great, their nation has a tremendous history, and so
they are allowed to participate in that greatness, to
possess it, to play a part in that tremendous history.
Self-Empowerment Is Just Another Word for

Narcissism
How contemporary feminism has lost its way.
NYMAG.COM
----
The Cut
The error in this article is that one can also use other
people as shit-containers for YOUR OWN NARCISSISM,
your own guilt-inducing sense of being special, of
being happy, successful, not just for your own
1076
powerlessness, destructiveness, etc. This is what Jess

Crispin is doing, I think. She is feeling what is called
"growth panic" for her own success, and so disowns it
by projecting it onto her peers and THEY become the
ones who are bad for being so attendant to
themselves, while she feels emptied of the "crime."
Self-Empowerment Is Just Another Word for

Narcissism
How contemporary feminism has lost its way.
NYMAG.COM
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Thursday, February 16, 2017
Reader's Guide to "The Two Towers"

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Reader's Guide to "The Two Towers"
The title "Two Towers" makes it sound like
this part of the adventure is especially daunting,
ominous. The adventurers have to contend with
two circumferences of evil influence, both
1077
linked. But the reader soon discovers that the
two towers are hardly in union: Saruman seeks
claim of the Ring himself, and is not the least
bit actually serving deferentially to Sauron; and
Sauron knows this about him but finds him a
useful enough agent nevertheless, at least for
the time being. Saruman, though of course as
old as the hills as Sauron is, is reasonably new
to the “being Evil” game (though Treebeard
suspects a longer tenureship, invisible to
everyone for being contrived in hiding), while
Sauron is "old hat." The "Two Towers" ends up
being as much about this the rivalry between
the newly rising and longestablished order
as it is about the two different threats imposed
in the pathway of the Fellowship, a theme, a
concern, which applies far beyond Sarumon's
relationship visavis Sauron to include
assembling allies of the good and members
within the now disparate venturing parts of the
1078
former Fellowship. It that is, a concern that
the old order not by breached; that people not
start thinking things with perhaps destabilizing
implications for the social order seems
concerned in this sense to protect both evil and
good in this book: it's an overriding concern,
making any act of bravery, initiative, or spirited
intuition, just as often something to be dealt
with and handled i.e. subtly or starkly
diminished immediately, than something
worth praise and support. An outpouring of an
eager willingness to praise or to lend strong
support, in fact, is more often to come out of
expressions of doubt and admittance of or clear
evidence of failure, than from successfully
accomplished feat, which is looked to warily if
it can’t be immediately packaged as something
as as demonstrative of one’s limitations as
one’s potential.
The book begins with Aragorn, Gimli and
1079
Legolas full of doubt, veering near a state of
despondency. "Now the company is all in ruin,"
Aragorn says. "It is I that has failed. Vain was
Gandalf's trust in me. [...] What shall I do
now?" He gets his answer to some extent by the
particular direction his heart points him
towards, but also seemingly in deciding for
modesty, for the more modest of the two paths
he needs to choose between grant the main
course to Frodo and Sam, and take the path that
is a "small deed in the great deeds of this time"
(416): somehow goodness lies therein. This I
think is the last time one ever hears of Aragorn
admonishing himself as a limited figure in the
text, and of seeking to venture away from
glory; in retrospect, it seems almost a
ceremonial gesture in that the one who is about
to serve as king over all of Middleearth, first
begs himself as someone who never forgets that
his greatest deeds have been bested by even
1080
greater kings before him, and that he has
known doubt, failure, and even moments of
despondency, as much as any man. Hereafter
he never openly reduces himself though upon
Gandalf’s return to the Fellowship, Gandalf
does school him to doubt himself no further
even if others mistakenly believe they see him
in reduced form i.e., his wearing a mere grey
cloak into the halls of Medusheld and the key
dramatic action concerning him is infinitely
more his rising, and into some form of
greatness that daunts everyone in terms of
stature “power and majesty of kings of
stone” (423) and accessibility: “none now of
the land of the living can tell his purpose”
(780). Henceforth, outside of being
momentarily spellcaught by Saruman, any
change on his part is to make him that much
more evident as a “kingly man of high destiny”
(780).
1081
Aragorn is venturing on a path that will not
actually have him rescue Merry and Pippen
Treebeard and the Riders do that but rather
only establishing himself amongst other
denizens of Middleearth as the great king
returned. Ultimately it's not by any means a
path that simply lends distinction to Frodo and
Sam's, but his journey announced, at the very
least, as a modest one does work to highlight
the outwardly bold presumption of those next
discussed in the text Sarumon’s, and his
servants of whom one of them is particularly
vile. Note that bold, brazen thought and action
is by no means due for criticism in the text. Not
at all, in fact for even Saruman's is carefully
done. Much of "Two Towers" is replete with it,
bold action that goes uncriticized or at least
by anyone given textual authority... by anyone
who matters. Aragorn, after deciding finally on
which course to take, switches entirely out of
1082
being momentarily fretful to simply
announcing himself from out of hiding upon a
whole horde of riding Rohan' horsemen, and in
such a stark and unexpected manner "What
news from the North, Riders of Rohan?" that
it's no surprise the Rohanians consider them
possibly netweavers and (evil) sorcerers, after
having first thought them possibly Orcs. The
path Frodo and Sam chose for themselves is not
to be assessed as only a “strange deed,” as
Gimli initially judges it, but only as a “brave
deed”: so states Aragorn. Pippen dares drop his
elfgiven (and so doubly daring) brooch so his
trail could be followed and he and Merry be
known as both alive and alert to the friends
hopefully on path to rescue them. Gandalf is
referenced as having stolen a horse from under
Theoden’s the Rohan' King’s nose,
cheating him of his hold’s greatest prize when
he meant only to offer a typical sampling. Sam,
1083
at the finish of the "Two Towers," succeeds in
stabbing the great monster spider Shelob,
something no one, not even great Gondor
warriors of whom, they're may not even have
been but a few had previously succeeded in
doing. All of these bold undertakings are
conveyed as actions to be respected and
celebrated, unreservedly. In not a single case is
anyone who undertakes such bold action meant
to be seen as deserving the punishment that
might have nevertheless been dealt them for
undertaking them none of them qualifies as
the sort of unwarranted claim, the sort of
lavicious action, that should be so slammed
down so hard it amounts to a moral lesson
others must heed.
The harsh moral lesson, "the burned hand
teaches best," is however applied to any bold
advance made even by someone in very good
standing, if it might lend one to reconsider the
1084
righteousness of the social order that the
returned king is set to restore. While held
captive by the Orcs, Pippin decides that he
shouldn't have let himself be daunted by the
fact that the company he’d be in would be
composed of such high company, and rather
himself undertaken to learn some of the
available knowledge concerning geography that
was available in Rivendale so he wouldn’t have
been as shortchanged when caught out alone. If
this was simply his being involved in self
reprimand involved in a turning against
himself: what a fool you are, Pippin! the text
would have found no trespass here. But it isn’t.
He is arguing to himself that no company
should ever daunt one. That you should make
an assessment of your likely needs and keep
faith with it, even if others around you are of
such stature that without explicitly stating it
their presence seems to insist on your suddenly
1085
forsaking yourself an honest assessment of how
best to equip yourself. Pippen, informed by this
act of selfcorrection, not selfreprimand, seems
to be the one we meet subsequently while at the
foot Sarumon's tower when he decides to make
claim to a fallen object the palantiri even
after being immobilized by spellchanting
Saruman as but a kid that doesn't deserve to be
at the scene at all, and which persists even after
haughty white Gandalf reprimands him for
independently making a grab at an object he
hadn’t yet been instructed to retrieve. "Half" of
this was supposed to be the will of the Ring,
but really, the text accords that the half that was
Pippin's own was just as suspect, for it's a
recognition of selfrule everyone's intrinsic
right not to be intimidated away from a claim
they made an independent judgment of as
earned and justified: a philosophy antithetical
to any social order headed by a king.
1086
"Fortunately," the palantiri takes Pippen for a
horrid ride, and "fortunately" the palantiri later
is used successfully by one of the Fellowship
Aragorn, of course who can demonstrate that
this is a world, not of those who erroneously
leach themselves of personal responsibility and
the responsible who don’t, but one of legitimate
claims and of illegitimate claims, and you don’t
act so much to absolve oneself of passivity but
to learn as to which of these two groupings you
properly belong the one that should take
action, that should lead, or the one that really
ought just sit on its hands when betters are
around, acting only if and when instructed. If it
“burns” you, and if someone of as
unquestionable textual authority as Gandalf and
Arathorn deems that you had it coming, then
it’ll service as evidence that next time you
think yourself guilty of too much passivity and
too little initiative, you’re probably doing only
1087
what people of your limited capability are due
for. Don’t strive to do better next time; just deal
with your accorded lot for it was justly dealt.
Sam, while upheld in the text as at least in a
certain circumstance as superior to every other
entity that ever challenged the might of a
demigod, is not so sustained while beginning to
have doubts concerning Frodo. The text takes
humor in Sam's comical inversion of the
natural social order when he addresses Faramir
as if he was admonishing a young hobbit for his
"sauce," for it's an instance of inversion which
instantly demonstrates the rightness of the
regular order of the appropriateness of
Faramir's retort afterwards, "Sit by your master,
and be silent!" The text is not, however, so
casual with Sam beginning to think Frodo a bit
too soft on Gollum, for here there is a trespass
on what might be mistook by many as a
righteous reason for taking charge, for taking
1088
command away from those given it, which
would have deep reverberations for the social
order. There's a sense in the text that not just
Sam but many readers have been lured far
along enough in a suspicion so that when it is
quit, shown up for good, an arising doubt built
on something implicitly weakseeming about
the right of a current hierarchy to its place of
rulership has been dealt with, and therefore, a
guaranteed long interim free of challenge. This
something, alluded to at the beginning of the
text by one of Sauron’s agents as the one trait
not even their worst is “cursed with,” is
"kindness": Frodo is Sam's "rightful master, not
just because he is more wise and genteel, which
are traits possessed by the like of Sauron, for
instance, but because he is more intrinsically
kind; Aragorn is Eowyn's rightful master, not
just because he is wiser and more mighty than
he, not just because he has better manners "I
1089
spoke only as do all in men in my land, and I
would gladly learn better" than he, but
because he is kinder, less harsh, than he.
Kindness is not, however, something a simple
person might mistake it for: it's not intrinsically
connected with weakness, with blindness,
however much the two can be connected (read
what happens to Theodon’s Rhodan when
Theoden is too open and permissive i.e., it
makes itself fully open to the machinations of
Wormtongue). It's actually twinned with a
larger degree of foresight than the simple are
usually capable of conceiving of, as per for
example Gandalf instructing Frodo on what
respect and pity can lend in you in surprise
when dealing with those ostensibly worth only
being slain, given their being accustomed to
associate receptivity to other’s pains only with
a peculiar willingness to selfdesignate yourself
open for others' usage and plunder. And it
1090
requires a reminder now and then of how it is
actually not at all necessarily that a stupidly
offered generosity informed of divine
aspiration but founded on ignorance that it’s
actually informed out of full knowledge of the
guiles of the weak, and is by no means a
capitulation to any of them, so that those due
respect not find themselves inadvertently held
in poor regard by their servants.
Even an entity as great and important as
Treebeard gets a hemmingin, a correction,
when he advances on a dangerous conclusion
built out of what the text needed to supply, but
for another purpose. The great wizard Saruman
must be soundly deflated in the text so that he
doesn't serve as an argument that the "uppity,"
those who’d go for change that isn’t gradual
and to the approval of elders but widespread,
all of a sudden, and shocking to all, sometimes
have good ground for thinking themselves
1091
superior to all who’ve existed before them. So
we are instructed that Saruman was a potent
captain but he was only ever but Sauron's
servant, even as he thought himself fully his
own master and in process of advancing
himself successfully as Sauron’s as well; that
he was only creating only a copy of Sauron's
constructions, even as he saw himself as a bold
originator; and that his awesome tower,
indestructible even to Ents Orthanc was
outside the building acumen of either of their
might. And Treebeard is accorded by Aragorn
as correct in further assessing Sarumon as
lacking in grit and raw courage as well. But
after that Treebeard’s denunciation of Sarumon
is stopped short by Aragorn, because, it really
does begin to seem, what is flawed concerning
Saruman cannot be allowed to go so profoundly
deep that it has implications for all others with
ostensibly ironclad claims on greatness, and
1092
that's the territory Treebeard begins to step into.
He ventures, "I wonder if his fame was not all
along mainly due to his cleverness in settling at
Isengard," which is a suggestion that what he
was actually foremost skilled at was pulling the
wool over other people's eyes. He’s going in
the same direction here that Boromir was when
he wondered of Galadriel’s purposes, gauging
her perhaps only ever full of deception and
guile. And so Aragorn expounds on this
trespass into Evil, that "No. [...] Once he was as
great as his fame made him. His thoughts were
deep, his knowledge was subtle, and his hands
marvelously skilled [...]." Yes, of course he
was, otherwise Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel and
Aragorn himself are either thorough fools or
agents of deliberate mischief, for so long
arguing him otherwise. And of course he was,
for otherwise these other three "great"
individuals might perhaps be themselves
1093
revealed as of the same actual makeup one
large, longpermitted blowup of what actually
amounts to nothing. All this would be seditious
thought of the highest order, so even the great
Treebeard suffers a burn of a kind, even if not
of course a literal one, and even if it’s
“singing” is minor.
If Sam hadn't realized that Frodo was so wise
and so far beyond him that it was really always
wise to just trust him, if Pippin hadn't said that
subsequently after his "burning" a whole platter
of tempting palantiris could be put before him
and he wouldn't touch any of them, and
followed through with this so much
subsequently that all he's doing in regards to
Gandalf afterwards is apologizing for his
initiatives and casting doubt on them, if
Treebeard hadn't immediately stopped the
denunciation of Saruman and left the extent of
characterwinnowing where Aragorn and
1094
Gandalf would comfortably have it, then their
fates would not subsequently have gone as
described is what one comes to gather from
the will at work in the text. If Sam had decided
that Frodo was still guilty of not sufficiently
countenancing the extent of Gollum's threat and
therefore had become himself a threat to the
success of their allimportant mission, a
conclusion which lead to him judging that he
should properly be the one carrying the Ring
before circumstances in the text i.e., Frodo's
incapacitation necessitated this of him, he
wouldn't have been the recipient of so joyous
an accounting of him in his defeat of Sherob
that for a moment he was a legitimate triumph
over most every warrior on Middleearth, but
rather someone undermined as being merely
lucky, and actually in fact probably
wholeheartedly battleincompetent not worth
a tale at all in anyone's book, not even the
1095
smallest... or rather, he might just been victim
to plot change done in a pique of anger and
found himself quickly stabbed at by Sherob and
mercilessly eaten. If Merry hadn't accepted in
his own mind that there was any legitimate
difference between his bold gesture of dropping
his broach to inform his three ostensible
friendly pursuers of his ongoing health and his
quickly judged and quickfingered retrieval of
the dropped artifact that was on its way to
being lost to all, if he hadn't perhaps
understood that his "rightful" claim to it was as
halfbaked a formulation as was Gollum's claim
to the Ring as his "present," he wouldn't have
found himself so kindly received by Gandalf
and merely dropped a notch in a familiar way
in being likened to a pawn in the company of
greater pieces and subsequently directed about
after having had inadvertently stolen Gandalf's
due limelight by being the one honored by
1096
Denethor's court and personal interrogation, but
rather told that that's what he gets for
proclaiming himself equal to all when actually
so undeserving, and rather than being spared
being forced to sing at court he’d of found
himself transformed into fully spent songbird.
If Treebeard hadn't accepted Aragorn's
assessment of Saruman and instead pursued his
considerations onward towards concluding him
as having always been a fraud, he wouldn't
have been as warmly excused by Gandalf for
his eventually letting his prisoner Saruman go,
but informed more of the inevitable
consequences of his clumsy mismanagement,
including Sarumon's ravaging of the treeloving
hobbit population... and, of course, of all the
dead trees incurred in his pursuit of making the
Shire a haven instead for brick factories, and
thereby driven Treebeard insane in grief,
longing for the elves to return to numb him
1097
back into stupidity before they left Middle
earth, an act of pity which they of course would
spurn him for having recklessly pursued a line
of thought that could have all the commons
doubting how well earned every one of the
greats’ reputation actually was, and so had their
whole “great” race as well hoisted on their own
petards before they had their chance to make a
graceful departure, at a time of their own
choosing.
All of them, in short, would have been made
subject to the dark fate viciously but absolutely
selfrighteously, inflicted in/by text upon
Wormtongue. If you're looking for the greatest
losers in the text the ones, not who die but
who suffer humiliations no one could bear
living with for long you can skip both
Sarumon and Sauron, for Saruman's preference
that he always remain a master, that he never
become anyone's servant, even as if abandons
1098
him of Gandalf's help and leaves him having to
counter the might of nine Nazgul which he
might actually, according to the text, have
managed to do is exactly, what? but of
course the typical stubbornness and pride of
wizards, and Sauron is caught off guard at the
end but whose weaknesses are heavily qualified
so that they are only weaknesses that abide a
certain kind of great genius an evil one, an
egotistical one. The ones to look to are Gollum
(though he for awhile gets a notable reprieve),
the Orc Grishnakh (who plays a Wormtongue
to Ugluk's Gandalf: pure power and sure
direction against an endlessly castigating
spitting snake), the Messenger of Mordor, and,
well, Merry and especially Pippin, but no
one more than Wormtongue. As a general rule,
if the text starts likening one to a cornered
animal or an insolent child, you forget all the
text's ostensibly fidelity to "pity" and be
1099
assured the text wants you alive only so that the
humiliations you suffer have much more time
to dig in and fester. So if it described you like
this: "His face was twisted with amazement and
anger to the likeness of some wild beast that, as
it crouches on its prey, is smitten not the
muzzle with a stinging rod," as it does the
Messenger of Mordor, then if Gandalf has to
stop someone from smiting you in the name of
secondchances and pity, it's going to amount
to a forced effort to say the least. If it begins to
describe you as a "greedy child stooping over a
bowl of food"... as it applies to Pippin, you'd
better in some way desist in what you're doing,
learn a moral lesson from doing it that you
never, ever, forget, and quick, or you'll get the
very same. And if it describes you as, "In his
eyes was the hunted look of a beast seeking
some gap in the ring of his enemies," and as
"coming out of a hut [...] almost like a dog,"
1100
then you're absolutely f*cked, because then
you're Wormtongue, and then you're a snake, a
kicked dog, and perhaps even a buggered child
what all does Saruman do to him behind
closed doors, after his stupidity costs him the
palantiri, to make him absolutely, completely
snap? and the world has to literally stop so
that all your poisonous fluids can cleared from
the paths and the possibility that you could
have mated with a treasured princess,
fumigated out of everyone's brain.
What happens to Wormtongue is what you get
in the text if you breech on someone else's
power and the text hasn't already anointed you
as someone of firmly established worth if
antiSemitic lexicon, if you're the Jew in the
European court. To avoid his fate, you go the
route of Hana when Gandalf runs off again,
doing his favourite bit of "ever [...] going and
coming unlookedfor," and take advantage of
1101
someone else's seditious doubt
"Wormtongue, were he here, would not find it
hard to explain" to make clear you couldn't
henceforth ever be driven to doubt him: "I will
wait until I see Gandalf again." Or of Eowyn,
after having accosted Aragorn, admitting his
comparative smallness and pledging to "gladly
learn better" from his betters. You have to in
effect act pretty much like Gollum's "whipped
cur [...] who is piteously anxious to please," in
order to be allowed in the text a status that
prevents it being pointed out. It's quite the grim
way to own people, but such is "Two Tower's"
Middleearth: caught in a doublebind, so that
an elder order needn't worry.
FINISH OF A READER'S GUIDE TO "THE
TWO TOWERS"
CODA (from Lloyd DeMause's "Emotional
Life of Nations")
1102
When Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907 at
the age of eighteen, he reported in Mein
Kampf, he haunted the prostitutes’ district,
fuming at the “Jews and foreigners” who
directed the “revolting vice traffic” which
“defiled our inexperienced young blond girls”
and injected “poison” into the bloodstream of
Germany.
Months before this blood poison delusion was
formed, Hitler had the only romantic
infatuation of his youth, with a young girl,
Stefanie. Hitler imagined that Stefanie was in
love with him (although in reality she had
never met him) and thought he could
communicate with her via mental telepathy. He
was so afraid of approaching her that he made
plans to kidnap her and then murder her and
commit suicide in order to join with her in
death.
1103
Hitler’s childhood had been so abusivehis
father regularly beat him “with a hippopotamus
whip,” once enduring 230 blows of his father’s
cane and another time nearly killed by his
father’s whipping that he was full of rage
toward the world. When he grew up, his sexual
feelings were so mixed up with his revenge
fantasies that he believed his sperm was
poisonous and might enter the woman’s
bloodstream during sexual intercourse and
poison her.
Hitler’s rage against “Jewish bloodpoisoners”
was, therefore, a projection of his own fears
that he might become a bloodpoisoner. Faced
with the temptation of the more permissive
sexuality of Vienna, he wanted to have sex with
women, but was afraid his sperm would poison
their blood. He then projected his own sexual
desires into Jews “The blackhaired Jewboy
lies in wait for hours, satanic joy in his face, for
1104
the unsuspecting girl” and ended up accusing
Jews of being “world bloodpoisoners” who
“introduced foreign blood into our people’s
body.”
1105
corrects IE6 width calculation

Sunday, February 12, 2017
Reader's Guide to Fellowship of the Ring

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READER NOTES TO TOLKIEN’S
FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
If I had to supply "reader notes" to
Fellowship of the Ring, it would be as
follows.
To begin, I would draw the reader to think
a little more on the character of Lobelia,
1106
the wouldbe Shire matriarch who is
astounded that Bilbo has managed to keep
his property from her all these years. She's
played for fun in this part of the book, but
the reader should note she's nonetheless a
bit too visible to convince one entirely that
she's just there to provide some levity
before the plunge into darkness begins.
There's a lot of talk about keeping doors
bars to her, about her returning like a
firebreathing dragon that's once again re
generated heat to launch a subsequent
belch of deadly haranguing, and about
putting on the magic invisible ring to
escape her. To anyone who considers that
it is our earliest scares and fears, brought
to us not just through mothers, nurses and
other early attendants, in their whisperings
1107
of dark "old wives tales" (that we note that
even Elrond says we should never just
pass over because they always trace on
real truths) or scares of creatures stealing
cribs and babies, but via the terrifying
presence of this lot themselves, that are the
source of all later fears, this section of
Lobelia as "invading monster" should not
be allowed to pass as inconsequential. It
might not be. Note that at the end of the
"Return of the Ring" Lobelia is "rescued"
as actually someone on the hobbits' side,
as someone to be proud of, but only after a
barbarian gang has visited the town and
done what barbarian gangs do to women
who come out of their houses too readily
to oppose them revenge themselves on
them horribly. Tolkien has said that he had
1108
the end of the book in mind when he
started the adventure: he may not only
have had in mind his concern to
demonstrate that the greatest evil, that the
greatest occurrence of "Mordor" out there,
is when such infiltrates your town of
origins, but to displace a desire for revenge
onto others and see them visit it upon the
book's very first predator the advancing
matriarch whom even the Ringbearer
would hope for greater spells to forestall.
Gollum is quoted as thinking, "People
would see if he could stand being kicked,
and driven into a hole and then robbed.
Gollum had good friends now, good
friends and very strong. They would help
him. Baggins would pay for it. That was
his chief thought. He hated Bilbo and
1109
cursed his name." Driven out the door by
the demands of a pressing Lobelia, not just
by Black Riders, were these halforc
barbarians in a way Frodo's newly
acquired "friends," his agents, serving out
a revenge he needs denial and distance
from? Flag it.
There is a sort of reminder to do this very
thing in the text – to flag the relevance of
Lobelia, and think on her further. For we
soon learn from Gandalf of how Smeagal,
the hobbitlike creature, became Gollum,
the gangly, deadly, sometimes spiderlike
creature that Gandalf surmises it may well
have been just to have outright killed when
chance allowed, even if the greater
wisdom would eventually come out of
Bilbo having tamed this instinct for pity,
1110
and it wasn't just the Ring that did it. The
Ring made him extraordinarily bothersome
a sort of town nuisance writ large but
it did not change him into something THIS
disparate from his normal, afterall, "ultra
curious and inquisitive self." Rather, it was
his expulsion from his home by the
leading matriarch... by his grandmother,
which did it – that’s what drove him away
from all light and into the caves; that's
what made him absolutely forlorn. He had
finally overwhelmed her patience and
exasperated her beyond all tolerance, and
paid one hell of a price for it. When Frodo
provides Lobelia with the home she
covets, it is done ostensibly only for
expediency the house needed to be sold
quickly, and she was the most interested
1111
buyer. But given the foreboding tale of
what happened to Gollum when he had
exhausted a matriarch's patience, in
addition, of course, to our own never lost
knowledge that nothing scared us more
than what happened to us in the nursery, in
retrospect it can feel like it was sold to her
almost in relief: the adventuregarnered
prowess of Bilbo had kept the home safe
to himself for over ninety years his
adventure and mightbacked "queerness"
intimidated, not just irked or intrigued
but with him gone, and it left only to
young, inexperienced Frodo to forestall the
accumulating anger of Lobelia's being
denied, decade after accumulating decade,
her inheritance, he took the last avenue he
had to stop her from for sure blowing his
1112
house down. He threw her, this "dragon,"
accumulating fury and strength as the ages
passed, a housesized steak – everything
she wanted and snuck quickly out
through the door possible?
Bilbo is about to be left out as a character
with any part to play in the story. But
while's he's still here in the text, we can be
drawn to think as we read how Frodo's
journey to being his own "master," to
maturity, differs from Bilbo's own. Both
set out on their journeys at the same age.
Bilbo's is estimated as only "quite a little
fellow" by Gandalf, but it's a bit of a poor
reading of him, actually, considering that it
was Bilbo's perhaps singular ability to
charm and deceive Smaug, the terrible
firebreathing dragon, that would, if he had
1113
lived, proved the greatest threat in
Sauron's arsenal, that brought about
Smaug's end: specifically, after catching
site of a possible flaw in Smaug's
ostensibly absolutely secure
impregnability, he lures Smaug into
exposing the full girth of his chest, bating
him into doing so by making it seem just
an extension of the sort of charitable play
they've been up to in the pretension of
their situation as simply of guest visiting
host "please, show me your acquired
paintings and magnificent heirlooms, if it
pleases you," is what it essentially
amounts to. His armored chest is forlorn
one piece of armoring, and without it
having been exposed here, Bard the archer
would never have known it existed and
1114
been no opposition to Smaug but only a
small piece of his carnage. Bilbo caught
off guard the greatest evil power in his
time, found out his only weak spot so that
against impossible odds, the villain could
nevertheless be taken down.
Frodo, on the other hand, does nothing of
the sort. And while we see on his journey
that he has considerable "grit," the
traditional hobbit' ability to thrive
surprisingly well to be "hard to daunt or
kill" (7) when they become accustomed
to being absent all the delicacies and
comforts they normally ensure coat their
lives, and that he does possess an unusual
delicacy with language a characteristic
which favors him with lordly Faramir it
is certainly never HE who figures out how
1115
Sauron might actually be brought down.
That person, in this narrative, is Gandalf.
What he discerns about Sauron's one
weakness, about his one flaw, that could
be made fatal to him?: though he is beyond
brilliant, he can't imagine anyone
possessing the Ring not wanting to use its
power it's beyond consideration that the
Ringbearer would seek to destroy an
artifact that grants such great power. And
so Gandalf loads it onto a member of the
one race that seems capable of resisting its
draw more than any other, and, as well,
just as remarkably capable of bearing its
crippling load of accumulating
despondency, and ships him off, and that's
what Frodo's usefulness basically amounts
to. Question, then: which of the two is
1116
really selfactualized and great, and which
does well only for being a reasonably good
representative of his kind? Further
question: which one goes on adventures
where he would seem to have earned the
kind of bearing that would have him fairly
confidently oppose Gandalf, if he wishes,
even as Aragorn is readily capable of, and
of having maybe even Gandalf back down;
and which one seems only capable of
doing so out of an inadvertent ability to
serve as a haunt like a young soldier
sent just at the arrival of his budding
adulthood to die on some straightarrow
path onto a foreign battlefield, his voice
gets heeded only in respect of the worth he
is being unjustly shortchanged?
There's a bit in "Return of the King" where
1117
Merry scans the effect all the places he has
seen have had on him, and decides it hasn't
been what he had hoped it would be... that
it was perhaps mostly just overwhelming,
an onslaught something that he didn't
explore and to some extent "master,"
demonstrate personal efficacy amongst
and upon, but rather something that just
overstimulated and overwhelmed him. He
is described as someone who, "though he
loved mountains [...] was borne down by
the insupportable weight of Middleearth.
He longed to shut out the immensity."
Merry, in effect, becomes the kind of
person who actually is easy to daunt
something not ostensibly one of their, that
is, hobbits', characteristics... or so told us
by a narrator perhaps more in mood to
1118
inflate, to be charitable, at the time. One
sees him as someone who in effect was
taught a lesson about his actual ability to
handle things in the outside world, one he
could be counted on to have others learn,
other young hobbits who yearned for great
adventure, so that they too would know
that they're actually not up for any new
thing other than what they'd been
accustomed to as farmers and gardeners
tending the Shire's peaceful grounds. This
is a lesson "Middleearth" inflicts, not just
upon Merry but rather on all of the
hobbits, pretty much as soon as they
escape their door. And it leads, it would
seem, to a kind of mindset that the text
demonstrates severe "beatings" serve upon
the beaten thereafter, if it's followed by
1119
kindness, you get an absolute readiness to
comply, absolute servitude. Bad cop
followed by good cop... a bit of "patting"
after severe mistreatment, leads Gollum
from being a troublesome miscreant to one
"piteously easy to please" (604); and when
it happens to hobbits it makes them
completely begotten to anything that
represents the old ways of Middleearth
and into those forever pit against
everything new that’s arising without
permission, without sufficient notice, and
all too aggressively.
Just out the door and beginning on their
own to make decisions like what path to
take of the multivarious available,
ostensibly still at a state of selfcommand
where Gandalf's recommendations as to
1120
what they should do serve as only that
as recommendations, not defacto
commandments and where at the very
least Frodo sees escape from the Shire as
an escape from all things sickeningly
stupid, they encounter paralyzing horrors
which daunt them with the lesson – you’re
not on your own anywhere near up to this.
Every predator will stir at the
announcement of prey onto their turf that
each will discern as fully within their
mastery. Frodo is allowed to demonstrate
fortitude while within the barrow mound,
as he awakens himself before being eaten
and smiting an advancing crawling
skeletal hand, but out of their nevertheless
still mostly being absolutely handled by
Black riders, by an angry forest, and by a
1121
barrow Wight, what are they established as
but those who'll be forever fixed to
perceive rescuers absent any serious
scrutiny? What are they but those so
desperately pleased to be rescued they
would only rejoice and celebrate old
world, oldway representatives like their
rescuers, the high elves and Tom
Bombadil? What are they other than those
who after being whipped turned piteously,
pathetically compliant?
At one point of the text Frodo delays a
vote on which route the Fellowship should
take, which course through the mountains
under, over, or around by saying it
should be delayed until daytime so that
Gandalf's vote would be given fairer
consideration (390)... "how the [night]
1122
wind howls [doubt]," he says. There is
terrific wisdom here, but it's not deeply
felt, and actually is more a demonstration
of his being mastered by Gandalf than it is
of masterly consideration of the effect
circumstance has on perception and on
ostensibly carefully deliberated choice.
For one notes that after being so easily
preyed upon by these three horrendous
bugaboos, these three great horrors of the
imagination, they're ready to be owned by
the saviors who rescue them, a path which
has them follow the high elves' ownership
of them one of the "chief events of
[Sam's] life," not just for evident charm
but for being his first suffered "perfect
rescuing vision" following the crawling
advancement of something as horrible as a
1123
Black Rider onto Tom Bombadil's
"give me the Ring you've been told to give
nobody, Frodo!" "Sure thing, here, take it"
and finally, the rest of the way, onto
Gandalf, and Gandalf is no longer
someone who "might suggest something"
but someone whom the others will
absolutely heed, someone they'll ensure
they prejudice everyone else towards,
whatever course or counsel he might be
advancing. If the real risk to Gandalf's
plans was ever the hobbits' independent
judgment would Frodo perhaps actually
give resisting, frustratingly indominable
Boromir a listen?... A fairer listen, where
if the two could actually find court alone
the "two together [might actually find]
wisdom" (522) this would have been the
1124
kind of course he would have plotted to
scare away all sense of themselves as
capable of standing on their own for a self
identity as those who could only conclude
that they'll shrivel when caught on their
own outside of guardian support. And so
also, those whose thoughts only go to
clinging desperately back, when they
could have begun to settle on...: "well, this
is neat and unaccustomed... I wonder if
new wisdom lies here?"
A few things to note about the stay at
Rivendale: One, why would Bilbo have
wanted to come here, other than for
purposes of reflected narcissism? He is
living amongst people who are better than
him at everything. The most they can grant
him when he produces his highest, most
1125
selfactualized art is that it could pass as
the worst their own kind might produce. It
is not to say that one couldn't take pleasure
nevertheless, mostly in the fact that you
reached a great pinnacle for oneself, but
you've surrounded yourself by others who
perpetually tempt you to more take
adverse pleasure in your accomplishment
through understanding it as allowing you
to partake to a very small extent in their
own unquestioned, objectively great glory.
It is a very beautiful vision this
Rivendale of ample abundance and
scintillating everything; but nevertheless
one that a cunning Hell would contrive to
keep you enslaved and secretly suffering.
Second, Elrond's heart tells him that he
should refuse Merry and Pippen's
1126
request/demand that they be taken along
on the adventure his heart does. This
should not be allowed to pass notice, and
indeed both Merry and Pippen refer to it
later in the text as it plays on their mind,
because it should make available to all of
them evidence that subsequently if their
own heart speaks loudly, it needn't mean it
should be heeded without question: it
doesn't just always tell the loudest and
most profound truth, for as great as Elrond
is in the text, his judgment is still second
to Gandalf's, who speaks as an even
greater Stewart of Middleearth, more
conscious of and loyal to all its parts, and
it is Gandalf who essentially informs
Elrond that his heart, in this, albeit, rare
instance, knows absolutely not trust to
1127
already installed friendship in this instance
and don't send Merry or Pippen away, or
we all die. It's either here a battle of the
hearts to match the battle of the minds we
see elsewhere in the text, or its an example
of mind pit against heart, but in either case
what is shown is that even the heart
belonging to one of the greats could lead a
whole world the wrong way to its
destruction. Yet Frodo does not remember
this lesson as he deals with Boromir,
waging between them the fate of the Ring.
His heart tells him to ignore Boromir's
argument, to ignore its favorable accents
and compelling force, and he lets it lead
him. And my guess is that many readers
didn't think anything awry about his doing
so at all. The text has prompted such
1128
wizardfollowers of us all, that even
Elrond himself can't make a dig at our
loyalty. Pity the fate of any "Boromir"
who'd hoped to change our mind, as well
as the fate of any goodness that might have
arisen if we were left open to being
deterred, to being “waylaid... There's a
sense that we're all done in by by the time
we've reached Rivendale, and we should
note that.
And finally, when the wizard Saruman
tries to manipulate a good hearing for
himself when precariously situated in his
isolated tower before Gandalf, the horse
lords, and the remaining members of the
Fellowship, he succeeds in daunting all of
them but Gandalf by making them feel like
those "shut out, listening at a door to
1129
words not meant for them: illmannered
children or stupid servants overhearing the
elusive discourse of their elders, and
wondering how it would affect their lot. Of
loftier mould these two were made;
reverend and wise. It was inevitable that
they should make alliance. Gandalf would
ascend into the tower, to discuss deep
things beyond their comprehension in the
high chambers of Orthanc. The door
would be closed, and they would be left
outside, dismissed to await allotted work
or punishment." Early memories of being
dismissed to the "kid's table" while
"adults" discuss serious matters, as a
deliberate tactic mostly intended to
depreciate your selfworth, apparently
remain in everyone, and thus leave you
1130
susceptible to evil manipulation, is what
the text informs us here. Yet the Council
of Elrond, the council of the good, is "high
matters" enough yet hasn't integrated that
lesson well enough that it seems to all
"cheek" cheek that is rewarded rather
than punished by the tolerant "parent"
when Sam “pertly” bursts amongst them
and demands a say. Invited guest Bilbo
speaks up, and though he gets tribute
Boromir laughs at his having done so,
considering the nature and high quality of
others who had previously spoken, but is
shamed to find that no one else thinks of
him similarly his claim as future Ring
bearer rings mostly of the oncenotable,
nowdotard, who still insists he can swing
a sword (only great ones like the aged
1131
Denethor and Theoden get to be
unquestionably still like that). He speaks
up only so that he can with finality be shut
out, however kindly one lingering bit of
old business now out of the way.
And when Frodo speaks up, it seems
almost as if volunteering so that others
needn't demand... a response that isn't so
much "out of your own initiative," but
rather one that betrays slavish high
receptivity to others' needs, conveyed
through innuendo, implication, hints
from atmospherically evident deliberate
avoidance of the obvious. And so Elrond
replies to his declaration, "yes, you were
really the only choice... the one we all
knew had to eventually "volunteer" for the
task." Volunteer? Why did he wait for him
1132
to volunteer when the answer to himself
and Gandalf, at least, was obvious? Is it
because they still nevertheless had to keep
their hands clean, because Frodo's going
on what Boromir rightly estimates as a
long, lonely death march into a volcanic
maw a clear suicide mission, a clear
mission of sacrifice, and of the most
promising of young hobbits, so that the old
establishment, the old foggies, can live on?
There's something in their decision which
rings of sacrificing youth, potential, and
accumulated largesse the Ring itself, of
course that points a finger at an urgent
need more to placate the wrath of long
ignored old gods than the proclaimed
intent to deal best with the realities of the
world as they are. The young are being
1133
misled, lied to. It's guiltinspiring if they
admitted this fact to themselves: that they
were so eager to dispense with their good
fortune and wealth and of a representative
of the young, so bloodthirsty and
ultimately not leaderly but slavishly intent
on heeding old gods looking upon them
with doubt and scorn, that this was going
to be their solution to any occurring world
problem. And so hold out "gratitude"
towards the young who've shaped
themselves so they pick up out of the air
the unacknowledged sordid wishes of
others', and so ostensibly make up their
own mind, make their own "choice,"
independent of influence. "It wasn't us:
they chose to go themselves," is not in this
instance a demonstration of respect and
1134
latitude and freedom about what
separates what distinguishes what is good
in this world from what is evil but about
slippery evasion and manipulativeness:
about a more evolved and foul kind of
predatory evil.
"Be willing to make yourself vulnerable to
falling into a volcanic pit, and you're elf
friend forever... that's the part we didn't
tell you about was coming when we first
drew you to find such pleasure in being
acclaimed our friend after your amusing
attempts at fluent elfspeech when we met
you just outside your door. All peddlers of
the dastardly draw their young prey in at
first with readily prooffered candy. Didn't
any of the wise ever teach you so? Don’t
trust those who arrive to offer salve and
1135
more just after disaster strikes, for mightn't
they themselves have originated the
disaster, just to garner an important vote
otherwise hard to make claim to?" It’s an
accusation launched at Gandalf many
times in the text "why is it you always
show up when disaster is upon us? Are
you sure that you and the disaster are
twinned in some way?... of the same
agency, or of the same level of malicious
intent one overt, the other covert,
perhaps?" Is it because there’s truth behind
it sufficient enough to arouse guilt, an
aroused guilt that can be, if not quit, at
least momentarily quelled, in seeing the
accusation voiced ("ill news is an ill
guest"; "you come with tidings of grief
and danger, as is your wont, they say") to
1136
someone you’ll soon be able to later
righteously dispense with someone like
"the Two Tower's" Wormtongue that
this accusation keeps on repeatedly being
aired?
Just at the entrance to the Mines of Moria
the text tells us that Gandalf understood
that the enormous monster in the water
was groping for Frodo specifically, it had
focused on him, but that he decided to
keep this secret to himself. We might
assume this is Gandalf being respectful not
to scare Frodo too much, but, really, is it
any news to Frodo at this point that the
greatest of monsters are mostly interested
in the smell of him? Thinking on Gandalf's
"discretion" is a way to not think of what
else might otherwise be arising in the
1137
reader's mind concerning Gandalf at this
point. Namely, perhaps, how already at
this point on the journey Gandalf favored
the Company taking the Fellowship has
already suffered as great a danger as any
of the other options could have offered
him a danger that had the smell on for
Frodo, and so one that could have been
relied upon to bring message to Sauron
that the Ring had been captured should
such have happened. Keeping this secret
keeps Gandalf from being embarrassed,
shown up. And secretkeeping overall
seems about giving one leverage over
other people, about maintaining the falsity
that some people can handle truth while
others can't, and masking the truth that this
"philosophy" is maintained in this world
1138
primarily to keep an old hierarchy in place,
whatever the actual ability of Middle
earthians to handle discordant truths.
Aragorn keeps a secret to himself later in
the narrative: that Boromir decided to
snatch the Ring for himself. How noble of
him to be do discreet and keep Boromir
from shame... is what we're supposed to be
thinking. How kingly. Yet what shame
does Boromir really bear other than his
being the only one on the Fellowship who
didn't agree with the Council's decision, as
it was not the course he would take, and so
his being the only one that the Ring had
something substantial to continuously play
on? Not that he was evil but that he
dissented, that he was not someone who
would follow Aragorn "wherever he went
1139
(512)," was his only “sin,” his only
"problem." And what good to the world is
done in not offering an honest account of
everything, in not challenging but playing
to childish requirements that heroes be
kept squeakyclean flawless, for instance?
Contra Gandalf, sometimes you need to
break things apart to find out what makes
them tick, if you really want to make
improvements and not rather keep a
flawed product intact because it's built the
right way now for your use. A Middle
earth that must be kept from knowing
things, a Middleearth kept emotionally
fragile, is in the dark and prey to be owned
by the most malevolently motivated of
things.
Boromir's attempting to steal the Ring is
1140
the last scare Frodo suffers from in
"Fellowship of the Ring," but the one just
previous shouldn't pass our notice. What
scared him right before? the visage of
great kings, of "silent wardens of a long
vanished kingdom," which drew him to
feel "awe and fear" and made him "cower
down [and to] shut his eyes and dar[e] not
to look" (516). Shame, awe and fear seem
to get a lot of respect in this book, if it's
inspired by lingering ghosts from long ago
or those who count themselves their
servants, and the text seems to make
nothing of the fact that Boromir has to try
and discourse with Frodo only after
Frodo’s been effectively bullied into
submission by these great looming giants
of the past that made him feel pathetic,
1141
vulnerable, small i.e., completely at their
mercy. A crime of the sort mentioned in
"Return of the King" is being committed
here, where the old are venerated to keep
the young from their due. It feels in the
text almost as if Boromir snatches the
Ring not out evil manifesting in him but
out of fully understandable arising
exasperation at the ongoing madness
everyone else is determined to keep
themselves caught within... their being
caught within a fugue of silly elder'
deference, to timidity spawned from too
much heeding of old wives' tales, and not
therefore able see the possibilities as they
are no matter how well they would shine
forth. Must "we" stay off the road that
seems easiest, only because intrigue
1142
doesn't take as well there as it does in
backroads and alleyways? What order is
our present course fighting to keep intact?
The possibility that members of the
Fellowship are mad, are in a state of heady
madness, comes up many times through
the rest of the text, ostensibly to show
them masters of secret knowledge, secret
ways, and able to mightily waylay all
others' considerations of them and, quite
frankly, also to demonstrate them those
who cause upset and disquiet in others at
their having been abandoned the help they
had been seduced into thinking available
to them (Aragorn’s more or less
unexplained sprinting off from the war
march to Pelennor Fields, anyone?). I
would suggest instead or, rather, in
1143
addition that it's a consideration that gets
constant airing as if the one inscribing the
journey is healthy enough to have some
inner voice of sanity prompting the
thought into his mind, to maybe finally
wake him up... this is a plot of France with
twice Germany's armed forces, or of
Chamberlain's Britain, pretty much finding
every way they can to lose to Germany's
might at the onset of World War 2 – "here,
we’ve got more tanks than you; want
’em?" This is a deathwish, or a
masochistic desire to restage an oppressive
onslaught from childhood. This sacrificing
your advantage of an early chessboard
capture of the Queen, is madness. Wake
up. Wake up. Wake up... you ostensible
movers of the board who are yourselves
1144
probably but pawns of ugly compulsions.
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END OF READER NOTES TO
FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Undifferentiated blurred bed of snow

I don't agree with this take. I think the only
problem about current feminism is that the people
within it have not yet reached their best potential,
which means specifically that they have not yet
reached the point where they possess no interest, at
all, in displacing their own childhood
1146
vulnerabilities onto other people -- and thus this

contemporary situation where they to some extent
tolerate that a class exists under them over which
they have power and whom must to some extent
suffer. What is an example of this? Well, if they
were at their potential they wouldn't take pleasure
in being served by people to some extent inferior
in their abilities and ambition, which they still to
some extent do. They'd rather ask themselves more
truly is this IS ACTUALLY THE CASE, or if the
nervous nature of trying to self-actualize at a time
outside of an overtly youth-favouring age like the
1960s, means it can only be done in a very
calibrated way, and those who haven't finessed this
art, those who aren't as adept at reading the
landscape for evidence of the critical, scrutinizing
eye and adapting oneself so you "pass," aren't
exactly going to be thriving now. And if it is, see
themselves only as those who came out of better
childrearing circumstances, not only as those
WHO DID when others failed in courage.
I think, though, they were actually getting there,
and that what we're seeing here are people preying
on this weakness as means only to take away all of
their public influence, to discredit them entirely,
leaving in charge a brand of feminism which is not
1147
actually 1960s/1970s radical and diverse, as

claimed, but actually much more timid in that it
would squelch every "narcissistic" "special
snowflake" out there into an undifferentiated
blurred bed of snow. It's a riot against 1960s
feminism and all its legacies, to re-install the
1930s hard left, which frowned on the idea that life
is about self-actualization... about fun and self-
celebration. This is just about scolding. And
bringing back to leadership those who'll jealously
sit on anyone out there that differentiates from the
horde. It makes it seem opposite to this, but this is
its intent, in my judgment.
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EndFragment
The Case Against Contemporary Feminism

Since November 9th, two main arguments against
contemporary feminism have emerged in near-
exact opposition to each other.
NEWYORKER.COM|BY JIA TOLENTINO
Monday, February 6, 2017
Why are Gollum, Worntongue, and

Saruman made to be so horribly forlorn of
1150
support
1151

[endif] StartFragment
I mean, Gandalf talks so much shit to
Wormtongue... but it is almost precisely similar to
Sarumon's shit-talking of him at the finish of the
novel, an action that lead to Wormtongue's smiting
of him with a sword, delivered, it is made to seem,
righteously -- one is almost meant to feel
momentarily good for Worntongue, in that he
refused to be further degraded. Does Gandalf
abjure total rejection of Gollum, Wormtongue and
Saruman because he, being a Tolkien
representative, knows each one of them is going to
endure a period of being totally alone, of being
naked, vulnerable, hounded, hated, and friendless
-- and thus a far worse fate than any of the
Fellowship has to endure, for none of them is ever
THAT alone -- and that this fate is somehow
actually undeserved for their representing a
"crime" that is in everyone... that is in HIM?
1152
What is Gollum? -- the most inquisitive and

curious of his kind, so the text explicitly states.
What is Saruman? -- the most heedless of
established authority; the most modern. What is
Wormtongue? -- an ambitious intellect, who makes
a grab at things that ought to be available to all, but
whom some proclaim -- the stupid and stodgy, that
is -- absolute ownership of. Tolkien was chastising
part of himself, the part that wanted to grow
outside of constraints... and almost too much:
verged on being conspicuous, drawing too much
attention as to why so much over-hate?... as if the
"guilty" party had to be punished to absolve the
punisher any suspicious co-ownership of the same
motives/motivations.
There's a bit at the end of the destruction of
Sarumon's tower by the Ents, where Treebeard
begins to identify with Saruman, saying, "you
know, if someone did the same to me -- destroyed
all of my home -- I might try and hide out in a hole
too," and Gandalf replies, "No, you are not the
least bit like him, for you would never destroy --"
and I thought, what's going on here is that Tolkien
is performing a kind of pseudo-empathy, pseudo-
identification, through Treebeard, so that he can
convince himself that he tried that... he tried to get
1153
really inside their head, when the truth is he has to

keep some firm distance from them else go down
the hellish hole of merciless punishment -- handed
out by Middle Earth, if not by Gandalf -- they exist
in the narrative to be destroyed within.

... but for the warning of my heart

1154
We all know how Frodo would have trusted
Boromir "but for the warning of his heart." But did
you know that the elf-king Elrond was against
sending Merry and Pippen along as members of
the Fellowship, owing to the warnings of HIS
heart? It's true... and Gandalf essentially told him
HIS heart, the great elf-king's heart, spoke falsely,
arguing for their inclusion with the weak argument
that since you can't send a battalion into Mordor
1155
for it being sure to be noticed, you shouldn't think

of military might at all when forming the
Fellowship, and instead count on already
established friendship. Yeah, 'cause it is SO
apparent that not having another elf who can shoot
down dragons or another human warrior who can
take down dozens of orcs before going down, is
but nothing if you've got a bit more of the
accustomed and the familiar within your party --
'cause who are kidding? friendship is born out of
nothing again and again through their journeys.

Friday, February 3, 2017
Lord of the Rings: the anti-adventure

1156
Re-reading "Lord of the Rings," I know it is a great
deal unfair to it to declare it such, but still my
ultimate summing-up of it is as sort of an anti-
adventure. Frodo begins the adventure pretty much
sick of hobbits and the Shire. He thought "the
1157
inhabitants too stupid and dull for words," and

hoped they'd be beset by legions of dragons or an
earthquake. This attitude, in case you're
wondering, is very much akin to Sarumon's, who
saw the like of another type of rural people -- the
Rohanians... the "Riders of Rohan" -- as brigands
whose children go about the floor with their dogs,
and who couldn't care less if the ancient "demonic"
forests were destroyed to make way for an
invasive, modern, engine-driven world. This
dismissal, in my judgment, is similar to the type of
dismissal made by adolescents, who in trying to
shed the maternal world they've long been content
with in favour of exploring and creating their own,
might start expressing serious malcontent. It's a
step, maybe not absolutely required, but perhaps
most often required, in order for the adolescent to
cast away old ties and feast properly on their own
self-mission.
If a malevolent, jealous, angry party... the party
being dismissed, wanted to nip this type of self-
actualization in the bud, it would beset upon the
young adolescent a kind of desperate need to cling
back to what they had known for a sense of safety,
and I think that's what a lot of the "Lord of the
Rings" is, under cover of being an adventure into
1158
the outside world where people surely must grow

and discover new aspects of themselves they had
hardly previously known were there. Frodo and the
other hobbits are barely out the door when they are
beset upon by Middle Earth's most dangerous and
terrifying predators -- some of the nine Nazgul.
Frodo is just about to humiliate himself in
betraying an insufficient lack of will to not comply
with their own, when suddenly a whole host of
elves appear -- a race that is the oldest of the old in
Middle Earth -- and the Nazgul flee their might.
The elves surround them with cheer and
acceptance, but they serve pretty much as if when
just out the door, mommy, or her close associates
-- the friendly neighbourbood watch -- had come
out and rescued them... at the cost of the "children"
thinking this outside world cannot be thought
through on their own: if you further rebel against
things long belonging to a familiar order, they
might not receive you so kindly when next time
you are required to retreat for their support, and
then where will you be? Whatever the elves might
want of you in future, you will heed their will... if
you sense something awry about them in any way,
you'll disown it for fear your suspicion might be
sensed. Way back into your unconscious it will go,
1159
and kept firmly guarded.

Subsequently the hobbits, in deciding on their own
what way best to traverse the country, find
themselves in woods where they prove absolutely
powerless to negotiate their own way through it.
The wood with absolute confidence steers them
into a trap -- an ancient and angry tree, Old Man
Willow, who must revenge himself upon
everything for so long seeing the world he is
comfortable with being so arrogantly disrespected
by the like of Saruman and Sauron. They're in the
process of being caged and, if I got it right, maybe
eaten, when suddenly Tom Bombadil appears, a
great Middle Earth deity, and instantly intimidates
the old angry tree from further torturing the
hobbits. Tom Bombadil is another of the old order,
akin to the elves, and the hobbits in their desperate
gratitude are neither ready to challenge him or
resist him in any way. Like the elves, he doesn’t do
anything harmful to them at all, but he de facto
shows them that who they mostly are are creatures
so powerless and unequal to him.... so unfit to the
task of making their own choices in the world, that
in return for a rescue they'd surrender to the
rescuer anything he chose (good thing he wasn't a
pederast): He tells Frodo to give him the Ring, and
1160
Frodo is automatically compliant. This is no minor

sort of manhandling. As the hobbits show by
Merry's remarking "he came when he was told,"
after Gandalf draws Saruman back from his tower
and thereby demonstrated there was only one
white wizard in town, they know a demonstration
of total command and fundamental submission
when they see it. They internalized the lesson.
The elves were responsible for this "rescue," for
they had let Bombadil know the hobbits were
about and to look out for them. Their being
perfectly and submissively charming to the elves
paid off. And their perfect submission to Bombadil
pays off as well: immediately after leaving them
they find themselves effortlessly captured by
Barrow-wights -- an old ancient sort of fright --
and after experiencing a terrifying long moment of
feeling entombed and set to be eaten away by the
creepy, crawly dead, they sing the song Bombadil
provided them to instantly draw his summons.
It isn't an entirely humiliating situation for Frodo.
The narrative tells us it was in a sense flattering, in
that he possessed enough spirit to wake himself out
of the wight-induced slumber and make a clarion
call to a rescuer. But this acclaim, this bit -- "grit,"
1161
"fortitude," "resolve," "stamina," "hidden depth

behind flaccid surface," "spirit" -- always strikes
me in the narrative as something ascribed to the
hobbits for them to subsequently take some solace
on, just after being denied the ability to grasp at
something greater, something more truly satisfying
and flattering that others are granted and enjoy and
what they themselves are intended to be forever
denied. They are mighty people in this world,
people of great wisdom and great might, and the
hobbits will never ever come close to being that.
When Frodo arrives at Rivendale and is amongst
the Council, he's pretty much at the point where
he'll do whatever authorities most familiar to him
would bid that he do. They want him to destroy the
Ring, so that'll be his course. He had suffered a
kind of deep humbling here... grafted so firmly to
Gandalf, the chief guardian of the old world, that
no new voice has a chance to disentangle him from
it. Boromir's that voice at the council, instructing
everyone that another course does lie... that the
Ring could be and should be used. This is not even
an enticing idea for Frodo, brought forward again
in a new context where others other than Gandalf
have authority, for at least some consideration. And
should it not be, at the very least, enticing, that is,
1162
because the idea not only represents an ostensible

destruction of Sauron but of an individual making
a surprising and significant impact on the world,
forcing it a bit his way -- or actually, why not? a lot
-- which is a way of accounting everyone's
righteously hoped for adult journey? Frodo's at the
point where he balks back away from any idea that
might beacon self-discovery, so to immediately
slip the arising shame in knowing he's been scared
away from all self-growth for life, off all legitimate
temptations -- and at just the start of his adult-life,
at that -- within the larger envelope of Gandalf's
appreciation and gratitude.
This sort of balm is frequently offered the hobbits,
subsequently. Every time they provide some
indication they feel as if the adventure had been
one long lesson on why you should not actually
ever venture out beyond your door -- if "venturing
out your door" means exploring new ideas and new
possibilities -- and rather just capitulate to the
known for otherwise a mean old angry ancient
forest or its like will show up immediately at your
path, Gandalf, especially, seems to beknight them
with something of a soother after stopping their
efforts cold. Indicate, like Merry and Pippen do,
that they probably have just amounted to riffraff
1163
tagging along passively... start acting out wildly,

like Pippen seems to be doing when he grabs the
Palantir out of the water and steals it later out of
Gandalf's tight possession, in unconsciously
motivated retaliation for being kept so tightly
bound, he -- or maybe just the narrative... but
really seemingly he, makes sure that in the next
place they visit everyone will mistake them as the
like of hobbit princes... and doesn't that feel nice,
young hobbits?... if you discount that it is mistaken
praise, doesn't it still feel quite nice to be thought
by a horde as belonging to the Middle-Earth-wide
fellowship of the lordly, even if representing its
least grand peoples? Be passive acquaintances of
the Ents, doing nothing but be carried around as
baggage they can banter with as they decide how
to act, and "you" get later accounted as the pebble
that brought about a a major landslide!, the
essential factor that made everything else happen
-- though of course this is an insult hidden within a
seeming compliment, in that "you" were
responsible for a mighty thing happening, but only
because a great thing was so close to being ready
for launch it now required but the itsy-bittsiest
stirring. Bear a humiliating examination by an elf-
queen, where she, Galadriel, explores every
1164
crevice of your mind in no less an evasive fashion

than what Sauron does to his subjects, with no
warning, and no permission asked or granted, you
get to bite back a bit, if you have the power to do
so -- as Galadriel suggests Frodo, the Ring-bearer,
does -- but mostly you have to learn to redirect the
arousal so that it is expressed not in anger but in a
furious expression of gratitude, as she follows it
with wonderful gift-giving. You sublimate quickly,
else risk expressing directly to your destruction.
What is especially grating is that you sometimes
get this sense that others are allowed to disclose a
certain humiliating truth about the servile, so to
further guarantee the attending hobbits don't prove
disagreeable to those intent on their following their
will. There is a lot of abuse handed out to those
who are "mere dogs at the feet of masters" --
Wormtongue, especially, suffers a lot of this. And
if you are a hobbit listening to Gandalf scold the
pathetically weak-willed... those who have been
cowed into always complying, you know what
kind of damage he could inflict upon "you" if you
should ever really disobey him in a way that didn't
just indicate your acting out but your separating
from his intentions and wishes. He's like all the
human warriors in the book who come to so
1165
appreciate hobbits... but who also make sure the

hobbits keep in the back of their minds, always,
that this approval could be instantly removed, for
haven't the hobbits enjoyed the entirely of their
happy sustenance owing to their being secretly
protected by the efforts of men... isn't there
something absolutely false, something of an
ignominy -- a dreamscape of some actually
impossible kind of comfort, fluffed up, permitted,
only because everyone else is united in reality-
facing and hard living -- about their entire ongoing
existence?
It's also grating that much of the ostensible growth
they are allowed is thin and false. Frodo is
ostensibly the wisest hobbit, and he is wise in that
he, for example, knows how to shape what he says
for best reception -- as Captain Faramir says of
him, when deciding what to make of him and Sam.
But the wisest thing he says and does in knowing
to trust Aragorn when he meets him because what
is actually most good doesn't keep hidden
disturbing appearances... or however it is said in
the text, is a falsely or shallowly learned lesson,
for the most truly ugly thing is shameful action,
and it is to avoid that -- shame -- that he decides
not to retreat back to Rivendale when further
1166
progress away seemed blocked; and it is to avoid

that -- the overtly ugly -- that he does not give
Boromir a fair listen to when alone with him at the
end of "Fellowship." To be beholden to others'
opinion of you -- which is what shame indicates --
is the ugliest thing imaginable, for it means you are
not self-ruled, you are a slave, but he is
everywhere so trusting of its arisings, its stirrings,
in his heart. For him, it is forever, "what would
Gandalf think of me if I decided thus...?" followed
by capitulation. When Boromir encourages Frodo
to choose to go his way, to take the Ring to Gondor
and use it, Boromir quickly shifts from being
smiling and friendly to being dismissive, insulting,
and aggressive... even if there is at first, there is no
long-sustained suavity in how he makes his case.
He argues that all of Frodo's heroes are timid souls,
are frauds, which is usually the way best to lose
your welcome. He admits how fabulous he thinks
wearing and using the Ring would be, refusing or
unable to conceal that it would be a blast to use the
Ring to act upon the world with such magnified
influence.
And Frodo does not say, "I would normally be
averse to trusting you Boromir, but you so little
mask what you know I have been taught to see as
1167
selfishness and arrogance while presenting your

case, I will actually give further thought to it...
Perhaps you're right, maybe those I've been
listening to are merely timid, and I actually kind of
knew it but had been intimidated away from
admitting this openly to myself out of a
requirement to avoid their reprisal -- a requirement
they in fact installed in me by being so ready to let
me think of them as the only rescue I've got from a
world I'd otherwise fall a hundred times victim to.
I've been set up, and it's about time I admitted this
to myself. Thank you."
He does not say this, but rather dutifully goes
about his appointed task... takes what is actually in
a sense the easy way, out of everyone who matters
to him being on the lookout for him taking the
harder one. He's ostensibly alone in Mordor, its
great big bleak landscape, accompanied only by
Sam, but this is only in one sense being alone, and
it's far away in unbearableness from the most
horrid type -- namely, being forlorn everyone's
good opinion of you, and Frodo's sad choice means
he keeps all that with him in spades.
But how now this mature man wishes for the 13-
year-old me, wishes for the young adolescent me...
1168
the stirring young adult in me, reading "Lord of the

Rings" when he was newly factoring how much
venturing he should do away from home, while
first registering the huge power his mother would
present in opposition to it, that he had. I would
have loved to have some voice sink into my head
early, sink into me then, telling me, with an alien
and exciting power, a power outside one I'd known
that draws me outwards into the world rather than
offering mere camouflaged further containment
within, that the true way to growth means bearing
the shame of being ugly to those you've thus far
depended on. Not just "the Shire," but an "old
world" representative as grand as Gandalf may
well think you're slime and you'll be documented
as akin in disappointment to Wormtongue or
Gollum. But nevertheless you'll be happier in
being able to bear it. For it won't be shameful to
you but rather, only disappointing: you'd like to
have been able to have kept them along with you
too, but were wise nevertheless in bearing the
loneliness and sense of abandonment consequent
of your choice.
Now about those elf-queens gone rabid and ancient
angry forests that will now present themselves on
your doorstep -- now that you've de facto made
1169
Saruman's own treachery -- be careful, for even the

strongest, most self-actualized person can be killed
by but one of those, as readily as could the great
Boromir by just one arrow, after he went all-in in
his attempt to seize the Ring -- a moral lesson for
us all. The burned hand teaches best, as Gandalf in
his evil, is wont to say.
1170

Those who are wholly healed view current

feminism as evil?

January 25 at 9:57am
The Women's March was full of the most embracing people on
earth, but if one came out of a family environment that wasn't so
good, one will see it as full of the most self-centred and spoiled
people on earth who really have no sense of self-restraint, as this
person does. This comes close to being a post that could have
been posted on Breitbart. Not the stuff about how the March is
launching subsequent activitism, sure, but absolutely the "look at
these spoiled, self-regarding and hypocritical mean girls,
indulging in their selfies whilst wholly indifferent to the pains of
those not considered their worth." Catch the set-up of them as
"proudly wearing their pussyhats," followed by their quailing at
saying a thing when black women around them are being
accosted as ISIS. There is no way that most people on this march
wouldn't have said something in that situation, and yet this
person paints the whole movement as full of people Gandalf
might cast aside in irritation as wholly fallen from once ennobled
origins... people whom surely Sauron would breeze through in a
jiff.
Also catch the bit about "legs spread exuberantly wide." This is a
complaint out of childrearing, where "you" were told you were
bad if you wandered around and spoke out of turn, while others
apparently were allowed to wander freely as the wind, as if they
owned the whole damn place. It's a complaint of the broken,
1171
complaining of those who got to have some. The impetus behind

Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/magazine/who-didnt-go-to-the-womens-
march-matters-more-than-who-did.html?smid=fb-share
Who Didn’t Go to the Women’s March Matters More Than
Who Did
Millions of women turned out to march last Saturday. But were
they marching for everyone?
NYTIMES.COM|BY JENNA WORTHAM
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1172
David Chayes One can't look at an evolving movement like

feminism and simplistically equate the entire movement, with all
it's factions past and present--as an undivided, unequivocal
"location of innovation and growth in society." A more nuanced
view would recognize that some very important growth and
individual liberation was achieved in the early feminism--but
after many decades, the mainstream movement of feminism has
become extremely regressive and manipulative.
Like · Reply · 13 hrs
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Well, I do. There are factions within

feminism I don't think are progressive, but I've never seen a
movement where that faction is large enough to determine the
overall "colouring"... to determine the gestalt of the movement at
its time. If I had to check myself on this, I'd probably explore 30s
feminism, which like so many movements of the time, probably
carried some of the era's unfortunate dismal of Flapper
extravagance, and were de facto an anti-pleasure movement, but
I don't know if this is the case. We'll see what happens in these
Trump years. If the feminists who emerge to power, if the wave
of feminism that develops, distinguishes itself from "white
entitled feminism" -- people like Lena Dunham and Gloria
Steinem -- then, yes, here would be a feminism which has
become owned by regressives. It turned on the best, and saw
only overwhelming women.
I don't agree that the mainstream movement of feminism has
become regressive and manipulative. It's still pushing women
towards self-actualization, which is feminism at its best. I DO
agree with DeMause's point that after periods of war and major
sacrifice, everyone can keep up with the advances that
progressives are leading (so whatever gen of feminism that was),
but that this lags with time, and the lagging psychoclass soon see
1173
what actually still REMAINS good and progressive, as somehow

having lapsed into self-indulgent evil. Your nuanced view I take
as simply a lapsarian's view, associated with those intent to take
down aggressive female power -- i.e., the Terrifying Mother.
Write a reply...
David Chayes The cycles of violence and growth do, still

happen, but they are not synchronized throughout society in such
a way that one can simplistically say, for example: "now war is
coming." The cycles are overlapping, as manifested in different
areas of society, and the outcome on the macro-scale is not
certain. And even while the cycles continue, there is also a trend
of improvement, through the centuries, as the phenomenon of
child abuse is becoming less and less severe, and more people
are becoming engaged with personal growth.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston With Trump getting in... with all these

Phallic Leaders getting in, I think this would be a fair time to
suggest WE CAN sometimes say, "now, war/hell is
1174
forthcoming... all over the blinkin' place." Don't we have today a

war between psychoclasses, straight up? The lagging classes
have finally reached the point where everywhere across the
globe they've reached the point where they need to bond with the
Terrifying Mother, split off their "bad selves" into others, and
deliver "justice" against the ostensibly manipulative and self-
serving? And this is why China, the U.S., most of Europe... and
I'm guessing, everywhere you look, you're seeing a part of the
DeMausian cycle which emerges after groups of people can no
longer stand the sense of abandonment that comes from growth,
after the Innovative Phase.
Your take is different from Lloyds'. Maybe you do have excellent
counter-proof, or a truly more accurate sense of what is
happening today, but my sense is that while it always seems right
to make an argument emphasizing complexity (in comparison to
the opponent's "simplicity") -- this is the standard historian' take
-- it doesn't make it ACTUALLY right. To anyone who's read
much DeMause, sizing up an argument as "too simple" or
"lacking complexity," reads instantly as the angle used by the
opposition to eliminate all consideration of his work, and would
be careful to characterize arguments so for fear they'll be thereby
dismissed before fair consideration. Saying that there's a pattern
one sees through time, is usually a take argued by self-inflating
historians to distance themselves from yokels who ostensibly
can't see past their nostrils. It sounds right, even if it isn't,
because it is the lord's take.
This said, I agree that childrearing has been improving, and the
result of this is that there are more people self-actualizing... if
this is what "personal growth" is to you. "Personal growth"
sometimes means people self-renunciating, followed by their
being superior to others' ongoing self-interestedness, which is a
kind of closet narcissism... and that's why I'm not always sure if
1175
it's the real article.

Deeper into Lloyd's theories -- farcical

idea, or valued pursuit?
January 31 at 8:01am
I've suggested that what we need is for people to
really engage with DeMause's theories, and note
when he says things that seem inconsistent.
Perhaps he isn't. Perhaps there is a way in which
apparent inconsistencies appear to exist, but which
can be revealed as simply part of the complicated
way things play out. But nevertheless, I wanted to
provide an example of the sort of thing I wish
people were taking on... testing, to see if they're
sufficiently testing his work while reading him,
rather than in a sense falling under his spell.
Here's an explanation for the popularity of Hitler in
Emotional Life of Nations, which explains Germania
as a merging with the Terrifying Mother, but which
emphasizes the merger with Hitler as merging with
the protective Phallic Father:
"The ecstatic enthusiasm of the jubilant masses of
people who celebrated their Phallic Leader came
directly from his promises of a violent Purity
Crusade that would end what Hitler called the
"poisoning hothouse of sexual conceptions and
stimulants
1176
[and the] suffocating perfume of our modern

eroticism [which is] the personification of incest"
--all three images suggesting flashbacks to the
sexually engulfing mommy of the family bed. Even
during the Depression, Germans said, "We are
somebody again!" only because of their delusional
merger with their Phallic Leader."
Here Hitler is phallic, mostly a Strong Man, and
strength comes from merging with Him. His
Germania is designed to "ward off engulfment by
the Terrifying Mother."
Here's an explanation of what merging with Hitler
was like in "Origins of War in Child Abuse":
The notion that Adolf was “overly nursed” and
“overindulged” by his mother is without a shred of
evidence. Like all war leaders, he was fused with
her—claiming “My only bride is my Mutterland”—
and he personally acted like a usual
German/Austrian mother while speaking to his
audience, screaming and bounding on tables and
threatening others with death. One German who
knew Hitler said, “Hitler is the most profoundly
feminine man he has ever met, and there are
moments when he becomes almost effeminate.”
His listeners knew him as a perfect representative
of their own Killer Mothers, Goebbels saying they
“felt like a child in the arms of a mother” with him.
So here Hitler is evidently maternal. And rather
than helping Germans avoid feelings of incest, of
maternal domination, he reminds them of them
constantly, with all his "screaming and bounding on
tables." He isn't here the Strong Father, nor the
perfect servant to the Mother -- the loyal knight --
1177
but rather Mother Herself.

This is just a quick test of his work I did this
morning. But it really pays to do a slow reading of
his work, not just to learn, but to test. At the very
least things get slippery. If there is actually much
interest in deep analysis of his work at this site,
maybe I'll supply another example later.
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David Chayes It seems that you are asking, "how

can one make sure to understand DeMause at the
deepest level?" My answer is: the most important is
not really analyzing the text but introspecting and
recognizing the persistent effect of one's own
personal infancy trauma. One will have reached a
sufficiently deep understanding when, after one
heals the trauma in oneself, one is able to
recognize instantly the psychological patterns--not
so much in the formal political events, but in the
emotions and mannerisms of the people
everywhere around oneself, including those who
are engaged in the politics.
Like · Reply · 1 · 23 hrs
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David Chayes For what it's worth--I'm more

interested in this fundamental issue than in
1178
discussing different views of feminism, Patrick.

Patrick McEvoy-Halston DeMause would say

you're being too modest: you CAN go from reading
individuals to how they'll be in a group, i.e., "formal
political events." Can you see it all, sufficiently,
without DeMause, without any social theorist, if
you've healed yourself? Possibly. But I think here
you're taking on the pretty formidable task of
making most of social science a waste of energy, all
textual analysis, if I'm understanding you right. Just
heal yourself, and if someone forced you to account
for all social phenomena without ever reading a
book, you could actually do it, if there is any
purpose to it, by working hard at expanding all your
institutions.
For me, I learn both about the world and myself
through challenging DeMause's texts. I think he
points out things about ourselves most of us who
think we've healed haven't yet healed sufficiently
enough to be able to accept. (I'm worrying about all
this talk about "healing"... somehow it feels like a
masochistic posture, when personal evolution is
surely about self-confrontation.) So in a sense I'd be
as happy to see people engaging with his
explorations of group dynamics, what happens with
the "social alter," as I would people discussing
someone like the psychiatrist James F. Masterson's
works.
Out of your personal experience, is Hitler more a
1179
Terrifying Mother or Phallic Father. When you've felt

need to cling to someone strong, does this person
represent a terrifying mother you're scared of or a
father than can be imagined as dealing upon her
the killing blow? Out of that personal experience, I
can extrapolate the situation at large when people
merge into their social alters, and designate Hitler
properly, favouring one of DeMause's accounts over
the other.
David Chayes It is the other way around: you can

never grasp the full meaning of a societal
psychohistory theory as long as you leave your own
psychohistory unexplored. And in order to explore it
you have to approach it wholeheartedly and
without preconceptions. You have to see what your
own personal issues mean to YOU, directly, based
purely on introspection, without plastering over
gaps and 'blind spots' by tentatively “borrowing”
from external frameworks.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston David Chayes You've got

to be healed first. And the way there is to spurn
outsider' help, any therapist, any company of
anyone who is healthier than you -- like, possibly,
DeMause -- and just introspect your way to the
truth? From this introspection, you can get to the
point that you can manage your way through
conversations involving ready reference to the
1180
Terrifying Mother and Phallic Father, without in

rebuttal mentioning only "healing" and
"wholehearted" openness, and without slyly
manipulating a prejudice of others' arguments by
characterizing them as simple and unsophisticated?
You can get that healthy? Am I just so unhealthy
that I don't see it?
I don't want plastering. I want more textual analysis
of a very fine social scientist's works, more hard
work, the kind of work that involves considerable
introspection, done. I remain convinced that this
would a emotional and intellectual undertaking
which would encourage a great deal of
understanding of ourselves personally, and of how
we behave in groups. It hasn't just barely been
started; it hasn't started at all. And you're calling
for even less than this? Why?
David Chayes Not less. More.

David Chayes Reading DeMause provided me the

clues I needed. But then I needed to see the truth
in myself, by myself without DeMause "holding my
hand" or "speaking for me."
David Chayes It is futile to "theorize" about a

1181
phenomenon while bypassing the true first-hand

data that we possess about it as an individual.
Actually, the fact that one is willing to forgo this
personal exploration is a dead giveaway that there
is something essential that one is missing. It
indicates that one has a 'blind spot' caused by
one's personal unprocessed psychological baggage.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston David Chayes I argue for

more exploration of DeMause, which is something
you'd think would be the everyday for a site
specifically named DeMausian psychohistory, and
you see only a facetious argument to bicker with,
saying instead, let's not discuss your references to
the Killer Mother and the Phallic Father, let's turn
this whole thing into a discussion on theory, where I
demonstrate how wise I am to have read DeMause
a bit but not really involved myself much in his
work, because that would be HIS taking over me,
and absolutely at the cost of attending to
something more worthwhile -- one's own baggage.
It can't be done otherwise, you say. If you start
wanting to analyze what a theorist like DeMause
said, it's always displacement away from the
infinitely more worthwhile introspection you could
have been doing. Your exploring it more deeply,
doesn't show that YOU'VE ALREADY DONE all that
introspection and personal therapy, and are
therefore ready to start refining his thinking and
improve it; it only shows one's own avoidance.
1182
Your criticism would make absurd anyone's doing

any exploration of a theorist's work. Any textual
analysis, any deep analysis, would actually be a
foolish clinging on, in your view. Every explorer of
Freud or Jung is not understanding herself better
through deep exploration and testing of his works,
but depriving themselves of the real growth that
would have come if they only skimmed a bit, and
then left for a cave to do a massive period of
introspection. I think this is avoidance. I can talk
about my mother easy-peasy. I know all about the
Terrifying Mother and how that draws one to
sacrifice one's own self-actualization. I personally
sure as hell know about the abandonment
depression incurred when you persist in an area of
self-growth that your mother tried to dissuade you
from, because to her it meant your leaving and
abandoning her. I see no problem, no waste of time,
in still wishing to pursue further exploration of
DeMause's great creative work. Someone out there,
have you actually gone at his work, with enough
respect and focus, with enough repeated visits,
you're seeing development, you're seeing
improvement -- or maybe regress -- and want to
note this down for other people, so they can realize
where DeMausian studies might fruitfully go next?
If there is NO exploration of DeMause's work at
hand -- and I'm testing this arena to see if there is,
or if there are any willing, at this at least
promisingly titled "locale" -- if every attempt to
explore his work is waylaid into ostensible OTHER
MORE IMPORTANT things we/you should be doing,
that end up drifting us away very far away into
1183
what seems actually an less emotionally committed

realm; or belittled as INTRINSICALLY a suspicious
thing to be doing; this is a deeply sad fate. Some
new DeMausian studies will have to be set up at
some point, and sure as hell it will have to filled
with people so suspiciously unprogressive, they see
the current feminism movement as a societal evil.
Jesus.
David Chayes I offered you a clue to something

that might turn out to be an important avenue of
exploration for you, and you gave a lengthy answer
where you did not engage with the core of my
suggestion. That is your prerogative . . .
Patrick McEvoy-Halston David Chayes Do you

ever encourage a thorough exploration of
DeMause's works? How do you know that I have not
already done the introspection/self-therapy you've
called for, when I encouraged people to start
exploring his work? Why was this your response?
David Chayes It is pretty clear that we are not

connecting in this perspective.
1184
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Maybe I've

misunderstood you. If what you're saying is that we
should make sure we're focusing on our own
personal development, our disinclination to avoid
our pasts, and so be able to really recognize the
truth when we see it, this is wise. And we have to
make sure we've done this, or we're not going to be
able to discern whether Lloyd was closer when he
said "this," or further away when he said "that,"
well, that sounds very wise. But after that, you're
not then saying that we shouldn't do deep analysis
of his writing, are you?
Write a reply...
David Chayes I'm saying that one should try to

identify the theme of the book within one's own
psyche. My own experience is that when I got in
touch with the relevant parts of myself, I started to
notice the theme all around me, without effort.
Things that, before, had seemed complicated to
understand in people's (and my own) behavior
became plain and obvious to me.
1185
I am all in favor of exploring the book to discover

more meaning from it. But at the same time, let's
remember that the basic idea of the book is not
complicated, so usually when something appears
complicated to us, it is likely due to some unclarity
within our own personal context, and the answer
will come from examining that context--not from
analyzing the book to death.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I think it gets

complicated, contradictory. But how do we know
when in response to my pointing out that Lloyd
says in some places we are fused with a Phallic
Father and in other places that we are fused with
the Terrifying Mother, when he argues two different
types of clinging that go opposite ways, that lends
to two very different understandings of what went
on in the German psyche with Hitler -- a very
replica of what is happening now -- you didn't
address it but rather talked theory?
What theme, exactly? I have a hard time thinking of
his works and identifying it as a theme? Is it that
childrearing plays out in society? Okay, but isn't
how that exactly develops a bit complex, not
always obvious to grasp? Is it easy to pinpoint when
people have switched into their social alters, and
what that will entail? Do we know what happens
when people experience growth panic -- Lloyd's big
point -- and the sequence of what follows next? Do
we know when people have clung back with their
1186
Mothers, when this makes them feel effeminate,

when this will mean their bonding with a Phallic
Father in response, how the subsequent splitting
will occur and who will play the part of the
Terrifying Mother and the bad self? Do we know
when it is that this phase will turn in on itself, and
they'll aim for some kind of suicide? Do we know
why it is that even as they've split off all their
ostensibly bad aspects off into an other and feel
like holy knights defending their Mother, they
nevertheless still sufficiently see themselves as bad
that they need it resolved in their own defeat and
death? Doesn't make sense. Why is that?
I think it gets intricate, at the very least; it expands
as you think it through and becomes very deep.
Lloyd has argued that we organize society so that
we can displace aspects of ourselves we cannot
handle within ourselves and remain sane, onto
institutions, which exist entirely for that purpose.
This means that absent any other development, the
fact that society has denied a lagging psychoclass
the institutions, the agreed upon people to
stigmatize without guilt, that it required to maintain
their everyday equilibrium, would mean they'd start
going rabid crazy, as the rightwing has, as Hillbilly
Country has, over the last few decades. This alone
would require their stopping society somehow and
bringing back institutions as they once stood,
rewinding the clock to the 1950s, not just the fact
that society has changed specifically owing to
progressive leadership.
But Lloyd argues you cannot therefore ignore the
1187
importance of what kind of force has been

engineering this change, for if it has been
progressive leadership, then somehow even those
left behind will nevertheless have been forced TO
PARTICIPATE in it somehow (how that works is
something of a mystery too, as to all appearances
they appear to spitting at it the whole time)...
experience its lure into unallowed self-actualization,
and this too causes psychic disintegration of a kind.
One kind is about feeling aspects of oneself that
one can no longer displace to the outside, and this
makes you unable to function. The other kind is
about feeling abandoned and discombobulated,
owing to feeling absent Mother's love and about to
receive Her revenge. Don't seem the same thing,
exactly. And worth clarifying, thinking through. How
do they entwine together?
Lloyd defines soldiers as minions of the Mother
delivering revenge upon bad boy selves. This surely
would entail very righteous warriors, determined
mostly to humiliate and kill. He also elsewhere
characterizes them as most interested in being
sacrifices, as sacrificing themselves. He calls this
the primary point of war. How does this warrior
function? How can he be both sadistic and deeply
masochistic at the same time? And if a whole
society goes warrior, if our current society is about
to, isn't this something worth disentangling?
Lloyd sometimes says that when we've bonded with
the Terrifying Mother we feel grandiose, like as if
we're her favourites now. He elsewhere seems to
characterize people bonded back to Her as actually
1188
mostly still scared shitless of Her, well aware of her

as still medusa, not as some glowing holy beauty.
I'd like to get at what is going on there. I think this
is important to our time as well.
These are a few things to come to mind. I think as
much as with any theorist around, though you do
need to make sure you're growing so you can
appreciate what s/he is saying -- something I still
think you can readily do while tangling and
challenging the work itself -- s/he's worth much
more than our saying, "yeah, sure, there's probably
SOME point to digging deep, but actually not THAT
much, so why emphasize it?" Is it really true that
once you've grown emotionally and healed
childhood harms, you can pretty much identify
exactly why everyone around is behaving as they
are, you can recognize displacement and splitting,
poison containers and holy knights... the restaging
of earlychildhood experiences at a social level, how
unconscious need plays out in social reality, in all
its variegated ways, without further exploration of
theorists like Lloyd DeMause who've spent their
lifetime exploring it?
Lloyd's an abundance worth our risking our being
overwhelmed by, in my opinion. I'm curious to see
if in the future you'll post here some comments on
what you see ahead for us now, and if I recognize
some DeMause in it. The bit about current feminism
being a false god, manipulative and evil, sounds
DeMausian... but not of profound understanding but
of partaking in the ghastly follow-up to the
Innovative Stage, where progressives / feminists
1189
serve as "bad selves" who carry our own ostensible

selfish, self-serving wickedness. I'm going to leave
it at that.
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Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Facebook comment
I think there needs to be less attention to
Trump and more to what's going on in the
1190
psyches of those who voted for him. He's
their vessel; if he does anything astray
they'll push him in the direction they want to
go.
How tough will Trump voters be? Since
they think that their's is a country which was
hijacked 40 yrs ago by corporations and
liberals who were antipathic to its gleaming
Greatness, and who've infested all offices of
power so there isn't a one whose ultimate
goal isn't keeping Americans pacified whilst
the invaders gain total dominion: petty
tough. (In their view, immigrants brought in
since American elites became more
interested in their cosmopolitan centres than
the Great American Heartland, weren't
brought in to strengthen the country, but to
confound and confuse it.) We have to be
prepared for it. Trump voters will die for
1191
their country as they feel part of its renewed
strength, and so far away from their previous
experience of total dismay and weakness as
the world progressed beyond their ability to
accept it.
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Terrifying Mother vs. Phallic Father

I've suggested that what we need is for people
to really engage with DeMause's theories, and
note when he says things that seem
inconsistent. Perhaps he isn't. Perhaps there is a
way in which apparent inconsistencies appear
to exist, but which can be revealed as simply
part of the complicated way things play out.
But nevertheless, I wanted to provide an
example of the sort of thing I wish people were
taking on... testing, to see if they're sufficiently
1192
testing his work while reading him, rather than
in a sense falling under his spell.
Here's an explanation for the popularity of
Hitler in Emotional Life of Nations, which
explains Germania as a merging with the
Terrifying Mother, but which emphasizes the
merger with Hitler as merging with the
protective Phallic Father:
"The ecstatic enthusiasm of the jubilant masses
of people who celebrated their Phallic Leader
came directly from his promises of a violent
Purity Crusade that would end what Hitler
called the "poisoning hothouse of sexual
conceptions and stimulants
[and the] suffocating perfume of our modern
eroticism [which is] the personification of
incest" all three images suggesting flashbacks
to the sexually engulfing mommy of the family
bed. Even during the Depression, Germans
1193
said, "We are
somebody again!" only because of their
delusional merger with their Phallic Leader."
Here Hitler is phallic, mostly a Strong Man,
and strength comes from merging with Him.
His Germania is designed to "ward off
engulfment by the Terrifying Mother."
Here's an explanation of what merging with
Hitler was like in "Origins of War in Child
Abuse":
The notion that Adolf was “overly nursed” and
“ overindulged
” by his mother is without a
shred of evidence. Like all war leaders, he was
fused with her—claiming “My only bride is my
Mutterland”—and he personally acted like a
usual
German/Austrian mother while speaking to his
audience, screaming and bounding on tables
and threatening others with death. One German
1194
who knew Hitler said, “ Hitler is the most
profoundly feminine man he has ever met, and
there are moments when he becomes almost
effeminate. ” His listeners knew him as a
perfect representative of their own Killer
Mothers, Goebbels saying they “felt like a child
in the arms of a mother” with him.
So here Hitler is evidently maternal. And rather
than helping Germans avoid feelings of incest,
of maternal domination, he reminds them of
them constantly, with all his "screaming and
bounding on tables." He isn't here the Strong
Father, nor the perfect servant to the Mother
the loyal knight but rather Mother Herself.
1195
1196
This is just a quick test of his work I did this
morning. But it really pays to do a slow reading
of his work, not just to learn, but to test. At the
very least things get slippery. If there is
actually much interest in deep analysis of his
work at this site, maybe I'll supply another
example later.
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Labels: lloyd demause

Monday, January 30, 2017
More on Tolkien
When Frodo is negotiating with Boromir the
fate of the Ring, he says he will not take the
easy way, which is what Boromir, he claims, is
offering. But if he did anything other than
trudge the dreary long way to Mordor, incur a
long travail of suffering, then Gandalf would
think less of him, Galadriel would think less of
1197
him, Glimi would think less of him, Legolas
would think less of him, and Aragorn would
think less of him. It would mean feeling
immediately ashamed and cast out, by all the
people he most admired. This would have been
the truly harder way, the way that incurred
what he most feared most shame as he
admits earlier:
"We still have our journey and our brand before
us," answered Gandalf. "We have no choice but
to go on, or to return to Rivendell." Pippin's
face brightened visibly at the mere mention of
return to Rivendell; Merry and Sam looked up
hopefully. But Aragorn and Boromir made no
sign. Frodo looked troubled.
"I wish I was back there," he said. "But how
can I return without shame unless there is
indeed no other way, and we are already
defeated?"
1198
"You are right, Frodo," said Gandalf: "to go
back is to admit defeat..."
I would have challenged him harder than
Boromir did.

Description of Galadriel, pg. 480: "She lifted
up her hand and from the ring that she wore
there issued a great light that illuminated her
alone and left all else dark. She stood before
Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement,
and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and
worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the
light faded, and suddenly she laughed again,
and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elfwoman,
clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was
soft and sad."
Description of Gandalf, pg. 392: "In the
wavering firelight Gandalf seemed suddenly to
grow: he rose up, a great menacing shape like
1199
the monument of some ancient king of stone set
upon a hill. They gave back before him. High
in the air he tossed the blazing brand. It flared
with a sudden white radiance like lightning;
and his voice rolled like thunder"
Note, one of these is about a great person's
being tempted; the other is about a great person
just properly strutting his stuff. The one
involving the personage being restored to true
greatness once shrunken, slender and gentle, is
a woman; the one involving the personage
being revealed in best form when blazing and
enlarged, is a man.
Tres interesant, n'est pas?

Chieftain's must be plentiful in Middle Earth: it
is the only thing the "Fellows" tend to hit.

Peter Jackson: "Can you promise that I will
1200
come back." " No... and if you do you will not
be the same."
Tolkien (at the finish of Lord of the Rings): and
if they [referring to Merry and Pippen] were
large and magnificent, they were unchanged
otherwise, unless they were indeed more fair
spoken ad more jovial"
Jackson is clearly FOR personal development,
whereas Tolkien's the kind of guy who in
response to your request for more
responsibilities, puts a gold star on your chest,
gets the crowd to cheer you, and lets you think
you've accomplished something whilst keeping
things exactly as ordered before.
1201
1202
Saruman may not have actually died at the end
of Lord of the Rings. He turns into some kind
of grey mist, which dismays the Hobbits, who
were expecting him to be more actually dead
dead. My hope is that by now he's formed
enough of his corporeal form back to inscribe
his take on what happened in the Rings... the
more you read LOTR, the more you realize that
he, like Jackson, actually said things that could
prompt you towards introspection, if you could
get past his sneering tone, not keep you
chastened in place, ostensibly happy because
your charm cheers up others.
blogID=8501313560459278629&postID=2778768652619091489
Friday, January 27, 2017
Questioning Gandalf
1203
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1204

mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-
family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-
fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-
And Saruman spoke: "So Gandalf was just
about to enter the fray of the most important
and dangerous battle of Third Age of Middle
Earth, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, and
suddenly was challenged with a choice
should I stay or should I go? He had been sent
back after death, ostensibly by heaven, and
endowed with powers that made him now
second only to Sauron. Here before him was
the battle that would determine whether
Gondor fell, and with it, as he had said
repeatedly, absolutely the rest of Middle
Earth."
"But before all this, one of the little hobbits
you, Pippen told him that Faramir was about
to be burned alive in some old barbaric pagan
1205
ritual and no one was around other than the
warrior Berragond, who, as it turns out, was in
process of killing all the guards... and thereby
maybe rescuing Faramir himself if maybe he
had a little extra help, like, perhaps, yours,
Pippen? to prevent this from happening.
Faramir's importance was pretty much zero at
this point, other than his being close in nature
and sympathy to Gandalf. With the King
returned, he wasn't going to rule Gondor. There
is no mention of his being a possible second
carrier of the Ring, owing to his ability to
refuse the Ring and readily if offered it,
and thus to be kept "available" if somehow
Frodo's will failed but not Faramir's frequently
referred to wizardly foresight to perhaps in
desperation locate it. And so Gandalf decides to
go help Faramir and ends up missing the
entirety of the battle. The whole goddamned
thing. The greatest piece on the board, greater
1206
than the Nazgulking, skipped town."
"Why did he do this, what drew him to make
THIS choice, rather than the evidently wiser
one of committing himself to battle? In battle,
as he himself had admitted, he was equal to a
thousand troops, and as much as legend held it
that the Nazgul king couldn't be killed by a
man, he certainly could have served as a force
mostly likely to distract him so that Merry and
Eowyn could surprise him from behind and
finish him off. And of course, there were
OTHER Nazgul around, killing hundreds of
troops... against these he would have helped,
this army onto himself, bigtime."
"Gandalf WAS needed on the battlefield. With
him there, maybe thousands of troops wouldn't
have died, and maybe not even King Theoden,
who served as the lure he otherwise would have
served as the great rival, as he was, to his
1207
power. All he had to do was say, "sorry Pippen,
I love Faramir to death, but you're a weak fool
to try to tempt me with this, when you know it
would leave our troops without their leader and
their most powerful weapon of artillery," and
thereafter waded into the fray, a great and
responsible leader."
"So why didn't he do exactly this? Here's one
possibility: the practice of barbaric rituals
disgusts him just that much! "What, have we all
gone back to the stone age and will soon be
bongodrumming and practicing primitive
communism as well?!?! That's plenty worse
than goddamned Sauron, who feasts his troops
filth but is at least an appreciator of his kind of
civilization and finery!" Here's another: he's
chicken, and further, not anywhere near as
powerful as he had inflated himself up to be,
and was already looking for some way to avoid
finding himself called out on this and thereby
1208
suffer complete humiliation when you supplied
such a good one for him. Yes, his grey self
the older version of him fought the Balrog
(or so his newer version claimed, for did you
see it?... did any of you Fellowship? Maybe the
Balrog slipped back into the depths entirely;
had escaped; was gone Gandalf never caught
up with him and all that happened was that
he found himself eventually at stairs which, in
doddery fashion, took a long while to climb up,
and heaven took pity on him and dusted him
off?), but at the previous last big battle, the one
at Helm's Deep, what did Gandalf do but take
to the hills just as the battle was about to get
started?"
"Everyone else had to do the bleeding and
boy, there was a lot of it there until morning,
whence he returned where no one could see
exactly what he was doing out there, with an
army of trees around to stomp out the
1209
remaining orcs, and also with the army he had
ostensibly brought with him, charging about in
thick ruckus. I suspect he kind of just stood
there doing what Denethor said all "greats"
actually do when battle is engaged: nothing;
just sit in place while the battle goes about,
bidding everyone do the dirty work. No wonder
Gandalf remained white all through; no grime
or dirt from battle ever did settle...."
But Saruman, the hobbits finally asked, "didn't
Gandalf fight the battle at the gates of
Morannan?" And Saruman replied, "Of that,
you'll have to tell me. I know certainly that he
was there, but in your account of the battle that
you described to Bilbo, there is no mention of
Gandalf at battle, of him actually fighting
anything certainly something worth a
description or two, if he was the army onto
himself he had told everyone he was. What
there is of him in the account is a lot of him
1210
talking... refusing terms, talking big, and, oh,
grabbing a bunch of really, really valuable
relics for himself."
"Oh I know he finally gave these back to
Frodo, but of course everyone witnessed his
taking them, didn't they? and would have
wondered what had become of them these
immensely valuable items if Gandalf hadn't
laid them back at this feet subsequently. How
sure are you that he hadn't taken them, not to
spite the Mouth of Sauron but because he had
just learned that Frodo had failed on his quest,
and knew that in the new barbaric age about to
unfold he needed to settle himself up as well as
he could as fast he could, so not perish? How
sure are you that ultimately his survival
instincts aren't so that he immediately switched
tactics and loyalties right then and there
under pretence of a different kind? How sure
are you that he wasn't about to also use cover,
1211
the cover of battle, to sneak away, finding some
small hidden series of hills he could lord over,
with wealth from the sale of one very valuable
coat of mithrail coat: worth a whole set of
villages, a whole Shire, didn't you know? That's
the kind of thing that white wizards, actually,
are wont to do, as you all know so well. So too
cloaking their actual intentions while seeming
to be keeping faith. They put spells on you all,
do they not, my dear hobbits?"
EndFragment
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Labels: lord of the rings

Wednesday, January 25, 2017
The (True) Lord of the Ring, continued

THE (TRUE) LORD OF THE RING,
continued:
The hobbits were aghast at Sarumon's claims
1212
against Gandalf. Wasn't he, they asked, not
exactly as Aragorn proclaimed him: the one
principally responsible for stopping Sauron and
saving Middle Earth?
Saruman acknowledged Gandalf was deserving
of respect, but argued that... "my point isn't that
he is somehow useless, but that he did
considerable harm in having the whole of you
ready to proclaim him great regardless of how
your whole journey finished up. You were
willing to cloak and hide anything disagreeable
about his actions, choices, behaviour, any
mistake, and Gandalf didn't discourage you
from this habit, a crime in a sense akin to the
sort of unreality my servant Wormtongue was
judged harshly for weaving."
"He took two of you along on the journey for
reasons you know might have been amiss,
might have been intrinsically soar and wrong,
1213
but knew enough that he wanted his decision
judged only as a kind of easytomiss wisdom,
but wisdom nevertheless, that you willed
yourself into misbelief so to reflect back what
you knew he wanted to see from you: that
nothing was amiss about his motives, or
needs."
"Unruly needs... Yes, what is it when you
include in your company the young, vulnerable
and small that would never really be confident
that they were on a journey they properly
belonged on? Aren't they perfect weren't
YOU, Merry and Pippen, perfect as "carriers"
of everyone else's fears, their sense of
inadequacy, their humiliating inclination to piss
their pants, so they could go about absent any
sense of themselves as other than the brave and
the strong as the strongest pieces on the
board?"
1214
"You were well along on your journey when I,
though certainly gruffly... and I do apologize
for that, nevertheless pointed out the true fact
that you were but Gandalf's riffraff, those
tagging along side him, evidently lacking
anything but sordid purpose for the company if
possessed of any true purpose at all. And you
recognized this truth, for a moment, didn't you?
You repeated the words I used to assess you,
later to Gandalf, perhaps to check to see if
maybe in reality... he secretly agreed with the
assessment. And how did he then counter your
selfdoubt? Did he point out to you the actions
you performed that no one else could manage,
as he would have, legitimately, with the rest of
your companions, never stopping, if his aim
was to do proper justice to them, until his
breath failed him and he collapsed in
exhaustion? No, he said that if you had doubt
as to your worth you should find respite
1215
knowing that my mind, that Sarumon's mind,
was currently foremost on you. Which, I'll tell
you, though I think you already knew it at the
time, is more a way of complimenting me,
pointing out my intrinsic great worth, than
adroitly highlighting your own. You are
noteworthy, he is actually saying, because you
caught the attention of someone who is
indisputably so, and so are great in the way that
heroic figures and nagging fleas are similarly
great, in that both can fully capture a great
personages' attention for awhile."
"A man who doesn't truly believe what he tells
another he believes of him, will reveal his true
feeling in time, and in fact it didn't take long,
not much after his arrival into Gondor, when he
identified you both as pawns in a battle where
the rest of the board the knights, the bishops,
the kings and queens were at play. That was
something else you ruminated on, fussed over,
1216
his calling you pawns. And even as you, Merry,
were subsequently called "great" by him for
stabbing the Nazgul King, weren't you actually
doing nothing more than every other pawn that
actually belonged on the board would do in
your place? You displayed no more than the
ability to follow through on an intention, that
those in Gondor deem as differentiating not the
great from the ordinary, but only the adult from
the child. What was notable about you, then, as
someone who still admittedly belonged on the
board if barely even in the least role, was
that you were easier than any other piece
present to pass over... another compliment
which works against itself, in that it points out
that in every other situation in combat, those
who forsook you for another deemed more
dangerous would have been hellright in their
assessement: you are valiant and exceptional
for a hobbit, but of no more combat prowess
1217
than any Gondor warrior's tenyearold sons...
like Beregond's son, Birgil, whom you were bid
to hang around with so as not be in the way of
adults."
"Merry, you helped take down the greatest
danger on the battlefield, and Pippen, you later
killed a trollchieftain, but wouldn't you say
that these exceptional kills were little more
worthy of a brag than a scared peasant's
shooting an arrow into the wind but
nevertheless scoring a fatal hit on a king at
battle? The greatest drifted into your killzone,
no more than that, a credit to fate and luck
rather than yourself. It is what everyone who
was there would know as the truth, if you ever
tried to hoist your accomplishment to the
diminishment of them, and what you'd at some
level know about yourself if you bragged about
your feat to those so unacquainted."
1218
"You both went along on this journey
reminiscing so constantly on whether you
would truly be worthy of any singling out in
any tale subsequently told about these events,
that when you did something on your own
which was unusual and creative that might have
distinguished you from all others if they'd be in
your place, but which was still nevertheless
absolutely ineffective your trying to deceive
your orc captors, by impersonating Gollum, to
somehow get them to untie your bonds, as they
tried to take you both to Isengard you hoped
that would warrant a chapter. It felt meagre,
and you knew it at the time; something that for
inclusion would still require begging, others'
leniency and generosity. And you knew it was
truly your best representation of yourselves
where you both couldn't have been filled in by
really any other feisty young hobbit. And at the
finish you went back to the Shire don't not
1219
admit it! hoping that being amongst people
who ostensibly had done nothing, what you
accomplished amongst people you knew were
much more essential and of legitimately more
worth than you, would gain more favourable
backgrounding."
"You also hoped it would make up for the fact
that you were evidently carried along, seized as
necessary for the quest, over even additional
elflords, when these rare breeds were
fortuitously immediately at hand, because
every venturing vessel into unknown terrain
requires more than armour, weapons and
wheels but also a toilet. They pissed and barfed
all their own vulnerability, their own terrors
and fears of inadequacy, into you, to mask from
themselves that they felt all of that too. And
when you reflected back to them, with your
long feeling inadequate even as the journey was
very far along, that you sensed you were being
1220
used, their eye focused on your long enough
only so to bottle you back up. Without you, all
that can be said, is the great may have had to
feel an insufficiency which would have
hampered them. You were their courts' fools."
"Come, my young hobbits. Don't be afraid to
revisit your past, and even admit that what
you're seeing happening here in this renewed
Shire I've helped create, is going to require
your catching up. You know that I won't flatter
you to keep you in a role that actually isn't for
your benefit. I'll challenge you to the end,
provoking you to think on about things about
yourself, things that are still very lacking about
you, so that you do the work of actually
pointing out these facts to yourself."
1221
1222

"Summoned in this fashion, by my provoking
but mostly through your own inner mental
attention and work, you won't later be able to
be waylaid by flatterers using you in really a
terrible fashion, because they can't face up to
what remains in them so all humiliations that
are their own must be born by others."
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1223

THE (TRUE) LORD OF THE RING
1224
So the hobbits eventually came back to the
Shire, having been forewarned at Bree that it
had changed and not for the better. And what
they discovered is that it certainly HAD in fact
changed, only it would seem transmogrified,
assaulted, worsened, only by those who were so
fearful that all change is bad they would
wilfully ignore that as different as it had
become, and as irreverent as this change stood
to longheld custom, what they saw was
undeniably overall BETTER.
Yes, many of the trees were uprooted, and not
that there wasn't some misery in this as all of
them so loved trees but what were these still
easily sprung things to what actually had been
planted all through the shire, some in their
place, in such ingenious design! Sam had
marvelled at great big Oliphants, monstrosities
of the animal world, and he had to admit that
the new brick buildings and factories and
1225
administrative buildings that had sprung up
were in their own sense monstrosities of types
of buildings he knew of, and just as dazzling,
not only frightening, for it. And the people
hadn't become the slaves to industry he had
been warned about, but all of a sudden had
awakened out of longheld patterns and become
individually unpredictable. You never knew
whether the next villager you met who had
been a baker or a farmer and whom you could
predict the same for the successive generations
that followed them, would still be involved in
this role or have branched off into some other
career, as previously rare innerchange in these
people was actually occurring all the time, in
response to new possibilities.
As the adventuring hobbits told their adventure
stories to everyone they met, all were delighted
to hear the marvellous tales. But they noticed a
distinct lack of envy and awe. Their own lives
1226
had become adventures of their own sorts,
which involved constant selfactivation, and
actually wondered, in seeing Frodo's absolute
weariness and permanent maiming, and the
other hobbits' stillevident in being
disappointed in not being looked upon in their
return as betters immaturity, if travelling all
across the world was in fact as conducive to
change as what proved for themselves in just
staying in place.
The hobbits came to meet the one heralded as
mostly responsible for all this change, and they
discovered it was Saruman! The hobbits were
incredulous: how could the villain of villains,
have created all this? Saruman replied that "it
sure wasn't easy, with hobbits being so fearful
of any kind of change happening at all in the
Shire. But all that was really required was for
someone to come amongst them who didn't just
want to take amusement in them, but rather
1227
actually wanted something for their benefit, to
challenge and help them. This I did;
persistently and over a long period of time; and
eventually more of them were realizing that
they to some extent had been forcing
themselves to pretend that they had been living
the ideal life, only because defying this
pretence would have them fearing some great
punishment for breaching a Natural Order
prescribed for them."
"I'll tell you, it all would have been a lot easier
if I had not just my talent to inspire trust even
in dubious tasks my "sugar tongue," as some
have called it in effort to misshapen genuine
worth but the power of the Ring, which
would have expanded my ability to gain trust
exponentially."
"Yes, the Ring, the very power you were all
told could only be corrupting... the Ring the
1228
very powerful might first put to considerable
good use, but which eventually would drown
them in egoistic pursuits and morph them into
Sauronakin tyrants. That was always untrue. It
wasn't that it often didn't destroy its users this
way, but that it NEEDN'T always do so. And
the reason no one ever discovered this truth is
because too many seized on its first few
examples of misuse to proclaim a universal,
for it fit their own fears that anyone's own
massive expansion in abilities, done without
respect for whether they had been granted,
must inherently consist of sinful reach."
"Recall back, someone in your own troop was
uncovering some of this dissonant truth for
himself. Recall, specifically, Sam, who made
use of the Ring for somewhat longish periods
of time, pretty much right before where the
warping influence of the Ring was strongest,
right before the great Mt. Doom, at a time when
1229
Sauron had finally achieved his full might and
in process of 'expressing' it to the illfate of the
world. He knew he should have just done
something to everreprimand himself of if ever
he came to thereafter, for having just done the
very stupidest thing possible, and that in point
of fact it didn't in fact happen... all that he was
told would surely happen IMMEDIATELY
wasn't much happening at all! He pulled off
the Ring just as much to keep faith at what
proved a superstition, a false truth, and all those
he (needed to, regardless of true forms?)
respected who upheld it, than from keeping the
ring from possessing him, for at some level he
knew he had just stabbed at a lie."
"What Sam couldn't fully consciously admit to
himself is that the reason the Ring didn't take
over him is that the Ring actually responds
POSITIVELY to people who aren't
narcissistically trying to be big honchos reified
1230
by the like of all the small peoples of Middle
Earth those it destroys, always but simply
in process of healthy selfactivation, which is
exactly what Sam was up to while alone in
Mordor, with Frodo, with his ostensible
intrinsic "master," at the time currently
senseless. One after another he was making
decisions... and the Ring read that as much as
Sam was trying to persuade himself he was
only doing it for Frodo that he was still
fearful of selfdevelopment, fearful of doing
something for himself, principally, and would
if only in this condition have eventually used
the Ring selfdestructively to shine some bad
light on his essential self to please naysayers,
whatever further it would do to sullen the
Rings' already unjustly misshapen reputation
that some part of him was acknowledging that
he was doing it for himself as well."
"It felt good, selfactivating, making his own
1231
impact on Middle Earth, as worthy as any
other, and the Ring knew it has finally got the
right kind of RingBearer. Not Isildur, who was
a narcissist who needed to be firmament of
everyone's understanding of their world's
origins. Not Gollum, who had a multiple
personality disorder and was an absolute
mental retrograde What hell can 'I' do with
that; 'I' wouldn't know whom to work my
miracles upon! Not Bilbo, who had the illluck
of obtaining the Ring when the powers of the
narrative universe were all bent on making it
only an invisibility ring, as notable but also as
innocuous as any other magical item. Not
Boromir, who saw himself only as a broad
coalition of all of Gondor, and thus not actually
truly invested in his own self. And not Frodo,
who was such downcast gloom of depression at
the very beginning, there was no material there
to play to and lift up! But rather Sam, who
1232
couldn't but help notice, as he went along on
his adventures, that he was as capable and as
appreciative of selfleadership as any, and who
unlike any other other than the legend, Tom
Bombadil could find himself humming tales
and cheerful songs in the absolute very darkest
of places, and thus someone the environment
would have to work hardest to draw against
himself: Some part of him would never quail,
and turn against what made him most happy. It
thus only supported him, informed him of new
abilities, not just invisibility, despite its
reputation as only a nasty bugger that would
drag you Sauron's filthy, nasty, nogood way,
especially if you dared foolishly put it on so
close to its maker."
"Now about its maker... Yes, Sauron intended
that all wills who long bore the Ring would
turn evil, if not always into servants of Him.
But sometimes what's intended gets turned
1233
around and results in its opposite. And if this
logic sounds foreign to you, if shouldn't, for its
something akin to the wisdom that that
otherwise inane Gandalf is always saying.
Remember how he remarked on Sauron's
darkness working against him, serving as cover
for a force opposed to him... and other such.
The examples are many. Sam, at some level
recalled this, as well as his Gaffer saying
similar things, and so stayed at some level in
fidelity to newly awakened truth about the
Ring, that contrasted inversely with previously
known, previously demonstrated, truth. It is
owing to such that your quest was actually
accomplished, not as Bilbo is trying to ascribe
it as having happened, in his current writings of
your adventures, as rather because of Sam's
quintessentially hobbit humility. No, some part
of him, even if not greatly ample, had become
ready to defy even Gandalf for TRUTH, and
1234
for such Sauron met his better, and for long
enough that he lost all."
EndFragment
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Thoughts on Galadriel and Boromir

We remember in Lord of the Rings, Boromir's
failing, and how Galandriel sort of called it.
But (the elfqueen) Galandriel knew too that
she could have been one who could fail her test
that is, to deny the Ring if within her power
to take it and yet allowed herself to be alone
with Frodo where her soothing sense of being
able to take all travails away from the suffering,
would very likely draw him to offer for her to
take it from him that is, what in point of fact
happened. When Frodo offers her the Ring, she
gets excited about the possibilities that would
1235
be afforded her if she took it, and in her
excitement grows into the stature of the dark,
terrible queen who'd rule the world... but
fortunately in the end she wills herself to
withdraw, and even as it means she must
herself withdraw into the West, she pleases in
knowing she passed the test she evidently
feared there was a decent chance she could fail.
I would myself call this a pretty previous
failing on her part, and it'd be nice if
afterwards, someone had called her on it.
Perhaps even Frodo, maybe after Gimli
declared how he know worshipped her, might
in irritation have contested that "no, Gimli, we
must thank the elves for their kind gifts, but
She is not to be worshipped, I think, not at all.
She came dangerously close to taking the ring
and with it she would have displaced Sauron as
the evil power, and we'd of had no chance to
thwart her, as unlike Sauron, who is lacking in
1236
his full power because he had invested so much
in the Ring, she'd be in immediate possession
of all of Hers.
1237

Legolas assured us there was no risk for us in
Her forest but in fact there really, really was.
Our fate could have been determined for us in
the worst way as much there as in the mines of
Moria, where we lost Gandalf. All she had to
do was make sure we never saw her outside of
her being attended by other elves, and her
reputation would be closer to what you declare
it, master dwarf. But there is vanity in not
having her weakness openly admitted and in
not allowing herself the humiliation of being
monitored for her own good. For the fate of the
1238
world, this should have been within her great
capacity."
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Thursday, January 19, 2017
And yet another further thought on Lord of

the Rings
If you reread the part where Elrond agrees to
let Merry and Pippen into the Fellowship rather
than the two elflords he was considering, it's
really rather amusing. What he actually does is
relent, to Pippen's badgering pick me! pick
me! and to Gandalf arguing for the
importance of friendship over sheer might... as
if friendship isn't something that is quickly
forged when on travels, as it was between
Gandalf himself and Shadowfax just before he
got to Rivendale, and it will soon be between
the elf, Legolas, and dwarf, Gimli, on their way
1239
to Mordor.
Elrond the great leader more or less goes, "fine,
it's only the end of the world if you fail... take
your two munchkins over my elflords, even as
even if two elflords can't "storm the Dark
Tower, nor open the road to the Fire by the
power that is in [them]," they could at least
come closer to that pippenmerry possibly
could.
1240
It's irritating that pippenmerry weren't given
better reason, for as it is it really seems folly
that Elrond didn't wave them and Gandalf off,
reminding them all that just previously they
only got away from the Ring Wraiths at
Weathertop because they were beset by only
1241
five rather than the full nine of them...
increments in power absolutely still count, even
as the course is of evasion not brash
confrontation of Mordor's total force.
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Further thought on Lord of the Rings

So at the Council of Elrond, there is an elflord,
Glorfindel, who argues that the One Ring be
deposited in the middle of the ocean. Gandalf
acknowledges that if might well be safe there
for "a passing of a world," but because the
threat even if incredibly long delayed
would still however exist, it must instead be
dealt with for good immediately. To me this
sounds a bit like someone arguing that, yes, the
sun is in no soon danger of burning out, but a
number of billions of years from now it
1242
nevertheless will do so, and so it is our greatest
concern to do something about this fact
NOW.
1243

Fortunately Elrond immediately steps up to
argue that the way east to the sea will be under
most watch it's likely what Sauron's
expecting so it's not really an option,
anyway, because otherwise Gandalf would
seem a bit ripe for mocking; especially
considering that the alternative he favours
involves bringing it closer and closer to him,
where the orcs get denser, and the pathways,
more clogged.
1244
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Musings on the hobbits in "Lord of the

Rings"
1245
I was thinking of writing a short essay on Lord
of the Rings the book. Not sure, but
probably. I'll mention now though that
comparing the book with the film, one notes
how much more democratic Jackson is
compared to Tolkien. Jackson's impetus with
the hobbits is to make each one of them leaders
in the sense that with their decisions, abide the
fate of the world... so leaders in the most
flattering and worthy sense. Frodo decides to
set off alone into Gondor, and the future King
1246
Aragorn has to react to this decision, and
decides in fact to change course, which is what
happens in the film. So all good both ways
there: Frodo sheds himself the impetus of the
great council of Elrond, which willed they go
as much as possible as a team. But in the film it
is Merry and Pippen who are responsible for
destroying Saruman, they sway the entleader
to his decision to participate and fight, when he
had at first decided to play it the Tom
Bombadil way and let the whole rancid world
go discombobulate go fuck itself, whereas
in the book this is a decision the entleader
comes to only on his own. Merry and Pippen
do nothing in their stay with him other than see
things they can brag about when they return
home... about how close they were to central
events, which is a kind of closet narcissism.
They also grow a couple of inches, literally,
which encourages a kind of grandiose
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narcissism. It's the "parents" that do the
meaningful stuff.
Now of course it is one of these two hobbits
who distinctively distracts the Nazgul
commander, by stabbing him with his magical
sword, and so he can be dispatched by the
warrior "who is not a man" but who is
temporarily stunned and on her ass. But could
you imagine how the reading experience of the
book would have been different if somehow
one of the hobbits being good at riddles
had divined that the secret lady warrior joining
the Rohirim into Gondor which he only
seems to know about might be the "no man"
perhaps fated to defeat the Nazgul lord, and
arranged to keep close to her through the battle
to perhaps serve as a sort of an innocuous but
essential assistant to her delivering the fateful
blow? He's small, nimble and easy to overlook,
and, more essentially, one of the very few
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soldiers with the kind of magic sword that can
do any kind of damage at all to the Nazguls
(the book makes this explicit: without the
magic sword, no painful piercing of Nazgul
tendons, no meaningful distraction, no dispatch
of the Nazgul king, and more assuredly, one
very much squashed princess on the
battlefield).
You can count up the number of times where
Merry and Pippen do surprisingly essential
things in the battlefield (for example, do you
know that the epic fight with the tremendous
cave troll in the film is absent in the book
because of one of them stabbing it in the foot
just as he was making his entrance?). But
without the canniness Jackson gives them, in
the books they seem only those who do
surprisingly well for childsized hobbits
(meaning: any Gondor knight would have been
better for the Fellowship, overall; and the
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Elvish lord that is considered... infinitely
superior.)
Strangely, this doesn't seem as true with
Jackson's film version of The Hobbit. In the
film, he does credit Bilbo with the canny
decision to distract the trolls, which in the book
is all Gandalf's doing... Bilbo is passive. But
elsewhere in the book Tolkien seems to give
him much more credit. The defeat of the
spiders is all Bilbo's doing: basically imagine
the whole contribution of the elves in the movie
and attribute it to Biblo solo and you're part
ways close to assessing his actions properly...
but not quite at all fully there! for Bilbo lures,
bates, and even seemingly triangulates the
spiders to their doom. And of course,
unforgettably, Smaug's doom is all Bilbo's
doing. In conversation with Smaug, Bilbo
believes he sees something awry in the Smaug's
swordproof armor and he manipulates Smaug
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into exposing his full "magnificent" body, into
posing, so Bilbo can be sure about what he saw.
The fact of this flaw eventually gets transmitted
to Bard so he can direct his aim... so he can do
something actually meaningful, other than
posture heroically before being fried to a crisp.
Bilbo didn't install the flaw in Smaug's
otherwise perfect construction, but he is all
Rogue One in that he is the one who finds out
about it and gets the message on its way to
"princess Leia" Bard. In the movie, of course,
Bard spots the weak spot on his own, and
without any cunning involved. Bilbo, on the
other hand, had to endure Smaug accurately
undressing Bilbo's every motive... even his
being in the possession of a magic ring.
EndFragment
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Labels: lord of the rings, peter jackson, the hobbit, tolkien

Comments (various)
From what I understand, this article is advocating sort of
a Rousseauian understanding of human nature. That the
infant is actually born beautific, but is warped into
something pained and selfreproaching through the
adverse influence of malevolent (a commercial,
authoritarian) society. I think this is right, but why... but
how, exactly, do these ostensibly absolutely antihuman
manipulations get installed in the first place? If aliens
from Mars who supremely hate humans didn't put them
in place, just to royally screw with them, then humans
themselves did.
Even if ultimately something that absolutely deserves
the mocking and attack this article presents them with,
did they once actually HELP humanity? Was
somewhere in the past humans' developmental history
so badly off, that the perversity of such conceptions of
children and parents listed here, and the whole structure
of an ostensibly dominantclass ruled society that joys in
manipulating and cowing the rest of society, actually a
step up from where it was before? Did it exist because
1252
to some extent human beings saw it as a tool that would
help alleviate their pain, and in fact, in sum, did so, even
as it is an accomplishment ultimately not much more
worth our celebrating that the true societal advancement
a couple thousand years ago of teaching children they
are bad and full of sins, from the previous norm of not
giving a damn about "reforming" them at all and rather
just routinely killing them through child sacrifice?

I'll permit myself one more comment on this very
interesting article whose progressive goal of helping to
eliminate the inculcation of selfhate, of self
alienatization, I absolutely support. The article is
advocating that we have been taught to understand
ourselves as naturally insufficient, as something
negative, when in reality we are all something positive.
And therefore our sense of self inadequacy; and
therefore our being willing slaves to a consumerist
society. But I would ask if this article ITSELF serves
such an end, for it teaches us that if we would assume
human beings are always good unless they are malignly
tampered with, and are therefore never actually ever evil
only ever traumatized even when they do the most
1253
cruel of practices, we are quite wrong, for the world as it
is is one put together by absolutely malignant forces
men, fear and hate you; the dominant classes, fear and
hate you. All irrationally: for the purpose of nothing
other than further succour of their own privilege! And
so if we agree with this perspective, are we not then
requited to being in a state of arousal, a state of fight? Is
there not then a sense that the Freudian father is actually
NOT something the theorist entirely abhors, would see
entirely vanquished, because a fight against something
big that hates us is basically the life we are necessarily
if conscious, if wideawake doomed to need to
accept as a good part of our lot?
What I'm getting at is that I think articles like this would
help further the goal of communicating that each one of
us is intrinsically good, by exploring how these adverse
practices got installed in the first place in a way which
doesn't suggest that somewhere in our lineage there
were genuinely evil people in charge. My own sense is
that the earliest human beings were of a psychic state
equivalent to the most traumatized, abused people alive
today. That was once the human norm. Children made it
to adulthood only because of stimulations they offered
their afflicted, depressed parents. Not at all out of love,
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out of generosity, because human love, ironically, hadn't
yet been born yet. Red in tooth and claw, alas, comes
closer. Since then miraculously there have been
incremental steps up, and so as we rightly look down on
parental attitudes from a century before, we are also
looking at practices that reflected genuine advancements
in caring from their own predecessors, each one being
the best "solution" they were able to come up with at the
time.
If you look at human history this way, as I do, then, yes,
we need to do everything we can to denormalize
conceptions of male/female nature that are actually
erroneous and get in the way of a positive life, of
complete selfactualization. We need to be loudly and
proudly feminist, each one of us. But it is easier to see
our "opponents" as not castrating gods of menacing
power... as some kind of Lord of the Rings Sauron, but
sad creatures from childhoods of horrible abuse, who
nevertheless remain a great problem. You can defeat
them, but not feel like someone who's actually repressed
his/her pleasureseeking ways to function as a more
stalwart crusader. You can avoid depriving yourself of
pleasure as you subscribe to requirements of mythic
crusader. A lot's at stake, but there is never a need to nip
1255
your living an enriching, pleasureful life in the bud.

It's mentioned quickly and not dwelt upon, but what I
like about this article on Trump is (Andrew) Sullivan's
description of Trump being "fused" with the nation, of
THAT as Trump's primary goal. This relationship to a
polity, to a nation, is highly psychohistorical. It gives a
sense of him not "governing" to enrich himself and his
billionaire friends for cynical purposes which is
what you'll hear from many on the political left, but
foremost out of a genuine, powerful psychological
desire to be a component of something larger and
omnipotent... which should even at some point entail his
total selfsacrifice, his suicide. Sullivan describes this
something as a "nation," but the DeMausian
psychohistorical understanding would be of a
Mutterland... to be back in a prelapsarian bond with our
mothers, a bond which lapsed, specifically, when we
"sinned" by abandoning Her for our own self
actualization and individuation.
The progressive war against Trump will not be against
some guy who enjoys being an enfant terrible, against
some guy who's only (forgive the pun...) trumped up on
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his own grotesque bloviated self; it'll be against a guy
who thinks his own mom could not possibly be prouder
in seeing him fight for her via her being projected out
onto the nation, in seeing him stick up for her, for HER
honour. He'll think he's her favourite, devoting every
resource he has to ensure no longer will her face, her
dignity, be casually besmirched by those who'd laughed
off loyalty and honour as virtues in favour of measly,
arrogant, selfspoiling. (Yes, I understand she was an
immigrant from Scotland, not native American. It won't
matter.)
Progressives need to understand that their opponents
will not understand themselves as trolls, but as of the
purest light. If we progressives still think selfsacrifice
and selflessness are virtues (I'm not proselfishness, just
not for selflessness as sacrifice of self to please denying,
meanspirited parental gods), if we get into their
mindset we might be forced to tip our hat to them,
because their horrid efforts will not be about themselves
only indirectly, in that it feels good to not have their
mothers hanging over them ready to obliterate them for
too much selfdevotion. This fusion state with their
mothers, which will make them immune to guilt and
very ready to sacrifice themselves for group (i.e.,
1257
mother's) gain, will make them very formidable
opponents.

Emporium
10 hours ago
Molyneux seems a pretty big supporter of Lloyd
Demause's ideas. DeMause, however, doesn't give a fig
about IQ; rather, he's into who's been most fortunate in
having the most progressive and loving parents, because
a child from out of that kind of environment is going to
have an emotional IQ the extent to which they will
want to help others that's off the charts! It's from
people like these that you'll get your most decent, most
humane society.
DeMause does however argue as does Steven Pinker
a Whiggish idea of history as progressively getting
better, as improving, which needn't but apparently
does give amo for discrimination against other
peoples, other cultures. I think Molyneux is using
DeMause's theories because he sees therein means to
take advantage of one of the weaknesses of our current
batch of most loved, of our current batch of
1258
progressives: they do romanticize, cast a Rousseauean
glow around people they're rightly trying to support. In
this moment when people may be wanting to discredit
progressives and so turn our society more openly more
hateful, he means to make use of their one blindspot to
discredit them entirely, even though they're overall the
most factadhering, most wideawake people on the
planet. That is probably his foremost goal. And that's a
terrible thing.
Further reply to Marc-Andre Cotton

Re: In the midst of the Greece turmoil, his shared
feelings are of particular significance to make
sense of the deep psychohistorical factors
underlying the current crisis. Three years ago, in
an ABC News 24 interview by Leigh Sales,
Varoufakis stated:
This is our Great Depression. Not only in an
economic sense, but also in a psychological sense.
Greeks are in a catatonic state. One moment in a
state of rage, another, this is a typical case of
manic depression. There are no prospects. There
1259
is no light at the end of the tunnel. There are
sacrifices, but nobody gets a feeling that these are
sacrifices that take the form of some kind of
investment in turning the corner. This is the
problem when you are stuck in a Eurozone which
is really badly designed, which is collapsing and
which does not give opportunities to its flimsier
parts to escape through some kind of redemptive
crisis[2].
Such a public statement carries strong emotional
overtones resulting from the close interweaving of
past and present sensations—a regressive process
Dr Vamik Volkan has termed “time collapse” in
his many books and articles[3]. Fears and intra
psychic defenses associated with a past traumatic
experience tend to resurface when triggered by a
contemporary menace such as social unrest or
economic downturn, often reactivating a sense of
victimization. In such a case, current perceptions
and traumatic memory become inextricably
interwoven into a seamless totality.
1260

Enjoyed the essay. Thank you. Wanted to mention
a concern I had about this particular section.
DeMause's argument is that economic upswings
and periods of peace are actually much more scary
to, produce much more unhappiness in, people

than periods of depression and unrest. Happiness is
the significant trigger (of trauma) because it
reminds people of how their mothers abandoned
them when they first felt the pleasure of self
individuation. I mention this because DeMause's
take on economic depressions is actually really
very interesting and needs to kept fresh as a vital
potential counter to everyone presuming that we're
in a period of revolution owing to how stressed out
everyone has been during these economically
depriving years. DeMause, we remember, would
have it that economic depressions... that periods of
severe austerity, actually reflect the wishes of a
populace. They're experiencing growth panic,
owing to prosperity, and at this moment find more
emotional peace than distress by the quieting down
1261
of life possibility.
We assume that everyone would be so much the
happier if during the last twenty years they'd had
full employment and living wages. But the
DeMausian take would be that essentially for all
nations outside that blessed locale of advanced
childrearing, Scandinavia, you'd be in error about
this. They'd actually be feeling worse. They'd be
absent an effective means of atoning for previously
incurred societal growth, and they'd feel guilty as
all hell... have inner maternal alters haranguing
them and driving them insane. As is, they now feel
rather virtuous for being able to show off how little
they've prospered, and so now they can't be balked
from the period of revenge that we all sense will
define our upcoming age.
1262
1263
They can't be effectively targeted as "deplorables"
because they feel so spare of what actually makes
them feel guilty and bad namely, riches,
prosperity, selfactualization. The ones lambasting

them as deplorable tend to be liberals who have

prospered and who have richly developed
individualized selves, and so seem to to the lower
psychoclasses like people who abandoned their
obligations to others (read: parents) to tend
selfishly to their own interests, and never looked
back. And for such are clearly the highest ranking
deplorables society has to offer.
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Labels: DeMause
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Thinking on and responding to Marc-Andre

Cotton's psychohistorical article on Brexit
MarcAndre Cotton wrote (originally posted
1264
on regard conscient.net , and permission
granted to repost) :
“S
ince a clear majority of British citizens
decided to leave the European Union on June 23,
heated comments have been voiced. According
to The Financial Times, their largely Europhile
parliament will be forced to drag the country
into “unsplendid isolation” as Britain is heading
for “a quite probable recession” (Philip
Stephens, “ Britain is starting to imitate
Greece ” , Financial Times , 06/30/2016). Not
surprisingly, The Spectator — where former Mayor
of London and ‘ Vote Leave ’ campaigner Boris
Johnson once worked as a journalist — holds a
different view. Waving reassuring news as a
falling pound attracts tourists and sucks in
investment, the conservative weekly neologized
Brexit “ the greatest opportunity ever handed to a
government by an electorate ” ( “ Business
confidence is returning to Brexit Britain ” , The
1265
Spectator , 07/29/2016).
Indeed, fantasies and misrepresentations
surrounding this controversial issue have polarized
opinions to the point that there is no clue as to
what lies ahead. On top of that, shortly after the
Brexit referendum, prominent supporter of the
Leave campaign Nigel Farage stepped back and
resigned as leader of the UK Independence Party
(UKIP), giving the impression that he absolved
himself of responsibility for potential damage
(Helen Lewis and Stephen Bush, “ The Brexit
cowards: we left Europe, then they left us to
it , New Statesman , 07/07/2016). The main
”
rhetoric of the proLeave —“ Let
’ s Take Back
Control! ”— thus triggered a backfire and a sense of
betrayal. “ At the top of British politics,
an insider
suggested, a vacuum yawns wide. The phones are
ringing, but no one is picking up. ”
(Bagehot, “ Britain is sailing into a storm with no
one at the wheel ” , The Economist , 06/26/2016)
A “
deepseated hostility
”
1266
Admittedly, British recrimination over European
affairs is hardly new. A stronghold of democracy
since the French surrender of June 1940, the
country was not prone to selfexamination after
WWII whereas France and Germany laid grounds
for an economic integration of the continent to
prevent future conflicts. In the 1950s, after Indian
Independence, Britain grieved the loss of her
Empire by securing a Commonwealth preference
system with former colonies whilst fighting tooth
and nail against the common market scheme.
Treasury officials even issued a ‘ Plan G ’—
namely
a free trade agreement designed to assert British
commercial leadership over Europe — perceived by
supporters of European integration as a malicious
sabotage effort by ‘ perfidious Albion ’
(David
Gowland et al., Britain and European Integration
Since 1945: On the Sidelines, Routledge, 2009, p.
45).
Subsequently, the French President de Gaulle
vetoed Britain ’ s application to join the Common
Market on two occasions, accusing her of a “deep
1267
seated hostility” towards the European
construction ( “ 1967: De Gaulle says
‘ non ’
to
Britain — ” , BBC, 11/27/1967). When the
again

United Kingdom finally joined the Europe of Six,
on January 1973, it remained “ one of the more
reluctant countries ” according to negotiator Sir
Crispin Tickell and would spend much time
arguing about details (interviewed by Stephen
Moss, “ How Britain negotiated its entry to the
EECthen failed to play its part ” , The Guardian ,
06/25/2016). To many Britons, the EU still
confuses with overgenerous subsidies and a rising
tide of desperate people on the verge of sweeping
their homeland.
Thatcher ’ s privatization program
Illustrative of such frame of mind, Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher ’ s bargaining with Brussels
known as the ‘ UK rebate ’
has been much written
about. In the 1980, at a time when most
Conservatives favored European integration, she
fought over Britain ’ s participation to the EEC
1268
budget, asking for “ [her] own money back
”
and
eventually obtaining a twothird refund of UK ’ s
annual net contribution. As for today, Britons are
the eightbiggest contributors to the EU on a per
head basis (James Kirkup, “ EU Facts: how much
does Britain pay to the EU budget? ” , The
Telegraph , 02/29/2016). Nevertheless, as
encouraged by proLeave tabloids, British
taxpayers are inclined to think they pay more than
their share to “ the growing pensions of European
Union fat cats ” (Jake Burman,
“ Now UK taxpayers
forced to contribute BILLIONS towards Brussels
bureaucrats ’
PENSIONS
” , Daily Express ,
11/09/2015).
It is seldom considered that the Brits themselves
have largely contributed to their financial despair.
During the Thatcher Years, inequality surged as a
major privatization program meant to reverse “ the
corrosive and corrupting effects of
socialism ” swept the public sector (Margaret
Thatcher, quoted by Alistair Osborne, “ Margaret
1269
Thatcher: one policy that led to more than 50
companies being sold or privatised ” , The
Telegraph , 04/08/2013). The shares of these
companies were not affordable for most ordinary
citizens and became property of foreign groups
and states. Subsequent restructuring measures such
as downsizing and increased cost to consumers
have deprived many UK household of vital
services and shifted the tax burden to working
people — and the shame to the powerless. Film
director of I, Daniel Blake, a welfare state drama
awarded the 2016 Palme d ’ Or at Cannes, Ken
Loach argues: “ We have to look again at this
whole cruel sanctions and benefit system which is
out to tell the poor that their poverty is their own
fault. ”
(Ken Loach, interview by Sarah
Montague, “ Ken Loach on
‘ despair ’
behind benefit
system film ” , BBC Radio , 05/23/2016).
Concern over immigration
Powerful fantasies are at play on the immigration
front too. In 2015, statistics show that net
1270
migration to the UK was over 333,000 and rising
— a surge Brexiteers have used to suggest that
“ mass immigration is still hopelessly out of control
and set to get worse if we remain inside the
EU ” (Nigel Farage, quoted by Alan Travis, “ Net
immigration to UK nears peak as fewer Britons
emigrate ” , The Guardian , 05/26/2016). Ironically,
the strength of the UK labor market is thought to
be a key driver of this evolution with the majority
of such increase involving countries of western
and southern Europe. Prior to the Brexit
referendum, polls showed that roughly three
quarters of Britons wanted immigration cut, but
disagreed on how to achieve this goal, many voters
saw — and were probably misled into thinking
—
the
Leave vote as a way to rein it in, although
campaigners never got into specifics. Former
Justice Secretary and lead Brexiteer Michael Gove
even suggested that a UK withdrawal could see
Britain accept more immigrants, albeit from
outside the EU (Asa Bennett, “ Did Britain really
vote Brexit to cut immigration? ” , The Telegraph ,
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06/29/2016).
In the last decade, the rise of UKIP — a third party
that gained 27.9% of British electorate in the May
2014 European Election, ahead of Labour and the
Tories —
underscored the importance of
immigration in the people ’ s minds. Concern over
integration of minority communities was joined by
much debate about British national identity.
Demographics of the Brexit vote show that the
British majority of England and Wales — where
opposition to migrants and concomitant support of
UKIP are highest — has tipped the scale in favor of
a withdrawal. Areas with a prominent share of
over 65s scored the highest antiEU votes,
indicating that the Leave option appealed to the
older generation (Ashley Kirk and Daniel
Dunford, “ EU referendum: How the results
compare to the UK ’ s educated, old and immigrant
populations ” , The Telegraph , 06/27/2016). But
Professor of Politics Eric Kaufmann suggests that
is was primarily values that motivated voters, not
1272
age or education. “ Invisible attitudes are more
powerful than group categories, he argues. The
same is true for a person ’ s immigration
attitudes. ” (Eric Kaufmann, “ Its NOT the
economy, stupid: Brexit as a story of personal
values ” , The London School of Economics and
Political Science , 07/07/2016).
A “
values lines
”
divide

Among those who think European unification has
gone too far, support for the death penalty strongly
correlates with Brexit voting intention. A similar
picture results when Eurosceptics express their
views on the importance of disciplining children,
whipping sex criminals, or keeping the nation safe.
“ This speaks to a deeper personality dimension
which social psychologists like Bob
Altemeyer, Kaufmann disputes, dub RightWing
Authoritarianism (RWA). ” As further shown by
Chris Rose of Campaign Strategy, an NGO
consulting firm working with the British Value
Survey as a tool, “ there was clear evidence from
1273
existing values surveys that pro and antiEU
attitudes strongly divided along values lines ” . This
values based segmentation of the nation group
forms a ‘ psychodemographic ’ system, Rose
argues. In this case, subgroups motivated by fear
of perceived threats, safety and control, or the need
for clearcut rules swung most strongly to vote
‘ Leave ’ , whereas people oriented towards success
or prioritizing individualism and cultural equality
— overrepresented in younger age classes
—
voted
‘ Remain ’ (Chris Rose,
“ Brexit, Values and
Age ” , Three Worlds Blog ,
www.campaignstrategy.org , 06/26/2016).
As we know from other research, such as political
psychologist Theodor Adorno ’ s, a harsh
upbringing will most probably result in personal
values like submission to parental authority, a
sense of duty and order, as well as ingroup
orientation —
all the while fostering a strong
resentment and feelings of victimization disguised
under mechanisms of displacement (Else Frenkel
1274
Brunswik, “ Parents and childhood as seen through
the interviews ” , in Theodor Adorno
et al., The
Authoritarian Personality, Studies in Prejudice
Series , Vol. 1, Chapter X, Harper & Brothers,
1950, 337389). It is not unreasonable to suggest
that the Openness vs. Closure divide characteristic
of the Brexit vote overlaps childrearing patterns
and beliefs, with a likely correlation between
maltreatment in childhood and Leave support.
Indeed, the immigration issue induces a loss of
cultural benchmarks in the ethnic English majority,
triggering a sense of disintegration stemming from
infancy. Debates surrounding the National Health
Service (NHS) funding reflect a growing fear of
dispossession that has little to do with economic
reality. Within hours of the Brexit vote for
instance, the official Leave campaign ’ s call to
divert UK ’ s EU contribution to the NHS proved a
false claim (Kate McCann and Tom
Morgan, “ Nigel Farage:
£
350 million pledge to
, The Telegraph ,
fund the NHS was ‘ a mistake ’”
1275
06/24/2016). Such inflammatory rhetoric is often
meant to stir up feelings of victimization —
all too
common in adults who were abused as children —
only leading to further frustration once the game

has been played ( Fig. 1 ).
A nation of “ enthusiastic smackers
”
The UK bears a painful legacy of child abuse
dating back to the Victorian era when ‘ the rod ’
was commonly used to subjugate children.
Corporal punishment in British staterun schools
was only banned by parliament in 1987, and as late
as 1998 in other private schools of England and
Wales (Colin Farrell, “ United Kingdom School
CP ” ,
www.corpun.com
). Significantly, traditional
Englisheducation is commonly linked with
childhood violence, pain and stoicism in the eyes
of mainland Europeans, with (in)famous Eton
College standing as a hallmark of discipline for the
British aristocracy. In a 2006 survey, 80% of
respondents still believed in beating children,
while 73% said a ban would result in an increase
1276
of juvenile delinquency — reflecting an image of
Britain as “ a nation of enthusiastic
smackers ” (Rosemary Bennett, “ Majority of
parents admit to smacking children ” , The Times ,
09/20/2006). More recently, a 2012 Angus Reid
Public Opinion poll found that 63% opposed a ban
on spanking in the UK ( Fig. 2 ). Under existing
laws, parents in England and Wales are allowed to
“ reasonably chastise
”
their children
—
that is as
long as the blows leave no mark — but near half of
Britons think even these rules go too far (Mario
Canseco, “ Britons Opposed to Banning Parents
from Smacking Their Children ” , Angus Reid
Institute , 02/29/2012).
The extend to which British adults had been
abused as children recently came as a surprise after
the Office for National Statistics (ONS) introduced
new questions on this topic in the 2016 Crime
Survey for England and Wales. In the first study of
its kind, the data show that 9% of respondents aged
16 to 59 report psychological abuse, 7% physical
1277
abuse, 7% sexual assault and 8% witnessing
domestic violence or abuse in the home. The
proportion of adults reporting illtreatment tends to
increase with age and women are more likely than
men to suffer sexual assault by rape or penetration,
with an estimated 567,000 adult women having
experienced this type of abuse in childhood
( “ Abuse during childhood: Findings from the
Crime Survey for England and Wales, year ending
March 2016 ” , Office for National Statistics ,
08/06/2016). These figures give an indication of
the powerful forces at play when repressed
feelings and emotions associated with such outrage
surface and are displaced in a heated political
context —
particularly within an aging population.
Given this unacknowledged reality, diverting such
resentment towards outside targets such as migrant
workers and EU regulation proved an easy win for
Brexit campaigners and fearmongering
demagogues. And as the saying goes: When you
play with fire, you end up getting burned ”
1278

My (Patrick McEvoyHalston's) response to his
article:
What is the relationship between a harsh
background and a later inability to adapt to a
changing society, so strong, it leads to psychic
disintegration? DeMause was influenced a lot by
James F. Masterons's works, and for him what
stops people from growing... what stops whole
socieites from growing, isn't so much that they

came from angry parents, that they suffered the
rod, and that this somehow cowed them into rigid
mindsets that feared change that doesn't quite
lead us to where, for him, we need to go but

from unloved parents who had children to give
them the love they did not receive from their own
parents, and who abandoned their children when
they began to individuate and selfactualize.
Children out of families like that may not just be
hardened, less flexible, more naturally rule
1279
focused, but incur the feeling that they are
hopelessly bad when they vicariously participate in
a society which expands one's possibility for self
actualizing... one's ability to become your truest
self, which is the way our society has been of late,
as it was, for instance, in Weimar. Inner alters in
their heads, representing their angry mothers, lose
all interest in them, and they panic and do
everything they can to regain her favor by stopping
all further growth, and warring against
progressives pushing for more of it.
think that what
To speak of psychoclasses, I do
had been happening is that a higher psychoclass
was displacing the societal forms which helped
maintain the primitive homeostasis of lower
psychoclasses, and that this lead to feelings of self
disintegration as the nature of the societal
"exoskeleton" no longer facilitated keeping one's
private self sane (your point). But I don't think that
immigrants are being demonized simply because
old memories of abuse are coming back and anger
1280
at parents has to be displaced somewhere... so
onto, how about?... immigrants. It didn't play into
anybody's hands, as if this need for revenge could
have been directed elsewhere. They feel
early
surrounded by predators, and this is
childhood memories returned; but I think people
are not just reminded of how tormenting their
parents were but of how bad they believe they
themselves once were to have incurred their
parents' abuse and rejection, and this "bad" part of
themselves has to be projected out. Immigrants are
ideal "poison containers" in that they are not
actually seen mostly as predatory but as weak and
needy... and in our early childhoods we decided
that the reason our parents rejected us was because
we were vulnerable that's what made us bad:
what else could be conclude when our first
experience of abandonment was as at the age of
two during the reapproachment stage?
("Authoritarian parents" is a dodge to some of us,
also because it allows us to avoid being reminded
of when we were most vulnerable, which wasn't
1281
when we were 8 or 9 and mommy and daddy were
threatening us with a stick, but 1, 2, 3 and 4 and
we were hopelessly vulnerable before parents as
gods). They are the bad children we decided we
once were, not just convenient people to kick at
when ideally you'd kick back at your parents. All
immigrants as targets by regressing psychoclasses,
then? No. Just those "we" can identify as being
brought into the country after "we'd" ceased to be
able to keep up with societal growth while those
out of more loving families the higher
psychoclasses thrived and took total charge of
it. So those given entrance post mid1970s, when
the working class could no longer keep up with
ongoing societal growth and when a liberal
professional class emerged which could.
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EndFragment
When we emphasize the idea of parents as bearing
the rod... as authoritarian and mean, it's difficult to
appreciate that what people most want to do right
now is bond back to their parents via their Mother
Countries; it's difficult to understand renewed
nationalism, the great joy of it, for the increasing
many. Why the hell would they want to do that?
Merge back with such a beast? It's important to
bring up the idea of splitting. So not just a revival

of memories of abuse, but of the psychic to having
an angry, abandoning mother in splitting her into
two: one that is loving that you can cling to, be to
her the favorite you never were in real life, another
on the outside you can war against. Nationalism
isn't us clinging to the one with the medusa head;
that scary lady is outside.

Establishing no true justification for shame

or regret, through memory reprocessing, in
"Nocturnal Animals"
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Nocturnal Animals
There is no point in living if you can't quit the
feeling you shamed yourself by being weak when
you could have been strong to terror this is the
point of "Nocturnal Animals." In fact, if you die
immediately after showing you're not such a
hapless fluff after all, just showing you could be
strong before your worst tormentor is such a
victory that that ostensibly sad fate of your body
being slowly besmirched into dust, cast amongst
the other wilderness rocks and stones, really
doesn't matter so much. Presumably you die with
your memories of you as a strong drawn sword,
smacking down the threatening dragon, basically
determining the nature of your spirit in the
hereafter: this is what you surely mostly were deep
down the whole time, even if it took this particular
moment to buck it out into the open. Okay, I
suppose I can sorta accept that... there's nothing
like seeing yourself finally as a perpetrator when
1285
you've seen yourself so often as just a passive
victim even if it's still not not actually hating
anyone, the next step up, surely, in character
evolution. Except, because never, not for one real
moment, is there ever actually an instance in which
Jake Gyllenhaal's Tony Hastings shows himself as
weak, this victory seemed like it should have been
applied to some other sapien' soul. And it gets you
wondering, has the movie doubling back on itself,
implicating its creator, someone whom we might
otherwise have assumed, had he actually showed
his protagonist as actually someone who turns a bit
humiliatingly cooperative when tormentors are
upon him known some true shame that he was
once probably weak himself but had come to know
some triumph over a past and more deplorable
version of himself.
No, this guy, Tom Ford, isn't even up to the point
weak, we begin to think,
of admitting he ever was
and perhaps it haunts him... is sufficiently aware of
it through his otherwise conscious experience of
1286
life as a steady sea of accomplishment, that he
feels he has to balk it back somehow... and so
creates a film whereby he might entrench in his
own mind a sort of facade, a covering, where he
can believe he has revived, frankly, bravely, a
version of his own humiliating time of weakness
but really only in hope of displacing it, bumping it
to the side, with the facsimile of it that bears no
real trace of such discomposure.
1287
If you explored every crack and crevice in Tony
Hastings and his family's interaction with the
roadside bullies, you can't really come upon a
single instance where he could have known
better... where he could have done something
which clearly, to him in the moment, would have
spared his family what they ended up suffering: the
1288
worst possible fate of repeated rape and murder.
There may have in fact have been something he
could have said or not said, agreed to or not agreed
to, that would have alleviated their fate somewhat,
made it so that, perhaps, they would have still
surely been poked and prodded a whole lot but not
ultimately on the alter of total sacrifice. But who
could possibly have anticipated it? Here is an alert,
sophisticated family, smart to the nature of the
people they are confronting and trying all sorts of
spontaneous and perfectly smart strategies to
defuse what could not help but excite and annoy
their tormentors: their evident belief in themselves
think they are
as morally superior beings. They do
better than these hillbillies, and they know that this
registers pretty plainly, that they'd most actually
just like to talk smack and remind them of their
low station, so they don't just simply defer
but sometimes, even a bit, antagonize them
yeah, we don't like you and we know you know it,
but you are still being total jerks here toying with
people beyond all tolerance doing something
1289
that's only half sincere, with the other half just
timepassing drama and we know you're
aware that there is some point where you're
supposed to call it off ... and do you really want to
trespass past that?; does it really flatter you to exit
being the grandly empowered playing with
absolute victims and instead perhaps forever
become those permanently and eventually
destructively entwined with them, just so you can
show you don't always just play? Be satisfied that
you made us feel very, very threatened; that we let
you know that we know that no matter how we
twisted and turned our fate was entirely in your
hands; and let it go at that: we amounted to
another amusing pastime to titilate you true lords
of the road in this actually quite enhancing realm
of the quintessential American wild (we've been
reminded of that: we may in our own way be
cocksure but surely we ain't cowboys... and you in
your way most certainly are) a response which
flatters the tormentors as beings perhaps mostly
actually like themselves, creatures of strong
1290
cognitive awareness of this as drama, but also as
truly embodying the kind of proud, selfpossessed,
menacing presence that Americans... that even
bourgeois, Mercedesdriving they , still kind of
bows down to. You know we think you're
hillbillies, but if you care about us not dissing you
so much how about more largely considering that
we're ultimately registering in this situation that
none of us has completely gotten past the moral
legitimacy of the great American outlaw. You're
quintessentially raw, raw American, even if still
villains, while we're adrift from that and evidently
hapless for it... but if such, not then also, those
possessed of the lordly ability to draw it all back
in and resolve at the finish on fair play?... We ain't
ever forgettin' you.
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Ostensibly Tony might register as irritatingly
passive when he follows the lead of the sheriff as
1291
he explores the case. He does just do as requested.
But this seems wellconsidered: the sheriff shows
he knows what he is doing, and Tony doesn't want
to detour from the most straightforward path to
justice. He gets tapped on the shoulder sometimes
to "remind" the caught tormentors of what they
actually did to them rather than their pretence that
they were nowhere near the area and did
absolutely nothing wrong, officer , but this plays
more like conductor's direction receding to the star
trumpeter's blasting away. And when Tony finds
himself alone with the chief tormentor, ostensibly
we're supposed to take as truth that Tony is unable
to pull the trigger of a gun because he has
been sadly inhibited; but the reality is that it
doesn't play as effective bait to work at potentially
cancelling his efficacy at this moment because all
we've really seen of Tony with a gun thus far is,
not his absolute inability to shoot, but rather his
ability to be caught out in surprise... he's not a

natural gunfighter; such things will happen. And so
when he ends up shooting and killing him later it
1292
doesn't play as him finally accomplishing what
he'd feared he was too naturally cowardly to be
capable of, but just as him doing as intended when
set and able to focus. With just this guy and him in
a room, there was no way he was going to find
himself laid low while the villain got away... and
so that wasn't what happened.
Tony's terrible misadventure, then, in a sense,
victory, constitutes what is only a fictional story,
the plot of a novel written by a man who too
suspected he might actually be a weak, hapless
person, doomed, in his case, to be the person who'd
only work in a bookstore and never finish his
novel that his wife decided he was just before
leaving him. But this person triumphs too by
proving to be someone who got a job teaching at a
university and who actually wrote his captivating
and accomplished dream novel. His wife's
assessment of his character was erroneous, a mis
applied hit, and she has to acquiesce to the fact that
she suffered a subsequent fate of finding a
1293
subsequent husband who looks great but who
cheats on her regularly, and a job where everyone
lacks her former husband's kindness, substance and
soul. Ostensibly, if she'd have more genuine faith
in him, she'd have been much more satisfied. Her
plaguing demons were at work in her decision, not
her having alertly spotted clear evidence of the
way his own would ride his whole adult life.
1294
But in fact despite her cheating husband and her
financiallyatrisk gallery and her nasty, self
obsessed associates, she comes across as living a
quite selfactualized life she no doubt really enjoys
for its poise, beauty, glamour, and circumspection.
We're not supposed to see this, but in this instance,
No way really would it
again, we of course see it.
have been sufficient to have tried to go halfway
1295
on this by sticking with a tweedprofessor
someone who'd, sure, eventually write a great
novel her smartset would enjoy, but who'd still
always beset upon her with his hohum demeanour
an affliction of memory of her undistinguished
college self onto her chosen and preferred strictly
cosmopolitan adult existence. Maybe the fact
that Tom Ford doesn't allow us to really process
her as someone triumphantly finished off by a
former lover she spurned, even as he wants, with
him not returning to her in the end even as she's
debased herself of a clear signature of pride in her
life away from him for him, to overtly make it
seem that this is what happens, is Ford's means of
enabling himself with an alternative if he can't
rewrite some past shameful encounter as
something spared justification for shame?
Maybe, if he's got to live with the ostensible fact
that much of his adult life has actually been
undermined by some past event he'd never fully
quitted, he can dig into his subconscious tested,
1296
irrefutable evidence that his adult life's simply too
legitimate to ever be something born out of having
being sidelined. Not cover, this time, but
antagonist, to a burr that's still dug in there.

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Labels: film, film review, movie, movie review, nocturnal animals

Fantastic "beasts," and how to react when

they're not properly locked in, in "Fantastic
Beasts and Where to Find Them"
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Colin-Farrell-Ezra-Miller.jpg

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
1298
Eddie Redmayne's Newt presents himself as
respectful and sometimes even demure, but though
there are honest aspects to both of these qualities
what he mostly is matches best with the
"troublemaker" moniker that was attached to him
during his time at Hogwarts. He sees the world as
requiring vast improvement foremost, a need to
encourage tolerance of strange animals amongst
his fellow wizards, but since we also see him
advocate against antimiscegenation laws, really
for the whole wallop of progressive causes and
sees himself as a potential chief agent for change.
In New York, he finds himself intertwined with
someone who is not exactly his equal. This is
Jacob, who unlike Newt never went to any kind of
special school, is not pursuing advanced studies in
the scientific art of magic creature naturalism, and
is, rather, mislaid into a terribly depressing,
isolated life working in a canning factory a job,
as the movie tells us, so foul it'll cut short his life
by decades. He wants terribly to have a chance at
opening his own bakery, but he has no collateral,
1299
so it's a pipe dream. Nevertheless, through being
allowed to tag along with the irrepressible Newt
Newt wants upon his first mishap acquaintance
with Jacob to "obliterate" all knowledge of magic
and the existence of witches Jacob has acquired,
but Jacob's required as a witness for a case against
Newt's perpetrations in New York so this proved
impossible he goes on a grand adventure and
discovers true love. Though he actually got to live
this dream fate, it's not something he still gets to
keep... it's not something that can never be taken
from him, and his friends do end up obliterating
his knowledge of both them and his accrued
adventures with them. He accepts his fate without
protest, with absolute acquiescence, basically
advocating the persecutor's case against him for
them, and we see him next moping back to the
factory where he'll be subsumed amongst all the
other despondent souls, surrounded, and dwarfed,
by any number of relentlessly fashioned stacks of
tin cans.
1300
Colin Farrell's Graves is one of the principle
leaders in America's society of wizards, but though
he presents himself simply as an honest if tough
enforcer of the status quo, what he actually is is
someone who is very dissatisfied with how
wizards have allowed themselves to be humbled
by "nomajs" i.e., pedestrian nomagic people
like us so to find themselves invisible amongst
them, playing coy, rather than asserting themselves
visibly, and is working for change. He has
consistent interactions with one ostensible "no
maj" in the city, a teenage boy named Credence
Barebone, who has been promised that he might be
granted the huge trespass of becoming a wizard
himself if he can help Graves find a tenyearold
orphan in the city who possesses great powers.
Credence is a fatherless orphan, lorded over by the
most terribly scary of guardian mothers. Though
clearly not entirely, he is still mostly cowed to her
intimidating will, almost completely any twitter
away from full subservient devotion means a
wicked, scarleaving beating with a belt, and he
1301
well knows it. Graves uses Credence to ostensibly
find the empowered orphan he's looking for and
then immediately abandons him, telling him,
though he actually does come from a wizard stock
he remains luckless in still being the sort of rare
runt denied all wizard powers. Credence, however,
doesn't sit quietly with this turnabout, and in fact
unleashes hell.
After the American election where the press
devoted equal time to Hillary's actually minor
trespasses as they did Trump's "epochal," massive
ones, we're supposed to be aware of drawing false
equivalences, but I'm depressing the fact of Newt's
goodness and Graves' evilness in favour of seeing
them as two individuals instructively worthy of
compare because I think we are watching them in
some sense similarly it registers to us that they
are both strong advocates for their causes, not just
that we like one and hate the other and that we
actually have more unconscious respect for how
Graves is interacting with Credence, what he's
1302
thereby risking in doing so. We suck up more
sustenance from his visitations with him than we
do with Newt's various interactions with Jacob,
because in a sense what he does with Credence is
more real to us. Here's where it's on the line,
because it actually bears resemblance to
encounters between bullies and brave "rescuers" in
our own lives.
With Jacob somehow it's just fluff, disconnected
from us. "Jacob" is about exactly the kind of
creation you'd put forward to a cautious mob,
fearful of change, to advocate for the inclusion of a
previously invisible outgroup. He's a version, in
his absolute harmlessness, of the happy gay couple
that gay marriage advocates put forward onto
shows like Oprah to loosen the masses' resistance.
They're absolutely harmless and lovable how
can you object to the inclusion of people like that?
What he is not, however, is someone they would
want those they are advocating for to actually
be like in real life, nor ever to represent their cause
1303
once the cause has gotten past the gate to become
part of the norm, because he's an insult to their
actual true interestingness, their true humanness,
their true ability to protest and their true potency of
will. "Jacob" probably registers to us like that as
we watch the film. Since part of the subject of the
film it's point, somehow is how one might
acquire entrance into the world of wizards if one is
stuck being a muggle, and none of us watching the
film bear any evident wizard marks, some part of
us might find ourselves feeling uplifted and happy
if the film confirmed that even though entrance
into this world is absolutely forbidden... that there
is no precedence for it, somehow through the most
fortuitous of circumstances, through the most
clever of confabulations, some muggle is made
through his harmlessness, his innocuousness, his
really just being after all a hapless bystander, to
have nevertheless spent too much time aware of
wizards for his connection to the wizard world to
ever really be depleted from him. He may not have
wizard powers, but he's breached one great barrier
1304
and who's to say that the next one, the even
better one, just as rigidly held, isn't actually
amenable to a great stealth advocate "lock
picker's" art as well?
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them.jpg
So while Jacob is some kind of untrue facsimile of
ourselves, lofted "into the sky" and involved in a
relationship with our betters that we have no
interest in other than that it succeeds, Credence is
the grounded, vastly more true version of
ourselves. He is a depiction of the sort of human
being Harry Potter would really have been if he
grew up in the kind of household that would so
despise and hate him he'd be perpetually
quarantined to a closet. So he is not full of spirit
and mischief and overt resistance. He mostly
quails to life, as so much that could have enabled
active participation has been sucked from him
before it had its chance to gestate. He can be
drawn to some actually considerable resistance...
1305
to think mostly of his own self interest rather than
his dangerous mother's, but it takes the constant
stealth intervention of fatherfigure Graves,
imploring him to take the risk required, for him to
do so.
Graves betrays Credence, but maybe we "take it" a
bit differently. He tells Credence what he thinks is
flatly the truth you are no wizard, and you never
can be one but when Credence reveals that
is
he
actually the person Graves has been looking for,
the person of vast powers that aren't wizard powers
but easily as formidable, and that are a threat to the
whole rigidly enforced homeostasis of the current
stultified wizard realm, and starts pushing back at
Graves and busting the world about him up, his
reaction is admiration, delight and astonishment.
Shit kid, you do not go down quietly!... Quite
genuinely now, fuck everything I've just said! Join
me and we will both celebrate our doings in this
world! For fucking real this time!... you're bloody
magnificent! Credence is Jacob when he is about to
1306
have his brain emptied by a wand jolt shot to the
head, saying, oh, by the way, by being those who'd
find every way to sneak in magical creatures into
America and advance causes you actually really
believe in even if it risked dire punishment, but
being so ready to be those requited to the stance of
having no other choice but play it by the book with
me, fuck you! fuck you! and fuck you!
And Newt would not be Graves delighted to see
what had been such an agreeably pliant ally
become all of a sudden more a powerful
and unaccountable eruptive force that is, more
akin to all the great magical creatures he adores,
who are so admirably irrepressible and assertive
when let loose on the world. He'd be more, shit
man, this is not how this is supposed to go... What
is supposed to happen here is that you play along
and continue to be hapless and then we eventually
decide to grant you some remission from your
pain. You'll still be sort of pathetic and register
mostly as a person all our make your
1307
advancement from making only your
grandmother's recipes will involve your only make
exact replicas of creatures you saw only because
we let you tag and that's all you really did, tag
along, but you'll get your bakery, you'll get an
assistant, and you'll possess some barest trace of
your memories with us, which might be recovered
at a later date into something better than that.
You weren't supposed to stage some kind of slave
revolt where you demand everything you want
right now as if it were always rightly yours! You
were supposed to wait until we were ready... and
we're only ready now for small disbursements of
allowance. We still require you yet as our sap and
our sop.

Aliens arrive to be sat on, in "Arrival"

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1308

1309

Arrival
When a film starts off with the a lonely lead
female character drinking a lot of wine, in a lake
house that's diffusely lit and morose in tone but
also flatteringly palatial, don't be surprised if aliens
show up at the planet's door that she proves the
only one who's up to actually communicating with
them. She's been abandoned of the love of her
daughter, of her husband, and her students don't
properly appreciate her genius what with their
twitter and Facebook and whatnot and despite
what she would show you of her outward
successful academic endeavours, she's mostly a sea
of selfinvolvement. What the aliens do, is show
just how wrong the whole planet has been to
ignore and deprive her even if it hasn't so
1310
deprived her of a plush university job (but it's not
Berkeley, because mr. knownothing, soandso
"big professor" has fooled the world into thinking
he's such hot holy shit!), all the career accolades,
plus a house that's just a smaller version of
something Bruce Wayne impressed us with in the
last "Superman" movie: because that's not the look
she wants, to properly see herself as the foresaken
ice queen. She doesn't have cats, though, or some
poor poodle she strangles with her love, but maybe
that'd be too much of a tipoff that what we have
here is a fantasy compensation where some poor
schmuck "aliens" are going to going to be forced
into the role of showing off just what a wonder she
is, even if they'd rather go off and share their first
planetearth beer with Jeremy Renner. They arrive
so placidly onto planet earth: maybe they know the

fate that awaits them?: we're just here to be acted
on. *sigh*.
The aliens are mostly inert combinations of
inverted large celery stalks and giant squids. They
1311
just stand there, like autistic individuals who at a
party would be no less than cold death arrived, but
out in the wilderness are peaceful, benign,
somewhat reclusive but thoroughly intelligent
creatures, waiting for someone who isn't a
bellicose dunderhead to approach and try and
understand them. Amy Adam's character... let's
just ignore her film name and call her Margaret
Mead or Diane Fossey, because that's the type she
is, whom we would assume would ignore humans
as silent and inexpressive as this if she was outside
this setting she doesn't seem much for military
personal; wouldn't seem too interested in luring
them into an intricate dance of communication;
and they're mostly ominously blankfaced and
serious too shows us how magically complex
these creatures actually are. Jeremy Renner is
supposed to be her coequal on this assignment.
But after a moment in the beginning where he
mansplains her his own true prominence, he has to
quietly go along mostly as her assistant, as she
shows him up in as loud a manner possible by
1312
accomplishing more in one visit with the creatures
than what everyone else assembled had managed
in their multitudinous various forays. Who could
have predicted that?
This film is a temporary salve for depressed
people. If some alien, outside intelligence
intertwined itself in the direction of this movie and
forced the protagonist aliens to insist at one point
on communicating with someone else if they
sidelined her when normal directorial control
was recovered, the movie wouldn't have turned
course and shown her simply respectful of their
change in preference and pleased with the
expanded communication that was thereby
enabled. It wouldn't show her joyous that
regardless of the turn of events, she'd proved a
very important part of creating the dialogue with
the foreign visitors the world had hoped for. It
would have drowned out these interactions, shown
no interest in them, and displaced her immediately
back into her palatial, lakehouse home, sipping
1313
wine, reminiscing on her lost child, lost husband,
and now on how her great meaningful relationship
with the aliens had been removed from her as well.
If the aliens showed up once again on
her television set, showing how with human
cooperation they'd solved all the universe's plights,
she'd grumble and throw her wineglass violently at
the set. How can you show off such little things
when what matters is that I am yet once again
rudely neglected and forlorn!
No, that would make her look too overtly evil.
Rather, she'd call some friend she'd domesticated
as an attendant sap, and explain how actually
grateful she was at everything that had
happened... even if they could of course gotten
much more from them and done so much faster if
they hadn't been so ignorant to forsake her help
and turn to colleagues who are actually nowhere
near her equal and who don't even truly
understand the very basics of communication and
who may have tenured positions at Harvard
1314
and Berkeley but who don't actually know
anywhere near as much as she does and who
really should be teaching
Hmmm.... In a malicious mood, I wonder what it
would have looked like if when the aliens at one
point were signalling about a weapon, it turned

out that that was actually what was on their minds !
But not on their using a secret ray gun
to devastate earth, but on securing a plainold,
earthproduced, loaded gun, in which to blow
their brilliant and complex squid brains out,
at being requited to what had proved the
unendurable role of being fodder for someone
else's specious further anointment. Good god! I
mean, I knew this wasn't going to be pleasant...
that being movieprop saps we had to play the part
of the visiting kid pet endlessly by his
depressed alcoholic aunt, but lord doesn't she
ever shut up!!!
EndFragment
Knew you but a little but even that proved too
1315
much, dear planet earth! Maybe next time
something a bit timid creeps up to your planet,
hoping only at first for a quiet "hello," maybe
DON'T immediately beset upon it the person
YOU'RE ALL trying to avoid?!!!
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Dialogue with Diane G

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Diane G writes: (speaking to Jim and myself):
Jim: As someone who spent 16 years as Chief
Psychologist in one of the largest prison systems in
the country supervising others and directly
involved in diagnosing thousands of men with
psychopathic and antisocial traits and attempting to
treat them, I can assure you Jim that I know
exactly what I am talking about. In all likelihood,
1316
the only way to deal with this man, who
unfortunately is at the helm, is to reverse the
projection and "lock him up". But, as I said, this is
not about him only. His entire party in Congress is
problematic. And its notions about women's health
as well as science and other matters is archaic and
self serving. Your condescending comment to me
is emblematic of the helplessness involved in not
being able to engage in mutual dialogue without
being reduced to ad hominem attack and a need to
dominate and control, which rather proves my
point re the suppression of women and factors that
contribute to it. More women voted for Clinton
though not a vast majority of white women did.
The identification of some white women with
their mate and her own phallo centrism is a
complicated process. There is a type of self
abnegation, isolation and a loss of selfhood that is
involved reminiscent of the type of thing we see in
domestic violence. I would expect that white
women with low information who are further out
west are much less likely to identify with women
1317
having advanced education and experience. Black
women tend to be a bit more sensitive to the kind
of man Trump is. Interestingly, an informal poll
this summer at the major opening plenary of the
APA meeting by Johnathan Haidt (The Righteous
Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics
and Religion) had hundreds of attendee
psychologists raising their hands in support of
Clinton and less than 10 who were voting Trump.
Patrick: I do not see your point with regard to
black people in the south. Child abuse is rife
throughout the US. Matter of fact, the vast
majority of sex crimes against women and children
in the US are committed by white men of which a
representative portion go to prison. Still, since
this crime is under reported (as one can easily see
from the President elects history), it is difficult to
get an accurate figure of how common it is. While
we have plenty of evidence of the harms of
spanking, it continues here but I imagine it is more
prevalent in some poor and uneducated groups
1318
than others. I was surprised at an informal poll in
a psych group here that showed so many spanking
their children.
This list does not show the material I am
responding to so that is it for now.
Patrick, I am presenting a psychoanalytic paper
this Sunday in part showing how the US is
mirroring the suicidemass homicide mission with
some cites from de Mausse. Child abuse in
general is a foundational element of the thesis.
However, the suppression of women is a part. Of
course, this is not just about the actions or
deprivations but about the mental representations.
There are many parallels. It is eerie. Another
piece that I think is eerie is the NY Times book
review of a new bio on Hitler. I have not looked at
the Atlantic Monthly article The Mind of Trump
though I have heard it is pretty good. I expect Mr.
Trump will become increasingly more isolated and
paranoid and dictatorial as time goes on and he
loses the over idealizing support of his followers,
1319
or he will just quit or be impeached by Congress
within a reasonable period of time. In the mean
time, he can do quite a bit of damage to existing
structures and, and because of the low degree of
authentic empathy, will not be someone we can
count on to do the right thing. I think the over
identification with his rage by the supposedly
newly disenfranchised blue collar white male will
fade as we still are a system of law and there will
be no Krystalnacht (sp?) without just consequence.
For blacks it is easier to figure out. They are used
to dealing with the phallocentric white and will
appear more compliant and acquiescent to humor
him. But the rage will only be suppressed for a
time. The master slave identity is a survival
technique that can be re introduced temporarily.
Perhaps we needed to have this period so we can
empathize better with some of the victims we have
amassed here and overseas.
1320
1321

Women's rights is a big deal for me because of
what I went thru as a young woman. Perhaps as
our rights are gradually eroded millennial women
will take up the flag and realize what Madeline
Albright and Gloria Steinem were trying to tell
them. BTW I just noticed in my state the Dems
are still trying to get pay equity for women at .77
to the dollar for men but Republicans continue to
stop it. For people who think this a zero sum game
I guess they will be happy about that and the idea
of locking down borders. Meanwhile, I am trying
to figure out how long i have b4 I need to get out
of the market.
Gloria Steinem is also the one who argued that
people wouldn't vote for Hillary because she
reminded them of their scary moms. Hers' was
actually the most acutely "Freudian" (or Jungian:
Dragon Mother) assessment I've seen. I personally
think that even if you had a man as the Democratic
1322
candidate Sanders, or whatnot it wouldn't have
mattered, because what ought to be automatically
inferred when someone argues that the nation is
still ruled by "mother issues" is the politically
more consequent fact that people who had mothers
who were unloved enough themselves that they
required their children to meet their own unmet
needs, and punished them when they individuated
and selfactualized for their crime of "abandoning"
them, is that they can only handle society
progressing in selfactualizing ways for so long.
Eventually, as Lloyd argues, they need to put an
end to the growth, fuse with their nation as a
motherland, split their own "badness" onto other
peoples, and then war against them.

My response:
My own opinion is that Trump will be way more
successful than people realize. Right now I'm
hearing educated people come to the conclusion
that Trump won, not actually because so many
1323
people are racist but because they have been
economically abandoned by elites of both parties
who didn't give a shit about them. They envision
people returning to the left as soon as the left goes
more Sanders... becomes more economic populist.
I'm also hearing lots of talk about Trump losing the
popular vote, and how that shows how he actually
, not
is beginning his presidency a bit isolated
empowered. When I think of this I think of the
Bernie Sanders supporters during the campaign,
many of whom are millennials who genuinely are
society's most emotionally evolved, but many of
whom were actually misogynistic, and loved the
fact that under cover of ostensibly irrefutably
being motivated to support the most progressive
candidate out there, they were with him because it
let them fully enjoy vilifying Hillary, overtly enjoy
their hating "the witch," which they'd clearly been
wanting to do for some time. Some of these might
still have voted for Hillary over Trump, but it
won't take long before they're entirely his camp.
1324
And how you're depicting the black population
how Brittney Cooper portrays them as
which is
well, I admit, even as I think it's pretty obvious
she's deluding herself so she can keep her own
birchwielding mother and grandmother
superhuman angelic is I think going to set us up
for more disappointment. We the left saw the
white American populace as racist just moments
ago, but are now in unison pulling back because it
is psychically discomforting to be drawn to hate
those whom we are more and more being forced to
acknowledge as having been economically
abandoned by us. Previously we didn't allow
ourselves to really see their deprivation, focused as
we were mostly on our own professional lives and
polite and commercial havens. And as a result, we
were in a sense and even if we were using them
as our own "poison containers," that is, convenient
places we deposit aspects of our own selves we
need to disown more "fair" to them: their

problem is really what it was that spawned their
racist, homophobic, antifeminist ways i.e.
1325
terrible childrearing not us for so long not really
giving a shit about them. Rather than cast a

romantic glow on struggling white Americans what
we really needed to do is be more aggressive in
attributing regressive psychological states outside
the white population (where it certainly still is
aplenty), and begin to recognize them better in all
peoples whose childrearing is as abusive and
abandoning as it is in Hillbilly Nation... and
apparently in all the Rust Belt states... and maybe
also. If we could do that, we won't be surprised
when Trump continues to gain support, which he
will, and when members of the press, the judiciary,
seem caught up in the same spell as everyone else,
and institutions we thought were sure blocks
against him are not only not effectual but in some
cases, have morphed into building blocks for his
cause.
The American left constitutes the most emotionally
evolved people who have ever lived. They have
not however outgrown two things their children
1326
will eventually completely outgrow. One, they did
not outgrow the need to disown unwanted aspects
of themselves onto other people. They did project
some of their own "badness" onto the white
working class their vulnerability, their rage
and disconnected all feeling towards them. This is
something akin to what regressives do all the time
and to a much greater extent. And it does not
mean that there was any other societal group or
party still better able to stick up for them out there,
of the same mien. Second, as Steven
but it is
Pinker points out, they have taken every group that
white bigots hate and cast Rousseauian makeovers
over them. This was entirely unnecessary, and it's
going to hurt as we organize to fight Trumpism
and find that a surprising number of minorities
actually kind of like the hypermasculine leader
who's now in charge, even if they didn't originally
vote for him, and wonder why we're always
defending societies' "weakest" when like Trump
we could we making the nation invigoratingly
strong again. Fearful of progress, because as
1327
Brittney Cooper says, it made them grotesque
"Columbuses," "manipulating and ordering the
universe to our own liking," they've regressed to
scared children again, imagined to be encircled by
terrifying parental tormentors. And, they think,
here we are bringing the softer side when Trump
could make us steel!
We're Jews in a Nazi society. That's how we've got
to think, prepare ourselves. Not the temporarily
mislaid who still have many friends and who espy
in the horizon the moment when Trump will falter
and we'll be able to assert ourselves again. For the
"crime" of genuinely wanting the best for people
and wanting people to grow Scandinavianlike
selfactualized and independent from life
inhibiting, regressive traditions, we won't have
many friends, because when most people get on
this train it leaves them feeling like they've lost all
chance at their parents' love. And when they war
against people like us, it makes them feel the
parental favourite, the mommy's favorite, they
1328
perhaps never were in real life. For them, there
won't be any greater kick than their stomping on
our faces because they'll be imagining their
mothers smiling down upon them for it. Good for
you! Pick on the one who'd lure you away from
me!
Best of luck with your paper.

Diane G writes:
Patrick, I did finally hear amongst the noise and
rattle, the reason for the lost election, on a major
news channel. Everything was thrown at this
woman in the end. It is not only that we have a
psychopathic male running for office with frequent
reference to racism, sexism and oddities of
discourse, extreme and almost murderous
projections throughout the time and a history of
exploitation of just about everyone he has come
into contact with for any length of time, but how
others directly and indirectly helped his cause.
1329
This was about misogyny.
Beginning with the Republican outrage about
emails that caused an 11 hour badgering and
harassment, then morphing into a democratic
candidate who decided to excoriate her based on
all manner of so called "offenses" regarding money
which offended his socialist soul but which men
have been involved in for more than 200 years and
someone who has his own issues historically with
women, then the hammering from the press for the
perception of not being more forthcoming, for
"hiding" something which is a typical womb envy
motivated accusation. Then she is "too sick".
Compared to what? Followed by a circus
performance by Trump was a disgrace and should
have been taken as an insult to any decent
physician. Then we have FBI Comey who said she
is not guilty, then lets look again, then there's
nothing there. This is pretty awful in itself but the
back drop is hacked emails which were evidently
orchestrated by Russia, often distorted and taken
1330
out of context and emptied upon the media and
public in a measured way throughout the entire
period. Finally, and this was something many did
not see . . . Several days before the election Pope
Francis issue a statement and threw it out to the
public and to the U.S. "Women can never be
priests". Why did he choose that moment? Why
did he even mention something that Catholics are
well aware of? It was code to all religious people
that women are to be submissive and not take
power. Calling her a demon is part of this last
motif.
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But all of this could be put down as simply
campaign mud if it weren't for the determination,
despite by now much walking back, that Roe v
Wade is to be overturned. Unfortunately it will
take quite a bit to go against this problem because,
as we can see, even women themselves have to
overcome their own internalized misogyny which
has developed over millennia. I say these things to
sensitize you and others who may be reading.
Most informed women, including the young, want
to be partners and not objects. Being reduced to
cutesy sex objects without minds like Sarah Palin
or Melania Trump is not what intelligent women
are all about. These are insults.
My response:
Re: "Internalized misogyny which has developed
over millennia."
James is right to direct us to the fact of so many
1334
married... of so many educated women voting for
Trump. Only, I think that his "rejecting leftwing
politics" isn't a sensible choice that'll save our
nation, as he presents it, or your believing that
women have succumbed, understandably, given
that they're having to struggle for whatever
inadequate gains they've made against
accumulated millennias of teachings that they are
evil, vile, selfish creatures, and it's a slipperily held
thing. I think women Trump voters, like everyone
else who voted for Trump, will vote for things that
will curb the capacities for true selfactualization
(e.g. Roe vs. Wade) because it is thereby that they
feel they can reclaim their mother's approval. Of
course, they very much plan to hate on their
mother too, which is what Pope Francis was doing,
which is what Comey was doing, which is what
Bernie Bros were doing. But this mostly will
involve a split. "Hillary" carrying the bad aspects,
mother country America, the good.
In my judgment, you can be informed and
1335
educated to the tilt, but if you had an emotionally
immature mother who was neglected and abused
by her own caregivers, and who needed you for her
own emotional homeostasis more than she actually
loved you, as you and your sisters accumulate
progress for yourselves you'll come to feel like
your mother has turned away from you, like she
did when you were an infant and you first learned
to walk, like she did when you were a teen and you
began your course on your own life journey, and
suddenly you'll start reducing yourself to
something degraded to save yourself from the
apocalypse of her complete abandonment. You'll
have Lloyd's (and Van der Kolk's) "persecutory
parental [read: maternal] alters" yelling in your
heads, and you'll heed their call, even if you have a
whole assembly line of PhD knowledge otherwise
filling up the space there.
I really hope the cities are as
powerfully cosmopolitan as some are
suggesting they are. It is not just the dumbing
1336
down of women that makes me sad reducing
them to something harmless and uninteresting
it's it happening to everyone as we turn
nationalistic and stupid.
As female Trump supporters start screaming for
the blood of their feminist sisters, I really hope that
some scholars out there will come to the
conclusion that something other than
misinformation is involved. If they see other
women as demons who need to be destroyed, have
they been taught this? You can teach this? Or
could it owe to their being possessed... maybe by
their killer moms?
None of this should sound too outrageous here. It's
pretty much straight deMausian thought. I weep
for all the women who didn't get their full chance
to selfactualize and be very much opposite of
cutesy sex objects, as I weep for all the boys who
didn't get their chance to fully selfactualize as
well. I'm in the fight to help ensure this fate for
everyone, but I think we have to be smarter as to
1337
the actual causes for misogyny, for DeMause's way
will help us understand why men and women will
feel so incredibly righteous as they target
empowered, feminist women. It means their
mother's love has returned to them. And it will be
lost again if you somehow manage to get through
to them again. We're too late in this time period's
growth phase for this sacrilege to be tolerated.
1338

This is an excerpt of full dialogue originally at
realpsychohistory google groups
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1339
Initial task of Trump to create a powerful

killer Mutterland?
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Is the economic story really that liberal

1341
elites have left their working class

countrymen behind?
If one is attending to Michael Moore or Chris
Hedges or Robert Reich or ... pretty much every
liberal right now, one is hearing that liberals have
to acknowledge that the reason they were caught
off guard by Trump is that they hadn't previously
wanted to look at the extent of the economic hurt
that was out there: they were in a bubble. They
detached themselves from other people's suffering,
and engaged with them only to hate them for their
bigotry... for being the basket of deplorables they
are. If one is listening to Thomas
ostensibly only
Frank and Chris Hedges and Andrew Sullivan,
specifically, we are being made to understand that
this was quite deliberate: that liberals have come to
hate the people who've been battered most by the
global economy that emerged since Clinton.
wanted to
I think that liberals have
detach themselves from an America they saw
1342
correctly as not being able to keep up with a more
challenging, novel, and progressive world they
wanted to formulate. But it wasn't just liberals' (or
if you prefer, the liberal professional class's)
own stranglehold connection to power that made
everything that kept an empowered working class
country in place, evaporate, but more the working
to find themselves stripped of
class's desire
previously achieved security and status.
Here is Lloyd's fascinating counter to the argument
that recessions and depressions the production of
economic wastelands owes mostly to
cruel negligence by those spoiling themselves at
the top:
(3) Internal Sacrifice SolutionIf the leader
cannot find an external enemy with whom to
engage in a sacrificial war, he often turns to an
internal sacrifice, either a violent revolution or an
economic downturn. At the end of the 1920s, for
instance, as economic and social progress seemed
to have gotten "out of control," world bankers—
1343
chief sacrificial priests of modern nations
pursued deflationary economic policies, trade
barriers were erected and many other "mistakes"
were made that were motivated to produce the
Great Depression that sacrificed so much of the
wealth of
the world. As Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon
said in 1929 as the Federal Reserve pushed the
world into the Great Depression, "It will purge the
rottenness out of the system." Business cycles, as
William K. Joseph has shown, are driven by the
manic and depressive cycles of groupfantasy, as
manic defenses against growth panic are followed
by depressive collapses into emotional despair and
inaction. Indeed, most death rates car crashes,
homicides, cancer, pneumonia, heart and liver
diseases rise during prosperous, manic times and
are lower during depressions and recessions. Only
suicide internal sacrifice rises during economic
declines, reacting to the prevailing groupfantasy
need for internal sacrifice.
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Depressions and recessions are thus not due to
"the Invisible Hand" of economics but are
motivated sacrifices that often kill more people
than wars do, halting dangerous prosperity and
social progress that seem to be getting "out of
control." That growing wealth often produces
anxieties rather than happiness can be shown
empirically. From 1957 to 1995, Americans
doubled their income in real dollars, but the
proportion of those telling pollsters that they are
"very happy" declined from 35 to 29
percent. Periodic economic downturns are the
antidotes administered by sacrificial priests for the
disease of "greed." Cartoons prior to economic
downturns often portray greedy people being
sacrificed on altars or children being pushed off
cliffs, scapegoats for "greedy" childhood selves
felt to be responsible for the trauma once
experienced. Like Aztec human sacrifices,
recessions and depressions are accompanied by
national sermons, "cautionary tales," about how
sacrifices are necessary to purge the world of
1345
human sinfulness.
The choice between these different solutions to
growth panic follows cyclical patterns, wars and
depressions alternating in groupfantasy cycles of
varying lengths. The empirical historical
investigation of these "long cycles" of group
fantasy will be examined in detail in the next
chapter, "War and Cycles of Violence."
I think in a sense what has happened is that the
time for suffering, for repenting previously
accrued growth, has ended, and now the working
class is using the economic destitution that they
actually wanted staged and wanted, as it decreased
the sense of psychic disintegration that was
ensuing from being linked to an America that was
progressing both materialistically and culturally, as
reason to start a war on the educated on
cosmopolitans, specifically. They told their elites
to abandon them. They did so. And now they're
telling elites that they are to be punished for
having done so.
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With Lloyd's way of thinking, if there had been no
economic hardship during the last 40 yrs, if
somehow everyone had during this time been
guaranteed a living wage that wasn't sure to get
tripped up when "the loans got called in," we'd still
be in the age of Trump. Indeed, his numbers might
be fewer: the psychic distress caused by profiting
economically during a time when prosperity owed
to liberal economic innovations, not conservative
populism, would have rendered many of them total
psychic discombobulates. Hitler gave his
folk Volkswagens and employment, and they were
enjoyed rapaciously. But they felt they were
entitled to it, it caused no guilt, because nothing
about their economy bespoke children distancing
themselves from old folk ways.
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Labels: chris hedges, lloyd demause, michael moore

1349
What's awry in our loving the perfect

couple, in "Loving"
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Loving
What could be wrong with telling a story about an
absolutely beautiful, loving couple, gaining the
right to stand proudly married in a heartland of
bigotry? How about if the setting is actually
convenient for you to stage how you're finding
yourself driven to imagine your own psychic
reality: on the side you're on, all good and purity;
and on the other, all foreboding, encroaching
villainy. For if this were the case, the interest in
those actually afflicted Mildred and Richard
Loving isn't as profound as they deserve, and as
you're pretending it to be. You're feeling anxious,
and so you make use of the past and your art to
stage a psychological resistance which quiets your
own terrors, but remits actual people that deserved
your full attention, to your convenience.
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For the person viewing this film, Mildred and
Richard's home offers a sort of inlet into a vast
Southern "sea" of bigotry. It's recognizably
attached, part of and not completely alien to the
rest of Southern society. These are not New
Yorkers trying to tough out living there, but a
couple who've only known living in this area and
whose descendants have been there for
generations: it's their milk and honey. So it seems a
point of entry where you can see up close Southern
culture, but there is no chance that you'll be
ambushed within the household with the same
dense bigotry you're creeping up on. What we have
here then is the same staging that people who've
known being hemmed in early in life by their
needy parents who were threatened by their
children's emerging desire for autonomy and self
actualization erect when they're regressing. That
is, they project onto the outside world a face of
scary people encircling them, who represent their
parents, ready to once again dominate them for
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their embracing unallowed trespasses into the
world of selfautonomy, and within their own
"home" they fill it with the pure and the good,
defended by great "monsters" of their own, of such
great majesty they can take beat up the villains
outside.
In this film, the "monsters" we've got on "our" side
are the ACLU, which in the 1960s the setting for
the story was beginning to pretty much wear
society's superman cape of unquestioned
legitimacy as well as know the unconquerable
power of his muscles. So the story is of Southern
bigots targeting a sweet couple, and finding their
unsuspecting, overconfident sorry asses before the
Supreme Court! They dumb 1950sruled
imagination poked what proved to be an
awakening 1960s' bear! Does this sound like the
sort of narrative, not someone of the left, but that a
paranoid nationalist would evoke to explain their
situation visavis the rest of the world? It does to
me, and akin to the one that's dominant now: a
1352
threatened America which had ISIS and
immigrants pouring in on all sides, finally finds a
Trump visiting them who intends to, and who will,
balk back incursions onto a nation of proud and
simple folk so to finally restore decency.
What actually would have been best evidence that
this was an incontrovertibly liberal film is if it
allowed some evidence that the mind taking in this
film was prepared to accept a portrayal of the
Loving family that would surely threaten anyone
who needed a simple good vs. evil story, with
cognitive dissonance: it would have been to their
point of view, confounding and distressful, but to
our point of view, appropriately complex and
multivariant, even while in some aspects
appropriately straightforward: antimiscegenation
laws are antifreedom and must, after all, only be
defeated and die. I mean, if what we liberals think
is that antimiscegenation laws are grotesque
affronts to people's civil liberties which they
most certainly are we don't really need to show a
1353
couple that is being denied full happiness owing to

these laws as an absolutely perfectly loving couple ,
do we? These laws are evil for their own sakes,
period; their evilness is not dependent on the fact
that they happen to squash the happiness of
especially endearing couples, but simply because
they serve to kill happiness. There's a reporter in
the film, very sympathetic to the Lovings, who
uses photos to sculpt a careful picture of them so
their cause will be popular in what was still a
broadly racist nation, wary of a new emerging age
of massive cultural change; but we're 2010, and
this is a film not for the majority of Americans to
learn from an advocacy film but probably only
for the educated to mull over, so why are we
getting this simpleton version, appropriate for
propaganda purposes in the1960s, now?
What we risk is betraying our own defence of
decent people by inadvertently fooling ourselves
into believing our defence is dependent on them
, to depict
being as we've chosen, as we've needed
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them as Rousseauian perfect and splendid, that
is. We are not for much longer going to be
controlling the universities and mainstream news
sources. With Trump, this will all change. And if
we have been doing the right thing by defending
people from prejudice and ensuring they live as
freely as anybody else in society, but the mistaken
thing in making it so that we can only see
righteously afflicted peoples as great giants of
goodness and soul, then when we're more and
more forced by the emerging altright to see people
stripped of our projections, we risk blanching at
immediately defending people who'll never more
need instantly summonable support.
Why is it that we've made that connection in the
first place? That we defend people who had
previously been victims of prejudice, but also cast
an ostensibly wholly unnecessary glowing
makeover over them? I think it is because though
the left is massively more psychologically evolved
than the right, are creatures of significantly more
1355
love, they have not as much as they think freed
themselves from needing to impose psychodrama
over the ingredients everyday reality supplies. I've
mentioned how we've imposed parental
persecutors onto the like of white racists, but I
think at other times what we've done is projected

aspects of ourselves onto them unwanted aspects
and then gone and disconnected all feeling, all
empathy, towards this now forlorn group. Most of
the left after all emerged out of families that were
more racist, more bigoted, than they themselves
are, and unless they came from a generational
chain of stalwart leftist leaders who were always
on societies' progressive end, the possibility that
this has completely left their psyches is unlikely.
They however feel that as much has happened,
owing to the fact that they've projected all these
stillpossessed inklings to hate the different into
the white working class especially those of the
American South. What's more, as children of
parents who were emotionally wellsupplied
enough to not be so fearful of our emerging
1356
freedom that it intimidated us off of fully self
actualizing and growing up, but not so healthy that
we were able to selfactuate without it making us
suspect we'll be abandoned for doing so, we've
also projected "vulnerability" and "isolation" into
the white working class, as we willynilly staked
our own life gains. The fact that white working
class has withered economically to the point of real
and terrible despair but that it has gone unnoticed
by the professional class, by the left, owes its
origins to the fact that they've served a convenient
grouping what the psychohistorian Lloyd
DeMause calls, a poison container that contained
our own vulnerability. And in detaching ourselves
from these "containers," we feel much less
tormented, and can go at life in a sane fashion. But
if we were to begin a more realistic assessment of
who bigots are, something possible to us as we've
got a much greater capacity to appreciate the
monstrosities that childhood trauma produces in
people e.g. it is certainly within our reach to
grapple with the truth that, universally, sexual
1357
predators were sexually abused in their own
childhoods we'd effectively be unloosening these
containers, and aspects of ourselves which had
been quarantined off would set upon us again. And
maybe we're now ready for it... and maybe, we
unconsciously fear, we're not.
Could you imagine if we acknowledged bigots as
creatures of several parental abandonment and
bizarrely were inclined to hate
abuse, and yet still
them? We'd be coming close to finding ourselves
bearing signs that pointed
hating the weak for
directly to their weakness. Could you imagine if
we lifted the veil of people whom bigots have
picked on and saw them not in a sensible and
evolved fashion, that is, as the likely deformed
adult products that constant abuse always
produces, but in our parent's regressed fashion: as
people possessed of character attributes that
actually warrant caustic blame and merciless
punishment? Seeing ourselves screaming at the
weak would draw us to psychically die; it would
1358
be the undoing of everything we'd hoped to stand
for. Our legacy would be that we had been well
loved enough that when the psychic and societal
mechanisms that drew us to be the most empathic
creatures we could be, were withdrawn, and we
witnessed angry, bigoted monsters emerging from
out of us, where others might have continued
wholehog and done much evil we'd cared enough
to withdraw and selfcombust.
We need to know we've got a left out there that
can't get untethered, lose its shit, when it is forced
to see that what it has taken as simply reality has
actually only been what they have cast as "reality"
in order to isolate childhood demons and provide
them with the becalmed space to work and live in
that psychic peace allows. Such a left would look
at this film and not "feel good," but rather start
peppering it with questions. Why is that this
couple is so good when everyone else around them
is defined by hate, is absolutely, in the worst way,
mongrel? Is this absolute exceptionalism to be
1359
believed? Do we need them to be this good, and
would we have felt uncomfortable if they were
actually shown as the kind of complicated, even at
times, unloving couple, that the soontobe
divorceridden, white middle class often actually
was during this period? Do we need them to be the
angels to their own children that they were in the
film? Would we have hated the feeling of wanting
to actually withdraw away from them if we saw
them yelling and screaming at their children, a
development which would thereby have made the
UCLA visitors from New York not just

intellectually superior but in every way superior to
this interrace couple we want much more to love?
They are expelled from the state for their illegally
marrying and they leave for much less bigoted
terrain Washington D.C., I believe. Why was the
portrayal of this not simply as absolutely
fortuitous, a blessing, even if it developed out of
regretful hateful impulse? They were so set on
clinging to a home barely any distance from that of
their parents', and thereby situate their children in
1360
ongoing, regressive Hillbilly culture. Why was this
not portrayed in the film as their fear of freedom,
of what a more actualizing environment would
allow for them? Why was this passed over? Why
when they were about to have a child did they need
to return to their parents, to go back "home"? Was
it really owing to the fact of their admirable
respect for Richard's midwife mother and their
many memories of her assisting community
members of admirable homage to a living person
and to tradition worth not fleeing from? Or was it
really a regretful retreat when another incident that
realized their selfactualization their now not
only being married but commencing a family
took place? Why when they permanently moved
back to their bigotsurrounded previous home, was
it given such legitimacy in the film? That is, when
Mildred says the roads are too dangerous in the
city, that next time it could kill their children, not
simply harm them, why wasn't some attention put
but the schools
to the fact that, yes, this may be,
are actually more likely to teach them something
1361
evolved in this place, and if they actually survive
rather than the statistically dubious possibility of
getting rundown, that's a road toward something
useful that no country pathway is apt to provide.
Why couldn't it be suggested that their parents
were taking their kids away from a more liberal
environment because thereby their children would
be less able to leave them behind. So not the
possibility of cars running the kids over, but in
truth because kids might be empowered to distance
themselves from them, that the country once again
was chosen. A cruel retreat that the parents could
enable because the kids didn't have the help of a
state that in their case, insisted they live in the
more evolved location. When the parents abjure
their chance to be present in the courtroom as their
case moved to the Supreme Court, why did the
film absolutely excuse it as owing to Richard's
understandable thorough disinterest in hearing the
opposition say mean things about their children in
public, and not offer some other consideration, like
they feared the limelight because it would draw
1362
them to acknowledge themselves as stars and risk
their feeling spoiled? Acknowledging the honour,
which is how presence in the court is pitched to
them, would make them special, when their case
absolutely justified their feeling that way, and their
courage and latitude, warranted such a coronation.
Maybe in reality they weren't defending their
children so much as they were defending
themselves against a spotlight that every liberal in
the 60s was embracing, for it meant balking back
all that restrained the good from living the good
life. Shouldn't we suspect a film that shows
drawing back from being "special" as showing
something admirable of one's character, which is
the effect here? Isn't this a betrayal of the sort of
acceptance of pleasure that the 60s gave to society
and which ultimately best represent what makes it
such a historically significant and progressive
time? It enabled freedom, it enabled happiness. It
allowed people not to be cowed by accusations
their own parents' had once thrown upon them
like being secretly spoiled and selfselfcentered,
1363
neglectful of homage to timetested, goldieoldie
ways, like Southern miscegenation laws.
The Lovings, as they are depicted in the film,
deserved our instinct to want to shout them out of
their passivity and plant hard their own two
feet, in their home in the South, in their home in
Washington D.C., and on the stand in the Supreme
Court. The instinct to want to coddle them at the
finish as cute is also something we the left should
explore about ourselves. What happens if those in
our own times whom we might want to see as loyal
to our cause, reveal themselves as becoming more
those who want to bite us, as actually hating us
more than those we're attacking for directing so
much hate upon them. If Trump ends up gaining
huge recruits from nonwhites in the next few
years, we'll know what that feels like. And it's
important once again that we can take this
development in stride, and not have to
superimpose a no longer existing "reality" upon the
real one that's regretfully developing before our
1364
eyes, because otherwise as we let loose old mental
structures and attempt to reorient our schemas, the
letloose, oncecontained past will crash through
and drown us. It'll mean in some sense that us, not
Trump, is fixed to the past. You're not doing what
you're doing; you're not doing what you're doing;
you're not doing what you're doing.
Recent Facebook postings concerning the

Trump victory
1365
Patrick McEvoyHalston
4 hrs ∙
1366
Lots of talk now about how more than half of
voting Americans voted for someone other than
Trump. There's anticipation that they might yet
sideline this guy, trip him up. But we liberals are
only getting a small taste now of the number of
Americans that will be abandoning us. It's going to
grow and grow, as Trump successfully creates his
version of America as a land of newly purified
folk, who've recommitted themselves to a country
they'd forsaken, that'll include a vast number of
people who aren't white. If we're committed now
to being wiser so we aren't surprised by future
developments, we might remember how surprised
we were just recently that so many of our friends
whom we thought were feminists revealed
themselves, in their obscene hatred of Hillary, as
greatly misogynistic Bernie Bros, and shouldn't
assume that this phenomena of corruption within
what we thought was a heart of god has been
staunched. We might remember that SNL skit
which showed that many more Americans than just
Trump supporters are committed to the idea that
1367
Americans ought to be Godfearing and humble,
and remain everconscious of incongruent these
traits are with the progressive goal of
individualism and full selfempowerment/self
actualization. For many people, this is way too
much selfattending to not be Satan's cause. We
are "bad" and were meant to suffer.
I think he'll present a 1950s' version, but that
repairs a lot of the damage against black americans
(his vision of "bad immigrants" means those
brought in 1960s on, through Ted Kennedy's that
is, through "liberals'", through our efforts). The
border gate will come up quick, and you'll find
some members of the press will even say it
actually isn't so bad an idea. He'll start some
national work programs, and you'll find some
members of the press start saying that "that
Trump... he's actually not so bad a guy after all; we
just needed to give a chance!" He'll junk
Obamacare but surprisingly replace it with
something even more substantial for the working
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class Americans out there that have begun to
worship him. And some time after that, when his
number of friends has expanded into communities
you thought we're guaranteed committed against
him (God, national pride, Americans as creatures
of sin who've finally begun to redeem themselves
through accepting of life as a burden... I wonder
how many people who aren't white that'll draw in?)
he'll start talking about how what we need to
now is to eliminate from the country all the vermin
that had corrupted it. "Spoiled" university students
will be attacked, as will professors who ostensibly
have focused mostly on teaching future leaders to
hate what is best about the American way of life.
Many liberal professors who've viewed what's
happening in the universities with irritated anger
will say, "well, I still have problems with Trump
but these spoiled shits surely had it coming, with
all their ridiculous insistences and complaining
that only got in the way of their actually learning
something... who the fuck did they think they
were, anyway our bosses?!!" and we'll have lost
1369
another wall of people we thought were surely
with us. They subscribed to the New Yorker for
heaven's sakes. How could we possibly lose them?
The way Fascism goes, is first national "fusion,"
which draws in gargantuan numbers, including
many who you thought were committed to a
progressive vision, then the fracture. Civilization
has simply tilted too far from what people's corrupt
childhoods allowed them.

Yesterday at 12:41pm ∙
If you think Trump's America is only going to
appeal to white Americans you'll probably have to
do a rethink. That potential unity between white
and black Americans that the Black Jeopardy SNL
skit suggested, will prove real, as Trump begins his
initial objective: not just policies, but creating a
spiritually fused nation (Hitler's first goal was
national fusion, not an all out war on Jews). You're
on the out, not based on your colour I think his
1370
vision will be inclusive to black and white, though
no other colour included but by the fact that no
part of you wants to drift back into imagining the
country you were born in as some kind of spiritual
homeland: if you're internationalist, globalist,
progressive, atheist, to the core.
I think we need to get used to being just small
mammals in the age of dinosaurs returned,
knowing that no matter how daunting and
impressive their unexpected resurgence, no matter
how alarmed we are to see so many of our
previously evolving kin start to grow back reptilian
fins and whatnot, historically their time of reign is
still limited. I think we're going to need to prove
adept at waiting things out. Show our foresight and
impulsecontrol, not rush to see what the courts
will make of Trump's plans, because they won't be
able to do shit. Hillary and Trump got similar
numbers, but Trumpism will grow and grow.

1371
Yesterday at 10:18am ∙
Americans were beginning to feel too independent,
and parentally abandoned for it, so they regressed
(I'm a Freudian) back to the freedomcurtailed
1950s. The people who have most to fear: the
people "mommy" hates because they abandoned
her for their own spoiled, selfserving self
actualization i.e. progressives.
If America had been giving guaranteed annual
incomes and a life of prosperity to everyone
dispossessed by trade deals, this still would have
happened. It's not the money troubles, the
Depression, it's what James F. Masterson calls
"growth panic" a flight from freedom.
Psychoanalytic exploration of this phenomena can
be found at Lloyd DeMause's website,
psychohistory.com.
EndFragment
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1372
Labels: donald trump, facebook

It's for it remaining a necessary war, that

"Hacksaw Ridge" should make us flinch
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Hacksaw Ridge
Hollywood had shelved Mel Gibson as one of the
worst illrepute as antisemitic and it's been
awhile since we've heard from him. And it looked
like for a moment in the film that it might contain
little inferences here and there that didn't distract
from the plot, but basically let Hollywood know
how he'd felt about that. There's a character in the
film, you see, who's nicknamed Hollywood, and
we meet him early on, well before they get to the
war zone. He's very beautacious and full of
himself, and he wilts when under pressure. Classic
attack upon liberals; close to classic antisemitic
attack against Jews. But he's not revealed as empty
and worthless. Really, he ends up basically just
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average, as an average soldier, who performs but
also gets dismayed in fear too. And in this film that
actually counts for a lot, because Gibson is with
them all, the great and merely adequate soldiers,
and soldiers of all ranks too (officers can be in
error and really, really harsh, but never ill
purposed and sadistic). He's not even really mad at
the Japanese, either. There's a good hunk of
nobility in each of them as well: they were sized
up for us early in the film, just before the big fight,
as an endless onrushing hoard with no respect for
their own lives, but ultimately only to stage the
degree of subsequent American bravery. So if like
I did you felt lured into exploring the film a bit for
Mel's own disses at Hollywood, for his return fire
and attempts at revenge, that came to an end,
quick. And like me, with its surprising complete
absence, you might then in recoil have
reconsidered the main character, and began to see
to
him as perhaps actually a sort of Mel Gibson gift
those who'd called him a bigot and banned him
from his trade.
1374
Andrew Garfield's Desmond Doss is not just
stringbean thin, he's about as overtly a geek as
you can get: during his first date with the woman
he'll eventually marry, he wants to talk medical
terminology. His view of the war is about what
most liberals would assume theirs would be if they
had been living at that time: they'd feel very
threatened by on the encroaching Japanese, they'd
want Americans to fight, but they'd hope if they
had to be the ones serving that they wouldn't have
to kill to help end the threat. Doss's role would suit
perfectly, if they were requited to
intense battlefield duty. Rather than having to
focus on and kill other human beings, like him
they could perhaps find means where they'd focus
only on repairing the injured. Their act would not
just nevertheless still very much help the war
effort, it might amount to poetry, an unsuspecting
flower blooming out of a field of wilt, an
effrontery to dark times. They'd be doing as Doss
imagines what he'll be up to: "While everybody is
1375
taking life, I'm going to be saving it." This is the
"glory" they'd seek, in what for them really would
be just a sad and unfortunate development that
would have to be seen through, because the threat
is real.
So if in this film the closest person to someone a
liberal would naturally identify with is not only not
an object of sport but a hero, should liberals react
to the film actually warmly? Is the film akin to
Glen Beck's recent recantation, his revelation that
he actually loves the man he had been so
committed to hate (in Beck's case, Barrack
Obama)? The immediate rejoinder to this
possibility would be of course that this isn't just
war being shown, but massive carnage, and isn't
there something a lot lurid in being drawn to
battles which are just meatgrinders of human
lives? ("Hi honey, I love you and we should be
married, but first let me go onto this stage where
I'll play Russian Roulette with guns and grenades
and with half a chance of dying or losing multiple
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appendages or finding a crater where my stomach
used to be, to see if it's worth our making any in
depth preparations.") Was it, for instance, perhaps
mostly the fact that the real Desmond Doss did his
heroics on a battlefield which suffered casualties
akin to the worst in World War One, which drew
Mel Gibson to him? That if Doss had done his
many rescues in a less harrowing environment, a
less catastrophic one, Gibson would of passed it by
as of no interest and even chosen over it subject
matter that had nothing to do with war and had less
to do with courage, but got the carnage part right?
And if it's lurid, if it's pornographic, then isn't it to
the distraught Republican working class' taste, and
rather to the educated liberal's natural aversion?
I'm not sure this necessarily is the case. The thing I
felt after experiencing so much chaos and gore is
that there is some resemblance between situations
I've experienced myself and what the soldiers'
experienced that is, of being distraught by
unexpected chaos and assault, but eventually
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becoming accommodated and beginning to realize
goals which I've grown from and am actually
proud of. There's the equivalent, I think, in many
of our lives, of being delighted when during a
situation that first causes us considerable stress,
that is hopelessly overwhelming, we start seeing
our environment less as something to only defend
ourselves against but as something to start
manipulating for our own purposes. At one point
in an intense battle, a soldier realizes that the
bodies that are flying apart and which are only
affecting him, can actually serve to empower him,
and he uses one as a shield to begin his troops'
first legitimate advancement on a battlefield they'd
found themselves simply stuck on. Mightn't a
reporter who was being accosted by a street protest
but who found means to get their story by
pretending to be one of them, be just as grateful for
their onthespot innovations? Of having
performed well in what was at first only a stressful,
overwhelming, and even hellish environment? And
mightn't this film just remind them of their own
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adventure , not point to their ongoing gluttony for
restaging the unhealthy rush? Amount more to
a paean to the human ability to successfully
denature a stressful environment, than a PTSD
driven desire to repeat overwhelming trauma that'll
never actually be silenced? Be more for them what
the war experience will prove for Doss in that it'll
not be that of fellow soldiers' fallen bodies and
felled guts what it was ever after for his World
War Oneserving father but of applying smiles
to saved souls when the possibility of any such a
rescue seemed at first completely forlorn?
What for me makes this a film that Hollywood...
that liberals ought to be averse to, isn't who it
mocks and who it praises, it isn't that it's set in one
of the most pornographically gory battlefields you
can imagine, it's that there is no sense through any
of it that war is an insane endeavour, that no one
involved, is actually completely sane. Liberals
have become unused to seeing World War Two as
something insane, however. We've regressed from
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the brave Catch 22 sense of it. But the war
that. As to the idea that it was
nevertheless was
something that had to be fought, note that Hawaii
was left open for attack. Roosevelt was warned of
what was coming and could have avoided Pearl
Harbour, the whole Pacific Theatre, but he knew
that his nation had become, like all other nations at
that time, almost psychotic in their sense of their
nation as something pure which needed a righteous
cause to justify their obliteration of "the infidels"
surely encroaching upon them. Americans were
paranoid. They wanted a righteous fight. They
were of the mindset Americans, in electing Trump,
have evidently found themselves in now. And if
we get ourselves back to this keen awareness of
war as that, and lose this current sense of it as
regretful endeavours that nevertheless sometimes
remain necessary and which are sometimes even
worth being proud of, we'd instinctively flinch the
very moment a director portrays it as something
people came to out of rational deliberation.
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Even good ol' deliberating, manofconscience
Desmond Doss was probably insane. He
acknowledges family trauma for his aversion to
guns; that the war zone was his chance to undo his
once having pointed a gun at someone he still
deeply loved his father and nearly thereby
caused a catastrophe. We need to be brave enough
to consider even his desire to see just one more
sweet smile from a rescued soldier, in the same
light. Might he of had, perhaps, a depressed
mother, who he lived to find some ways to enchant
and entertain... draw an attentive smile from out of
her removed, remote soul? Was his inclination to
repeat, repeat, repeat, in what proved a generous
sense, not much removed from his need to be seen
and noticed in what proved for much of the film, a
disruptive sense: his attentiondrawing declaration
that he not only won't shoot a gun, but he won't
ever touch one either. There is nothing adult about
war. It's a stage where we regress and become
children fighting for our motherlands against
countries full of people we've split all our "bad boy
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and girl" selves onto. It's in not showing any of
this, that this film shows up its work against the
liberal cause which ultimately is about mental
sanity shows up its madness, shows up that Mel
Gibson hasn't changed one bit, even as we might
have moved a dismaying some, in his direction.
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Labels: film, film review, Hacksaw Ridge, mel gibson, movie, movie review,
saving private ryan
C.K. Lewis thinks of Hillary as not really a

feminist but as our childhood mother we
hated but didn't deserve
Louis C.K is all in for Hillary Clinton - CONAN on

TBS
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Sometimes the best arguments come from the most
unlikely sources. For example, comedian Louis
C.K. delivered the best argument for voting for
Hillary Clinton that you will hear from anyone
during this election.
C.K said, “I think she’s great. It’s not a lesser of
two evils thing. I think she’s great. She’s talented
and supersmart. I’d take her over anybody else
who would do it, and to me, it’s really exciting to
have the first mother in the White House. It’s not
about the first woman. It’s about the first mom.”
The comedian later explained that he supports
Clinton because she is battle tested and has taken
abuse from her critics for decades, “Hillary
Clinton can take abuse. She’s been taking it and
taking it. We’ve been holding her down and
spitting in her mouth… and she just keeps
working.”
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He later added the country needs a president who
can get things done, “I don’t want somebody who
is likable or cool and more.”
“ We need a twofaced, conniving, crazy ––
somebody who’s got a million schemes,” he
explained. “And, by the way, all (her) sh*t is out
there. Every email she ever wrote is in the
newspapers — and she’s not in jail which is
amazing. But we need a tough b*tch mother who
nobody likes and just does sh*t.”
He had some strong words for the complaining
class of liberals who are not going to vote,“If
you’re a liberal who’s not going to vote, you’re a
piece of sh*t!”
Louis C.K ’s summation of this election was
perfect, “This is my feeling overall. If you vote for
Hillary, you’re a grownup. If you vote for Trump,
you’re a sucker. If you don’t vote for anybody,
you’re an assh*le.”
You’d be hardpressed to find a funnier or more
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compelling argument for Hillary Clinton
anywhere else outside of Michelle Obama.
Comedians are our great social mirrors. Through
their humor, we see ourselves and our country.
Louis C.K. explained this election better than the
entire class of pundits that litter the cable news
landscape.
The 2016 election isn’t an argument over grand
ideas. It’s about who can do the job, and on this
measure, Hillary Clinton stands head and
shoulders above Donald Trump.
[reposted from politicususa; article by Sarah
Jones and Jason Easley]

C.K.'s right of course voting for Hillary is the
adult choice. But I think it is worth our time to
think on exactly how "adult" C.K. sounds here,
how emotionally sound.
The image of a mom here sounds about how a
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narcissistic mother imagines herself. That is, as
someone who does everything for anyone but
receives nothing for it but disrespect and neglect:
our abuse. I wonder if perhaps this was C.K's
mother. And the child who complains all the time
about a mother who perhaps wasn't there 200%
and who actually neglected and abandoned the

child, was himself his complaints, had basis .
And rather than acknowledge his own anger at his
mother , he displaces it onto himself and us (the
bad child who doesn't deserve his selfless mother),
thereby hoping to be worthy of the mother's
ongoing provisioning and avoid her medusa gaze.
Psychohistorians will note that this is the preamble
to an eventual sacrifice of bad children. (Emotional
Life of Nations, chapter 2). If it goes this way,
Hillary Clinton will be cleaned up, as we split off
her "twofaced, crazy bitch" aspects that nobody
likes, onto someone else. We'll keep her
toughness.
Regardless, it doesn't sound like he's setting up
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Hillary Clinton as a candidate who will function in
the DeMausian way, that is, as someone who'll
take into herself our own inner badness, our own
pollution (arising owing to dismay over too much
societal growth), and eliminate it; it sounds more
like she'll rebuff us, won't pay attention, as she
steers on through our idiocy. He actually makes
Trump sound more like the leader ("this guy, every
time he's criticized, everything stops and he makes
everybody pay that's not how it works") we
might be seeking, someone who's antenna is
affixed to our own needs, even if now it's only
ostensibly to strike out at us.
Anyway, Michael Moore has recently been
attacked by feminists for ostensible praise of
women which actually comes across more as
insult: i.e. Moore's tweet that women weren't
responsible for wars, the atomic bomb, etc. I
would hope some find some of the same here in
C.K. saying what we need is not a "first woman"
but rather a "first mom." First woman, after all, is a
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feminist conjuration, and bespeaks our progressive
– our adult
advancement; first mom, adoration
and excusing of what sounds like an
actual horrible mom, bespeaks ... regression, n'est
pas?
Thanks to Jerrold Atlas (at historical motivations,
Yahoo Groups) for the prompt.
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Labels: c.k. lewis, lloyd demause, psychohistory, realpsychohistory

"Dr. Strange" won't let its hero sink away

from being a showman
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Dr. Strange
Stephen Strange ostensibly has to lose all his ego,
become the opposite of narcissistic, in order for
him to become sufficiently powerful in the occult
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to heal his crashwrecked, formerly elegant, hands.
But if he were to do this, then the new member of

the Marvel Universe wouldn't be Dr. Strange , a
debonair, cosmopolitan, unpredictable and flashy
man of mystery, but rather someone anonymous,
who, while still doing some notable and even
spectacular things, is dressed in worse rags than
even the povertystricken Peter Parker had come
up with before Tony Stark elevated him a bit. Dish
Rag might be his moniker; or perhaps,
Okay To
Poop On Me If You Want To... Anyway, you get
the point: somewhere along the line Stephen
Strange has to recover out of submitting himself to
absolute humility and allow himself to flowerout
again, if he's going to be the strange and singularly
in the Marvel U.
interesting person he is
The way there it seems is to provide obvious signs
that simply leaving one's ego at the door and
agreeing to do the drudgery and humiliation of
endless constant practice, are the ingredients for a
cult where you never evolve out of being the badly
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dressed serf while a select few are profiting from
your slavery, adorning themselves with ample
jewelry, colossal homes, Ferraris: i.e. everything
you're not supposed to have and are adamant at
being permanently divorced from. The head "cult"
leader in this film the Chosen One doesn't go
around after hours in a Ferrari, of course, but she
does dapple huge in a realm of knowledge that no
one is supposed to touch for it being ostensibly the
very source of evil things like egoism and
narcissism, and comes out of this with no less than
eternal renewal, eternal life: the biggest golden
goose egg of all! It turns out the Chosen One is
doing her own kind of Clintonianism. Rules that
apply to "you" don't necessarily apply to her.
Strange uncovers this by going through and
mastering some of the same advanced books the
Chosen One has. The bait to do this, and to suspect
there might be something amiss with how she has
been applying her knowledge, comes from the fact
of the rather obvious Orwellianism at work in how
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the cult determines access to power. It's all overtly
egalitarian; there is no book, no knowledge, that is
permanently off limits. But because some books
might destroy you if you're not ready for them, you
only get to read them if a chief librarian a
personage chosen by the Chosen One, of course
judges you ready. And because the dark arts have
been built up as something that can warp even the
most disciplined and empowered mind, what this
means is that only the Chosen One and a disciple
she might choose every few centuries, ever gets to
read them. Not a problem, wouldn't be detected, if
no one knew these books existed... if a newbie like
Stephen wouldn't be likely to stumble upon them.
But instead they're forthrightly showcased in the
library, communicating something for the newbie
to understand. Urging, beckoning, that is, some
thought on their part as to why in this place of
absolute humility they are yet as decorously
dressed as the most ostentatious showoff at a
Grand Soiree. Why this incongruity? Why this lack
of harmony? Why this counterfactual?... Am I
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loyal or disloyal to what they want to
communicate if I don't blank knowledge/memory
of this out?
So, Strange does end up challenging her while
others blanche at his incredible presumption, and
you have a sense with his recovered ostensible
arrogance that he is going to go his own way this
point on, and that it's likely to involve striking
adornments like an ostentatious smoking jacket
and a more distinguished nom de plume, even if
they didn't just mostly drop down naturally upon
him as they in fact and in the case of the cape,
lovingly do. Voila! the indelible, scarlet
caped Doctor Strange is born into Marvel's
produced film universe! But while it almost seems
as if the Chosen One was luring him into
appreciating that what he most needs to learn from
her involves him making the intuitive link
himself... that losing one's ego doesn't mean
abandoning one's own judgment and cowering
stupidly before some ostensibly perfect master of
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humility even as she's showing off just how much
she actually likes brag, there is something to her
overt instruction for him that he must simply
practice, practice. practice.
His empowered confrontation with her amounts to
practice for his eventual confrontation with the
king baddy in the universe a mountainsized
head, that lives in an empurpled, psychiadlic realm
of blobs, of not four but a magic multitude of
something like eighteen dimensions! He goes at
this, this epic confrontation, that the Captain
America/Avengers series after eighteen or so total
movies hasn't yet braved entotale (or really, even
partially) with its king baddy, with even more
aplomb that he did with the Chosen One. You
really wonder at this guy: all this sorcery that he
has learned, and what matters most is that he
through disposition and practice is acclimated to
stepping past a hundred different rules, a hundred
different hemmingins, if a situation calls for it. A
magic power of an instant summons of Herculean
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hutzpah! And as the Avengers are killing
themselves over who is actually the most selfish
and the most destructive to humanity and who less
so, it was a refreshing turn of events to experience.
The Avengers while they were having fun, rather
than drooping dark.
Of course, in this film, no cities actually get
destroyed. There are not thousands of innocent
human lives lost while titans thundered against one
another. All damage done there , gets undone
completely. So while the film does beget at the
finish its own angry avenger, most of the film feels
like its transposed from everyday reality: there's
nothing bitter to ferment within everyday human
beings because the action happened at a slant away
from their existence (Dr. Strange's exgirlfriend's
the surgeon, Christine Palmer being the
exception, of course). They can have their own
life, unperturbed, as Marvel's players frolic
elsewhere.
I don't know quite why it felt this way, but the
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effect of this split almost served as a suggestion

that we take our own everyday lives as
an encumbrance, which is what normals' own are
becoming in the Marvel U. This was my
experience. Like we're in the process of taking
someone's admonishment to take our play outside
and transforming this into a great new liberty.
Alright , we declare to one another as we enjoy this
newly evolving comic book film universe, from
now on our regular lived work lives are "bodies"
to be kept in unperturbed regular motion, while
our real lives will blossom as astral selves living
vicariously in great lush realms of the like of the
splendidly Teletubby' roundish and Yellow
Submarinish' psychedelic purple . Here we finally
live; as we exit we become once again, mere
bodies in preprogrammed motion . Won't some
want to do this even if this decade doesn't turn
Trump' dark and remains Clinton' complicated?
Avatar 's sequals are in the near future. Somehow I
suspect that people won't this time be disappointed
that they have to return to reality, because for them
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this will be no more than a return to a necessary
parttime somnambulism society doesn't find much
meaning in anyway. It's all work robots will
eventually be doing, and with more predictable
regularity. A fortuitous demotion would
have occurred.
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Speaking of being perfectly invisible... One does
note that the great accomplishment given so much
due in this film humility in service is actually
most admirably actualized by Dr. Strange's cape.
"It" seems to know exactly how to properly allow
Dr. Strange the lead, while nevertheless not

refraining from offering advice choose that one!
and even strong admonishment no, god damn
it! I'm not letting you go there! It'll be your ruin!
Subliminally, if in this show of ostentatious show,
people walk out of the film strangely thinking of
being more subtle and selfless, it'll be, I think, not
owing to anything we've been directed to learn
1396
from but from the efforts of an ostensible accent.
Perfect development for a film about a Marvel
character who isn't simply 'vested in performing
his equivalent of the dull Hulk smash, who lets us
admire the treat of garnish.
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Labels: dr. strange, film, film review, movie, movie review

"Moonlight" spots a light on something

suspect developing in the liberal mind,
seeking free expression
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Moonlight
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Amanda Marcotte, at Salon.com, has famously
accused many of the supporters of Bernie Sanders
as being misogynists they, she claims, constitute
the misogynist left. According to Marcotte, before
he emerged, they probably thought themselves to
be profemale and to truly hate misogynist men,
but as soon as someone came around which
permitted them to express hatred towards women
without blowback (aligned with Sanders, they can
vent their hatred of all woman upon Hillary and
readily convince themselves they are only venting
hatred at the corrupt establishment candidate), they
immediately revealed to those still true in their
faith their actual, true, womenhating selves. I
wonder if in their huge admiration for "Moonlight"
liberals are admitting to something equally corrupt.
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For "Moonlight" is mostly about the advancement
of the thesis that being gay is not intrinsic to an
individual, but about combating early childhood
deprivement involving an overwhelming mother
and an absent father. The movie demonstrates life
triumph as becoming someone who could daunt
other men, and who lasted long enough to see the
powerful virility of the near demonpossessed
mother succumb to insanity, selfdoubt/self
incrimination, and physical degeneration: to see
her neatly boxed up and no longer any threat to
you.
His that is, the main character, Kevin's
homosexuality in the film is about intimacy, not
about "ingesting masculinity" (mind you, the only
other time we see someone fondle through his
pants is his mother invasively doing so, so in that
the act might also not just be a discovery of sexual
satisfaction but also an undoing of maternal
invasion this isn't quite a given either), but
otherwise the film demonstrates proof for the
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psychiatrist Charles Socarides' thesis that the most
important development for a homosexual young
man is to incorporate more manhood into his life:
out of this comes his life "cure." Young Kevin is
afraid to go anywhere near his home. And how
could he not be? Returning home everyday is
like everyday going back to the dragon mother
who might eat you (his father is long gone:
probably gobbled up). He is not allowed to stand
up for himself in his home. He has no propriety, no
ability to resist his mom from her invading any
part of him she pleases: as mentioned, we witness
her encroach upon him and invade his trousers
while he's still wearing them to take every scrap of
money kept secretly within. But one day young
Kevin, while at a distance from his home, is met
by a decent man who offers him some temporary
succour, as well as a permanent alternative as
someone he might dare allowing himself to latch
onto. The model is someone who is careful not
to encroach upon him, someone who is a master in
his own realm not in his impressively egalitarian
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household, but on the streets where he's the head
drug dealer and someone who would as much as
possible confront and challenge his mother's abuse,
induce her to better care, while supplying the
replacement.
EndFragment
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When young Kevin morphs into adulthood and
becomes himself one of the lords of the streets,
built, imposingly, like a linebacker, he gets
challenged by a former lover as not becoming who
he should have become, as perhaps not having
discovered his true self. But he has become a
version of the man who saved him, if stripped a bit
of his decency (we see in his conduct over people
buying drugs from him, some savouring of
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intimidation, of being the bully, even if he
eventually relents off of this), and it feels like an
accomplishment. Like a base, a secure base, upon
which, yes, he can make improvements, rejoin
previously promising threads like his poetic
disposition but certainly not a life journey gone
completely amiss.
Liberals are also all for removing wouldbe
tormentors from people's lives. To them, "Standing
up for yourself!" is a maxim for a culture that
tolerates too many people being shamed and
bullied from freely expressing themselves. But in
this movie ignoring the school counsellors who
implore Kevin to name his tormentors is shown as
a kind of higher thinking on Kevin's part, as
evidencing advanced powers of discernment. For it
isn't just that if Kevin were to name his tormentors
he would be forced to implicate the school mate he
loves and who was forced to attack him, it's that
what he clearly needs to do more than anything is
show that he can fight back. What this movie
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shows is that withdrawing bullies from Kevin's life
is about eliminating the opportunity for him to see
himself reject the endless onslaught of his
oppressive mother, which simply got continued on
in school through weaknessattuned (they are
shown as really more this than homosexuality
attuned), bullysome young men. Through them, he
can begin to fight back at her. When Kevin decides
to handle his daily oppressors by coming to class,
grabbing a chair and smashing it over the head of
his chief oppressor, ostensibly, since it leads to his
subsequently being completely divorced from high
school life and affixed to the criminal, this is a
terrible development. But it mostly comes across
as a selfactualized moment, a triumph, even as no
realityadrift liberal therapist could wrap her (note:
it might be relevant that the therapist who counsels
him and advises him awry that is, towards
having someone else settle the problem for him
belongs to the realm of females) mind around this
fact.
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The intimidating adolescent who was daily
tormenting him surely came from one hell of an
abusive household as well. But the film doesn't
direct us to consider this sure fact. Rather, it
dangles him out as just one of the nasty monsters
out there that requires someone who has known
being cowed to him to triumphantly stand up to
him, for everyone else to feel like some part of
them might store the very same sort of liberating
prowess. In this film, counsellors can't offer this
because they seem a world of coaches, who, rather
than empower their players in a game they have to
play to fight their way past pasthaunts and
towards freedom, would stupidly remove the
opponents entire, leaving them lifelong, creatures
mastered by past abuse.
This is not the way things are. This is simply an
articulation of reality. And it's one I would have
thought more liberals, while still rightly
appreciating the movie, would nevertheless have
seen as something to strongly rejoinder rather than
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acquiesce to as if native to themselves.
EndFragment

Saturday, October 29, 2016
"Inferno's" twin satisfactions: Enjoying the

frayed, young mind for romp and
adventure, and destroying the radical
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Inferno
A man wakes up in a hospital room, not sure how
he got there, but has a head full of horrible
memories, a redhued hellscape of tangled,
putrescent, menacing bodies an urban, corpse
filled, bloodfilled war zone. A young and
beautiful it is a nurse?... no, a doctor, attends to
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him. There is an age disparity, but she knows who
he is for his being a famous professor of Dante and
for her being someone who has read and admired
all of his books. Her name isn't Florence... as in
Nightengale, but we find out that's the city he has
found himself in.
No sexual interest is every admitted between them.
Nevertheless, very promptly he finds himself
dressed in her boyfriend's or is it maybe an
astray or maybe an ex boyfriend's clothes, for
where is he through all this? why otherwise does
he never get mentioned? A perfect fit as it turns
out. Simply a sober fact, but on some other planet
certainly not here! no, definitely not here! it
might perhaps suggest that he fits neatly as
substitute. The next stop is some great Italian
museum, where, after dropping everything to thrill
at the surprise rearrival of the great professor, the
pregnant matron in charge encourages them to
drop the "I'm her uncle; this is my niece" routine
and admit baldly to being lovers. For this is Italy,
1409
you now, not some place prosaic and
unimaginative like the United States.
There is a great deal of adventure. He
demonstrates great prowess. Maybe not always
athletically though we note he does bang up and
even smack down people who are basically intense
machines of youthful muscle but certainly
intellectually. In the museum, he looks over a
massive work of art with the same sort of brilliant
scrutiny that a master military strategist would
look over a field of troops. In fact the painting he
of a great battlefield. Maybe anyone
scrutinizes is
who might still confuse him as a harmless Harvard
aesthete would be reckoning that if ever there were
the need, this guy could morph into being a

military officer a general without skipping a
beat. This is a man whom in no way is to be
underestimated. Maybe even as lover. She keeps
up with him, assists him, even as she's not the
scholar he is. They are great team, together
fighting their way toward decoding an ultimate
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puzzle.
And then after threequarters of a film of this, there
is a sudden termination no more couple on an
adventure. Instead, he finds himself back with
someone ageappropriate, whom he ostensibly is
just as content with. If there is something
subterranean about his relationship with her it's
that while they are ostensibly admiring their
middle age maturity, being casually accepting of
their middleaged fate all its pluses and
negatives the truth is that they're not middle
aged like other people are middleaged: there's
been quite a bit of eloquent plastic surgery, the
removal of creases and lines on their faces, done
cunningly, so it takes a moment or two to notice
exactly why it seems that they make their almost
declaratively bland acquiescence to middleage
seem so ripe and right. This is a minor sin; one you
can get away with.
This is the version I saw of the film where it felt
designed to appeal to an audience with conscious
1411
brains under some strict note, not apparently
Italian matron's charge, but with reptilian brains
that still crave illicit release. The conscious brain
thinks he's enjoyed a film that got the arch
conservative's okay, but the subliminals, the
inferred, had their reptilian brains thrilled as if they
had mostly dined on sex romp. The other version I
saw was not as boomer' indulgence but as an
expression of boomers' anxieties towards youth.
Not subconsciously realized "youthful" release, but
an expression of stern, unconscious desire for
alarmingly wayward youthfulness to be curtailed.
In this version, the professor is less... brilliant, and
more, established . He is less exertion of brilliant
mind to appreciate the new, and more casually
combing an already stockfilled brain that could
care less if it learned one more damned thing. The
point is to luxuriate in what is already known, to
demonstrate an actually easy ability to decode that
astonishes those without your large body of
knowledge. It isn't his vigour which would draw
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the young, but the fact that he has a depth which
must have been drawn out from a longish periods
of unstressed exploration, of ease, something
unknown to the brilliant young of today, who since
day one have been expected to perform expertly
and stress uninterruptedly. Because your place is
safe because the most brilliant of the young see
you with the allure that the centred have over those
who are ADHD/PTSD illatease, you see a future
for yourself where you continue to easily enjoy the
fruits of tenure no longer readily offered, while
they put their shallowbuthighIQ minds slavishly
at work multiplying the discoveries of the like of
biological science, which you sense will mostly be
affordable to and thus applicable to comfortable
people like yourself.
What the young must not do is get pissed off about
this state of affairs and turn toward rebellion. It's a
threat, because in the process of creating people
perennially shocked away from accruing the slow
development of a stable core self, you have created
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a people where it seems plausible they might
suddenly mistake someone else not you, the
relaxed, selfassured boomers as prooffering
reassurance and stability, leading to the emergence
of an ostensible messiah. And a messiah, a cause,
might plausibly make these minds who are
furthering Moore's law in exponentially expanding
everything known every year (if now more in
biological science than in computing science), into
those who'll turn their fertile genius towards
blackening and corrupting everything known.
These are the young people that have, in your
minds, recently emerged at elite universities, who
are now renown just as much for ostensibly
entangling and tripping up boomer professors with
their demands for trigger warnings and appropriate
gender assignations, as they are for intrepid
scientific advancements. With the young and
brilliant suddenly askew, adept workers long
designed for a certain purpose gone "Westworld,"
you're just as much likely to be assigned as
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someone, not with depth, but who has long hugged
a suspect domain, saturated as it is with sexist,
homophobic, ignorant material. In their minds, it
becomes not their duty to be the passive and learn
from you, but to instantly encroach upon
everything you're fool enough to lay out and stake
a thrilling claim of righteous protest. You
expostulate the fullness of your known world... to
discover that you've simply laid out more eternal
beauty for the most corrupt of permanent
makeovers.
There is a great deal of talk about culling in this
picture, and under threat, it seems, are mostly
places where a lot of old people hang around and
bond with the eternally classic; but we notice that
the only people who actually get culled are the
young all the young brilliants in this picture go
radical and die. It's presented as the solution to a
pressing problem. We can finally, once again,
relax.
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hanks
Staring up at gods, in "Keeping Up with the

Joneses"
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Keeping Up with the Joneses
The expression "keeping up with the Joneses"
could be thought by some to be synonymous with
capitalism itself people prevented from being
content by the neverceasing lure of something
glittering, something better, still not under their
possession. One would think that in all
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circumstances this estimation of a society would
be profoundly negative, yet it is possible to see its
being vulnerable to such an attack meaning it's in
possession of something of real value. To the
point: it bespeaks a society where the majority,
even if a mouth that never finds satisfaction, is still
the principle venue for consumption that wouldbe
elites remain dependent on... it means an

empowered, a vital middle class, with reach. And a
society which can be accused as one where
members of the middle class pointlessly emulate

and accumulate is also one that one might imagine
being defended as actually one where class
mobility is a real thing; as fluid and open; and that
this is in fact the true story. That is, it's not one
where one camp can establish themselves as
superior and prevent everyone else from partaking
in the societal spoils their presumptuous position
seems to entitle them to. But rather one where
others can ape them, eventually pass as them, and

actually become them, and everyone senses it. So
in truth, such a society is one where you don't just
1418
keep up with but rather actually
sometimes become "the Joneses," or whomever is
the vanguard of the best and latest. And though
this might of itself sound of no great whoop, what
it means is a society where no matter the
circumstances you're born with, if you have
genuine value to add you're less likely to find
yourself unable to make the contribution for
people collectively believing that if you don't meet
certain requirements, if you don't possess a certain
"look," you couldn't possibly be contributing
something of value, even as you already in
. The society, the
albeit, unpolished form are

culture, its overriding deity , seems to demand it
staunchly as prerequisite. And for such, a whole
society progresses to a higher reach, even if while
you look at it it's just pointless whatnot; the
busyness of bees.
For several decades after World War 2, with high
income tax on the rich, with strong unions, with
plentiful jobs, people were "keeping up with the
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Joneses," whether this just meant buying the latest
fashionable consumer goods or seeing their
children entering the same newly emerging
professional fields. On the same block, were
professors and plumbers, lawyers and factory
workers, journalists and doortodoor salesmen.
People of all varietals, vied with one another; they
mixed. And during this period there must have
been several dozens of films released that explored
the not entirely strange phenomena of an exotic
person or couple suddenly moving into a block
where everyone else is on the more prosaic side.
The premise of this movie, where "the Joneses" are
that an exotic, absolutely beautiful and
sophisticated couple was a plausible, if still
unlikely reality, even if in a good number of them
they turn out to be genuine monsters (very likely
vampires). This was a time where the bland
American family represented the American
heartland the centre of American culture. And if
you were the Fonz (Happy Days), Sideshow Bob
(Simpsons), Jimmy Stewart's worldtravelling
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photojournalist (Rear Window)... anyone who
would pretend to be superior to the muddle
boringness of middle America, it still made sense
who found
that somehow or another it was you
, their home, their
yourself drifting towards them
abode: somehow these "prosaics" were the
America that forced everyone in the world to
recognize America as the worlds' greatest
superpower. And as much as you might secretly
despise them you were cowed by the power of
their optimism and their blindness to class barriers
that had once kept so many in place and so many
societies sickeningly, sadly, stalled. Maddeningly,
these people didn't know how to defer; they could
encroach, and successfully. And the power of this
spirit was daunting, truly enviable truly
believable, as the actual source of a great society's
expansive, youthful power.
This society is not however today's society. The
professionals have long escaped to their own
neighbourhoods, and they, their consumption, their
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activity, is acclaimed by all as what keeps America
going, not Joeloser and his neighbourhood
barbecue grill parties. The heartland, the formerly
prospering middle class neighbourhoods, no longer
a fiery hearth, but really more the skinsag that's
still attached to a body that rejuvenated itself long
ago by going its own way. The deity that overlooks
this culture seems bent on ensuring that in some
ways it's frustrating to all: so the mix won't be
enlivened by genius nobodies that grew up in no
place of relevance, but only by children of
plodding professionals, who went to the right
schools, accumulated the right grades, dotted their
resumes with the right internships. And what they
have to offer that's new never displaces the
awareness that they represent privilege that'll never
change, never be threatened. They're a wall against
"your" own aspirations, so you might as well just
drink and drug, and continue in your private self
discombobulations. The difference between you
and them is so great they seem not of the same
species. While you remain attached societally
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even as you're now but the drag every possible
connection between you two has otherwise been
severed.
And so it is was actually a wonder, then, that this
movie landed in our own times, defined as it is
much less by genuine class fluidity than by the fact
that you can now look at a couple and pretty much
know exactly where their children will land. What
could this perfect couple, with sophisticated tastes,
want with two representatives of our contemporary
American sag? The purpose, it appears, is mostly
about effecting some measures to ensure that "the
sag" doesn't spirit up and revolt, so that the stage
just before the accretions of time mercifully clips it
off for good goes without a hitch. They are the
dispatch to ensure a taut, effective, laststage
medical procedure.
The perfect couple feel they don't actually have to
offer much. In fact as they first either bring or lure
the plebs into environments which stage how their
true relationship to one another is of elegant,
1423
awesome predator to pathetic, quivering prey the
husband is taken into an underground den where a
snake envenoms him; the wife is lured into
Bloomingdales where she finds herself
humiliatingly caught out by the grand lady spider
within a good part of their visit is actually more
about taking and indulging rather than managing.
But nevertheless they do manage the couple,
prevent anything from going awry, by offering
them this: while there is in fact no way for you to
keep up with us, you can in fact construct some
facesaving (false) selfesteem by gauging

yourselves superior to people of your own class .
So if you allay your own sexism while your
neighbours overtly exhibit theirs, or if you're still
in possession of a home while your workmate has
lost his and now lives in his van, you can feel
temporarily safe from further humiliation and like
you're already in possession of something of value,
even as society now will no longer enable you to
expand on it.
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And while you have yourself feeling becalmed
when, really, if you had any pride, you'd be staging
a revolt and rebelling no matter how sweet our lies,
we'll people your last moments with a fantasy
dream vision where you win us over by your
warmth (re: your overeager need to be liked by us)
and openness (re: do with us as you will),
something our association of detached European
coolness has ostensibly denied us, and could pass
with a bit of coaching and smart dressing up as
sophisticated agents. And to ensure this is credible,
at least to you, we'll make the villain you confront
not someone like us but rather a portly
discombobulate... to someone actually mostly like
you; someone you actually used to interact with,
work along side with. Face to face with another
schlep who thinks a better suit is enough to clothe
deep inadequacies like poor bone structure and
traumafilled, plebeian roots, it's in fact another
sort of humiliation, not really an offering at all:
you rise only if we let you pretend it's an age past,
an uncorralled 1950, that'd permit such a rise in
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place, rather than our actual, for you, dream
crushing, curtailed, post2010. You're welcome.
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The Accountant
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The Accountant
Autism usually is taken now as something that
owes to genetic mixup; you're born with it. The
Accountant offers dutiful fidelity to this now core
1427
assumption but dramatizes it as actually a kind of
retreat of the mind the older conception of the
mental illness in face of a consistently
undependable childhood environment. Christian
Wolff, aka "the Accountant," his brother and sister,
are children of a military officer, who requires
them to move maybe as much as five times a year.
He and his wife aren't dependable either: there is
discord in their relationship, which eventually
leads to divorce, just before the children have
reached adolescence. When you can barely count
on the fact that the place you've settled into will
last as home beyond a month or two, and when
you're just beginning your epic life journey into
adulthood and one of the two pillars you're
absolutely dependent on falls off the grid for good,
no wonder you have a panic attack when you fail
to communicate to yourself that some potential to
wipe out a frustrating environment exists by your
succeeding in completing a jigsaw puzzle.
There is a sense, though, that the truest way to
1428
account for the behaviour of "the Accountant," as
an adult, is not actually to explore his autism,
because what we see of him in his adult life is
made to seem more about how about how key role
models responded to him just before his beckoning
adolescence. One of them a kindly, sweater
wearing, "cozy" therapist encourages the father
to let his son stay with him, where he will be
treated respectfully in an unchanging chateau
environment geared not to frustrate him in the way
the normal outside world surely would. The other,
his father, a stern, grimaced man, staunchly resists
the advice, arguing, essentially, that for his son to
have a chance of being a full person he's going to
have to figure out ways to manage the full
maelstrom of adult life, even as he must come at it
with a "kick me" placard taped to his back.
The way it plays out in the movie is not so much
therapist vs. parents' will, or Democratic
tenderness vs. Republican hardlove, but really as
if your homeredolent mother (therapist = mother),
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seeing you about to begin your turning away from
family as you become an adolescent, finding ways
to construe you so that you can be an exception,
someone who will never escape dependence, and
finding her blocked by the will of the father, who
is militant in making sure his sons sure as hell get
out there. Every child's life up to about the age of
twelve, all its empowering (being cherished and
loved; knowing the bodyheated coven) and
restricting (dependency and minimized challenges
the leash) is in encapsulated in what the therapist
offers. And the future, scary (it might pummel the
shit out of you) but thrilling (you can discover
whole unknown realms of yourself, by yourself),
with the father.
He is required to take the father's way, and it is
really the result of this that explains "Christian
Wolff," not so much his autism. For the Christian
Wolff we see in the film is, yes, an isolated
bachelor no wife or children with daily rituals
required to keep his mental equilibrium in order,
1430
but mostly someone who has succeeded as an
adult. Someone who has chosen a career that
reflects his passions in his case, being
an accountant and is capably living
independently. Someone who enjoys the life he has
made for himself.
This is not to say, though, that the man who had
stepped in to help him the therapist is de facto
entirely maligned in this film. Not at all, actually.
Before Wolff had a chance to morph into his adult
form, the therapist represented a threat, for his
philosophy encouraging a dependency no longer
appropriate for him. But with this managed it
seems he can be fair, that the film can be fair, to
what he also represented: namely, someone truly
from outside (so not just "mom" projected out)
who makes an effort to show genuine appreciation
for you: what good qualities you possess.
Whenever Wolff encounters people like this,
people who delight in him rather than shun him, he
wants to give back, even if in some cases he is
1431
rather inexpert at how best to do it. We appreciate
it as a gesture of respect, but how does revenge
really help his deceased prisoncell roommate,
who while delineating for him how he did
business, is shown in wonderful interchange with
Wolff, teasing him into stretching his limited
understanding of people's gesturecommunicated
meanings, for instance?
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Thursday, October 13, 2016
Birth of a Nation
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Birth of a Nation
There is a moment in the movie when another
black man tries to caution Nat Turner away from
killing. He argues that their killing whites will
mean that the many of the slaves who did not
act, will
participate will be killed in retaliation. His
mean all of their deaths. The movie communicates
however that this particular man the one doing
the cautioning, a notably feminine, fretful figure
has become askew to the real desires of the black
community. That all of them are quite ready to die
to have one of them, even if only for a small
moment in time, enjoy revenge on a
cruel, exploitative culture. Nat Turner is told that
his wife and his daughter will be killed. But he
hears from his wife and his mother
his
and
grandmother, only that they could not be more
may hang us afterwards, but
proud of him. They
1434
son, bury that hatchet deep into them today. We're
afar but we'll know when the blade has bit, and
we'll be joyous.
Standing up to bullies feels great. And if I accept
that what I am witnessing actually happened as
told, I get in this instance why the black
community stood behind him and ignored those
advocating keeping being Jesusloving rather than
initiating being Godwrathful, even if it meant that
whole hordes of human beings who knew nothing
of Nat would be hanged for his actions. He told
them there was fighting power in all of them. All
the obsequious behaviour will continue if it must,
but it can be discarded as actually intrinsically
alien to them once the white slaver's empire shows
greater cracks than it proved to in this instance.
Staged one hundred years later, it could have done
the trick... and even now, an impossibly powerful

oppressive culture quaked, and those who will
matter in subsequent generations were inspired.
My problem though is that this way
1435
of narrativizing is shared by every group that feels
(and has been) victimized, and the extent of these
groups is much larger than obvious groups like an
exploited black population or, say, the
contemporary American populace exploited by
Wall Street. It very much includes the Klu Klux
Klan and fascists everywhere. Dig into the
childhood of any fascist and you will find one
filled with abuse, as the current book Hillbilly
Elegy is trying to remind people. Look at any
horrid action visited upon a powerless person
like the one in the film, where a slaver knocks out
the teeth of a slave so he can force food down his
mouth and you'll be witnessing a version of what
actually happened to the person inflicting the
torture upon him/herself in childhood (in Hillbilly
Elegy , the author describes family members being
set on fire as part of the everyday hohum). So
while watching the film and witnessing it
argue that we become men only when we've
heaved our oppressors' cutoff heads before us, I
am hesitant to only applaud. What if the film had
1436
followed its ending with a quick clip from
, where the whites knew
Griffith's Birth of a Nation
glory when they'd strung up "oppressing" black
men, thereby asking us how much of our cheering
actually owes to fidelity to the black people, and
how much to just craving a story of men becoming
men through bloody revenge, achieved in a
politically correct, nonguiltarousing form?
Maybe the inverse of demonstrating empathic
reach, we demonstrate in our enthusiasm of the
film an endorphinfueled mindset, exactly opposite
one that invites in the lived realities of others?
Putin is starting to make films like this one, where
an oppressed Russian people finally resists an
oppressive power (in the case I've heard about
recently, the Hitler regime), and you don't feel so
much that what's going on is applauding the efforts
of brave victimized people who finally put a bullet
to the oppressor's head, as gearing up a current
Russian Putinadmiring populace for revenge on
slights projected onto our current landscape. His
1437
historical narratives are going to get transplanted
onto today's reality, and it's best not to meet them
just as revved up.
Be kind to the one who braves standing up and
saying, hey, maybe there's another way, like
Thorin's Balin (You don't have to do this. You
have a choice. You've done honourably by our
people...) and Kirk's Spock (There is no Starfleet
regulation that condemns a man to die without a
trial). There may come a day, soon, where we'll
need these type of people intact as, not unmanly
cowards or selfinterested traitors, but those really
worth listening to.
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What to do with the pathetic in all of us?

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The Girl on the Train
The first half of the film is about the delineation of
a really sick person Emily Blunt's Rachel. She's
irrepressibly alcoholic. She has lost everything of
meaning to her, and now she's dependent for
survival on the kindness of a very tolerant friend.
And for something to live for: getting glimpses
each day on her train ride ostensibly to and from
work, of a couple who live a dream of life of
neverdissipating sexual interest in one another and
who are absolutely gorgeous to boot. She's the
sagging hag, drinking deep her watercontainered
vodka, while they're redolent of living Adonises
from whom even a fountain of youth might draw
inspiration from.
1440
The only other version of her that we see is when
she reminds herself of her behaviour when drunk
while with her husband. She acted out, a lot; she
was violent. She damaged other people's lives; cost
them their jobs. Her husband evidently couldn't
deal with it anymore, and, even though it was with
someone he met before his relationship with his
wife was over, he still admirably cut his losses
and moved on with a life with someone else. His
evolving life with her, his new wife, is actually the
other thing that Rachel witnesses... actually in their
case, more than witnesses: every once in a while
she finds herself invading their home and doing the
like of wandering out on their lawn with their new
born child.
This story of Rachel is, in short, about exactly
what one would show an acting out friend to
induce them to perhaps consider AA. You're not
glamorous, you're sick. Akin to the very, very sick
and sad that Rachel's exhusband assesses
Rachel as, in an actually kind effort to invite
1441
someone else to draw back from assessing her as
just a very dangerous psycho.
So the heroic moment from what we've seen of her
to this point, is her actually attending a meeting of
AA and admitting that she is afraid of herself. She
might actually hurt someone; her business with her
her exhusband's baby might have been about
something abominable the very worst you can
imagine. She might also have killed the beautiful
young woman of the fantasy pairing, as others,
who were actually trying to help her but whom she
had in return only abused and accosted, had
assumed she had.
But then the movie changes. It turns out she had
remembered things wrong. And while it doesn't
turn out that when drunk she was actually the life
of the party, she was in truth a harmless drunk: all
she ever does is quietly pass out. The violence she
remembers was actually performed often upon
her by her exhusband, who is unredemiably
in his case a psycho monster. It turns out that she
1442
had been focusing all the blame on herself, that
everyone else her friends, the police, people she
didn't know on the train were doing so also, when
it belonged upon the story's true monster, who
would have her staying feeling terrible about
herself to keep his own self intact.
So all that's left for a complete rehabilitation of her
selfimage is to join his current wife in abolishing
him from the planet. This they do, with her doing
the initial stabbing, and his new wife deliciously
twisting the knife in (if there is anything of their
actions that warrants some legitimate self
incrimination, it'll thereby go on the new wife.).
She doesn't go back to AA because those truly sad
sacksofshit, who were nodding the whole time
she described the absurdly awful things she did
while drunk, had in retrospect taken the bait to
reveal themselves as a different level of pathetic.
All she needs to do is sit in a different seat on the
train... which comes across as making just a minor
adjustment, and she's an empowered modern
1443
woman with great vistas ahead.
Somehow I suspect that the sequel to this movie
will involve her enjoying a terrific sexlife with the
hunky psychiatrist in the movie, who while first
implicated as a jerk, gets rehabilitated as
absolutely beyonddoubt good. And a great plus:
He's a darling at not questioning the motives
behind women who find themselves with babies
they've innocently killed, so surely neither those
whose abduction of other people's babies never
quite gets cleared in our memory as something
that's maybe more on her rather than her most vile
of exhusbands.
Police detective Riley, who's nobullshit, all
confrontation, will probably getting a passing
mention in the sequel, but only to show that those
who could still complicate a restored selfimage
with things like the truth can have miserable things
befall them. I suspect we'll find out she'd been the
whole time addicted to cocaine. This movie is
based on the bestselling book, probably in the
1444
world. And just like if a public wants a Trump,
there is nothing a sober truthtelling media can do,
if it wants a cultural sphere which completely
exonerates people like us who might be feeling
guiltbefallen, there is nothing an oldstyle hard
medicine dispenser can do to which won't end up
getting turned around so they become the
actual problem.
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train
The Magnificent Seven

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Magnificent Seven
There are two kinds of people in the world
universe of Magnificent Seven . There are
breeders (the townspeople) and there are livers
(those like the seven). The breeders don't quite
exist for themselves but are valuable as part of
a continuum. The reason they are to be
protected isn't because there is value to each of
their individual lives nothing about them
is intrinsically worth exploring: there is nothing
but the mundane in all their "art" of making and
selling but more because somehow there's a
sense that if their flow is squelched, if one
generation of them becomes barren, the human
line dies, and it'd be a failed cowboy who saw
the herd about him go to waste. So if you're not
a breeder but rather a liver, someone who you
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don't look at and see their parents nor any
potential children, but rather someone who
lives large on their own within his/her own
time, it's important to keep the herd intact. You
have the pleasure as you go about life in a loose
and uninhibited way of knowing also that
you're guardians of something in sum quite
epic: the long swath of time and the miracle of
constant cellular rebirth of Life. It's a bit like
knowing you're not just one equal to the rolling
hills, sunsets, and great stakes of trees, but the
genesis in the torrenting rivers as well. How do
you like them apples.
Cognitively, then, we sense that the difference
between the villain and the heroes in this film is
that the villain has erred in misconstruing lesser
people who nevertheless constitute the human
background for heroes to lean on when they
will and definitely to effortlessly shine
amongst! for worthless miscreants to be
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wiped off the earth. Admit it, he declares,
we're
better off with just plain dirt. We should see
through you as you clutch desperately to your
kids (each and every one of you, always
clutching your quaking, quivering kids!),
cleverly trying to intimate that your slaughter
would breach some kind of
cosmically mandated decorum and/or a loss of
a metaphysically necessary category, and thus
be both daring the gods and risking a complete
loss of psychic equilibrium. Nonsense! You're
parasites skilled only at poisoning the minds of
hosts into thinking they're necessary! They are
not so much opposite to one another, as rather
that one has simply portioned even less worth
to a category of people the other still holds low
as well.
One side would kill them all willynilly if they
don't take up the measly few dollars offered
them for their property. The other would poke
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fun at them, with their inclination to hide and
their measly ability to defend themselves, but
hold back at hinting that they might be in fact
be worthless. In this film, the villain stakes out
beckon at: maybe
turf the heroes' attitudes do
we should take a try at not caring for these
people at all and simply defend their lives for
the delight of constant effective responsiveness
in a volatile and dangerous apocalyptic
shootout. The emergence of the gatling gun at
the end, not cause for dismay, even as it would
mow down most of the remaining townspeople
and leave the barest speck of human crop and
ostensibly a mute point to their whole effort:
with only a few of them left, they'd surely have
been better off all moving elsewhere but for
jubilation, as it'll gift an avenue for a great
poetic finish for one of the seven.
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For perhaps if one of the Valkyrie angels sees
your brave finish and lifts you up to be a hero
in an afterlife realm... if another proud vista
before you opens up, what matters if the one
behind gone dirt?
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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
You can make being forced to live in a
comfy environment, where there aren't much
in the way of changes but where you feel
protected and enjoy fellowfeeling, seem
greatly sad and perverse ... something to be
broken out of in a hurry. The way I would
do it is to remind people that that what was
part of what living through 1930 to 1945
was like. This was not a time for
individualism, for breaking free of
expectations into a realm where you
establish what life you might like for
yourself; but rather for people cloistering in
packs against a menacing world. It was a
time where all pronouncements that every
human life involves a process of
individuation as children establish
themselves as adults, have to be put into
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question: you could be, potentially and
even very likely, for it's what the age wants
of you pretty much the same person, as
you orbit in your safe familiar routines, from
age ten through adult. You could be the
person stunted into not making any thrilling
changes about yourself, as you basically
stand in place, glad, at least, not to be
withered by the threatening outside world.
And perhaps glad, also, not to be pressured
to be expected to make something of oneself
further
and experience the cataclysm of that
great scary unknown. Question: How did
you survive the Depression? Answer:
Everyone in my community looked after one
another... and also, I was lucky enough to
have a job. Not much there, you'll find, of
the human story as from overseen child to
individuated adult.
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Miss Peregrine is the matriarch of a home of
"kids" defined loosely, as a number of
them are in their late teens that perpetually
exist in the day where their home is bombed
by cascading German bombers they
"loop" back to the beginning of the day, just
as the bombs are dropped. It's Britain, at the
time when, plausibly, Germans might yet
conquer Britain, and the war and the
prospect of German rule had no end (mid
1943). They mean you to understand them
as very different from other Britains, in that
they are good and soulful people while the
rest of Britains are bigot barbarians keen to
see any new stranger in their midst as a
dangerous infiltrator to be strung up.
Wonderful, it would have been, to hint that
that sense of belonging and warmth that you
are meant to feel as you experience
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Peregrine's home, is how Britains
experienced their own hearth at this time as
well... it's really how they were experiencing
their pub culture, this delightful clinging to
loyalty while they endure their collective
Britainundersiege. That is, if you want to
pick a group of people who really would be
distinguished from other people at this time,
don't choose those who, in their eager
embrace of this cloistering environment,
evidently are those who'd be afraid of
venturing off just now into an exciting new
postwar environment. Choose instead...
well, the villains of this film, who are
distinguished by the fact that they took their
given lot in life (an ability to create time
loops) and aimed not just to remain content
but to dramatically improve on it: those
who'd defy the gods and demand more; Jazz
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Age in an age of collective reproof and
accepting of your lot. People like this guy:
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We are told at the end that what enabled the
"kids" to triumph over the scary hollowgasts
was that the intruder into their realm, Jake,
from 2016, gave them bravery. Well, if we
are really watching the film rather than
indulging in its delivered beats, we'd note to
ourselves immediately that the kids really
didn't need to discover that: we saw no
hesitation in their combined efforts to thwart
the mob and rescue Jake when he first
tumbled into their stiffened, suspicious 1943
world, for instance. They acted in just as
coordinated a fashion there as later. All that
seemed to be called for in this latter instance
is that governing matriarchs be disposed of.
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Miss Peregrine gets locked in a cage; and
the new head mistress gets eaten up,
immediately after she delineates how the
children are to stay out of the way and do
nothing while she handles all the baddies
herself. Apparently, they, gone, gives
avenue to growing new wings. Something
was different this time out, even if their
actions were the same, like as if perhaps
they felt that this time they were doing it for
themselves rather than as extensions of
others' agency.
Actually Jake may have played his part in
their discovery of new bravery if perhaps
innocently. Unlike the rest of the peculiars,
his primary attachment is to adult men. Not
just his grandfather, who in a sense doesn't
really represent the complete individuation
attached to him for his previously leaving
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the 1943 loop and experiencing "a life
outside" including wife, kids, and
grandchildren because it turns out he
spent much of his time as a kind of servant
to this time, going about the world hunting
hollowgasts. His mind was ever with them.
Where it wasn't was with his own son, who
complains at one point to Jake about this.
And it is he, Jake's father, the one who can't
be brought to believe in Jake's phantasms,
and who seems a normal if beleaguered dad
one you might hope to eventually forge a
better connection with who is the real
perpetrator Jake innocently brings into the
lives of the peculiars. The command in Jake,
that is, is something they might smell off
him, not owing to his connection to the
ostensibly individuated grandfather, but
owing to his having a connection to a father
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who can't be enticed into this world they're
so beholden to. Like a figure from
contemporary literature brought into a
fantasy realm, he wouldn't want any part of
it, no matter how real it ends up proving to
be.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children:

Chris O'Dowd On Set Interview
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In my judgment this isn't a stretch. Jake only
gets to this past 1943 loop by taking a
vacation with his father. So while the
relationship between father and son is not
shown here to be in any sense ideal most
of the attention is put to how distant they are
from one another attention is nevertheless
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put to the very fact of their company. We
think on it. Its potentials, realized and
thwarted. And we see out of this that the
father doesn't only display behaviour his son
must learn to spurn. There's something
worthy in how his father handles outsiders.
While alone Jake is shown to be bullyable,
his father is confident in situations where the
son senses only that he's likely going to be
victimized. The father can change the
expectations of others, manage situations.
The film ultimately uses these instances to
shortchange the dad getting the vagrant
teen gang to show his son around the island
spares him time to write his book but not
something to learn
before we notice there is
from him, and even hope for more of that.
Or even just for improved interchange
between them, kind of like we saw when the
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dad, rather than scolding his son, accepts
that his son might be up to just teenage sort
of stuff, and that that's not just a relief he's
not a psycho, than god! but actually, well,
okay.
This is a human being doing that, one alone
before the world, without any guidance. Not
some member of a special collective,
beholden to a lifescript of us vs. them, just
like any other sad Depression and wartime
kid. In this film, it is the dad, in being so
ontologically alone and still trying to
function, who bears traces of being
enticingly peculiar.
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Versailles
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Part of what Milo argues is what Chris Hedges argues.
That we have a liberal professional class that covets its
rulership more than anything else. With both of them,
trolls didn't necessitate this class regrettably closing its
doors. Rather, enjoying the idea of their foreclosed
ownership of what is right opinion and correct manners
enjoying being distinct and better than everyone else
they sought out means to classify everyone outside of
their class as predators, trolls, deplorables. To both Milo
and Hedges, our situation is Versailles.
And the problem for the left is that there is truth in this.
We just live outside those periods of unambiguous
growth where the most progressive people out there
which is always the left are absolutely uninterested in
bourgeois/genteel pretensions. We've had that age the
60s. Now we are living in one where though they
cannot acknowledge it they actually do enjoy the idea
that they and their children will be part of a class clearly
superior to other people. Best schools, right company ....
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since kindergarden, manufactured in a way that the
cultural anthropologist studies to be recognized as
unrelated to the odious and suspect mass public.
We should hate this. It's obnoxious. It's even unfair to
the professional class because if they were induced to be
a bit more emotionally healthy, they would not be
enjoying this but noticing how shortchanged it is to a
truly egalitarian environment (remember when liberals
created the internet and genuinely hoped it would allow
hundreds of thousands of people to shine!).
But it is something they will eventually evolve out of. It
makes them vulnerable to attack, but they remain the
most emotionally healthy people out there. And the
policies someone like Clinton, who overall seems one of
the more emotionally healthy people of her fine
generation, will implement, will empower people and
lesson the incurred growth of sadism and hate. If she
can get in in this sort of environment, it would be a
massively encouraging event. It would tell me that even
during this period where so many people are rebelling
against genuine progress, which owing to their own
impaired childhoods, they feel makes people "bad" and
"selfish," we're going to skate through this period better
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than they did the previous period like this, the 1930s.
Milo as Salon's replacement

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Milo is Salon's replacement. Salon isn't to be seen as
empowering Milo, but rather as shuddering as they
sense the limelight passing. Amanda Marcotte noticed
that there were many who identified as strongly
feminist... who were the sort of people who previously
loudly applauded Salon when it went after sexist men,
who suddenly revealed themselves as actually not so
feminist at all and in fact as actually very, very angry
at women when they became Bernie Bros. It was if
they'd finally found a safe space where they could
finally speak their minds without feeling like they would
be obliterated for it, and they indulged as if previously
prisoners humiliated into forced identification.
They had aligned with people like Marcotte, that is,
defensively. By being with her, they couldn't give voice
to their prejudices and in fact had to experience the
constipated discomfort of staunching them but they
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could partake in her being bitchy, arbitrary and
dismissive buoyed, as Milo correctly argues, on being
the cultural wars' victors and having remade their
opponents into gutter rats to versions of themselves
they felt a need to deny.
What's happened is that the nativist sense that our
countries are like our dearest mammy has sort of gone
live. A bunch of selfinterested globalists have in this
version of seeing things let their countries go to rot as
they've been spoiling themselves Versailles style. And
the ones who are now worthy of the penetrating, angry
glare become, not the Hillbilly white boy, who's bad
owing to being descendent of colonialism and centuries
of exploitation and rape, but rather the like of
universityentrenched feminists, who at end of the day
are seen as mostly handmaidens of globalist ascension,
who willfully couldn't give a damn if their abandonned
home countries broke apart in rust and if it turns out the
only people they were fighting for were themselves.
So now people can go Milo rather than Marcotte and
feel not so alone and vulnerable for it, but rather like the
loyal, parentcherishing child about to be accosted yet
again by the presumptive, parentdissing sibling... but
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this time while the clubtoting, pissedoff parents are at
hand.
They've hopped over to someone else's shadow, and,
just now indulging in its spoils of new permissions and
liberties, are gleeful over it.
ay, July 29, 2016
Recent comments at Salon.com (July 29

2016). I am Emporium.
Original Article: Kudos to Hillary for playing the
woman card: If people are going to call her a witch,
she’ll tell them she’s Hermione Granger
FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2016 3:23 PM
Aunt Messy Emporium turney333 Jayne Cullen Just for you, Aunt
Messy:
The fact that Hillary and Chelsea wore different color dresses
intrigues me as well. They weren't unified, part of one-another --
all white. It was a white and red "split". Maybe not a priming of
good-and-bad-witch, pure-and-bad-blood split... something which
will soon be displaced onto Trump, as he gets portrayed as a
foreign Russian devil, with noticeable female attributes. But I
wonder if they were encouraging us to see Chelsea as the blood on
Hillary's hands: that with Hillary elected, the future of the young
would be a sacrifice of blood.
A subconscious communication: if you're tired of pushy, uppity,
disrespectful youth -- you don't need to go Trump Republican...
Hillary will make sure they'll be targeted and killed in other
countries.
Permalink

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Dienne77 I'm fairly certain she's gloated over a Slytherin or
Malfoy defeat somewhere along the line... and I can't remember
her reminding everyone all the time that we should have empathy
for Voldemort because he was a neglected orphan, and that this is
what happens to children born of abuse. This is the problem: our
not seeing other people as themselves, as always human, as they
actually are -- always worthy of empathy -- but in possession of
dark traits we've projected onto them. When we war against others,
we can't be persuaded from seeing a dark Voldemort within them...
someone who actually truly really deserves our hate.
Hillary's not immune to this. But she's better than most.
Permalink

DinahMoeHum wejahnke VictoryRider2005 PeekieClassic I agree
with this.
Permalink

agrippina minor Jayne Cullen ifthethunderdontgetya They all
should have stayed in England?
Permalink

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turney333 Jayne Cullen But it's a solid point. If Hillary gets in,
we'll split off our good mommy -- or the good witch -- onto her,
and our bad one onto some other. If she's our Hermione Granger,
some other "sap" will start bearing the dark, vampiric visage of
Ursula the Sea Witch, and through her we'll take our revenge.
Children will die, and they'll represent our child selves, who we
also blame for the abuse.
Permalink

Michael Pullmann Emporium If Hillary doesn't get in, it'll owe to
people's collective mommy issues. Enough people will remain
cognizant that Trump's mind is more hornet's nest than an actual
brain (credit to Andrew O'Hehir, who said something like this), and
still vote for him, for he'll be their agent for matricide.
I wonder even if this "Hermione Granger" bit is not just about
emphasizing how hard she works, but de-emphasizing her as the
Dangerous Mother... it's possible that even the Clinton campaign
might be considering their candidate's problem is people's
projecting their childhood issues onto her, might attempt to
"resolve" them through her, and are working against it by
promoting her sans dangerous witch qualities, sans older women
qualities.
Permalink

Aunt Messy @Emporium Right, it's this bit:
"He was abused," Clinton told Franks. "When a mother does what
she does, it affects you forever."
Clinton continued: "I am not going into it, but I'll say that when
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this happens in children, it scars you. You keep looking in all the
wrong places for the parent who abused you."
Permalink

Aunt Messy Emporium I'm not falling in line for her. She can still
say very interesting things, and deserves credit for it. Amanda was
a bit like that yesterday, and we should support the brave. If it
helps, I think Hillary is brave and will make a great president. I
preferred her over Bernie.
Didn't Hillary herself once remark upon Bill's relationship with his
mother as explaining his promiscuity... there was some interview
once, I remember, where she said something like this. I'll look it
up.
Permalink

agrippina minor Emporium In 2008, reporters could barely look
Hillary in the eye. Obama barely could. What is the origin of this?
Just societal stereotypes? Or something quite massive, like
childhood abuse, like mommy issues?
There's more Steinem behind this than Paglia. She's the one who
explained the aversion to Hillary Clinton as owing to people's
difficulties with their mothers.
Permalink

1471
She revives childhood memories of being bullied and manipulated

by our love-denied mothers, who are the ones who mostly attend to
us in childhood, not our fathers. This is what Gloria Steinem was
getting at. This is what's going on with Bernie Bros, and this is the
origin of the witch stereotype: its basis is actual experience. It's not
a sign of intrinsic male awfulness towards women. It gets dropped
when more societal resources are devoted to assists mothers as
caregivers. We need to be much more Scandinavia. We won't get
there until we get further past needing to revenge ourselves upon
them, and as well their defenceless children -- representatives of
ourselves, who we also blame for the abuse.
Those who were lucky enough to have had mothers who were well
loved enough to be much more genuinely nurturing, to not use the
child to make up for love not given to her, won't be attracted to this
stereotype, no matter if they grew up in a 16th-century Puritan
household.
Hermione Granger is a teenager. She's the sort older men who've
suffered abuse from their mothers turn to when they're fleeing the
power of the dominating mother. I'm not sure we should hold her
out as bait.
"We are all aware, on some level, that it's anonymous but hard-
working women that make the world run, who do all the thankless
and unglamorous organizing, cleaning, planning and detail-
sweating..."
Camille Paglia gave us this speech too, but credited those "Gloria
Steinem" feminists disparage -- men... the ones who built bridges,
civilization... all that. My point is that it's more Bernie rhetoric, not
Hillary, who's been accused of being oriented almost entirely to
members of the professional class; those who leave the house-
cleaning to others.
Permalink
Original Article: Obama’s DNC letdown: The

president needed to hit it out of the park, but he
surprisingly fell short
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THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2016 5:05 PM

62Fender Yeah, it was an interesting perspective; a useful
contribution.
Permalink

Does it strike anyone that we have been guilty of doing a lot of
projection onto the Obamas, at the expense of those who are
actually more interesting. I've always found both Clintons much
more alive and vibrant... much more of what I tend to think of
when I think Democratic. The Obamas seem just so controlled, like
the latest incarnation of British monarchy... much more like how
Republicans like normally to have things.
I think we wanted someone like him in office because for a good
long while we wanted a more detached relationship with the
presidency... some sense that the presidency was kept apart form
all the emotional turmoil in our own lives. A statue. Some rebuff.
Why, I'm not sure. Maybe it's because we needed a time where we
could predict for certain an unchanging social/political/cultural
environment... the next 8 yrs will be for--. And we couldn't as
easily do that if someone who registered our own emotional
unevenness was at the helm. Anyway, just my best guess right
now.
Permalink

sjlee Marcotte assumes they became friends. Gauging at least by
what was happening to Hillary supporters like Ferraro and Walsh,
Obama was getting ready to absolutely destroy her reputation in
2008... get really, really nasty. Fortunately Hillary relented in time,
1473
and all that was happening and was about to happen could be
displaced in mind as we all joined "Hope".
It's possible he felt -- and still feels -- the same aversion to her as
most reporters did in 2008... preferring to look at his feet or to the
side rather than square in the eye (as SNL finally made a skit
about). In natural aversion to her, maybe he actually shares some
similarity with the Bros portion of Bernie's supporters?
Permalink
Original Article: In defense of Bernie’s boo-

birds (sort of): Democratic dissent is not the
party’s real problem
TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2016 10:48 PM
Perhaps out of this democrats might conclude
that conventions ... these stadiums of crowds
and anticipation, belong to a mindset we might
be evolving beyond. I like Andrew's appreciation
of raucous conventions of yesteryear, but what if
over the last 50 yrs what's happened to many
democrats is that they by temperament have
become more Scandinavian... that is, more
subdued... less in need of theatre politics, owing
to being in possession of less excitatory, less
damaged, less traumatized amygdala brain
systems. We might be losing this desire to move
into what Stanley Milgram called, an "agentic
state"

1474
Recent posts at Salon.com (July 23 2016). I

am Emporium.
Original Article: His dark materials: After
that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald
Trump could easily end up president
Christine B. BrainDrain Yeah, your point is one
Steven Pinker would corroborate with his "Better
Angels of Our Nature."
Permalink

masaccio Again, DeMause:
Those who are able to remain outside the social
trance are the rare individuals whose
childrearing is less traumatic than that of the
rest of their society or whose personal insights,
through psychotherapy or other means, are
beyond those of their neighbors. For instance,
extensive interviews of people who were
rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust in
comparison to a control group of people who
were either persecutors or just stood by and
allowed the killing of Jews shows startling
differences in childrearing. While all other
dimensions of the lives of the rescuers were
similar to the control group religion, education,
even political opinions what distinguished the
1475
rescuers from others was their childhood: their

parents used reasoning in bringing them up,
rather than the customary use by European
parents early in the century of beating and
kicking children to force obedience. The
rescuers’ parents were found to have invariably
showed an unusual concern for equity, more love
and respect for their children, more tolerance for
their activities, and less emphasis on obedience,
all allowing rescuers to remain in their empathic
central personalities and not enter into social
alters and dissociate their feelings for Jews as
human beings. The rescuers risked their lives to
save Jews not because they had some
connection with Judaism or were politically
radical, but because they remained in their
compassionate personal selves rather than
switching into the social trance constructed by
the rest of their society.
Permalink

Jack Burroughs They do feel dislodged. And if
somehow under Hillary Clinton they were given a
living wage or guaranteed income -- all their
financial insecurities totally dissipated -- and
were no longer targeted as the lowest form of
slime, as progressives (again, somehow) lost
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their need to use them as convenient poison

containers, they'd still feel just as dislodged,
alone and afraid as progressives continued
moving the country along into what should
objectively be called, a more evolved reality.
They weren't raised as permissively, as lovingly.
They felt there was a limit to how much
progress, how much change, is actually
permitted. This is why they want the world to
stop. This is the foremost issue. If not an
immigrant had been allowed into the country
over the last 50 yrs, they'd still be demanding for
a Trump... their talk would still be of their being
surrounded, as memories of childhood isolation
come creeping back.
Personally I think the idea of having a homeland
is sort of sick. Isn't what is blessed about the
world today that we are increasingly likely to
meet people across the world and discover
something shared... that in fact if they had been
your next-door neighbour you might actually have
had a more fruitful relationship with them than
you did with those of similar tribal heritage?
Suddenly so many things about you've been told
you are seem to slack off, and you can
reformulate your self-understanding in a way that
feels intrinsically more appropriate. The wonder
of cosmopolitanism, I guess.
Thanks for your post. I enjoyed reading it.
Permalink
1477

Your discussion of amniotic fluid, of being born
into a frightening new world, as well as your
reference to a leader as an "avatar," had me
searching for this bit from the psychohistorian
Lloyd DeMause's earlier work:
1. We begin to reexperience our early traumas

when we feel too much freedom, prosperity and
individuation-wars are usually fought after a
period of peace, prosperity and social progress
produced by a minority who have had better
childrearing, producing challenges that are
experienced as threatening by the majority
whose childrearing is so traumatic that too much
growth and independence produces an
abandonment panic, fears of a persecutory
mother-figure, a defensive merging with the
engulfing mother and then fears by men of
having been turned into women.
2. We deify a leader who is a poison container
into whom we can pump our frightening feelings,
our “bad blood” you can see this blood-transfer
concretely when Nazis put up their arms like an
umbilicus and throw their bad feelings their “bad
blood” into Hitler for cleansing, while he catches
their feelings with an open palm, standing under
a swastika (the ancient symbol of the placenta)
1478
imprinted upon a blood-red flag, the

hypermasculine leader becoming society’s
protector by finding an enemy to persecute
rather than individuals reliving their early
tragedies alone and helpless.
Permalink
Original Article: An attack on all of us: The

France horror has shaken the world — but
terrorists will not destroy our humanity
MrJoyboy Emporium Mostly only if it echoes
disrespect you're already well familiar with. If
there wasn't much of this in your originating... in
your HOME environment, then an astonishing lot
can be casually brushed off easily.
Permalink

Don't Quote Me Emporium and respond by ...
writing an absolutely ferocious letter to the
editor, while channeling Mencken, a la
"Greenberg."
Permalink

1479
MrJoyboy Somehow this doesn't seem to well

describe the average Brooklynite reader of
literature.. the average hipster. Maybe they just
grew up with parents who treated them daily
with respect rather than with constant
denigration and abuse.
Permalink

CyclingFool CyclingFool
Weren't the first American settlers -- the Puritans
-- actually fairly democratic for their time ... that
time's left... those who rebelled against popish
ways, against hierarchy and aristocracy? If they
had somehow clamped down on immigration and
kept their "country" tight in bounds, wouldn't
their country essentially be Scandinavia (+) at
this point -- a social welfare, a caring society,
leader/model? Is it true that in their case, at
least, they were swamped by those of more
regressive orientations?... that their once
dominant culture, kind of lost to yahoos?
Wouldn't the American North have been better
off it had shorn itself of its Southern states?
Hasn't it amounted to a weight on the degree of
progress, progressives might establish at the
national level?
I'm asking this even as I acknowledge that
1480
basically no one who right now talks about the

"swamping" of countries by immigrants, actually
means well. The kind people out there -- or
almost all of them -- talk like you do. Your
orientation... is basically the one to support until
we're clear from danger from those who for
psychic reasons, are warring to keep their
country from unmooring them with further
genuine humane progress.
I think if you let in people whose childrearing is
worse than the aggregate of your own, it's only a
good thing when it means that your own country
is being administered by those who are open and
not-bigoted -- the bigots are being kept at bay.
Otherwise, it's best to have in immigrants whose
level of childrearing is better than that of your
aggregate's, which is surely the case of the
professionals into our own country. These people
shouldn't be so much encouraged to assimilate
as to teach us an even better way.
Permalink

bluecollarpeep "We must end poverty in order to
recruit people to the idea of world peace"
If you grew up with emotionally immature
parents, you existed to satisfy their own unmet
needs -- they didn't WANT you to become you're
1481
best YOU, but rather make up for their loneliness

and absence of love from their parents. When you
first started individuating at the early age of
around two -- that first separation from mother --
she would have reacted instinctively by in some
way abandoning you, removing her approval. This
scared the absolute shit out of you; and so in
your brain you installed the super-ego to watch
over over the pleasure-seeking id which would
eventually betray you.
The next years after that were fine enough
because children at that age are naturally
mostly drawn to their parents, but around the
age of 13 -- adolescence; the dawning of adult
departure -- this same sequence repeated itself.
You saw the world as something which might
substantiate yourself, become mostly about you
and your chosen peers, your chosen life and
"world," and you experienced this terrifying
withdrawal of still-absolutely-needed parental
love.
What wealth does, for "you," the child of
emotionally immature parents, is actually make
you feel incredibly anxious, like as if the
horsemen will eventually arrive and smash
bottles across your face, debase you in acid, rip
you into bloody pieces, for your presumption. As
a collection of people, you can only tolerate
sustained increase of wealth and opportunity
after periods of severe war and depression -- a
1482
price has been paid, and you sense some

permitted avenue.
This is why, for awhile after WW2, all incomes
increased. This is why, for awhile after WW2,
there was a legitimate conversation between
societal classes -- the working class -- home of
many of the worst raised -- could allow
themselves to keep up to some extent, with the
progressives in their society's lead.
You can only have a Scandinavia, where
everyone finds grotesque the idea that someone
could be suffering, could be destitute, when the
childrearing as an aggregate has improved
dramatically. This doesn't mean an improvement
in STYLE ... well, it does, but it is best
understood as an accretion OF LOVE, slowly
through generations, which manifests itself is
such things as eliminating harsh parenting,
eliminating spanking, eliminating discipline-
focused schooling, etc. ... which manifests itself
through style.
Wealth and opportunity is far more the actual
source of the terrorism we're experiencing that
destitution and ruin. We as Westerners could
have been true saints across the world,
absolutely respectful and beneficiary, and those
of awful childhoods would still target us for
representing the affluence and opportunity that
just the sheer fact of life provides, that they
cannot any longer abide in themselves.
1483
The humiliations they will be revenging

themselves upon are sourced from their own
childhoods, those inflicted upon them by their
own parents, even as it is a wonderful thing that
many in the Western world's first thought is that
its "obvious" source is their own governments',
their own people's, grotesque and cruel
expression of sadism outwards onto the world.
Permalink
Original Article: GOP war on porn: The

same party that nominated a libertine for
president is now calling your porn a “public
health crisis”
Tropez Emporium Jayne Cullen Algernon2
I wish porn was all about very well treated men
and women enjoying their sexuality. I'm sorry it's
not all about that. But the future I see ahead is
more Hays morality code -- a restrictive binding-
up of youth and youthful impulses. And so I think
I'm more for humanization than you
have surmised.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Recent posts at Salon.com (July 14 2016).

I'm Emporium
Original Article: GOP war on porn: The same party
that nominated a libertine for president is now calling
your porn a “public health crisis”
1484

Jayne Cullen Algernon2 The war on pornography that is going on
right now though is perhaps best understood as a war against
pleasure. It is the emerging prudish attitude of the 1930s
condemning Jazz Age fun as civilization-destroying. It really just
isn't the time to be with those who argue that porn dehumanizes.
Such times might have once existed. Not now. Best to go with
Marcotte's people just having a bit of me time on occasions.
Permalink

frigmous The guy walking into the nightclub and killing 49 people
was walking into a "pleasure-house." The key problem of our age
is that increasing numbers of people feel suddenly pure, loyal and
good when they kill other people's happiness. They target people
who represent the parts of themselves they are trying to gain
distance from. Projection. Poison containers. Elimination: all
suddenly feels pure and light, as the sin that was once part of you
is gone from the world.
Permalink

Minnesotan "but I wonder if widespread access to porn hasn't
actually been beneficial to society. Young people are having sex ...
at historically low rates"
Young people having less sex is beneficial to society? What does
society want? People who barely explore? Or those who come to
know want they want through sexual adventure?
Permalink
1485

"On the contrary, this is yet another example of Trump's strategy
for winning over the Christian right, by giving them all the power
they demand..."
No, I don't think this is strategy. If strategy, then you know Trump
thinks there is considerable amount of hokum in the idea that porn
ruins civilization, but it's expedient to pretend to be a true believer.
I think we'll miss understanding the psychology of our times (like
how the Jazz Age 1920s changed into the grey 1930s) if we don't
understand that a lot of Americans -- including Trump, and
including perhaps a good number of liberals -- who previously
were all aboard the idea that life ought to be about consumerism
and pleasure, are doing a turn-about as sudden as if the "Marilyn
Monroe" they'd fantasized in their heads had morphed into a
punitive grandma... or the old naked lady in the Shining, or the old
naked witch in Game of Thrones, threatening them with a stick if
they masturbate or have fun at all. And that their brains decide that
the best way to absolve themselves of all guilt --- Trumpy has been
very bad! -- is not to heed their inner grandmas, give way to them,
but to in a sense become them.
Osama bin laden was a playboy before he chose to live in holes
with barely any drinking water and not a single source of fun. Not
just all conservatives but unfortunately many liberals were not
raised with allowance-tolerating, well-enough loved parents to
endlessly tolerate the idea that life can be about fun, without at the
end feeling the need to turn on the idea.
Permalink
Original Article: Sure, celebrate Sanders, but let’s

also honor Clinton for her historic accomplishment
WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016 6:47 PM
Between_The_Wheels I look at things in terms of narrative.
1486
If I was teleported into the near future and was told that the
presiding president was one who held that women were
systematically discriminated against; that they still faced
scepticism and dismissal, even as they evidently changed the world
for the better; I would know that the liberal society I was familiar
with had continued.
If however I was told that the presiding president held that there
were many groups that faced discrimination... but that the most
pronounced were evidently the working class, I wouldn't be so
sure. More than likely, actually, I'd know I had teleported into a
society where the gains by feminists were about to be withdrawn
as the "staid and true" -- real Americans -- began to speak their
mind.
I find it a bit disconnected from the fact that evidently the nature of
one's social class right now matters a whole lot more than one's
sex, but still, given that the age ahead is probably not going to be a
time a hippie time where everyone everywhere is considered
beautiful but a time of 1930s parochialism, we'd better hope that
the narrative that one's sex matters most, is the one we remain
living amongst.
Permalink

"No wonder so many women suffer from imposter syndrome.
When the whole world is telling you women -- including women
like Hillary Clinton -- only win by cheating, it's hard not to suffer
unnecessary doubts about yourself"
This is true... but it's also true that if I was a white working class
male who succeeded, I wouldn't feel so comfortable that the
professional class whose arena I breached, didn't think me an
imposter barbarian. Someone whom in terms of actual virtue, was
probably no better than your average internet troll, and should go
back where he came from.
1487
I wish the left -- the professional class -- didn't encourage its own
imposter syndrome upon others; wasn't insouciant concerning how
they might be cruelly withering the self-worth and self-esteem of
others. But it has not evolved beyond the psychic need for out-
groups.
Permalink

I'm not sure if Sanders, Clinton or Trump deserve credit for their
success. This isn't to say that if we take a good look at what they
did, how they performed, they weren't objectively skilled in a way
that is hard to duplicate -- they might each BE that. But that each
one might mostly represent something to the American populace,
and served mostly as a kind of emblem of that. Who wins might
just mostly represent what kind of society we want over the next
while -- what impulse, mostly, to follow upon.
If I'm Hillary, and I win, I don't think the truth of this necessarily
besmirches my accomplishments. I know I worked hard. I know I
was resilient. I know I had in mind, mostly, what I might do to
assist the U.S. become better (some egoism: first female
president!), as much as it might not have mattered if I had not
actually been all that. The nature of my sex is part of a package
that the establishment, or the established -- not menacingly
defined, as it means a hell of a lot of us -- was going to offer, just
like Obama's race was: keep the country from falling apart;
incremental change that symbolically is very telling and wonderful
but sort of as part of the ongoing roll of our evolving, increasingly
global, post-industrial society (without knowing it and just living,
the world becomes better, and better yet).
In this instance, it isn't a strike against "me," my sex, something to
be overcome, but the next extension upon which the animus
moving the world for the last several decades, implements itself --
that is, a help ... we didn't have to configure something. There is a
1488
feel-goodism about it; how wonderful we are to be part of this

special moment where another of the disadvantaged makes the
incredible breach! It satisfies the ego and makes us exult.
But the push against the collective regression we might all at some
level be experiencing, was going to require finding some kind of
refuge in unimpregnable virtue to keep going. And we need things
to keep going. It's a dark precipice, the other way.
Permalink
Original Article: Meet North Korea’s perfect

family: Totalitarianism, Trump and the politics of non-
thought
Tom_Collins Sweden, Norway and Finland are also examples of
profound individualism and personal freedom. The collective
empowers each individual so their relationship to their businesses
and their families is not a servile, dependent one. You can leave
your place of work, and not find oneself without health care. You
can disappoint your parents, do your own thing, and not worry that
your parents would retaliate by not taking care of you if you're
desperate.
Permalink
Original Article: Pottermore problems:

Scholars and writers call foul on J.K. Rowling’s
North American magic
SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2016 11:45 PM
If Indigenous people's background ends up being
more like this
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emotional-life-of-
nations/chapter-7-childhood-and-cultural-evolution/
or as Steven Pinker accounts in "Better Angels of Our
Nature,"
1489
then I'm fairly sure the author would learn to settle for
bastardized accounts.
Recent postings at Salon.com (June 30

2016)
Original Article: Don’t blame Brits for the
Brexit: The EU strayed from its roots in post-war
unity to become a neoliberal technocracy
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2016 4:23 PM
E.L. Deflagrante kumicho "we do not get that the member
nations are not US states, but nations with thousands of
years of history"
I always wonder when people talk about the importance of
the length of time a country has been a country, if they're
thinking that somehow a race's history gets passed on
through the genes. It's like as if some serum was injected into
each young child, so they're inextricably infected with the
millions of voices of their ancestral heritage. Within each one
is actually a Jungian legion! I'm sorry, but weren't they
rather just playing with their X-boxes and listening to their
Taylor Swift? How exactly was the Magna Carta,
Shakespeare, Chesterton and Churchill lurking somehow,
even within that?
Maybe it's rather that if you've been well loved as a child, you
don't project onto a nation anything mythical or magical --
you're spared that psychological malady. It becomes... simply
a collective; one that might not make anywhere near as much
sense as one you might choose to formulate within your own
generation, with people of similar dispositions, across other
countries. Like the E.U. was for the post-war generation.
Permalink
1490

jak123 "the fact that even at this late date that no one seems
to know exactly why she wants to be president"
More opportunities for women. A society with better
healthcare. Less disparity between the rich and the poor. A
more educated society. Encouraging a less egotistic, more
generous way of looking at the world.
She may not be the best progressive out there, but she IS
progressive. Her intention to be president is very worthy.
Her example will encourage other intelligent people to do the
same.
By the way, borderlines love an Orwellian, 1984 society. It is
something they'd wish upon themselves. For it means their
"parents," however loathsome and distrusting, have not
abandoned them.
We need to explore just how much people ACTUALLY hate a
surveillance state, or are somehow eased by it. I don't think
you can tell simply by the fact that someone is criticizing...
sometimes in the criticism one feels that the world would be
psychically molded to be this prison, this panopticon, even if
the outside world didn't much substantiate. At some level,
they actually feel more at ease than they do ill-at-ease, in this
ostensibly existing surveillance world prison.
Permalink

Reality-based Liberal Emporium "people with crappy
1491
rearing generally bow the corrupt and powerful"

Yes, this is right. For them, the horsemen of the apocalypse
come riding when they self-actualize too much. When they've
suffered, it's proof of how actually selfless they've been
living.
You can only get "Scandinavia," not with the successful
spread of examples and ideas, but when the childrearing, the
true level of genuine love in families, is high enough for
everyone to feel well at ease when each one of them lives an
enriched, fully independent life.
Permalink

Reality-based Liberal Emporium Oligarchs are actually our
parents, displaced. Anyone who complains about how they've
been humiliated through too much boot-licking, has come
out of childhoods where their parents inflicted similar
humiliations upon them. There IS a sense in which they're
actually innocent... people who would have been forced to
play their parts, had they not been willing, so the world could
re-stage their early childhood humiliations... the pretext, to
eventual glorious revenge.
Permalink

firstpersoninfinite Emporium The electorate know what
they're doing. They deliberately vote in people who'll abuse
them. Kill our easy prosperity. We'll develop character
through suffering -- i.e. we won't self-actualize at all, so our
1492
parents won't think we've abandoned them.

Scandinavians don't do that. But then with them it's just silly
to discuss psychic behaviours like masochism because their
level of childrearing is too good. The professional class
everywhere is getting beyond this as well. But the good old
white trash -- who need their children to make up for
attention they did not receive from their own unloved
parents, and who ferociously abandon them when they have
the audacity to do their own thing -- keep the Freudian
concepts of superego, sadism and masochism, fully relevant.
This hugging of the flag we're about to see plenty of now is
regressive clinging to mommy. Borders will outline the
beautific mother country's body. Everyone inside will be
good the "good children" again, as they displace all their own
"bad" aspects, as well as those of their Terrifying Mother's,
onto other countries.
E.U. has seen a beloved period of peace. This period of
nationalism will have countries looking at other countries
like the fellowship did Mordor.
Permalink

Without neoliberalism the world would have fashioned
themselves like Scandinavians have now. They'd all be
earning living wages, have 5-week vacations. Anxiety-levels
would be down, and life would be all about rich self-
development and self-actualization.
Hardly.
Without neoliberalism, the working class would have found
some other way to make the world make them suffer. They're
actually content when they've scars aplenty to show the
world. Look, mom, not the least bit spoiled, am I! The
1493
problem for the world is that they've decided the time for
them to accrue scars is over. Now's the time where they take
out revenge. We'll all patsies to their executing their own
personal psychodrama. They'll project on us all the
appropriate parts.
Permalink
Original Article: Lessons of Britquake 2016: A

history-shaping crisis, and a moment of danger
and opportunity
SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2016 3:13 PM
Slickship Gunner Emporium This is the great "men" theory
of history. Leaders change the course of a nation. I think they
just follow the emotional rhythms of the rest of the country,
and as such, could have been replaced by hundreds of others,
and each would have been established indisputably singular
and "great." I hope in temperament, whatever reality is, we
prefer to know more of undistinguished Brussel democrats
than great Churchill leaders facing the tide... It'll mean we
won't secretly relish periods which are ultimately truly nasty;
find heroic, figures who lead millions to their deaths.

Recent comments at Salon.com (June 26

2016)
Original Article: Smart country, foolish choice: The
U.K.’s Brextremely stupid move
If this cosmopolitan world somehow manages to keep going, we're
going to see some of these Anglophiles genuinely pressed on
exactly how much, truly, they're disappointed when a cosmopolitan
1494
world collapses... how disappointed they are, truly, when suddenly

everyone in their own country wants to know more of their
Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Wordsworth origins, rather than what
the rest of the world "bursted" (good literature bursts?) with their
ostensibly equally worthy literature.
For if it somehow keeps going, Literature departments will likely
be pressed on this habit of sticking to, of permitting, study
according to country. Why communicate to students that it's okay
to devote oneself to more or less uninterrupted involvement in your
own country, when the world you're in is an interconnected reality?
Why communicate that people share something in common,
perhaps mystically, owing to the fact of their geography, their
national heritage?
Why not instead communicate that the person who might really be
most simpatico with you, could be someone living in a different
culture, and this won't be the joining of two exotics but rather of
two natural soulmates? And the same for literature, so you couldn't
possibly devote yourself to all things English and be as equally
emotionally evolved as the student who naturally wants to dabble
everywhere. Why weren't YOU like that as well? Why if you love
this interconnected, global world, didn't you find yourself with a
rather mixed reading list... and a bunch of traditionally oddly
grouped texts, to want to arrange for a class?
Why find yourself in this unfortunate fix where all the books
you're going to be redoubling your efforts to comb through, are
pretty much exactly the same ones Nationalists are going to be
parading as recommended or mandatory reading lists? How much
are you going to regret that during this next historical period,
you're not so much going to stand out but rather, sufficiently
"pass."
Permalink

history-shaping crisis, and a moment of danger and
opportunity
1495

Slickship Gunner You make it sound like we are all blessed by this
moment -- a chance for heroes; for a washing away of bulimic
greed. What we need more here is some sense of what is tragically
lost when an advanced and successful society regresses into
nationalism. And for that we need language that lauds a society
that appreciates something much quieter than grandiose heroic
figures. We need praise of our commercial society, and our decades
of relative peace. So much of your colourful language here works
against that.
For her own sake I don't want Clinton to "bend her course,"
because if it's a different Hillary who gets elected than the one we
have now, it won't be simply because she adjusted -- we'd spot
such a faker. It will because she herself has changed, and has
begun to see some of the same version of the world that Trump
himself sees: America as a homeland; herself "saving" it.
Hillary, keep sane. It is dubious to me that any single individual
"saves" civilization. What is more likely true is that the overall
populace proved less insane during these shared periods than
elsewhere. There were a million possible candidates for a
"Roosevelt" and a "Churchill," and we would have lauded every
one of them, and they'd have followed exactly the same course.
Permalink

opportunity
SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2016 6:07 PM
"I don't know, and don't claim to know. But conventional wisdom
and complacency seem displaced at this historical moment, don't
you think"
Good point. I wonder how many of us know what unconventional
wisdom looks like? My guess, different, nutty. You all ready to
look strange but also to have a better chance of contributing
something relevant to the understanding our current moment of
1496
history? Hope so.

Permalink

opportunity
Gert M Emporium Charming to make your acquaintance. It is an
earnest attempt to add some illumination, not satire. Your
explanation for Hitler's Fatherland and the creation of the Volk, is,
what, economic?
Permalink

opportunity
"But they couldn't quite say why, largely because for most people
the E.U. is identified less with its purported human-rights and
social-justice priorities than with the neoliberal economics,
crippling budgets and disastrous "free trade" deals."
So if after Brexit the economic consequences are severe, the

English won't be thinking of how great it is to have their own
country again, but rather of how the exit actually crippled them,
made things worse -- hey assh*les, this plan didn't deliver? For me
it's so easy to imagine them so happy to once again count
themselves part of their proud ancestral lineage, that their wealth
even cut in half wouldn't irk so much.
I think the idea that what is most irksome to people right now is
how they have economically struggled, is worth challenging. I
really wouldn't just assume it. IT IS possible to me that if what
happens in England right now is a reclaiming of some kind of
great, mystical union, a bonding back to Magna Carta through to
Churchill, and a rejection of something seen as imposed and
1497
artificial, and it really does lead to an even worse economic

situation, that people wouldn't instantly turn disappointed and
angry. Could you not imagine them quite proud to endure the
hardships? Proudly bearing the pain, to be part of something so
"great" again?
It isn't that they are being used, that they had no say, either. That's
not quite right. But rather that they are being dragged kicking and
screaming into a world they aren't prepared for. I truly believe
every single one of them could have been granted a living wage,
had no financial difficulties at all, through this whole period, and
simply being part of this expansive phenomena of globalism
would've compelled them to eventually call a stop. I also believe
that the fact that they didn't have much say in this last whole period
was probably to our collective good fortune -- good thing, as
arrogant as this sounds, many of them wanted to go through a
period where they could demonstrate their being absolved of all
previous sins by overtly collecting upon themselves so many scars,
pains and humiliations. Free trade -- they knew unconsciously this
would deliver on that.
This new England will use them just as much. But no grievance:
they'll be happy to be its patsies. Because it'll be all done for their
great, beautiful Fatherland/Motherland, and their being absolutely
loyal will make them its purest, cleanest subjects.
...
It is true that I'm not dealing so much with Bernie here. I hope this
proves a time of exciting opportunities for the left. It is nice to be
provoked to think of it.
Permalink
Original Article: Trump and Brexit: Right-wing

populism of the two is rooted more in base
nationalism than in economic insecurity
Steven Danis Amanda argues that they are aware of this: "So, this
1498
is a fairly ugly example of people choosing to screw themselves

over economically rather than accept cultural change."
Permalink

kchoze But what about the example of elite universities, where
homogeneity is more about the fact that all of them, regardless of
where they come from in the world, are sons and daughters of
professionals. They're psychologically similar, and that's key,
because for this they're better able to relate to one another than
people who speak the same language but are psychologically
vastly disparate.
These are their natural kin; they want to know one another; so if
there is a language barrier the desire will be there to deal with it.
What cosmopolitan Londoner suddenly wants to count himself part
of ostensibly shared ancestral heritage that the provincials are
suddenly yammering about?
Permalink

czuklz Well, they delight over parochial nationalism, so they just
gave substance to the next bunch of elites who might otherwise
considered different.
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SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2016 1:27 AM
Excellent article.
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susan sunflower FreeQuark I've read the book. What he couldn't
acknowledge is that the liberal professional elite may have been
assholes, but they really had to leave everyone else behind. The
working class, who for awhile had sorta kept pace with the more
evolved psychoclass leading them, had exhausted their ability to
tolerate further growth. After this point, they really were just a
burden that had to be shlepped off if you wanted a progressive
cultural movement... if you wanted what Hedges dismissively
calls, "boutique" societal accomplishments.
There are a lot of people who actually wanted to suffer, and what
the hell do you do with that, even if you weren't in mind to
disparage them? You don't go down in other people's sinkhole.
These people knew what was going to happen to them with Reagan
and NAFTA, which were compliant with their own sordid wishes
-- take away the happy times that we don't feel we deserve. No
betrayal occurred, that is, upon earnest working class people, too
easily given to trust.
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Original Article: Trump and Brexit: Right-

wing populism of the two is rooted more in base
It may not be right to say it is principally bigotry that is
moving these people. I think it really is sovereignty --
possession -- and strong borders. But by this I mean...
Hitler's first business wasn't suddenly to go around
executing Others. He wanted to be part of inducing a
populace (a populace that would have compelled him, if for
some reason he proved somehow in truth uninterested) to
1500
think of their country as some kind of great parental identity

-- a Fatherland or Mutterland -- that had been forsaken, and
everyone else loyal "children" who were absolutely ready to
die for it -- a fusion into the Volk. It is for the successful
creation of such an entity that people are primarily joyous
now. The body of their country is their mother again. They,
part of it. They're going to be part of a mystical entity again,
and are delighted by the prospect.
This returned "parent" will have her attributes split -- all the
good in one's own country and all the bad outside. And the
war against the split-off Terrifying Mother, as well the those
who betrayed her -- liberal cosmopolitans, and their "pets" --
will wait for next phase: there will be awhile where
cosmopolitans might think they might just manage their way
through this, even as this madness spreads. You might even
find them echoing the mandatory greeting, Hail "Hitler," but
this won't spare them, for it's not something about to pass.
Recents comments (I'm "Emporium") at

Salon.com (as of June 25 2016)
Original Article: No, Syrian refugees didn’t
rape a child in Idaho: Right-wing urban legend
shows how ugly anti-refugee movement has
become
susan sunflower Emporium Good point about the similarity
between this case and the scapegoating of Jews as child-
abductors. Referring specifically to Jews, this was a minority
actually leaps ahead in terms of childrearing, true child care,
than the rest of Germans -- they were the most progressive
group in the country.
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Original Article: Nick Denton isn’t sorry: New

interview reveals more about Gawker founder’s
ethics
Society will miss an uninhibited Gawker.
Permalink
Original Article: Fact-checking Trump’s

garbage truck of lies: His speech accusing Clinton
of corruption is riddled with fiction and
conspiracies
Come on. Hillary is not some exempla of absolute human
rationality. We just almost never elect in those people. She,
like Obama, can actually unconsciously want war. Innocents
punished, and all the worst. But their impulses are still much
better than so much of the rest of the population.
If she gets in, I'm not quite sure she'll be the war hawk that
many expect her to be -- operating under the belief that not
that many of us are entirely immune to whatever turn in
psychology is driving so many of our countrymen into
nationalists, I actually expect her to turn a bit isolationist --
but I think she's going to do other unconscionable things --
like putting weight on the "radical left." There will be no
good reason for doing so. It won't simply be strategy, but
rather, pathology. And yet it'll still mean overall for a good
progressive run by a candidate, many leaps of psychological
health over her opponent.
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become
susan sunflower Emporium We don't have a left who can
look at refugees and say, these individuals need to be
welcomed into our country, and given the full chance of a
rich life they deserve, but they do come from areas where
the amount of love in families is abysmal, so we can't
assume they'll get to the contributive stage any sooner
than we'd expect some generational chain that's been
here for a century and rightwing and xenophobic the
entirety of the time, to suddenly just now become one,
given the right pamphleteering.
We'll look at many families within our country and say,
they're entrenched: these people keep on re-inflicting the
same traumas upon their children and they never seem
to become other than societal retardants. Society moves
on, essentially only by forgetting about them and focusing
on the advances of the cosmopolitan, educated, liberal
elite. The particular irony of our current form of
progressive thought -- the best to date out there, mind
you -- is that refugees, for us, simply by being amongst
peoples the rightwingers in our own country tend to
project upon and hate, magically become exempt from
this way of thinking. For them, surely, after a little bit of
careful guidance and a grand measure of respect and
support, they'll bypass this generation-after-generation-
stuck-in-the-mud rule, and start inculcating our own
society with a wonderful dalliance of their own cultural
1503
contributions, as they've caught up with our modern

contemporary standards of behaviour in every way we
could expect to hope for. Take the bullies off of them (we
know what it like to be picked on too!), and give them a
little bit of support and love, they'll thrive. It's too bad
we've rejected psychoanalytic talk therapy, because
therapists in those circles understood that when the
abuse has been bad it can take decades to shape people
into normal.
You mentioned before that many of our immigrants are
actually highly educated. Progressive for their own
countries, very likely. These may well be in advance of
what constitutes the American average, and simply by
coming here, are weighing our country towards the left,
towards sanity. As much as possible, this ought to be the
idea.
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become
What liberal doesn't hear of Syrian refugees and want to
apply a "Rousseauian image makeover" (Steven Pinker)?
What lover of Dave Eggers' wonderful fiction -- Zeitoun,
What is the What? The left is best defined as being those
who are more sane that its opponents, but what is good
about the current refugee program may be more that it is
part of our current generation of progressive's world
1504
vision, than the degree to which the refugees somehow

function to keep our world somehow intrinsically
cosmopolitan and progressive.
We may actually be letting in people who have come out
of childhoods more traumatic than the ones that lead
people to being rightwing, American-style. This means
hate. This means rage. This means parochial attitudes,
that stretch over generations. This is not a problem, but
only in a sort of complicated way: the only alternative
vision of our times will lead to mass bigotry and a great
furthering of pain.
If the American populace wants to chastise the left, its
(the left's) inclination to romanticize will be part of how it
goes. The other avenue is already currently being
exploited: the American left has not evolved beyond
needing a group to irrationally hate, namely the American
right (or downscale, white, working class
Americans). Irrationally? Insanely? -- yes. For if they were
looking at people outside their culture rather than within
it, their tone would be much more tempered, and they'd
be much less inclined to mock... they'd talk instead, rather
respectfully -- not to besmirch the totality of their whole
cultural background -- of a still necessary re-education.
They'd deal with them as educated, tolerant employees of
European governments do the refugees they're
respectfully helping settle in.
There is still something irrational in the American left, a
need to project an inner worldview onto outer reality,
even if vastly less the case than their opponents. I don't
1505
think this is an achilles heel, but if the whole nation goes

sorta Trumpish ( which, believe it or not, I think it can
kinda manage even with Hillary), if we close in on the 51%
of the population who are in the same mind as Brexit
even if not quite for a tantrumy head-of-state, the left is
going to have to be really, really smart to minimize the
damage, and keep our subsequent years the best under
the circumstances.
Yes, the right is truly, deeply mad. But they need to
consider their own psychic weak spots, and what it might
have made them perhaps overlook.
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Original Article: “Brexit” is British for Trump:

Why the U.K.’s anti-Europe surge should scare
us
LynnRobb Globalization can be seen as a sort of reaching
out for your own. You're educated, broadminded, and
you seek the same wherever they are in the world.
Someone tells you that, "no, the people you left behind in
your hometown are actually TRULY your kin, and that it's
time you reminded yourself of that." And you look at
them and say to yourself, "what, those neanderthals?
Please... no thank you! I'm doing everything I can to
escape them!"
I doubt a single one of them truly believes they are of
exactly the same "nature" as those who think the world is
disintegrating into some kind of polygot mess; that
something pure is being endlessly climbed over by dark
1506
and fearful beings. That is, I think they believe they are
psychologically different, more evolved. And the reason
they don't see the world as in some kind of chaos but
rather becoming more peaceful (which, it is) and, overall,
more integrated and communicative, is because they
have evolved into the temperament where a changing
world doesn't scare them, nor feels like a forbidden
trespass.
What does it mean when we say we want people to
assimilate? Shouldn't we prefer that newcomers, rather,
scintillate -- challenge, with their human uniqueness, our
traditional, roundabout way of doing things? Isn't it for
this that we'd want to invite them in? And do we trust
people saying they want assimilation? Are they thinking
rationally, sanely, demanding we consider the heartland
something forgotten but somehow still absolutely
essential to our collective identity? Or are they in some
way worthy of being forgotten -- not humiliated and
preyed upon, as they have been, but still forgotten?
Why not correct course by instituting a living wage and
providing meaningful jobs for everyone -- go vastly more
Scandinavian socialist -- and as well de-emphasize Wall
Street and put significant taxes on the super-affluent so
there is no great financial divide, but otherwise keep
those clamouring for loyalty to currently besmirched, old-
day America, out of the news? Don't you sense the
madness in them?
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Original Article: “Brexit” is British for Trump:

Why the U.K.’s anti-Europe surge should scare
us
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22, 2016 12:22 AM
The way you describe disgruntled downscale voters at the
end of the piece makes it hard to believe that the biggest
problem is the particular state of the E.U. itself. If they like
white Americans are operating under some kind of
conscious or unconscious death instinct, mightn't it just
distract to delineate its problems?
Maybe if their desire to re-stage early childhood
humiliations but no longer to suffer but to triumph over
the oppressor -- here in the guise of snobby Oxford
Londoners -- is strong enough; maybe if the drive to start
a course that will ultimately lead to some kind of mass
suicide that will please because it would acknowledge
ultimately how "sinful" "you" really are, is strong enough;
maybe if the need to create some out-group into which
one projects all one's badness into is strong enough -- in
this case, immigrants -- it wouldn't matter one bit if the
E.U. was actually functioning as it was envisioned, a
monumentally beautiful edifice of human social creation
that people two centuries ahead in time will mark as a
significant signpost of evolutionary progress. These same
regressing people would look at and see it in exactly the
same fashion they do now. An unctuous, appalling
monstrosity, even though in reality, a true beauty.
The real problem for these people with the E.U. is not
what it is doing wrong but what it is doing right. At some
1508
conscious or unconscious level, these downscale voters

know that they are being incrementally brought into a
more progressive world that will ultimately increase the
opportunities available to them. The problem however in
coming out of families, still, that are like many of our own
were but way back in our grandma's or great-grandma's
time, is that burned early on in their brains is that too
much self-activation and self-realization makes you
spoiled, makes you rotten: your own growth means
you're ignoring the multitudinous pains of your deprived
parents, who bore you to ameliorate them -- for psychic
equilibrium. And these people, like regular harshly-reared
Germans in liberal Weimar Germany, need for a stop to
be put on growth, have all the "bad boys and girls"
punished, and commit to a Fatherland or Mudderland,
because otherwise a complete psychic apocalypse for
them is guaranteed.
Published comments
Original Article: The narrative falls apart:
Evidence that Omar Mateen was in the closet
undermines GOP framing of the Orlando
shooting
TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 2016 10:59 PM
Frank Knarf Emporium The need to imagine themselves
as under threat is what is paramount in Europe. It is true
that many refugees are from countries where the level of
childrearing is abhorrent. And it is true that liberals
romanticize cultures their conservative "peers" projected
upon and despised, where if they were themselves even
1509
more emotionally healthy, they could have just seen them

straight. But if the recent millions into Germany -- for
example -- were actually more emotionally evolved than
Germans were, less violence-inclined, such is the need for
many Germans to imagine their country as vulnerable
and under threat, they would have made their actually in
this case very evolved and progressive refugees, into
villains.
Many people are rejecting progress for a nationalistic
mindset. This is what is most important about our time.
Thereafter we made do with what the world offers us to
"justify" it. And it certainly helps but actually ultimately
doesn't matter, if there are powerful entities out there
who really do want to cripple us.
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shooting
freebird Emporium The concern of this article was how
the nation was likely going to process this event given the
facts. What I was trying to get at is the obvious real facts --
that this guy needed a psychiatrist and
institutionalization, and was only very tenuously related
to "radical Islam" -- won't matter. (Regressing)
Mainstream America identifies muslims as outsiders
because they were amongst the immigrant groups
prioritized when America "drifted" away from 1950s
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values to our progressive, contemporary ones. As belief in

globalism/cosmopolitanism/righteousness of a
professional society shakes -- and it is evidently shaking,
here and elsewhere -- muslims increasingly intrinsically
become the dangerous outside other. Citizenship
becomes an allowance handed them, when Americans
were lead by liberal professionals who ostensibly were
willing to wreck a country they had no respect for while
they gloated in their coastal city enclaves.
This said, the effort to say that the most accurate way to
identify this attacker is with all others who grew up in
family environments of massive lack of love and ample
supplies of insanity (i.e. in with Christian
fundamentalists), is of course correct.
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shooting
I'm not sure how much the facts matter. ISIS, viewed
rationally, is hardly a titanic threat to the world, but in the
minds of the mainstream, it has become so. People
changed from being enthusiastic or mildly accepting of
increased social progress to beginning to want to cloister
into a bordered nation, imagined as being surrounded by
dark, predatory villains. If ISIS didn't exist, any other
group would do... truly, if all they had were peashooters,
our imaginations would admittedly be stretched but
1511
somehow we'd be convinced of their absolute threat.

Muslims are associated with the cultural progress of the
1960s on -- the victory of the cultural left. They are
increasingly viewed suspiciously, not just because of
ostensible capacity for violence but because they are
seen as part of the equation of a leftwing professional
elite that has been driven to increase opportunity in the
world and to decrease "legitimate" avenues in which to
express your hate. They were amongst the groups
principally brought into the U.S. and Europe when both
where rejecting the parochial members of their society
and branching off into cosmopolitanism/globalism --
something actually enlightened. The rightwing talk about
them as liberals' "pets." That is, as much as the Right is
identifying them as medieval cultures, they're hated
perhaps principally because of their associations with the
most progressive of our own times.
As such, there is no victory based on facts for the left
here. All mainstream Americans need to know is that a
muslim was involved (one of the outsiders, brought in by
Kennedy and the left) in creating an apocalyptic event in
their country. Yes, many mainstream Americans are still
homophobic, and certainly are developing a lot of hatred
for their millennial young, but they don't feel self-
implicated in this attack -- see their own wishes horribly
expressed -- because they feel too strong a need to
categorize the dead just as carnage... as further evidence
that the outer-world is full of attackers who are
succeeding in busting giant bomb holes within America's
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vulnerable, corporeal body.

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shooting
Patricia Schwarz Too much emphasis on fathers. These
boys spend most of their time with their mothers, and it
is their abuse of them that causes shame. Mothers cheer
when their sons become suicide bombers. It means their
boys will never grow up and away from them. They'll
always be with them. And boys feel in suiciding
themselves, they'll finally be loved.
Permalink
Original Article: American crime: Maybe

Omar Mateen used “radical Islam” as an
excuse, but his heinous actions are all too
familiar
TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 2016 3:11 AM
JamesRT We don't yet know how powerful the NRA will be
if our nation becomes nationalist. The government is no
longer a threat in this case, but truly part of the beloved
body you're co-habiting. Remember, just a number of
months ago, the Republican establishment was all-
powerful... and then suddenly, it wasn't; at all. People had
shed something they had psychically wanted for decades.
A need to be humiliated, readily assumed; to be
1513
misrepresented and betrayed. Could Hitler have reigned

in all the loose guns, if he wanted to... saying that in order
to own one, you had to be one of his soldiers? And the
possibility that you could come up with one, that *just
anyone* could come up with one -- a vulgar affront to the
leader's power of control and the dignity overall of the
nation? I kinda actually suspect that the NRA won't have
the power it has now for long. I mean this even if Hillary
gets in, because I suspect that we're going to make
whomever gets in, our next nationalist leader, our next
Roosevelt. Anyway, late at night and just thinking bold.
Permalink
Original Article: Overcompensation Nation:

It’s time to admit that toxic masculinity drives
gun violence
Benthead Emporium Freedame Lester Phinney The only
families where the fathers are anywhere near as involved
as the mothers are, can be found, like, in Brooklyn, or
Scandinavia. Everywhere else, there is not a chance that a
father has anywhere near the influence of the mother
upon the development of the child's psyche. Sources...
well, I know for instance that Margaret Mahler argued this
point. You could start there.
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familiar
NorEastern Jack Burroughs The old cliche is that America
was attacked because it represented earthly indulgence...
a happy, sunny place. If attacks keep occurring
predominantly against the young, and in their happy
places, perhaps the U.S. could have done absolutely
nothing abroad, and still been a prime target of terrorist
attacks. Its crime, just being ostensibly a place where
dreams might be realized.
Maybe what we do when we express our sadism through
war crimes is not get deserved "feedback" -- maybe we
just kill people; people who did not need to be killed. The
fact of ostensibly obvious "feedback" may just reflect a
wish. A wish for Bush to be even more evil. A wish that a
lash has already been applied, gloriously showing up our
guilt and sin.
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familiar
Jack Burroughs No one in the left really trusts that the
mood in the country is rational right now towards
immigrants.
We have two groups. The most sane, who can rightly be
made to seem insane in that they seem incapable of
1515
accepting that many immigrants coming into Europe are

from regions with absolutely abhorrent childrearing
traditions, who vent the hate that was vented upon them
readily upon other people. And we have the much less
sane, who recognize this, but who in their talk of
assimilation and being reasonable, really are just
preparing themselves with the beginning of a dialogue
which will end in isolating outgroups for a deluge of hate
and destruction.
So the human beings that are going around all
abstracted... may be just the best kind of human heroes
we've got this time around. The ideal... the left that
doesn't romanticize or themselves require some group
they can be enfranchised to hate (the best of the left will
eventually not hate the right, even as much they'll totally
regret them, because they'll never not see in them the
kind of neglect required to make them so much hate
themselves when they and the nation progress), doesn't
quite exist yet. But they'll come. The superego's gone in
most of them, and the need to project, soon also.
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gun violence
Freedame Lester Phinney They're men... who had fathers
who spent little time with them, and so they were almost
entirely raised by their mothers. Women ARE, in a sense,
just as much front and centre, if you're looking to
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childhood influences for the reason why.

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familiar
Benthead Emporium You don't think it's at useful to point
out that that our primary problem is with those who
seem irritated if we DON'T think America is a cesspool of
intractable badness which requires a complete and total
cleansing? Hey, make a bold statement about how
awesome our students, boldly insisting on applying
"trigger warnings" all through the curriculum, and see
how many extremists, conservatives, liberals -- all -- want
to see you strangled.
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familiar
balitwilight Whichever has the worst childrearing. That's
where the hatred of hubris comes out of... the total belief
in sin; fear of pleasure. Not taught. Not instructions. But
basically being coldly abandoned and brutally punished
every time you as a kid, as a young child, did anything
self-actualizing and kinda fun. Later you shortchange your
1517
life possibilities and also project your "bad" version of

yourself into others, discriminate against them, and feel,
now purified, like you might just be the good boy or girl
your God parents might finally love.
Many families, many countries, really have not evolved
much through time: each one just repeats the same
crimes upon their children. It is true: compared with the
most progressive families/nations of the world, they're
essentially medieval in psychic state. Though also true:
people from the most loving families are the ones who
are saying it's not time to link any culture right-wingers
are trying to target as medieval. Hell, with these folk,
Andrew might even get in trouble for bringing up the
16th!
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familiar
MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2016 11:50 PM
The guilty are those who'd try and cast a pall of darkness
upon our nation. Some Hillary supporters were beginning
to see the Bernie bros this way. Bill's "they want to kill
one out of three on Wall Street!" for instance. Krugman's
"these lunatics with their plans that don't add up, will
wipe out all our hard-fought-for progress"! Is it possible
that with Hillary beating Bernie, we have for a moment
escaped those who see America in the gloomiest of
terms... those who have a kind of perverse hatred of
1518
those who find themselves still actually happy.

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gun violence
Rapproachment Emporium In our current sagacity we
were all caught off guard by Trump.
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gun violence
People are noting that this man was an underachiever in
life. A loser. And because he was a loser he went hyper-
masculine to save face. Perhaps these things interconnect
differently. That is, maybe he shortchanged his personal
development -- like borderlines do -- so as to not be guilty
of individuating so much and thereby avoid what is called
the abandonment depression: he doesn't have to deal
with the six horsemen (depression, panic, rage, guilt,
helplessness, emptiness) of the psychic apocalypse that
come riding to engage you when you ambition a truly
self-fulfilling life for yourself. So sales clerk not lawyer. So
security guard not police man.
Noting a culture that continues to present him with
opportunities to self-activate and have fun, to ease his
distress, he had to ambition further, as inner voices inside
1519
his head -- i.e. his parents -- told him that the guilty
young, desiring growth and fun so badly, deserved to die.
Of note, if you came out of a family environment where
the father wasn't around much and your environment
was largely being around your mother -- that is, one of
maternal engulfment -- when you start regressing for
feeling abandoned because your nation still tempts you,
you can feel feel part of her again, maybe her prop, again
-- that is, feminized. This is where the fact that it was gay
youth who were targeted is important. They were as he
physically felt he was: immersed in female "poisons."
Killing them, he becomes hyper masculine: gloriously free
of his previously compromised, feminized self.
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gun violence
TomJohnson Emporium You're welcome. And I hope so as
well.
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gun violence
Just as important is the fact that it was the young who
were killed, youth who were having fun. Basically, men
who kill like this come out of families where they pretty
1520
much existed to maintain the psychic equilibrium of

mothers who have been the recipients of very little
respect and love in life. When they made efforts to
individuate, their mothers understood them as rejecting
them -- just like everyone else has in life -- and
emotionally abandoned them for it. This was felt as so
intolerable to the child, he installed in his mind a
superego... a superego that goes into overdrive in his own
young adulthood when the possibilities of the world are
open to him. He alleviates his sense of intolerable hard
self-judgment by projecting his own "guilty" self onto
others, and attacks. The mother and father inside of him
-- psychic alters -- rejoice, and he feels a good boy who
now can be loved.
The fact that he was going after gay men may not be as
important as one thinks here. That is, if we're going to
increase security, do it in any venue where young people
are enjoying themselves. Like Disney World, like someone
just below just posted.
Permalink

gun violence
TomJohnson Yep. Lloyd DeMause
nations/chapter-3-the-childhood-origins-of-terrorism/
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Original Article: O.J. Simpson, American icon:

Why the football star turned accused killer is
one of the 20th century’s most important
cultural figures
susan sunflower Emporium BlackHeywood I wasn't
expecting this. I may have missed what you were getting
at originally.
Permalink

cultural figures
susan sunflower BlackHeywood So if Brexit occurs, will
this be because the British people deliberated hard on
the facts but simply came to a conclusion we don't like, or
really just sad tribalism? If Austria and Germany elect in
rightwing nationalists, is this because they deliberated
sanely on the problem of loose borders and millions of
immigrants who can't be assimilated, or really just sad
tribalism? I imagine a lot of liberals wouldn't hesitate to
drop down the word "tribalism" on ever-increasing
contexts these days, and rightly so (Krugman may well
have done so with Bernie Saunders, and maybe not
entirely for adverse reasons). But somehow back then,
still, there wasn't an ounce of it. Everyone who sees in
that trial mostly an emotional response, an irrational
1522
response, is a meme-spreading racist.

Permalink

cultural figures
The lasting legacy of the trial may be that many white
liberals have learned that some thoughts and judgments
of theirs would have to be buried or completely effaced.
Very briefly a whole lot of them were Patrick J. Moynihan's
"culture of poverty" people, and knew that the progress
they wanted in the world could not possibly be made out
of this understanding, only cruelty. And so after
discussing with their friends how absurd the judgment
was, and momentarily being revolted by what they saw
with the jury, they would be required to do the regretful
task of killing or shortchanging part of their
sanity/knowledge of the world. And what their brains left
with them afterwards is this "inhabited two different
national realities" "realization."
There is no avenue in their inner-universe to see people
they want to respect as being capable of excusing the
crimes of a murderer because they were so pathetically
open to emotional manipulation. They had to have had
reasons. There was smart calculation, a higher purpose.
They saw the larger picture... it certainly wasn't a form of
heroic-figure "fellatio"! They focused this realization on
people they did not feel a need to respect, and the white
1523
working class -- aka, trolls -- gobbled down this

condescension to satisfy their own psychodrama, their
own righteous revolt.
Permalink
Original Article: Hillary Clinton, Democratic

nominee: Now the left begins to bargain with a
painful reality — and a hopeful future
Mojoman Emporium samandor1 "actual powers that be...
manipulating pawns" sounds like fantasy as well, at least
to me.
Permalink

E.L. Deflagrante As is, what smells of illegitimacy, is that
she isn't the next generation's candidate. The young did
not vote her... and what exactly is the future, but theirs?
Otherwise, she did win, fairly, democratically. But
nevertheless the election went previous-gens... we all saw
what the young wanted, but kept it within our own range.
Permalink

Mojoman Emporium samandor1 Sounds like you've
1524
forgotten that the key thing that happened this year: all
conventional wisdom, turned upside down. That is, what
happened this year with Trump and Bernie, was fantasy
all but a year ago.
Perhaps not so silly to see an even stranger future? Not
so intrinsically suspect, to refuse the just-humiliated way
of prognosticating the future, and continue to project the
unfathomable?
Permalink

samandor1 Yes, if she remains the person as you rightly
describe her, the future is as blessed as it could possibly
be. I'm expecting, however, the future "evolution" some
might see in her in the future, as she becomes the
armoured Brienne, thundering reprove, even on or even
especially on Wall Street, is actually the end of her
genuinely-evolving journey. We'll all be saying, who knew?
Wow, what a surprise! What a package! But somewhere
the most progressive in America will take note from
ample cues, this could go bad for us. Not Trump bad, but
along the same lines.
Emporium
11 days ago
@Christopher1988 I think she'll be a nightmare for

Wall Street, only less so than someone else will be.
1525
Only the thing is, I'm not even exactly sure that the
psychology of Wall Street will be the same, and that
if she becomes our era's nationalistic crusader, that
they mightn't not not be willing to squander their lot,
if only to be more part of a rejuvenated, repentant
America. I find it very difficult to see her being a
repeat of Obama, only with a bit more give on
minimum wage issues, more on worker rights (and of
course bombing the hell out of other countries ) --
what we're all thinking she'll be. If she can be that,
kudos to her (sorry of course to all the countries
bombed, owing to our still immature, demented
psyches), because there's going to be strong pull to
be the person who, how to say it, rejoins America to
something mystical again. Something long lost.
I personally think that anyone THAT strong, wouldn't
even be considered for presidency, this time
around... because unconsciously, we all have a sense
that a term of collective redemption is near at hand.
We all want to slip into a decade-long sleep. Not
Scandinavia as in our sights, but America, in a
unsullied, virgin form. This even absent Trump,
absolutely.
Delete
LikeReply
Christopher1988
11 days ago
@Emporium @Christopher1988 Do I just post

"HAHAHA" for several lines? The woman whose
husband's staff was lead by one of the founders of
Goldman Sachs, whose other staff members went to
cushy Wall Street jobs after leaving his
administration? The woman who at most could
1526
muster a "Cut it out, guys!" scolding to these people

because 911, who spoke privately to Goldman Sachs
and reuses to share the content of those speeches
with the public? This woman will be tough on the
banks? Are you a lobbyist?
Emporium
11 days ago
Are we sure Clinton a year from now is the same

person? Perhaps it could be that, whomever, the next
ten years will do our era's version of the 30s,
construct a new deal, sway people towards
nationalism (actually, sway along with everyone
else), cause a fear we could go fascist, and otherwise
be of a culture that a subsequent one will say, hell
enough with that rigged, stifled, old left shit? That is
to say, my only beef with this article is that it
articulates a future where Clinton is as she is now,
whereas I fully see her becoming someone different.
More heroic to the people, but ultimately historically,
less sane.
Delete
LikeReply
Randy Stone
11 days ago
@Emporium
Hillary is already turning to the right...I guess that's
what you might mean by "...less sane."
I agree.
Flag
2UnlikeReply
1527
Original Article: The Internet’s bigot crisis:

There’s a new push to curtail online bigotry,
but the toxic sludge of hate is too enormous to
erase
Concerning black childrearing: Brittney Cooper discussed
last year at Salon that if every parent was guilty of child
abuse for spanking their kids, if this was a jail-able
offence, then pretty much all Southern black parents
could be sent to prison for how they raise their kids,
because pretty much all of them spank. She wrote that
they thought this was simply good parenting... they were
disciplining them, for two reasons: it meant they weren't
as likely to see the world as something to just grab and
own, like white kids ostensibly were/are, and it meant
they weren't as likely to be attacked by white bigots: they
themselves curtailed their kids, so those who would do so
viscously -- without any intent of love -- wouldn't feel as
much a need to do it for them. She wrote it was done for
loving reasons, that is. This said, she felt it nevertheless
created a desire for revenge on the part of the beaten
kids, and for this reason had to be abandoned. She
concluded that overall, Southern black parents are doing
terrible things to their kids.
Joan Walsh reacted to this article by focusing on how
commendable these parents were, doing such a terribly
hard thing because they knew it would ultimately spare
their kids. She reacted by ascribing black parents not as
flawed, but as astonishingly heroic... as actually super-
1528
parents. Whereas she would probably accord that every

other parent who spanks is probably attacking the child
because they've projected their own flaws into them...
doing so because they themselves are insane, "mad,"
maladjusted, because it is black parents being discussed
her mind frisks her off to the opposite, and we're dealing
with endlessly heroic super-resisters. All evidence, even
the most distressing and counter, will be bent to fit so
one's psychic equilibrium isn't lost.
This is what I mean when I argue that some progressives
still feel a need to romanticize... have not evolved to the
point that maybe perhaps their children will get. You
don't need to make heroes out of those who have been
traditionally victimized, yet this is still the powerful
inclination. All people, all parents, are not everywhere the
same: progressives show this in how they characterize
the white working class -- what they do, particularly
regressive and bad. It is getting near the point where the
effort to mop up a traditionally-picked-on people's
misbehaviour as just part of the human condition, or as a
widespread flaw, or whatnot, reflects instantly... draws
attention, seems conspicuous. Someone cannot stand to
see something exposed to the light of day.
The way people parent is not a matter of choice. It is
pretty much determined by how you were raised. The
same thing goes for level of empathy -- if you had abused
parents, your very brain will lack the capacity for empathy
that better-raised children possess, as they neglect you: it
will be underdeveloped. The Left's reaction suggests to
1529
me that though they might know this, somehow at a

deeper level they don't believe it -- some people are just
bad. Thus they take attention away from specific
instances like this because they're afraid, not just of
growing rightwing prejudice but because if they
themselves focus too hard, some very prejudicial thinking
will emerge -- jesus christ guys, take care of your kids! --
and their brains will contort, twist-hard, come loose and
discombobulate, and ultimately go down in catastrophe.
Permalink
Original Article: The Internet’s bigot crisis:

There’s a new push to curtail online bigotry,
but the toxic sludge of hate is too enormous to
erase
The Left we have is not however the most evolved one we
will ever know. It took groups that the more regressive
members of their society tended to not be able to see
absent their own projections, and rather than simply strip
away their delusions and see a world finally projection-
free -- as it really is, as it were -- they did feel a psychic
need for romanticization. They got far, but couldn't go the
whole way. And they are vulnerable to being targeted as
keeping people as "pets" -- "you" have to be the way I've
represented you, as it helps maintain MY equilibrium.
This tendency, this powerful inclination, has gotten white
feminists in trouble with their non-white feminist peers,
in recent times. Don't manage us into your preferable
form, thank you.
1530
Steven Pinker's influential "Better Angels of Our Nature"

argued that people have become far less violent over
time. Effectively he posits all anthropological tribes as
being akin to early "man," who were the most violent
people ever (read his discussion of native indians: he
basically says that the colonizers in many instances
described them, described their level of savagery, right). If
the Left that would police people into understanding that
the only group you are allowed to wantonly discriminate
against are Catholics and the white working class, was
firmly in control, he'd have gone nowhere with this book,
but instead it's on Bill Gate's favorite 10 reading list, and
was Zuckerberg's first selection for his Facebook book
club: it's made inroads; it's near mainstream.
It is people like this, and as well liberals like Dawkins and
McEwan, who are accusing other Leftists as being
unconsciously more moved to see the world a specific
way, one satisfying to their psychological needs, than to
understand the world simply as it is, that suggest to me
that other members of the Left need to start exploring
how they might in fact be taking pleasure in
romanticization... and also in diverting attention away
when they get a whiff of something discontenant to the
factuality of their own worldview and focusing instead on
society's even more self-deluded souls. Because
otherwise they might find themselves rather instantly
being shown up by people they thought would also be
with them -- fellow liberals -- as being hopelessly
detached from the facts, and made irrelevant, even
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though even in their somewhat self-deluded form they're

still about the most psychologically evolved people
around -- still the best tools around, for our world to do
the most good.
Permalink
Original Article: This is how fascism takes

hold: The media is turning Donald Trump into
just another candidate
Anncaroline The media... the liberal professional class
have required a group they can rage at and portray as
intrinsically dangerous -- the white working class, and
everything they represent. This doesn't mean that when
the media starts doing what you want that it'll be mostly
about it becoming less biased, but rather mostly about
them becoming in sync with what the American people
are getting prepared for if they vote in Trump. I felt this
when Facebook agreed it would no longer be suppressing
conservative news on its newsfeed (it denies ever doing
this, but this sort of thing was not only something you
could get away with but actually were encouraged to do,
for it being preferred in our era that you treat
conservatives wantonly... with casual disregard). This isn't
progress but rather people we might have hoped would
remain saneish in our era starting to feel more pure in
rejecting their previous identity as being individually
distinguished from the dissolving American mob.
Permalink
1532

Pillbeam The deciding factor may be immune to media
influence. What Trump represents is an end to progress.
He's a stop sign in way of an even more progressive
America. This will seem holy to people who believe
Americans have become too independent, too
transgressive, too spoiled, too disloyal to their ancient
birth mother country.
These will be people who had parents who so needed
their own children for their own psychic equilibrium they
threatened them with loss of favour, with loss of love,
when they self-actualized too much. So when society
evolves too much -- when students are being "uppity,"
when women are being "uppity," when those previously
prejudiced against start pushing back and gaining respect
-- these people see a society that has lost all favour, and
every effort will be made to cripple it at the knees... to put
in a strong man who'll think of the Nation (i.e. mother)
first, and help will people back into less individuated, less
self-actualized, less selfish and accomplished form.
Permalink

I think the press is less powerful than you think. If it was
1533
entirely united in portraying him as the end of civilization

as we know it, people who understand and like Trump
would in their inner mental theatres portray him in the
dog-loving, child-hugging form. Certainly they'd like this
image to be manifested all-over in the media as well, but
if not available -- for the media remaining sane -- they'd
settle for this.
This isn't top-down but a bottom-up phenomena. It's not
Trump but large segments of the American people, who
share his desire to stop progress and become loyal
Americans again by worshipping their motherland and
targeting those thought to be snubbing their noses to it. If
Trump suddenly dropped out, these sections would try
and intimidate Hillary into becoming Trumpish.
What the media shows us is here is not so much their
power, but what they unconsciously want for America.
How they behave here is showing us how many people
we thought were with us, are going to remain with us, or
suddenly start -- like David Brooks -- longing for big loves
again, like patriotic, self-sacrificial love of country. These
kinds of people are "the Volk" who first demonstrated
their love of a resurrected great Germania, and then
purged "pollutants" so they could feel pure.
Permalink
Original Article: Trump wants revenge: His

hunger to be president is all about gaining
power to settle petty personal scores
Tristero1 They're masochists, preparing for later grand
1534
revenge. The professional liberal class was going to

portrayed as great abandoners regardless.
This said, we haven't yet seen a societal group that is
completely absent of a need for some group they can spit
on and disparage. So even though many progressives are
at some level aware that societal bigots have surely come
out of abusive families, it often doesn't seem to factor
much in how they treat them: they're dealing with those
who've known little love, who've been cruelly abused, but
such is their need for some category of people to hate
they just can't pull back and make evident their disgust...
and even pleasure at seeing them rendered powerless
and scrambling.
They're healthier people, and perhaps their children will
be those without any need for some category of people
to rage at -- as they themselves never experienced any of
this in their own childhood -- but they're not there yet.
Permalink

corporatephd Emporium Hitler wasn't Hitler ... until he
was, is what I was getting at. He even downplayed the
anti-Jewish bit for awhile. I think he is mostly going to be
at encouraging a kind of fusion with the country, kind of
like Hitler encouraged people to fuse into a greater
Germania, as first order of business. If he targets people
right away, I don't think he's going to seem evidently petty
1535
in his targets, for they'll be those many Americans want

targeted as well.
So while perhaps individuals who crossed him might be
targeted, what Americans will mostly notice and applaud
will be his targeting of progressives -- you know, the
students who fight for trigger warnings, feminists who rail
against perennially sexist men and seem "uppity": that is,
our most evolved.
I'll vote for Clinton, because I think it's important to keep
alive the cosmopolitanism that's associated with her.
Permalink

mswales Emporium Borders, for one -- the wall. This will
be felt by many who vote for him as a kind of protective
armouring, so the country, and they themselves, don't
feel like they're so perennially vulnerable.
Permalink

TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2016 9:02 PM
"There can be no doubt that a man who is mostly drawn
to the White House to settle petty grievances will abuse
the power the presidency affords him to go after anyone
he believes has laughed at or disrespected him."
1536
That's the current line on the liberal professional class.

According to the likes of Thomas Frank and Andrew
Sullivan, liberals used their ascension over the last few
decades, in part, to humiliate the white working class,
members of whom may have been imagined as once
having chastised them as nerds.
This article will surprise no one. He's going to eviscerate
anyone who humiliated him (though who they are really
are just people he's introjected his early childhood bullies
onto). What might surprise is just how much of a
nationalist he turns out, that is, not someone who got a
job he really didn't want but which is especially useful to
destroy people and also to build even bigger monuments
to himself, but which afterwards is kinda a bore. But
rather someone really committed to his version of
making America great again.
There's a strange sense that he is perhaps best defined
not as a narcissist or a perpetrator, but as someone in
service to the grand ol' U.S.A, who only after he puts this
together, will his eyes focus on revenge... he might even
be sorta agreeable at the start, readily sidestepping critics
who want to pin him as petty.
Permalink

TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2016 8:46 PM
Trickster 1008 Why particularly his father? Few of us have
our fathers anywhere near as much around as our
1537
mothers.
Permalink
Original Article: Corey Feldman blows the lid

off of Hollywood sex abuse: “I would love to
name names”
THURSDAY, MAY 26, 2016 10:54 PM
kobayashi PoodlePlay Aunt Messy I agree. And the reason
it is unacknowledged is because it means targeting -- our
conscious awareness cannot be fooled -- our own
parents, mother and father, in their own abuse. Once
we've done so, we forgo any chance we might yet claim
their love. So instead, we stifle discussion, and
somewhere in our heads our parental alters take notice
and give us the thumbs up.
Permalink
Original Article: Why Trump’s attack on

Susana Martinez matters: He proves again that
unity isn’t his goal — only dominance over
everyone
Bella N. Mattheus I don't think this descriptor, however
redundant, is going to be sufficient, though. If he gets in,
it'll prove pretty quickly that it isn't going to be all about
him. Don't think he'll be building further monuments to
himself everywhere. Rather, he'll be a nationalist. The
great God won't be himself but some archaic version of
the united states, our mother country, that has ostensibly
1538
been forgotten amidst our self-centred, craven,

individualistic modern times. It'll be as like with Hitler and
mostly in the first stage be about us, all together, the
good folk, "the volk," and the country we've ostensibly
forsaken but which might yet be redeemed through our
self-sacrifice.
Permalink

everyone
kobayashi Emporium Same related phenomena -- retreat
from sophisticated cosmopolitanism; retreat into
parochialism.
Permalink

everyone
JJAliceGrace Well, if he's only TRYING to be alpha, some
people are cooperating in making him such: such
everywhere is the news of his dominating his 17 (!!!)
establishment opponents. If he is an enormous rage
monster, is he's got any kind of visage that resembles this
-- hairy orange orangutang will do -- then it's trouble for
us if enough of the U.S. wants big things smashed... And
1539
as if those relishing the Hulk preferred he'd mastered the

sophisticated tone to also wine and dine ambassadors
with ease, and with splendid, whip-smart sophistry. (Mind
you, Hitler wanted to annihilate eastern "proles" but
mostly simply wanted to impress the haughty French and
Brits, so perhaps here too, lack of articulacy -- evident
sloth manners and stupidity -- might bite.)
Permalink

everyone
Dog Almighty Good to hear "Trump" is going to be limited
to the U.S. One has heard ugly rumours that nationalism
was slowly becoming the norm in Europe as well... you
know, Austria, Germany, Brexit.
Permalink
Original Article: Hey Mr. Trump, rape is not

sex: His Bill Clinton smears are tricking the
media into confusing consensual acts with
assault
WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 2016 7:09 PM
Liberals have for the longest time been unable to
acknowledge that they too possess -- though, yes, to a
much lesser extent than do conservatives -- a need for
some societal group they can wantonly discriminate
against and humiliate, a group into which they can project
1540
unwanted aspects of themselves they might want to

punish. Thus in this piece every woman who might of
been abused by Clinton, can feel the hopelessness of
their finding redress in being categorized as part of the
redneck swamp, civilization has been seeking justified
total escape from. What business is your
discombobulated psyche doing outside the cleansing
whirlpool justifiably dispatching of its existence?
But this is beginning to change, and not because the left
is evolving and ceasing to hate anyone (only hurt people
hurt people), but because many of the left are regressing
and wanting to bond into what Joe Klein calls, a nostalgic
state, a nationalistic homeland. And so for instance an
environment is being created by the likes of Thomas
Frank and Andrew Sullivan (and previously by Chris
Hedges and even Noam Chomsky) where it is becoming
difficult to detach the awareness that those who are
being disparaged -- the swamp dwellers -- by liberals, are
also those who've been suffering most. Progressives who
then use the old rhetoric once used to cast a humiliating
sort of invisibility upon selected out group's hurts (white
working class), seem absurdly callous, as if just mostly
wanting to further rejoice in the pain of people they find
disgusting, as Marcotte kind of does here.
1541

Saturday, May 14, 2016
My response to Andrew O'Hehir's recent

article (I am Emporium)
Andrew O’ Hehir
’ s Salon article: Appetite for
destruction: White America ’ s death wish is the
source of Trump ’ s hidden support
Is an “October surprise” that could put Donald
Trump in the White House already baked into the
American electorate? That’s the frightening
question one could derive from this week
’ s column
by Thomas B. Edsall, one of the most useful (and
least ideologically hypnotized) contributors to the
New York Times. We can ’ t be sure how many
people really support Trump, Edsall reports, since
there ’ s considerable evidence that they aren ’ t
telling pollsters the truth. Voting for Trump, it
appears, is something white people do in the
1542
shadows. It ’ s a forbidden desire that is both
liberating and selfdestructive, not unlike the
married heterosexual who has a samesex lover on
the downlow, or the executive who powers
through the day on crystal meth and OxyContin.
On some level you know the whole thing can ’ t end
well, but boy does it feel good right now.
I have argued on multiple occasions
that white
Americans, considered in the aggregate, exhibit
signs of an unconscious or semiconscious death
wish. I mean that both in the Freudian sense of a
longing for release that is both erotic and self
destructive —
the intermingling of Eros and
Thanatos —
and in a more straightforward sense.
Consider the prevalence of guns in American
society, the epidemic rates of suicide and obesity
(which might be called slowmotion suicide)
among lowincome whites, the widespread
willingness to ignore or deny climate science and
the deeply rooted tendency of the white working
class to vote against its own interests and empower
1543
those who have impoverished it. What other term
can encompass all that?
Trump is the living embodiment of that
contradictory desire for redemption and
destruction. His incoherent speeches wander back
and forth between those two poles, from infantile
fantasies about forcing Mexico to build an $8
billion wall and rampant antiMuslim paranoia to
unfocused panegyrics about how “ great ” we will
be one day and how much we will “ win. ” In his
abundant vigor and ebullience and cloddish, mean
spirited good humor, Trump may seem like the
opposite of the death wish. (He would certainly be
insulted by any such suggestion. Wrong! Bad!) But
everything he promises is impossible, and his
supporters are not quite dumb enough not to see
that. He ’ s a death ’ shead jester cackling on the
edge of the void, the clownish host of one last
celebration of America ’ s bombast, bigotry and
spectacular ignorance. No wonder his voters are
reluctant to ‘ fess up.
1544
Normal publicopinion polls conducted by
telephone, Edsall writes, have consistently shown
Hillary Clinton well ahead of Trump in headto
head trial runs, by a recent average of about nine
percentage points. But online surveys compiled by
YouGov and Morning Consult tell a different
story, showing Clinton ahead by much smaller
margins. The most recent YouGov/Economist poll

of registered voters, for example, shows Clinton
leading Trump by just three points (43 percent to
40 percent), well within the margin of error. Edsall
quotes Kyle A. Dropp, who runs polling and data
for Morning Consult, estimating that throughout
the primary season Trump has gained a consistent
advantage of eight or nine points in online polls
versus oldfashioned telephone surveys.
In fairness, we don ’ t know which numbers come
closer to the truth. There are valid reasons why
many political scientists and statistics wonks
believe telephone polling is more accurate in
predicting actual voting, and Edsall doesn ’ t discuss
1545
those. But as he puts it, “ an online survey,
whatever other flaws it might have, resembles an
anonymous voting booth far more than what you
tell a pollster does. ”
Your computer won
’ t raise its
eyebrows in microscopic disdain when you click
the box for Trump; it won ’ t tell its friends after
work about this person it met today who seemed
normal but turned out to be a raging bigot. And the
idea that “ social desirability bias
” —
in English,
the desire not to seem intolerant or unenlightened
in someone else ’ s eyes —
can distort poll results
has a long history that may give the Clinton
campaign some sleepless nights.
Social desirability bias, in its Trumpian context, is
closely related to the “ Bradley effect,
”
a polling
problem frequently observed in elections where
one candidate is white and the other isn ’ t. That
name goes back to my youth and the California
gubernatorial election of 1982, when Tom Bradley,
the AfricanAmerican mayor of Los Angeles, led
in the polls throughout the campaign but wound up
1546
losing to Republican George Deukmejian. A
significant subset of white voters (so the theory
holds) told pollsters they were planning to vote for
Bradley, but didn ’ t. Either they lied about their
true intentions because they didn ’ t want to sound
like racists in the supposedly liberal context of
‘80s California or they discovered, in the privacy
of the voting booth, that they couldn ’ t pull the
lever for a black man.
We don ’ t have that scenario to contend with this
year, obviously, and many social scientists believe
the Bradley effect has faded: Barack Obama ’ s
actual support among white voters, during his two
election campaigns, was pretty close to his poll
numbers. Hillary Clinton ’ s likely status as the first
female majorparty nominee will clearly be an X
factor in this year ’ s fall campaign, a positive for
some voters and a negative for others. But the
Trumpspecific version of social desirability bias is
different from those things in a subtle but powerful
way: Voting for Trump can be understood as
1547
embracing something rather than rejecting it, even
if that something is viewed as insane or repulsive
by polite society. Turning your back on a
candidate because he ’ s black is a negative, private
act that ’ s likely to make you feel bad about
yourself; embracing the jingoism and misogyny
and smallmindedness of the Trump campaign is
joining a movement.
It ’ s transparently unfair to compare Trump to
Adolf Hitler (even though I ’ ve already done it),
and it isn ’ t likely, in the context of the 21st
century, that a Trump administration would
actually resemble the Third Reich or provoke
World War III. But here ’ s how they ’ re similar:
Hitler cloaked the death wish in positive terms too.
Nazism rolled the most noxious elements of
German nationalism and European antiSemitism
into a package that seemed affirmative and
optimistic, to a nation struggling with economic
difficulty and an internal identity crisis. Trump has
tried to do the same with his toxic package of
1548
racism, sexism and xenophobia, his thoroughly
imaginary version of America built from white
people ’ s despair and paranoia and selfloathing.
We have underestimated its allure all along, and
we still don ’ t know how deep it goes. Mainstream
pundits and politicians in 1930s Germany made a
similar mistake.
——— —————————————
Emporium
2 days ago
I say it goes deep. Amanda Marcotte wrote
somewhere how surprised she was at how many
male liberals were expressing surprising amounts
of hatred towards women, via attacks on Hillary,
now that they had Bernie as cover. Anger towards
women, is anger towards one's mother and
Hillary, as Gloria Steinem has argued, brings her
to mind and necessarily also at oneself: the self
centred, spoiled, neglectful brat one feels was
responsible for her neglect. Love is always
1549
potentially available, one feels, if at the end the
person you feel most deserves to die, is the child,
who by selfactualizing in life, surely purposely
abandoned the mother. By chasing down death
yourself, you might yet acquire her love.
Americans know that Trump will quail
independent women, and this will be felt as
hemming in the overpowering mother of our
childhoods our righteous revenge. He will
intimidate progressivism everywhere, and this will
relax our sense that we are enriching ourselves
with too much opportunity. He'll bond us to our
Mother Country, show us the way to be patriotic
to be "good boys and girls " and target others
whom we've projected our own "bad boy"
impurities into. If like the Nazis we build roads
and enable ourselves with Volkswagens, it'll just
further ensure we engage in an impossible suicidal
war against the world that can only lead to
thorough ruin.
I agree though, it won't get this bad. And the story
1550
is more complicated, because however much we
may underestimate the number of people
unconsciously desiring to stop progress, restage
our early childhood humiliations, and enact
revenge, we also have a large base of people who'll
be mostly immune. This article will help them self
prepare for the future.
———
FreeQuark
2 days ago
.......the deeply rooted tendency of the white
working class to vote against its own interests and
empower those who have impoverished it.
What major political party in the U.S. currently
represents the interests of the white working class?
The Democratic Party has been run by globalist
technocrats since the late 80s at least, and the GOP
has been the party of the 1% since Teddy
Roosevelt left the White House. It's ridiculous to
criticize the white working class for voting against
1551
its own interests when it has no other viable
option.
I have argued on multiple occasions
that white
Americans, considered in the aggregate, exhibit
signs of an unconscious or semiconscious …
One indication of this is the almost total passivity
of white Americans in the face of trade and
immigration policies designed to undercut white
Americans economically.
StvInIL
2 days ago
@FreeQuark "One indication of this is the almost
total passivity of white Americans in the face of
trade and immigration policies designed to
undercut white Americans economically. “
I think they sprinkle in a little racism against
blacks and it makes EVERYTHING better. Many
of these policies they support can be explain by
one of their experts, Lee Atwater.
1552
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “ Ni**er, ni**er,
ni**er. ” By 1968 you can
’ t say “ ni**er
”—
that
hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh,
forced busing, states ’ rights, and all that stuff, and
you ’ re getting so abstract. Now, you ’ re talking
about cutting taxes, and all these things you ’ re
talking about are totally economic things and a
byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than
whites. … “
We want to cut this,
”
is much more
abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell
of a lot more abstract than “ Ni**er, ni**er.
”
And for over three decades now they have
been destabilizing our country from within. And so
it continues.
Emporium
2 days ago
@FreeQuark I think you can argue that what
wasn't passive, is/are white Americans voting in
politicians they unconsciously knew were going to
1553
wage war against them. The professional class
psychologically required some group to suffer
while they "indulged," but even if they were the
most kindhearted folk they were going to be
forced to be exploiters/abandoners. All to
empower today's righteous revenge, enacted not
just by those who lost manufacturing jobs but by a
lot of progressives... who really can seem like
they'd want to kill one of of every three people on
Wall Street.
Beerbob77
2 days ago
@FreeQuark You're agreeing, then, right? But
complaining at the same time.
———
Jack Burroughs
2 days ago
"Consider the prevalence of guns in American
society, the epidemic rates of suicide and obesity
1554
(which might be called slowmotion suicide)
among lowincome whites, the widespread
willingness to ignore or deny climate science and
the deeply rooted tendency of the white working
class to vote against its own interests and empower
those who have impoverished it. What other term
can encompass all that? ”
The thesis that whites' support for Trump is
somehow a “ death wish
”
is so crazily backwards
that I ’ m tempted to call it insane.
But then I remember that I ’ m reading Andrew
O ’ Hehir, and Andrew obviously isn ’ t insane. It ’ s
just that he has no intuition at all for how working
class people actually feel and think — and yet he
loves to be recklessly presumptuous about the
“ true, secret motivations
”
of people with whom he
has nothing in common, and whom he does not
understand.
Worse, his presumptuous speculation is an
egregious violation of Occam ’ s Razor: if
1555
hypotheses should not be multiplied without
necessity, if the simplest explanation is the likeliest
explanation, then the motivations of Trump ’ s
supporters are not mysterious at all. Trump ’ s poll
numbers exploded, and they stayed high, when he
spoke aggressively about illegal immigration. His
numbers went even higher, and they stayed high,
when he called for a temporary ban on Muslims
entering the US.
Following Occam ’ s Razor, shouldn ’ t we therefore
conclude that whites are supporting Trump
because they actually like his stance on
immigration? Do we really need to concoct a weird
theory to explain behavior that is straightforwardly
explicable?
Of course it ’ s true that many whites have long
been in a state of despair. Why so? Well, sure,
partly for economic reasons. But also emphatically
for demographic reasons. And that is what
Andrew does not understand about working class
people: they hate being forced to become a racial
1556
minority in an historically white majority country.
Working class people — not only them, but
especially them — are racially very tribalistic. That
is how they ’ ve always been, it ’ s how they are now,
and it's how they will be a hundred years from
now.
The reason whites have been in such a state of
despair is because in 1965, they were about 90% of
the population of the US. Today, whites are a fast
shrinking 60something percent. The immigration
act of 1965 was opposed by a majority of the US
population when it was passed, and the public was
basically lied to about its likely demographic
implications. Most Trump supporters are very
angry about that.
Moreover, whites are bombarded by incessant anti
white propaganda from the mainstream media, the
educational establishment, and of course from web
sites like Salon. And whether Andrew knows it or
not, when he accuses white Trump supporters of
harboring “ an unconscious death wish,
”
he is
1557
waging a subtly evil form of psychological warfare
against them. His subtext is, “ Hey, stupid working
class whites. I know you *think* you know why
you ’ re supporting Trump. But I, Andrew O ’ Heir,
know you better than you know yourselves. You
are suffering from false consciousness; and I see
the hidden truth about you. You are suffering from
an unconscious death wish. Your support for
Trump is clearly pathological! ”
The straightforward truth is that white support for
Trump is the opposite of a death wish: it is a
desperate “ life wish.
”
That is, many whites are in a
state of despair because they feel no organic
connection to an increasingly multicultural society
that was forced on them against their will. White
despair is above all an *ethnocultural* despair;
they feel they are losing their homeland.
Trump seems to them to be their only hope of
arresting, and possibly reversing, the current
demographic trend of white minoritization. Yes,
it's a dangerous vote. But what alternative do they
1558
have?
A similar despair would afflict *any* historical
majority population anywhere in the world, were it
confronted with becoming a minority against its
will. And, given the opportunity, a similar
desperate convulsion, and final attempt to do
something, would likely happen in other countries,
too.
Do you think the Japanese would handle it well,
were they set to become a minority in Japan? How
about the Mexicans in Mexico? How about the
Somalis in Somalia? Or the Chinese in China?
As it would be with any other historical majority
population anywhere in the world, so it is with
whites.
It's really that simple. No extra theorizing required.

Emporium
2 days ago
1559
@Jack Burroughs The truth is that white support
for Trump is the opposite of a death wish: it is a
desperate “ life wish.
”
That is, many whites are in a
state of despair because they feel no organic
connection to an increasingly multicultural society
that was forced on them against their will. White
despair is above all an *ethnocultural* despair;
they feel they are losing their homeland. A similar
despair would afflict *any* historical majority
population anywhere in the world, were it
confronted with becoming a minority against its
will.
I see them as reexperiencing early childhood
traumas, where they knew too much of powerless
and fear (Germans, who were swaddled as infants
and starved by their caregivers, were obsessed with
a need for an expanded motherland the world
had become populated with their own projections).
So, I agree, there is a sort of "life wish" to this.
Wellraised people, people mostly absent these
sort of terrifying childhood traumas, won't react
1560
this way to external realities. Just becoming part of
a global community is to microscope one own's
previous nationalistic/tribal identities, and most
progressives have found this a breeze (I suppose
you could argue it was because they willed it; but
as I've argued elsewhere on this thread, ostensible
imminent selfdestruction can be selfwilled as
well, and be the opposite of threatening if it
welcomes you back to traumas you feel the need to
restage and revenge against). Because for them it
doesn't recall any sense of once being engulfed or
extinguished.
So, yes, in a sense "life wish"; but ultimately
since these endorphinfilled, revengedriven
"saved lives" will operate more as pawns and
target our most progressive, our mostactualized,
our most trulyliving members, it'll be about saving
the lives of destroyers.
———
LynnRobb
2 days ago
1561
Undoubtedly O'Hehir is describing a few Trump
supporters. However, considering Sanders' big
win in West Virginia, he might also be describing
Sanders' supporters. You take good jobs away
from people and then insult them by saying they
are privileged, bigoted thugs who cling to their
God and guns. And, oh, by the way, they are
demographically going the way of the dodo which
is a very good thing.
Then you expect those voters to smile, bow
towards Washington five times a day and send
their children out to marry someone who hates
their culture and denigrates their religion to hasten
the liberally desired Caucasian demographic
collapse? (Which is the way those hicks in flyover
country see it.) I don't think so.
In one calendar year we have seen the new order of
the liberal world: merchants and county officials
forced to participate in gay wedding ceremonies,
nuns forced to provide their employees with
1562
contraception and women forced to allow men in
their public bathrooms. It is easy to understand
how those with a traditional bent think Washington
has gone stark, raving mad even if they still have
good jobs.
Working class white voters don't have a death
wish; they have a life wish. They want theirs back.
What you are seeing today is massive backlash in
the form of a Donald Trump. If it hadn't been him,
it would have been someone just like him. Any
amateur historian could have seen this coming. I
just expected it to take a little longer.
RobertSF
2 days ago
@LynnRobb Thank you! I said pretty much the
same thing. I usually like O'Hehir's articles, but he
missed the mark here, taking the side of the
plutocracy that has created the current situation
over the past 40 years.
1563
Emporium
2 days ago
@LynnRobb One theory as to why it didn't occur
earlier is because the populace has been going
through a process of restaging a humiliating
existence that they once knew in their childhoods.
Bowing to arrogant overlords; forced to do things
they themselves found unpleasant; yet also
humiliatingly disregarded: these are the complaints
of still many Americans out of their unpleasant
childhoods. In society they've seen it once again,
writ large.
It could have been their intention to see it this way
because if the "new order of the liberal world" had
simply empowered them, brought them into global
glory like it has the professional class, in their
minds they would have experienced their immature
caregivers their parents rejecting them again
and again for abandoning them (the old faith) for
frivolous frolicking. One figures this would have
lead to psychic discombobulation: shunting
1564
themselves back into the role of victimized child
look ma! there's clearly no spoiling going on here!
probably allowed some sanity.
This isn't to say the professional class hasn't
required some other to bear punishment arising
from their own guilt, while they themselves knew
true personal growth. As Thomas Frank has
argued, they got a kick out of a world that
informed them that they themselves were the only
ones who really mattered, and the rest were some
kind of puerile disregard. But if they weren't this
way... if they insisted on such things as a living
wage, guaranteed annual income, and paid
healthcare for all... if they resisted poking fun at
those in flyover country and instead saw them as
worthy people, however much stunted by coarser,
crueller childhoods, this wouldn't mean a jolt as to
our current situation.
To serve fantasy purposes, even if the professional
class were in fact as benevolent as they could
possibly be, given how really few of us are
1565
comfortable not finding someone out there who is
really, truly the bad one, ostensibly worthy of
being neglected, when we ourselves are knowing
unprecedented ongoing professional and personal
growth knowing ongoing happiness they
would have retrofitted in the imagination as
gloating humiliators, attempting quite literally to
starve the breath out of them.
All the humiliations the nazis handed out to the
Jews those who thrived in Weimar's age of
change, owing to being more warmly raised by
more emotionally evolved parents were replays
of humiliations their own parents inflicted upon
them. Be suspicious of anyone, including Frank,
and including Andrew Sullivan, and including
Brooks, and Hedges, who is suddenly focusing so
much on how humiliated the white working class
has been, presenting the professional class as
composed of those who sport most joyously when
they sport around other people's pain.
The extent to which they actually are like this
1566
might just be helpful, but not at all necessary, for
the anticipated revenge upon them, already baked
into people's psyches. These people indulged, and
wished for a world that would limit the permissible
discrimination upon groups society has previously
seen as guilty simply for being vulnerable
women, children, minorities an instinct for
uncowed accusation against the bullying parent:
for this they must be punished.
———
jprfrog
2 days ago
Underneath all the chestthumping, flagwaving,
and boosterism that is Trump's protofascism lies
nihilism. At the deepest level, desperate white
working men voting against themselves has no
little in common with Wotan's urge to "end it all"
(Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelungs") which
ultimately does happen: at the climax of "The
Twilight of the Gods" Valhalla comes crashing
1567
down carrying the gods to destruction as the
flooding Rhine cleanses the earth for, presumably,
clean restart. The vision was realized at the end of
1945 when the last remnants of the Third Reich
went up in smoke and flame with the Soviets
overrunning Berlin.
Is this as stretch too far? I certainly hope so, but
there is enough expressed desire to "shake things
up" no matter what shakes out to make me fear
otherwise. A major component of that fear is the
obvious imperviousness to logic or facts by the
Trump acolytes demonstrated every day in
comment columns at places like WaPo or
AOLnews. (The latter is really a shocker,
resembling Stormfront at times.) Even from the
Left, there is often a desire to see Trump win
(rather than Hillary) just for the pleasure of making
the "establishment" or the "elites" miserable. That
everyone will be made miserable should that
happen does not seem to matter or may be a
secret desire. There seems to be some fantasy
1568
abroad about what happens when an older social
order breaks down, that somehow virtue and honor
and decency (even "justice", whatever that might
mean at a given time) arise from the chaos that
ensues when means of commerce, income, even
the distribution of food become uncertain.

All this might just be me recovering from a nasty
bout of flu (unable to eat, lost 10 pounds in 6 days,
still very weak). But I have more time than usual
for sampling the intertubes, and the results are not
uplifting.
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Sunday, May 8, 2016
Recent posts on Facebook

May 2
We're going to see a lot of this sort of critique in
1569
the near future.
One thing I would like to point out is that there is a
great deal of energy put into attacking those who
sneer at the working class every progressive you
know, is suddenly set up as the most callous
person ever. Another thing is that Plato's sense of
latestage democracy is not really established as an
illusion here. He Andrew Sullivan, that is
basically agrees that something awful is
necessarily unleashed as freedoms suddenly
abound. For Plato it is societal inversion, as
everyone forgets their "proper" role, deference is
lost, and everybody does what they want; for
Andrew it is more than people lose roles that
actually matter, that aren't intrinsically humiliating,
as well as that narcissism and emotion gets
unleashed the passions and order and good
reason is lost.
Just for reference. I have no sense of our times as
latestage anything. Basically what we have are
increasing numbers of people who see society as
1570
going amok because it reflects their own inner
mental state, rather than what is actually going on
around them (well, they are losing external
"pillars" that kept their immature psyches in
check). That world out there that is becoming more
egalitarian and less bigoted, and that is now
shorning itself of a need for somebody to suffer
while they prosper, and so even America is now
talking about a national health care system,
including dental, (for real, it's on the ballot in
Colorado) as well as living wages, is doing just
fine, thank you, and is not in any state of necessary
absolute complete collapse because, ostensibly,
unprecedented narcissism has gone along with it.
The unleashed emotion Andrew frets about, is
kinda awesome on many of the sites I visit it's
people actually usefully testing one another, rather
than being boringly restrained to show how blue
blood superior they are. Emotion can be a big part
of what is plus about our world, as we see in the
passionate student movements at places like
Columbia, that have retrograde professors quaking
1571
like they did in the 60s, even as it is sadly true that
increasing numbers of the elite are training their
children to be dispassionate, as a further marker
that they're a class apart from the Troll mob. It can
be one of the things we flag as sign of society
being reborn and renewed, not gone lateterm and
out of control.
And it must be said, the bad part, the huge bad part
(read: populism that is about borders and
eviscerating foreigners, or about executing one out
of three on Wall Street, not sane loud objections to
how we've structured society), is not the outcome
of people being humiliated and discarded in the
now, nor because of the internet and the ability of
a mass rage to form instantly and hugely sized, but
more, actually, owing to humiliations they suffered
in their childhood the very stuff, that is, that
made it so that this political world that Andrew
rightly argues the mass has ALWAYS had a hold
of, was driven to become one where the mass
could pay penance for past indulgences by
1572
enduring endless pains and grotesque humiliations,
so that at some point they could insist without guilt
for financial stability again even excess as
well as the opportunity to enjoy the sport of
eviscerating the betterthanthou, elite,
professionalclass, coastal progressives, that were
if anything lured into not sparing their admittedly
infuriating (and selfshortchanging) sense of
superiority. The rage has increased, people are
going mental, because these were people (again,
not the like of students protesting against
increasing student loans) who as kids were
abandoned and terrorized by their parents when
they tried to selfactualize, and they to some extent
have been forced to participate in a world that will
not stop its efforts to end prejudice and entitle its
populace you get an A just for participating!
Look at all these spoiled shits!
Progressives, watch your backs the less
emotionally evolved of your own are craving the
dispatch of you as much as said working class,
1573
ostensibly being humiliated by not working
craftsman jobs but rather effeminate retail.
America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
That ’ s what ’ s scariest about Donald Trump.
NYMAG.COM|BY ANDREW SULLIVAN
———
May 5
Jesus. I hope I don't have do a walk of shame on
way to regular:
Captain America: Civil War
IN 3D:
Today (May 5) 7:50, 8:20, night: 11:20, night:
11:45
Fri (May 6) 11:20am, 1:05, 2:40, 4:35, 6:10, 8:10,
9:45,
Sat (May 7) 11:20am, 11:50am, 2:45, 3:15, 6:30,
7:00, 10:00,
Sun (May 8) 1:10, 2:40, 4:35, 6:10, 8:10, 9:40
1574
Mon (May 9) 1:10, 2:40, 4:40, 6:10, 8:10, 9:45
Tue (May 10) 1:10, 2:40, 4:35, 6:10, 8:05, 9:45
also in IMAX ®
3D:
Today (May 5) 7:00, 10:30
Fri (May 6) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
Sat (May 7) 1:10, 4:30, 7:50, night: 11:10
Sun (May 8) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
Mon (May 9) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
Tue (May 10) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
also in UltraAVX & in 3D (with optional CC +
DVS):
Today (May 5) 7:30, night: 11:00
Fri (May 6) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Sat (May 7) 10:20am, 1:40, 5:00, 8:20, night:
11:40
Sun (May 8) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Mon (May 9) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Tue (May 10) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
also in UltraAVX & in 3D with optional DBox
(with optional CC + DVS):
1575
Today (May 5) 7:30, night: 11:00
Fri (May 6) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Sat (May 7) 10:20am, 1:40, 5:00, 8:20, night:
11:40
Sun (May 8) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Mon (May 9) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Tue (May 10) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
also in regular format (regular cost, but walk of
shame required):
Today (May 5) not playing
Fri (May 6): 1:35, 2:05, 5:05, 5:40, 8:45, 9:15
Sat (May 7) 10:50am, 12:40, 2:10, 5:00, 6:00,
8:50, 9:30
Sun (May 8) 1:40, 2:10, 5:05, 5:45, 8:45, 9:15
Mon (May 9) 1:40, 2:10, 5:10, 5:45, 8:45, 9:15
Tue (May 10) 1:40, 2:10, 5:10, 5:45, 8:45, 9:15
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1576
Acting on one's own behest, in "Captain

America: Civil War"
vzLowaWd7RM/Vy3rMkfkQ_I/AAAAAAAAA0c/ibdf85SB3_YePDWv6yNtsVYBe
aF-IDVGwCK4B/s1600/what-motivates-iron-man-to-go-to-war-in-captain-
america-civil-war-811579.jpg
If "Captain America: Civil War" somehow
was occurring in our actual world, it's a nobrainer
as to which side — Cap's, who wants to keep the
Avengers independent; or Iron Man's, who
believes the team should essentially part of the
security force of the United Nations — is right, the
more progressive: the genuine evolution as to
where the Avengers must go. Cap's would
represent a sort of childish nationalism, where one
country stands apart from the world because it
can't see global cooperation as something other
than entanglements and forced passivity, a
curtailing of freedom: America as it was in the
world until about Obama. Iron Man's would
represent an adult appreciation that respecting the
global community is the best way to not be a sort
of global antagonist: the kind of force Vision
1577
talks about in the world that baits nations into
warfare and terrorism that could have been drawn
peaceful. But in this film world, overall, Iron
Man's side, joining the United Nations, is mostly
seem to be about a lapse of mature judgment, not
a recognition of it.
It actually is made to seem closer to what
is occurring psychically when people who were
once interested in being cosmopolitan start
identifying themselves "starkly" as proudly
nationalist: fitting yourself into the nationalist
collective, you surrender distinction and autonomy
but "feel good" because you suddenly feel free of
antagonists for your own previous independence
— a kind of defensive clinging, a retreat,
undertaken not out of "wisdom" but because some
great punishment was felt sure to be coming. This
isn't to say that some of the members who decide
for the U.N. aren't made to seem noteworthy for
doing so: Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, in
particular, is made to seem as if she made a
1578
deliberated choice, where experience and age and
the benefits of faithful friendship have all helped
her to see the world in a more enlightened and
sophisticated and less personal demonhaunted
way (Don Cheadle's War Machine's pronounced,
instant decision, on the other hand, seems a bit a
flunky's response, as well as arrogant: he'd demand
for a team that he's been part of, for how long?).
But overall this steering towards the U.N. is made
to seem as if it's part of the machinations
summoned of the wilful mind of Iron Man, when
he wants to chastise and punish his own teammates
because he feels himself filledup with rottenness.
Iron Man's a bit of a wreck in this film, and it's not
made to seem owed to the aftereffects of having
made the near selfsacrifice of himself through
directing a nuclear weapon towards an armada,
beckoning close in deep space. This is not him
akin to Mark Ruffalo's Hulk, or in this film,
Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlett Witch, taken apart over
psychic repercussions from wrought damages on
1579
the battlefield — innocent lives lost, or nearlost.
Rather, his troubles here are "Rosebud" territory:
there's some terrible, terrible guilt associated with
feelings towards his mother and father, that are
bubbling up in a mad way, making it so that, for
him, whatever carnage his team was responsible
for in the past — whole wasted city blocks, whole
wasted cities — bears the smallest comparative
relevance.
In the movie's first scene, where Tony Stark is
revealing to an MIT audience a newtech device
he's invested hundreds of millions of dollars on,
specifically to try and help himself rewire his brain
so plaguing traumas can finally get eased, we have
a sense of a guy, who, maybe in this instance —
okay, yes — but maybe otherwise can't be trusted
in a room with other people of about the same age
he was when his genius was blossoming but so too
his repudiation of his parents, just before — it
turned out — they lost their lives in a car crash:
the temptation might be, to help ease his own guilt,
1580
to project his own ostensible wickedness — which
won't go away with time or even with brain
rewiring — onto some other selfrepresentative.
We don't sense it just here with this group of
safelyensconced, princeling children of the
professional class, MITers, but when later in the
film he seeks out adolescent Peter Parker, with all
this young man's discomfort, his humiliating
complete lack of ability to account himself well
when actually pressed to be "the man" he claims
for himself through his "Spider Man" moniker,
there was a little bit of a feeling of someone come
along to manipulate and use, not to recruit —the
wolf, the vampire, the predator, accidentally
invited into the home, to prey on the squirming
children caught within... all other pressing
business, to the wayside.
The Captain, on the other hand, is made to seem so
that whatever talk there was of him possessing
some hidden dark side in "Age of Ultron," it's
simply false: this guy might find
1581
himself occasionally unable to comprehend the
variegatedness of the global, 21st century, and
maybe go "red, white and blue" just to recenter
himself every once in a while, but really this guy
has no dark side, no marked inability not to be able
to adjust to and propel positive — personal
growthenabling — change. He can stay true to
himself and the avenue of possibilities that are
open to him, even as many of his friends slides off
into disconsonance, into obeying the will of inner
overlords now directing their psyches, calling for
the punishment of the ostensibly obstinate and for
collective, pointless selfsacrifice of all.
I think the fact that Captain America loses Iron
Man as a friend while more firmly reattaching
himself to his previous one, Bucky, the Winter
Soldier, owes to the fact that the latter can be
triggered to be a madman but remains otherwise
good and sane, while it's getting harder and harder
to find any speck of the former's full sanity
remaining in charge. Captain America, it turns out,
1582
isn't the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay
down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over
you... unless the guy crawling over him has got his
own mental wires intact. Without this, he'll sever
his ties, and attend to those he can continue to
grow with.
This can mean those who can be triggered to
violence by key words but who otherwise
know neighbourliness, and who've known the good
hearth. But not those whose whole psyches are
everset to rage, owing to repercussions from
feeling responsible for the loss of parental ties and
love, and who are in fact on the lookout for
triggers to restage and find proper punishment for
"the participating parties," even if adventurous,
hardearned plots weren't aboiling to make sure
one got served up.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d9BM3JmIQhg/Vy4WzkrC-
kI/AAAAAAAAA0s/KvmLrstUvkwWvLpcipHi_C4WKLtNY80RgCK4B/s1600/39
e5712038c41bcd5fdfe90f17bf5f3e.jpg

1583
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Labels: captain america, captain america: civil war, civil war, film, movie
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Recent postings on my Facebook site

I gather at some point in "Harry Potter" I'll get
some explanation as to why the hierarchy at
Hogwarts is so intentionally obtuse as to how
horrible the family situation is that they keep on
insisting Harry go back to.
Read more »
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Friday, April 15, 2016
Hairless Butt Potter and the Pederast's

Dong
Hairless Butt Potter and the Pederast's Dong
Book 1: Boy with the Lightning Tattoo
By Patrick McEvoyHalston and Steig Larsson
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Hairless Butt : Uncle, you have me caged in my room
and won't sign release forms so I can go on fieldtrips.
I'm lonely, isolated and without practice in the
summer, even my Quidditch is beginning to suck.
Uncle Asshole : You're a sorcerer, the dirtiest human
being! You deserve no better! However, you do possess
the most admirable hairless butt. How about we put our
relationship on more agreeable terms ... If you do
something for me, I'll do something for you.

Ron : Hairless Butt! It's great that you can visit during
the summer now, and that you can join Hermione and
me as we go on fieldtrips. How did you manage this?
[Hairless Butt details the sexual services he provides his
pederast uncle so that his uncle will give him these
minimal allowances. Ron, hoping to become the next
Quidditch team captain and join the bros, begins to
distance himself from Hairless Butt. Hermione, first to
put up her hand to answer questions but a Catholic
recluse on matters of sexuality and abuse, comes to full
time quarantine herself in the library. Hairless Butt
becomes even more alone and isolated than he was
before.]
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Voldemort : Hairless Butt! I've arrived to destroy you!
Hairless Butt : Don't bother. I haven't the faintest
interest in destroying you, only in joining you, if you'll
allow.
Voldemort : ... Well, of course.... You're not mad that I
killed your mother and father?
Hairless Butt : Not as much as I am furious at a world
that takes a parentless child and lavishes it with further
unrelenting cruelty. I mean, after all, didn't as much
happen to you? You were an orphan, which is pretty
friggin' sad, and yet the only thing anyone ever hears at
Hogwarts is that you're the world's worst person ... and
besides, as long as people are loyal to you, you treat
them pretty well from what I understand. That would be
a miracle coup for me!
Voldemort : Alrighty then. Let's go destroy the world!

Book 2
Dumbledore! Run for Your Life!
By Patrick McEvoyHalston and Cormac McCarthy
1586
Saturday, February 20, 2016
So through witchcraft life must be: a

review of "The Witch"
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BZTMYlg/VshtIRT3CUI/AAAAAAAAAzs/Pw0G1EERiqY/s1600/the-
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The Witch is about an evolved family, brutally

ruptured by an evil so powerful there was nothing
they were going to be able to do to master it.
Evolved? This absurdly Puritan family? This nutso
sin-obssessed family—evolved? Yes. Historically,
the Puritans themselves had better parent-child
relations than their English kin... they were
less intrusive parents, less punishing, and seemed
to others like families "stepped out of time." They
fled England for Plymouth so to not be swamped
by their regressive countrymen. And this particular
family flew their Plymouth colony, it would look
like, for the same reason—they were prepared to
balk authority; everyone else in town stays
components of a collective. Yes, they instruct their
children how sinful everyone is—what we
moderns recognize as a significant kind of abuse—
but when we see the family before it gets half-
crazed by visible signs of the actual Devil preying
upon them, we see no hitting, no sexual abuse; we
1587
see instead a good deal of the father talking to his

children, listening to them, being soothing but not
false—especially notable in his discussion with his
son over the limits of human awareness, when
their unbaptized child is taken and killed—even if
it's only his weaknesses that his mostly grown-up
child, the budding, teenage Thomasin, focusses on
later in the film.
And about that, about the daughter scolding her
father with the truth of his weakness, his many lies
and acts of cowardice, boldly enumerating every
single instance: how many of you would ever dare
the same with your own parents, right to their faces
(the director Robert Eggers says he was influenced
by Bergman's Cries and Whispers, one wonders if
he wasn't as well by Bergman's Autumn Sonata,
where the audience is both alarmed and quietly
thrilled by the extent to which the daughter shreds
through her mother's lies, defying all the unvoiced
threats that commanded she never dare air but
flattering reinforcements of her preferred self-
image.), even if you were in a situation like hers
where there was nothing to be lost in doing so. The
last film I saw which featured the possibility of
such a confrontation—last year's The Intern—had
a feminist daughter at the helm of a large company
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she created about ready to suicide herself if her

mother found out what a bitch she actually thought
she was. So, yes, the correct perception of them is
as actually evolved—products, each one, of
considerable allowance, not as the repressed
religious nuts that sixty years later (the film takes
place sometime near 1630) would be responsible
for the New England Witch Trials—those
ostensible worst of American peoples.
Indeed, through what happens with Thomasin,
there is a sense that the family's destruction and
her "moving on" is about using the elements of
what they're bound to—the narrative of a folk tale
—to do the best impression of a family moving so
far forward its lone remaining constituent knows a
kind of liberation that can only be represented
in the wilds of devilry—an eternity of licentious
play and self-discovery, through willing
subservience to the Devil. But before getting to
Thomasin and how the film binds "witchery" to
her own acts of impressive umbrage, almost in a
sense forcing her to go perhaps truly pruriently bad
in order for her to explore what is most exciting
about her, it is important to note that this isn't a
film where you simply cheer at the end for the girl
being released from family ties and other harsh
1589
bonds, ready, instead, to flock about a beckoning

undiscovered world.
In particular, you care for the young boy as he
bravely seeks down the horrors in the forest, and
are abashed that this truly brave young man doesn't
meet something he could feasibly handle,
something that would give him feedback on how
he himself is becoming someone to be reckoned
with, as he makes his own moral choices and fights
for those he loves (not just to kill the wolf, but his
lying to his mother to rescue his father from
sustained humiliation), but instead faces an instant
great over-pour of a taste—lust—that he had only
the slightest previous experience in getting a
handle on (previously, his looking away when it
dawned on him his sister might be aware that he
was aroused at his catching sight of her partly
exposed breasts). He was prepared to think he
might master a wolf in a brawl (and he might well
have), but had no handle on the consideration that
lust wasn't something that could only come to
rightly own you if it arose in full bloom on your
own apparent knocking at its door (hasn't this as
much been on your mind, young man? haven't you
also been hoping more knowledge of this might be
lurking deep in the proximate tangles of the
1590
woods?). We also feel tremendous empathy for all

the kids as they, in a different register, quietly ask
one another if the other is actually in truth with the
Devil... there's the sense of the world siblings have
constructed for one another, an understanding they
have that parents aren't party to, that is touching
and inspires our wanting to see kept protected.
6lMU5XBgcGY/VsiuFxBwUxI/AAAAAAAAAz8/JLRRkfsEUXQ/s1600/the-
witch-image-3.jpg
So it's not like when the family gets so torn apart,

loyalties irrevocably shamed and broken—as they
accuse one another of being the like of either failed
patriarchs, wanton whores, and of course,
witches and devils—amidst a farmed land that has
likewise collapsed as an edifice outside of failure,
that there is nothing but rightful allure that awaits
her as Thomasin steps into a wild that instead
knows self-command, the company of
witches. She knows that in addition to being done
right by by living unconstrained, loose, and free
—"seeing the world," as the Devil says—she'll be
dispensing trauma upon families of as just as much
worth as her own has been many times to her. But
still, it is every time she does what should
objectively count most right about a person—their
1591
own self-exploration/development—that she

becomes bound to witchcraft—so through
witchcraft, life must be.
It is when she is fiddling with a game of peek-a-
boo, extending the duration she keeps her eyes
hidden so that both she and the infant can be
surprised with the infant's reaction to something
outside of pattern, that the infant gets snatched
away. Her brother is raped by the witch just after
he gets manipulated (an act of creativity and self-
activation) by Thomasin into letting her journey
with him on his nighttime "adventure"—itself, an
impressive act of self-activation on his part—into
the forest. She manages the problem of the twins
hounding her, calling her a witch, by stopping her
repeated denial that it was in fact a wolf that
snatched away the child and instead embracing the
concept, unfolding in a moment into a lively,
embellished persona ostensibly ready to boil and
bake the twins if they should ever reveal her "true"
identity. Through all of this, she reveals the kind of
personality that would later flourish in New
England Puritan communities, as it was from
exactly these that America got its first impressive
artistic and literary community.
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think-the-witch-trailer-was-scary-762737.jpg

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Superimposing another "fourth-wall"

Deadpool
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gallery-image.jpg
I'd like to superimpose the fourth-wall breaking

Deadpool that I'd like to have seen in the movie. In
my version, he'd break out of the action at some
point to discuss with us the following:
1) He'd point out that all the trouble the movie
goes to to ensure that the lead actress is never seen
completely naked—no nipples shown—in this R-
rated movie was done so that later when we
suddenly see enough strippers' completely bared
breasts that we feel that someone was making up
for lost time, we feel that a special, strenuous effort
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has been made to keep her from a certain fate—

one the R-rating would even seemed to have called
for, necessitated, even, to properly feed the
audience expecting something extra for the movie
being more dependent on their ticket purchases.
That is, protecting the lead actress was done to
legitimize thinking of those left casually
unprotected as different kinds of women—not as
worthy, not as human.
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l-officially-rated-r-by-mpaa-789274.jpg
2) When Wade/Deadpool and Vanessa are

exchanging info on their past lives, the only one
who admits to anything really incriminating is
Vanessa. She was and is a prostitute. We are
ostensibly meant to see this as something that
could empower her, or that she could engage in in
an empowered way. But the fact that Wade didn't
pay her for sex but rather to join him in a ball-
tossing carnival game, suggests that if she had
taken the money for sex, something about their
relationship would have been degraded. She had to
first be granted a cleanse—sex apart from money,
and only after a normal period of dating—to
become more of an acceptable love interest, to
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be worthy of dignity.
If the movie meant to really show her prostitution
as something that didn't degrade/potentially define
her they'd have let their relationship arise after he
paid her for sex... the sense would have been he
didn't spare her from something, something averse
and degrading. She was lifted—perhaps a bit
unearned?—into a dignified, "acceptable,"
situation—what a guy! The way it is, if she should
ever turn on him, humiliate him, spurn him, he
could just throw another hundred her way and tell
her it will be the normal "ball games" this time—
even though she wouldn't go for it, it'd be a
presage of the base life she'd be back to after him
—and she'd be denied the ability to take no
disadvantage from it that would have remained
hers if she hadn't been so graciously spared his
"courtesy."
3) What happens to Wade's face and body is not
nearly as bad as we all are meant to pretend that it
is. Using him as a proxy, we savour the fact that
this guy gets superhuman strength and reflexes, as
well as pretty much full immunity to being killed,
gets to keep his superior physique and handsome
facial structure, but is permitted the allowance of
1595
being as ruthless as he pleases to his enemy—and

perhaps to the humanity that scorns him—because
the cost of his transformation is so high. If it really
was, we wouldn't make that trade in a heartbeat...
and all of us would. We ostensibly made a lousy
trade, but we really didn't: "more square
footage...": we gloat on how well we scored on this
deal.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zBtAOUocN7A/VsR-
Tjl14rI/AAAAAAAAAyE/Pqyg71xi4Vg/s1600/deadpool-trailer-39-750x308.jpg
If the movie really wanted to make him so ugly

Wade couldn't presume to ever be appealing to
women again, and to ensure that we would desist
in readily identifying with him, in using him in this
film world as our "second skin," they could just
have made him a third-degree burn victim—a
pretty common, unexceptional fate, which looks
this much worse: (actually, I can't show you
pictures—they can be that terrible; you know what
I mean.)
4) Wade endures a lot of torture (so to shock his
genes into producing a mutation). If you really
mean for those of us using him as our proxy to
experience this as something nasty to sit through,
you needed to exclude one thing in particular.
Don't show him as one of two guys being tortured,
1596
and show the other guy, a regular guy, built out of

beer and nachos not constant strenuous exercise, as
enduring it particularly poorly (cowardly?), despite
his easy-to-see-through tough-talk. What happens
then is that the torture becomes something
to bulwark/cement your own macho, and the other
guy becomes someone we can project all our fears,
all our humiliating experiences of childhood terror
and subservience into, to disown. At the end of the
torture, with the other guy perishing passively and
"our" fate suggesting our remaining degree of fight
—our inherent difference—"we" come out actually
in a position where we ought properly to thank the
villain: he helped cleft us from the Mr. Pathetic we
fear could be our core.
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NL9jXHWk/s1600/deadpool-trailer-ajax-torture-wade-weapon-
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itijGkQmoEI/VsSDL75Ax5I/AAAAAAAAAyU/O0Y24dTbxdI/s1600/images-
2.jpeg
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6UI/AAAAAAAAAys/BQczYE707wA/s1600/deadpool-trailer-deadpool-vs-
ajax1.png
1597
5) If the X-Men start courting our proxy,

Deadpool, please don't pretend this doesn't send
thrills down our spines. If "we" don't immediately
accept, it's not because we like going solo. It's
because, since Wade represents someone supposed
to be akin to us, a "second self," who (according to
film critic, Mike Lasalle) in being distinguished
mostly for being shameless and endlessly self-
forgiving is really not much like the standard brand
of heroes and more like plain old everyone of us—
notable, simply for possessing a "selfie"—we kind
of have to be eased in so we feel like we actually
belong in the first rank... there needs to be some
tweaking.
With Ant-Man, this was accomplished by elevating
his heroism; by some restraint on his part. Here,
we're seeing the other option in play: by
representing the X-men with previously
unrepresented characters, including a simple, code-
following man-child, Colossus, and a withholding,
pouty teenager... hell, even in his unadulterated,
much-more-just-a-huge-asshole-than-just-bawdy
state, he's already on Charles Xavier's coattails
before even arriving at the entrance to his mansion.
This movie is the red carpet in, if he chooses to use
it.
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http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U3C1_Ldmtr0/VsSKuMG3uyI/AAAAAAAAAzI/L-
LJOQdQE68/s1600/deadpool-empirephoto1.jpg
Why otherwise wouldn't he? Well, well there is
something about a patient transferring upon his
doctor a withholding part-object identity, that
strikes me as relevant in this case. As well as
perhaps just using a connection to an institution to
stabilize psychic identity. But that diagnosis for
another time, where owing to his "lowering," it'll
probably have to applied to more of the hero class
than just him.

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Dead potential, in "Deadpool"

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According to the psychiatrist I pay most attention

to, James F. Masterson, children who grow up
under mothers who require their children to meet
their own unmet needs for attention have a very
difficult time nurturing what he calls their "real
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self." What happens is that the mother's strongly

averse reaction to the child's first sign of
autonomy, which occurs when as an infant s/he
first started walking, and which kicks in hard once
again at adolescence, scares the child away from
full (or even partial) self-realization. In the way of
the path ahead to ever becoming his or her real self
are fears and pains arising owing to feeling
abandoned, which are so paralyzing they're akin to
what reliably blocked Truman from just driving
across the bridge and leaving Seahaven in The
Truman Show. He calls them the Six Horsemen of
the Psychic Apocalypse: Depression, Panic, Rage,
Guilt, Helplessness, and Emptiness. What happens
to such children? They never really grow up, never
really individuate. Ryan Reynold's Wade shows
signs of being exactly this sort of person. At first,
he's the kind of guy who seems mostly motivated
to deny parts of himself he is concerned actually
best represent him by bullying those in overt
possession of these traits—geeky guys who wear
their vulnerability on their faces and who rage
powerfully at women. So it's not him, it's the guys
he bullies. He becomes someone however who
actually enters a real relationship with a woman,
one with promise. But as soon as he gets past the
1600
period of mutual-gaze infatuation and enters that

period where his relationship might challenge and
mature him, take him adrift from his past life of
being just another member of a homosocial gang, a
calamity happens (here his developing cancer)
which leaves him essentially living with his
mother, fretful of women rejecting him (my god!
my acne!), wantonly acting out his aggressions,
and associating with those without the
sophistication to see through him (here the simple-
minded proletarian X-Men, Colossus, as well as
the petulant sorta one, Negasonic Teenage
Warhead).
This is the first R-rated comic book film, but in
truth what's on display in terms of characters
relating to one another is mightily regressed from
the adult relationship we saw on display between
Tony Stark and Pepper Potts in Josh Whedon's
the Avengers. It's too bad it's doing such good
business, because it puts the pressure on
recognizable adult characters in other superhero
films (like McAvoy's Charles Xavier) not to make
him wilt—and not making him wilt, is the other
reason why the X-men's mansion is always empty
when Deadpool visits it, one he wasn't actually
going to admit to (or indeed even allow himself to
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remain for long cognizant of) when he breached

the fourth wall, wink, wink: Storm, Cyclops,
Wolverine, as they've been depicted thus far,
would have no truck with him. May they never be
forced to pretend to be willing partners in his sort
of retrograde.

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Film Reviews, 2013-2016

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61270880766_400_300.jpg
Hail, Caesar!
The Force Awakens
Bridge of Spies
Steve Jobs
The Martian
The Overnight
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Inside Out
Jurassic World
The Avengers
Ex-Machina
American Sniper (from American Sniper to Triumph of the Will?)
American Sniper (Eastwood's comfort zone)
Fury
Boyhood
Lucy
Railway Man
Transcendence
Bad Words
Draft Day
Nymphomaniac
Noah
Divergent
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Non-Stop
Pompeii
3 Days to Kill
12 Years a Slave (it might not have been worth it, Lupita)
Gravity and 12 Years a Slave (out of the frying pan and into the
fire)
Her
12 Years a Slave
Ender's Game
2013 films, accompanied by text by Lloyd deMause
Gravity
Carrie
Don Jon
Prisoners
The Family
Insidious 2
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The Butler
Kickass 2
Blue Jasmine
Elysium
Only God Forgives
The Conjuring
The Wolverine
Pacific Rim
This is the End (and summer self-surrender)
This is the End
The Bling Ring
Man of Steel
Mud
The Great Gatsby
Iron Man 3
Pain and Gain
Oblivion
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Brave

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Sunday, February 7, 2016
Hailing the 1950s, in "Hail , Caesar!"

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OjI/s1600/8cda0f8f8b7c73c3cc9a42060ee038cec3e23167.jpg
The critic Richard Brody has written that in Hail,

Caesar the Coen brothers are exploring their own
1950s origins. So that would be two men of 2016
looking back on a very patriarchal society where
father knows best and where the majority of
families were still raised in a conservative fashion
(this wasn't a time where you were supposed to
float free and discover your own calling, but still
mostly follow through with what your ostensibly
"did it all for you," "self-sacrificing" parents
expected of you). And so we might presume there
would be some criticism of this previous social
order—the women we see confined to
supplementary roles would show the capacity to
1606
actually lead companies if only they were in the

21st; those we see shepherded into accomplishing
what others expect of them would betray
something rote about their efforts that would be
absent if they'd had the freedom and
encouragement to discover what they themselves
wanted in life. Yet we do not find this. Rather, with
wifely sustaining of the work-pressured husband
and employee' willing full accommodation to
bosses, the thing, the brothers here come across as
presenting what others now only harshly
deconstruct, as an ideal.
In the 1950s the thinking was that the basis of the
entire success of the social structure would be
found in the mass replication of the sort of
responsible, nuclear family home that Josh Brolin's
Eddie Mannix possesses. Here's "Father Knows
Best," with the wife the one who attends to the
children and the home, and gives sustenance and
support for her faithful, hard-working husband;
and the husband the one who brings home the
income and who is first in the household, but who
has a profound respect for his wife's deeply felt
needs—which are for him to stay healthy, and
perhaps send more time at home—even if she is so
respectful of him, of the load and stress he already
1607
has to bear, to only ever whisper them so despite

their impact on her they semblance an aside. She
knows he works so hard and is so good she would
never want to haunt him, even as her goodness
ensures that—ultimately benevolently—she can't
help but do so: her request that he attend to his
health and not smoke afflicts him throughout the
day... he is tempted to escape it.
But nevertheless the harpies—or rather, the harpies
that succeed in encouraging our own negative
judgment of a protagonist—of the Coen brothers'
last two films are gone in this one. Eddie isn't
hoorawed by a little girl, and diminished a bit in
our eyes for it, as is Rooster Cogburn in True Grit,
nor does he have to bear a torrent of ridicule by a
caustic sister and a furious former lover, mostly in
our eyes deservingly, as does Llewyn Davis in
Inside Llewyn Davis. He does have to abate for a
time two crowing gossip columnists who believe
they have the permanent edge on him, but he
deflates them soundly by the end. But then he isn't
someone who "lies in filth and bemoans his
station," nor someone who besmirches everyday
working people as those who just "exist." Instead
he's so commendably performing his company role
as a problem-solving film producer, his societal
1608
role as a hard-working stiff, those who'd tempt him

towards an easier, less troubling life might appear
to have the moral edge over those who'd encourage
him to stick to his chosen occupation and persist.
In the 1950s, you were supposed to work hard and
keep faith with your chosen occupation, but this
wasn't going to mean not earning a significant
bounty for it.
The parenting of the 1950s has been described by
the psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause as
"socializing," meaning, so long as you did as your
parents wished—pursed the interests they wanted
you to pursue, chose the job they wanted for you,
whether in order to blandly replicate or boldly
enhance themselves—you would have their
approval, their largesse. The film suggests this
version of "good things come" as natural law. The
"good children" of the film being the film stars
Hobie Doyle and DeeAnna Moran, who do
whatever Eddie and the studio requires of them.
Hobie, the former rodeo employee, agrees to star
in a production that rightly requires someone
educated and whip-smart, not a yokel. But no
matter how much the director's instructions for him
pound down the fact of his near illiteracy—be
"rueful," try a "mirthless chuckle"—and how right
1609
his fellow actors are to instantly regret his being on

set, for good-naturedly doing as his superiors
requested, he's protected: the director doesn't dare
go as far as to fully undermine him, or it'll be his
project lost, his career broken. He also agrees to
date whomever the studio wishes. And apparently
for this, ends up well matched, and gets to engage
in playful, relaxed, totally savoury flirtations with
his new partner, spared any sense that it can't all be
deeply let in and enjoyed (a swath of earthly
paradise for this still innocent and loyal "Adam").
With DeeAnna, there is no questioning on her part
the studio's further request for how she handle the
upcoming birth of her child, whose father is
uncertain and whom DeeAnn adamantly can't
stand as a potential husband. And seemingly for
leaving the decision of what to do to the studio and
to accede to their decision, she is distilled better
than she could ever have expected, the (ironic) gift
of free choice, actually: she gets to keep as "father"
and husband someone of her choosing—another
longterm, dutiful, "it comes with the job, ma'am,"
willingly wound-sustaining employee, who
likewise is rewarded for his fidelity.
The "bad children" in the film are Baird Whitlock
and Thora and Thessaly Thacker, who either
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knowingly or unknowingly forget their place.

Thora and Thessaly perform an approved role in
giving the studio the press it wants. They get
access nobody else gets, but only through their
servility, however as much—with their
promiscuous estimation of their rectitude and
importance—they might like to construe the nature
of their relationship with the studios. But not this
time: they've acquired information (Thora knows
about Baird's homosexual experience; Thessaly
knows about Baird's disappearance) that by no
means the studio can afford to have spread, and
with this hope to gain leverage, essentially dictate
terms. And seemingly for forgetting their place in
the natural order—other industries, other
"battleships in the sea," might displace the power
of the movie industry but not once-dependent mere
individual subjects—one of them, Thora, ends up
on the receiving end of a humiliating reversal: the
very source of her empowerment is turned into
something that guarantees her compliance. The
punishment isn't Old Testament-like, the
dispensation is provided with some shoring up, not
only because the studio still has need of her but
because she has served the 1950s approved lesson
that unbound children are wanton children, and
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that women... just can't help themselves (Frances

McDormand's C.C.Calhoun getting her scarf
caught in the moviola—women and their irrational
vanity!—had something of this feel as well,
however otherwise she is meant to be seen as
fluent at her job)—i.e., the fault might even mostly
be with the studio for not keeping sufficient tabs.
Eddie breaches natural order by joyously
recounting before his boss the explosive
revelations of Communist philosophy,
inadvertently thereby parading what might well be
a worst form of torture before this loyal, Catholic,
American subject as something he might be
expected to have to suffer without complaint. He
gets the tar beaten out of him for this trespass, but
here too, even, there is at the finish some rescue,
some genuine encouragement for him to go out
and be the star he is and act his ass off: what Baird
did not do was show himself someone who
couldn't learn his lesson after receiving the
"proper" 50s feedback for badly errant behaviour,
corporeal punishment. After the shock of this kind
of feedback, he'd would reset and go back to
performing as expected.
If the Coen brothers wanted to distance themselves
1612
from 50s moral codes, they had ample opportunity

to do so in the subsequent scene where Eddie acts
the penultimate scene of the studio's big film
project, "Hail, Caesar." This scene involves Baird
as a Roman tribune who desists in claiming a full
serving of water before the slaves get theirs, owing
to the inspiring, life-changing example of this great
man before him on the cross—Jesus—whom he
witnessed sacrificing his own needs for others'
gain just days before. That is, it's a replay of what
Baird himself just experienced, his having been
buoyed and inspired by the new ways of imagining
the world by the genial and truly respectful
comradeship of those he just met (in his case, the
Communists—Hollywood writers, as well as the
scholar Herbert Marcuse—who abducted him). It
was a chance to contrast performance
incontrovertibly owing to inspiration—how Baird
thrilled in describing this revolution in thought to
Eddie—with performance that might for an expert
just be rote, and the spotlight wasn't placed on
what the bullying studio system, what 1950s
authoritarian society, shortchanged itself. Instead,
we are directed to how affected the audience is by
his performance, how powerfully moved. Baird
could be beaten back into remembering his place,
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and in every respect, not miss a beat... a great

dispensing machine that could be counted on to
dispense again and again and again, and we all
would never know him as other than someone who
drew true inspiration from every role he took.
Eddie refuses an offer to grab for himself the easy
life as an executive in an industry outside of being
humbled as fluff (the airline industry, specifically),
and the feeling is, what other industry other than
his own allows one to execute as akin to a mob
boss who can tap other people everyone else hold
as akin to gods to perform as his subjects? Even if
you're a loyal Catholic subject yourself—in a
sense, just one other before God—there’s a high
afforded here that can't be matched if you moved
to a perhaps more relevant industry. It's kind of
gross, this mastery; and I think it's up to us as
audience members to wonder why the Coen
brothers have provided a film here that would
make a kind of Trump-style societal regression
seem something that might give opulent pleasures
to the man who orchestrated it, but which could
well be for our own good.
Do we need someone archaic to stay behind to
hammer us back into a rule-enforced society that
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might still afford us, as Richard Brody articulates,

"delight [and] unexpectedly free expression within
[…] strictures and hermetic confines"? Have we
psychologically devolved back to the point where
we feel most relaxed and free only once we’ve
sacrificed enough of our future potential that an
overlord could experience us as reset, as not so
much a problem anymore, and therefore, grant us
some guarantee of latitude?
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Labels: coen brothers, film, hail caesar, movie

Recent postings at Salon.com (I am

Emporium)
Original Article: The Clintons’ sordid race
game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise
was premised on repudiating black voters
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 10:22 PM
NotARepublican Emporium Hillary represents
as an ideal the educated professional, feminist
and cosmopolitan in outlook--liberal
individualism: something that tasks the mind to
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achieve. Sanders may be more each of us as

brothers and sisters, common identity, where it's
easy to imagine it being about mental slippage.
Permalink
Original Article: Our terrified hyperpatriots:
Here’s what Palin, Trump and anti-Muslim
extremists fear most
This article doesn't seem so much concerned
about the hyper-patriots as liberals who might
potentially be slipping. It shores up and warns.
The (German) Left's response to the recent
episode in Cologne was that the sexism you saw
on display there was no different than it is
amongst non-migrants. "Cologne" shouldn't
direct you so much to target migrants' "culture,"
but sexism in general in society. And hearing
this, the outrageous silliness of it, the German
middle class got that much closer to desisting in
their enjoyment in being deemed worthy for
their cosmopolitan, progressive outlook, for
beginning to want someone to take a closer look
at the ostensible facts behind the Leftists' case
for equivalence.
Permalink
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Original Article: The Clintons’ sordid race

game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise
was premised on repudiating black voters
It is possible that after a great sacrificial war
(WW2) and a debilitating Depression, we're still
only going to allow ourselves so much
permission. Following that, it is not a matter of
savvy compromise but a reflection of how much
many of us liberals are still uncomfortable with
ongoing growth, that we needed to ensure some
groups got a beating (1980 and after) while
genuine progress did persist ahead. These groups
"contain" projections of our weak, vulnerable
childhood selves, and by giving them the beating
we increasingly felt we deserved for our
increasing autonomy, our self-attendance, our
ostensible sinful narcissism, we're okay with
growth continuing. Then and only then. This is
projection; this is using people as poison
containers--carriers of our ostensible sins. The
Clintons were under this hold just as much as
everyone else. They're certainly not evil, and
collectively this all were going to be able to
handle.
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The thought is that Sanders reflects a young

generation's ability to tolerate growth less
conflictedly/ambiguously. They were raised by
boomers who spared the rod, unlike their own
parents. They weren't only socialized into an
order, but allowed to go their own way. They
didn't feel as much at an inherent level that they
were terribly spoiled and bad every time they
reached for the cookie jar. So a victory for
Sanders means greater benevolence, an end to
some-prosper-but-most-fall Clinton/Obama era,
and back to society that raises all boats. Maybe.
But it is possible that a Sanders victory would
mean people wanting to surrender that sense of
themselves as particular, as highly individuated
and richly developed individuals, for the
clouding and obfuscation involved in become
part of a populist miasma.
Taking that into consideration--that Sanders
victory is akin to one by Trump, in that it means
a kind of collective devolution into a hive-mind,
the folk, the Volk--it might actually be the more
progressive win if Hillary gets in. Sanders is the
embodiment of our desires; he sways at our
1618
bequest. Hillary is apart from us, prizing her

own distinction and autonomy.
Permalink
Original Article: They’ll always lose the
culture wars: The right loves fighting lost
causes– but liberals keep winning
Aunt Messy Emporium Her saying that she was
dismayed that the progressive 1920s were
followed by the conservative culture of the
30s/40s/50s, didn't strike me as especially Jerry
Falwell-like. It stuck in mind. One decade of
advancement; three of regression.
Permalink
Original Article: They’ll always lose the
culture wars: The right loves fighting lost
causes– but liberals keep winning
One day perhaps this particular viewpoint will
itself be seen as regressive, something a current
generation of Leftists would need to hold onto to
maintain their psychic equilibrium, regardless of
the evidence that surfaces. They are comfortable
1619
with ambiguity, complexity, transgressions; the

opposites need a polarized, complexity-spared
view of everything.
The counter is that this generation of Leftists
were advanced in that they had less of a need to
project their own unwanted characteristics--their
"badness"-- onto other people, but weren't
capable of doing it without romancing those
they're protecting: that is, everyone subjected to
the bigotry of the Right couldn't possibly be on
their own a collection of regressed bigots,
possessed of no culture really worth protecting--
infused, as it all is, with aspects of racism--but
always a valued people with cultural heritages
that enrich the world. A more advanced Left
wouldn't need to posit a Cinderella story--the
oppressed one is actually the more beautiful--
onto the world around them. They just stop the
oppression, and look at the oppressed, square.
Maybe they're better, maybe they're worse:
doesn't matter: bigotry arises out of abuse--hurt
people hurt people--and is no one's fault, just
something to be eliminated from the world.
No group composed of progressives is just going
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to open their borders so that a gang of MRA

bigots could join in. The progressiveness would
get drastically watered down. America's problem
may have been that those who settled in the
North--those from intact families that fled
European oppression for their more advanced
Religious views--didn't find some quick way to
foreclose the South to the single men, the later-
born sons, and convicts who came there. If one's
level of tolerance for societal changes that
actually enrich and empower you is high, it tells
you a lot about what kind of background you've
come from. For sure, you've had parents who
didn't abandon you or brutally punish you as
spoiled brats--your parents didn't project onto
you--when you ventured outside prescriptions.
Since you're talking parenting, not habits but
dispositions towards children born out of a
leakage of very little love through a generational
chain, it's not something to be addressed quickly
with the right kind of pamphlet information.
If you let a lot of people like that in and the
Republic continues to move along a progressive
path, it may be just that you don't realize that it
has already affected your Republic, and is why
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you could only get away with a punitive sort of

neoliberal evolution which ensured huge groups
would suffer while society made genuine
advancements in its attitudes, rather than
something more generally provisioning; and
possibly that you're looking right now at the
peak before the crash: Trump gets in, devolution
sets in--union leaders who urge Democrat but
can't, alas, control their base--because the truth
of (parenting) heritage could not be balked
forever.
The author of this piece is what Dawkins, Maher
et al. call a regressive liberal, that is, those who
are irresponsibly projecting a particular, pleasing
framework on the world, just at the time when
the support columns for their advanced views
are collapsing. In their view, people like this are
going to need to start talking borders and
making judgments that would make them sound
like bigots, even to themselves... they've got to
be this brave, even while knowing that the
advanced psyche is always the one that isn't
polarized, that is always ready to assimilate fluid
complexity. They charge them as being
unwilling to taint their preferred sense of
1622
themselves, and so cling to a world view that

makes them feel virtuous even as the facts of
reality--"you were all were supposed to vote
Democrat, not Trump--only bigoted whites vote
Trump!"--force them to detach themselves and
go recluse.
Progress, incremental attitude adjustment, is

likely inevitable. But it's that when it goes
downhill it can be so bad that it can look like it'll
never get back up. This is the 1930s and 40s and
even 50s, after the Jazz Age 1920s (Paglia wrote
about this recently; how distressed she was at
the extent of the fall.) And it could come pretty
close to being smothered: there are a number of
scholars who argue that Jews got targeted in
Germany because Germans were jealous of their
(the Jews') ability to handle Weimar-era, quick,
progressive cultural change, when they were so
threatened by it and desired quickly to reset to
nativism, known roles, and shortchanged
opportunity.
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Sunday, January 31, 2016
When you're hating on General Hux...

CL2uI9Edb84/Vq4vVbdK2ZI/AAAAAAAAAwg/SvCwUE-0vUg/s1600/general-
hux_078a3f89.jpeg
Arthur Chu at Salon.com wrote this:

A lot has already been written about “Star Wars
Episode VII: The Force Awakens” and its
meteoric ascent into the pop-culture canon after
the mixed reaction to the prequels. One of the
takes I liked best was how the very idea of doing
a sequel to “Return of the Jedi” and its splashy
happy ending turns the Star Wars saga from fairy
tale to something bleaker and more realistic,
facing the hard truth that war never really ends
and evil is never really defeated. “One Death
Star is a horror; two Death Stars and one
Starkiller Base… is something more like the
inexorable logic of history, grinding us all to
dust.”
There are many reasons Episode VII feels like a
bleaker world than Episode IV–one of them
1624
being that the backstory to Episode VII consists

of movies we’ve actually seen and characters we
already love. It’s one thing to kill off an old man
we met in Act I as the climax to Act II; it’s
another thing entirely to kill off an old man we
got to know and rooted for as a young
wisecracking scoundrel over the course of three
movies.
Similarly, it’s one thing to vaguely imply
something about the “Clone Wars” as an old,
settled conflict and vaguely posit that that peace
somehow led to the war we’re in right now (and
to somewhat unsatisfyingly try to fill in the
details of that transition with an ill-conceived
prequel trilogy). It’s another thing to give us the
happy ending we were promised at the end of
three movies–celebrating Ewoks, exploding
fireworks, our protagonists hugging and
laughing and smiling–and then show us that
happy ending collapsing into wrack and ruin
years later with a new movie and a new war.
But there’s one particular thing that I haven’t
noticed people talking about that I’ve felt
nagging at me ever since watching “The Force
1625
Awakens.” Something that seems off compared

to the unspoken “rules” of the original trilogy
and the prequels, something that deeply
undermines its message of hope–and something
that’s all too clearly reflected in the real world of
2016.
In the new Star Wars, the bad guys are young.
In the original Star Wars films, the struggle
looked pretty much like an intergenerational
struggle–fresh-faced Luke and Leia, barely out
of their teen years, and Harrison Ford as Han
Solo acting the world-weary cynic at the ripe old
age of 35.
The good guys, the heroes, were the youth, the
new generation who saw the corruption of the
system and were moved to stand against it. Hell,
the conflict between Luke Skywalker and Uncle
Owen in the first movie is a stock theatrical
trope, the fiery young man eager to go on a
“damn fool crusade” against the wishes of a
father figure who wants him to stay home and
play it safe.
The bad guys, the Empire, are the
1626
Establishment, the Man. They’re a bevy of

middle-aged white guys with British accents in
uniforms who seem in love with bureaucracy
and procedure. There’s precious little passion in
them, compared to the Rebels; instead they’re
driven mostly by an officious sense of duty and
sneering contempt for their inferiors.
Stormtroopers idly chitchat about nonsense
while pulling tedious shifts of guard duty, with
no particular emotions about the Rebels except
as “scum” to be exterminated. Middle-aged
Imperial officers bicker over status at staff
meetings, and the only time we see young faces
among them it’s as a sight gag–the field-
promoted Admiral Piett nervously stepping into
the place of his recently Force-choked
predecessor, the put-upon, in-over-his-head
Moff Jerjerrod–pathetic figures, sellouts, the
1960s stereotype of a gormless milquetoast
Young Republican.
The figures who were the animating force
behind the Empire? The ones with real menace?
The gaunt-cheeked elder statesman Grand Moff
Tarkin. The terrifyingly decrepit Emperor
Palpatine. And, of course, Darth Vader, who is
1627
literally Luke and Leia’s domineering dad.

The story George Lucas was telling was the
story he grew up with, as someone who came of
age in the 1960s. It’s a story of youth revolution.
Yes, there are wise old mentors among the good
guys, too–but the key thing about Obi-Wan
Kenobi and Yoda is that they failed, and now
Luke, Leia, Han and the dashing Lando
Calrissian have to complete the task they left
unfinished. Obi-Wan and Yoda, we eventually
learn, are wrong to think that Darth Vader can
only be defeated by force; Luke succeeds where
they failed through empathy and love.
It’s almost unnecessary to point to the cut scenes
from “A New Hope” with Luke and his friends
hanging out in a small town on Tatooine eerily
similar to the Modesto, California in “American
Graffiti,” or to the Vietnam parallels in “Return
of the Jedi.”
Star Wars is about liberals like George Lucas
putting their hope in youth and youth culture to
do what the New Deal Democrats of the World
War II generation could not, to finally defeat
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bigotry and inequality and redeem the American

dream. Star Wars was far from the only
franchise from that era with that theme. And
even though the 1960s were a high-water mark
for Youth Culture as a phenomenon in the 20th
century, it’s a narrative that’s been
around before and after George Lucas–witness
the imagery surrounding the messianic
“millennial voter” in 2008’s mass celebration of
“Hope.”
The problem, of course, is that there’s no
guarantee whatsoever that history will progress
as progressives wish it would generation by
generation, or that youth in and of itself implies
virtue. Today’s “The Man” was yesterday’s
Angry Young Man; the System started
somewhere.
The Star Wars prequels famously squandered the
opportunity to make that point, manipulating the
story so that the bad guys are still malevolent
elderly authority figures, the gray-haired Senator
Palpatine and Count Dooku, the comically
bumbling wizened plutocrats of the “Trade
Federation” and the “Banking Clan,” while our
1629
good guys are a 14-year-old genius political

leader and an adorable kid Jedi who only falls to
darkness in the last movie.
But look at Episode VII. Yes, there’s the weirdly
inhuman Andy-Serkis-portrayed CG character
“Supreme Leader Snoke.” But look at the
frighteningly intense General Hux, whose
impassioned speech against “disorder” makes
the First Order feel even more uncomfortably
close to the Third Reich than the Empire of the
old movies. Look at the Darth Vader wannabe
Kylo Ren, who takes Luke’s struggle with the
Dark Side and inverts it, with his religious
devotion to “darkness” and his stubborn
insistence on resisting the “light.”
They’re both played by young actors–Domhnall
Gleeson and Adam Driver are both 32 but look
younger, and are associated in the public
consciousness with youth. (Gleeson is probably
best known to American audiences for his role
as Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter movies and
for playing a callow 20-something computer
nerd in “Ex Machina.” Driver, of course, is the
ur-dudebro boyfriend from “Girls.”)
1630
They’re not pawns of older authority figures.

The only authority figure above them in the film
is Snoke, who’s present only as a hologram; for
the bulk of the film Hux and Kylo Ren are the
duumvirate directing the First Order’s activities,
and they do so with relish.
There is still hope, yes. Finn and Rey, our
heroes, “awaken” to the war that our former
heroes are still fighting 30 years down the line
and throw in on the side of freedom and justice.
But the story of “The Force Awakens” is a story
about a war that’s still going on in the first place
because hope in the next generation failed–
because young men like Hux were willing to
throw all their talent and energy into rebuilding
the grinding war machine Luke, Han and Leia
destroyed. Because Kylo Ren, né Ben Solo,
presumably grew up with the story of Darth
Vader’s redemption and return to the light–and
somehow rejected it, decided the cause Luke
devoted his life to was a mistake and sought to
bring back the evil cult Luke’s empathy and love
had destroyed.
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On one level that’s just necessary storytelling in

order to give Luke, Han and Leia something to
do in this movie besides “live happily ever
after.” But on another level, as Gerry Canavan
mused on his blog, it’s a message about the
world we live in today.
Remember all that crap about how the older,
racist generation–those wrinkly Grand Moff
Tarkins and Emperor Palpatines–would
inevitably eventually die out and the “political
realignment” brought on by new, PC millennials
would change everything? Remember the in
hindsight darkly comic handwringing in 2008
about the possibility of a permanent Democratic
electoral majority and the possible end of the
Republicans as anything more than a regional
rump party?
Remember how happy the left was on Nov. 5,
2008? Fireworks and dancing Ewoks and
playing drums on the desks of ousted
Republican congressmen? Well, it turns out that
there’s plenty of racism left to go around among
the young and up-and-coming. It turns out that
the younger generation, if frustrated enough or
1632
bored enough or simply contrarian enough, is

more than willing to join up with old-fashioned
reactionary mobs or create them anew from half-
baked Internet philosophizing. It turns out that
this generation of young men is just as willing as
the past one to commit mass murder over fascist
ideology as diseased as General Hux’s and petty
projected grievances as disordered as Kylo
Ren’s.
It’s unsurprising that Kylo Ren almost
immediately got a parody Twitter account
mocking him as a modern-day performatively
angsty self-obsessed teenager. Kylo Ren is a
perfect picture of what’s screwed up about too
many young men–latching onto bizarre belief
systems about racial or sexual superiority in an
effort to feel big, to feel like they matter.
Look at Kylo Ren staring at Darth Vader’s
mask–something he can’t possibly understand
the historical context of, a relic of a conflict that
ended long before he was born, something that
its original owner needed to wear to survive–and
deciding that he’s going to make it his symbol,
that he, too, will wear a mask just because it’s
cool. Much like young edgy American guys
1633
online deciding to take up the flag of Rhodesia

and pre-apartheid South Africa–because it feels
rebellious, transgressive, badass.
Comparisons have been made between the Kylo
Ren character and the toxic masculinity of geek
culture–and those comparisons are worth
making. The community that calls themselves
“nerds” online hasn’t shown its best face in the
past couple of years, and we’ve received vivid
demonstration after vivid demonstration that
being young, tech-savvy and having all the
information of the world at your fingertips does
nothing to prevent a person from being a vicious
bigot.
But it’s not just an “Internet thing” or a “geek

culture thing” or a “gamer thing” or a “science
fiction fandom thing.” It’s not something we can
or should just laugh off. All over the world right
now we have people recapitulating the sins of
their fathers, signing up for ideological wars
they have no direct connection to for petty,
stupid reasons. We have the far-right theocrats of
Daesh somehow convincing bored kids that
1634
religious fundamentalism is “punk rock.” We

have young “alt-right” racist xenophobes
mocking what was formerly the mainstream
Republican platform as “cuckservative” and
pining for the red-blooded, openly violent,
openly white-supremacist conservatism of
yesteryear.
We have the young people who run the booming
tech industry entertaining thoughts of taking
over the status of Gilded Age robber barons,
defying or rewriting the law, establishing
themselves at the top of society’s pyramid
permanently thanks to the accidental confluence
of wealth and political influence they find
themselves in.
We have an abundance of bad ideas from the
past that just won’t die, because the human
impulses that spawn them haven’t died. As
someone just turning 32–the age Domnhall
Gleeson and Adam Driver were when they
filmed “The Force Awakens”–I’m reminded,
looking back over my own short life, how often
people declared history to be over, the movie’s
plot resolved, roll end credits. It was ridiculous
to think that in 1992 and it was just as ridiculous
1635
to think so in 2008.
I keep hearing from people who want to know
when the fight will be over and we can finally
rest, when we can drop all this “Social Justice
Warrior” nonsense and stop being on the alert
for bigotry and hatred in the world. It’s
frustrating and exhausting–you can see the
weariness on Han and Leia’s faces in “The
Force Awakens,” the toll it’s taken on them,
living a life of running as hard as they can to
stay in the same place.
The answer is that, to quote a much bleaker
entry in the geek canon than Star Wars, “nothing
ever ends.” There is hope, yes–no one has to
keep fighting the war by themselves forever. For
every Ben Solo who turns to the dark side
despite all the hopes and dreams his forebears
invested in him, there’s a Rey who seems to
appear out of nowhere, bringing the awakening
of hope with her.
But looking at the dismal statistics about racism
and sexism among my own generation, the
lesson I keep in mind is the lesson of the
1636
character of Finn–that no generation is imbued

with virtue or insight simply because of being
the ones who come next. Everyone has to ask,
regardless of whether they’re following their
parents’ values or their peers’, if they’re the
stormtroopers and not the good guys, and doing
the right thing will always require some measure
of courage to fight against the crowd.
Our enemies, the ones that matter, aren’t our
parents or grandparents–the real enemies will be
our classmates, our colleagues, our brothers and
sisters, our friends. The real test of our
generation won’t be our ability to overthrow the
last generation–every generation succeeds at
that, in the end, if only through the passage of
time. It will be our ability to overcome
ourselves.
Link: The "Star Wars'" Kids aren't alright: The

movie gets millennials right, the fight isn't with
"the Man" but each other.
----------------------------------------------------
Emporium (Patrick McEvoy-Halston)
1 day ago
1637
Meandering of thoughts from this interesting

article:
From their (young racists') perspective, they're
not interested in dominating weaklings but
rather saving their weakened "people" from a
callous establishment intent on obliterating
them. Potentially, racists and leftists, both, can
imagine themselves as the “rebels"... they can
both work well with this "Jungian" archetype.
Rey's way of living—scrounging for scraps to
please an asshole food-dispensing boss—is more
familiar to children who end up racist than
children who become liberal and informed. The
current child of affluent liberal parents is more
likely to be groomed to fit the establishment, and
will in life more closely resemble the assured
position of the villains. When you're hating on
General Hux, maybe you're more hating on the
liberal child of affluents who is irritated by those
calling for revolution—when, to them, the world
clearly is becoming fairer, more provisioning,
and increasingly orderly... and so why are you
bothering them?—and less at "alt-right" young
1638
Hitlers?
GManASG
14 hours ago
You made a very good point. I think you are

correct in rearranging the back story of racist
youths and liberal youth. That being said this
article did a good job of pointing out how in the
real world history repeats itself, something star
wars seems to be doing as well if by accident
and imperfectly as a exact representation of the
real world, it is at the end of the day just a
movie, one that I certainly love.
Emporium (Patrick McEvoy-Halston)

14 minutes ago
@GManASG The concept of history repeating

itself is one beloved by conservatives, not
progressives. It isn't progressives telling you that
evil will always remain in the world, and that
those who think it can be extinguished are
foolhardy and ignorant, but rather Catholics...
people like Tolkien.
1639
You read this article and you have no doubt that

Chu is pleased with the atmosphere of this Force
Awakens world—its bleakness. It's the "outside"
to Chu's inner state of mind. If we had a world
where you could finally rest, how would Chu
show how virtuous he is as a sufferer, as
someone who has been so worn in his own fight
against the "evil" in himself and in his
generation that the wear and tear shows on his
face? This is the mask he wants to put on, even
if he doesn't have to, and if too many people
think like Chu I think it's going to cost us.
For perhaps people like Steven Pinker and Mike
Ripley are ultimately right—that, in fact, overall,
we've made considerable progress: that facts
prove we should remain calm, and be optimists.
There are fewer wars, fewer people being killed;
progressive attitudes are spreading—what we
get upset over now would have been thought no
big deal a generation or two before. And yes,
some of the young are clamouring for some kind
of race war and have clearly regressed rather
than evolved, but perhaps the real progressive
response is not so much what Chu offers—to be
1640
vigilant warriors ourselves, to militarize and

scorn and hate ignorant people who think it okay
to just relax and enjoy life—but rather to go
through this upcoming time comported more
like relaxed bourgeois... like comfortable, even-
tempered children of loving parents and a de-
stressed home life.
That way we'll be persuasive when we say we
wouldn't actually be disappointed if this perhaps
now-fashionable idea that you-can-never-relax,-
evil-will-always-sprout-out world view, proves
actually to be incorrect, and that life could be—
even now—most progressively lived, in not
gearing for an apocalyptic fight but just being
part of the everyday gearing of a liberal society.
Even if we need revolutionary change, perhaps
the best way to do it is more the Scandinavian
way. Where we don't show progress in our fight
through scars, stress and shortened lives, but in
our better countenance. Less single rays of hope;
more a landscape of them.
Saturday, January 30, 2016

1641
Recent comments at Salon

Original Article: The “Star Wars” kids aren’t
alright: The movie gets millennials right — our
fight isn’t with “The Man,” but with each other
SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 2016 12:46 AM
Meandering of thoughts from this interesting
article:
From their (young racists') perspective, they're not
interested in dominating weaklings but rather
saving their weakened "people" from a callous
establishment intent on obliterating them.
Potentially, racists and leftists, both, can imagine
themselves as the "rebels"...they can both work
well with this "Jungian" archetype. Rey's way of
living--scrounging for scraps to please an asshole
food-dispensing boss--is more familiar to children
who end up racist than children who become
liberal and informed. The current child of affluent
liberal parents is more likely to be groomed to fit
the establishment, and will in life more closely
resemble the assured position of the villains. When
you're hating on General Hux, maybe you're more
hating on the liberal child of affluents who is
irritated by those calling for revolution--when, to
them, the world clearly is becoming fairer, more
1642
provisioning, and increasingly orderly... and so

why are you bothering them?--and less at "alt-
right" young Hitlers?
Permalink
Original Article: The GOP’s Trump
meltdown hits critical mass — but can the
right’s empty suits stop him now?
SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2016 6:48 PM
I would argue that the Republican base knew from
the start that they were supporting an
establishment that would sell them down the river.
They were looking for this kind of "governance,"
just as they were looking for a societal sequence
which would leave them once again living
withered, poor, alcohol-soaked lives, dying before
the age of 65 (mission accomplished!). The way to
understand this is to think of them as akin to those
college kids who suddenly go Taliban; that is, as
people who, owing to how they were built out of
their nasty, denied childhoods, freak out so much
after knowing the opportunities and possibilities of
self-actualization they actually seek out such a
reversal as the destitution of cave life.
They were people who grew up with parents so
abused and themselves denied, they emotionally
1643
abandoned their children when they showed signs

of focusing on themselves (for them, children were
born to give love to their parents, not the other way
around). They were people who learned the
inspiration, then, as children, that by showing they
would actually work to create a society which
would shortchange them, leave them appalling
open to whatever menace, they demonstrate their
active desire to deny themselves and thereby, their
remaining pliancy--we're dependents; we haven't
grown up and grown away from you; "we're" still
yours to use as you will. And therefore, their
worthiness of reclaiming their parents and finding
love. The Gods, i.e. our parents, however
conditionally, could still care... God coming for
suffering-stuffed, wound-stricken Christ.
Andrew suggested in his previous post that these
Americans, full of self-hate, were keen to deposit,
to project, their foul lives onto some Other. I think,
rather, they're feeling rather self-righteous right
now, empowered, entitled, and so not quite so foul,
after earning their Oscars for suffering, and are
now ready to shirk off the establishment that did
their job of humiliating them in preference for
those who'll empower their strut.
1644
Those about the National Review were used --

sadists at the bequest of masochists -- and now,
casually abandoned (Those at the National Review
have successfully empowered a repetition of their
own early childhood predicament, "You abandoned
us!": For them, too, mission
accomplished.). They were never truly leaders but
rather a concoction summoned to pierce a ready-
bared hide so those stricken would know no one
would doubt they've suffered Rome.
Original Article: Dissecting Paul Krugman’s

Bernie backlash: Being a Sanders skeptic
doesn’t make you a hack
There is something about Bernie which suggests
an intrinsic faith in the American people. I think
this is out of step with a lot of the professional
class, who count themselves as cosmopolitan and
the rest of the country as dullards/trolls who need
to be shepherded and managed and overall told
what to do.
The rise of Bernie and Trump suggests a changed
landscape that would upset how they've structured
their psychic life. They won't as readily be able to
dismiss the commons as full of trolls--hey look at
1645
this commenter jackass!--and count on their

viewpoint being mirrored without contention. And
so what are they if they aren't in fact overtly better,
but actually in fact vested in a worldview which is
unfair and cruel to many to support their
narcissistic estimation of themselves?
Permalink
Original Article: Dissecting Paul Krugman’s
Bernie backlash: Being a Sanders skeptic
doesn’t make you a hack
Slickship Gunner We only lurch sideways when we
feel overtly threatened or unfairly oppressed.
Otherwise, this is a very stable, middle-of-the-
road kind of country. And that's how we like our
politics.
So in the 1960s America felt threatened and
oppressed? I thought it just dared to dream. Also,
why is this middle-of-the-road country beset with
enough fire power to blow up the world one
hundred times over? You'd think middle-of-the-
road would settle for a modest moat and perhaps a
couple low-key guardsmen.
Permalink
Original Article: Sarah Palin’s feel-bad
1646
politics: The dark allure of right-wing nihilism,

self-pity and curdled nostalgia for a
once-“great” America
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2016 11:00 PM
Dr. Zachary Smith Jack Burroughs The German
media didn't immediately report about the Cologne
attacks--despite their awesome number--because
they were afraid of the majority becoming petrified
of the Other. You don't think this is possible in the
States? That the majority who are poor or who are
not white wouldn't collectively decide, in some
state of massive psychic regression, against some
unfortunate Other?
Permalink
Original Article: Sarah Palin’s feel-bad
politics: The dark allure of right-wing nihilism,
self-pity and curdled nostalgia for a
once-“great” America
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2016 10:30 PM
Jack Burroughs This is a good, tough post. The
Left cannot manage the response you're wishing
for because of all the self-hate, the psychic
oblivion, that would arise if they had to admit that
all the peoples their regressive white peers project
on and discriminate against where themselves
1647
easily as regressive and possibly way worse. To

some extent this is why all the attention to the
genuine barbarities of the regressive whites: the
Left caught sign early on that if they look too close
at some of those patriarchal societies that
constitute the European-culture-ravaged, they see
horror, horror that cannot be accommodated, so
they whipped around and faced the European
white bully while basically assuming (the nature
of) the abused people now at their back whom
they're defending.
Still, the Left are the better people. And the Right
would have erupted regardless of Cologne and
endless foreigner' molestations. What's at stake to
determine if a society progresses or regresses is the
aggregate ability to tolerate change and growth. In
the 1930s, there were many who were up to speed
on Weimar cultural advancement, could handle it
and then some (Jews, notably so), but were
outnumbered by the Germans who saw in growth
some kind of terrible sin. Our hope is that the
current situation proves more complex. Perhaps
the whites Andrew speak of gain redemption,
become Christians worthy of being loved, by
proving now to have lived so truly non-selfishly
they're dying earlier and living worse lives.
1648
America in the 1930s was a lot like that, after all--

we didn't quite go fascist.
Permalink

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Labels: salon
Discussion in Salon' comment section on

"trigger warnings"
Article: The big micro aggression lie: The real
story behind the right's phone war on political
correctness --Salon.com
Victim talk is back. According to two sociologists, Bradley
Campbell and Jason Manning, our moral culture recently
underwent a seismic shift. Rather than upholding
appropriate standards of honor and dignity, we now inflate
trifling slights into allegations of victimization. Minor
grievances of all sorts are showcased in cyberspace in an
effort to garner sympathy and support. This “new species of
social control,” they maintain, threatens an America where
weakness suddenly rules.
Their and similar allegations about this novel insidious

“victimhood culture” are being applauded and proselytized
in major newspapers, journals and talk shows – from
1649
the New York Times and the Washington Post to

the Leonard Lopate Show and Time magazine. Even
President Obama entered the fray by speaking out against
the reported refusal of American students to grapple with
controversial subjects under the pretext that it might distress
them. He emphatically rejected the premise that students
should be “coddled and protected from different points of
views.”
[. . .]
To be sure, some of the postings on microaggression
blogs may be overblown, and many professors, myself
included, are reluctant to include content warnings on our
syllabi. For their part, the “diversity managers” in university
administration are sometimes too quick to jump into
action, codifying and implementing cumbersome and
overreaching protections. Nevertheless, these missteps, even
in the aggregate, do not constitute evidence of a pervasive
“victim mentality,” widespread moral decay, and an assault
on free speech. Typically, Campbell and Manning’s evidence
is anecdotal and relies on conflating substantively different
forms of dissent. They lump together hunger strikes, hate
crime hoaxes, protest suicides and microaggressions as
comparable illustrations of this cultural turn. More
importantly, microaggressions, trigger warnings and even
the controversy over Woodrow Wilson’s legacy are not the
ultimate target of this critique.
MORE ALYSON COLE.
-----------
(NOTE: I'm Emporium)
Emporium
19 hours ago
We've heard how some students at Columbia

protested that most courses in the humanities should
1650
come with trigger warnings. We've heard them

complain of how, for example, Ovid is replete with
references to rape, and of the Greek culture's casual
acceptance of it--it either does the woman no harm
(in their literature, the raped eventually marry their
rapists), or was her fault.
What we haven't yet heard, though, is a core of
students complaining that perhaps the like of Greek
studies shouldn't be canon, shouldn't be studied at
all, only that it can marginalize. That is, I think that it
is actually possible that students haven't yet become
radical enough. For it really seems logical that if
you're at the point where you see triggering material
everywhere--and Greek drama, for instance, is full of
sexual assault--that you check and recheck the
reasons why you're still sure it should be studied.
Maybe its not "foundational" but unrelated to us. A
bush fire, a "Nam," into which we still keep throwing
students in?
Maybe what should be pointed out to students is that
despite their keen protests they yet still cling?
Delete
1LikeReply
agrippina minor
19 hours ago
@Emporium There is a strong case to be made that

stories of rape in mythology should not simply be
glossed over as metaphors or as supernatural
explanations for the births of founding heroes, but
addressed for what they are, which was just as much
a reality of life in antiquity as now. Ovid's Book 1 of
the Metamorphoses is quite a literary tour de force:
1651
it's the same "origin story" told over and over but
with variations, rather like a poetic version of Ravel's
Bolero. The story is: god lusts for mortal or lesser
deity, attempts to rape her, is thwarted when she
transforms into something else (tree, river reeds,
cow), god solves the problem by appropriating the
newly created thing as his own: his sacred tree, his
Pan-flutes, or in the case of Zeus and Io, he just turns
himself into a bull. There are a dozen possible
feminist readings of that text. Why not encourage
students to pursue them instead of sweeping the
obvious under the rug?
Flag
4LikeReply
Emporium
18 hours ago
@agrippina minor @Emporium I think I'd disagree

with the "just as much a reality of life in antiquity as
now," part of your argument. Perhaps pederasts,
rapists, were just more commonplace--and not even
seen as all that bad. Maybe the student who doesn't
find the culture all that entrancing, isn't so much
"missing something," but just knows a pervert when
they spot one, and finds their art just as besotted.
The better feminist, not the one who applies a
reading to the text, but the one who sustains a
different one.
Delete
1LikeReply
Gonzago
17 hours ago
@Emporium @agrippina minor Here's an idea:

1652
maybe don't take a course in ancient Greek literature

if you're not interested in ancient Greek literature.
Why does it have to be excised from everyone
ELSE'S curriculum?
It's not wall-to-wall rape and pederasty. I need to be

shielded from Priam's plea to Achilles because
someone ELSE is made uncomfortable by the
kidnapping of Helen?
Flag
1LikeReply
agrippina minor
14 hours ago
@Emporium @agrippina minor I've got a surprise

for you, my friend. Professors of literature don't
consider even the great works of classical literature
sacrosanct. I got perhaps the best grade of my
college career for a paper trashing Euripides' "Trojan
Women." I acknowledged what the author was trying
to do and then enumerated my reasons for thinking it
didn't work. My husband describes a similar
experience with a paper he wrote for an English
class. The paragraph his professor liked the best was
the one that began "But in the fifth stanza, this all
falls apart." If the student hates the work, let him, or
her, write a paper explaining why! The one condition
is, it must be a well-reasoned argument supported by
facts, not a rant.
Flag
LikeReply
Adelaide McGinnity
19 hours ago
1653
@Emporium It is impossible to take Greek

mythology out of the Western canon, for the simple
reason that too many later works reference the older
Greek myths, and it is impossible to understand the
allusions without it. How could you, for instance,
begin to comprehend Joyce's Ulysses if you were
unaware of Homer?
Then what do you do, excise Joyce from the canon
because to understand his work you need to read
material written in a time when everyone wasn't as
progressive on things like women's rights? That's
okay, I guess. But if that's your standard (nothing
written in a time when women were considered
objects and nothing referencing such times), you
aren't just getting rid of the Greeks, you are getting
rid of pretty much the whole canon.
Either that, or this is just satire and you don't really
believe that books from less progressive times need
to be excised from today's reading lists.
Flag
5LikeReply
Emporium
18 hours ago
@Adelaide McGinnity @Emporium If ancient

Greeks are bad company, some thought should be
taken as to how much contact with them
can worsen you, even as much as it might make it
possible to get more from Ulysses. I say might,
because the person who thereafter encountered
Ulysses has got to bring what happened to him or
1654
her into the reading as well. It is possible that they'd

have done better blanking on the references, but
spared long company with the rape-apologist Greeks,
while encountering Joyce.
The humanities should be about creating not just a
broad-minded person but a more emotionally healthy
one. Given that 21st-century progressives are vastly
more progressive than, say, 18th-century ones,
perhaps the focus should mostly be on minds within
the last century. More Gloria Steinem, and no
Aristotle at all. Those who advocate going back to
enrich the experience, should be expected to be
mature in balancing thoughts on what might be
gained, with the fact of their advocating trips into
Mordor.
Delete
LikeReply
Adelaide McGinnity
18 hours ago
@Emporium @Adelaide McGinnity I must

respectively disagree with you.
It is impossible to focus on the great minds of the
present while blithely ignoring the great minds of the
past, in large part because the works of today's
thinkers are built on the ideas of thinkers from the
past. You can't simply start with Derrida. You can't
even really start with Marx; you need to go back to
Greeks in order to understand the progression of
western thought and western philosophy.
But beyond that, the case you are making is
bothersome to me as a supporter of liberal
education. No intelligent mind should be bothered by
1655
the revelation that ancient cultures had different

values from today's culture and that, therefore, what
is celebrated and considered normal in works from
the past will not be what is valued and celebrated
today. Certainly there are some who are bothered by
this, but rather than bend the liberal arts to their
whim, we should instead be thinking about how best
to remedy the fact that they were clearly unprepared
for the liberal arts in the first place.
Being educated means reading works with which you
disagree and which might offend today's standards of
decency. If you disagree, well, then perhaps the
liberal arts simply aren't your thing.
Flag
2LikeReply
Gonzago
18 hours ago
@Emporium @Adelaide McGinnity Part of being

emotionally healthy is learning to deal with reality.
Our cultural history is filled with good things and bad

things and if we excise the bad things from education
then we give the impression that the whole of
Western history has been one long rights-respecting
jamboree.
People stop acknowledging racism and sexism if

they're never shown any examples of it. People start
taking their own point of view for granted as the way
things have always been if they're not exposed to the
evolution of western thought.
And honestly, if you really can't take the depiction of

1656
sexual assault in Ovid without becoming emotionally

unbalanced, then heaven help you if you ever
wander into the Student Union while Game of
Thrones is playing.
People go to college to grow, not to shrink. Depicting

something is not the same as condoning it.
Our Founders were slaveholders. Slavery is, to say

the least, an alarmingly unpleasant and emotionally
stressful subject. But we're not doing anyone any
favors if we either exclude slavery from the history of
our nation or stop teaching about the Founders
altogether.
Flag
4LikeReply
Emporium
18 hours ago
@Gonzago @Emporium @Adelaide

McGinnityOur Founders were slaveholders. Slavery
is, to say the least, an alarmingly unpleasant and
emotionally stressful subject. But we're not doing
anyone any favors if we either exclude slavery from
the history of our nation or stop teaching about the
Founders altogether.
I'm sure there are a lot of conservatives who know
history up to their eyeballs; it hasn't prevented them
from a disposition that finds any significant advance
in a populace's empowerment,
somehow threatening.
Maybe the foremost thing we can do to prevent racist
attitudes has more to do with alleviating the
1657
inclination to project, with alleviating trauma, than it

has to do with information. I know very literate,
progressive people who simply don't read history--
they smell the regressive personalities, therein. I
personally find them less suspect than those who so
easily found themselves entranced with these
inadequate peoples of yesterday.
Delete
LikeReply
Gonzago
17 hours ago
@Emporium @Gonzago @Adelaide McGinnity If

you're shielding yourself from reality because it's
unpleasant, then maybe being a student isn't for you.
The foremost thing we can do to prevent racist

attitudes is to confront the issue head on, not seek to
filter what people are taught. To teach people how to
think, not what to think, and to allow them to engage
in a meaningful, informed debate.
History is unpleasant. The western canon reflects a
good deal of that unpleasantness. The modern world
is unpleasant. The best literature from the last
century also reflects that unpleasantness.
You can't teach people about liberation without
telling them what they're being liberated from. It's
like abstinence-only sex education. Doesn't do a lot
of good to tell kids to not do something if you can't
describe what that something is.
Flag
1LikeReply
1658
Buzz Wallard
17 hours ago
@Emporium @Adelaide McGinnity No no no. The

study of history through literature is not a
psychotherapy class. The study of history, and of
literature, demands the scholar be exposed to all
manner of nastiness, of horror. The understanding of
the depravity of which human nature is capable is
essential to a meaningful education.
An obvious example: the scourge of Nazism is
horrifying for sure and in some sensitive and
intelligent people that history will produce
nightmares.
Those nightmares are good to have. They are a
marker of good character.
A true scholar will read Mein Kampf. And also Andrea
Dworkin. And so on...
Flag
LikeReply
Emporium
17 hours ago
@Buzz Wallard @Emporium @Adelaide

McGinnity Does every scholar think of themselves
as akin to Hemingway? What makes them potent is
the fact they took in the horror as well?
Germans had the worst childrearing in all of Europe.
They subjected their children to all sorts of frights
that were ostensibly for their own good. All it did was
make them hate the "spoiled" Jews who were rather
more comfortably--in their less traumatized fashion--
making something of Weimar opportunities.
1659
My hope is that some of these Columbia students

applying warnings to subject matter some scholars
see as necessary for good character, help nurture a
sense of the scholar as someone who doesn't
necessarily see themselves as deprived if they
couldn't endure Mein Kampf for more than a page.
Delete
LikeReply
Gonzago
17 hours ago
@Adelaide McGinnity @Emporium And then

there's this to consider: if 18 year olds are coming
into college and are shocked...SHOCKED!...to
discover that the Greek Myths are rife with
kidnapping, torture, sexual assault and the
inhumanity of war, well, maybe that's because
they've been shielded too much in primary and
secondary school.
I'm not saying we need to go over the Rape of the

Sabine Women in fourth grade, but a college kid
walking into a course on ancient Greek literature
really ought to have some comprehension of what
the basic material is.
Especially considering that you don't usually get to

those classes in freshman year. Deep readings of
Ovid are typically upper division courses.
So if you've spent a year or two in college and still

are surprised to read depictions of sexual assault in
ancient texts, I'm not too sure we're doing you any
favors by skirting the issue.
1660
Because when will you be able to handle it? In your

30s?
Flag
LikeReply
Emporium
20 hours ago
To be sure, some of the postings

on microaggression blogs may be overblown, and
many professors, myself included, are reluctant to
include content warnings on our syllabi.
Why doesn't Salon ever provide us with a post by a
professor who doesn'tthink microaggression blogs
are overblown, and who isn't reluctant to include
content warnings on their syllabi? Why must the
voice of sanity still be a sort of curmudgeon? still
sound sort of old?
Maybe the most strident students actually have it
right. Maybe we just don't realize the damage that
was done to us; have taken the insane as actually
sane; and the most evolved of youth can't fool
themselves as to how much of what we accept as
normal is actually full of completely unnecessary
pathos/sadism, and so their justified, complaint after
complaint? Maybe before we end our lives they're the
last chance for us to rethink how we've been shaped,
and start uncovering a real self as opposed to one
that was actually much more broken rather than
tested by the world that bore down on it.
1661
Delete
1LikeReply
TYCapitalism
20 hours ago
@Emporium because even crazy college professors

are not generally stupid.
Flag
2LikeReply
peaceofmind
20 hours ago
@Emporium Voice of sanity? You mean like calling

out all those people throwing out the PC card
because "other " people are "too sensitive" yet they
see THEMSELVES as victims?
Flag
LikeReply

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9Tjo-
hbvSik/Vn8HMsaF2uI/AAAAAAAAAvk/6R9CMMckcng/s1600/sea.jpg

This film begins by baiting you that the whalers
upon the Essex did something so egregious by
1662
eating fellow dead crew members, that they maybe

deserved to be eternally shamed by it. But the
experience of the film is that cannibalism was
almost an exploration of the amount of leeway, the
permission—what one might theoretically in fact
thereafter get away with—granted one when one
pulls back from doing the one thing truly
punishment-worthy. Truly punishment-worthy, is
the unwillingness to backdown from the pretension
that there may actually be no limits to how much
humanity might claim for themselves out of nature.
You can come close, real close, to this pretension,
but if you're actually willing to go all the way then
Nature will ultimately wake up, reveal just how
sized She actually is, and squash your ass.
The setting is New England, the 1820s. The
whaling industry is full-bloom confidence, and is
indispensable to the obvious prosperity of New
England coastal towns. What is commanding, is
New England fishing prosperity. What mostly
aren't, are the whales themselves. Yes, driving a
killing blow into one is still such a significant feat
that those who do so wear emblems of their kill,
which draws awe from newbies, yet to do so. But
if one is to liken them to legendary knights who
comport teeth and scales from dragons they've
1663
slain, you'd have to do so with an image of each

and every one of these dragons having been done
in while sleeping, so all it took was the bravery
required to approach and plunge down upon a
creature, singularly larger than your whole
company of knights. Effectively, though it is the
strongest, largest whales which are hunted, for
their containing the most oil, whales are as easy to
kill as are herbivores wired to let their oldest and
weakest be caught out. They don't turn as a herd
and wage war, as might perhaps rhinos or bison;
they run away like a streak of zebras or gazelles,
leaving any of those harpoon-struck to slowly fade
back and satiate the killers with the treasure hoard
in their carcasses.
It's a feat to come to the point where you are really
able to convince yourself that things so massive
are in fact so really not part of the possible
disasters involved in a whaling expedition, that
they really don't need to be factored in in
insurance, but the New England industry is clearly
there. In their minds, the stupendous, largest-
animals-ever-to-have-existed—whales—are cotton
to be picked—which they actually are. The sea is a
much rougher turf than any cotton field—and the
film shows what inadequate seamanship might do
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to even a large ship, if it gets matched up against a

powerful storm—but even this this educated,
superstition-mostly-now-lacking, New England
mercantile society, has grown weary of fretting:
the truth is, what the sea is not is something one
needs to be wise to never disrespect, some place
which at its deepest or most distant parts might
present Man with the void, but
something eminently transverseable—an ice-
skating rink upon which might glide, one ice-skate
cladden girl from one "port" to the next.
To the current mindset of the film's director, Ron
Howard, human beings like this are at the sure
edge of a precipice. What they have done is
become sufficiently arrogant and wantonly
dangerous, that Nature, who has until now largely
ignored them, has decided it's time to make the
effort to shuffle its continent-wide shoulders, turn
its country-sized head, reveal itself as actually one,
very sentient, unitary being, and begin the long
heft up of its arms into space, so to commence
plunging this whole sea-faring culture into shallow,
widespread paste. How he shows this in the film, is
to have the largest whale ever to be hunted,
suddenly develop the inclination that widespread,
would have prevented the existence of the whaling
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industry. Once struck by a harpoon, it doesn't

expend all its energy in some futile attempt at
retreat, but rather turns about, and commits itself to
becoming a one hundred ton torpedo. No
nineteenth-century ship was built to take this, and
suddenly, ostensibly, the industry is back as if
matching matchstick structures against the heft of
something real. To see it all crunched apart, would
require only for the initial harpoon-hefter to
decide, despite what he'd now seen, to go for
another attempt at a killing strike.
This, he doesn't do. He pulls back, and the whale
returns to his herd. And for this—mostly gifts! Yes,
he's got to return back to New England, not only
without any whale oil but sans half his crew and
the whole of his ship. But the film dramatizes this
as an opportunity to confront a town afraid of what
his news what might mean for their industry, with
the will to tell the truth nonetheless. It gifts the
whaler with a new career—one where he now gets
to be the captain rather than the perpetual man-in-
line, and in a industry outside whaling, which, the
film exults in revealing, was doomed for quick
replacement, as oil had now been discovered in the
ground—imagine that!
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Yes, there’s still the matter of their eating other

people—but this too gets readily patched up as
actually something that speaks for these men;
speaks for their being better prepared rather than
more morally suspect than most. They were, after
all, carvers of flesh; this they were accustomed to
and experienced at. And they merely extended
their skill and, momentarily, the metaphor of
butchery, so they could survive and get back to
their wives and children, who would be lost
without them. To have failed to have done so
would have been to waste the practical skills God
had given practical men, simply to seem prettier.
War is not inevitable

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3.jpeg
Henri Parens, War Is Not Inevitable. London:

Lexington Books, 2014
Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston
The reason Henry Parens believes that war is not
inevitable is that over several years of watching
babies with their mothers, he noticed that the intense
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psychic pain they experience owed to maltreatment,

traumas, that lead to enormous rage that would
eventually need to be discharged. Abuse leads
children, not to develop normal, healthy, primary
narcissism—a desire for self-empowerment—but
rather hyper-narcissism, where the wound all very
young children incur when they realize they aren’t
actually vastly empowered but rather small and weak,
leads instead to greed, envy and a stark need for
power and revenge. Children, who need their parents’
love too much to blame them, and who learn psychic
“tools” like displacement and projection within the
first two years of their lives, end up as adults finding
other victims. If a whole populace has incurred
psychic distress as children, and if as a nation they’re
suffering from an oppressive regime or a debilitating
depression—and especially if the nation has been
accumulating a store of hate that hasn’t yet been
discharged—you can expect a large war, and perhaps
genocide. Exactly what, and who becomes designated
the “bad” other, though, will depend on a particular
culture’s past history/mythology—if it’s had it in for
Jews in the past, this is the way it’ll go once more.
He argues that if we can alleviate the pain caused to
today’s children, and if we can intelligently temper
the diplomatic relations between today’s nations with
the influence of psychology, war can disappear.
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This book reminded me of Lloyd DeMause’s

Emotional Life of Nations in that both works argue
that war is born out of widespread early child abuse
and both deal with enough political science—with
nations, not just mostly personal psychology—that a
political scientist might better see it as something
they’re supposed to grapple with. The key difference,
and what might make it seem less offensive at a time
when there’s been a confident rise in the prejudicing
of, not just those of who argue that child abuse is
widespread—who are in now in common parlance,
“witch hunters”—but of the validity of the whole
discipline of psychology itself (see this year’s NYT
discussion of what happened when influential
psychology experiments were redone)—is that Parens
believes that most parents unconditionally love their
children while DeMause argues that historically
rather few have. (Because Parens argues that children
learn very quickly to displace blame away from
parents, he might acknowledge he thereby makes
what might be a sour pill go down much sweeter.)
This leaves “childrearing styles” as the culprit,
which, one intuits from his discussion of how early
societies formed, where everything seems so rational,
means he probably thinks they may once of had
purpose. One notes too, that rather than, say,
widespread sexual abuse of children, his focus is on
authoritarian parenting, parental dominion, which is
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an excess of what children still normally require—

direction, resistance, authority. What they fail to give
them in love owes to such as being stressed,
overworked and tired and therefore unavailable—i.e,
the intention to be kind was very much still there: of
course they loved their children!
I found much of the book will actually reinforce
long-held “truths” so that unconsciously part of its
appeal may be that it undeservedly flatters the reader
that s/he could so effortlessly grapple with an entirely
new way of thinking. He stresses the importance of
the first five years of life (even this seems to vary—
see below), not just the first two, so that allows him
to fairly target the father as the possible primary
source of rage, potentially leaving sacred “Mom”
mostly unscathed. Hitler, he argues, had a wonderful
mother but a terrifying father—and so, in effect, the
crime of genocide falls mostly to him! So too was
Stalin’s father a tyrant. Since he argues that children
learn to blame themselves if they hate their parents,
but doesn’t argue that children hate themselves if
they self-actualize and become independent—which
is a corollary of DeMause’s thesis that many mothers
have children not because they love them but because
they need them, and therefore withdraw desperately
needed support and attention when they begin to
individuate—he is spared having to persuade that
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what causes war are actually prosperous times,

especially ripe with opportunity. The true culprits are
the familiar ones: oppression, exploitation, economic
suffering, which all bring to the fore memories of
one’s own suffering in childhood—i.e., what can
actually be war-retardants to DeMause’s way of
thinking, for their limiting the avenues for self-
actualization. You’ll find no discussion of how
German nationalism is actually individuals, fleeing
self-actualization, throwing away their individuated
status and re-bonding as “good boys and girls” with
Mother here (he does discuss Mahler and the bond of
“oneness” with the mother, but in a brief “detour.”)
Instead, you learn that German nationalism was made
possible by the fact of centuries-worth of
authoritarian parenting, which made Germans
susceptible to being bossed around and manipulated
to Hitler’s preferences. This isn’t Hitler hypnotizing
people—that old canard—but still kind of is: it’s
people being induced into a state where they can be
forced to be ready pawns for someone else’s
directions—i.e., what everyone already “knows” is
what happened there. And again it’s a million miles
away from DeMause’s “lampoon” argument that
Germans in fact made use of Hitler, and would have
ignored him if he’d pointed them in a direction they
didn’t want to go (so long as they shared the same
childhood, to DeMause, pretty much anyone could
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have been their Hitler!).

So political biography, and much of a whole life (for
Hitler he draws attention to his three decades of
suffered humiliation, for Stalin it’s his childhood and
adolescence) study, is important. And, if somehow
centuries worth of hate can explode out at single time
—something which is impossible to imagine
occurring within an individual but that Parens argues
is somehow possible within the group—then
certainly careful study of history is. (This too doesn’t
follow from DeMause’s work, since if within one
generation there’s been significant improvement or
regression in childrearing, you’re simply dealing with
different people. And to him the choice of one’s
enemy at time of war isn’t so much based on heritage
as on who best represents the aspects of oneself one
is trying to purge—so Jews, not because of heritage
but rather because Jews were comfortable self-
actualizing in a time of Weimar opportunity.)
Further appealing to current intellectual prejudices is
how, despite really seeming to advance a mostly
unicausal argument for war—at base, a groups’
childhood is the culprit—it’s “arrival” can at times
seem to get really complicated, and even
contradictory. For instance, the exact circumstances
in Germany in the 30s apparently lead to even fully
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sane people desiring war and genocide. There’s also

no threat that psychology will infuse societal
institutions—which most people like to think of as
clearly part of an adult, deliberated world— with
origins out of childhood: when he talks about the
influence of psychology on government he isn’t
suggesting the DeMausian correlation between a
group’s incurred childrearing and its adult extension,
the “exoskeleton”—its political/economic/religious
structure—but rather of governments using
knowledge of PTSD to assist a traumatized world
after WW2, and how we need to see more of that. He
does say that Communism doesn’t suit a basic human
need, our primary narcissism, but somehow one
doesn’t feel impelled to explore this further in regards
to specific childrearing, and in fact is made to seem
the odd duck.
This was an exciting book to read, and I do applaud
it. It’s dense, and worth your while to attend to every
sentence and footnote for there might be a
compelling adventure there. (On first reading I
missed his explanation for why Communism’s a fail,
for instance, for thinking I could afford in some parts
to scan.) I happen to adhere to a psychological school
which places a lot of importance on confronting, but
his generous company is a reminder that outside such
titanic accomplishments of changing how various
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principles interact with one another at the UN—one

of his hoped-for goals—the widespread company of a
book infused with smarts and accumulated life
wisdom can tend to our collective psychic distress as
well.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Bridge of Spies
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Bridge of Spies
Bridge of Spies is a film which salutes
competence, canniness and experience, and as such
it leave the two young Americans caught out in
Russia and East Germany, out in the cold. Tom
Hanks’ James Donovan is a newbie spy, but it
turns out his genius in negotiating insurance—
where he reframes an incident where a multiple
number of victims might potentially each file a
claim against his client so that it's justifiably only
one claim against him—is perfect training for
negotiating an exchange of spies, where he also
brazenly and successfully insists that there aren’t
two deals on the table but rather only one: two
young Americans for their one caught senior
Russian spy. The film begins with showing off
Donovan's competence, and we are meant to
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remember it later when gets over the brief initial

hump of feeling a bit unprepared for his new
undertaking. It also begins by showing off the
senior Russian spy’s: when the CIA have barged
into his apartment and surrounded him—when the
game is up—he dazzles by nonchalantly figuring
out means by which still openly displayed,
acquired top secret information can still be
disposed of. Specifically, he merges the paper the
information is on in with a cloth the agents have
agreed to let him use to tamp down his painting,
thereby saturating it with enough paint that it is
unreadable and likely undiscoverable.
We remember how the Russian spy reacted, how
he ultimately fulfilled any mandate required of a
spy after being caught, how, however much his
country may not have deserved his loyalty they
nonetheless had themselves quite the agent, when
we attend to how the Americans comport
themselves when they were caught. One of them
was supposed to destroy his plane, if possible, and
for sure kill himself if ever caught by the Russians.
And however much Spielberg may think he’s
encouraging our being in this young man’s favour
by showing how valiantly he attempts to press the
spy plane’s self-destruct button after it’s hit by a
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missile, we think more rather on how, unlike the

Russian, he just plain failed to do what he was
supposed to—twice: it’s passed over, but clearly he
didn’t prick himself with his cyanide-laced needle
either. The other young American is shown
gallantly returning into East Germany, even as the
wall is almost constructed, to retrieve his
girlfriend. But his effort, upon return to the wall, to
talk his way through the guards involves him
explaining to them that he’s ostensibly of no
concern … because he’s an American who’s only
been staying in Soviet-controlled Germany to do
PhD studies on Communist economics. As they
seize the Phd thesis he carries in his sack, he says
something to the effect of “wait, that’s my only
copy” … and we’re thinking he might rather ought
to have tried dropping the whole damn thing in the
mud and leaving it behind some while ago—some
version of what the Russian spy would have done
—rather than risk being caught out and have to
appeal this ignorantly and clumsily for empathy.
The way the film prejudices youth (there’s another
notable incident, involving a young Russian spy
that is made, owing to his naivety, to be Donovan's
patsy) as somehow guilty just for being those who
can so easily be caught out, reminded me a bit of
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Casablanca, where the young couple Rick rescues

from resorting to measures that’ll taint and even
destroy their marriage, exist mostly as means by
which Rick himself can be inflated in our eyes—
what a good guy! To be naive and innocent, in an
environment where there are one thousand and one
clues that this is the last thing you can afford to be,
actually disavows one of empathy: means you’ve
earned your fate, and are probably supposed to be
ruined and perish. The film, then, does not quite
remind me of its era—the late 1950s. For the years
where the smart-talking lawyer or savvy ad-men
seemed the ultimate embodiment of an era were
about to close down very quickly, and be replaced
with an era of dramatic experimentation and social
change where it is to your advantage to be young
and obvious about it.
Rather, it reminds me of today, where if you’re
going about life thinking that it is endlessly
forgiving of missteps or experimentation, you’re
impossibly naive: for evidence everywhere
suggests it isn’t. Post something on the internet,
it’ll be dug up by bosses, landlords, future lovers,
be sure, so it had better be banal or reflect widely
shared tastes or opinions. Get a few mediocre
grades in school, you’ll never recover and be
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exempted from all the prize colleges, so go for the

sure thing and don’t experiment. Say something
averse about your government, the NSA will take
note of it—so take care you don’t seem in any
other way an alien, or they’ll be down your door.
You had better be careful, and if you’re not, it’s
your fault because it’s been this way for so many
years it’s beginning to seem like it’s always been,
and you should really have known.
This is the first film I’ve ever seen which featured
the division of Germany into East and West, where
it didn’t inspire nightmares of being the hapless
person who found himself trying for the West just
after the wall was finally in place and was no
longer an option—aaarrrgh! if only I’d gotten there
a half hour before! The reason I think is that you
have a vision of the drastic difference in the kind
of life that would unfold for one if one actually
made it across to the West—all that freedom and
ever-accruing self-development—and it’s almost
impossible to imagine one handling just now, so
the possibility of being stuck in the East would
actually be a bit easing. Caught out in the West
would involve a life of truly unlimited potential,
but would also involve incurring the sense of
abandonment one experiences when, via your own
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self-attendance and independent growth, your

parents see everything you’re up to as massively
disrespectful affronts and turn away from you. In
the 60s, youth could do it, somehow, for all the
social change they fought for left them strangers to
the generation before them—mommy and daddy
would never adjust, never understand—and they
never as a result of this just fell back into line:
instead, they incurred the abandonment depression
and let them go, buried the Depression and War
past and made a new and glorious future for
themselves. But now, lacking the benefit of
following the kind of massively sacrificial period
that enfranchises an extended follow-up period of
youthful play and entitlement, that would be way
too big a thing to try and manage. No God, no
natural law, no strong current, no way of things, no
evolutionary principle, is with us.
And with it just being us, being out into the future,
with our parents shutting themselves to us, and no
large and menacing state apparatus to interject
them into, would mean having to fight a perpetual
sense of rejection and abandonment that would
stop us, even if we know the world we were
leaving behind the very opposite of Eden. What we
never admit about this NSA/Orwellian world is
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that it’s an environment we curse but are

psychologically invested in maintaining. For
behaving as if we are being watched, curtailing our
life in recognition of its power, means
communicating that we accept its adverse presence
as nevertheless a certainty … and feel thereby that
our parents will stick with us, even as they look
over us, way, way into our adult lives, like
omnipresent elves on the shelves. We may live our
lives in an East German kind of fear before the
intrusive parental state, but we’ll never feel forlorn
its interest in us, which means our evading a much
more apocalyptic sort of fright.

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Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs
The film begins with 50s footage of the
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futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicting that at one

point what were then only gigantic, takes-a-
warehouse-to-fit-one computers would
become so small that every home would have
one. It’s clear he’s envisioning big things from
out of the this titanic diminution in scale, but
from our vantage point, with him speaking as
one coifed in 50s “grey flannel suit” style,
speaking within 50s big corporation society,
we might not be so sure he is. If everyone has
a personal computer at home, but only in
home offices, where their routine seems about
the same as it would if they’d commuted to
work at General Electric, or Proctor and
Gamble, or IBM, or whatever — what change,
really? If it enables everyone to be a work
drone in corporate culture, subsumed as a
distinct person to the greatness of one’s
company, regardless of where one lives in
New York or in some remote rural hell, how
empowering, really? Giving everyone easy
access to the kind of computing that once
required a military budget to acquire, and a
similar largess to house and power, would be
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revolutionary only if advances in technology

were accompanied with advances in what kind
of person, exactly, we would collectively
allow each person to become. Allow someone,
whether at work or at home, to fully self-
actualize, and then, yeah, making it so that
each one has gone a toolkit that can keep up
with their inventiveness, and then some, could
readily be the thing that makes a spark of
inspiration go supernova.
The creators of Steve Jobs—by which I mean
mostly the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, whose
influence on the film is primary—clearly are
under the delusion that their film demonstrates
that Steve Jobs was the genius who enabled an
era where 60s rebellious individualism was
finally met with technological advances that
could enable even the most remote and or
trapped person to transcend their situational
difficulties and blossom. They clearly believe
he stopped the like of IBM and Microsoft
from having such unchallenged success, it
would curdle the undeveloped artist in
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everyone—what right have you to be doing art

on a machine and operating system so
reminiscent of business and military and
government that it would consider any such
both childish play and an irresponsible waste
of resources? Thanks to Jobs, the movie
creators are under the delusion they are
conveying, each one of the empowered artistic
individuals associated with the Apple brand —
the likes of Dylan, Einstein, Joan Baez, John
Lennon—could have more rightful peers than
one would think possible, as what looked like
would be a machine age that inflated only the
tech geek and business school graduate gets
taken over sufficiently to be just as much one
where the artist in you gets empowered.
What the creators actually are doing by
referencing all these recent, massively creative
and rebellious individuals, is creating not a
vision of something massive, complex, and
everywhere sprouting—a hippie garden—but
a Mount Rushmore that looms over everyone,
with room only for one or two more: one of
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these indisputably being the great visionary,

Steve Jobs. What the film thinks of those
who’ve grown up under his influence can be
seen in its exploration of his daughter, who
represents the very first generation who would
grow up with personal computers. Early in the
film his daughter uses his new MacIntosh
computer to make an abstract, featuring, in
particular, one “drawn” line that squiggles
upwards on a diagonal path. Jobs looks at the
picture and is not shown to be drawing on his
own fascination with angles and lines to
consider what his daughter might be
expressing. Instead, he is thinking that she is
proof that his dream that a generation could
grow up knowing computers as a tool they can
use without in part kowtowing to, and as
primarily a device for artistic self-expression,
is possible—it was the first thing his daughter
thought to do with the unknown device. The
extent of self-actualization his machines help
enable is not as much on his mind as is the
possibility that people like her, counting in the
eventual millions, will help make a future that
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is much more pleasant to be amidst. They’ll be

agents, in a sense, of gentrification, where the
point is not for them to actually be unique—
which would bring about the unpleasantness
of a highly variegated human landscape—but
uniform in a pleasing way: overt bullying by a
cold corporate order would have to be lost.
You could endeavour to get to know each one
individually, and in pretend earnest, but really
it’s appropriate to count them together as a
conglomerate and see about one the like of a
bustling metropolis, full of ostensible “bright,
young creative minds,” over a previous
landscape that had once threatened monolith
cold parental refusal or, with its aesthetic
obliviousness, a reflection of one’s own
imperfection. His once welfare-dependent,
emotionally-astray-mother-raised daughter
gets into Harvard, and writes for the Crimson,
and you realize just the fact of this was so
close to be encapsulated as a perfect
development for Jobs, it would allow him to
block out if reading his daughter’s writings
startled him with the discovery that she was
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actually idiosyncratic … couldn’t be assumed;

would take awhile to know and might prove
intelligent but truly abrasive: portends a future
that is truly unaccountable.
He doesn’t in fact read her papers, and it’s
likely she couldn’t overcome the giant will of
people like him to develop idiosyncratically
anyway, and rather just be someone who in
being generic Harvard with a preference for
Apple products and an abhorrence for
imperfection, would please a generation who
arose out of every possible sundry place of
origin, that their human byproducts removed
them of taint of origins. The fact that their
children are actually boring, easy to accurately
assume, is what this still insecure lot wants:
for dull gentry reads as practiced, long-
established gentry—long hewn into perfected
form, so they’re safe from drawing on
anything astray in one’s makeup to shift one
from out of one’s class.
The film argues that Steve Jobs helped bring
back 50s uniformity of personality-stifled
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souls, but in such a way that an ostensibly

individualism-touting populace could deny
having occurred. Those who rebelled against
branding, and were genuine about it—and
therefore as I will discuss, truly interesting—
created youth who couldn’t or wouldn’t figure
out their way out of getting destructive
narcissistic satisfaction out of their attachment
to brands, likely for fear of being rejected.
But if the film suggests it likes the idea of
creating a breadth of progeny that aren’t
troubling, that are actually stifled and
controlled, and so life, the future, can more
readily just be assumed and appear like a
classically ordered garden before one’s
balcony, for oneself, the film thankfully
instructs, the ideal is still to self-actualize
enough that you are as interesting as the great
leaders you associate with. In this film, Jobs is
not shown as someone who of course needed
other people to realize his dreams but who
were, in total fairness, compared to him
actually only the discardable “B” sort of
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personnel he claims were responsible for the

engineering of the Apple II. Rather, each one
of them is played by a significant actor and
made to be absolutely riveting in their
conversations with Jobs. There’s a weight, real
gravitas, to each one of them, and one senses
at times the film playing at the idea that what
truly makes Jobs “great” is in part still our
not-entirely-shed human need for human
titans, rather than the pure simple fact that if
certain people like him hadn’t been born, the
future would have been significantly
lessened.
The film is so interested in the Apple CEO,
John Sculley, wants to credit his significance,
wants to credit him, for instance, it even plays
with denigrating something that might feel as
a still-broadly-needed foundation myth by not
glossing over the fact that during Jobs’
absence, Sculley and chief engineer, Wozniak,
put their resources into a product that really in
retrospect comes across as astoundingly
visionary: specifically, the Newton—an iPad,
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but twenty-five years too early. To keep Jobs

still seeming singularly necessary and
visionary—the sense of them we still overall
want—it suggests that with Jobs, Apple would
have gotten a modified early iPad that would
have enabled people to make use of the
product then, rather than only recently. But
while we accede to this unlikely vision we
don’t forget the film’s play of giving a
scandalous amount of credit to those other
than Jobs, and that it wanted to do so because
as human beings, it is capable of finding them,
like it does Kate Winslet’s Joanna Hoffman,
Seth Rogen’s Steve Wozniak, Michael
Stuhlbarg’s Andy Hertzfeld, very near as
interesting.

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The Martian
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The Martian
In Ridey Scott’s Alien, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley
was put in a situation where she had to refuse a
teammate from coming aboard, and it wasn’t easy
for her. She wasn’t someone who just obeys
protocol no matter what. And she certainly wasn’t
malicious … like Charlize Theron’s character kind
of was in Scott’s Alien follow-up, Prometheus,
who seemed eager to show she’d be willing to melt
a teammate before letting any one of them push
her around. Rather, she cared deeply for the person
who was afflicted by some kind of unknown
parasite; was aware how cold it is to be spurned
just at the point where treatment might finally be
before one; but refused to alleviate her teammate’s
distress by letting the besotted teammate into the
ship, for it genuinely being an unwise thing to do.
For this, for even not be dissuaded by the captain
— who too like everyone else other than Ripley,
wanted protocol passed by this time for decency
sake, and who was hardly otherwise insensible and
foolhardy — she gets the kind of viciously
delivered catcalls that could wound anyone not
made out of rock. We, the audience, might not
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even like her much either — in a sense we’ve been

out there in the cold along with the rest of the
teammates (they’re the ones we’ve been
cinematically following, not Ripley inside), and
through being let inside without dithering, might
have been spared our frayed state being
compounded by mirroring their frustration.
This, to me, was a very adult moment — one of
those moments in a film where you hope others
experience, for it shows how the right thing to do
actually can be very difficult, leave one potentially
completely out of favour, and give some sense of
the kind of person who would be at a loss without
friendship and approbation but who nevertheless
could forebear it if necessary. It is unfortunate,
then, that in the Martian Scott in a sense tells us
that this is exactly the sort of person we shouldn’t
want to be — maybe not a villain, but someone
interceding in the realization of something
humanity now needs, which has priority over any
previous protocols devised out of who we once
were and what kind of oversight we might once
have required. It has priority over the use of
authority to prevent a whole crew from putting
themselves at genuine risk to possibly save just
one other; it has priority over the use authority to
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keep a crew ignorant when an emotionally

heightened situation suggests their not being able
to spare themselves for a year-long return trip to
Earth, the self-flagellating and vitally important
work-impairing torture of knowing they left a
teammate behind to very likely die.
The head of NASA is the immediate
relief/gratification-blocker here, and when
momentum in effect pushes him aside, we are
meant to be gratified and relieved: we’re going to
get the outcome we want. Sean Bean’s character is
the one who subverts him, informs the crew that
their teammate is still alive, and in effect makes
possible the desired finish where the abandoners
themselves make amends and where space remains
a frontier far out enough that independent action
gets juiced and central control can get quitted in a
hurry (We love that the finish involves a mixture of
routine procedure and experimentation and
independent judgment — something that had
momentarily lapsed once the “martian” stopped
improvising on the spot and started just following
NASA’s dictates.) The “Sean Bean” subversion
occurs just following a meeting compared to the
fateful council meeting in Lord of the the Rings, no
less, but the message that comes through isn’t
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some inverse one where those shepherding

humanity from knowledge and empowerment are
awry in not sufficiently trusting humanity, it’s not
implying that if the Martian’s “philosophy” was
interred into Lord of the Rings, Boromir would
have been right to have been traitorous and gave
humanity knowledge of the ring. But rather that
when humanity happens upon something it realizes
it really needs, it has to be allowed to happen.
Ridley Scott inadvertently shows us, not how do to
the right but hard thing, like he did in Alien, but
how we can seduce people into thinking the easy
way is actually difficult and adult — the one to
emulate. There’s a lot of talk in this film about
people preparing to do things that’ll surely, we are
meant to understand, lead to very strong
hangovers, harsh repercussions — long-held prize
jobs lost, court martials, families abandoned for
subsequent years. Scott wants us to fix on the men
and women preparing to accept these repercussions
as exemplary: they are not so much informed of
their likely fates as they are thereby encased as
“heroes” as this information settles upon them. Yet
it is clearly obvious to anyone not partaking of
their narcissism that there is no chance of reprisals,
repercussions, incurred guilt for any of them: the
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public upswell of support for them would balk any

such down — would you want to the one who
would draw the ire of a united, chanting and
cheering U.S.A and China!
There should be, but for most people I’m guessing
there probably isn’t, something gruesome in
witnessing how after being told how the astronauts
would have to incur another couple full years away
from their husbands, wives and children, being
witness to how the only images subsequently
shown of them are of them in fact being readily
entertained, apparently thoroughly satiated, by the
limited communications they do receive.
Apparently everybody is so fulfilled by being
involved in this shared mission, all someone has to
do is send the occasional space “postcard” — here,
images of them doing the like of eating large
floating bubbles of water in their gravity-free
environment — and damage owing to further years
of time away is quelled or even absolved entirely.
So clearly does the film want these astronauts
absolved of all guilt, the family members had
better at least pretend convincingly they are more
content than one might expect from their situation.
Where otherwise would be their loyalty and pride?
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There should be something gruesome as well out

of our sensing that we are meant to see the crew as
honourable and heroic, no matter how well earned,
so that if one of the teammates did serve as the
single vote that ostensibly would willy-nilly
prevent the ship from turning around and returning
to rescue the “martian,” he or she would simply
become a gross irritant because he would show this
as actually just pretence — that they actually were
going to go, regardless if the vote wasn’t
unanimous, and were therefore really just staging a
ritual to show off how admirably united they were
rather than consenting to a vote that dignified
individual choice but which could deny a clear
majority getting its way. We are meant to think
that, like them, we’re those who expect and insist
on maturity in our heroes, while being encouraged
to be those who’ll only acknowledge results that
satisfy our needs, and who shouldn’t fret at all our
insisting on remaining free of any jolts arousing
from becoming aware of our hypocrisy.
I’m sure Scott believes that he would know when
he himself is partaking of a mob mentality — I’m
sure he thinks that probably at all times, he is not
like the ugly mobs in Gladiator demanding thrills
and blood but rather like the senator in that film
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who alone remains clear-headed, thinking only of

how all this ill-reason is depleting the state of vital
reserves. But in my judgment, I wouldn’t trust that
he is: for when you’re caught up in a societal wave
where achieving something necessary takes
precedence over all previous routines — which
must be made to happen, regardless — you’re not
going to appear to yourself as someone drooling
for something base, for quick satiation of some
urgent need which would pass leaving you only
depleted. You’re going to be in the mood the
Martian sees, not only no problem with, but
encourages: Damn obstacles, damn protocals —
humanity demands that you bring the damn
Martian home!
I’m quite sure the Romans were thinking that after

a great man — Marcus Aurelius — was quit from
the earth, the empire itself was felt to be at risk
unless a rebirth ensued out of gargantuan human
sacrifice. For them, each gladiator slain was one
step closer to restitution, not one step further into
ruin. And the Empire’s food and money could be
drained, must be drained, so that the Empire itself
could continue to live — something larger was
about, and if you couldn’t understand that,
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couldn’t feel that, you yourself must be an alien!

The Empire was at a momentary very great loss:
Bring the damned Empire back!
We don't want people who will see

It was a bloop in IM from a colleague. “Oh god, I’m so
sorry,” it read. “And screw Gawker.” It was an email a
moment later, from my boss. “Just ignore it,” it read.
“It’s not a big deal; they do this to everyone.” That’s
when my heart lunged into my stomach. That was four
years ago. That was the first time Gawker wrote about
me.
The piece itself was relatively mild, on the Gawker
spectrum. There were no intimate texts involved, there
was no damning sex tape. I had simply been pronounced
irksome because “She’s against domestic violence.
She’s against harassing children. She’s against elder
abuse” — and I apparently expressed this in ways
insufficiently nuanced for the writer. I was, in
summation, declared “a first class hack.”
I’ve been at this a very long time and been called worse
by better, so it wasn’t the piece itself that really got to
me. It was the picture. It was an image of me, pale and
freckled, that had run in Salon seven months before,
when I shared that I had just been diagnosed with
malignant melanoma. A photo that had been taken just a
few days prior, one of my last remaining images of
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myself before I learned I was sick. It never appeared

anywhere else. And now it was being used to make fun
of me.
Still, it was relatively easy to put the hit piece behind
me. My father-in-law was busy dying of cancer himself,
and his brother had died a few days before, so I had my
own stuff going on. Then a few months later, I was
rediagnosed, this time at Stage 4. My cancer had
metastasized into my lung and soft tissue, and I entered
a Phase 1 clinical trial in the hopes of staving off a
disease one of my doctors would later describe as
“rapidly fatal.” That fall, I wrote about the experience
several times in Salon, along with my usual pop culture
pieces. In December, I wrote multiple stories around the
subject, including one about how my kids were facing
the holidays after two deaths in the family and my own
“full-blown late-stage melanoma.” When the same
Gawker writer tweeted out that day, “I have a joke for
you: ‘Why I Still Believe in Santa,’ by Mary Elizabeth
Williams,” I braced myself. (I am not using the person’s
name, because you know what? This is about the
Gawker culture, and because I have it on very good
authority that publicly shaming individuals is an ass
move.)
On the penultimate day of the year, I appeared on a
Gawker list of people who should quit the media in the
coming new year. In it, the writer described my style by
noting, “Be sure to throw in some irrelevant tidbits
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about your personal life designed to short-circuit any

criticism of your work in advance…. We’re not being
mean. We’re being honest.” The words appeared, again,
next to the photo from my cancer story. This time, I
cried. And you can laugh at me if you want, Gawker, but
when you’re actively in the midst of a grueling medical
experience and uncertain how much time on earth you
have, a cruel reference to your imagined fate for the
coming year pretty much sucks.
Fortunately, I got better. Just a few weeks later, I was
declared cancer free and I have been ever since.
Gawker, meanwhile, continued to sputter at me,
damningly referring to me as “polite mom” and
“America’s least necessary cultural critic,” and taking
umbrage that, as they put it, I’d written that “It’s sad
that MCA died.” Of cancer. At least they stopped using
my picture. And it’s hard to take seriously an outlet that
rages that your writing is “like sticking a needle full of
SUPER SWEET SUGAR WATER in your veins.”
But I entered a period of constant low-level dread
nonetheless. I knew what happens to figures who
become their popular targets, how they are perpetual
low hanging fruit for a slow news day. Each time I filed
a story, I wondered if it would be the subject of another
scathing takedown, and what the fallout might be. “This
is just how they are,” my friends said, and some of them
said it from experience. “It’s what they do.” In my
world, it has long been understood that Gawker might
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today rip you to shreds. Just because. And this has been
considered totally normal. So I avoided writing pieces
critical of Gawker, for fear of retaliation. This went on
for longer than I care to admit. For a company that
claims to pride itself on freedom of expression, I wonder
if they’ve ever considered the profoundly chilling effect
their tactics have had on others. It’s been a while now,
but I have never stopped looking over my shoulder,
wondering how I might again incite the outrage of
Gawker, and what form that might take. It’s a sickening
feeling.
But they meanwhile apparently moved on to other
imagined adversaries, because they stopped aiming at
me. They went full fury over a friend who wrote a
lighthearted Styles piece. They mocked another friend’s
cheerful enterprise for women enduring a stressful life
experience. All because we — females in our 40s — had
committed the crime of failing to entertain our youthful
male media watchers.
And I am among the lucky ones. I didn’t have my
personal life dragged through the mud. When earlier this
year, Jezebel — Jezebel! — used the Sony hack as an
excuse to laughingly reveal Amy Pascal’s Amazon
orders and her “cheap, crotch-intensive beauty
regimen,” I cringed for the woman. She hadn’t even,
like me, directly offended the Gawker gods. She’d just
ordered personal products on the Internet. Think about
that the next time you do the same.
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Then last week, while facing a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan

over a sex tape, Gawker achieved peak Gawker when it
ran a piece on a married media executive’s attempt to
procure a gay escort. The piece named the man, but not
the escort, who had been rebuffed after attempting to get
his potential client to exert political influence for him in
a housing dispute. When the story was pulled the next
day — with a note that still referenced the man by name,
by the way — the staff expressed uniform anger over
the deletion. And Monday, two top editors resigned,
including Max Read, who’d previously defended the
story by saying, “Given the chance gawker will always
report on married c-suite executives of major media
companies fucking around on their wives.”
I’ve never worn my sickness as Teflon. I’m accepting of
criticism of my work — and I’ve received a whole lot of
it in my time, believe me. I’ve also had death threats and
rape threats and Bill O’Reilly and a popular pair of
shock jocks go after me, and I’m still here. But I do
think it takes a special kind of mind-set to see a
photograph that literally says “my cancer diagnosis”
above it and go, “Yup, let’s go with that one to trash
her.” A special mind-set to go after someone for
“irrelevant tidbits about your personal life designed to
short-circuit any criticism” while she’s publicly writing
about her inoperable disease and experimental
treatment. A Gawker mind-set, if you will. I don’t
necessarily believe it’s deliberately malicious. I think
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it’s something scarier. I think it’s just casually

indifferent.
I know Gawker could easily target me again. They could
find ex-lovers to reveal my kinks, former friends to
share my greatest humiliations and darkest insecurities,
classmates who know my most illicit and reckless
deeds. I’ve got them all! And here’s the thing — they
can do it to you too. Not because you’re Donald Trump
or Antonin Scalia. I wasn’t. That media executive
wasn’t. They can do it because they have the
information and the inclination and blah blah blah truth.
They can do it because they inflict pain without any
sense that inflicting pain hurts people. And that’s why I
do not say this lightly — I’ve been through serious
disease twice and two full years of a drug trial, and
Gawker is still one of the most toxic things that ever
happened in my life. I’m not being mean. I’m being
honest.
(Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon.com, "I was slimed by
Gawker")
————————
According to the LA Times, Gawker is responsible for
getting the attack on Cosby in motion. If true, might
have been worth a mention.
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http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0722-
bustillos-gawker-gossip-good-20150721-story.html
MEW needs the the world to reflect her preferred self-
image. Gawker confronts this.
———
Lauren Lipton
I hear you. In 2008, I wrote a piece about Jezebel for the

New York Times. It was a fairly straightforward, not
particularly damning Styles piece. Jezebel posted the
link, and although the Jezebel writers were pretty
balanced with their compliments and criticisms, some of
the commenters went berserk. They piled on like rabid
13-year-old girls, mocking my name and questioning
my journalism skills. I finally created a commenting
account using my real name and went on there to very
politely explain the reasons why I had reported the story
as I had, and to basically tell them how journalism
works. They ended up falling all over themselves to
apologize, so it all worked out fine, but for a while it
was a little terrifying. I thought, "OK, here we go; I'm
now going to be a Gawker/Jezebel target." I thank the
journalism gods that I emerged relatively unscathed.
@Lauren Lipton MEW is heaping Gawker in with the
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comment sections in trash. We have an ever-enlarging

category of opinion that well-mannered people of
character need not concern themselves with.
I think when a society is going well, polite people who
aim to tutor unruly children end up having a terrible
time of it: these "children" can't help themselves but see
their "parents" infractions, and call them on it. When it's
going poorly, we get a kick when we know that those
who still possess the fight and self-esteem to do so, have
been effectively neutered of influence ... rhetorically
captured, so that no penetrating truth they could show
can possibly escape being mostly seen as further troll
breath. It's called identification with the perpetrator.
— ——
KennyC.
Sorry, but a diagnosis of cancer doesn't automatically
make one a noble human being and it certainly doesn't
make one an interesting writer. There are plenty of
people who deserve (richly) to be ridiculed or even
slimed by the likes of Gawker, from full-of-themselves
idiots (Justin Bieber) to influential dopes (Thomas
Friedman) to moral monsters (Dick Cheney).
Conversely, all too often Salon seems to exist for the
sole purpose of creating a space for writers to embarrass
themselves.
rs959903
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@KennyC. I think that's the crux of the current issue.

Gawker should be aiming itself at the powerful, the
elite, the hypocritical and the unaccountable. But it
should do so in a way that is relevant to challenging
their power. So if a person is gay and in the closet and is
found out to have frequented an escort
service/prostitute. That is not Gawker newsworthy
unless that person is also being an outright hypocrite by
pushing a family values agenda or a bigoted anti-gay
position. So when Ted Haggard turned out to be
frequenting a gay escort. That was newsworthy because
he was pushing a hard-right Christian agenda that had
social and political consequences.
But outside of a relevant social hypocrisy, this is not
news. This is a person struggling with their identity in a
way that will have enormous personal consequences
soon enough. Outing that person the way Gawker did is
nothing more or less than cyberbullying.
So I totally agree with your point. The powerful deserve
Gawker's acerbic wit. But the everyday people -
including journalists - don't deserve a junior-high
takedown or hitpiece. What Gawker is learning is that
there is a fine-line to standing up to a bully and
becoming one yourself. Gawker has, over the years,
become a bully. It's ironic, challenging voice is now a
sneering putdown. In other words, the old Gawker
would have torn the new Gawker apart, mercilessly.
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@rs959903 @KennyC. But this person wasn't ordinary
-- he was powerful, wasn't he?
How sure are we that what we're up to now isn't figuring
out a kind of rhetoric where we help keep the powerful,
or the empowered, immune, somehow permanently
fixed, while believing we aren't the ones who are
regressing but those still pointing fingers are? Maybe we
need to feel like we're just as eager to see the powerful
and hypocritical exposed, but are effectively ensuring
fewer of them are by enabling "sanctuaries" many of
them can fit themselves into so they're immune to
censure? Situate yourself so you seem an afflicted adult
dealing with adult problems, and the people coming
after you are vicious untempered children, and you
become immune. Make those who deserve to be listened
to those who resound of the repressed adult, and those
who don't, of let-loose children, and you become
immune: for then without knowing it you've effectively
entered a conservative landscape where the point ends
up being that you, like your ancestors, knew enough not
to speak about such matters, and what all this'll do to kill
your happiness.
MEW has talked about the right of couples to be left to
sort things out for themselves, and one felt the same sort
of wickedness one felt in "Gone Girl" where all apt
criticism could be pacified because the couple showed
they were willing to play exactly according to the
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current temper. Show that you'll self-masticate enough

to be whatever the public wants rather than what you'd
prefer to stand up for, and in a regressing time you'll
pass notice because there's no self, no real proud self-
worth, there to irk spurned gods.
It was either the Nation or Mother Jones that wrote they
detected something conservative being enfranchised in
our unity behind gay marriage. Somehow, that is, a
conservative institution -- marriage -- was coming to
seem unquestionably a pillar of society. With this now,
so too the old idea that the public's duty is to bear
wounds and suffer? Maybe what matters is that MEW is
a Catholic while Gawker ain't...
carbondate
@Patrick McEvoy-
Halston @rs959903 @KennyC. He wasn't a public
figure. He was, however, an executive at a rival media
company. The hit piece was personal.
Lauren Lipton
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston @rs959903 @KennyC.
People who go to journalism school learn that certain
rules--some legal; some just ethical--govern when it's
appropriate to invade someone's privacy and when it is
not. It basically boils down to a combination of 1. Is the
subject a public figure? and 2. Is the subject's behavior
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hypocritical, based on standards to which he holds

others? In the case of the Conde Nast executive, he is
neither a true public figure (being "powerful" does not
necessarily make one a public figure), nor has he made a
career out of chastizing others for their sexual or moral
proclivities. The story Gawker printed was indefensible,
and any journalist with appropriate training and
experience would have known that.
The Overnight
BoNecBt9XUY/VZKik_PQjVI/AAAAAAAAAq8/e2UJGKTMP2g/s1600/the-
overnight-trailer-video.jpg
There’s been quite a lot of attention lately to the

seemingly plausible occurrence that you could lose
everything you’ve accrued for yourself in life over
one casually made remark — you always have to be
watchful. When we hear this complaint being made
it’s usually people pointing fingers at a politically
correct culture, and we’d be correct to assume that
what the people complaining want foremost is
actually a chance to flip things around so that the
politically correct — i.e., progressives — are the ones
under pressure. We’d also be correct to note that
easily as fair a way of assessing our times is actually
more of it as eliminating our ability to shame groups
of people, and that it is really this, our successful
activism against prejudice and stigmatization, that is
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a key source of many people’s anxiety: “you” feel

bound up, it’s because we’ve taken away the arenas
you were used to being able to piss into, so deal! But
we must still note that there’s a sense that we’ve also
made all of society as if it’s being “taught to the test”
… that there is a specific sort of human being that
we’re all supposed to be, and that we’re all expected
to match each and every one of the expectations in
order to qualify as relevant just the same way every
student hoping to get into a decent college has to.
Good people still do move on, but aberrancy, true
oddness — doing something different that isn’t
immediately appreciated as bold and new and A+-
worthy but perhaps rather as wrong and badly astray
— has no time to recover: you’re judged this way
once and you’ll drop a few classes in people’s
estimation, never to recover into societal relevancy,
even if you were being faithful to instinct in a way
that would eventually lead to generously new
product. The point is, you are someone whose
activation is unhinged from applause, and its tough to
“like” someone and keep them in the public headlines
when, however much they shine along today they
can’t be counted on to not burrow up into some hole
tomorrow that they’re too adrift to know has been
designated for public obliteration — probably
because it embarrasses us for its revealing something
true about us. The point is, we’re going at our societal
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growth nervously, and keeping everyone’s reflecting

one another "perfect" pose seems to make us feel that
it can’t all be sundered from us. We forfeit ourselves
a lot of originality, and shortchange some people the
kind of feedback and allowance that could make
them great, because moving as we are out into the
wilds of a new social landscape, it just feels safer to
be doing so in some glistening rocket ship that looks
good all around rather than as some muddle of
strengths but also unaccounted for weak spots, that
might however speed like the ’Falcon. “American”
aberrant genius goes by-by, when “Russian”
constancy makes us feel braced, and more calms our
nerves.
For me, this film begins to portray itself as a brave
attempt to maybe offer a kind of safe zone for a
couple that isn’t ever going to receive it. Specifically,
Alex, who has the same-sized infinitesimal penis as
an adult that barely looked promising when he was a
child, hasn’t had anyone in his family or school
circles who hasn’t implicitly communicated that his
possession of it isn’t something best kept hid from
the world — his parents told him it would surely
grow when he hit puberty, rather than prepared him to
consider just how much something one can do
nothing about tells you about a person; his school
mates were a chorus of endless taunting, just waiting
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to erupt if they ever learned his secret. And evolved

society, however much it’s making some groups feel
less subject to public shaming, still seems vested to
still want to keep some things that resound too much
of insecurities they share kept out of view, and further
vested in subscribing a portion of our populace to
some avenue of bland perfection — near replaceable,
one for the other, but each one significantly ripped —
fit-bit people, as if they had to be, like 1940s actors,
prepared to head out instantly to serve as a wall of
war muscle, hasn’t really gotten its act together
sufficiently to spread the kind of cover all around that
it is commendably offering some: it's got body issues
too. The feminist, "evolved" take on the portrayal of
Black Widow in the last Avengers film was that we
shouldn't have had to wallow in her owning up to
being sterilized, her owning it, but rather just be
excited by her simply kicking ass: even a hero we
really want to root for risks being forced into
unfriendly categorization, disturbing our preferred
sense of the degree of our unconditional loyalty to
her, if her identity becomes partly based on
something out of our own reminders we want to
wrench ourselves away from rather than watch, and
so what chance infant-dick Alex for a group hug? —
would you ever count yourself House Greyjoy? But
Kurt, the man who introduces himself to Alex and his
wife and hopes to befriend them, represents someone
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who might just be able to provide a conceivable

enclave where Alex might let his guard down and
have his difficulties addressed ... be rehabilitated, for
there are pockets of space out there in the world that
we can imagine as being adrift from what all else is
concerning people in the world, and Kurt is
majestically in possession of one of them.
Kurt's got one of those grand estates in LA that is in
absolute defiance of "decent" restraint and has never
had to care. He's linked to that part of our conception
of LA as it as absurdly afloat in its own dreaming
ways, but that has as little to be concerned of what
you might have to think about it as would the French
of a bland American who has strayed into Paris,
hoping to hoist attitude. You go at him, you're going
at Hollywood, California, the self-made man and the
really potent money-maker, and even democracy —
the country itself! — and so goes into the dumpster
all your presumptions to situate him for ready
judgment and targeting. And when he apparently
inadvertently stages a scene where Alex's body issues
would come to the fore, but does so in a way
informed with therapeutic acuity — he doesn't insist
that Alex join him in the pool "au natural” but rather
is willing to let it go, but later also doesn't shrink
from ultimately confronting Alex about his hesitancy
— there's a sense of real therapeutic gain for Alex in
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his deciding to talk about how ashamed he has for

long been made to feel.
Unfortunately, the film cuts itself off there as being
some kind of "Midnight in Paris" adventure where
someone who has always felt all out of sorts and
despaired of ever finding someone who could provide
feedback he could trust, finally finds "it," and
becomes more sort of a thriller where you wonder
whether in the end the disoriented, guileless couple
will realize that in agreeing to an overnight they've
consented to being flies caught in the spider's web.
We are motioned to consider Alex's new actually
liking his dick as actually a plot device that functions
to get a trepidatious, cautious couple — meant now
to be a proxy for any one of us — further into being
willing to venture into unaccounted territory, and as
something that begins to loosen a tight husband-and-
wife bond — Alex's wife Emily was never successful
in abating her husband's dis-ease but this forming
homosocial bond with Kurt was — so that the
possibility that reticence won't actually conquer the
evening and that they might actually “swing," and
perhaps, effectively, discombobulate, is kept alive.
Further, we are made to feel that it really isn't Alex's
truly brave reveal that is something to succour
through proxy, but rather his finally at the end
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stopping his being passive, forever moved along and

shaped by his host for his own purposes, and taking
command. He barks at Kurt and orders him into
a position where his wife would ostensibly succumb
to him in sex, and it reads as of Alice finally
shattering the beleaguering Wonderland that has
refused her any chance here-to to gain her bearing. In
response to this, his hosts "shrink": we are
encouraged to see them as more bereft than Alex and
Emily, vastly more troubled, for while Alex's
especially small penis may mean he and his wife are
forever subscribed to humiliating, less-than-perfect
sexual experiences, the fact that as a married couple
with a child they're still having sex puts them way
ahead of Kurt and his wife Charlotte, who have
essentially been trying to function as a neutered,
sexless "friendship" relationship for over ten years,
and its not cutting it. Alex and his wife are in need of
friends, Kurt and his are profoundly desperate — the
swinging we see unfold briefly at the end, reads
almost as Alex and Emily's charity.
Both both couples inadvertently meet, perhaps a
month’s hence, and Kurt and Charlotte are the ones
that have to beg as to why the clear distancing —
they're the ones who have to behave as if the evening
tested them and one couple made it through okayish
while the other came out worn. The message we take
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away from the film is that it can feel good to lend

yourself into some grand adventure where in
a densely-packed, short period of time you'll have to
encounter a lot of the strangeness you might normally
have to accustom yourself with over a long
while — undergo a risky overnight — because you'll
feel like you've got your full bearings instantly. It's
the kind of message that appeals to people who don't
want to know that letting down your guard only to
become instantly more lordish, is just bravado —
non-growth. Anxieties are momentarily quit, and you
feel temporarily inflated and proven —that's all.
If the film had not explored an overnight but a
swinging collection of couples in an adventure of
such prolonged, ongoing self-discovery that it
reminded one of the languid 1970s rather than of our
own urgent need to feel everywhere well patched up,
we'd have seen an existence so untethered from the
day-to-day self-adaptations we are all making with
one another through our social networks that when
they "emerged," it's difficult to convince ourselves
they wouldn't just come out, permanent cast-offs —
people who are simply non constituent of the societal
narrative we're all making for ourselves, and thus,
some species of human ostensible fair attendance to
reality requires we pass by unseen. But that remains
the movie I wish I saw, from start to finish, because
1715
it’s just right that we stop, listen, and discover, and

encourage good people their chance to blossom.
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Inside Out
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Out_1000.jpg
I wonder if the creators at Pixar are unconsciously

drawn to subvert the prescribed messages they are
surely required to put out. I ask this out of logic: Pixar
employees show too much intelligence, too much
subversive intelligence, that always can be relied upon
to titillate the adult in us even as we accept their mostly
requiting us to remember our inner child, to rest without
severe qualms if they are requited to a company which
overall nullifies itself as any strong nudge for change. I
also ask this out of evidence: why else construct this
movie, with inside prompters who delight when their
subject, eleven-year-old Riley, resounds the same old
familiar behavioural notes — yay, once again it’s happy
Riley! hockey Riley! goof-ball Riley! — so that it
recalls the struggle out of The Truman Show, where as
we know exasperation at unfamiliar initiative was not
warranted, but rather something that shows up the
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controllers' overall intention to keep their subject

mirroring their own expectations and needs?
We are supposed to understand the struggle of the film
to be about preventing a big move from a locale where
life can be imagined as not changing much —
Minnesota — to one where it’ll always be about being
expected to keep up … be as well at the forefront of
urban life and societal change — progressive, urban San
Fransisco — from momentarily destabilizing Riley so
much she goes badly awry, incurs inner psychic damage
and retardation that could perhaps permanently slow and
inhibit her. Her inner emotional directors — the-clearly-
adult-and-so-not-really-part-of-her “Joy,” “Sadness,”
“Fear,” “Anger,” and “Disgust” — are in a frantic effort
to save her from collapse: great, conglomerate, already
well-developed and distinctive “cities” of accrued
experiences, are actually collapsing, leaving the
possibility that when Riley finally girds herself for the
new environment, she’ll do so as just that, that
massively angry, destructive energy, forlorn anything
else — and so now, the makings of a psychopath?
But it appears to me that whether consciously or not, the
creators of this film allow for a very subversive reading
of what actually underlies all this massive, angry change
in Riley’s psyche, so that it’s not fear and disorientation
that prompts it but sudden realization, astonishingly
astute, clear awareness. When Riley’s family pulls up to
their new home, there’s a weird sense that we’re all
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being encouraged to waylay an awareness that surely

draws on us as we catch sight of the breadth of where
her new life is taking her, as if, if we were to hold onto
this awareness consciously, we couldn’t as easily
partake in this adventure as about saving Riley’s psyche
but perhaps more as the scabrous one of adult,
conspiratorial annihilation of a child’s effort at real
autonomy. We’re being directed to see this new home as
modest and a bit decrepit — a lonely, stark, bare
environment for the new arrivals. Yet what it is to
anyone of adult awareness is mostly clear demarcation
that Riley is being scooped along with the rest of her
family along the route of gentrification: small and
compact though it is, in San Francisco its squatness
emphasizes rather than shields its being a million dollar
home, scrunched in with all the other families that will
produce none other than those of the professional class.
The memories that were packed into Minnesota, and
which were perfect for an adult’s imagining of the
perfect child in early life, are going to met with those
that match the image of the perfect child in adolescence
and early adulthood: first-goal Riley! will eventually
become first-date Riley! first straight-A report card
Riley! first Ivy-League college acceptance Riley! first
opportune internship Riley! — first-on-the-road-to-
satisfactorily-possessing-every-marker-of-the-new-elite
Riley!
Dawned on us momentarily is the awareness that for this
family, Minnesota was meant to be understood as shed
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because it didn’t look good on the resume past a certain

point. Every urban sophisticate is willing to go along
with imagining the perfect childhood as being farm
cow-laden, and thus, okay, Minnesota. So loudly do
liberals cheer women’s sports teams now, her early love
of hockey, as well, needn’t at all make her seem doomed
to sports and hockey boyfriends and maybe teen
pregnancies, but much more to emphasize her as being
at the core a constituent of the times … as someone
who’ll feel it natural to incur personal growth in fields a
regressive society had assumed no woman, no
progressive, could get past the wear required just to get
within their gates to much-all transform what constitutes
it within. But adolescence absent an environment that
would insist ingesting distinctions from the rest of cow-
fat, cow-brained rest of America — like San Francisco
is going to amply do, with its subscribing every slice of
pizza as beholden to broccoli rather than pepperoni, and
whatnot — counts against you immediately. The
competitive game of life where one becomes enshrined
as a prince or discounted as hardly worth a pittance is
now on, and years are being lost where you essentially
ossified when you could have become appropriately
alien to the rest of deservedly-languishing, hopefully
soon irrelevant, slovenly, stupid America.
Subsequent to registering that we may be being
aggressively misdirected — susceptible to some
controller’s bullying promptings, ourselves — we may
not be as likely to just accede to seeing Riley as
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distraught only because reliable support columns are not

available to her, but rather to think more on the
suggestions, hints, apparently coincidental connections,
the film makes but which seem planted in such a way
they seem innocuous, innocent, spared … as something
that can readily be discounted so they’ll pass sensor'
examination. One such is the coinciding of Riley's
joyful effort to dress up her completely bare room in her
imagination, beholden only as it is now to dust, dirt and
a dead rat as “filler,” with her mother approaching her
thereafter to tell her how much they depend on her
never-failing joy and optimism to counter their own
distress and to keep their family unit functional. If we
were dawdling along the road the film has signalled it is
perhaps compelled to usher us along, the mother
approaching her here to inadvertently ask her to dress up
an actually very different reality — she is actually
hopelessly distraught — for something false, isn't much
worth thinking about: just being shorn familiar anchors
was going to dislodge her mind and disturb her into
beckoning truancy, and besides, her mother was clearly
only momentarily dislodged from registering Riley
properly. But something-more-true that we may be
being signalled to consider, adding emotion and affect
— horror — to a scene the creators were conspicuously
cautious to abandon it of, is the possibility that she is
being asked to dress up her new life in San Fransisco in
no different a fashion that she was required to in
Minnesota. What the move to San Francisco offered
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insight into is what will always be expected to underlay

how Riley constitutes her relationship to the world —
above all, keep it commensurate with her parents’ needs;
ease their distress. Her mother casually obliged her
along the path she blithely expected she had been built
to follow, but at a moment when Riley could register it
as the way she was expected to subvert every individual
effort to constitute herself in a freshly opened up world.
Riley's inner psyche ends up being one of awesome
apocalyptic collapse, as the carefully curated world all
her inner directors were so proud of begins to sunder
completely. This sundering is supposed to have
something to do with these directors themselves
— Sadness and Anger are targeted as corrupting things:
what's happening, we're being reassured, is still under
their control — but clearly this awesome oblivion is felt
to be something completely apart from any of these
cutesy, neutered — individualized only in the way any
corporation would allow — minions. Riley looks to be
withdrawing Joy, the emotion most fundamentally
entwined through all of her core memories and aspects
of self, from her psychic makeup. Overtly this is
because she is just so unfathomably sad, and so is
recklessly polluting all her previous experiences with
affect from her current despondency. But her, for
example, not lacking her previous polish but almost
losing the ability to stickhandle, reads not of a sullen
mind but one who in extricating all falsity has almost
permanently unstrapped familiar muscular actions of all
1721
tendon support. All that was in error lent out, is in the

process of being withdrawn. Not pollution, but
discombobulation of corrupt reality, through angry
umbrage and driven revolution.
Joy fights back, and goes about on a mission to prevent
Riley from being detached from her control. But as she
goes about on her travels within the brain, ostensibly a
Rudolph or a Dorothy on a querulous mission in a
strange landscape, what is mostly conveyed is just how
abated of all disturbance and fright the landscape she
has preferred to clothe herself within is. At times it’s
slightly odd, disorienting, but anything she stumbles
upon that one might think would get defined as
registering real trauma in Riley’s life, gets encountered
as if it was mundane, scrubbed of being worth more
than the most generic of reflections. The long-lost
imagined friend she rediscovers is dressed of cozy
childhood memories — candy cane fluff and dolphins
and such — which may have been out of reasons of
succour, but if so from wounds every child is susceptible
too ... every household can get lonely sometimes, and so
every child might for a short while need to frame a
“friend” out of everything they otherwise love most. The
monster in her subconscious is discovered as a giant
clown, but conveys mostly every child’s ostensible
susceptibility to at least one fright from something hard
to account for in their encounters with a new world,
whether it be the awful alienness of spiders, the
disturbing disorientation of heights, or the ghastly
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smiles and painted faces of the stuffed toy clown, which

for some reason is expected to be as loved by the child
as the clearly snuggle-worthy stuffed bear is.
Joy experiences real fright when she trespasses into an
area that seems almost as if its lead-in to the
unaccountable territory of monstrous, great expanse that
can swallow up whole island cities of arranged
experience, that is coming to seem the key constituent of
Riley’s current temper — where she is locating herself
now. Finding herself in a great pit where all abandoned,
life-stripped memories lie — colour-dead, opaque ball-
corpses —Joy resorts to magical thinking in hope to get
out. To buttress this primitivist regression, is another: it
seems the imaginary friend is adding too much weight
to get their magic sleigh over the slope, and so—.
Though it doesn’t play out this way, and it’s actually an
accident that the imaginary friend falls off the sled into
the dissolving pit, anyone observing Joy's frantic mood
would know she was in the mood to do … anything,
including sacrifice; and further might be beginning to
suspect that the reason she has for long been in charge
of Riley is because Riley planted her there to palliate a
version of this oblivion she experienced at the beginning
of her life, and so sacrifice of something innocent and
beautiful — this innocent friend; Riley’s right to shape
life to suit her own needs rather than her parents’ — is
basically the ground out of which she grew, and her
thorough modus operandi.
1723
Concomitant of Joy's despair before this chilly

landscape is Riley’s facing off with her mother. Though
the father in the film has been discounted as any source
of true terror for Riley — his working himself to
escalate and do something drastic, put his foot down! is
meant to show his outer fury as about as discountable as
are the comic cartoon personalities in the control room
of his head — the mother who almost caught her
daughter stealing her credit card from her purse is as
unlikely to invite a belittling cartoon-show of the
workings going on currently in her head as would a true
torturer invite your gallow humour. If Riley had been
caught crossing her to this degree, her mother would
have been bent out of shape in a way this film hasn’t the
resources to try and contain — the point of view of the
eyes that almost espied Riley’s great trespass, were the
squinted eyes of a croc toward a brave but vastly less
well-planted mam’ strayed in her path.
So here is the one and only terror the film would seem
shy to dare doing any patchings to; and if we twin her
mother being shown as quite terrifying with her being
being hinted at as the source of how Riley constitutes
herself, then Joy once again being at the helm of Riley’s
life would spell her living a quiescent life at its base
motivated by fear. Riley making San Francisco an
expansion of who she already was, someone possessed
of the same old identify markers but now expanded and
elaborated, is Riley as Truman from the Truman Show
experiencing even the like of ostensibly inevitably
1724
unpredictable and rocky life stages as puberty in such a

way that it actually becomes hard to reckon how it got
its reputation for wild unpredictability in the first place
— it’ll be stripped of anything so jagged, so abrasive, it
can’t be readily taken and discounted as just stage-of-
life drama. It’s Riley ding-a-linging all the bells that
trigger choruses of respondent joy in others, but which
would leave her all her life suspecting she was on a false
trail, and perhaps, despite all the markers informing her
of how profoundly accomplished she is, actually
essentially empty.
But we needn’t stray down that path where Riley,
through all her picture-perfect subsequent life moments,
becomes worthy of becoming discounted as just one of
the many “excellent sheep” in our ivy league
universities that have been forestalled at every step any
chance to discover their own wishes and requite the rest
of reluctant society to them, because just as we were
prompted to correct what a move to San Fransisco from
Minnesota actually would foretell for the family, we’re
lead to want to correct how what we saw happening to
the landscape inside Riley's head would actually argue
her independent journey was taking her towards.
The film ostensibly would have us take her journey as
regressive; she is clinging back, through a great act of
truancy, to Minnesota for some kind of reassuring balm,
a catastrophe given all the joy and self-development San
Francisco will offer her if only she can get past this first
1725
few moments of chaos without incurring some difficult-

to-remedy deep inward retreat. But visually we have
seen that what Riley has been up to is obliterating every
single core memory that constituted her existence of
Minnesota, so whatever journey she is on, the one thing
it feels near blasphemous to suggest it is is this one. The
film doesn’t spell it out for us, perhaps because this
grand presentation of a fresh life where parents have
been defied and others’ insistent wishes for you have
been discarded, doesn’t match with the crowd-pleasing,
crowd-owned Pixar’s inextricable mission, but the
territory headed for here for this elevn-year-old is very
close to that delineated for the twelve-year-old in a film
by a hipster auteur that just has to be held close to the
heart of a huge lot of the young, creative phantasm-
creators helmed at Pixar — Wes Anderson.
Truant Riley, who has angrily unspooled out of her head
every accomplishment that had made her her parents’
reliable joy, and who has just gotten past her mom as
guard at the gate, bears some resemblance to Suzy out
of Moonlight Kingdom. Heading out that way, it is true,
could equally mean for her the catastrophe that could
easily have followed Suzy and Sam’s self-contrived
foray. But out of it might have come a core memory just
as immune to parental dishevelment, and from which a
distinctive new person might be framed that could be
part of breaching though an age where no one is
expected to escape the humiliation of having to
subscribe themselves to a host that wants more than
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anything for you to have to have to oblige. The clever,

the brilliant, the especially promising, all in a sense
wiped out, as they get whirlpooled into society’s
predominant preference for perennial following through
on requisite visits … for stagnancy.
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Monday, June 15, 2015
Jurassic World
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I felt sorry for the monster in this film as soon as I knew

this movie would not base its appeal on introducing
something new, but in showing itself in opposition to
something so monstrously presumptuous, and in
curdling back in the lap of already laid out
accomplishment in rapturous fealty. The movie begins
in suggesting that crowds of viewers were beginning to
be bored by just plain dinosaurs, and profit required
new, dazzling creations; brazen, even criminally bold,
experimentation. But what we feel as we use members
of this crowd as our avatars is not exactly boredom but
the pleasure in being bored at something that really
should bedazzle. We wonder for a moment if a real
Jurassic Park was created, if, simply by our experience
1727
of watching the films, we might feel so grand —

accomplished — to be a bit blasé at the sight of even
reptile titans! This is a feeling to want to loiter in,
lounge in, not necessarily to cast off quickly to once
again be innocents to the unknown.
The kids use their VIP status to stray outside the
permitted areas, but the sequence that follows isn’t
exactly unaccustomed to us: the big scary new dinosaur
locks her jaws around the vehicle the kids are strapped
to; they release their attachment to the vehicle, letting it
preoccupy itself for a moment with the now peopleless
contraption in her mouth; and then they move a few
hundred steps before braving a cliff-jump into a body of
water: in short, its the sequence out of Avatar, when
Jake Sully sheds his antagonist, the giant cat monster,
who equally as much as this dinosaur also takes a few
very close snipes at her prey, risks a bit falling over the
cliff herself, as they descend out of reach into the rapids
and water. Those thirsting the new should be put off
when they’re offered a theme park recreation of a scene
made famous elsewhere. Those who don’t really want to
stray, those who want to acquaint themselves as
extensions of, as properties of, previous greats, would
however thrill: they get to go on a chase into the great
unknown without any feeling at all that what they’re
also doing is abandoning others’ labours. They fled
Jurassic into the lap of Avatar. One mother frets losing
her children but feels salve in seeing they haven’t found
recluse on their own, in self-autonomy, but rather in the
1728
lap of another mom.

There’s a short delay before the next great mark of
fealty, some filler: a squadron of escaped reptile “birds”
laser their interest at fleeing pedestrians, and so we are
greeted to a revisit of the scene in Mission Impossible,
where a blade — this time the reptile bird’s supinely
sharp beak — comes within a hair of dispatching our
momentarily caught out protagonist. Then finally our
reward of being so partizan to past creations, past greats,
who we imagine now not feverishly creating but, like
dallying monarchs, basking in a landscape they’ve made
their own … and so of course it makes sense that all the
awesome meanies in the original film are actually our
“friends”: T-Rex and the raptors team up as irritants and
capable distractions, to this movie’s monster’s ultimate
doom. The monster tried to telepathy the raptors onto
her side. But what is a new spun power by an outsider
pretending to distinction, when “they’ve” idiotically
emerged into a landscape where every peasant met is so
eagerly in the mood to taunt, “oh yeah, just see what our
bad mamma can do!,” and to see Her riposte as
devastating even if in truth it’s spittle to the newly
emergent’s torrent.
The great beast in this movie was doomed by being
waged at the very beginning as being something truly
new, something cemented in our estimation of her as she
tricked her captors into believing she’d climbed her way
out of her enclosure — something which suggested she
1729
had insight into the particular concerns of her captors:

they had previously been fretting the wall’s perhaps
insufficient height. Of being able, like the film’s Indiana
Jones character is supposed to be capable of, to foresee
possibilities that no one else had countenanced. She was
doomed by an avenue of life the film wanted granted
her, the exhilarating, open-ended one of freely
determining exactly where she fits in the food chain, by
granting no automatic status to anyone she meets but
rather to succumb everyone to being testable and
possibly dispatch-worthy: no way to cement a
previously established social order this! past kings will
fall! commercial people will displace aristocrats!
anarchy and a new order!
So this poor sucker, sodden with everything that would

exhilarate a sane, non-regressing society, as something
to behold, becomes amongst the audience flocking to
this film something to cheer being methodically
sacrificed. For what is this film than the new idea being
bated, bit by bit, one dumb dinosaur herbivore
“breadcrumb” after one dumb dinosaur herbivore
“breadcrumb,” closer and closer into a giant sacrificial
Mesosaurus pit? It’s bright homo sapiens (I had hoped
they’d crossed the dinosaur’s genes with maybe
Einstein’s, which looked a bit the case at first) lured into
a sea where a giant stupid orifice — a shark — can
arrogantly presumptuously make a giant casual snack of
it. A true tragedy, to be enjoyed only by those who
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project madly onto the orifice, someone who would hug

his mother’s girth as if it was the grandest thing in the
world, even while at the door is an invite that would
take little him or her closer to something that smacks of
adult interest.
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Film reviews: 2013-2015
The Avengers
Ex-Machina
American Sniper (from American Sniper to Triumph of the Will?)
Fury
Boyhood
1731
Lucy
Railway Man
Transcendence
Bad Words
Draft Day
Nymphomaniac
Noah
Divergent
Non-Stop
Pompeii
3 Days to Kill
Gravity and 12 Years a Slave (out of the frying pan and into the
fire)
Her
12 Years a Slave
1732
Ender's Game
Gravity
Carrie
Don Jon
Prisoners
The Family
Insidious 2
The Butler
Kickass 2
Blue Jasmine
Elysium
Only God Forgives
The Conjuring
The Wolverine
Pacific Rim
This is the End
The Bling Ring
Man of Steel
1733
Mud
The Great Gatsby
Iron Man 3
Pain and Gain
Oblivion
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Friday, May 29, 2015
Ruins of the past

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TIZDI/AAAAAAAAApU/lG02QpUUKkY/s1600/D64C8E36-BD50-4512-8531-
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I think it is useful just to make open the fact that the

bulk of both Emotional Life of Nations and Origins of
War in Child Abuse are averse, grotesque, offensive, to a
good number of psychohistorians. One now knows that
if one actually likes these books, hasn’t never though to
shy away from them, exactly where one stands. One had
1734
been wondering, hearing discussions of changing … of

improving childrearing through time, if the full story of
what this means is being kept in clear view; or if the
matter can only be discussed and explored at some
remove ... as if if one actually had to write of possessed
mothers seeing demons in their "bad" children and
rejecting them only out of that, the game would be up,
and all of a sudden the discourse on the matter
would change so that Mother is exonerated, and the
child, at fault. One would be wondering if the whole
subject is being manoeuvred not just to suit the
academic temper, but so that if one's own mother espied
what you were up to she wouldn't say, hey! you're
pointing at exactly the kinds of things I've told you are
not ever, ever, to keep conscious of, and you know
what’ll result of this, don’t you, young man?, and
perhaps just more drowsily say, eh? what's this
all about then? before losing interest and digging into
her latest read. Whew!
DeMause's theory of gradually improving childrearing,
if true, means that a lot of adults have to confront the
phenomena of having children before them from whom
they actually have more to learn than they have to
impart. We're starting to hear a lot of credentialing here
on this list … with space created by Judith to allow that
some of those who predominated in the 1960s may not
have all what we hope the current field of professionals
would possess, but were of such massive, credible depth
that they bequeathed great jewels of influence to
1735
the subsequent generation of professionals — so they

get a pass, and then some! I think deMause helps create
the space so that young people interested in
psychohistory can take some faith that if they aren't yet
possessed of many of the accoutrements of a long
professional career, they can also claim some
“advantage.” What you may have is the emotional
health to be able to sustain a kind of abandonment that
would follow pursuing taboo subjects that would
blanche most of those, generations past. You may be
able to distance yourself from subject matter that had
occupied minds for generations, but which were never
really worthy of the fully healed, "helping class,"
homo sapiens’ attention.
Those at the student paper at Columbia University are
insisting that many humanities courses carry "trigger
warnings" on their syllabi. It's been getting a lot of press
lately. Professors of Ancient Greece/Rome, for instance,
are being pressed by students to make clear beforehand
that a lot of the texts from their periods carry offensive
attitudes towards women, and a casual approach to rape
— such as the “wisdom” of reconciling with the rapist
— as well as a grotesque preponderance of it. They
deem this, not just offensive, but hideously damaging ...
to them it's like being made to watch a gang rape
without a hint of warning, by a professor who’s
somehow convinced themselves there’s redemption in
the matter (my own personal experience of
Anthropology struck me as like this, btw). The famous
1736
online feminist site, Jezebel, describes Donna

Zuckerberg’s —the editor at Eidolon, an online classics
journal — account of the matter here; and sums up her
whole field of study like this:
My subfield inside Classics is Greek drama, and if I
wanted to expunge all texts containing triggering
material from my syllabi, my classes would consist in
me and my students staring at each other silently across
a seminar room. Domestic violence, war, rape: these are
the foundation of Greek tragedy. And jokes about them
are the foundation of Greek comedy.
Euripides’ tragedies are especially full of sexual assault.
In the Ion, Creusa identifies as a rape victim, racked
with guilt because she initially found Apollo attractive,
even though the text specifies that he used force on her
and that she screamed for her mother. Euripides’ Trojan
Women is the story of a group of wives of dead Trojans
who know that they’re about to be divided up among the
Greek generals to be their sex slaves. The prophet
Cassandra is raped before the beginning of the play by
Locrian Ajax in Athena’s temple, and her obvious mania
in an early scene of the play could be seen as a response
to her recent trauma.
Unfortunately, Euripides’ fixation on sexual assault
doesn’t extend to sensitivity about its effects. Tragedy
uniformly assumes that these female characters who are
given away as the spoils of war will eventually resign
1737
themselves to their fate and become affectionate and

loyal towards the men who won them. One prominent
scholar calls the world of Greek tragedy an example of a
rape culture.
Zuckerberg ends up being cool with students’
complaints, seeing means to go half-way, but the
implications of the students being alarmed by something
she had accepted, never really thought to question,
aren’t really considered. These students have climbed to
the level of emotional health that what ought always to
have offended — hey, this work of art is full of rapes …
why are we studying this? — offends in the way it
should, and the professor has massive credentials in a
field of study that is beginning to look like it could
eventually disappear … eventually, no longer of interest
to intellectuals in the Ivy Leagues. What do her
“trophies” signify, after all? Accomplishment, or
gruesome misfortune: one’s bizarrely chaining one’s
whole life to demons in the past, who raped, and raped,
and raped; feeling pleasure when one’s own
involvement was intense enough that it would be
recognized? What was wrong with you?
The student who wants to respect you but knew enough

from all the tell-tale signs to split early and commit to
something else, doesn’t want to understand her very
beginning as superior to your whole life’s
accomplishment, but she can’t hide from herself the
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conclusion self-respect indicates she keep alert to. The

world must be remade. Much of what was once revered,
must go. Personal trophies, not even worthy of
nostalgia, but of the wayward inflations those of worse
childrearing, injected into the objects of their world.
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Monday, May 25, 2015
Time for the Anthropology take-down?

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I've argued that the implications of Steven Pinker's

“Better Angels” looks to be that there is little reason
anthropology and Medieval Studies should continue to
exist. This was an exaggeration. He posits all the
peoples anthropologists tend to study, as well as the
entire medieval period, as “id,” which means they had
the worst table manners you could possibly imagine,
they were gross ... I mean, really, really gross, and about
a hundred time more likely to stab a neighbour over a
trivial matter as you, civilized reader. But even though
these people were to him not making use of the capacity
of the brain to still these impulses, they nevertheless
represent a manner in which even contemporaries might
slip back to if for some reason they let their current
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focus on reason slip, so in that sense they are still

relevant to today. They are part of what ostensibly
remains innate about us, part of something Pinker fears,
so he allows the same room to study them as he does
chimps, who, argue some, kill every outlier from a
different “tribe” they happen to meet.
You go about the web and you get a sense of what
anthropologists and medieval historians make of this
offering. Their disciplines and specialities, they insist,
introduce us to to people who are in some ways superior
to ours. These are people, many of them tell us, before
the crushing overlay of that devouring monster
of undeterred, constant, indifferent-if-not-just-plain-
cruel change — modernization. Their "disciplines" are
not built about a longing to hide out with a whole swath
of undeterred pederast priests in medieval England, or to
gain the sympathy of peoples who still infanticide their
young and who carry proudly, each one of them, more
scars out of mad brutal warfare (Pinker points out that
this is changing now more to "local homicide," as
anthropologists try to repackage the people they’ve been
studying so they appear more local crime-addled than
war-driven) than your typical WW1 soldier, but out of a
desire to reach out — meet the world outside of our
prejudices, that serve to cast so much of the rest of the
world in unflattering light. Anthropology, as Brian R.
Ferguson, tells us, has activism built in — it’s one of the
real good guys, which has been ridding itself entirely of
the colonialist impulse. He describes what it was like for
1740
the discipline in the 1960/70s at Columbia, where it

seemed part of sudden uptake of astonishing human
goodness … of a complete shedding of the long-
forsaking of the pains and concerns of so many. And
when you hear the discipline being grouped, as you do
in Ferguson’s account, with the Revolution … with
“Black Power, Women’s Lib, Stonewall," you’d have to
think that if you’re a radical progressive today, you’ll
count yourself for sure amongst those negotiating
anthropology and "the world before history” so it’s
spared Pinker’s dreadful winnowing.
Except, when we live in an age where you hear
Ferguson’s concerns that much of anthropology could
become militarized, lose all the trust it’s earned, and
become an agent of god-damned colonization again, as
military money beckons to flood the field, and you
guesstimate that scholars who find no qualms in
accepting this money will probably flourish over the
concerns of activist brethren, that they will displace
them, ignore them — gleefully conquer them — this
may be a time when the savvy young progressive
actually holds back her support. Sorry dog! You were my
inspiration, but anyone who addles along with you into
this fight is just going to end up broken … I’ll save
myself for a more sunny tomorrow, thank you.
I think we are living in an age experiencing growth
panic. And what this is again, is when our own incurred
societal growth has us feeling like we’ve earned our
1741
being abandoned by our mothers (the persecutory

maternal alters in our heads). And, in an attempt to be
"good children" again, and reacquire her love, we end
up turning on those who genuinely most want to avoid
our world becoming one of such harshness and affliction
it would lead to perfect ground where conservatives like
David Brooks argue, "character" might develop.
We favour people like Pinker, because there’s something
imperial if not ideological about him — he steamrolls
through his opponents, many of them those one senses
most feel the pains of "outliers," people like Noam
Chomsky (with subjects of American military
domination) and William Deresiewicz (with brutally
overwhelmed and constricted students). Stern refusal …
excites, as of unflinching parental retribution. Plus he
allows avenue, as much as he might deny it, for a
righteous war against arising "id" cultures, like perhaps
China or Islam (have they or haven’t they successfully
"compartmentalized" their more worrisome
inclinations? If they haven’t, can they really be allowed
to grossly afflict those who’ve arrived at the civilized
stage where their "bad parts" are finally under strong
self-guidance?). A war against China and or Islam
would cost us a lot of young — and this is the second
group those experiencing growth panic are going to
want seen sacrificed. They represent people with so
much capacity to grow — our own "guilty" striving
selves — plus as well, vulnerability — the other thing
we were when our mothers turned on us, which "surely"
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is part of the wickedness we must pick on.

And so we’ll watch as anthropology, "sadly" afflicted
not only by some of the most activist and decent
professors alive, but with subjects who so readily
suggest the small, afflicted, and vulnerable, draw upon
itself the most intense of smackdowns. The rightness of
ignoring their (i.e. anthropologists' ) guilt trips will first
be established. They’ll try and show us as just bullying
imperialists, so we’ll begin to enfranchise thinking of
them as those who’ve profited for years by putting the
truly righteous off balance. We’ll show, like Pinker is
doing, that who they may be most intrinsically are
people loyal to themselves, quite willing in fact to
manipulate how their subjects get represented — be in a
sense, casually untrue to them — if it helps them keep
their own place secure. So they change from saying they
are studying people who are all Rousseauian to arguing
that most of them are actually — like all of us — a
mixture of both … with the exceptions of a notable
number who actually are human perfection (some tribes
scattered here or there in the Savannah, suggesting an
oasis that might just be "found" for the rest of us; or that
lost swath of all mankind that dwindled six thousand
years ago but which ostensibly were living peacefully
and collectively for no less than a period of hundreds of
thousand of years), and so their subjects seem more in-
line of what evolving common sense and retained sense
of eager hope, will allow for them. They change from
arguing their subjects are war-free to arguing that their
1743
discipline once made this mistake but has fully corrected

this earlier error, thank you, gauging that with this foot
put down … internal correction has occurred, so no
longer concern yourself with this matter; crowds
disperse! will intimidate any further bothersome outside
poking around within their field of expertise.
We’ll suggest that anthropologists are holding us back
from what all we’ll need to survive in a world where
local tribes might all of a sudden conglomerate into
some ferocious ISIS massing that might appear
anywhere within our civilized world to do nothing short
of raping our women, destroying our cultural artefacts,
and cooking us alive, through making any study of a
tribal culture that veers pejorative off limits, evil. We’ll
need the inside stuff on them to avoid this appalling
carnage, and you sir/madam, are in the way of this.
Revved up, we’ll undercut the shield they think they’ve
got comfortably enough in place to protect further
assignations for awhile, a block of, have you factored in
how you're never studying a tribal culture solo, but
always as formed through interactions with predatory
imperialist Western cultures? of, have you factored in
how all the war-instinct in chimps might be explained
simply out of human-caused territory restrictions or
artificial provisioning? of, have you factored in how
every bloody piece of evidence Pinker puts forward has
got significant holes? and take the focus off the war and
instead onto what-all has been suggested about how
1744
these tribes raise their children — we'll go domestic,

when the anthropologists think we're fixed on the
political. It’s a focus that’ll come to us naturally — so
not really tactics — because the source of this
downward, regressive turn in our own psyches, is the
abandonment and terror we experienced at the hands of
our mothers and fathers in our own lives; and as much
as we will be intent to blame ourselves and exonerate
them, we’ll just as much do a split so delicious righteous
revenge can be partaken in as well. And so the enemy
we focus on, will not be the one anthropologists seem
concerned about — the savage warrior — but more the
abandoning mother, so crass and evil she dangles her
children mercilessly over fires and pits … how deMause
shows Saddam Hussein, for example, was consistently
portrayed before the Iraq War.
We'll look at studies by scholars like Bambi Chapin who
seem near tied up in knots as to how to move forward in
research when their research seems to be crumbling all
around them as something worth dispassionate,
disinterested examination ... as something worth
studying in any such a matter that the possibility that its
subjects aren’t just intrinsically sick, gets allayed, and
show that such like her rosy assessment of her tribe's
childrearing that morphed into a later assessment of it as
really quite frightful, is what you'll find with every tribal
culture once the romantic glow that can lead to such
glossings of love for incest, and useful boundary-
formation for abandonment, is off. We'll find every kind
1745
of empowerment now to go at scholars like Mathieu

Ricard, and so face off against his assertion that in many
tribal cultures you can find such goodness, such intrinsic
sense of cooperation, and such maturity, they discourage
the kind of praise that might make group leadership
something to compete viciously for, with de Mause's
sense of them as just squelched people, afraid to reach
for any level of power because their parents terrified
them out of making any kind of reach at all for capital
acquisition — just evil-stepmother-ridden people,
essentially, forlorn of all fairy godmothers. These are
kids everywhere that need nothing more than to be
rescued, we’ll point out — obviously — and
anthropologists have anointed themselves as the proper
agents to familiarize us with them ... only to lax around,
allow and be indifferent to their squalor, like the worst
of self-obsessed provincial administrators, who make
fun of "the capital" for being so easily mislayed from
ever incurring their natural right to come visit and see
for themselves. We'll conclude that what we always
suspected — that the reason they've kept tribal so long
and stayed a million years' distance from modern
medicine, modern dress, modern culture ... from
civilization, couldn't have owed to anything good; and
judge that you can know what you need to know about a
people simply by noting if they bear the outside,
extraneous marks of having incurred "their
Reformation" … Are they tent people, that have barely
begun the human climb, or can you visibly see in their
1746
cosmopolitan centres the earnest bustle that energizes all

emancipated, modernized people?
They’ll be a fervour. Anthropologists, sensing defeat,
committing all to battle. But what we’ll do is take
advantage of the fact of a society leaning our way, to go
especially arrogant, and CAT-scan whole tribes to see if
they’re possessed of the kinds of brains we know can
only incur out of prolonged childhood suffering. We’ll
show damaged amaydalas, and shrunken orbitofrontal
cortexes, in every tribe we scan; we’ll show how well it
matches those of CAT-scanned brains of murderers —
for goodness sakes!; and we’ll pretty much then nest in
total victory … one might hear some brave lingerers-on
suggest this too might represent only what-all savagery
the West is responsible for, but they’ll be spooked away
the moment we compliment this victory with our first
threatened proposal of late-night showings of tribal
infanticide, or youth-upon-elder New Guinea fellatio …
what have you been doing casting these people as those
most worthy of your earnest friendship, and of endless,
endless, endless defence, all this while? Nothing
spooked you out ... Jesus Christ, how can this possibly
be?
While this hideous mess is occurring, savvy
progressives will be preparing for the world after this
period of growth-panic has ended. We’ll actually be
pleased that hunting and gathering has been
disenfranchised as an ideal … because what we’ll want
1747
to take up again is the intellectual energy and excitement

of 60’s Berkeley/Columbia, the movement, not just the
sitting together quietly on the grassy slope, whittling
away the time — we’d had our lost decade, been stilled
long enough, thank you very much! We’ll know that the
past hasn’t a model for us, and that when we dip down
“there,” we’re to be conscious that when we see
something that inspires us, it’s not distanced from the
familiar phenomena of being able to see inspiring
formations even while looking at the mess of a
massacre. No romanticization, this time. No fetishes.
Just the desire for a better world, and the care to make
sure no one out there is suffering … and, quite frankly,
much of the jubilant 60's partying, though it seems near
shameful to speak of such gleeful matters now.
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Labels: anthropology, brian r. ferguson, steven pinker

Friday, May 22, 2015
Reflecting on anthropologist, Bambi Chapin

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pg
I was wondering what you guys made of Bambi

Chapin's "Reflecting on how we know dreamwork and
fieldwork in Siri Lanka," in March 2014, Clio's Psyche.
1748
She says that the "miracle" people she was working

with, who ostensibly were able to make use of a form of
childrearing -- i.e. "giving in" -- that she argues surely
leads to spoiled, selfish brats in her own culture, to
instead produce older children who were respectful and
self-denying, were in fact NOT up do anything we
might soon want to emulate. She says she is coming to
realize that the reason these children end up becoming,
not tyrants, but rather those who so thoughtfully don't
bother anyone with their needs, is because they have
learned if they do end up becoming "a bother," they
overwhelm their mothers, and end up feeling
rejected/abandoned by them: they stop asking, that is,
because they're scared stiff of the repercussions: loss of
everything that really matters to the child -- mom (they
don't come to understand borders/boundaries, but
just denial of love, is what she writes). She suggests that
the fairest way to assess this childrearing is in a
pejorative manner (she isn't too pejorative, though: she
never considers that the mothers actually lack interest in
or do deny their children love -- it's all about the terrible
consequences of the child's misinterpretation of surely
benign intent), something she only allowed herself in
her dreams, because it's such an insult to the people
she's been graciously allowed to get to know, and
because it'll lead to the intense arousal of her peers
who'd surely scold her over her insensitive Western
righteousness. She then concludes by remarking on how
much goes on when we get involved in the messy
1749
process of ethnography.
I'm hoping that in discussion of the article, someone
mentioned that what she describes as typical of Western
families -- that those mothers who give in to their
children, spoil them, give them everything they want,
produce tyrant children -- is seen as a kind of fantasia on
the part of adults by such Western thinkers as deMause
and Alfie Kohn. (DeMause would suggest that the
person holding this point of view may still not be
"helping psychoclass" ... that they themselves have
incurred the kind of parental abandonment after self-
attendance that would lead to naturally associating
terrible things with self-attendance and ideal things with
self-denial; Alfie Kohn would argue that Chapin shows
signs of a "deeply conservative assumptions about
children."). I'm hoping someone mentioned that she
essentially makes the Sinhala seem a group of people
who are no different from any other engaged in a cycle
of abuse, and that it therefore seems inappropriate to
finish as she does, by encouraging us to think on the
"messiness" of, rather than perhaps the inherent
limitations of, enthnography ... it seems as "avoidant" of
what perhaps she ought to have encouraged as the one
she highlights as typically used by anthropologists when
they begin to doubt the people they've been invited to
become intimate with: namely, putting focus on the evils
of Western and corporate imperialism.
To be more blunt: shouldn't she have asked herself if the
1750
next step would be to explore other suspicious things

about the people she is studying, that she may
not allowed herself previously because it would have
been pejorative ... like, perhaps, the depiction of
feeding, where the mother just shoves food into the
mouth of the child, seemingly independent on whether
or not the child is actually hungry (erotic feeding)?
Shouldn't she have ended her article suggesting that if
there was the equivalent of some empowered UN child
services out there, first thing before doing anything
further would be her stepping out to make that call?
And while they separated parents from children until
some arrangement could be made so the children don't
become those who shape their adult selves out of
terrifying fear and who panic when life inadvertently
amply provisions them, then she might encourage us to
think more on the nature of ethnography. Perhaps even
suggesting that if it can shroud a people from immediate
response from child advocacy, there may actually be a
built-in limit to the amount of respect and consideration
enabled by its methods?
drwargus
May 8
Thanks to everyone for the many varied responses

1751
to this article. As many of you know, I come from a

developmental paradigm. As the human
imagination becomes more complex, We develop
more complex systems and forms of government.
Documents like the Magna Carta and the U.S.
Constitution represent Whole new ways of thinking
about human rights.
How can we govern ourselves? The answer to
some degree depends on how inclusive you are.
Do you just want to take care of your city, your
state, your nation, or the whole world? of course
this document from the state department does not
adequately address the situation. Most people are
not ready to comprehend that old "us versus them"
thinking is not adequate. We can no longer think in
terms of our nation versus other evil empires. What
is the solution? The answer will evolve over time,
but psychohistory should be able to make
intelligent commentary, both theoretical and
practical.
mfbrttn
May 8
1752
Barney and Brian,

A quick note: Gene Sharp's how-to manual is:
From Dictatorship to Democracy, a Conceptual
Framework for Liberation. Published by Green
Print.
Re. harmful power yields because the context
makes it unworkable to continue: Gene's book
spells out lots of ways to make things unworkable
for dictatorial power so that it must collapse.
Also, I mentioned the strategy re. child soldier
armies: typically the opposing soldiers had to fight
their way through the children while the adult
commanders of the child-soldiers stayed in the
back and would flee to escape capture if the
fighting went "the wrong way." Leapfrogging the
children and going right after their commanders
creates a new context that makes the strategy a
losing proposition for would-be commanders of
children. What before made those commanders
powerful now makes them fugitives desperate to
escape.
I am also vaguely remembering former President
Jimmy Carter negotiating with generals in a country
in Latin America for them to resign and leave the
country, and not getting anywhere. Meantime the
President of the US (was it Clinton?) finally ordered
an invasion force to take to the air and head south.
1753
This was reported to the generals by their own

people, and a deal with Carter was quickly
reached. My memory is missing in action re. the
details.
From general strikes that show a regime's inability
to control a country, to the press of outside
invaders, etc., it seems there are many ways
change-creating-power can meet dominant-power
head on (or indirectly), leaving dominant power
unable to keep its hold over people. For example
also, Brian shows many examples of workers
pushing back against current power structures in
our country, using organizational approaches to
field adequate resources/power to challenge
continued dominance.
This approach is all about altering the terrain in
which dominant power is operating, such that the
attempts at exercising that dominance no longer
work. The power calculus has shifted in favor of
others, from the few to the many. Instead of
power losing faith in its own purposes, this is an
approach in which power's options are curtailed by
court order, legislation, boycott, country-wide
strikes, and an entire array of means that render
"business as usual" a quick path to jail, a quick
path to economic collapse, a quick path to being
voted out of office, etc., etc. That's what I had in
mind in this phrase.
1754
I also agree that data mining is more of the current

fad, which itself has redefined the terrain of power.
And yet, perhaps, in moving in that direction, some
movement toward getting to know, appreciate and
relate to the real lives of others might slowly
develop. Maybe. (Then there's the terrain-altering
use of data-spilling/leaking that makes it harder to
those in power to keep on as they have been.)
And through all of this, the challenge to make of
our complicated world a life together that is more
"lovely" than ugly, more mutually respectful than
brutal. And for all of us, the art of making it through
the long, slow transition.
——————————————-
Brian
May 7
Jim, what does survival have to do with it?

Survival is an outcome. The death instinct is
supposed to explain behavior. If some people and
1755
some cultures are nonviolent, that means we need

to explain why some are violent and others not. If
everyone has a death instinct, then why isn't
everyone violent?
James Sturges <jhsturges@att.net> wrote:

Trevor, I think I understand your point
about the importance of exceptions . . . I
just can't think of any with respect to the
idea that pacifist societies cannot long exist,
at least not without protection from
another.The Swiss come to mind; yet, the
Swiss are very capable of defending
themselves in those mountains if anyone
ever tried to invade. Every adult male has
military training and is armed.
-------Jim
On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 3:52 PM, Trevor

Pederson <trevor.pederson@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Jim
I think that understanding the exception to
1756
the rule is always important. Yes there's

been a lot of war, but like heterosexuality,
it's not universal. There are some primitive
political economies that don't engage in it,
or that get bulldozed by others who do.
Freud's very point about sexuality is that the
penis and vagina connection found in most
animals (there are some homosexual
mammals and Bonobos kiss, engage in
bisexuality, fellatio, etc.) is extremely more
plastic in humans.
I think psychoanalysts rightly got a lot of
flack for wanting to view things as eternal
and failing to appreciate how
sociological/technological changes might
have changed "human nature".
Do you ever study the exceptions?
On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 1:49 PM, James
Sturges <jhsturges@att.net> wrote:
Brian,
We'll have to disagree about there being an
inherent human drive to death and war. I
see it everywhere.
Would you agree there is a sex drive? If so,
what evidence do you have other than that
1757
humans want it, and most engage in it when

given a chance?
Also, I happen to think that world
government would equal world tyranny. Like
capitalism, what makes things acceptable
(to the extent that they are) is some healthy
competition.
Incidentally, calling the death instinct
"pseudo science" is incorrect, at least by the
definitions of Thomas Kuhn, who I happen to
agree with. The correct term for all of our
areas: psychoanalysis, psychohistory etc.
would be "Protoscience." This means there is
no defined and repeatable "paradigmic
experiment" in the areas of depth
psychology.
Actually, I think that is the trap of the
behaviorists, academics and other similar
ilks who try to treat psychology as a science
when its subject matter is inherently non-
observable, being by definition subjective
material.
--------Jim
1758
-
Brian D'Agostino
To
cliospsyche@googlegroups.com
May 3 at 6:55 PM
Jim, I like your formulation of “the
inextricable connection between real events
and depth psychology.” But I don’t agree
with your notion that war can be explained
by innate destructiveness of any kind.
There are a number of problems with this,
not least of all the pseudo-scientific
character of this kind of explanation.
Whether we call it “death instinct” or “killer
genes” or “original sin” or anything else, this
whole recourse to an innate destructive
principle amounts to an argument of the
sort, “Humans are destructive because there
is something in us that makes us
destructive,” which is no explanation at all.
It is like saying that wood burns because it
has a combustible nature, or Mary is
depressed because she has a melancholic
nature.
The only way to understand war is to
understand it historically, that is, as
1759
something that did not always exist and

need not exist in the future but which came
into existence under specific historical
conditions and persists as long as those
conditions persist. Here is the historical
analysis that appears in the IPA’s statement
on violence:
The institution of war has its origins in the
Neolithic period, when towns based on
agricultural surplus became vulnerable to
raids by armed nomads. The acts of
aggression by nomads had clear economic
motivations and the earliest warriors of
agricultural societies most likely played a
defensive role. With increasing class
inequality, political elites gained increasing
control over resources and used force as an
instrument for gaining yet more control. It
was in this historical context that the
institutions of war, the state, and slavery
developed simultaneously and persisted for
millennia. While war has always been a
complex result of psychological, political,
and economic factors, it is fundamentally an
instrument for the accumulation of wealth
and power by self-interested elites whose
perceptions of self-interest are distorted by
1760
psychopathology.
The policy-making process is more complex
than indicated here, of course, and involves
international relations, the politics of state
and other elites, and the mass public. The
decisive support for militarism and wars of
aggression, however, comes primarily from
hawk political elites and the predatory
investors and corporate elites who benefit
directly or indirectly from militarist policies
(see Brian D’Agostino’s The Middle Class
Fights Back: How Progressive Movements
Can Restore Democracy in America, Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012). Individuals
who actively pursue unlimited military power
and wealth at the cost of vast, unnecessary
human suffering harbor pathological
motivations almost by definition, though the
form that the actions of policy-makers take
are heavily shaped by the institutional
contexts in which they act.
Full statement at:
http://www.psychohistory.us/resources/IPA
%20Statement%20on%20Violence.pdf
Something else you said also merits
discussion: “a society which temporarily
1761
gave up war would soon fall victim to

another which was not similarly
predisposed.” This concept has long been
recognized in political science and is called
“the security dilemma.” Actually, the most
recent research in game theory suggests
that this description of “reality” is valid only
under certain conditions (see Martin A.
Nowak, Evolutionary Dynamics). However,
even if we assume for the sake of argument
that a “kill or be killed” logic operated for
much of human history, the assumption that
this is an eternal feature of the human
condition is almost certainly wrong.
To see why, we have to look at history as a
whole. Starting with warrior kings in
antiquity, the process of conquest brought
more and more of the world under larger
and larger states, culminating in great
empires such as those of Alexander, the
Romans, the Muslims, and later the Spanish,
the British, and most recently the American
empires. The logical outcome of this
process of aggregation is world government,
which would also mean the end of war. In
fact, the world currently has the institutional
machinery needed for global governance
1762
and the abolition of war, most notably the

UN Security Council. The political conditions
do not yet exist for this machinery to work
the way it was designed to work, but the
globalization of the world economy and the
need to manage the ecological and other
global crises are pushing things in the
direction of cooperation. Whether we will
get there in time to avert a planetary train
wreck is not assured, but if we survive long
enough, that is the direction in which things
are moving.
A world in which the most powerful states
(e.g. the US, Russia, and China) cooperate
to constrain the ambitions of lesser states
(e.g. Saudi Arabia and Iran, a rivalry that is
currently wreaking havoc in the Middle East)
is a world on the verge of abolishing war, at
least in its classical form of armed conflict
between states. Other forms of armed
conflict (e.g. “civil wars”) are likely to persist
a while longer, but not indefinitely because
once stable states emerge, the conditions
for an enduring peace will be established.
Here I am using the term “peace” in the
minimal sense of “the absence of war;” a
more robust and profound peace can only
1763
occur as a result of continued progress

towards non-violent and humane child
rearing. In summary, peace is not a
“fantasy.” It is a state of affairs towards
which the political logic of history is
tending. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels
of Our Nature, which is in many ways a
flawed book, does contain a very good
account of this process.
I also very much like Bob’s statement
“Currently the world is experiencing the
ferocious upheaval/resistance to
modernity/paradigm shifts on multiple
domestic and foreign fronts.” This is the
explanation of religious fundamentalism in a
nutshell.
Brian
Brian D’Agostino, Ph.D.
President
International Psychohistorical Association
917-628-8253
www.psychohistory.us
James Sturges
1764
To
May 3 at 12:13 PM
I'll start by agreeing with Brian's position,
which I will re-state (hopefully correctly) as
asserting the inextricable connection
between real events and depth psychology
as being the essence of psychohistory.
One thing we learn from psychoanalysis is
that events which might appear to be
random are often driven by unconscious, or
hidden, motivations. There is a useful
presumption in psychoanalysis to assume
people do things, even self-destructive
things, because at some level they want to.
This presumption applied to society in
general implies that the ruling elites want
wars and in fact find them indispensable.
Personally, I go further than this and believe
that what makes them ruling elites is their
willingness to coalesce the undefined death
instinct (call it projected, free-floating
depressive or paranoid anxieties if you
prefer), and lead it the resulting
psychological group into bloody annihilation
1765
of self and others.

As I understand Alice's position, and other
fantasies of peace, the ruling elites would
have to cease being the ruling elites if it
were to give up war. At the very least, a
society which temporarily gave up war
would soon fall victim to another which was
not similarly predisposed.
----Jim
jhsturges
May 7
Hello, Brian.
In answer to your question about why some
are violent, and not others, if everyone has
the death instinct, I would offer the following
responses:
1. It is my personal belief that the death
instinct is very regularly projected into the
1766
large group mind. We all participate,

psychologically, in the killing carried out by
our military forces for example. I hasten to
add that this does not in any sense imply
ethical endorsement. As Bion stated,
(paraphrasing from memory) the
schizmatics are as much a part of a group as
its cheerleaders. As another example, most
of us do not kill meat with our bare hands,
but we do it through delegation to the
group.
2. Religions are all very much based upon
dealing with death, promising it, explaining
it, even putting an attractive cloak upon it.
Just another example of point #1, IMO.
3. The death drive (as I see it), is
analogous to the sex drive but is also
structurally different. We can personally
engage in sex with a partner and have no
need to project the sex instinct out into a
large group. Suicide, on the other hand, or
homicide, cannot be carried out as a routine
individualistic behavior . . . at least not more
than once. So that pushes them outwards,
as projections; and, in my view, creates a
very important basis of large psychological
1767
groups (e.g., nations, religions, even some

corporations).
4. We can engage in sexual fantasies, and
even do things in fantasy life that we would
never, or could never, do in actual practice.
Such fantasies are an imperfect substitute
for the real thing, to be sure; but, in some
cases they might be better than nothing.
The same is true, in my opinion, about the
death drive. Just take a look at our popular
culture (cowboy shows, cop shows, even
serial killer fantasies etc.) and it seems
obvious to me that many of us, at least,
enjoy death fantasies as a substitute for the
actual act.
---------Jim
Alice Maher
May 7
I think it's essential, in any discussion of war, to

distinguish individual dynamics from group identity
dynamics. Young people join the military not
1768
because they're "violent," but because they're

caught up in a societal dynamic that makes the
military an appealing choice.
Barney
May 8
Dear Alice,'
As you point out, the military is NOT a truly violent
enterprise, except for the cannon fodder. Most of
what happens in the military is 1) repetitious (like
prisons are); 2) boring, like bureaucracy is; 3)
stupid, like clerk supervisors; 4) corrupt, like
prisons are; 5) dangerous, like a construction site;
6) soul-sucking, like corporate governance is; 7)
low ceilings on pay, like sanitation workers; 8)
occasionally deadly, like ocean fishing; 9) a refuge
for misfits; 10) unappreciated.
It is far more violent to drive a car in America, or to
live in certain cities. As Napoleon knew so well,
soldiers fight for "the flag," and for their fellows in
the field, not for mother or cherry pie or even the
1769
loot (which is often a main motivation but is not

talked about much . . .).
To be a civilian in wartime is often the most violent
sector to find oneself in.
Barney
Ralph Fishkin
May 8
Alice,
That’s a generalization. In addition to the factors
you cited, some people do join the military because
they want to kill. As a Navy doctor, taking care of
Marines, I found that to be true, some of the time.
Ralph
=============================
Ralph E. Fishkin, D.O.
Secretary, American Psychoanalytic Association
=============================
2200 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Park Towne Place, Suite E 104
1770
Philadelphia, PA 19130
(215) 568- 9241 (Office)
Email: rfishkindo@gmail.com
May 8
Other recipients: barneyatbeaches@gmail.com

Count me one who is very glad not to appreciate
the military! Soldiers aren't "misfits" -- they're
amongst the least-loved people in society, and
therefore the least pleasant (most sexist, most
homophobic, most racist), who get off on
depictions of the military like this because it
heightens their sense of informed knowledge for
being part of the club (a cut at the populace they
ostensibly serve); emphasizes them as
fundamentally unappreciated, which makes them
feel like they haven't done any spoiling of
themselves in life -- so they've always got
1771
something on the rest of the populace, who spent

their time ... shopping -- so they've set up for
themselves the only conditions upon whereby they
could accept gifts, rewards, love, without
experiencing guilt.
The least loved apply scars to themselves because
they finally feel it makes them worthy of love -- the
forlorn, cast-out, broken toy, "who" is now due to
be adopted and loved by "Charlotte."
If we can somehow change the military and the
police force so it attracts more of our most well-
loved and most progressive citizens, then it's due
to be ... more appreciated (they'll argue for it to be
shrunk back to about a tenth of its current size, of
course). As is, I think a lot of us progressives are
worried that it's not just underclass blacks due to
be strangled in the streets, but peaceniks too, by
the military who've grown tired of people pissing on
their beloved flag i.e. mommy conduit. (I would
never underpay anybody, of course, but grant them
truly ample living wages -- what every person
deserves.)
It's about impossible to go through Lloyd's work
and find anything that flatters the military. Maybe
this will put him in good account when more
progressives finally hear about his work, and
discover that -- contra some people's assertions
1772
here -- it really does come down to the unloved,

Terrifying mother, and how she uses her child.
(I have "mommy issues," Denis. We all do -
our consciousness and brains developed primarily
through our communications with her -- and most
of us had mothers who were given insufficient love
in life and so more needed us than loved us, so it's
the norm. But I suppose your referencing this was
just some kind of masculine taunt, which
says something about the company you think we're
in -- and the history in psychohistory, me thinks --
that you thought it might work rather than double-
back on you.)
-
May 8

Actually, it's not just the image of people shopping
while they serve, that they get a kick out of, but
people shopping while not appreciating that their
"soft" "easy" life is (ostensibly) enabled entirely by
the military man's self-denial and self-sacrifice.
It seems pretty clear to me that Americans are
1773
probably going to turn pretty nationalistic, and

experience their beloved homeland as at real
threat of perishing owing to "Islam." I do worry that
progressives working to disarm this paranoia and
keep people from being demonized, will be seen as
weakening our resolve to defend our nation, our
flag, in Her moment of great need. I really am not
in the mood to see any redemption of the military.
Barney
May 8
Dear Ralph,
Some people become doctors because they want
to control and kill.
Over the years, I have known and worked and held
classes with many military men from several
nations, and the last thing most of them wanted to
do was to kill. Maybe that seems counter-intuitive,
but for me, experience seems to bear it out. Most
of the soldiers in combat areas were constantly
worried about being killed, not in killing. Of course
there are a few psychopaths who kill for kicks, and
some who kill for revenge (that's the most
1774
prevalent in my experience) and a lot who kill by

accident (you fire in the distance and maybe you
kill somebody called the enemy, and maybe not). I
lived and taught in Annapolis for several years and
met only one psychopath (killer) among many
many sailors and officers. My brother was a Marine
and he was a very sweet and non-violent man
despite jumping from airplanes and running toward
gunfire. The key to military life is not violence but,
as with peace, obedience. Obedience is a much
bigger monster in human life than violence;
interestingly, the most salient character trait of
medical doctors is "obedience" (65%+) to authority.
What is the psychohistorical paradigm of
obedience? Why does "authority" (all those who
are righteously quoted or referenced in "scientific"
papers) make so much difference? (And is there
any valid antidote to that?) The more I think about
it, the more it seems like chronic "CYA" --- as does
much "peer review" and "validation." Asimov said
violence is the last refuge of incompetence and in
many cases I agree. What'shisname (can't recall at
the moment) famously said "War is diplomacy by
other means," and very few diplomats worth their
champagne and caviar are violent. I still believe
that the closer definition of war is the armed
absence of obedience, not the love of violence.
Best,
1775
Barney
Ralph Fishkin
May 8
Barney,
What you write about military people fits with my
experience too. Alice left the psychopathic young
out of her idealized younger generation that seeks
to join the military for "societal dynamic" reasons.
Citations in scientific papers serve other functions
besides obedience to authority. For example, they
show what work was previously done, its validity,
what has not YET been researched, etc.
A final comment: people can be violent and also
make war, despite not loving violence. But still,
some people, love violence for a variety of
reasons, including the pleasure of revenge,
something you mentioned.
1776
Complicated world, ain't it?

Ralph
PS: Don't we have an agreement to limit our
postings to three per day? It seems that several
people have been disregarding or unaware of that.
I, for one, advocate that we agree to stick close to
that. The alternative is to just delete emails from
some people without giving their thoughts the
benefit of a read.
Ralph
——————————————-
1777
drwargus
May 6
Alice, this article might fit the bill.

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/29/8514239/qddr-2015
Sent from my iPad

Bill Argus
Alice Maher
May 7
Thanks for the suggestion, Bill. Looks intriguing.

Would the rest of the group like to discuss this over
the weekend?
Brian
1778
May 7
I think this is as good a starting point as any for

discussion and will comment on the article in detail
this weekend. Thank you for resurrecting the idea
of a common text, Alice. This one is so short and
accessible that it can be read in a few minutes.
The piece is not psychohistorical, but it raises
psychohistorical questions, such a global violence,
that interest us. It has the virtue of putting forward
a big picture of what is wrong with the world and
answers this question in terms of institutional
factors. I think it will be a useful exercise to ask
how we, as psychohistorians, would go beyond this
level of analysis.
Some of us think institutional factors are
unimportant and see psychohistory as a substitute
for the kind of analysis this article provides. My
own view is that institutional factors are just as
fundamental as psychological factors, and that
psychohistory supplements rather than displaces
the kind of analysis presented in this article. In the
past, our efforts to talk about these different
pictures of psychohistory were hanging in the air
and went nowhere because we didn’t have a
common text and a specific theory on the table. If
1779
we all read this article, we can have a more

informed discussion with a well-defined thesis to
critique.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
From: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com
[mailto:cliospsyche@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Alice Maher
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2015 4:56 AM
To: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] The quiet global crisis
that scares the State Department - Vox
Mark as complete
Ken Fuchsman
1780
May 7
Bill,
The article is certainly political, there is not much
historical here, and I didn't notice anything that was
psychological or psychohistroical. What made you
think this might be a good common text for us to
read?
drwargus
May 7
All politics is psychological and this is speaking to

psychological and cultural development. As life
conditions change, the human institutions must
develop and become more complex. I believe this
is much of what Lloyd talks about in his
developmental stages. If psychohistory is to remain
relevant, I believe that it must be able to contribute
to discussions like these.
1781
May 7
Other recipients: drwargus@aol.com

The QDDR proposes a number of ways to
improve its focus on these issues. For
instance, it proposes a new investment
on data-driven forecasting designed to
predict conflicts and mass atrocities. If
State Department diplomats have a
better way of knowing countries are
most at risk of serious violence, the
theory goes, they can know where to
invest resources in order to prevent
those conflicts from getting worse.
This is what deMause provides.Those

who had the least warm childhoods,
those who had the least-loved and
therefore least-loving mothers, will have
learned that their own individuation and
self-growth is "spoiled" and a bad thing,
and if life "provides" them such anyway,
1782
they'll eventually need to re-bond to a

maternal entity -- a mother nation, a
maternal group ... whatever -- become
her good boys and girls, and destroy
everyone they've projected their own
"sinful" vulnerability and striving selves
into. The task will be to see if those most
qualified by their emotional temperament
to do so, will finally shorn themselves of
their need to make everyone they've
protected from neanderthal rightwing
minds in their own countries as people of
grace, courage and thorough beauty.
This is not a sure thing. Salon's

progressive editor, Joan Walsh,
has admitted that mostly black
Americans, for example, spank and hit
and intimidate their children (Brittney
Cooper, a leading black intellectual who
contributes at her site, has said this
straight-up, and argued that she
will endeavour to do no such thing
herself) -- that this has been going on for
generations. But, she maintains, this has
only been to prevent their children from
1783
getting killed by white masters if they

appear too uppity. That is, she maintains
who they are in fact are the most brave
and loving of mothers, who do the very
last thing they would do in the world,
only because they love their children so
much they did even this, to save them.
It's nonsense. Liberals shouldn't need

this to create an egalitarian, progressive
society, that tolerates the abuse of no
one. But the majority just can't do it ... I
think because they experience some
weird feeling that if peoples really were
capable of this kind of damage, and there
was no better reason for it other than
they were angry or disinterested or just
plain brutal or just didn't care, then these
people maybe ....deserve scorn and
hatred
... and sensing this, what-would-prove,

self-oblivion for a moment arising in
themselves, they lock in firm to seeing
those whom they want to love and
respect as more noble than you could
1784
ever imagine. And they'll fight you to the

death if you diss them for it.
In case I wasn't specific enough, what

we need to do is chart childrearing
across the globe -- levels of unlove and
brutal treatment -- as well as areas of
growth. If societal progress is becoming
marked in any region where the
childrearing wouldn't allow for it, these
peoples will go 1930s provincial, new-
things-hating, well-loved-people hating,
Nazi.
May 7

"mostly" should have read "most".
my apologies.
If you'd like a link to Joan Walsh's article, it can be
found here:
1785
If you'd like to read what Brittney Cooper wrote

about black childrearing, you can find it here:
dr.bobstern
May 7
"...better governance"
What came up for me was that at all levels, from
personal to global, humanity's rational ability for
self-governance, to plan for the future, rely on facts
and analysis, delay immediate gratification
(governance over the selfish, immediate), has
been short-circuited by inflammatory politics,
ideology, greed, fantasy. And media technology
has accelerated this degradation of self-discipline
by allowing manipulators of human passion a
powerful platform to inflame.
Here at home, we should be worried about our
domestic future, as there seems to be no longer a
commitment by electoral losers to be the "loyal
opposition." American politics has become a
competitive zero-sum game where, at least for Fox
News Republicans, governance is not a priority:
winning the competition by whatever means
1786
necessary and undermining the opposition by

whatever means necessary... is.
mfbrttn
May 7
In response to this article...

Some years ago I participated in a conference of
political scientists at Rutgers University, and heard
one professor sum up the tenor of things in his
field as the Cold War was closing down:
"Understanding international relations from here on
out reduces to the study of cognitive psychology."
As a therapist, I was struck that he said this at all,
and that his sense of the psychology crucial to
understanding such matters as historical violence
and its avoidance lay with cognitive psychology
only, and did not include anything from the clinical
realm, from developmental psych, from
psychoanalysis, etc., etc. That said, on to the
1787
article... This is a first draft, so I apologize for it not

being tighter.
In reference to this article, I am reminded of two of
James Scott's books, Seeing Like a State, and The
Art of Not Being Governed, where he suggests that
there has from the first been a disconnect between
the way governments map the societal world and
the ways people informally work life out. The
close-to-the-ground realities of life are less
conceptually neat than what the state cares about
in terms of ability to assess and collect taxes, etc.
The state proceeds at a more conceptual, reduce-
life's-complexities-so-we-can-manage-them, big
picture level; ordinary life is woven out of the fine
grain of everyday reality, with lots of variability --
personal and local relations perspectives are
everything. In my recent work with government
managerial approaches, I see the tendency toward
that gap over and over.
With the best of intentions (or not), what goes on at
the big level is not in contact with what goes on at
the actual-life level. Louis Wirth (reported in Jack
Saul's Collective Trauma, Collective Healing) wrote
about this as an ecology of human relations, with a
"meso layer" of organization required between the
micro layer of lived life and the macro layer of
these large institutions. There needs to be a
linkage between the centers of policy and power on
1788
the one hand, and the people who live with the
impact of those decisions on the other. That layer
consists of intermediary organizations. In my work
currently, we are discussing the intentional
creation, the building-in, of opportunities for
"empathy-walks" between the larger layer and the
actual people with the actual difficulties
government is trying to address. Rightly or
wrongly, I read the state department's "fine bore"
approach (as reported in this article) as a shift in
that direction. State does not propose to alter its
fundamental aims, its structure, and it does not
propose empathy either. What it proposes is the
currently idealized use of data mining to pick up on
clues that conditions are ripe for violence in one
place or another, so that prevention (whatever that
might mean) can be initiated. Data-mining may
invite a tilt toward use of empathy in two ways:
determining what the categories are to pursue in
the mining, and getting to know what's actually
going on in a given locale or region such that these
clues are being generated. If you don't use
empathy at both these stages of data mining work,
reality will tend to surprise you; that may press
state toward empathy in this project, just as social
media may as well.
In regard to the tension between institutional and

psychological readings of historical matters, a long
1789
standing dialogue here at Cliopsyche.. I am

reminded of Bergen and Luckman's work, the
Social Construction of Reality, in which two
perspectives always are operating, and no
sociological phenomenon can be understood
without both. One is the perspective from the top,
from the macro or institutional level, and the other
is from the bottom, from the level of the individual.
Systems thinking (e.g., Peter Senge's work)
suggests that institutions and other large scale
systems may be initiated by individuals working
together, but systems/institutions can take on a life
of their own and run away with us, creating
consequences we do not intend -- and carrying us
right along with them, perhaps with conviction
we're doing the right thing and perhaps with a
sense of being appalled by a current of events from
which we cannot extricate ourselves, as in the Cold
War. Systems can own us, in part because here
and now so many people's lives are organized
around them: these are the roles we play in each
others' lives and this is how we do it. As Durkheim,
and Berger and Luckman, argue: this gives
social/cultural arrangements a solidity much like
nature seems to have. This is "reality" to us
because everyone else believes it is and acts
accordingly. And that creates the contexts within
which lie the choices we can make, no matter what
1790
our childhood was like. Childhood may change,

but systems live on through their sheer durability,
at least for awhile. (This being the macro-down
perspective.)
In addition, because institutional contexts are
everyday reality for adults, the tenor of life within
those institutions is reality for that very large subset
of adults who are parents (practically everybody)...
And that makes it the reality that infants are born
into and children grow up in. For them, as Berger
and Luckman note, this is how the world has
always been, much as the sun's rising, the
mountains standing there, etc. Institutions are
unquestionable, taken for granted (unless parents
thought otherwise). As adults we figure out our
options within the roles, mandates, values, etc. of
those institutions. Institutions thus have a kind of
cognitive hold on us. In addition to that, current
neuroscience research suggests that the emotional
states of parents in response to the world as they
know it become part of the fabric of the emotional
self of children: If the world is perceived and
presented by parents as violent, controlling, gentle,
empathic, or whatever, that becomes the
experience children encounter and absorb
emotionally, making it the foundational experience
children have as to "what it means to be human
around here" or "how I must go about dealing with
1791
others" -- which then becomes the core of how the

child-grown-into-adulthood will be prepared to treat
various parts of the human world when he or she
grows up. The macro world thus cycles through
parent-child relations into the intimate world of
DeMause; but equally, the intimate world of
DeMause cycles forward through children's
growing up and enacting what's been absorbed
into the choosing of options in adult historical
circumstances, the initiation of policies, the shaping
of historical actions. Childhood's early emotional
relational experience thus cascades forward into
the shaping of historical life some decades in the
future. Both dynamics reinforce each other, or
create possibilities for change in each other. This
is not best understood as an in the moment
snapshot, but rather as an across-generational-
time dynamic. But both are leverage points for
intervention. Change needs change at both
levels: the impact of adult situations on children,
the acting out of a past-childhood onto adult
decisions affecting historical life in the present.
What happens in childhood emotionally and
relationally plays a powerful role in historical life, in
this complex way. However, you can also look at
the institutional level apart from childhood and the
emotional templates carried forward (a very
measured way of expressing such powerful
passions, attachments, distresses and loves).
1792
System dynamics are not only an interplay of

levels, they are an enactment of motives having to
do with control and power. That makes them
enormously consequential for real life. Historical
actions are in part re-enactments of prior
experiences relating to love or control, violence
and power, from early life, from teen age years,
and from early adulthood (as Jervis showed many
years ago). And adulthood very often gets enacted
onto or transmitted to children, who will then be
prone to "speak" of those matters via action as
adults in various institutional settings when they
move into leadership roles. (Cf. also Alice Miller).
That is the emotional dynamics from childhood side
of it. It is multi-generational, cascading forward,
creating a kind of lag between what children were
steeped in and when they will enact it on the stage
of history.
The other side is that the institutions within which
or against which historical actions will be initiated
have dynamics of their own and can run away with
our lives. From the point of view of the ecological
movement, the cumulative impact of myriad little
decisions whose pattern is created by consumer
capitalism has nothing to do with what ordinary
folks want to bring about, but is bringing about
those dire circumstances all the same. And, also
on this side of things, and pertinent to Brian's line
1793
of thought, I am reminded of Hans Morgenthau's

analysis of power as the purpose of politics, the
instrument by which those who govern make things
happen, the tool they are forever sharpening, the
motive for positioning for future conflicts, etc. Here
too, very different from Peter Senge's runaway
system dynamics perhaps, is the dynamic of power
pushing itself in certain directions just because
that's what power as a context is about.
So there are two dynamics, each complex in its
own right. The childhood-to-adulthood dynamic
has a complex, multi-generational dimension; the
systems layer has both "systems dynamics" and
"power dynamics" dimensions. Instead of either-or,
there seems to be a dialectic-over-time, with a
built-in lag effect, in which these two complex
layers interact, while yet being somewhat
independent of each other. Institutions as systems
take on a life of their own, as Senge notes with his
types of system dynamics and as Morgenthau
spelled out in regard to political life. Add in the
reality that we are a world of many cultures,
countries and peoples, all with our own overlapping
and interacting institutions, and the possibility of
system-run-away is clear, as also is the possibility
of massive concentrations of power and wealth.
Things can move suddenly in ways the system-
controllers are not expecting, as they can also
1794
move very rapidly in ways ordinary people are not

expecting.
The fact that things are organized in massive
institutions, wielding enormous military, judicial-
legal, and economic power, clearly creates
enormous power differentials, leaving many people
powerless and vulnerable to being killed, tortured,
incarcerated, dispossesed, stolen from, exploited,
abandoned, etc. It is this enactment of ruthless,
violent and exploitive power at the expense of the
life-dreams, the hopes, the loves, the labors, the
neighborhood connections, the communities, the
cultural values, the physical intactness, the very
lives of others, that brings to life the moral
response, the caring, the sense of moral outrage,
that says this all must be transformed into
relationships in which respect for the lives of others
prevails and organizes the particulars of
institutional life, in which empathy and concern and
generosity permeate the organizing and the
policies and the conduct of institutions, a tying
together of the work at the centers of power into
everyone's ordinary lives in ways that are all about
nurturing local family and community resilience and
supporting life. As Brian has articulated it, there
needs to be a moral shift from harm-centered
relationships between the macro and micro level,
and genuinely collaborative relationships -- as in
1795
genuine worker-owned businesses, or truly

collaborative worker-management businesses like
the briefly successful Saturn car company. This is
the clinical goal if you will, a shift in how people
encounter each other, engage each other,
comprehend emotional life with each other. It
involves a coming out from the current managerial
model that pervades governments and businesses
for the most part, into a different way of being
macro and micro together. (It also involves a
coming out from the pre-programmed emotional
patternings of relationships and ignorance of
emotional life that each upcoming generation
absorbs from the adult world into which they were
born, as Alice has articulated so beautifully.)
How then to foster this kind of change? There
seem to be three levels of answers. First, as Alice
is pursuing: education in emotional life and in how
to do it better. Not only does that help individuals
and school systems do life better together, we can
hope that as that thinking slips one way or another
into the jetstreams of cultural discourse, it becomes
a way of thinking more broadly accessible to
institutional leaders, to media, and to the
conversations, even among the powerful, about
how power should be conducting itself. Harmful
power begins to yield because it loses legitimacy in
its own mind, as in the release of Gorbachev by his
1796
military kidnappers in Russia not so very long

ago.
Second, as Brian argues, power yields to better
ways because it can't get away with doing
otherwise any longer, and that happens thanks to
the development of a mesolayer of organizations
that oppose the larger power of those at the
institutional centers. For example, there's a
movement to teach town governments how to
enact legislation prohibiting fracking within their
boundaries (against which fracking businesses are
mobilizing state-level legislation to prohibit town
governments from exercising this kind of legal
control over their own destinies). This is the open
battle of mid-level organizing against macro-level
domination. In situations of outright totalitarian
control, Gene Sharp has a small how-to book for
those who want to bring down the regime,
hollowing it out by creating an alternative culture
within, dramatic events that show the regime as
powerless, etc. Harmful power yields because the
context makes it unworkable to continue. In
dealing with child soldier armies in Africa, one of
the military-political strategies is to jump over an
advancing army of children (in part so as not to
have to kill them) and attack the adult commanders
who are operating at the rear, thus making this
particular calculus of power no longer safe and
1797
therefore no longer of interest; better to forget

trying to raise armies of children on the cheap as
they no longer make you invulnerable.
On the third level, perhaps, is the MIT Presencing
Institute's ULab initiative, with 26,000 students
worldwide engaged recently in an interactive web-
based but also locally-sited, and person-to-person
support group based, endeavor which tried to
support people worldwide to take the reading of
their own deeper sense of what is needed to
transform this world and then setting out to do just
that. This is a form of seeding capacities for
making culture anew, within governments and in
the business world, to pioneer new ways of being
institutions. This is a world-wide revolution
percolating from the top down so to speak, the
generation of non-harmful forms of organizing
economic liveliness and political life as well (Cf. the
Presencing Institute's example in Indonesian
politics.) It is a bit like Gene Sharp's creation of an
alternative culture as well. The macro level can
become coopted for other ways of operating by
social innovators. But the core power institutions
themselves can also become populated by
individuals with a different emotional culture who
initiate new, more empathic, respectful and life-
supporting ways of organizing their institutions
because that's the wave of the future and the right
1798
thing to do.
All of this reflects a number of clinical values.
These are moral values that transcend clinical
work, of course. But they do reflect the reality that
clinical thinking, which permeates psychoanalysis
as we would hope it would, is value-charged.
First, less physical violence is better. Second, a
shift from callousness to relatedness, empathy and
concern is a good thing, not just as feelings but as
the core of how actual relations are conducted.
These both bear on human-to-human relationships,
across the micro, meso and macro levels.
Third, facing reality is better than denying reality
when there are things that must be attended to and
can be attended to. This is interconnected with the
fourth: self-care is better than self-neglect. It is
better to take care with real life than to indulge any
number of alternatives, not only individually but as
communities, peoples, countries, and globally.
These two values bear especially on our human-
to-Earth relationships.
In short, it seems to me that the psychohistory
discussions to date articulate a multi-leveled
understanding of dynamics that are themselves
multi-leveled, powerful, and interacting. They
suggest, to me, that there are multiple points of
leverage in the system-as-it-is that can help the
1799
system-as-it-should-be emerge in its place. All

these interventions aim at the same enormous
cultural shift toward a more mature, more fully
human-capacity-based (empathy, foresight, moral
sense) way of making life together. All seem to me
worthy of respect, worthy of investment, worthy of
energy and commitment. They seem different and
yet natural allies in this great endeavor of cultural
transformation. Which, to return to where I started,
is the point in clinical forms of psychology as
contrasted with cognitive: We are all about
transformations in thought but also transformations
of heart that engage real life, in its actual
complexity, in ways that reflect greater wisdom and
integrity within self, greater integrity in the conduct
and shaping of institutional and everyday life
together, greater empathy, concern and generosity,
such that we grow in our shared resilience and do
life better together. (Cf. Jack Saul's Collective
Trauma, Collective Healing).
Michael Britton
Barney
May 7
1800
Dear Michael,
"For example, there's a movement to teach town
governments how to enact legislation prohibiting
fracking within their boundaries (against which
fracking businesses are mobilizing state-level
legislation to prohibit town governments from
exercising this kind of legal control over their own
destinies). This is the open battle of mid-level
organizing against macro-level domination. In
situations of outright totalitarian control, Gene
Sharp has a small how-to book for those who want
to bring down the regime, hollowing it out by
creating an alternative culture within, dramatic
events that show the regime as powerless, etc.
Harmful power yields because the context
makes it unworkable to continue. In dealing with
child soldier armies in Africa, one of the military-
political strategies is to jump over an advancing
army of children (in part so as not to have to kill
them) and attack the adult commanders who are
operating at the rear, thus making this particular
calculus of power no longer safe and therefore no
longer of interest; better to forget trying to raise
armies of children on the cheap as they no longer
make you invulnerable."
Altogether an admirable draft, in my opinion,
maybe because I entirely can see what you mean
1801
in most of it.
With the paragraph above I'd appreciate a bit of
elaboration, especially the boldface statement.
(What is the name of the little Sharp book?)
I'm going to re-read the piece later so I can enjoy it
twice.
Thanks,
Barney
Alice Maher
May 7
Bill, at the risk of being a bad girl and adding a 4th

post for the day, I have to tell you that I really liked
this article. It resonates with me not just because it
seems valid, but also because it helps explain
differences in the way some members of this group
feel about the perspectives of other members.
"The world's institutions are no longer adequate for
today's problems."
Some people here are focused on the "institution"
of psychohistory. They see it as provocative when
1802
some of us say that we need another, deeper,

overarching model to help psychohistorians make
a leap to addressing ancient and future problems in
a way that opens the door to new insights and
transformations. Some of us - Brian, Ken, Denis -
are focused on making psychohistory an
intellectual, scholarly subject of study. Others -
me, Joel - want to trash the existing
psychohistorical theories and figure out new ways
of looking at old stories.
I found this article to be very helpful, not just in
understanding the new global world order, but in
understanding myself and the dynamics of our
group. I don't know what your understanding and
intent was, but I'm grateful to you for sharing it.
Brian
May 8
This gives my take on the article and responds to

Michael. The author is correct that the
international system is not working very well—I
think we all knew that already—but does not
provide an analysis why. If I am mistaken about
1803
this, would someone please summarize in one or a

few sentences the author’s analysis of why the
international system isn’t working? He is reporting
the findings of a State Department Report, so by
extension it would appear that the authors of this
report do not have an analysis either.
This is a familiar scenario. It is called “The
Emperor has no clothes.” This report was written
by people working for the State Department, so it is
extremely unlikely that the authors of this report are
incompetent or poorly informed. I will leave it as an
exercise for people on this list to figure out why the
article contains no analysis of why the international
system isn’t working. There is a very simple
answer to this question, but I don’t want to give it
away before others have had a chance to work on
this puzzle.
Given the absence of an analysis, why do I think it
is worth reading this article? Because it shows that
the people running the State Department
recognize the need for global governance in order
to solve the interconnected global problems that
humanity faces. Anarchy is not working. Jim said
that he thought world government would be
tyranny. Well, it certainly could take that form, but
the same can be said of any government
whatsoever. Is the solution to abolish government,
or is the solution to create institutions for keeping
1804
the power holders accountable?

Now for Michael’s post. First, data mining seems
to me like an extension of what already exists. The
CIA has long had a vast apparatus for analyzing
information from all over the world and using it to
predict what will happen in every part of the world.
Data mining just extends this apparatus. The really
important questions are how we change the
purposes to which this knowledge is put.
Michael, your discussion of “the social construction
of reality” is right on point. In a previous post I
suggested that we need to talk about the way
social systems and individuals interact, which is
exactly what you’ve done. I argued that holistic
explanations were the thesis for deMause, and his
“methodological individualism” was the antithesis,
and that we now need a synthesis that integrates
systems and individuals. Your thinking on this,
including your discussion of the centrality of power,
is exactly where we need to go as
psychohistorians, in my opinion. I was also glad to
hear the name Gene Sharp in this discussion,
probably the most important theorist of power in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Like
Barney, I’d like to know the title of the particular
book by Sharp you mentioned.
Finally, I love the way you think about the world
1805
and how to change it: “In short, it seems to me that

the psychohistory discussions to date articulate a
multi-leveled understanding of dynamics that are
themselves multi-leveled, powerful, and
interacting. They suggest, to me, that there are
multiple points of leverage in the system-as-it-is
that can help the system-as-it-should-be emerge in
its place.” Right on!
Brian
President
917-628-8253
drwargus
May 8
Thanks to everyone for the many varied responses

to this article. As many of you know, I come from a
developmental paradigm. As the human
imagination becomes more complex, We develop
1806
more complex systems and forms of government.

Documents like the Magna Carta and the U.S.
Constitution represent Whole new ways of thinking
about human rights.
How can we govern ourselves? The answer to
some degree depends on how inclusive you are.
Do you just want to take care of your city, your
state, your nation, or the whole world? of course
this document from the state department does not
adequately address the situation. Most people are
not ready to comprehend that old "us versus them"
thinking is not adequate. We can no longer think in
terms of our nation versus other evil empires. What
is the solution? The answer will evolve over time,
but psychohistory should be able to make
intelligent commentary, both theoretical and
practical.
mfbrttn
May 8
Barney and Brian,

A quick note: Gene Sharp's how-to manual is:
From Dictatorship to Democracy, a Conceptual
1807
Framework for Liberation. Published by Green

Print.
Re. harmful power yields because the context
makes it unworkable to continue: Gene's book
spells out lots of ways to make things unworkable
for dictatorial power so that it must collapse.
Also, I mentioned the strategy re. child soldier
armies: typically the opposing soldiers had to fight
their way through the children while the adult
commanders of the child-soldiers stayed in the
back and would flee to escape capture if the
fighting went "the wrong way." Leapfrogging the
children and going right after their commanders
creates a new context that makes the strategy a
losing proposition for would-be commanders of
children. What before made those commanders
powerful now makes them fugitives desperate to
escape.
I am also vaguely remembering former President
Jimmy Carter negotiating with generals in a country
in Latin America for them to resign and leave the
country, and not getting anywhere. Meantime the
President of the US (was it Clinton?) finally ordered
an invasion force to take to the air and head south.
This was reported to the generals by their own
people, and a deal with Carter was quickly
reached. My memory is missing in action re. the
1808
details.
From general strikes that show a regime's inability
to control a country, to the press of outside
invaders, etc., it seems there are many ways
change-creating-power can meet dominant-power
head on (or indirectly), leaving dominant power
unable to keep its hold over people. For example
also, Brian shows many examples of workers
pushing back against current power structures in
our country, using organizational approaches to
field adequate resources/power to challenge
continued dominance.
This approach is all about altering the terrain in
which dominant power is operating, such that the
attempts at exercising that dominance no longer
work. The power calculus has shifted in favor of
others, from the few to the many. Instead of
power losing faith in its own purposes, this is an
approach in which power's options are curtailed by
court order, legislation, boycott, country-wide
strikes, and an entire array of means that render
"business as usual" a quick path to jail, a quick
path to economic collapse, a quick path to being
voted out of office, etc., etc. That's what I had in
mind in this phrase.
I also agree that data mining is more of the current
fad, which itself has redefined the terrain of power.
1809
And yet, perhaps, in moving in that direction, some

movement toward getting to know, appreciate and
relate to the real lives of others might slowly
develop. Maybe. (Then there's the terrain-altering
use of data-spilling/leaking that makes it harder to
those in power to keep on as they have been.)
And through all of this, the challenge to make of
our complicated world a life together that is more
"lovely" than ugly, more mutually respectful than
brutal. And for all of us, the art of making it through
the long, slow transition.
——————————————-
May 8
Conservatives won in Britain, despite an austerity

climate that was ruining the economy and soddening
people's lives. The usual questions are being asked -- did
Conservatives better manipulate the populace? play to
their worst sides? hide from them temporarily all the
1810
misery they'd been on the receiving in and instead

focused them in on other concerns?
As a psychosocietyian, I of course would be available
for this counter -- the counter I offered you guys a few
weeks ago -- and so they might be nudged to actually
know people a bit differently than their preferred
psychological model, which has the populace as
fundamentally sound of mind (i.e. they naturally do not
want to suffer; they want prosperity) but manipulatable
when people play to their worst sides:
Paul Krugman, at his blog, has just explained why
austerity-favouring politicians in Britain might well
get re-elected. He writes:
Well, you could blame the weakness of the
opposition, which has done an absolutely terrible
job of making its case. You could blame the
fecklessness of the news media, which has gotten
much wrong. But the truth is that what’s happening
in British politics is what almost always happens,
there and everywhere else: Voters have fairly short
memories, and they judge economic policy not by
long-term results but by recent growth. Over five
years, the coalition’s record looks terrible. But over
the past couple of quarters it looks pretty good, and
that’s what matters politically.
This is the common sense understanding of how
people work that liberals generally (always?)
prefer, that they're basically good but have certain
1811
weaknesses that make them exploitable. He's wed

to it, unfortunately, so that if it was only one quarter
that looked pretty good, he'd of made the exact
same argument. If it wasn't even that ... if there
weren't any promising economic quarters but
conservatives we're dangling goodies of some
kind, like tax cuts, it would be amended slightly, but
he'd in essence argue the same thing: These good
people's weakness isn't their "fairly short
memories," but their "sweet tooths" -- sadly ready
to gobble down anything sweet-sounding given to
them without thought of the long-term. The liberals
role is to press and educate, get the news out, so
that perhaps these instinctive tendencies in the
populace can be abated by forcing them to do
some hard recall, some temporary restraint and
denial ... this too -- thank God! -- they're capable
of.
I think this common sense understanding of people
is wrong, and, other than deMause, the only
person I've heard argue that people actually know
what they're getting when they vote in people that
will ensure hard times, is the conservative historian
John Lukacs. Lukacs had argued that people knew
the kind of world Reagonomics was about to bring,
they weren't fooled or conned or exploited, and that
the people chose it because they knew it was
required to breed character, something Lukacs
1812
believed it did as well (and also David Brooks: his

new book is all about it). To him, it showed
something impressive about them that
they intrinsically preferred a "testing" environment
to one always dispensing "candy."
Lukacs is a very erudite nut, of course. It's de
Mause who's got it right. At certain times, people
vote in politicians who will ensure further suffering
and growth-inhibition, because, without it, they will
feel something worse: complete abandonment by
their mothers, installed as alters in their right
hemispheres.
De Mause would argue the should-be-common-
sense argument that voters actually well-
remembered the five years of suffering, not the two
quarters of economic improvement; and in fact are
maybe about to vote back in conservatives in spite
of the fact of recent economic improvement. In de
Mause's view, the people aren't good but prey to
unfortunate weaknesses, but rather people who
rightly fear the feeling of apocalyptic abandonment
they experience when they know they've still been
enjoying themselves way too much, making life
"selfishly" about themselves, rather than the group
(the mother). In de Mause's view, people aren't
those out of some quaint Irish village that are
maybe prone to drinking too much and forgetting
themselves, but rather those who've seen wicked
1813
terrors and can spot those who'll invite them back

-- i.e true society-advancers -- progressives -- a
mile away. He sees them as more "Grimm," and
rightly.
De Mause says that most children did not have
parents who could be completely enthusiastic
about their children's growth, and tended to punish
them, abandon them, when they focused too much
on their own needs rather than those of their own.
He argues that most children conclude out of this
experience, two things: one, self-attention and
growth is bad, a sin; and two, that being vulnerable
-- what they most felt like before being abandoned
-- is itself a terrible, punishment-worthy crime. This
they learn so hard it changes their brains -- "super
ego" develops ... which to super-ego-almost-never-
saying de Mause, is really
internal perpetrator alters. If you renounce growth,
you're not anywhere near as deserving as
punishment. If the 60s and 70s had just continued
on, it would have driven people mad.
Not you or me, no -- but we were better loved.
Click here to Reply

1814
————————————
May 8
It’s always interesting to see how folks take away or

emphasize different aspects of a particular theorists’
work, especially Lloyd’s. Sometimes it tells us as much
about us as it does the theory. I will always feel
indebted to Lloyd as his writings represent my
awakening to the horrific reality of child abuse and
models of human behavior including object relations
and trauma theory, epigenetics, family dynamics and
large group process. I was inspired by him and the work
of many other psychohistorians. This inspiration was
partly why I went on to work in child welfare in NYC
for most of my career working clinically with
unimaginable forms of individual, family and
community trauma. What I took from psychohistorical
models made me able to see process within a system
that functionally relied on pointing fingers. I must say
that your emphasis on mothering only (“it's the mother
1815
primarily all the way through”), devoid of systemic

and/or group process models or specifically, the
delegation process in Lloyd’s work, will lead folks to
suggest you are mother bashing and in many cases,
blaming the victim. I am not trying to analyze you and
say that you have mommy issues and this is why you are
focused on just this aspect of Lloyd’s work. I have no
place or right to do so. Lloyd has often been criticized
for blaming mothers. The way you present his work
justifies those critiques. I don't want to see his work so
easily written off.
Denis
Denis wrote here that he has "no place or right" to
suggest that I have mommy issues and that this is
why I have ostensibly mischaracterized Lloyd's
contributions. I would have thought otherwise, that
he really did mean to suggest I had mommy issues
and felt he had every place to assert it, considering
he begins by priming us in the traditional way an
adult talks to a child to get them onto something
about them that is awry and telling ... Sometimes it
tells us as much about us as it does the theory. ...
before bringing up the dismissing assignation that
he ostensibly hasn't the least interest in pinning it
on me.
I would suggest that what is happening concerning
deMause is people finding ways, not so much to
keep him relevant to future generations, but to
1816
keep him from beginning rejected by themselves ...

they can't let certain parts of what he says into their
consciousness, because when they begin to do so
they find themselves angry at a man, who, after all,
has given so much to them, for the indefensible
crime of saying most of our mothers were
so unloved they simply re-inflicted the tortures they
themselves suffered upon us -- for the
indefensible crime of showing up our own beloved
mothers.
I would endeavour to invite further rejection
of deMause by pointing out that a fair distillation
of how he thinks is going to look appallingly
woman-hating to anyone who is still seeking to
prove a loyal defender of their own mother's -- i.e.
most men, especially -- reputation, because they're
in the way of progress. I don't want them as
guardians, thank you -- they're more like more like
self-interested counsellors who've taken over, who
don't want anyone to actually meet the man for fear
that some things that need to be kept hid, can no
longer be hid from.
DeMause argues that the whole nature of the
society you are in depends entirely on
the relationship between mother and child. Does it
innovate, does it not innovate, does it war, does it
suppress war, does it torture, does it try not to
torture, does it allow bourgeois happiness, or does
1817
it hate against the thing so much that it genocides

against those deemed most happy and mercantile
-- the whole bit. You want to know about ISIS?
Islamic terrorists? Sorry -- a fair characterization of
deMause has you going straight "there" as well; so
you if you want to be a loyal deMausian
and keep him relevant to headline topics, you're
going to be in the hard spot of doing so while
essentially never referencing him.
I don't think that whatever group models or
systems you propose be referenced, whatever
evasive and neutral terms skillfully used, will shield
you from the fact that underneath it all, to use
deMause fairly, you've got to use the mother-child
dyad as the engine from which everything else
unfurls ... unless what unfurls is blissful and
flattering, you're mom will be onto you -- "You're
saying my beating you is responsible for global
war! You ungrateful jackass!!!" -- and you'll know it
and shy away.
May 8
1818
Correction: "you're mom will be onto you," should

read: your mom will be onto you.
Barney
May 8
Dear Patrick,
My sainted mother used to say: "Do away with
women and you'll do away with war."
She was an objective realist. But she was also a
Canadian.
Barney
Denis O'Keefe
May 8
1819
Patrick,
I smiled reading this. You may be right, at least
unconsciously, I may have been suggesting that
you have mommy issues. I added that comment
after completing the message and, when reading it
over, realized it could be interpreted that I was
saying you have mommy issues, which I can't
possible know, but might have been intuited as the
unconscious does. So to clarify, I meant to
comment on my own biased reading of Lloyd's
work emphasizing what I found helpful in my
clinical work within institutions. Any take on his
work that doesn't include system/group level
phenomenon should rightly be critiqued as mother
bashing, which at that point in our discussion, you
seemed to me to be doing.
Denis
May 8

She didn't watch her language, apparently.
1820
We need more women; just better loved ones. We

don't get there by people who keep mom
sacrosanct but who war against the "whores" (i.e.
socially approved targets of hate, who, if not overtly
female, bear conspicuous feminine and/or maternal
attributes) -- in the end a lot of women get the
battering the revenge-intent boys need to deposit,
and so not just truly poor them! poor mothers! but
also ...whither the next generation of children (I
hope I'm using that word right)?
Barney
May 8
Patrick,
As my friend Sydney Zion used to say: "Trust your
mother, but cut the deck."
Found it to be excellent advice, more than good
even with my mother's mother. She was very tricky
and her tongue was never watched, by her. She
was the most infamous curser in Manitoba (to this
day). My favorite: "You should have all your teeth
pulled out except one. That should be saved for a
terrible toothache."
1821
Yiddish is super good a vivid curses. She was a

virtuosa.
Barney
mfbrttn
May 8
I'm not sure where to add this in: I'm reading the
Anthropology of Childhood by Lancy, second
edition. It is a well-written, comprehensive review
of anthropological research around the world on all
matters related to child-raising, including infanticide
and abandonment. I am finding the detail and the
contextual analysis, so far, a remarkable education
in life around the globe vis a vis children, and
(hopefully not prematurely) recommend it as
relevant to the issues you all are discussing -- not
as tilting one way or another but as supplementing
or complementing the discussion.
Mike Britton
Joel Markowitz
1822
May 8
Some wise woman said that, were there no men,

this would be a peaceful world populated by fat,
happy women.
Joel
May 8
Other recipients: djo212@nyu.edu

I don't really know what you mean by "including
system/group level phenomenon." What I know is
that when you described Lloyd's works, you
provided no sense that what we were dealing with
is the terror and fear of unloved, abandoned
children, and all its eventual consequences for
society. Instead I read something completely
sterile. It got nods, but is this what we are
supposed to emulate? Is this what Lloyd himself
wants? the kind of writing he criticized as
1823
dominating books about the emotion-packed

"landscape" that is human history?
Thanks for explaining what was going on while you
wrote your pointing-out that I too, like Lloyd, am
worthy of being IDed a mother-blamer.
Barney
May 10
Mike,
Fine advice. Will look for it. Thanks.
BC
——————————————
——————————————
1824
May 9
As a mother-hater, my very worst day of the year is

Mother's Day. It's awful: all these people paying
homage to the women we mother-haters hate the
most! So what we've taken to doing is getting
together into a maternal cave, and reading things
we've written that are so dripping in mother-hate,
it's easy for us to imagine it permeating the uterus
cave, going through the body public, and causing
each and every one of them to die off.
A contribution will be made tomorrow by my friend,
Vanessa Vargas-Cooper, who's actually just posted
it at the feminist site Jezebel; it's great, of course,
so if you're a mother-hater too, please feel free to
read: a Toast to all the Brave Kids Who Broke Up
with their Toxic Mothers.
I'll be reading some of the things I've written for the
Clio's History discussion site. I'm just going to pick
a couple at random, as I can't remember a single
one where I wasn't fuming at mothers while I
wrote.
1825
Then, after enjoying a paleo feast made entirely

from ... well, you know, we like to finish the day by
paying homage to the greatest mother-hater of our
age, the psychohistorian Lloyd deMause.
We could just read random parts from his work too,
because every paragraph contains some wisdom
pertaining to our faith. But we often tend to go to
chapter seven of Emotional Life of Nations,
because its one of the juiciest.
What follows is a partial line-up of what we'll be
reading about infanticidal mothers, the worst
mothers of them all! who do all their villainy for no
reason at all other than their being really mean
people who take pleasure in others' misery.
THE INFANTICIDAL MODE OF CHILDREARING
IN NEW GUINEA
I have termed the earliest mode of childrearing the
infanticidal mode
because parents who routinely resolve their
anxieties about taking care of their
children by killing them without remorse also
convey this attitude to their other
children by demonstrating throughout their lives
that their personal existence is not
important to them except as the children satisfy the
needs of the parents.
1826
Although anthropologists commonly excuse

infanticide as required by
"necessity" and don't count it as part of the
homicide rate their informants themselves
report otherwise when asked why they kill their
infants, stating they killed them
because "children are too much trouble," because
the mothers were angry at their
husbands, because they are "demon
children," because the baby "might turn out
to be a sorcerer," "because her husband would go
to another woman" for sex if she
had to nurse the infant, because they didn't want
babies to tie them down in their
sexual liaisons, because it was a female and must
be killed because "they leave you
in a little while" or "they don't stay to look after us
in our old age."
Infanticide by mothers can be thought of as an
early form of post-partum depression. Siblings
commonly watch their mothers kill their siblings
and are sometimes forced to take
part in the murder. In many tribes, the newborn is
"tossed to the sows, who promptly
devour it. The woman then takes one of the farrows
belonging to the sow who first
attacked her baby's corpse and nurses it at her
breast." Pigs, by the way, are
commonly nursed by women at their breasts, then
1827
often used for sacrificial

purposes and discarded thus disproving the notion
that infanticide is made
necessary because of lack of breast milk. Even
when the baby is buried, it is often
found by other children: "the mother...buries it
alive in a shallow hole that the baby's
movements may be seen in the hole as it is
suffocating and panting for breath;
schoolchildren saw the movements of such a dying
baby and wanted to take it out to
save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the
ground and kept her foot on it.
...
Anthropologists often report the infanticidal
actions of New Guinea mothers
without noticing what they are actually doing. As a
typical instance, Willey reports
in his book Assignment New Guinea that a group of
mothers were gathered outside
the police station to protest some government
action, yelling, "Kill our children."
Willey says, "One woman in the front line hurled
her baby at the police, shouting,
"'Go on, kill my child!' When the senior officer
caught it and handed it back to the
mother, she held it up and yelled, 'Kill my
baby.'" Invariably, these mothers are
1828
reported as very loving, not infanticidal.

...
Individuals or groups who murder and eat babies

are in fact severely schizoid
personalities who handle their own rage,
engulfment fears and devouring
emotional demands by either murdering children
to wipe out the demands they
project into them or by eating them in order to act
out their identification with
devouring internal alters. Indeed, anthropologists
are only reflecting their own
denial rather than looking at the evidence when
they conclude that the ubiquitous
infanticide in New Guinea is really a good thing for
children because then "children
are desired and highly valued [because] there is no
such thing as an unwanted
child."
As one step beyond their need to murder children,
infanticidal societies are
commonly found to treat children as erotic objects,
again in a perverse attempt to
deal with their own severe anxieties, repeatedly
sexually abusing them in incest,
pederasty and rape. It is to this sexual use of babies
1829
and older children in New

Guinea that we will now turn.
....
The Sambia, like most New Guinea groups, have
prolonged postpartum
taboos that prohibit couples from engaging in
coitus for at least two and a half years
following the birth of each child. Anthropologists
always portray these postpartum
prohibitions as unexplained "cultural beliefs," as
though there were no personal
motive for them, but in fact they are simply
practices chosen to express the mothers'
desire to use their children rather than their
spouses for sexual arousal. Since a taboo
this long means women choose to have sex with
their children rather than their
husbands for much of their lives, it is obvious that
they are unable to achieve the
level of mature love relationships, and instead, like
other incestuous individuals,
need to have sex with children in order to counter
deep feelings of depression. Like
all infanticidal mothers, New Guinea mothers,
unloved themselves in childhood,
feared as polluted by her society, devoid of
intimacy with her husband, needs her
1830
children rather than loves them.

...
Since Poole was the only New Guinea ethnologist
who interviewed both
mothers and children, he obtained the most
complete reports of maternal incest.
Like infanticidal psychoclass mothers everywhere,
Bimin-Kuskusmin mothers
consider their babies to be part of their own bodies,
"never permitting the infant to be
detached from contact with her body" and
breastfeeding the baby "not only on
demand, but also sometimes by force," whenever
the mother needs the stimulation.
Mothers, Poole says, constantly masturbate the
penes of their baby boys, while trying
not to let their incest get out of hand:
...
No better description can be imagined of the

infanticidal, incestuous mother
using her child as a poison container to handle her
depression: mother wants to
annihilate her inner tormentors, she kills her child;
mother needs sex to counter her
depression and deadness, she masturbates it;
mother is angry or sad, she twists and
1831
hurts his penis.

...
Children are experienced by mothers as extensions
of their bodies, and any
separation or independence is seen as rejection of
the mother, as reminders of the
severe rejection of the mothers' own childhood.
Mothers do not allow others to nurse
their children, saying their milk is "poison," and
even do not allow their one- to twoyear-
olds to visit their relatives for fear they would
"poison" them. When a mother
dies, often the "infant would be buried with her
even if perfectly healthy," and if
the infant dies, "the mother remains secluded with
it for days, wailing, attempting to
nurse it," blaming it by saying "I told you not to die.
But you did not hear me! You
did not listen!" When infants begin to show any
sign of independence, they are
either wholly rejected and ignored or forced to stay
still. Typical is the Wogeo child,
who Hogbin describes as often being "put in a
basket, which is then hung on a
convenient rafter...or tree" and "discouraged from
walking and not allowed to
crawl...[forced to] sit still for hours at a time [and
only] make queer noises" as he or
1832
she is immobilized to avoid even the slightest

movement of independence from the
mother. Anthropologists regularly see these
ubiquitous New Guinea baskets and
net bags in which the infants are trapped and in
which they are often hung on a tree
as "comforting," even though it means that the
infants often live in their own feces
and urine and can neither crawl nor interact with
others. Only Hippler describes
them as a function of the mothers' pattern of "near
absolute neglect" of her child
when it is not being used erotically.
...
This emotional rejection and lack of verbalization
has been widely noted
among infanticidal mode parents in simple
societies. When the baby stops being a
breast-object, it simply doesn't exist. In my New
Guinea childhood files, for instance,
I have over 1,000 photos from books and articles
showing adults and childrenincluding
one book of over 700 photos of Fore children taken
randomly so as to
capture their daily lives. Virtually all the photos
capture the adults continuously
caressing, rubbing, kissfeeding and mouthing the
children's bodies, but only two
1833
show an adult actually looking at the child.

...
So difficult is it for New Guinea area mothers to
relate to their children as
independent human beings that they are unable to
feed them regularly once they are
off the breast. Like contemporary pedophiles, they
do not so much love their children
as need them, so when the parents' needs end, the
child can be emotionally
abandoned. When still on the breast, New Guinea
children are constantly being
force-fed, so that nursing "becomes a battle in
which the mother clutches the child,
shaking it up and down with the nipple forced into
its mouth until it must either
suck or choke." As soon as they are off the breast,
however, the mothers no longer
need them as erotic objects, and they have
difficulty understanding that their
children need three meals a day.
...
Throughout the New Guinea area, children are "not
only turned loose for the
daylight hours but also actively discouraged from
returning to the parents" and so
1834
are forced to join "a transient gang." As is usual in

gangs, the older children "lord it
over" the younger, often beat them and make them
their servants, particularly their
sexual servants, since they were used to constant
sexual stimulation by their parents
as studies have shown, "incestuous children are
uncommonly erotic...easily
aroused...and readily orgasmic." Malinowsky was
one of the first to report sexual
intercourse beginning at age four in the Trobriand
Islands, where "children are
initiated by each other, or sometimes by a slightly
older companion, into the
practices of sex," including oral stimulation,
masturbation, and anal or vaginal
intercourse. Others since then have confirmed the
pattern:
...
New Guinea men fear women as incestuous,
engulfing mothers whose "menstrual blood could
contaminate and kill them." By
raping boys, these pederasts reverse their own
being passively used as erotic objects
and instead actively use the boys sexually. Thus the
boys become sexual objects
devoid of the mother's frightening configurations,
while restaging the maternal rape
1835
of their own infancy. Both the boys and the men

recognize the rape as being like
breast-feeding, rationalizing it as necessary for
growth, telling the little boys, "You all
won't grow by yourselves; if you sleep with the men
you'll become a STRONG
man...when you hold a man's penis, you must put it
inside your mouth-he can give
you semen...It's the same as your mother's breast
milk."
...
The notion that boys must be given semen to stop
them from growing into
females has a certain logic to New Guinea people.
Like all maternally incested
children, they feel that being used sexually by their
mothers "pollutes their blood"
and since the boys consider themselves responsible
for the seduction they feel "full of
women's pollution" and need semen to "get
mother's poison" out of them. Since as
infants they were used erotically by always being
rubbed against the mothers'
bodies, they were intimately familiar with her
menstrual fluids, remaining with her
in the menstrual hut, and so an explicit association
is made between menstrual
1836
fluids and poison

...
The ritual both demonstrates "we are all bleeding,
polluted mothers here" and
tries to undo the feeling of being polluted by
cutting the boys with the razor-sharp
leaves in their nostrils and the cane-sword down
their throats. The boys
understandably "tremble, urinating and defecating
in fear" during their torture. Yet
the feeling of still being incested, polluted maternal
sex-objects remains with them,
since so many continue to bleed their noses,
tongues or penises periodically the rest
of their lives.
There's no doubt about it -- Lloyd hates mothers

more than any of us, which is saying something,
because I've argued in public that the reason for all
our current problems is that we stopped burning
witches. He is beyond redemption, by even the
most wizardly of opponents, who'd have us see
him as actually wretchedly full of love for these vile
beasts!!! This is why he is our god, our protector,
our all. Be with us tomorrow, our one and only ...
we'll need all of your delicious hate to make it
through the day!
1837
Barney
May 9
You know how to make a mother proud.

b
Barney
May 9
Dear Patrick,
I cannot even begin to fathom how sub-moronic it
is to hate anything, much less one’s mother. Surely
you are joking about your “Mommy issues” and in
the best Colbertian tradition, you are simply making
other Mommy haters see how trivial and silly they
are. I think you may be a bit heavy handed, but as
you mature you will deal in a little more delicacy
and it might even be funnier for it.
1838
I do tend to feel a bit flustered and irritated by your

too frequent, in my opinion, use of Lloyd deM as a
schtick.
He does not seem to hate “mothers” so much as to
give them credit for what non-uterus-containing
persons have not given them proper credit for
since 1963.
You might want to keep in mind that Dr. deM
references himself in some of his most grotesque
descriptions of life in the past, and the inevitable
role of mothers in it, and I think you might not count
on him so much in terms of actual versus
fantastical human behavior.
I wonder, in honor of Mother’s Day (a terrific
commercial success), if anybody on the Clio list will
venture to accurately characterize their mother in
25 words or less? A haiku or a limerick is also
acceptable.
b.2.0509
May 9
1839
Je suis Charlie Hebdo.
May 9
Tell us more about how unappreciated the military

is, Barney. It causes a lot of carnage involving
women and children ... is this something we need
more appreciation for?
Last post for a couple of days ... I need to begin
casting my wards.
Brian
May 9
Thank you Barney, this is said more eloquently

1840
than I ever could.

My mother is close to the point of death and I have
written something that will be incorporated into a
memorial booklet. I would like to share the first
three paragraphs. Of course, it is customary to
only say positive things about someone who is
dying or recently died, so this does not and is not
intended to capture my mother’s full humanity. But
in truth, I feel I was lucky to have the person I did
have as a mother, and I don’t think that my
gratitude is evidence of unexamined
psychopathology. Here is what I wrote:
My most fond memories of Mom go back to my
childhood and adolescence, when we lived in a big
house on Worthington Road in the Town of
Greenburgh, New York. We had a four acre estate
that included magnificent trees and landscaping, a
sprawling lawn, and a large pond with ducks. My
dad and uncle owned a Garden Center nearby and
I attended Iona Grammar School and Prep in New
Rochelle. These were my formative years and I
will be eternally grateful for the love and joy I
absorbed from my mother, which nurtured me and
became the best of who I am today.
I remember all the summers when I would go with
Mom after breakfast out to her rock garden next to
the pool. She would bring her mug of tea and a
1841
hand spade to putter in the garden. We merged

with the roses and marigolds, the azaleas and
junipers, the red cedar mulch, and little statues like
the dwarf sitting on a mushroom and the miniature
pagoda. She would pull out little weeds and pinch
off dead flowers and leaves. I will never forget her
liveliness and the immense joy she found in this
garden.
Children, as we all know, learn their deepest
lessons from what they observe, not what they are
told. When I spent those precious moments with
my mother, I learned that life is beautiful, and that
the world is good, and that I am a good too, and
that life is meant to be lived in the present moment
and savored for its beauty. Those experiences and
that lesson became a bedrock of my life, and
through the years have given me an inner
sanctuary, an inner garden that no amount of
cynicism and human destructiveness in the outside
world can take away.
Alice Maher
May 9
1842
I'm very moved by the personal stories shared by

Brian and Ken, and honored that you would be
willing to share them with us. I find your stories
very helpful in understanding, and in motivation to
understand. Thank you.
My mother had a high school education and one of
the highest emotional intelligences of anyone I ever
knew. In this context, this memory stands out.
Once, when I was an adult and she had wrapped
her head around my career choice, my move away
from literal Catholicism, and my embrace of
homosexuality as a non-sinful alternate way of
loving, she said this to me: "You were always the
perfect child. You did everything you were
supposed to do; everything we asked you to do.
But it never seemed like you were FROM us. We
could SEE you, but we couldn't IMAGINE you."
To me, that said it all. It addressed the mother's
longing to imagine her child - even more than the
longing to raise a perfect one - while at the same
time addressing her awareness that that kind of full
understanding of another was impossible. Without
ever reading the analytic literature or being in
therapy, she had intuitively come to accept that her
daughter was a person separate from her, and
share that awareness with me.
She died in 2008, after a long period of Alheimer's
1843
dementia. But even during that time, she was, with

a nod to Julianne Moore, "still Peggy." Her aides
loved her even after she stopped speaking to
them.
Thanks for the question, Barney.
Joel Markowitz
May 9
Alice,
That's terrific! -- "her longing to imagine her child"
etc.-- that entire paragraph !
Joel
Barney
May 10
1844
Dear Brian,
A lovely and poignant remembrance. What is your
mother's name?
Barney
Brian
May 11
Thanks, Barney. My mom’s name is Marion.
May 11
Other recipients: bdagostino@verizon.net

There's an article at Salon, I believe, talking about
how so many Americans make the biggest deal out
of Mother's Day, but then go around and make
sure they elect in governments that are very
1845
conservative on the issue of maternal leave,

providing little to no funding. It's splitting: you
venerate the mother, defend her to death, and tell
all sorts of fond memories of her ... of her endless
patience when you were bad, and then go about
supporting such things as the military, that always
seem so good at targeting civilians targets (read:
mothers and children), and denying the
government the chance to provide resources that
would support the like of single mothers.
I'm sure the original Mother's Day was a feminist
victory; I wouldn't be surprised. But right now it
feels conservative ... All these people fighting to
show how much they love their mothers will find
some bewitching opponent they'll want to suppress
into silence with their masculine fortitude. Watch
how Islam gets portrayed, for
instance. Also deconstructionists in universities.
I'm a socialist; I support theory, deconstructionism
in universities, because it's always the more
progressive students and professors who are with
it; I expect the equal presence of women and men
in all fields; I also believe that there is nothing more
crucial to the future success of our world than
giving every financial resource to parents, to the
community that supports parents -- if I was in
charge, 9/10ths of military funding would
be transferred to parental assistance. But I'm down
1846
on the Mother's Day because it's become but

another imposition of elder veneration that youth
need a complete break from for society to get what
it requires for innovation ... for them, for youth, to
get their deserved lot in life.
When youth move beyond their parents, at some
point, parents get anxious, get angry. It's a sad
thing if they've got their children so under wraps
they ultimately succeed in getting them to half-
venerate the like of Mother's Day just so they get to
continue on in life. We start entering Caliban
territory, then ... all life as an effort to figure out
what will please an always shifting God.
Of course I root for your parents -- for your mothers
-- and for all of you as well. But as I said, down with
Mother's Day. (For those of you who care, my
protective wards succeeded: I'm free
from annihilation for at least another 364 days!)
May 12

1847
He does not seem to hate “mothers” so much as to give

them credit for what non-uterus-containing persons have
not given them proper credit for since 1963.
You might want to keep in mind that Dr. deM references
himself in some of his most grotesque descriptions of
life in the past, and the inevitable role of mothers in it,
and I think you might not count on him so much in
terms of actual versus fantastical human behavior.
DeMause doesn't hate mothers; in his "cosmology,"
there really is no one to hate (not even Germans in
the Nazi era, whose abhorrently awful experiences
in childhood really just have to be explored by
anyone who wants to count themselves as truly
literate) and really only one thing to regret
-- that evolution started homo sapiens off on a very
very poor start. He mentions over and over again
that parents re-inflict the damage they themselves
experienced onto their children -- there is little to no
choice in this. He makes plain, over and over
again, the delusions unloved mothers suffer from
when they "encounter" their children -- they see
them as their own deliberately-abandoning parents,
for example. He argues that children can represent
a woman's chance at individuation and happiness,
which displeases their own unloved and
possessive mothers, and so deny their children to
forestall parental judgement. Etc. But he isn't about
lending credit. Yes, all innovation owes to improved
1848
maternal care between mothers and children. But

also true, is that the foremost perpetrators in
history are mothers as well. The age that lends
credit to women, here-before denied by a
patriarchal society, isn't best understood as about
brave women overcoming bad men, but rather as
about the slow rise of maternal care breeding
children of both sexes that no longer psychically
need for women to be shut down, because the
mother is no longer someone simply terrifying,
someone associated with forestalling psychic rest,
individuation -- life.
DeMause is providing what he argues is the
everyday, the usual sort of actual behaviour of
peoples in the past, and in tribal societies of today.
It's not fantastical, but the real so awful and
exposed it seems as if we've entered the terrain of
Bosch. Pinker did the same thing in Better Angels
of Our Nature -- terrifying, unbelievable, stuff, that
he argues was the norm. Take a peek -- like
deMause, he realizes that in order to persuade one
to his point of view, he has to get one to see people
as living in a psychic-madhouse environment that
seems impossible, given our whole history on how
we've been taught to broach them ... he has to get
you so that when you return to reading history, you
start resisting, start feeling angry, as if you're being
forced to consciously cloud your brain, so it all
1849
begins to seem so tamped down, neutral and

sane.
The problem for progressives who unfortunately
still feel a need to tilt themselves on over to the
side of abuse-apologists, in their unconscious
obfuscations of the actual psychic states and
behaviour of the tribal peoples before them, is that
they've furnished in their careers means by which
they can be wholesale discredited if one is no
longer simply a neanderthal illiberal if you out
yourself as "whiggish" in your view of history ... if
they lose their control of the culture wars. I'm not
sure they think this could happen, but they should
worry that Pinker, who argued that people who
essentially argued his point years ago were ripped
apart by anthropologists for doing so -- even
accused of genocide -- really has not gotten much
flack for his highly publicized book (Zuckerberg
made it his first choice for his Facebook book club).
He presents himself as being massively brazen
and risk-taking, but that would have been him
presenting his book ten years ago, not, apparently,
today. Right now, he's probably just helping unroll a
way of way of seeing things that could prove
ultimately terrible -- an agent of a darker time; a
first advance of a what an age is rolling out, not
himself ... "pas lui meme."
Something is shifting. I suspect what that is, is
1850
people realizing that for our own time to be seen

as frowning sufficiently on youthful rebellion and
innovation, the best of progressives, the best of
people, from just-time-past have to be discredited.
They need to be shuffled off to the side and their
positions taken over by more "sober," more
"serious," academics, who won't in their fanciful
desire to see those outside the Western world as
prettily better than us, essentially put forward
nothing of more worth than a grand swath of sheer
lies. Deconstructionists could be accused of the
same ... just those who tied people into knots and
disabled Western defence against a menacing
world, spared all such self-defeating
entanglements. Theory, which has been lead by
the most progressive people on earth, could be at
risk. Provincialism back into universities, and what
is truly avant-garde, discredited for a generation.
Brian
May 12
1851
Patrick, your presentation of deMause’s ideas

make a positive contribution to this discussion.
However, determinism is no longer tenable, even in
the physical sciences. It is now known (and was
known when deMause was writing, but the
knowledge was still diffusing from the physics
community) that the human body and brain at the
quantum level are chaotic and unpredictable. They
are more predictable at larger time-scales, but still
probabilistic. This is perhaps what we experience
subjectively as free will. Or, to use an emerging
metaphor from cognitive science, we are
programmed by our traumas and culture, but we
can reprogram ourselves and transcend these
defaults through self-reflection, psychotherapy, and
spiritual practices such as meditation.
Here is how I view the human psyche (drawing
largely from Jung). Experience and trauma imprint
themselves on our nervous systems, but even our
initial experience is not entirely a function of
objective reality, but is filtered through our cognitive
perceptual schemas. If someone experiences
inadequate mothering or parenting, the trauma and
neglect is stored in the nervous system as chronic
stress, rage, anxiety, etc. This may be related to
the chronic muscular rigidity described by Wilhelm
Reich. The internalized experience of the parents
becomes part of the self (i.e. “introjects”).
1852
Throughout the lifetime of the individual, the brain

and nervous system retain a large degree of
plasticity and, as mentioned above, at the quantum
level are dynamic and chaotic. Thus the
unconscious of the individual and their total psyche
contain traumatic and other experiences, but these
are continually subject to transformation. Jung
described how recurring archetypes of wholeness,
for example the mandala symbol, periodically
appear in dreams, representing a kind of
spontaneous tendency towards healing and
individuation. If the individual becomes conscious
of this process and begins to attend to the signals
from the unconscious, the transformation of trauma
and development of individuation can be
accelerated.
I don’t think this picture minimizes the damage that
people sustain from inadequate parenting. But it is
consistent with what is known about physical reality
and Lloyd’s determinism is not.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
1853
———————————————
How war really works according to Volkan, in 4 1/2

minutes
Alice Maher
May 12
While we're waiting till after the conference to read

and discuss written material presented by Brian
and Ken, I'd like to invite you to watch my
videographer's very rough preliminary edit of the
25 minute video of my students interviewing Vamik
Volkan. In it he summarizes his theoretical model,
his life's work, and his hope and recommendations
for the future. I'm hoping to figure out a cool way
to end the video and a worthy place to direct the
1854
conversation for people on Facebook and Twitter

who might be intrigued. (I hate "join the
conversation"; other ideas needed.)
I would be grateful if you would take the 4 1/2
minutes to watch it and share your thoughts. It's
presented in simple lines and broad strokes with
much room to quibble over details, but I think if
there's have any hope of intriguing the masses to
think in new ways, this kind of presentation is the
way we need to begin.
https://vimeo.com/126897569
password VOLKAN
Molly Castelloe
May 13
Other recipients: alicelmaher@gmail.com

It's interesting, Alice. He says the same things he
says in the interviews I started videotaping with him
in 2008.
-
1855
Alice Maher
May 13
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: How war really works

according to Volkan, in 4 1/2 minutes
Yes, Molly. I'm looking forward to seeing your film
at the conference! I find it intriguing that the two
women in this group have a powerful reaction to
his work, while the men seem not to respond to it
very much....
May 13

I admit it's a bit too pastelly for me. He seems to
want for everyone to have their space and basic
integrity, which is fine, but where does, say, the
1856
feminist who wants to take more than a poke at frat

bros and their rape culture, fit into all this? Is she
just someone needlessly throwing mud, when she
should have just had a sit-down and engaged in
mutuality?
Barney
May 13
Dear Alice,
I think men, as when they encounter a very homely
woman, must be just naturally more polite than to
comment at all.
Barney
Alice Maher
May 13
Lol get over it and comment! ;)

1857
Sent from my iPhone
Bora
May 13

Hi Alice,
I think this video is a great edit of the full-length
interview you
have on your website. The only comment I have is
about the very last
thing Volkan says in the clip: about there always
being 'people in
each large group who are willing to talk'. This is
such a key
concept, but it doesn't feel 'sticky' enough. I
wonder if it might
work better with a more dynamic track that 'pushes'
forward Volkan's
message at the end. He is very soft-spoken and
measured in his
speaking that I only caught the message on my
second viewing.
Anyway, it's a wonderful video. Thank you so
1858
much for sharing with

us. I always look forward to your posts on the
forum.
Alice Maher
May 13

Hi Bora, thanks so much for your response. It
makes a lot of sense and I'll pass it on to my
videographer. Much appreciated!
Paul, the students who interviewed Volkan were in
9th grade. They took our class starting in 7th.
They don't appear in the short video to protect their
privacy, but all of the questions were theirs. You
can hear them asking those questions in the longer
video.
Next week my 8th grade students are going to do
an exercise based on Volkan's model. They're
going to write about prejudice from the perspective
of their individual identities, and again from the
perspective of their group identities. ("As a black
person, this event makes me think/feel... but as
1859
Michael, I think/feel.... ) The name of our program,

Emotional Imprint, is based on the idea that from a
distance our hands all look alike except for small
differences in size and color, but when you look
closer you see that our fingerprints are totally
unique. In a similar way, each of us is a unique
individual, but in times of stress our "handprints"
rise to the surface and take over from our
"fingerprints," and we react as representatives of
our large group/s.
That's a way that Volkan's model can come alive
and be immediately useful in the present moment.
That's why I like it as much as I do.
I think there's a clear gender distinction in this
group. I see the men as arguing over who has the
longer reference list, while the women are working
to create something and breathe life into it.
Brian
May 14
Alice, when I went click on the link to watch this, I

1860
get a Vimeo screen that asks for a password. Can

you provide us the password?
Alice Maher
May 14
Brian, the password was provided under the link.

It's VOLKAN.
I'm thinking of inviting people on social media to
join a different kind of "conversation" - an arena
where they agree to think about their motivations
for posting and address whether they're posting as
individuals and/or as representatives of a particular
large group. A Facebook friend reframed it in this
way, "to make people think why they think what
they think."
Brian
May 14
1861
Alice, I think the video is very well done. The

technical quality is excellent, and I like the way you
flash the student’s questions on the screen and
keep Volkan as the only talking head, which gives
unity to the piece and keeps the viewer’s attention
on the substance of what is being said.
I think Volkan is doing good work in the area of
“conflict resolution,” for lack of a better term, and
has made some important, original contributions to
the field, especially his concept of chosen
traumas. That said, I also have some critical
feedback. First, what Volkan does is not entirely
original. Other practitioners in this area, such as
Jean Paul Lederach, do comparable work, and
have made their own original contributions. In
saying this, I don’t mean to devalue what Volkan is
doing, just to put it into a broader context. It is a
good thing, not a bad thing, that this field is much
bigger than Volkan, because we need all hands on
deck to turn the tide against violent conflict.
Second, the success of Volkan’s practical work
does not entail that all his beliefs about this work,
much less about broader questions of war and
human nature, are correct. The notion that
humans are warlike because natural selection
made us that way is a controversial and in my mind
very dubious proposition. More on that when we
resume the “war” thread in June. In addition, the
1862
notion that war in general is driven fundamentally

by ethnic divisions and mass psychology is, in my
opinion, AT BEST a misleading oversimplification.
If you want a less misleading simplification, I think
it is that war is an instrument for people who
already have a lot of wealth and power to get
more. This is a fundamentally different model of
war, but one that I think holds up better to
reasoned analysis and the vast body of available
evidence on this topic. Mass psychology plays a
role, but geopolitical considerations, and the role of
powerful special interests in the internal politics of
states are by far the more decisive factors. I have
articulated this viewpoint in considerable detail on
this list and will not elaborate on it further here.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
Behalf Of Brian D'Agostino
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2015 6:10 AM
1863
Subject: RE: [cliospsyche] How war really works

Alice Maher
May 14
Thanks, Brian, I really appreciate this!

I agree with you that Volkan's ideas are simple,
maybe to the point of appearing simplistic, and not
fully accurate. But I'm speaking here as a
representative of my own "large group identity" - a
psychoanalyst who thinks of ways to catalyze
change in a mega and malfunctioning system. In
my day job it's individual people's psychic realities,
and in my other life I try to find ways to catalyze
new insights and changes on a larger scale.
That's why I like his simple ideas and way of
presenting them. I think they will be much more
likely to catch the attention of people roaming
through Facebook or Twitter, and a tiny percentage
of those people could help take it further.
Eventually more nuanced truths would emerge, but
if we begin with debates over research studies
eyes will glaze over immediately. People don't
1864
know how to use disembodied intellectual ideas,

but the potential exists for discovering concrete
ways to make real use of simple metaphors like
his. (That's exactly what I'm doing now,
referencing my own large group identity as a way
of trying to make myself better understood.)
I wouldn't say that your model of war is so
"fundamentally different" from his or mine. As you
say, mass psychology plays a role, but it's not the
only role. As an analogy, I would say that the
psychology of an individual plays a large role in his
or her success at any particular job or partnership,
but the reasons for success or failure must take
many other variables into consideration as well,
such as the type of work, the supervisor, the salary,
the dynamics within the corporation, co-workers,
etc. My emphasis is on the internal
psychodynamic end and that's what I'll continue to
emphasize because it's the "tent" that I live under,
but I'm in no way implying that the other factors
aren't significant in individual and large group
dynamics.
Thanks again for the very helpful comments. :)
——————————————
1865
Paul Elovitz
May 13
Alice, the video is quite nice and effective. How old
were the students Vamik Vollkan was speaking to?
Colleagues who want to know more abour Vamik's
peacemaking work and background should read
the Festschrift for Volkan in the Sept. 2013 Special
Issue of Clio's Psyche on Peacemaking, Trauma,
Veteran Suicide, and War. It is available at
cliospsyche.org/ back issues.
Paul
Paul H. Elovitz, PhD, Historian, Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapist, Professor, Director of the
Psychohistory Forum, and Editor, Clio's Psyche
May 13
1866
Other recipients: Pelovitz@aol.com

Yeah, I'd like to know how the students reacted.
Did they argue? Did they counter -- like Jews were
known for compared to their suppressed German
classmates? Or were they lulled by the palliative
tones to accept the, alas, mournful and chastising
message, that human beings are always going to
have it in them to war?
Alice Maher
May 13
The whole video is on my website,

www.changingourconsciousness.org or
www.emotionalimprint.org. The kids were amazing
but we don't want their faces plastered all over
Facebook and Twitter.

1867
May 13

In the new Avengers film, we are told at the end by
the newly created android, Vision, who is meant to
be seen as offering a dispassionate and accurate
assessment of humanity, that humanity, though
great, is ultimately doomed. Just before he says
this, he makes a joke where he admits "he was just
born yesterday"... but you know that we weren't
meant to be factoring this in when assessing the
accuracy of his ultimate judgment of "man's" fate:
he is simply meant to be understood as wise and
right. He is meant to be an effective counter to
Tony Stark, to Iron Man, who is always arguing that
there exists some means by which we can invent
our way out of troubles -- no, sorry, the inclination
for war and self-destruction is always in man.
Pinker argued the same thing in "Better Angels" --
that we can alleviate our need for war by playing to
our capacity to reason, but parts of our brain will
always be craving it.
Now is any of this truth? Or just our taking pleasure
in making human kind seem still far from perfect --
forever distant from "God's" own perfection --
which provides the sadistic thrill in shrinking the
1868
young's own ambition -- you think you have

unlimited capacity? think again! -- and the thrill in
feeling -- having enthusiastically deflated yourself --
that you're now worthy of love from parental gods,
who would have turned away from you it you just
thrust past them and left them in the dust?
Brian
May 13
Patrick, in a previous post you agreed with my

critique of the “death instinct” but here you seem to
be endorsing the notion of killer genes, which I
think is equivalent. We will be discussing this topic
more fully in June in the war thread, but for now, let
me say this. If evidence counts for anything,
Pinker’s theory is full of holes. Brian Ferguson and
Douglas Fry have shown that he cherry picked his
examples of extant “hunter and gatherer” societies,
misinterpreted the data that he did pick (e.g. every
one of his so called war-deaths among the Ache
and the Hiwi were not committed by members of
these societies but by armed outsiders driving
them off their land, and that his sample was not
typical of the kind of forager cultures that scholars
1869
agree existed during the paleolithic, where the killer

genes supposedly were selected. These criticisms
are devastating and Pinker’s whole analysis rests
on this now thoroughly discredited use of data.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
May 13

I'm not in any way in support of the idea of killer
genes. I'm suggesting people who argue for the
idea like it because it makes human beings seem
limited. I'm not familiar with Ferguson and Fry's
studies, but I might take a look. If Pinker made the
error you're accusing him of, it's quite the story. I
strongly suspect that all evidence will eventually
point to showing hunting and gathering tribes as
1870
constituting those of the worst childrearing and the

most aggressive of "men."
What is at stake with both deMause's and Pinker's
works is nothing less than the discrediting of two
whole disciplines of study (if the past is the
nightmare deMause says it is, and made from
people different from us -- i.e. worse childrearing --
why study it? if tribal societies are fantastically
more warlike, shouldn't the emphasis simply be on
bringing them up to speed?), and I don't think
Pinker, at least, is quite prepared to usher anything
as significant as this about just yet, so we may not
have seen all that will eventually be brought to bear
against those now recuperating hunting and
gathering societies from Pinker's assault. You
yourself have directed us to a study of a particular
pygmy culture. I'm not sure I'll read that either, but
the blurb on the back of the book referencing all
the kissing and touching that was deemed proof of
fatherly love, could just have been their making
their children into mother's breasts -- so more
about incest than love. That is, the opposite.
I've met one of the people who's on the web
disproving Pinker -- Christopher Ryan -- and I
assure you, he's not a healthy guy, and I'd
personally want him far away as the "protector" of
any collection of peoples.
1871
You've got a lot invested in this, and you're a good

person; what develops might unravel you too --
take care.
mfbrttn
May 13
Paul,
I'm not finding Sept 2013 or a Festschrift on Volkan
in the back issues... Maybe I'm not approaching
this correctly?
Mike Britton
——————————
ethnocentrism, anthropology, and child rearing
Brian
1872
May 14
This responds to Patrick’s last post, which raises

larger issues that merit a new thread. First, in
doing psychohistory or social science, we need to
do whatever we can to compensate for our own
cultural or ideological biases and/or our tendency
to project our own unresolved psychological issues
onto others. There is a tendency to assume
narcissistically that other people and other cultures
are like us, where “us” refers both the observer as
a member of a cultural group, and as an individual
with our own unique psychobiography. Western
culture is notably violent and we have a long
history of imagining people in stateless societies as
violent savages; that is, we assume they are like
us, except that we have states to keep us from
killing one another and they don’t have the benefit
of that. While DeMause has attributed human
behavior to childrearing, not genes, his low view of
non-Western, stateless peoples is of a piece with
this cultural bias.
It does not follow from this critique that I am
advocating the opposite, “noble savage” picture of
tribal or hunter-gatherer or prehistoric humans. I
agree with Lloyd that adequate child-rearing is a
1873
highly-developed skill that primates and humans

are not born with, and that inadequate parenting
sets up an intergenerational cycle of abuse that
needs to be overcome through a long process of
development. But at least some societies that
have lived on a tribal level or a prehistoric level of
technology, such as the Aka pygmies, may have
over a span of millennia evolved advanced
childrearing skills and an advanced consciousness
regarding children. To assume that societies that
have not created states and advanced
technologies are primitive in every other respect is
just an ethnocentric bias of our own culture, which
is advanced in some ways and no doubt primitive
in others.
Again, I am not romanticizing hunter and gatherer
societies. I am trying to take a truly empirical
attitude, namely, that each culture is unique and
has its own long and unique history. It is nothing
less than arrogance and bigotry to assume that we
already know what another culture is about
because we are superior and have a universal
theory that accounts for all human variation. In this
respect, the anthropologists have it right. To
characterize another culture adequately, we need
to dispense with our preconceptions as much as
possible and approach the work empirically,
inductively, empathically, and with humility.
1874
To be sure, many anthropologists bring a romantic

bias about pre-modern or non-Western cultures to
their work, and this creates the opposite problem of
selectively overlooking and/or rationalizing abusive
childrearing, neglect, violence etc. Here, deMause
provided a corrective and I stand unequivocally
with him on the need to confront and expose
abusive childrearing subcultures wherever we find
them. But I reject his assumption that non-state
and technologically primitive cultures are
necessarily abusive and that all anthropologists are
romantics who overlook and excuse abuse.
This brings us to the question of Lancy’s
Anthropology of Childhood, which Michael Britton
said he is reading. I agree with Michael that we
need to learn everything we can from such a well-
researched book, but at the same time we need to
have our antennas out for anthropologists who
overlook and rationalize abusing parenting.
Michael, I’m not sure what you meant when you
said that Lancy doesn’t “tilt one way or the other,”
but if that means that in the name of
anthropological impartiality he is unwilling to
confront abuse and advocate for children, then that
would be very problematic.
To be sure, the roles of participant observer and
whistle blower are not in harmony and put
anthropologists in a real bind. In order to earn the
1875
trust of people from other cultures so that they will

reveal what is really going on in the intimate
corners of their lives, they cannot then turn around
and blast them, the way deMause has done, for
their abusive child rearing. To write the kind of
book that Lancy has written with skill and integrity
means presenting these other cultures on their own
terms while still communicating the relevant
information about child abuse, in a subtle but clear
way. It is not necessary to explicitly label abuse as
such, which would mean burning your bridges with
your contacts in those societies. Rather, it is
enough to depict practices that people in those
societies think are OK but which people from more
enlightened child rearing subcultures will recognize
as abuse. Michael, how well do you think Lancy
pulls this off?
Patrick, you said “what develops might unravel you
too.” To what were you referring?
Brian
President
917-628-8253
1876
May 14
I'm saying that the reason Pinker didn't receive

much flack wasn't because he fits our ongoing
prejudices -- as you are arguing -- but rather our
emerging ones. If he had come out with his book
ten years before, I believe he would have put
himself in a dangerous spot -- those calling him
Whiggish, pro-European colonization, pro-Bush
wars, anti-Islam, would have knocked him off his
rocker: Pinker isn't wrong to talk of the power of
the pro-native mafia, or whatever he calls them. I
believe however that more and more liberals are
experiencing growth panic -- that is, are wanting to
distance themselves from points of view that will
keep our world advancing, progressing, endlessly
(not Western expansion, of course, but things like
peace-making and improved care of citizens:
empathy for everyone in the world); are wanting to
distance themselves from people who represent the
most hopeful of "men." So now rather than siding
with fellow academics and intellectuals who would
attack him, decent people, like Frans de Waal and
1877
Edward Herman, Foucault scholars, diaspora

scholars ... anyone who is trying to resuscitate the
world previously dominated by the West, I believe
they've allowed themselves to become part of the
famous quiet majority that ultimately leans
patriotic Right. As these same people make it seem
that Islam or China is "surrounding" us, surpassing
us, and that Western civ. is at risk, they'll use the
like of Pinker's research to feel justified in
expunging all those academics that have ostensibly
just been feeding themselves fat while quieting
everyone else through guilt (Pinker says he isn't
akin to Samuel Huffington, but he does make his
pro-Islamic stance in the book seem conditional ...
on their continuing to "compartmentalize" their
religion; and if this slides, then they become one of
those violent "id" cultures that he clearly believes
the world should show prejudice towards.)
The best of men and women, the kindest, the
most emotionally evolved, will NEVER accept that
hunter and gatherers, tribal peoples, are more
violent, less empathic, less evolved, than the worst
of European conquerers. Doesn't matter the reality
of it. They will never accept that these people don't
have, as Diamond just argued, just as much to
teach us (by which he of course means more) as we
do them. Doesn't matter the reality of it. The
number of people out there who can accept
the truth of this reality but who are not ideologists,
1878
patriots -- those who wish ill on the rest of

mankind -- are very very few. Almost all of them
are right, or, like Pinker, indeed sliding right
(remember, he's for superego control, not the
power of empathy, so he reads a bit like David
Brooks). So it's a terrible thing for the world if
truth ultimately proves victor here. We're going to
see scholars out themselves as more and more
ridiculous, as, after an avalanche of proof is
unveiled in an intellectual environment which has
suddenly switched away from its previous existence
as heavily pro-French theory, heavily left, heartily
cosmopolitan, heavily anti-American parochialism,
they make their stands on the thinnest of reeds,
growing louder and louder as indeed the reed strips
down to bare nothing. It's tough to not sound
ridiculous, grow belligerent and "savage" -- like
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, when lost back into the
jungle -- when all the support that was at your back
is suddenly withdrawn.
The most dangerous thing I've heard from some of
the critics of Pinker is the assumption that we're
being lorded over by a narrow sort of liberalism, of
the patriotic kind Pinker ostensibly partakes of.
Academia is not well described as a place where
other cultures can only be seen as replicas of
ourselves, but rather a place so powerfully if not
predominantly anti-imperialist, anti-right wing
West, it is understandable that many conservative
1879
critics describe it as anti-American and left-

infested. In short, when I read critics like Chetan
Bhatt describing academia this way, I think to
myself ... "you've seen nothing yet: that is, you're
not prepared for how at a loss you'll be when
academia actually goes the full way you're
assessing it to be now." "You haven't been these
last years a hearty warrior battling peer prejudice,
but someone the institution has wanted to put
forward to showcase their cosmopolitanism, their
distance from the American muck. This changes
the moment 'the nation' becomes more
a beleaguered mother-country -- a beloved mother
-- that desperately requires help. This is beginning
to happen now."
I haven't addressed the evidence you referred me to
-- that put forward by, for example, Pederson and
Fry. It strikes me that people are not going to focus
so much on evidence of people living twenty
thousand years ago (I believe they were massively
violent, fiddling with their own childhood traumas
and so much and afraid of growth, they'd didn't
evolve for millenniums, of course -- but I might get
into the nitty-gritty of it). If what they want is to
turf progressives out of the universities, severely
put them on edge, they'll focus on tribal cultures
today -- those we have been made to experience as
lessons to us all; those who so much represent "the
vulnerable," "the innocent"... those who so much
1880
remind us of our own "guilty" vulnerable childhood

selves, who were "rightly" attacked by our mothers
and fathers, we want an excuse to
demonstrate parental loyalty by hurting them bad.
If someone can take a camera and go into any one
of them and show infanticide taking place, in the
upcoming climate, they'll all be done for. Those
saying, "hey, it's not what you think/not as bad as it
looks," will be stampeded down, as like a capitalist
banker when the curtains have been drawn away,
and the populist crowd presses.
May 14

Brian, in the Bookforum article critiquing Better
Angels, Douglas Fry argues that nomadic cultures
are peaceful and profoundly democratic -- equal in
wealth, opportunity and status.
DeMause addresses these ostensibly utopian
cultures and argues that every one of them be
understood as actually full of schizoids, who don't
own anything for fear of being called selfish, who
don't trust anyone enough to allow someone to
1881
function as a leader, who fear change too much to

allow for hoarding and surpluses, etc.
If we have lost our interest in fighting against
Western parochialism, against our own regressive
predecessors, who projected their own demons
onto the other; if collectively we start wanting to
see the West repossessed of grandeur; then I think
a lot is going to depend on exactly how tribal
societies treat their children. We -- that is, yes,
many of us liberals -- will not be interested in
covering up or in looking away, but in finding
reason to no longer give so much a damn about
something that has tainted us with so much guilt --
we'll be looking for reason to dismiss. We may
actually all decide not to see, for example, the
licking and fondling of infants as loving parental
caresses -- as have so many anthropologists -- but
as instead the clear explanation -- incest -- for why
these people remained still all of their lives, why
they never advanced or progressed, why they
stayed tribal.
If we come to this conclusion -- that cultures are
nomadic not because they are onto something
democratic and satisfying, but because terrible
childhoods stopped them from even attempting
something more advanced, then whatever the
evidence or lack of evidence of mass burials,
notches in bones, child sacrifice, in the prehistoric,
1882
will prove sort of beside the point ... We'll dismiss

them not because they were more violent but
because we'll know why they stayed so long so
chillingly the same -- they were all Harlow's
monkeys, who hadn't yet psychically calibrated
themselves enough to even begin the human story.
Trevor Pederson
May 14
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: ethnocentrism,

anthropology, and child rearing
What about being nomadic to follow the food
sources and because of a lack of knowledge of
animal husbandry and agriculture?
What if they were healthier animals and they
needed to go through different eras of slavery to
become the unhealthy animals that we are today?
Brian
1883
May 14
I think Fry is one of many anthropologists who tend

to romanticize the “noble savages” and Pinker and
deMause tend to demonize them. Neither Pinker
nor deMause has done any actual fieldwork and
base their ideas entirely on the secondary
literature. Both of them, as far as I am concerned,
are guilty of cherry picking the evidence to fit their
theories, which is antithetical to real science. At
least anthropologists actually interact with real
representatives from extant “hunter and gatherer”
societies and so they have a feel for the concrete
reality, however much they selectively perceive
what they are predisposed to perceive. Pinker and
DeMause also perceive what they are predisposed
to perceive and in addition are one step removed
from the data and therefore on shakier ground.
Pinker took his highly problematic sample of extant
hunters and gatherers from another non-
anthropologist with a theoretical axe to grind,
Samuel Bowles, an economist. The way these
guys appropriated and misused anthropological
data is embarrassing. Patrick, you tend to engage
in ad hominem arguments, which are also
antithetical to science. Instead of addressing Fry’s
actual critique of Pinker, you dismiss the whole
thing by appealing to Fry’s bias. If we keep doing
1884
that we will not get anywhere, because we all have

biases. I agree with Ken that we need to address
questions of evidence on their own terms and by
engaging in disagreements with people from other
viewpoints, people on both sides can keep one
another honest.
In spite of Pinker’s one-sided picture of violence in
the Paleolithic, I think he has a very nuanced
picture of “human nature” as consisting of both
violent and pro-social tendencies and I think he has
some good insights into the evolution of political
institutions in history. Psychohistorians, or at least
deMausian psychohistorians, go beyond Pinker by
explaining the destructive tendencies as primarily
the result of childhood trauma. In addition, I think
we need to see prehistorical societies as falling
along a spectrum from violent to peaceful,
depending on the ecological circumstances in
which they live. Cultures evolve. Primatologists
have found that even colonies of animals learn and
have rudimentary cultures. If Western civilization
evolved from extremely brutal child rearing modes
to much more enlightened childrearing modes in
less than 2,000 years, how can we assume that
hunting and gathering societies, like the Aka
Pygmies, remained static for even longer periods
of time? This is ethnocentrism at its worst.
Brian
1885

President
917-628-8253
Ralph Fishkin
May 14
Re: [cliospsyche] RE: ethnocentrism,

Well then, Brian, psychohistorians are as reductive
as the others they criticize. What is the evidence
for that ecologically based spectrum? What are
the other factors involved in “destructive
tendencies”? Are we each grinding our favorite
theoretical axes, or are we developing a complex
integrated theory and eliminating hypotheses that
have no basis beyond hunches, and preferred
fantasies? Why is it necessarily ethnocentrism at
its worst for western scientists to assume that
hunting and gathering societies remained static for
long periods, just as Western Societies did?
1886
Oh, and what is objective about “enlightened”?

Didn’t the Germans believe that their rigid child
rearing practices were enlightened? Who comes
forward to say that their own policies are archaic?
Sorry, I’m feeling combative today. Must be mom’s
fault! Or, was it dear old dad?
Ralph
jhsturges
May 14

Brian, I'm just going to throw out there that
your attempt to be "empirical" and
"scientific" reveal a strong cultural bias of
which you may not be aware. :)
------Jim
1887
Howard S
May 14
RE: [cliospsyche] RE: ethnocentrism,

Dear Brian, Ralph, Trevor, Patrick, and everyone in
the Clio'sPsyche community,
Good afternoon from Oklahoma. May I suggest
some readings to help address the theoretical goat
rope? Three anthropologist/psychoanalysts have
studied childhood, parenting, and their relation to
adult life etc. in preliterate societies and are highly
critical of relativism. They are Arthur Hippler, and
L. Bryce Boyer and his wife Ruth M. Boyer. Bryce
Boyer wrote the book Childhood and Folklore: A
Psychoanalytic Study of Apache Personality
(Psychohistory Press, 1979); Ruth Boyer wrote the
book Apache Mothers and Daughters: Four
Generations of a Family (Univ Oklahoma Press,
1992). Arthur Hippler studied the childhoods of
people of many preliterate societies and is
published in numerous journals, and is also critical
of relativism and romanticizing life and childhood in
1888
preliterate societies.
Also to be noted is anthropologist Robert
Edgerton's Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of
Primitive Harmony (Free Press, 1992). Although his
focus in not on childhood, it is a good evidential
critique of cultural relativism.
Warm regards,
Howard
Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;
Interdisciplinary Seminar facilitator, American

Indian Diabetes Prevention Center
(AIDPC)/Adjunct Professor, Department of Health
Promotion Sciences, College of Public Health,
OUHSC, Oklahoma City OK; Research Associate of
the Center for the Study of Organizational Change,
University of Missouri, Columbia
1889
howard-stein@ouhsc.edu
Phone: 405-787-6074
Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied
Anthropology
Home address: 1408 Oakhill Lane, Oklahoma City
OK 73127 USA
________________________________________
Brian
May 15
RE: [cliospsyche] RE: ethnocentrism,

Howard, thanks for the references. Can you
recommend a chapter or article that might serve as
a good focal point for discussion on this list?
Yes, Jim, science is one of my core values. But
some of my best friends are humanists. I even
associate with a few ignoramuses. :-)
Whew, Ralph, I must have hit a raw nerve. Was I
too critical of Western Civilization or not critical
1890
enough? When you say "psychohistorians," which

ones are you talking about? I don't think anyone
has accused Lifton or Erickson of being reductive,
but in my view, deMause is. Do you feel I am
being reductive when I speak of an ecologically
based spectrum? In fact, I had just finished saying
that childrearing is important so in referring to
ecological factors as well I thought that I was being
ANTI-reductive. Culture has multiple sources. The
main ecological variable is the abundance of food
relative to the size of the human population. Some
of the articles in the Fry book I mentioned discuss
evidence that this is correlated with the degree of
violence in cultures.
I think it is rare or non-existent for ANY culture to
remain static. When you say that Western
Societies were static, which ones and at what
times did you have in mind? During the so-called
Dark Ages in Europe, advances in farming
technology laid a foundation for future economic
growth, and the culture of the Germanic tribes was
interacting with Greco-Roman institutions and
cultural forms and with Christianity and Judaism in
complex ways that eventually produced the
distinctive amalgamation of these elements that we
know today as European Civilization.
Western scholars used to think that China and
India were static, but the more they learned about
1891
these societies, the more it became apparent that

this view was erroneous and reflected their own
ethnocentric prejudice. Yes I think "it is necessarily
ethnocentrism at its worst for western scientists to
assume that hunting and gathering societies
remained static for long periods." On what basis
would someone make such an assumption without
actually studying the phenomenon in question?
The anthropologist Eric Wolf said it all in the ironic
title of his book, "Europe and the People Without
History." Anthropologists who actually bother to
study tribal cultures, say those of the Native
American or African peoples, are not so quick to
come to this conclusion. Perhaps some of these
cultures are, in fact, static but that would be an
empirical question, wouldn't it? My guess is that it
would require an unusual degree of ecological
stability, zero population growth, isolation from
outside influences, and other conditions that are
not normally present. Hunters and gatherers have
the same neural machinery that people in
advanced industrial societies have, with the same
vast capacity for learning and creativity. The fact
that they have managed to live in harmony with the
Earth and we have not suggests to me that we
have something to learn from them.
As for child rearing, do you really think that the kind
of child rearing culture prescribed by Benjamin
1892
Spock was not objectively more enlightened than

one characterized by corporal punishment and
sexual abuse? In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller
pointed out that Hitler was severely beaten on a
regular basis and that his speeches resonated with
so many Germans because abusive parenting was
widespread in the country. But his speeches did
not resonate with ALL Germans, and in fact more
of them voted for left political parties than for the
conservatives and the National Socialists. This
suggests that there were different "psychoclasses"
in Germany, deMause's term for subcultures
shaped by different child rearing practices.
The German Social Democratic Party was an
engine of democratic reform in Imperial Germany,
a process that was derailed by complex factors that
go well beyond the mass psychology of ordinary
Germans and that include the Versailles Treaty, the
class and institutional politics of the country, and
geopolitical dynamics of the other European
countries that were shaped by group fantasies of
the elite classes, analyzed by David Beisel in The
Suicidal Embrace. In saying all this, I am making a
critique of psychohistorical reductionism, which has
been one of my mantras on this list. But since I
consider myself a psychohistorian and have good
company with the likes of Lifton, Strozier, and
many others, I don't think it is fair to say that all
1893
psychohistorians are reductive.

Brian
President
917-628-8253
May 15

Patrick, you tend to engage in ad hominem
arguments, which are also antithetical to science.
You provide the distinct impression there's only a
specific way you're prepared to accept the world,
and that science will be a vehicle to it. I'm sure this
is just another ad hominem attack, but it remains
true, and I doubt this is good for science either.
Alice Maher
1894
May 15

Patrick, I agree with you and with Ralph about
Brian. But I think that exactly the same thing can
be said for you, for me, and for each and every one
of us. We all speak from a personal center - a
personal identity and a group "tent." (I'm curious
how Joel's' model of a "group mind" relates here. It
seems similar in some ways and different in
others.)
I think that Volkan's model can be useful,
methodologically, in the here and now, to help us
move forward from the place where we regularly
get stuck. If we realize that we're all speaking from
different centers, respect those individual and
group "tents" and work to understand them, and
refer to them at appropriate times with respect for
our human perspectives and differences, I bet Clio
can move to a new place without regressing to
these kinds of regular, predictable and
unnecessary attacks on our simple humanity.

1895
May 15

Brian, I don't think you'll like the anthropologists
Howard refers us to. They're the ones deMause
uses to make tribal cultures seem "demonic" ... that
is, possessed of such wretched childrearing that
their neural circuitry is actually not at all like ours,
and are so intent on fiddling with childhood
traumas and afraid of losing all parental approval
by actually, like, growing, they remain stuck for
twenty thousand years. Actually, not stuck -- every
two millennium or so they angle their spears
slightly differently. They're the type of
anthropologists who make it seem that it is only
accurate to say they live in harmony with nature,
when you take into consideration that nature is
precisely the entity that gave us red and tooth and
claw for 99.99999% of its existence ... you know,
lizards and everything else, remorselessly eating
one another.

1896
May 15

Alice, two people are talking to one another. One of
them is perspicacious, a good listener, doesn't
project onto the world, and wishes well for the
world -- the product of truly loving parents ...
someone of deMause's helping pscychoclass. The
other is none of these things. We might find it
agreeable to say the former "speaks from a
personal center,"' but the later would be better
typified as dripping goo from some dark tar sand
void of despair. We should want a society where
everyone warrants being seen as "speaking from a
personal center," as possessing that sort of
gravitas ... but some people from god awful family
backgrounds, experiencing extreme forms of
growth panic, simply will want to eat everyone up:
in this situation, it'd be wise not to get in the room
with them at all, but wait until they've sacrificed
a hundred "bad" kids, revenged themselves on a
hundred abandoning mothers, so, sated, are a bit
closer to the fit mental state required for a tete-a-
tete.
1897
Alice Maher
May 15

Patrick, I don't think we can divide people that way,
into the good guys and the bad guys, even if we
soften it by saying that the bad guys must have
had bad mothers. When I said that we all come
from different centers, I wasn't suggesting value
judgments at all. Psychopaths and psychotics
have centers too.
What I was suggesting is that the people here -
you, me, Brian, et al - come from different personal
centers and group "tents," and I think it would help
if we acknowledged that in our Clio
communications.
BTW, in your model, if people are in fact as you
describe, it seems as if the only way to handle the
problem would be to kill them. Are there other
alternatives?
Ken Fuchsman
1898
May 15

When we resume our discussion of warfare after
the IPA Convention is over, Brian has suggested
we look at the 2013 volume War, Peace and
Human Nature, edited by Douglas Fry. Brian says
this is a collection by scholars who find hunter-
gatherers were peaceful.
A 2014 volume, Violence and Warfare Among
Hunter-Gatherers, edited by anthropologists Mark
Allen and Terry Jones, documents extensive
warfare in the Paleolithic. It will be helpful to
explore the evidence in these and other books.
We will have our work cut out for us.
Barney
May 15
"To be sure, the roles of participant observer and

whistle blower are not in harmony and put
1899
anthropologists in a real bind. In order to earn

the trust of people from other cultures so that
they will reveal what is really going on in the
intimate corners of their lives, they cannot then
turn around and blast them, the way deMause has
done, for their abusive child rearing. To write
the kind of book that Lancy has written with skill
and integrity means presenting these other
cultures on their own terms while still
communicating the relevant information about
child abuse, in a subtle but clear way. It is not
necessary to explicitly label abuse as such, which
would mean burning your bridges with your
contacts in those societies. Rather, it is enough
to depict practices that people in those societies
think are OK but which people from more
enlightened child rearing subcultures will
recognize as abuse. Michael, how well do you
think Lancy pulls this off?"
Dear Brian,
A riveting good letter. I've one philosophical issue:
I am at a loss to figure out how the epithet
"whistle blower" in any way has meaning when it
comes to anthropology. Do you mean that
anthropologists are going to witness "other"
cultures doing stuff (mostly sexual, of course,
with some human sacrifice, scarification,
1900
animistic medicine, and corporal punishment on

the side) that might get the tribal members
labeled for all legalists to see as "abusive"?
Must I, as an anthropologist (or as a citizen), see a
man slap his toddler son across the face in a
Manhattan supermarket because the boy is
screaming for his mother, who entirely ignores his
hollering, and either step in personally or call a
cop? Can I whistle-blow on humanity?
To repeat the obvious: mammals punish their
offspring with slaps and spanks and nips and bites
and occasional dustups and fistacuffs, and not all
civilized folks detest incest, and Heaven knows
what all else. Humans are mammals. Most
mammals do not, ever, learn "bad" or "abusive"
child raising practices; a dog mother mothers like
all other mother dogs, and a lot like most
humans; same goes for a cat, a tapir, an
elephant, a goat, a camel, and even the
celebrated bonobos.
Mammalian parenting does not change: only the
human rules regarding child rearing do. It's not
hard to see that the illusion that human
regulations can alter fundamental species
behavior is absurdist.
To the fierce and fanatical "spare the rodders"
1901
and "let them have a childhooders" and "above all

else we have to protect our childreners," and all
the lovely "toxic mothers" and "fey fathers," the
"children" represent a very forlorn and fragile ray
of hope; fear for the "children" is really fear of
their own demonstrated weaknesses and doubts.
How does one convey the idea of child abuse in a
"subtle way"? ["Behind closed doors and only to
the faithful, the barbaric slicing off of a boy
child's foreskin and the subsequent "sterilizing"
sucking of the penile blood by the sanctified
priest cutter is practiced daily, as is clitorectomy
on countless young women. The laws of man and
God casts a blind eye on such acts."] Is that subtle
enough?
I can mention many more ways that almost any
mammalian society/community/tribe behave
toward offspring that zealots may blow a whistle
on, but anthropologists wont. The anthropologists
earn the trust of the people they report on by
carrying in as few preconceptions as possible and
steadily and forcefully continuing to remove the
preconceptions that are still clinging before they
commit thoughts and images for the record.
Unless an anthropologist can successfully do that
cleansing operation, and can continually keep it
up no matter what, there is little hope the
student (anthropologist) will learn anything
1902
important or report anything of significance.

I believe there is no human society so strange to
us (even to those who barely realize other
civilizations exist) that some lazy professor won't
slap a iconograph on them and slot and pigeon
hole them, and make them fit all previous
preconceptions that appear so fluently (and
occasionally fraudulently) in academic references
and footnotes.
The problem is that many on-the-surface travelers
and under-qualified historians are as frustrated by
primitive strangeness as a pickpocket in a nudist
colony. Many are actually embarrassed by direct,
straight-forward, naked looks at real people(s)
who live in parallel times and yet in different
contexts (tents?). These ersatz anthropologists
are the ones who blow the whistles. Scrupulous
anthropologists do not require the people they
observe and report upon to react and respect any
other rules of behavior than the ones that have
kept their genetic tendril alive to this point in
time.
As a side issue:
If I can nominate one of the most overused and
meaningless words in current English, then I pick:
"Abusive."
1903
It can never reach the dizzying heights of numb-

nuttedness that "empower" still occupies, but it's
up there near the throne.
Barney
May 15

Okay, my "tent" is the most emotionally evolved
one.
Stop them from hurting people; heal them; bring
them up to speed so that when we're comparing
"tents," we're comparing structures of truly equal
worth, rather than grand modernist edifices vs.
shanty towns.
Alice Maher
May 15
1904

Be careful, Patrick. "The most emotionally
evolved" sounds like a close cousin of "superior
human beings."
When I was in training as a classical analyst almost
40 years ago (I'm about to celebrate the 40th
anniversary of my med school graduation), they
only accepted people for training who had the
requisite type of "ego strength." I had friends who
committed suicide or moved out of town after being
rejected for analytic training, because the clear
message was that you are defective in such a way
that you have no hope of redemption.
That's the tragic flaw in the field of psychoanalysis
that we've been struggling with ever since.
If you were raised by sucky parents and emerged
as a sucky person, that needs to be honored and
confronted at the same time. If you live in that tent,
then that's where you live.
Barney
May 15
1905
Dear Patrick,
Can you name any two things that are of equal
worth?
Worthiness is among the most ephemeral and self-
indulgent of all concepts, perhaps the least
scientific, and among the most vague. It shares
that contextual niche with "worthless."
Barney.2.051515
P.S. I suppose all have noticed that until the 20th of
May all of the dates are the same backwards and
forwards?
How ominous is that?
B
One must of course always ask, "To whom?"

1906
May 15

Everyone cautions me ... apparently how I say
things will sink the reputations of good minds (note:
I've just made deMause not only a mother-hater
but a bigot, so I'm sure I'll hear from Denis again
shortly), encourage genocide, draw upon me a
crowd of angry mothers, and perhaps draw God to
withdraw from us this pleasant grassy habitat we
call earth! ... And yet I'm more left than Sweden!
It is awful to hear you actually had friends commit
suicide after some jackass (read: massively
unloved person) took pleasure from reducing them
into human jokes, from humiliating them. Whatever
you've heard from me here, believe me, when I'm
face to face with someone suffering from abuse,
what they'll feel foremost from me is respect for
that self that is still sort of there, and that deserved
to have had a chance to flower and surprise us all
-- what a wondrous voice to the human
conversation! Scholars who are keeping whole
peoples to themselves so they can dabble with
what they want to make of them -- do I study? do I
heal? do I protect? do I enshrine? do I use them to
1907
scold others? -- I approach differently. There I

mostly want to remind them that if you were
dealing with a family chained to a cycle of ongoing
child abuse, you're not still going to be sorting
through them to perhaps find harmony on earth;
you're not going to sanctify them by calling them a
culture; you'd only study them on their own terms
to show them you fundamentally want to respect
them, but you'd still effectively be a gate-crasher
whose primary intention is to change them, as
quickly as you can, so that they come into a
different form, vastly improved from their
previous, sickeningly sodden selves.
May 15

Ripe oranges and ripe apples are of equal worth --
both terrific fruits; equally delicious tastes. Two fully
formed minds, spared child abuse, are of equal
worth -- you'll feel their leadership and spirit in all of
their disparate endeavours. I don't know if the
1908
people who created "science" would ever use

science to discount me, but if they did I would
suspect it wasn't the science that made them do it
but a foulness of spirit. A powerfully unloved person
will inevitably grow up into a human monster -- a
society of any worth would appreciate that the
latter incarnation owed to a denial of everything
that should have received in life, so it will protect
them, resuscitate them -- love them -- and
thereafter do what they can so that each and every
human being gets the guaranteed ripe fruit self
they'll all possess, if they get the nurturance they
deserved.
PETSCHAUERPW@appstate.edu
May 15

Fellow psychohistorians...
One of the points the deMause made, and which I
have seen in our academic setting, is that all
people who grow
into abused and abusing households do not turn
into monsters or stay so if they were so at one
1909
point in their lives.

New psychoclasses could not have emerged if
everyone were stuck in the one in which they grew
up. That is, if a
person or persons grow into horrible environments,
or even only moderately unsupportive and unloved
ones, he or
she can see the negative environment for what it is
and change his or her behavior for the better.
I do not want for the whole psychohistorical house
to come down on me, but let me say first it is
possible for
massive numbers of people to "grow out" of war-
time trauma, prison and abuse. We heard of it
here. It is also
possible for massive numbers of warriors to lead a
normal life after having been at a front and killed,
sometimes
with abandon. I spoken to many such men. It is
also possible for children who were abused to see
what terrible
experiences they were for them and say to
themselves, I will do better with my own children. I
heard a
presentation in Heidelberg by a colleague from
Israel who spoke of the traumatic early lives of
three artists, how
that experience influenced their art, and how they
1910
worked that early experience out through it and

became
otherwise "normal" human beings.
So then, my take, we would never have had any
progress as a species toward better childrearing
and more
thoughtful approaches to many givens around us, if
at some points some parents had not reared their
own
children differently than they were reared.
Have a good weekend.
Peter
Peter Petschauer
Prof. Emeritus, Appalachian State University
Author of "In the Face of Evil; The Sustenance of
Traditions"
http://www.peterpetschauer.com
Barney
May 15
1911
Dear Peter,
If it is acceptable to say BRAVO!!!! Then
BRAVO!!!!
Barney
Brian
May 15
Yes, I agree Peter, but want to add that I think

Lloyd was inconsistent on this point. At other times
he talked about people being entirely determined
by their history of experience. What you say
relates to something I posted previously:
From: Brian D'Agostino
[mailto:bdagostino@verizon.net]
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2015 1:04 PM
To: 'cliospsyche@googlegroups.com'
Subject: RE: [cliospsyche] My very worst day of
the year -- Mother's Day
1912

1913

accelerated.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
1914
Howard S
May 16
RE: [cliospsyche] Re: ethnocentrism,

Dear Brian,
Good afternoon from stormy Oklahoma. I haven't
forgotten your request. I suggest the following
paper by Arthur E. Hippler: "The Athabaskans of
Interior Alaska," American Anthropologist 75(5)
1973.
I think that it will advance our discussion of child
rearing and everything else to be as empirically-
minded as possible. Ideology has always stood in
the way of scientific (or any other kind of)
advance.
Warm regards,
Howard
Professor Emeritus
1915

Phone: 405-787-6074
Anthropology
OK 73127 USA
[cliospsyche@googlegroups.com] on behalf of
Brian D'Agostino [bdagostino@verizon.net]
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2015 3:10 PM
Subject: RE: [cliospsyche] Re: ethnocentrism,
Brian
1916
May 16
Thanks, Howard. Ken and I want to discuss after

the IPA conference the extent and nature of
violence in prehistoric societies and have some
more recent articles in mind, but when we’re done
with that discussion, I recommend that we read this
article. Whether or not the article addresses
violence, I think the discussion in this thread raised
its own set of issues and I look forward to reading
something that came to your mind in response to
this discussion.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
Behalf Of Stein, Howard F. (HSC)
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2015 4:59 PM
Cc: Stein, Howard F. (HSC)
1917

Dear Brian,
Good afternoon from stormy Oklahoma. I haven't
forgotten your request. I suggest the following
paper by Arthur E. Hippler: "The Athabaskans of
Interior Alaska," American Anthropologist 75(5)
1973.
I think that it will advance our discussion of child
rearing and everything else to be as empirically-
minded as possible. Ideology has always stood in
the way of scientific (or any other kind of)
advance.
Warm regards,
Howard
Professor Emeritus
1918

Phone: 405-787-6074
Anthropology
OK 73127 USA
[cliospsyche@googlegroups.com] on behalf of
Brian D'Agostino [bdagostino@verizon.net]
Yes, I agree Peter, but want to add that I think
Lloyd was inconsistent on this point. At other times
he talked about people being entirely determined
by their history of experience. What you say
relates to something I posted previously:
From: Brian D'Agostino
[mailto:bdagostino@verizon.net]
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2015 1:04 PM
To: 'cliospsyche@googlegroups.com'
Subject: RE: [cliospsyche] My very worst day of
the year -- Mother's Day
1919

1920

accelerated.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
1921
Behalf Of Barnard Collier
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] Re: ethnocentrism,
Dear Peter,
If it is acceptable to say BRAVO!!!! Then
BRAVO!!!!
Barney
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 2:31 PM,

<PETSCHAUERPW@appstate.edu> wrote:
Fellow psychohistorians...
One of the points the deMause made, and which I
have seen in our academic setting, is that all
people who grow
into abused and abusing households do not turn
into monsters or stay so if they were so at one
point in their lives.
New psychoclasses could not have emerged if
everyone were stuck in the one in which they grew
up. That is, if a
person or persons grow into horrible environments,
1922
or even only moderately unsupportive and unloved

ones, he or
she can see the negative environment for what it is
and change his or her behavior for the better.
I do not want for the whole psychohistorical house
to come down on me, but let me say first it is
possible for
massive numbers of people to "grow out" of war-
time trauma, prison and abuse. We heard of it
here. It is also
possible for massive numbers of warriors to lead a
normal life after having been at a front and killed,
sometimes
with abandon. I spoken to many such men. It is
also possible for children who were abused to see
what terrible
experiences they were for them and say to
themselves, I will do better with my own children. I
heard a
presentation in Heidelberg by a colleague from
Israel who spoke of the traumatic early lives of
three artists, how
that experience influenced their art, and how they
worked that early experience out through it and
became
otherwise "normal" human beings.
So then, my take, we would never have had any
progress as a species toward better childrearing
1923
and more
thoughtful approaches to many givens around us, if
at some points some parents had not reared their
own
children differently than they were reared.
Have a good weekend.
Peter
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1924
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Mark as complete
mfbrttn
May 16
1925
Brian,
To answer your question about the Lancy book: I
am only a few chapters into it -- returned my library
copy and ordered a copy of my own so I can
underline. Still waiting for it to arrive. I am
cautious about giving my impressions so far, as it is
only "so far" into his work.. That said, it appears a
small number of tribes were non-abusive to their
children, while the larger number of societies (apart
from the modern world -- at least of the West) saw
children prior to the age of five as either
economically useful (and put them to use as early
as possible) or as expendable (with high rates of
infanticide and abandonment). He so far relates
the later to ecological conditions and the struggle
to subsist, and gives a number of ways the cultures
who dispose of small children think about infants
(generally relating to their being either unwilling to
really come into this world from the spirit world,
being poised between the spirit world and our own,
or being taken over by an evil spirit who must be
killed). He contrasts what he states is the vast
majority of societies/cultures with our own, stating
that in those other cultures the most important
people are the oldest, with the hierarchy of value
extending down to infants who are least valuable,
while ours inverts this value schema, placing
infants and children at the apex of importance,
ranking other members of society less valuable by
1926
age down to the elderly as the least valued. He

seems to have a bit of a mission to say that our
taken for granted views of childrearing cannot
accurately be projected onto the rest of the world,
as it doesn't fit. Some of the examples that are
given of what people do in getting rid of infants
show brutality, and a question is raised or noted
about the impact of the frequent deaths of children
prior to age 5 on their parents and the capacities of
the parents to bond to children under that age --
but he also suggests that parents can be brutal in
one instance and yet love the surviving children on
the other hand (make of that what you will). I'm not
sure where his argument is going to go, or whether
it actually goes anywhere, as he seems to have
organized the book around stages of childhood
and the variation in practices attendant on those
stages, a kind of reportorial approach to "set the
record straight" as it were regarding what people
actually do. Again, I'm not too happy saying all this
as I haven't read the rest of his work yet, but that's
the impression I get so far.
Michael
——————————————-
1927
The mandala
May 16
Brian said this about the mandala:

Jung described how recurring archetypes of
wholeness, for example the mandala symbol,
periodically appear in dreams, representing a kind
of spontaneous tendency towards healing and
accelerated.
My question is: is the mandala an asshole, or
what? If it really meant us well, wouldn't it be
appearing every night, like a genuinely loving
caregiver, giving us the continuous contact we
need to believe we deserve an individuated life?
Wouldn't it avoid having us mistake the fact that we
deserve to evolve out of traumas and become
more individuated, only because we served so
much penitent time outside its healing influence --
1928
because we've been the good boy or girl, who

spent so much wayward time hurt, lonely, and
frustrated, without complaint? For a lot of Jungian
patients, I bet this describes a lot of their
childhoods ... so the mandala that appears
occasionally ... like the hunter and gather tribe that
is, finally, the discovered oasis of goodness in a
world otherwise full of compromise and blight ...
fills us with so much hope, because it shines on us
the fact of our otherwise bearing so many scars
and wounds.
Brian's example makes the mandala seem like
some core part ourselves, that knew what it was to
deserve better than this, and is trying to make sure
we don't go down; but if the mandala is really a
placenta/vagina .... mother symbol, when we were
with her during the period -- infancy and early
childhood --when we were devoted to her, and so
therefore most fully earned her love, then it might
be one and the same as the vagina dentate that'll
have it with us if make use of the allowance our
forlorn lives have gifted us to go whole-hog in our
individuation and self-development.
That is, if it's just the "us" who earned love
because we were devoted to her, because we
hadn't yet threatened upon her the same
abandonment (which comes automatically in life,
just by the fact of our aging into later childhood and
1929
adolescence) she had received from her own

caregivers, then I'm wondering just how much of
our lives ends up qualifying as the "having strayed"
part of the mandala equation? I wonder how much
individuation and self-development is subsumed
with one's accepting one's role as but a part of a
vastly significant, mystical universe -- the maternal
re-bond? I know I'm making the mandala symbol
sort of fascist, but to deMause both the mandala
and the swastika were vagina or placental symbols
(the swastika is a placenta symbol in Foundations,
but a vagina symbol in Origins, in case anyone's
interested in closely documenting deMause's
changes).
We seem to talk a lot about soldiers who recovered
to live normal lives. I have a problem with this.
There's a huge portion of Americans who aren't
keeping up so well with progressive reforms ... who
may in fact mostly be supporting the idea of gay
marriage because it subsumes yet more people
within a conservative institution/ideal, and so are
for it but virulently against abortion rights, for
instance ... and I suspect that a solid portion of
military personnel count amongst its constituents,
so our constant referral to them is like being a
proud reader who turns so frequently to the like of
hard sci-fi: shouldn't we prefer to avert this kind of
company, rather than seem naturally drawn to it --
1930
why the the attraction to the forlorn warrior?

I like deMause's example of how so many Jews
rebounded after WW2, after genocide, and his
linking it not mostly to excellent support groups but
to the fact that they were, after all, German's best,
most lenient, most tolerant and loving parents --
the most developed psychoclass, which is why
they got targeted in the first place. It suggests,
instead, that our most natural company are the
most loved, not those who may like us seem to
have earned love because we bore wounds and
sacrificed, rather than indulged and "spoiled." If we
tend to gravitate too much that way in our
psychohistorical discussions, how much are we
just using our own wounds to succour for ourselves
more love? How much are we building the case
that those who just keep on "arrogantly"
disrespecting our elders by reforming away all their
regressive societal ways, surely "have it coming?"
—————————————
1931
Clio’s Psyche ›
DeMause the Demonizer
May 16
I've argued that we're in the process of emerging

into an era of intense growth-panic, and our need
to distance ourselves from our own "spoiled,"
"indulging" selves, is why so many prominent
writers are arguing for the same main villain.
Yes .... ISIS, but also -- the hippies. Steven Pinker,
Chris Hedges, and David Brooks, are construing
the 1960s as the most self-indulgent and least self-
sacrificial era ever. According to them, if we want a
better future, we've got to purge ourselves of what
we learned from them (flipping through Brooks
latest work, one of his "heroes of character"
appears to be a self-sacrificing Catholic, who didn't
at all agree with the 60s culture she was living
amongst). If you want a sense of the new emerging
sensibility, developing even in many youngish
liberals (the regressing ones), here's an example
from today ... from a Portland-dweller.
1932
I see them in a different light, of course. What I

love about the 60s is that this wasn't incremental,
modest, change, but wholesale -- youth just took
over: they were quite willing to overturn everything
previously held in reverence, in undue respect, for
what is actually better. When I read deMause, I
don't encounter someone demonizing people; I
encounter instead this 60s voice -- that one that so
grates people because it's unapologetic in its belief
in itself; that takes pleasure when a frowning elder
gets steamed because it's such a joy when you
can be loose-limbed even while planted just before
your monsters! -- the hippie girl daunting a flower
before the pissed-off working class police officer --
and one that is also proudly girding for itself ground
that it has no plans to give up (damn straight!).
DeMause believes that capitalism is some kind of
fantasy solution that tends to the needs born out of
some kind of regressive childrearing that is
beginning to -- with the emergence of some finally
belonging to the helping psychoclass -- pass. He
talks about the military as the same kind of sad but
once necessary fantasy solution for adults born out
of destructive childhoods as well (he says it exists
to rape and kill, I believe, and also as a way of
depleting ourselves of surplus resources that would
otherwise actually improve our lives). He believes
well-loved parents will always nurture children who
1933
are even more emotionally healthy than

themselves, so parents would always be tempering
their assessments of their kids with the knowledge
that what they're doing that grates ... might grate
simply because it belongs in some still unallowed
category of self-attendance that the parent can't
quite dip into as freely as can the child. He's for a
socialist society ... for the hippie, grassroots,
everyone-is-actually-a-special-snowflake, 60s'
culture, that we were once in the process of forging
in an uncompromised, un-pissed-off-parent-
looking-over-our-shoulder-(and-in-an-effective-
way)-the-whole-time way.
Someone may never have pressed him on it, but
it's not just what he writes but also the tone of it
that suggests, that argues, that we shouldn't be
afraid to challenge our whole need to learn about
this nightmare realm, history (I've written about this
before, but if you're a frequent reader of liberal
online sites you'll be noticing how many young
progressives are accusing the teaching of Western
civ. as a kind of assault -- too many rapes! too
many regressive attitudes! -- as too punishing and
insulting to the sensitivities of the youth before
them -- though there's some backlash to this
amongst some others [again, the regressing ones,
in my judgment]).
Concerning anthropology, his tone for me doesn't
1934
lend to demonizing. What it does is empower you,

so that if you're a young progressive who walked
amongst a people and recognized instantly that
you were within a community of ongoing child
abuse (you don't need to win their trust so to gain
entrance to their private lives and so discover it --
there surely are many overt tell-tale signs), you
won't, in a sense, fail the people, limiting your
ability to help, by slipping into some kind of self-
involved state which has you succouring your own
"commendable" modesty ... which has you
projecting onto them so that they're some kind of
fragile "you" that is being picked on by parental
bullies, but rather just do what you'd do if you
encountered a community of child abuse within
your own society. If you have every resource
available to you ... if you're living in some
advanced Scandinavian country which provides
enormous resources to societal nurturance, then
you'd get involved immediately, separate the
children form the adults -- stop further abuse -- and
treat everyone concerned as if they are all
shortchanged human care and love. The whole
history they'd accumulated for themselves, all
their familiar practices, won't concern you much --
it deserves to be completely forgotten as
something built actually out of love has a chance to
develop. If you don't have that, then you temper,
talk trade-offs, be very careful not to invoke closed
1935
doors -- but only then.

I like making this all sound so ... gatecrashing,
because it causes unease amongst those who turn
fretful -- be cautious! be careful! -- when one goes
"too far" in one's presumption, and for me living
rightly these days seems to require my imagining
myself some strong-flung bolt that can attend
calmly to the wind, be poised in consideration of
the clouds, even as it passes through considerable
blocks of obstructions ... but of course this
treatment will be slow, and careful, and done over
a lifetime: no loud noises or elephants in the room
-- but rather many gradual "acclimes," by many
attendant "Alices."
In short, when so many are agreeing that the one
who goes too far one is verging on the devil's turf,
rather than leading on the angels, being "demonic"
is a slurring paint that nevertheless marks you as
one of the actual good guys. Fear the one who
instead makes it seem that when life has forced
them to temper their ambitions, in the end it lead to
wisdom and maturity: this is the making of the
proud provincial, of the true villain, who reborn in
modesty will numb so much potential happiness
and self-development the young, especially, should
have known.
1936
Brian
May 16
Patrick, how can there be a growth panic without

growth? Median wages and benefits in the United
States have been stagnant or declining since the
1970s. Increases in GDP have been benefitting
the minority, especially the top one-tenth of one
percent. While the US is technically in a recovery
and we have low unemployment in theory, in reality
the majority of Americans who would like to have
full time jobs at living wages have either given up
looking for them, are working part time, or are
killing themselves with two or more minimum wage
jobs in order to make ends meet. It is even worse
in Europe, and worse still in the developing world.
What world are you living in?
You can rationalize all this by recasting Lloyd’s
growth panic theory more broadly to be about non-
economic “growth” such as expanding gay rights.
But in that case, let’s be honest about what you’re
doing and let’s acknowledge that the theory as he
originally presented it does not correspond with
economic reality.
1937
P.S. Someone recently reminded us that there is a

three post limit. I would like to reiterate that point.
The list has been quiet today, but that is not
necessarily a bad thing. Silence can be the sound
of people thinking. I love that sound!
Brian
President
917-628-8253
jhsturges
May 16
I have long regarded growth panic as a

swing-and-a-miss by Lloyd. It is a bit too
teleological for my taste.
As part of these misgivings, there is Lloyd's
position that the past was so psychologically
impoverished (infanticidal psychoclass,
etc.); and yet, the ancients produced the
most enduring
1938
literature/philosophy/spiritualism/myth on
the planet. I could never buy into the theory
that they were all trucking along on the level
of BPD, NPD or worse.
I think it was a nice theory; just wrong.
Wrong theories can still be highly useful in
framing a question, as Einstein pointed out
in a succinct little essay about Kepler, and
the way he used what we now think of a
false theory as a stepping stone towards
eventually achieving his sublime 3 Laws of
Planetary Motion.
-------Jim
————————————-
Clio clings to an innocent-- and misled-- focus

1939
Joel Markowitz
May 16
Clio's a real democracy. Every theory gets an

equal vote. No single
theory-- and there are many of them-- is superior to
others.
Yet Clio does TEND to crystallize on ONE range of
opinion.
MOTHER is important to Clio in a big way. Not
FATHER-- who was, in
fact, primary in directing history.
Clio focuses disproportionately on PRE-OEDIPAL
development. In
individuals, that's the boy's stage of development
(groups have been
male thus far in history)-- ONLY BEFORE HE IS
FOUR YEARS OLD AND
OEDIPAL.
-------------------------------------
Clio deals almost exclusively with the nursery and
1940
playground-- where
only mother, really, is important. Not the adult
world. Not
where history is made.
That's why deMause has taken Freud's place as
far as Clio is
concerned. deMause -- and Clio-- focus on child-
abuse. They want
the "good breast"-- the loving mother-- over
the"poisoned breast"--
the hating, abusive mother.
Clio's against child abuse ... Clio believes that
friendly discussion
will solve problems-- a friendly, cooperative, talk
(the innocent
gatherer-scavenger-hunter mindset). Not a
Freudian-based,
psychodynamic understanding of the problems
involved.
And we all agree that child-abuse is bad; and that
mothers should be
loving.
Clio hasn't mentioned Freud for a long time; nor
has Clio REALLY
dealt with Freudian thinking. Instead: deMause
has become a
1941
preoccupation with Clio. deMause greatly

exaggerates Mother's
role in history.
Clio doesn't think in terms of oedipal determinism.
That happens at
ages 4 and later -- the fundamental dynamic
influences of paganism
and history.
--------------------------------------
Contrary to Clio's thinking, children don't run
history. deMause is
wonderful in discussing infant and child rearing.
But I believe that
EVERY ONE of his theories on history is wrong!
Mothering certainly affects the human condition.
E.g., a good mother
tends to give a child confidence. BUT MEN HAVE
RUN HISTORY. Boys
compete with Father during their oedipal
development;l then they grow
up fearing Father; rebelling
against Father; submitting to Father;
identifying with Father ...
Women were severely suppressed. While The
Church insists otherwise,
1942
TENS OF THOUSANDS (according to authorities)

of women were burned as
witches as a warning to millions of women. To
become Stepford
wives-- OR ELSE!
That is: women were forced to accept the
traditional role assigned to
them-- to keep a low profile; to obey their
husbands; to be as
asexual and as pious as possible ...
Men brought up by toxic mothers were usually too
insecure, too busy
trying to simply survive, to become leaders.
Clio's thinking becomes relevant to psychohistory
only when Clio
dares to think in terms of oedipal determinism and
Father-- despite
injunctions against that focus by this Christian Era.
Joel
Alice Maher
May 16
1943
Cheers, Joel! I can't say I understand all your

words, but your "music" is beautiful. I respond to it
more than anyone else's here. I'm reminded of
Einstein's statement that you can't solve a problem
using the same level of thinking that was used to
create it. Your thinking is at a different level of
abstraction. :)
May 16
Other recipients: markowitzjoel@gmail.com

Well, the response from this particular portion of
Clio, is that focusing on the father, even when
complaining angrily about him, is a means of
respite from thinking of the massive titanic power of
our mothers in our early childhoods. One of the few
sexist spots left that sometimes gets a "clear" scan
from progressives, from feminists, is when we
focus on that dastard, the authoritarian father, who
we must focus on and pulverize for a chance of a
truly egalitarian, "hunter and gatherer" utopia! But
1944
the alert espy that this has become just another

enclave where we can superimpose a father-run
land as necessarily our primary focus, rather than
acquiesce to the healing that would lead to us to
feeling uncomfortable, maybe even bored, when
necessity ostensibly requires we focus mostly on
empowered men.
I've read some issues of Clio's Psyche, and there's
quite a bit about the authoritarian (read: father
overlorded) family -- did you miss that? Also, Brian
focuses on the power of the father ... in fact I
believe he gives his mom the clear (no trauma in
her company, I believe) while focusing on his
Republican father (and all that implies). And the
head of Clio -- Paul Elovitz, right? -- summarizes
deMause as someone profoundly influenced by ...
not his overwhelming, abandoning mother, but by
his belt-lashing, terrifying father ... even given
deMause's own insistence that it is only really
appropriate to focus maybe equally on the father
when you're talking "helping", both-parents-
equally-evolved-and-involed, psychoclass -- and
that ain't he.
I do like the way you write, though, some poetry to
your formulations. A splash of an intense
intelligence with vivid observations, but I don't want
so much want to help you prepare your man-cave
den, so a group of mostly men can focus once
1945
again, mostly on "the Man."
Ralph Fishkin
May 16
When I agree with Joel, I think I should say so,

because I have disagreed with him on so many
occasions. I agree that both mothers AND fathers
are important in psychohistory. But that is only a
partial agreement, so don’t get too smug, Joel. I
disagree with you when you merely reverse the
polarity and emphasize father and the oedipal
period at the expense of mothers and the pre-
oedipal developmental period. And, don’t forget,
fathers AND mothers are important in post-oedipal,
oedipal AND pre oedipal development.
I also want to thank Peter for his thoughtful email
earlier. I don’t get all this discussion of Lloyd de
Mause. He was a scattershot theorist who hit the
mark sometimes but who was wildly inconsistent
and contradicted himself. I find political ramblings
based on his writings to be a waste of time, and I
am just deleting them. I thank Brian for his
reminder about the three post per day limit that
most of us are observing.
1946
One more thing, when we get around to deciding

on the readings on war, can links to them be
posted so that they can be accessed more easily?
That would encourage participation.
Ralph
Ken Fuchsman
May 17 (22 hours ago)
Ralph,
Brian and I will post links to the readings on war so
that everyone can have the opportunity to read
them,
Joel Markowitz

1947
Thanks, Alice. I value your support. I'm otherwise

accustomed to
being a voice in the wilderness ...
Joel
-
jhsturges
Joel, I have been thinking of replying to your

posts . . . but maybe now is the time.
First, I will say that I am also a Freud lover.
There is absolutely no substitute for reading
his original works, in my opinion.
To illustrate his effect on me, I was reading
one of his books in bed one night when my
wife looked over and saw tears streaming
down my face. "What's the matter?" she
asked.
"It's Freud," I replied.
"Did he die?" she asked.
1948
"Yes, in 1939," I replied.

My point is that the depth of intrapsychic
insight in his works is so phenomenal that I
developed an almost personal relationship.
There are still times i think of him as my
psychological father (and Melanie Klein as
my mother.)
HOWEVER . . . here is my push-back on the
Oedipus Complex: I believe it became a
right of passage of Freudian psychoanalysts
to enter into shared hypnotic trance with
their teaching analyst and receive the
Oedipus Complex as a posthypnotic
suggestion. Of course, once installed, a
posthypnotic can never be uninstalled. It's in
there forever. (Thank you, father Sigmund,
for revealing the structural workings of the
Ucs.)
I know Freud eschewed classical hypnosis;
but, as we have learned from Milton
Erickson, the whole psychoanalytic
technique (relax, free associate, age regress
etc.) is a hypnotic induction. Moreover, the
transference indicates the induction is
mutual.
1949
And YES, I do have some humility about

giving my opinions on these matters to a
professional in the field . . . but que sera
sera.
Incidentally, I expand my skepticism to
include Freud's whole infantile sexuality
argument . . . but it is natural to have some
disagreements with a parent . . . right? :)
--------Jim
Barney
Dear Jim,
Sublime post. Brought several smiles. Bull's eye. I
went back to read some Freud (in German) and,
alas, not even one tear. On the other hand,
Erickson makes one laugh out loud. A great
psychologist has a great sense of humor.
Barney
Alice Maher
1950
Makes perfect sense, Jim. If you haven't immersed

yourself in a powerful psychoanalytic process from
both sides of the couch, one where you experience
a genuine transference neurosis (unfortunately a
term that we got rid of because the field was too
scared of it), reading Freud can feel profound and
ridiculous at the same time. And you'd be right, it
is. I've experienced one of those processes and
catalyzed maybe a couple more. The rest don't
approach the full depth and intensity of the
dynamic constellation and immensely powerful
change process that Freud led us to imagine.
I suggest reframe the "Oedipus" question in this
way: Why do we love who we love? What are the
forces that lead us to the conviction that this
person fulfills and completes us?
jhsturges

1951
Alice, I am familiar with, and attracted by,

the "fulfill and complete" phraseology to
describe love; but, consider it lacking.
One problem is that it implies a deficiency in
the individual personality, a la the
discoveries of Heinz Kohut in the field of
Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
This would suggest that a person with the
best possible parenting might somehow
have a diminished capacity for love . . . a
thought which I find abhorrent.
For these reasons I think that love must be
placed in the category of the group mind.
The group mind is what completes a
person . . . even one with "perfect"
parenting.
The group mind is, of course, not the natural
purview of the clinical couch . . . but it
should be the focus of psychohistorical
discourse.
--------Jim
Trevor Pederson
1952
Its not a diminished capacity Jim. The person who

has full internalization of the imago has more love,
and for a wider group of objects. The person who
doesn't has more passionate and intense love for
fewer objects, and is more likely to suffer ego
injuries.
Alice Maher
My point in asking the question about love is to get

you thinking about the question in the full depth
and complexity that it deserves, and to point out
that Freud is the person who helped us take the
"music" of unconscious forces and begin to put
"notes on the page" - to imagine forces like sexual
passion and rage, conflict and defense, conscious
and unconscious, subjective and objective,
abstract and concrete, maternal and paternal, the
symbolic and the real, etc, and begin to codify
them, put them into words, and harness those
1953
forces to do the work of insight and conflict

resolution.
His early musical notation was the equivalent of
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with more than a few
sour notes, but he paved the way for symphonies
(also with plenty of sour notes) to be written,
listened to, discussed and internalized. I totally
love him.
Joel Markowitz
Apr 14
Especially since Darwin and Freud, the mindset of

The Church had been losing ground. It welcomes
support from purportedly scientific sources.
1954
Which side does Clio tend to support?

@ The Church's primary role in history has been to
criminalize-- and to force us to repress-- phallic-
pagan (i.e., oedipal) fantasies. That ended
paganism.
As religion was losing credibility, there has been an
increasing acceptance of the roles of oedipal
determinants in our thinking.
Clio often supports the Christian position. Clio
tends to replace the Oedipus Complex with other
types of a boy's issues with his mother.
E.g., Clio tends to replace much Freudian thinking
with deMausian-- and other anti-Freudian thinking.
The Church needs such supports in its anti-
Freudian struggle.
@ The Church insisted that people were not
animals. That they're superior to animals. Clio
also tends to separate us from other animals.
Animals have alpha-male strivings. Young male
animals fight alpha-males to replace them as
alpha-males and to mate with the females.
We all agree that this is normal, healthy behavior;
and that it advances improvements through
natural selection.
1955
Not so with people, Clio seems to insist.

According to Clio -- and religion, peoples' battles
derive from their sinful, evil, greedy natures.
While animals have normal territorial disputes, the
evil natures of humans drive their wars for territory
and other advantages.
Joel
Click here to Reply
Apr 15
Sorry if I was partly responsible for supporting the

idea that humans are evil. I don't believe that at all.
What I was trying to say is that we come to believe
as children that we are evil, bad, spoiled, guilty,
because we feel we must have deserved our
abandonments and punishments from our parents
-- it's a means of keeping them people who were
"right," and therefore people we might even finally
1956
be able to prove ourselves worthy of -- historically,

usually through suffering.
As childrearing improves, as better loved mothers
give even more love to their children, human
beings will simply understand themselves as they
are, which is beautiful -- I don't agree with those
like Steven Pinker that there's no such "Omega
Point" due for the human race; I think this was just
his means of tamping down his own enthusiasms,
so some jealous "god" didn't spot him out and
stomp on him.
-- Patrick
———
Brian
Apr 18
Patrick, I appreciate that you’ve processed what I

said and responded to it, which makes genuine
dialogue possible. I still feel that you are trying to
reduce everything to a single factor, which is a
fundamentally misguided way of thinking about
reality. But at least now we have some basis for a
more meaningful exchange of ideas. I have two
responses to your post.
1957
First, on one occasion I spoke with deMause about

Chodorow’s work and my own empirical findings
about machismo and militarism. Interestingly, he
did not respond as you have by talking about the
quality of mothering but said instead that what
makes males violent is getting beaten and abused
in other ways by their FATHERS. One of the
frustrating things about talking with Lloyd was that
at any given time he would insist that one and only
one causal factor was at issue, but at different
times he himself pointed to different factors. Not
only did he talk about the roles of both the mother
and the father in the etiology of violence, but in
Foundations of Psychohistory he said that war is
caused by perinatal trauma, yet another factor.
In other words, Lloyd has always presented his
ideas as mono-factorial, reductive explanations,
but has been unwilling to commit himself to exactly
which factor is the ultimate explanation or to put all
his disparate theories on the table at the same time
and work out contradictions and figure out how
they all relate to one another as a multi-factorial
theory. Many of Lloyd’s ideas are brilliant but they
cannot all be true in the reductive form in which he
proposed them and taken as a whole they do not
form a coherent conceptual framework for
psychohistory. This leaves unavoidable unfinished
business for anyone today or in the future who
1958
claims to be a deMausian.
Second, at the most fundamental level, deMause
expressed his reductionism as the principle of
“methodological individualism,” which he defined
as the negation of “the holistic fallacy that the
group exists as an entity over and beyond its
individual constituents.” He used the term “group”
broadly to include cultures, societies, and states.
(Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 133-134). In
pitting himself against “the holistic fallacy,” Lloyd
substituted one form of reductionism for another.
For him, holism was the thesis and individualism
was the antithesis, but I would argue that today we
a synthesis, or a dialectical way of viewing systems
as both shaping and shaped by individuals. This is
in fact how many systems theorists and family
therapists, among others, think about the world.
In your comments you seem to acknowledge that a
sex-stereotyped society does violence to
individuals and you then go on to say that the
society is itself is the product of individual
psychology and behavior, as shaped by quality of
child rearing. This is actually close to the
dialectical view I am proposing, but you keep
reverting to the idea that only the individual side of
the dialectic matters. Why can’t you accept the
idea that neither society nor the individual can be
reduced to one another, but are constantly shaping
1959
one another? In the sex role example, we

SIMULTANEOUSLY need to dismantle the social
caste system based on sex stereotyping AND
reform the quality of childrearing. Why can’t we
walk and chew gum at the same time? Or to use
another metaphor, why do we have to choose
between apples and oranges? Does it make
sense to argue whether apples are more important
than oranges, when the ideal scenario is to have
both?
Brian
De Mause is not consistent through his writings. To

his credit -- and to our investigative pleasure -- he
is complex, so much of what may seem
inconsistency is actually just conflation of multiple
different things happening at the same time. But
when he says in Emotional Life of Nations that
wars help purge your femininity, acquired after
unconsciously re-bonding to your mother after too
long a spell of peace and societal growth had
made you feel unworthy and abandoned by her, by
allowing you to form into raping Fatherlands, this is
clearly not the same de Mause we find in his
subsequent work, Origins of War, where, while
there is still plenty of talk of men needing to
restore masculine potency, there is zero talk of
Fatherlands, and instead entirely of the good
1960
mother (the Motherland you bond to) / bad mother

(the "other" you rape) split. In Emotions, he talks
about how phallic father Lyndon Johnson
freed himself of feeling
maternally engulfed/stampeded by attacking
Vietnam, and while in Origins he talks about this
(and Kennedy's need to do the same) as well,
he primarily features Hitler as ... a "perfect
representative of [Germans'] own Killer Mother."
Certain portions of Emotions seems to be effaced if
not exactly contradicted in Origins, that is.
(Explore how he portrays Kennedy's motivations
before his assassination, for another example of
this -- one has him as mostly being hyper
masculine, the other as mostly masochistically
resolved. And Hitler too changes in both
works: Emotions has him as hyper-masculine,
more like how he shows Johnson -- someone with
an erect dick)
Personally, though, I'm not so much bothered by
these, again, maybe not always straight
contradictions but certainly often significantly large
changes in emphasis, for two reasons. One, I often
find refinement, weeding out of theories he once
held as significant but which no longer hold as as
true, and so need to be become fainter. Anyone
who appreciated de Mause for his explorations of a
theory where one needn't think of the particulars of
1961
one's own childhood at all -- the "fetal drama -- will

come to Origins disappointed, and probably angry.
He discusses it; but this work is mostly effective in
eliminating the sense you had in his previous
works that perhaps, just perhaps, the universal
feelings we all share in being de-oxygenated and
strangled in the late stages of our womb
experience, could trump our sense of being
overwhelmed and love-denied ... intentionally, by
our mothers. As I've said elsewhere on this listserv,
in Origins Lloyd is to some extent his own "yeah,
but: someone who seems to be in some agreement
with his younger self, but only to substitute in a
caveat that sort of eliminates the legitimacy of a
portion of his previous arguing. He acknowledges
the relevance of the womb experience, but if you
had a well-loved mother feeding her
healthy emotional state into you, well, you really
don't need to worry so much about that placenta
you'll find yourself wrestling with in late-stages
...There's no way that could possibly lead you to
later desiring war, for instance. Sorry about talking
about that so much previously!
And two, while I think there is less animus
in Origins than in Emotional Life of Nations, I think
it's also in a sense less hyper masculine, less
phallic. The 1920s Moderns beat back the
oppressive Victorian Titanesses by becoming
1962
aggressive, tough, capable of telling terrible (but

honest) truths, and I think this is a bit like how
Lloyd may have more been while writing Emotions.
That is, I think it was his own temporary need
which explained why a more important truth -- how
in wars we're merging back with our mothers -- is a
bit less present in Emotions than is the image of
the angry, empowered, mother-raping father -- the
Phallic Father -- whom we are meant to be
appalled by but are probably at some level, given
Lloyd's pictorial "inducements," excited by. I think it
was empowering his creativity, his animus --
and gave us the creation of his master work.
I think it is possible that when he talks to you,
Brian, of the importance of the father, he might just
have been going against his better knowledge just
to for a moment pretend that the father's influence
on the child can be such that the mother somehow
can feel as if she's been bidden into absentia,
recluse -- hidden away successfully in the
basement. I've mentioned that in Emotions when
he discusses his own experiences it is his own
father and his spankings he tends to focus on, not
so much his own mother's abandonment. But his
emphasis on the primary importance of the mother,
through all his writings, is entirely consistent.
In Origins, by the time you get to his discussions of
the emergence of the patriarchal family and of the
1963
obedience-demanding, tyrannical father, you can't

forget that it's not the spanking father but rather the
depressed, love-craving mother which really
counts; and in Emotions ... well in Emotions you
get this incredible bit:
Sociologists and historians have avoided
looking for the family sources of wars
and social violence. Whenever a group
produces murderers, the mother-
child relationship must be abusive and
neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has
not even begun to be considered in
historical research; just stating that poor
mothering lies behind wars seems
blasphemous. Instead, the grossest sort
of idealizations of historical mothering
proliferate. When, for instance, studies of
the sources of the extreme violence of
the Mafia turn to depictions of Sicilian
mother-child relations they inevitably
come to resemble the happy, loving
families out of "The Godfather.” Yet it is
only when an Italian psychoanalyst,
Silvia di Lorenzo, writes a book on
La Grande Madre Mafia that her
1964
descriptions of typical Sicilian mother-

child interactions begin to give us an
accurate picture of the maternal origins
of Mafia violence:
If a boy of theirs commits a slight fault,
they do not resort to simple blows, but
they pursue him on a public street and
bite him on the face, the ears, and the
arms until they draw blood. In those
moments even a beautiful woman is
transformed in physiognomy,
she becomes purplish-red, with blood-
shot eyes, with gnashing teeth, and
trembling convulsions, and only the
hastening of others, who with difficulty
tear away the victim, put an end to
such savage scenes.
Thus the conditions of early mothering
have profound affects on adult
human violence. It is not surprising that
Ember and Ember found in their cross-
cultural studies that where the mother
sleeps closer to the baby than to the
father and uses the baby as a substitute
spouse--usually sexually--there is more
1965
homicide and war. Every childrearing

practice in history is restaged in adult
political behavior. Children whose
mothers swaddled them and were "not
there" emotionally could not as adults
maintain object consistency and grew up
paranoid, imagining "enemies"
everywhere.
Children whose mothers regularly did not
feed them in a timely fashion
experienced the world as malevolently
withholding. Children whose mothers
rejected them with depressive silence
experienced peaceful international
periods as threatening. Children whose
mothers dominated them and who were
engulfing often choose totalitarian
political leaders. Children whose mothers
were so needy they describe their
children as "born selfish and demanding"
and or who saw them as "angry
since birth" experienced other nations as
demanding too much or as angry "bad
babies."Children whose mothers used
them as antidepressants chose manic,
1966
often violent leaders to counter their

own depression. And mothers who
ridiculed and humiliated their children
whenever their activities didn't coincide
with her own were experienced in the
international sphere as poison
containers of intolerable ridicule and
shame--as in "the shame of Versailles." It
is not surprising, then, that
violent, authoritarian political behavior
has been statistically correlated with
rejecting,punitive parenting.
And further, this:
One of the best defenses against fears of
maternal engulfment is merging with a
Phallic Leader to restore potency. Anzieu
found small groups regularly
searched for a narcissistic, aggressive
leader when they felt that "everything is
crumbling" in the group. Parin found the
Anyi tribe he studied, where the
mothering wasneglectful and incestuous,
produced men who feared being
"poisoned, devoured and castrated by
1967
women" and who chose exceptionally

violent leaders because they felt that
"the preoedipal mother is more
dangerous than the oedipal father," and
merging with a "strong and severe
father" saved them from feeling
castrated. And Blum found that when
nations choose "hypnotic-like surrender
to the leader," they overcome "infantile
helplessness and weakness, childhood
traumata, child abuse and neglect and
feelings of being unloved [through] an
escalation to war [whereby] the sacrifice
of the sons in battle by their oedipal
fathers and a ‘macho' defense
against femininity are powerful
dynamics."
Which is again another rebuff of those who
perhaps want to focus so much on the influence of
the Father so that discussion of the truly terrifying
Mother can be elided.
I've mentioned before my suspicion that when
psychohistorians start talking about multiple
explanations for the course of history, they're not
so much adding depth to lead us to truth as casting
1968
multiple objects into the air to distract our already

informed vision. When Denis O'Keefe writes about
de Mause that "In his attempts to intervene, it
would seem he chose childrearing as the most
actionable cause and he certainly ran with it,
whether it was mom, dad, schools, birth, or the
many of forms of child abuse he wrote about," he's
not only mistaking Lloyd's primary consistency
(yes, its "childhood" at first, but it's the
mother primarily all the way through, guys; even
when it's neurobiology and trauma, it's about how
the mother's encounter with the child determines
the brain -- that pleasure or trauma) while
obliterating his integrity -- Lloyd was apparently
suffering from his own "flight to action" --
but doing his own version of casting objects into
the air. Casting an array of objects into the air, to
blight out "the sun" that thanks to Lloyd we caught
full sight of, but which left us seared and frightened
... to blight out the fact that when we're talking
"childhoods as the actionable cause," we're talking
about ... our own mommies -- Her!
Which "sun"? Which "sun" could sear and blight

that we would cast our eye elsewhere to thereafter
avoid it? It's the one out of Rheingold; the one that
is no where on this listserv and of whom no sense
can be found in O'Keefe's encapsulation of Lloyd's
work. It's the one that would kill us if it sensed
1969
we'd cottoned on to the full impact of her influence.

That is, this lady, of whom, I've believe, you've had
some experiences with, however much you may
not remember in quite this way:
Whether the mother is depressed and
withdrawn or dominating and angry, the
extremely vulnerable baby and young
child fears being killed or abandoned
by her, and this fear of imminent death is
embedded in the brain in a dissociated
alter in its right hemisphere, where it is
unavailable for correction as the child
grows up. Beginning with two path-
breaking psychiatrists writing in the
1970s—Joseph Rheingold (The Mother,
Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic
Death Complex) and Dorothy Bloch (“So
the Witch Won’t Eat Me”: Fantasy and the
Child’s Fear of Infanticide)
psychoanalysts have begun to address
the fact that many of their patients
continue to fear and defend against early
death-dealing Killer Mother alters that
remain in a cut-off dissociated state in
their psyches. Rheingold emphasizes
1970
the child’s terror of being violently killed

by their mother who wishes him dead,
and shows that he concludes that it must
be because he is bad and that “by dying
he appeases her and hopes to gain her
affection.” Rheingold sees this as not
only the source of suicide and other self-
destructive behavior but as the ultimate
source of religion in rebirth fantasies
such as the Christian and Islamic wish to
die and be merged with God/Allah,
shouting “Allahu akbar,” “God is Great,”
the Killer Mother is Great, where
“mother’s love is the prize of death.”
Rheingold reports on Despert’s studies of
the dreams of preschool children, which
are “almost always sadistic
[and] concern being chased, bitten, and
devoured [by beasts, identified with the
mother] never pushed, hit, scratched, or
kicked, all hostile acts that he might
have actually encountered.” Even when
Sylvia Anthony “asked normal children of
2 to 5 years of age to tell a story [of any
kind, they told ones] of aggression, death
1971
and destruction and fears…of wild

animals like lions, wolves, and gorillas, of
ghosts and witches.” Rheingold’s work
backed an earlier statement by Freud
that he found a “surprising, yet regular,
dread of being killed by the mother” in
patients, a clinical finding that he soon
explained away by positing an inherited
“death instinct” rather than destructive
mothering. Since children have little fear
of normal dying of old age, Rheingold
emphasizes that “the child does not fear
to die; he fears being murdered…
thoughts of punishment and death come
readily to the minds of children.” Being
unloved means being killed for being
bad.
Brian
Apr 22
Patrick, it is not possible to have a rational

discussion with you if your response every time
someone disagrees with you is to ignore the
1972
substance of what they say and try to discredit it by

alleging that they are avoiding this or that
unpleasant truth about their own psyche. Imagine
that I say, “Patrick, it seems that you have
psychological problems handling complexity and
ambiguity, and so you cling to a black and white
picture of the world for security.” That wouldn’t
work for you, would it? Would there be any hope
of communicating with someone who kept ignoring
what you say and instead offered an unsolicited
critique of what they imagine to be your
unconscious motivations? Well that is how I feel
when you make the kind of argument that you are
making.
Barney
Apr 22
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Dear Brian,
Why wouldn't that work for Patrick? It's pretty much
on the money and Patrick appreciates clarity and
1973
precision.
It's damned hard for most people to handle
ambiguity and there are some who see the world in
black and white and yet get along with almost
everyone just fine. Patrick is no doubt among
them.
To handle ambiguity with grace may be an
acquired facet of will power. In my experience, one
of the problems of child raising in America is the
idea that ambiguity is a "bad" thing, because right
is right and nothing else is. Studying for tests only
increases such preconceptions. Ambiguity actually
makes some people lose self-control.
To have two or more ideas coming true at the same
time, or being demolished at the same time, is a
sap to most folks' confidence. It need not be. Many
children are taught very, very early that two things
cannot exist in the same space and place at the
same time, which is not true in a quantum world
that actually exists whether we like it or not. But
few are taught that ambiguity has its roots in the
idea of foods and in old France "ambigu" signified
a medley of dishes all served together.
Some people love a smorgasbord; in his heart of
hearts, does Patrick? Do you?
"Would there be any hope of communicating with
1974
someone who kept ignoring what you say and instead

offered an unsolicited critique of what they imagine to
be your unconscious motivations?"
I'd say probably yes. First, you have to figure out what
will cause someone not to ignore you. If you do that,
your unconscious motivations will be entirely irrelevant
because you have achieved your goal and then there's no
time to waste in making the most of whatever you have
to say. In Patrick's case, maybe serve up your ideas one
plate at a time and without a menu so that he can't worry
and complain to invoke the Terrible, Awesome,
Terrorist, Testicle-Tugger Mother to deal harshly with
you.
Barney
Apr 22
You said Lloyd talked to you about the influence of

the father; I responded by saying that he may well
have but his work is grounded in the mother, her
influence. I think this is hard to argue against,
personally, so what now of your conclusion that the
guy was bloody everywhere? Anyway, I didn't
ignore you but took you on.
1975
You already have tried to paint me as someone

who doesn't engage with what you say, while
you're one who thinks things through. My own
experience with you is more of you missing so
many of the interesting things I say, not addressing
them, as if they couldn't be captured within your
schemas and so were erroneous ... you want me to
think they're erroneous. I don't always respond to
everything you write because I don't want to take it
too far into me: women ignoring a mansplainer
might be thought inattentive, difficult to argue with,
but they're really just being properly self-protective:
they're not just being talked to but just as much
administrated, overlaid, directed; to maintain "your"
stance, you have to think of yourself more as a
battering ram going through than someone
cushioningly receptive.
You wrote on this thread that everyone is
agreement with your point of view, that everyone
found their way to you; that what is "reasonable" is
your take. Your take of measuring the impact of
childrearing, grading it on some kind of spectrum,
is, to anyone who understands that in talking about
"childhood as a factor" you're of course going to pit
yourself against your reluctance to admit the
importance of it in your own life, as well as the self-
hate involved in judging your own parents, your
own beloved mother, obviously probably mostly
1976
about dilution -- and as much of it as possible!

-- not fair measurement. You ignore the larger
context we're in, which in my judgment has fallen
away from the taking on mom, which feminists did
aplenty in the 60s, and which Lloyd has so
profoundly done, so to make it seem as if it is
nothing other than rationality involved for childhood
to be removed as single cause. It's not, it's control
-- if we feel like we're tightening in too much we
can always loosen up. The other thing, I'm saying
again, that may be involved, is avoidance of self-
implication: you don't want to be caught out letting
your mom know what she most definitely doesn't
want you to remind her of. To do means never
being her favourite. Being an outcast, and hated.
When people are capable of re-experiencing their
early childhood terrors, the degree to which they're
unloved mothers actually could want to hurt them,
we can trust psychohistorical explorations of the
impact of "childhood" in history. This is what I think.
If we're not there, the most responsible thing is to
help create ground for the kind of courage required
to "get there." This is what I'm trying to do, so
psychohistory ultimately doesn't prove in these
post-Lloyd times to be about obliterating his
respectability, about garnering self-pleasure from
feeling one's own mother's praise, in
your obfuscating or hampering one of her primary
1977
antagonists and opponents.

We don't want to be those another generation just
skips over to get to the valid stuff; the bog of the
1930s that followed the brash, youthful, truly
groundbreaking 1920s. If we pride ourselves that it
meant our being included amongst the rest of the
grownups, our finally being taken seriously by other
disciplines, this too will prove another reason
others will find us kind of sad.
Brian
Apr 22

images from Brian - Always display images in
Clio’s Psyche
I LOVE smorgasbords, Barney. In fact, that is the
perfect segue to the IPA annual conference, which
is nothing if not a smorgasbord. Dear friends, if
you would like to gorge yourself on a table of
tantalizing and variegated psychohistorical food—
all you can eat for three full days—join us on June
3 – 5 at NYU. I promise you won’t put on a single
pound (at least not from the psychohistory that you
ingest). The menu is available at
1978
http://www.psychohistory.us/conference-and-
membership.php (scroll down for the preliminary
program).
People presenting from this list are: Bill Argus,
Herbert Barry, Kristina Blake, Molly Castelloe,
Brian D’Agostino, Paul Elovitz, Ken Fuchsman,
David Lotto, Alice Maher, Trevor Pederson, Burton
Seitler, Jacques Szaluta, and Eddie Taylor. If I
omitted anyone, please speak up. Whether you
can come or not, one great thing you can do for the
cause of psychohistory is to promote the
conference by distributing our flyer or the link to it
(same as the above link) in cyberspace; xeroxing it
and leaving copies and/or posting them wherever
potentially interested people may see them, and
distributing this information to your friends
specifically. Bon appetite!
Brian
Denis O'Keefe
Apr 22

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1979
images in Clio’s Psyche

Patrick,
I did my best to wade through your comments… to
some success, I think. It’s always interesting to
see how folks take away or emphasize different
aspects of a particular theorists’ work, especially
Lloyd’s. Sometimes it tells us as much about us as
it does the theory. I will always feel indebted to
Lloyd as his writings represent my awakening to
the horrific reality of child abuse and models of
human behavior including object relations and
trauma theory, epigenetics, family dynamics and
large group process. I was inspired by him and the
work of many other psychohistorians. This
inspiration was partly why I went on to work in child
welfare in NYC for most of my career working
clinically with unimaginable forms of individual,
family and community trauma. What I took from
psychohistorical models made me able to see
process within a system that functionally relied on
pointing fingers. I must say that your emphasis on
mothering only (“it's the mother primarily all the
way through”), devoid of systemic and/or group
process models or specifically, the delegation
process in Lloyd’s work, will lead folks to suggest
you are mother bashing and in many cases,
blaming the victim. I am not trying to analyze you
and say that you have mommy issues and this is
1980
why you are focused on just this aspect of Lloyd’s

work. I have no place or right to do so. Lloyd has
often been criticized for blaming mothers. The way
you present his work justifies those critiques. I
don't want to see his work so easily written off.
Denis
jhsturges
Apr 22

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Clio’s Psyche
Denis said something similar to what I was
thinking about Patrick's presentation, but I
want to take a stab at it.
Lloyd's "psychogenic pump" may be the crux
of this controversial area. As everyone here
probably knows, that is his assertion that
the mother-daughter relationship is the
optimal leverage point if one wants to
change the course of history. If I recall, it's
not that males don't matter . . . it's just that
1981
the mother-child relationship is so

universal . . . so engulfing in the earliest
months especially . . . and every mother
was once herself a daughter. So if you could
somehow improve the mother-daughter
relationship for several generations, you
would also be improving the males, each of
whom also had a mother. Again, from
Lloyd's perspective mother-daughter is the
point of maximum leverage . . . i.e., the
point where energy or resources devoted to
change would obtain maximum bang for the
buck.
And Denis is quite right to mention that
some feminist women who are interested in
psychohistory consider this "blaming
mothers." I'm sure many of us in the past
have watched these arguments play back
and forth over and over, frustrated that
neither Lloyd and the predominantly male
"motherists" nor the offended women could
ever seem to see the others' point of view.
But, Patrick, I would echo something else
Denis said, in pointing out that Lloyd's
emphasis (at times) on mothers fits within a
much larger context of the body of his work.
1982
For me, for example, the "mother" work

itself is less theoretically significant than his
exploration of Group Fantasies based upon
shared, fetal part-object relationships. I
know that the whole area of fetal psychology
is not everyone's cup of tea; but, for me, it
was a revelation.
Also I would mention that his basic idea of
the significance of psychoclasses -- large
psychological groups defined by their shared
transgenerational childrearing patterns -- is,
for me, a great idea that has stood the test
of time. I'm not saying I necessarily agree
with all his specific classifications, but as a
framework of thought and research, a way
of approaching the differences in societies,
the idea is profound.
Regards,
Jim
Brian
Apr 22
Jim, you raise a number of interesting points and I

1983
want to respond to two of them. First, regarding

the mother-daughter issue, we need to question
the assumption that “mothering” is always and
eternally the task of women and their daughters,
which is indeed a sexist notion. The machismo
factor that I found to be a strong predictor of
militarist attitudes fits Nancy Chodorow’s theory of
gender psychology like a glove. If empirical
research counts for anything, this correlation
between machismo and militarism provides as
much leverage in averting war as changing the
quality of mothering. And Chodorow’s work
suggests that dismantling the gender caste system
is the way to exercise this leverage.
So if deMausians want to communicate effectively
with feminists, there is no better way of advancing
the dialogue than to acknowledge that the gender
caste system is a fundamental reason that humans
are so screwed up at this stage in our evolution
and that psychohistorians are committed to
dismantling this system. Another important book
on this topic is Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid
and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and
Human Malaise. Following Stephen Covey’s
maxim, “Seek first to understand, then to be
understood,” we might then have a better chance
to be heard by feminists and not viewed a blaming
women when we talk about the quality of
1984
mothering.
I have said before and I will say again that
promoting quality of mothering and expanding the
role to males are not competing, zero sum
agendas. In fact, at the level of solutions, they are
the SAME agenda. I am referring to what is
probably the single most important and effective
intervention that we can promote for improving the
quality of child rearing—teaching a course in
humane parenting to high school students. If this
course becomes a mandatory part of the high
school curriculum for both sexes, like algebra or
American history, then this one intervention
SIMULTANEOUSLY attacks the child abuse
problem and the gender caste system problem.
Margaret Kind’s extremely important article
“Changing the World: Teaching Parenting in
Schools” discusses this parenting course; her
article appears in the Summer 2014 issue of
Psychohistory News at:
http://www.psychohistory.us/archive.php
Second, I agree with Patrick that earlier traumas,
other things being equal, are more consequential
than later traumas. However, by this reasoning,
perinatal traumas trump inadequate mothering.
This includes not only the birth trauma itself, but
the common medical practice of separating the
neonate from the mother immediately upon birth
1985
and putting the neonate in isolation into separate

enclosed environment. I don’t know if this is still
done, but it was a common practice in the United
States for decades and the trauma imposed by this
medically imposed separation could not be more
severe. So the reform of birthing and the care of
neonates is arguably at least as important as the
reform of mothering. When I talk about multiple
factors, Patrick hears this as “casting multiple
objects into the air to distract our already informed
vision.” I see it as walking and chewing gum
simultaneously. Or perhaps, walking, chewing gum
and bouncing a ball—all at the same time. The
multi-factorial picture also happens to be true—no
small matter, in my opinion. This is my third and
last post for the day.
Brian
Apr 23
This includes not only the birth trauma itself,

but the common medical practice of separating
the neonate from the mother immediately upon
birth and putting the neonate in isolation into
1986
separate enclosed environment. I don’t know if

this is still done, but it was a common practice
in the United States for decades and the trauma
imposed by this medically imposed separation
could not be more severe.
What we want for a better world is anything that
improves the child's earliest contact with his/her
mother. So reform of traumatizing hospital
practices is going to be a big part of what'll
facilitate it, but the existence of its practice owes, in
my judgment, not to a variety of factors but entirely
to the nature of the current aggregate of medical
professionals' experience with their mothers. If it
was full of abandonments, they'll inflict such upon
others, and consider it professional or good
practice, in their own homes and at the hospital
(how, then, do we get psychoclass evolution? De
Mause answers this and would be a great topic to
further explore but I won't do it here). So how we
solve the problem of traumatized, unloved people
can be handled a variety of ways, but the cause of
it -- at its source -- is the problem of unloved
mothers, now or yesteryear, and the kind of
societies and societal practices this leads to (I
know Lloyd hates the word "society," btw). People
talk about a lot of balls, a lot of factors; and I look
away from my ball to see the ones they've got in
hand; I see just other aspect of the very same ball
1987
I'm already holding; and start wondering if they're

crazy -- one of us is.
If we want to improve our discussion with feminists,
all we need to be are feminists. Feminists tend to
come out of the most loving families, because
feminism is about empowerment -- it'll lead to
richer, more fulfilling lives, which is something that
doesn't emerge out of families where the mother
wanted her children squelched -- all hers, and
when the try and individuate, they're spoiled rotten
for leaving her. People out of better families have a
good read of others' temperaments -- they
recognize their own. So if someone is no-holds-
barred de Mause, if someone talks about his
subjects in the exact unapologetic I do, but like me
reads more women authors than male ones (not
true with older writers, but definitely true with
writers under 40), watches "Girls," speaks against
rape-culture, reads Jezebel on a daily basis, works
mostly with female bosses and admires and
respects them ... if they're someone who evidently
wants no girl or boy shortchanged in life, they pick
up on it. I know this from experience. And while it is
true they don't exactly thereafter dig deep into de
Mause's work, they end up being ... curious.
He's been tabled, most definitely tabled, and might
enter their life when they're a bit more ready to, in
public, explore their still-troubled relationships with
1988
their own mothers, out in the open (it still brings up

a sense of apocalyptic abandonment -- even if in
muted form compared with what children of
unloved mothers experience) ... it remains
something that you're still not so much supposed to
do, makes them uncomfortable to do, and it's just
easier to speak out against the atrocious rape-
culture in society so they don't much go there.
But the fact of how young feminists might actually
encounter de Mause isn't really a factor, if what
really concerns us is how the angry maternal alter
in our heads will react if we don't somehow shut
him up. Are we actually only hearing feedback from
other women? Or do they prompt the scary one
we've got embedded as an alter up there in our
right hemispheres, so we may not even be reading
their own tone all that well?
And one more thing on this subject. If you want a
feminist period, a good one was the 1920s flapper
culture. Women then were right in the faces of their
mothers. They were right in the faces of the god-
awful Victorian matrons they saw as needing to be
banished from the scene for their own
androgynous and playful way of life to be enabled.
Feminists were a bit like this in the 60s too. I used
to read them all the time. You take the same kind of
well-adjusted young women we have today and
give them a period which facilitates their influence,
1989
which works in tandem with their youth rather than

in opposition to it -- try and be young, carefree,
fearless and parent/authority-defying when you're
saddled with 50 000 dollar student loans by age
25!!! -- give them a golden age like what was
experienced in the 20s and 60s, and they'd have
no problem with the guy because he wouldn't just
be read as someone pointing fingers but as
someone giving life to so many rich avenues of
thought! to freedom!!!
Lloyd delightfully clears the way! You read his work
and you really do wonder if history should be read
at all. It's full of god-damn rapes -- do you really
want to be amongst this? How incredibly liberating
to really know this as an option -- you can discard
rather than revere and cow-tow to your parents, is
what it means! You can have a youth-determined
culture, rather than an adult one which scowls at
too much youthful play! And unlike Pinker, who
doesn't want you to trust your youthful impulses,
who wants you schooled down, you feel that de
Mause wants you to do exactly that: fight off the
guilt, the sense of abandonment you experience,
when you start accomplishing things in your life --
continue to enjoy life and accumulate! -- your "id" is
a great thing!; you are a great "thing"! It's your
"superego" that's the rancid bitch!
Great, great stuff! Totally offensive and playful and
1990
liberating! I'm a feminist; I believe in personal

liberation. And I get it!
---
Guys, give me a second to go through all of your
responses. I read through Brian's last one and
James's, and I promise to read the rest. But just
now, one thing occurred to me as I read Denis's
post from a few days ago that I'd like to discuss.
Brian, Denis wrote this about de Mause:
It has always seemed to me that Lloyd’s primary
emphasis on childrearing had a functional aspect
to it regarding his advocacy work for humane
childrearing and the ill effects of child abuse, which
he involved himself in long before it was
fashionable or accepted by the psychological
community and society at large. As you probably
know, the problem with reciprocal causal structures
is that it completely undermines identification of a
first term or cause in the series making it difficult to
develop intervention strategies. The question
becomes, which cause is most actionable? In his
attempts to intervene, it would seem he chose
childrearing as the most actionable cause and he
certainly ran with it, whether it was mom, dad,
schools, birth, or the many of forms of child abuse
he wrote about.
1991
What does this description do to de Mause? What

does saying that his concern to be activist, to
"intervene," determined what he did with his
scholarly work, do to someone's scholarly
reputation? Would any graduate of any Phd
program read this and not find him a bit ...
clownish? A man of good impulses, for sure, but
fundamentally one of ill-reason, not quite to be
trusted? If it became an accepted understanding of
him, wouldn't it further banish him from academia
so that in order to be discovered what'd have to
happen to him is what happened to Jerry Lewis for
him to be resuscitated?: he'd have to finally be
encountered elsewhere where no one had an idea
of all the associations that'd been piled upon him?
What I'm getting at, is that when earlier on this list
Baker (?) said Noam Chomsky was a great activist
but not someone's whose research was exactly to
be trusted, you did what you could so he could be
be spared seeming just some hippie-hippie man of
man of ill-reason that should be patted on the head
for his activist work but brushed away from
consideration within academia. You went on the
attack; you were fierce. But not a word here, alas. I
really hope this isn't because, while you object to
this happening to Chomsky, you don't mind so
much if it happens to Lloyd -- wouldn't it help
psychohistory be accepted by other disciplines if
1992
(mickey) de Mause had his reputation buried

just that extra bit? -- so the damage was done
here, and it got your pass.
Barney
Apr 23
Dear Brian,
I do not understand the fabulous importance
people (particularly researchers and reporters) put
on traumas. It's trauma this and trauma that and
there is trauma from just before death to the
moment that the impetuous sperm first traumatizes
the ovum.
On the other hand, long periods of contentment,
pleasure, delight, enlightenment, and ecstacy are
given miserably short shrift all round, particularly in
uterus. Does anyone ever connect a mother
tenderly and often kissing her baby daughter's toes
with the child's ability at age 30 to fight off and
chase her mugger and purse snatcher through the
mean streets of Lisbon and get her purse back? Of
course not. But how easy would it be to connect a
mugging or a rape to endless and limitless
weaknesses and swoons in future?
1993
Why don't researchers go back and count the 193

days of tranquil subconsciousness of the fetus as a
major factor in the later brilliance of its life? What
about the positive effects of severe trauma. It is
well known (although officially classified by the
DOD) that newborn dog pups who are plunged into
ice water and centrifuged to 4 mach at birth are
mentally far better off and sharper and more
emotionally stable than any ordinary dogs, and are
thus nicknamed "superdogs."
The why of the popularity of trauma queens seems
pretty easy to me: Like most news organizations
and reporters in general, the traumas are mostly
ordinary and very easy to discern without much
work, whereas 175 days or somesuch of pure
peace and womb-like tranquility may seem merely
boring to blunt minds and thus unworthy of serious
notice.
Has anybody kept a clear measure of positive and
active tranquility and what effects it causes upon
the human organism. In fact, it may be learned,
tranquility is far more important to human
development and adaptability than trauma (no
matter how disturbing short of deadly).
It seems to be unknown if anybody has ever
perished as a direct result of prolonged
contentment and tranquility, but if so nobody has
1994
yet reported such an incident.

Barney
P.S. ANYONE WITH A HEART CONNECTED
SOMEHOW TO THEIR BRAIN WILL BE
FOREVER GRATEFUL TO SEE THIS FILM:
"Seymour"
It is about Seymour Bernstein, a grandmaster
pianist, composer, and teacher and resident of the
Upper West Side. Never have I ever witnessed a
better piano teacher or sweeter-souled man. The
film is a project of Ethan Hawke, who is admirable.
If you need a little happy shaking of your head and
a long smile of delight, go see it. If you play the
piano, run to the theater.
b
Brian
May 5
In this post, I reflect on the process in my

exchanges with Ken yesterday. I am not
intimidated by attacks, but neither is proving my
manhood in some kind of constipated and pathetic
1995
mind game a good use of my time. Yesterday I got

drawn into an unpleasant game and I feel like I
wasted a lot of time. It was a Catch 22 for me. If
someone makes apparently sincere scholarly
criticisms of what I say and I don’t respond, then it
appears that there are “scholarly difficulties” with
what I said, in Ken’s immortal words. But if I do
respond, and the person is really playing a game,
then I “get bogged down in nitpicking,
defensiveness, and counterattacks” as Ralph put it.
The difference between authentic criticism and an
attack is a matter of authenticity. Is the person
interested in an authentic, scholarly exchange of
ideas, or are they playing a game? There is no
way to know initially, but if you take their criticisms
seriously and respond sincerely and it is never
good enough for them, it eventually becomes
apparent that they are playing a game. Eric Berne
in Games People Play talked about such
dynamics. In a psychological game, the exchange
is governed by unconscious dynamics, not the
ostensible topic of discussion, such as whether war
began in the Paleolithic or the Neolithic. For
example, in what Berne calls the “Kick Me” game,
a sadist pairs up with a masochist and the game
provides a socially acceptable vehicle for them to
re-enact their needs to abuse and be abused.
For anyone who really values scholarly dialogue,
1996
the dilemma I described above is a serious one. In

an ideal world, I would like to have an authentic
scholarly exchange of ideas with Ken. On this list,
however, it always turns into a game. So in the
future, Ken, make whatever criticisms you want of
what I say. Since I don’t want to play your game, I
will simply not respond. Other members of the list
will need to draw their own conclusions about the
scholarly matters under discussion. If anyone
thinks that Ken makes a criticism that has scholarly
merit and would like to know my response, then
that person will need to restate the criticism and I
will respond to that person.
That said, if Ken wants to reflect on the process
issues I have raised here I am willing to have a
conversation about the process. I have
accordingly started a new thread for purposes of
such meta-discussion.
Brian
Ken Fuchsman
May 5
Brian,
1997
Yesterday, I wrote to you that for this website, it

was inappropriate to attribute motives to someone
else. We are not supposed to make things
personal either in what we say about another or
about our own feelings in relation to them We
have had trouble when this happens. We should
just stick to the subject matter. My own belief is that
when feelings arise, we take things offline.
Today, you say that I am a game player while you
are sincere. You announce to all of us you will
cease interacting with me on this site. You are the
good guy and I am not.
And again you attribute motivation to me. And
again I say to you, this is not the way this website
should work.
For any of us here, before we start making
assessments of another's actions, we need to take
a look at our own motivations.
I regret that you have made this personal and
public.
Not that long ago here, you were criticizing what
David Lotto and I were saying about President
Obama, and said that as a political scientist you
knew more about how politics work than we did. I
had issues with that, wrote you a personal email,
and we worked it out.
1998
Again, my belief is that when we have issues with

someone here, we talk offline, we ought not to
make our feelings about or assessments of another
part of the dialogue here. Why would any of us
choose to announce things to the group rather than
deal with a colleague one on one?
May 5
In this post, I reflect on the process in my

exchanges with Ken yesterday. I am not
intimidated by attacks, but neither is proving my
manhood in some kind of constipated and pathetic
mind game a good use of my time. Yesterday I got
drawn into an unpleasant game and I feel like I
wasted a lot of time. It was a Catch 22 for me. If
someone makes apparently sincere scholarly
criticisms of what I say and I don’t respond, then it
appears that there are “scholarly difficulties” with
what I said, in Ken’s immortal words. But if I do
respond, and the person is really playing a game,
then I “get bogged down in nitpicking,
defensiveness, and counterattacks” as Ralph put
1999
it.
Just fyi, we're beginning to see some of that macho
that probably all trying to avoid in these posts as
well. Gender coding. It is always the man, the
warrior, who gets waylaid off his path, into the
"feminine" milieu of nitpicking, defensiveness, and
counterattacks, which are always a waste of the
warriors time, and regretted later (he's serious). It
is always the female, the witch, who tempts, who's
always mostly interested in seeing just how much
she's got her male subject under wraps. Also,
Ralph, in my judgment, disliked the good stuff -- it
had me eating my popcorn in earnest, riveted as I
was to the screen.
Alice Maher
May 2
Dear friends and colleagues,

With an important election year approaching, the
time is now. It is essential that I pull my vision and
my efforts together in a simple, original mission
statement, rebrand myself and my work, and get
support from at least one Very Important Person - a
2000
person in the media, a celebrity, a journalist, a

philanthropist, a person with a million Twitter
followers. I also need an excellent person to help
me rebrand myself, pull together my 501c3, my
education, mental health and political dialogue
projects, and do it in a way that will catch the
attention of the world.
I know what can and must happen to address our
society's binary, adversarial thinking and gridlock,
and I have a simple way of presenting it. The next
step is validation - the kind that will entice millions
of people to look in my direction.
We live in a world that supports strong arguments.
We live in a world that tolerates attacks on
sincerely held beliefs, and rejection and ridicule of
the people who sincerely believe them. This
MUST, and CAN, change. A new movement is not
only essential, it is possible, and even simple.
Here is my Big Idea. If it makes sense to you,
please help me gain support. If you have
questions or challenges, please ask.
____________________________
The stage for resolution of conflict on a large scale
was set by Dr. Vamik Volkan, the psychoanalyst
who has spent his remarkable career mediating
between large groups on the verge of war. He has
been nominated multiple times for a Nobel Peace
2001
Prize.
Recently my Emotional Imprint 9th grade interns
interviewed him. This is a summary of their
dialogue.
Q: Why do we have war?
Dr. V: It has to do with the development of our
brains. First we fought for simple things like food
and women. Later, as our minds developed, we
put emotions into it so we began to fight for more
abstract ideas like honor and prestige. Only
chimpanzees and humans fight wars in this way.
Q: So it's human nature to fight wars?
Dr. V: It is part of human nature, yes.
Q: How does it happen?
Dr. V: Imagine groups of people living under huge
tents. They paint on them, symbols of things that
happened to their people, things that are
meaningful to them. Leaders as the poles that hold
up the tents. In times of peace our individual
identities are primary and we barely notice the tent,
but in times of crisis our group identities rise to the
surface. When someone throws mud on our tents,
we think "Who are we now?" and war happens.
Q: If it's part of human nature, is it hopeless?
2002
Dr. V: No, because if you talk, you don't kill. You

don't have to like each other and be lovey-dovey,
you just have to talk. It is necessary that both
sides keep their own identities and not expect each
other to think the same way.
Q: But is that really possible? Won't things be
said that can't be taken back?
Dr. V: What happens over time is taming. New
leaders come in, things change, the groups move
on, and war doesn't happen. Not everyone can do
it, but some people can.
_____________________
This is brilliant and valid, but we need to take it one
step further. It's not enough to say that you have to
keep talking until nothing happens, or that only
some people can do it. Young people faced with
immediate situations don't know what to do with
that. We need a new metaphor. We need to
present a new way of "talking" that everyone can
see, use effectively in the present moment, and
demand that our leaders use.
Bodily metaphors are most effective in
psychoanalysis. They will be most effective on a
larger scale too.
Consider the metaphor of "binocular vision."
2003
If you're a right eye, you're wired to see right. You

see what you see in the way that you see it, and
you believe that the landscape in front of you is
real, true, and the way things are and should be. If
you're a left eye there may be considerable overlap
with the right, but the landscape that you see is
different. You see some things that right eyes don't
see, and they see some things that you don't.
If we think about it from this perspective, our
seemingly-intractable conflicts seems simpler to
understand and address. Right eyes sincerely
believe that what they see is real and true, and left
eyes believe the same. They attack each other for
misperceiving reality.
Using this metaphor, a simple solution emerges.
Instead of attacking each other for being wrong,
"right eyes" can learn to understand the perceived
experience of the left, and vice versa, without
actually "owning" that different worldview. If they
focus together on a shared horizon - with one eye
dominant and leading at any particular moment -
their visions will merge and they will see with
clarity, perspective, and depth.
If the masses demand that our leaders
demonstrate this ability, we will have a better
campaign. There will be less acrimony, and the
best, most creative and visionary leader/s will be
2004
permitted to rise to the top.

Our children will begin to understand how
"empathy" - imagining the perspective of the other -
actually works, and they will have the tools and the
enthusiasm to develop ways to use it effectively.
We can do this. I know how, but right now I'm
talking to very few people. If this makes sense to
you, please help me find someone to support me
and help me take this to the mainstream media.
I'm nobody right now, and I need to become
Somebody.
Thank you.
Alice
Ken Fuchsman
May 2
Alice,
In order for you to take things to the next level, you
will need to be better informed on the literature of
war and human killing. Volkan has many virtues,
but the dialogue you print from him above is
uninformed on the anthropology of war. First, war
2005
is not a human universal, and, as such, is difficult

to defend as integral to human nature. Second, as
I have said to you before, just talking does not
prevent war. Volkan's statement is historically
inaccurate. You might read anthropologist
Raymond C. Kelly's "Warless Societies and the
Origin of War", for a start. I also recommend you
read political scientist Jack Levy and William
Thompson's "The Arc of War." In order for you to
get the support you wish to acquire, you will need
to have credibility, and therefore you need greater
knowledge that relates to your mission. You do not
need to be an expert, but it will not help your
cause,if you rely on statements that are factually
questionable.
Alice Maher
May 2
Ken, I sincerely and powerfully disagree. People

are not convinced by "facts," especially ones that
can be easily interpreted from different
perspectives (as is constantly in evidence on this
list). People are convinced by new metaphors that
are easy to see, original, exciting and empowering.
The "hard data" will be filled in, and accepted as
2006
truth, much more easily later.
dr.bobstern
May 2
I think ridicule of sincerely held toxic ideas is under

rated.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
2030896/Klan-buster-Stetson-Kennedy-exposed-
Ku-Klux-Klans-secrets-dies-aged-94.html
Jon Stewart's Daily Show is rather detested by
those whose detestable ideas are so
effectively mocked by him.
There are those who sincerely believe that
dinosaurs walked with men, homosexuality is an
abomination, the Holocaust never happened, etc.
So, what respect is due?
B
Ken Fuchsman
May 2
2007
Alice,
Whether or not people are convinced by
facts, those who are supposed to be accurate and
are not can face consequences. NBCs Brian
Williams did not deal in facts in a number of his
public statements and has been suspended from
his job for being un-factual. And you, Alice, don't
you want to be informed and accurate?
Alice Maher
May 2
Yes I do, Ken. So let me pose the question this

way. If we think in simple lines and broad strokes,
could it not be said that wars are fought using the
parts of our brains that matured over time -
motivations like honor, prestige, identity, money...?
I like his model because mine elaborates on it in a
particular way. If our brains are part of the problem,
they can be part of the solution. Even though we're
not hard-wired to see the world from the
perspective of a "different eye," we're capable of
using our brains to understand that different
2008
perspectives exist.
Ken Fuchsman
May 2
Alice,
Describe to me what you mean by our brains
matured over time. Many writers say that our brain
size was in place when Homo sapiens appeared
200,000 years age. So that our brain was
physically "mature" when our species
emerged. When hunter-gatherers engaged in war,
there was not money. Some anthropologists and
political scientists say that in many instances
during the hunter-gatherer period war increased
when hunting was more prominent, and there was
competition over these resources. It is also not
clear that honor, prestige, and identity were
significant in the egalitarian structures of hunter-
gatherers. I would be reluctant to say that over the
duration of our species that it is accurate to say
that wars have been fought primarily for honor,
prestige, identity, and money.
If being informed and accurate is important to you,
2009
then you need to look at the literature that debates

whether war is part of human nature or not, and
you would then also need to find evidence for and
against Volkan's claim that if you are talking, you
are not fighting. For instance, the Japanese met
with the U. S. to talk things over when they had
already decided to attack Pearl Harbor, and during
Vietnam talks went on for years while fighting
continued. .
Alice Maher
May 2
Ken, I'm not an historian, so any research I do

would not be useful since "many writers" argue
many different perspectives, armed with many
more facts than I'm capable of assimilating at the
age of 63. You yourself refer to "debates" rather
than conclusions about whether war is part of
human nature. If I were to get lost in those
arguments, forward movement would be aborted. I
prefer to stick with what analysts might call an
"inexact interpretation" - one that may not be
entirely accurate but that stimulates new
associations and opens new doors.
2010
Evidence doesn't effect change. Emotional

engagement, fantasy and transference power
does. In analysis, facts are the last piece of the
puzzle, not the first. When they emerge in the right
way, everyone sees the same thing and believes it,
and new truths and realities emerge.
If you talk, you don't kill. That doesn't work in the
world as it presently exists, except in groups of
people that hire Vamik Volkan. That's because we
don't yet have a methodology to harness that force
effectively. We're capable of developing that
methodology.
Alice Maher
May 2
With regard to the idea that our brains matured

over time, I think he's talking in simple lines and
broad strokes about the fact that we have smarter
brains than other creatures, and the complex hard-
wiring, emotions and identities become part of the
dynamics of war. If we have any hope of
communicating across those divides of difference
and identity and personal/cultural/religious needs,
2011
we need a new way to communicate across

divides.
I think of it as analogous to the development of a
new language, like rocket science or computer
science that allows us to bridge formerly
unbridgeable divides.
Alice Maher
May 2
Robert, I hear you, but I've been working with

psychotic people for 40 years and believe me, if
you treat their worldviews as coming from a place
of authenticity and ask them about it in the right
way, they will learn a lot and so will you. I think the
same is true for people who have different religions
and different political perspectives, and different
levels of intellectual and emotional intelligence and
experience. It's hard to imagine seeing the world
through eyes that aren't your own, but I think it's
essential that we begin by slowing down our
impulse to ridicule and attack, even though it may
be funny and fun to do it.
2012
Trevor Pederson
May 2
I personally think that Jon Stewart and the daily

show are doing a lot in ridiculing the Right. It
doesn't seem like they are in a place to debate and
talk about anything. However, new generations of
Republican leadership might end up internalizing
Stewart's mockery while they are still open to wider
influences in their youth.
It makes me think, Alice, whether some
reconciliation in the short-term should be the aim or
whether the goal should be something else with the
understanding that the reconciliation might only
come later.
Also, Ken, I think that there are definitely cultures
in which competition and prestige are undermined
by certain practices. Even in Geertz's study of the
cockfight we can see how practices like using the
same names for people and telling them that they
are merely repeating eternally the practices of the
gods/ancestors will diminish the importance of
them as individuals and defuse prestige from the
individuals who excel.
2013
We can't return to such religious explanations, but

there is something about a good psychological
explanation of our motivations that puts us in a
similar place of merely being avatars of the forces
of the drives.
Trevor
Barney
May 2

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Alice,
It is sometimes forgotten that "war" has historically
been and continues to be the accepted and
expected way of settling unresolved problems
among ARMED human camps ever since some
guy long long ago picked up a stick and used it to
get his point across to a neighbor.
Fisticuffs (despite tonight's fight) do not add up to
war; neither does invective. To commit war, you
2014
and a bunch of others of your ilk must be armed,

as they say, "to the teeth." The more deadly the
arms, the more deadly the war.
Armament makers are born and made in almost
every human society. The biblical equivalent of Colt
made David's slingshot (.90 caliber pebble shot,
tortoise shell handle cover, goatskin sling). The
mere notion of making even a dent in worldwide
"war" without finding a way to neutralize or
eradicate arms makers is delusional, and to my
mind ridiculous, and funny.
Death dealing is the threat of all warriors and no
warrior goes into battle without arms; no, I don't
believe Ghandi, Mandela, and this sort are
warriors. They are unarmed psychologists.
The so-called "right to bear arms" is the way the
American founding fathers described the
philosophical antidote to all the king's men. Arms
makers have been a paramount occupation in
America since before the republic. They still see
themselves as the only means to fight "the king"
(now the U.S. government), and they are natural
allies of people who buy arms and pay armies.
Anthropologically human beings are tool makers,
and if you are mad at somebody for some
disrespect, then you make a tool (an ancient "app")
to arm you and harm the enemy. The use of tools
2015
and the use of "arms" is what is distinctly human

about war and that tool-use ability is entirely
centered in the human brain(s). Tool use is almost
uniquely human. It will not be easily eradicated by
psychology.
What you need to go after with laser-beam focus,
Alice, is the mind of the arms makers. Get to know
and understand how they think, how they operate,
how they conceive of arms strong enough to
tremor the whole Earth. I think you have not even
the tiniest conception of how significant an
insignificant part of the population is in causing and
fighting "major wars."
One reason is that you may be forgetting the most
important meaning of the word war: it is rooted in
the concept of orderliness and the chaos of what
happens when the rules are all tossed and, truly,
anything goes. War is the armed absence of rules
of conduct. In that sense, Dick Cheney is entirely
right, I believe. There is no crime in even the
foulest torture because in wars, torture is normal
and not to torture is the exception (as per George
Washington). Cheney is a damned realist.
So you have to consider those who devise newer
and better death dealers and those who market
them and those who finance them as an emperor's
court that includes the most educated and
2016
intelligent men and women ever born. It is

significant that Albert Einstein is the true father of
the "atomic bomb" despite what his admirers may
argue, and some of the most intelligent scientists
ever collected together pooled their brainpower to
make the bomb project the dubious success that it
was.
This musing is not a way of distracting you from the
pursuit of mistaken notions. It is to ask that you
turn your attention to the factors which, if removed,
might disable the long-term functioning of "the war
machine." Perhaps there is a modern way of
turning the gun and bomb makers into plow and
hay makers.
That thought is so obviously absurd that it may
have already happened in Connecticut.
Keep on trucking,
Barney
Alice Maher
May 3

2017

images from Alice Maher - Always display images
in Clio’s Psyche
Hmm... Too many interesting but random
associations. Sorry for forgetting the three-post
limit yesterday.
Let me begin by repeating something I've said
many times before; something that Volkan talks
about when he shares his methodology for talking
effectively across divides. When you're trying to
talk, both sides have to define and preserve their
identities. You can't become like the other person,
because you lose your identity in that effort.
I think we would do well on this list to divide our
"tents" into the psychoanalyst tent and the historian
tent. When we try to blur those distinctions, we
lose our identities and we don't make a lot of sense
to each other.
Psychoanalysis is a dynamic change process.
History is a process of research, documentation,
and interpretation of facts and events. They're
different.
They come at problems from different directions.
When I talk about my efforts, I'm talking about my
desire to develop a mechanism of initiating a
change process in society using psychoanalytic
2018
tools. When I think about how to do that, I use

history in a different kind of way.
In psychoanalysis, historical facts and theories
emerge at the beginning, but it's assumed that they
will change, or that the understanding of them will
change and deepen and other historical data will
rise to the surface and assume greater importance
over time. The analyst shouldn't try too hard to
research and debate what really happened and
whether interpretations are perfectly accurate. The
analyst should present new and intriguing ways of
looking, and invite the other person to play and
struggle in that open-ended space. Insight,
change, and accurate history emerge organically.
Like Male and Female, History and Psychoanalysis
must work effectively together en route to a greater
understanding of human events and the possibility
of changing same-old same-olds. Neither can be
fully effective without the other.
But before they can play well together, let's agree
that they're different first, okay?
Alice
Alice Maher
2019
May 3

in Clio’s Psyche
Hmm... Too many interesting but random
associations. Sorry for forgetting the three-post
limit yesterday.
Let me begin by repeating something I've said
many times before; something that Volkan talks
about when he shares his methodology for talking
effectively across divides. When you're trying to
talk, both sides have to define and preserve their
identities. You can't become like the other person,
because you lose your identity in that effort.
I think we would do well on this list to divide our
"tents" into the psychoanalyst tent and the historian
tent. When we try to blur those distinctions, we
lose our identities and we don't make a lot of sense
to each other.
Psychoanalysis is a dynamic change process.
History is a process of research, documentation,
and interpretation of facts and events. They're
different.
2020
They come at problems from different directions.

When I talk about my efforts, I'm talking about my
desire to develop a mechanism of initiating a
change process in society using psychoanalytic
tools. When I think about how to do that, I use
history in a different kind of way.
In psychoanalysis, historical facts and theories
emerge at the beginning, but it's assumed that they
will change, or that the understanding of them will
change and deepen and other historical data will
rise to the surface and assume greater importance
over time. The analyst shouldn't try too hard to
research and debate what really happened and
whether interpretations are perfectly accurate. The
analyst should present new and intriguing ways of
looking, and invite the other person to play and
struggle in that open-ended space. Insight,
change, and accurate history emerge organically.
Like Male and Female, History and Psychoanalysis
must work effectively together en route to a greater
understanding of human events and the possibility
of changing same-old same-olds. Neither can be
fully effective without the other.
But before they can play well together, let's agree
that they're different first, okay?
Alice
2021
mfbrttn
May 4
You already are Somebody. I understand you want

to break into the nationally influential circles so as
to make things better. That's different from being
Nobody. You are doing good things and
contributing to the real lives of other people. That
sense of being nobody on the national level to me
embodies the vulnerability to power that is part of
our terrain. Part of resistance is owning that you
are Somebody no matter how things play out. Your
writing and your body metaphor are eloquent and
articulate in my eyes. In terms of induced counter
transference, when a voice of caring that is clear
and eloquent and practical ends up feeling like
nobody, I think this is what the voice of conscience
inside the powerful is feeling when it comes to
trying to get their attention.. I do not know anyone
such as you seek. I can only say: persist, and I
am glad you are out there in our world doing your
best to help.
Alice Maher
2022
May 4
Michael, thank you for reading closely and

understanding the intent of my original post. These
listservs remind me of the Telephone Game. One
person relates a story and asks that the next
person repeat it, and by the time it reaches the end
of the line there's nothing in the final story that
resembles the original.
When we fight, at least we're keeping our stories
alive....
When I talk about the need to be Somebody, it has
nothing to do with self-esteem or contributions to
the lives of individual people. It has to do with the
fact that a large-scale movement needs to be
initiated, and it would be very helpful if someone in
power could look my way. Hey, if Kim Kardashian
complimented my ass, I'd instantly get a million
more Twitter followers than I already have. That's
not about being Nobody in the self-esteem sense,
it's about transitioning to Somebody in the name-
recognition/curiosity sense.
With regard to the quibbling that goes on on this
list, I think it's because we have no differentiated
identities and no shared horizons. I think my
model would work well in this group - differentiating
2023
psychoanalytic from historical models and focusing

together on a more distant, shared goal. Unless
and until we can do that, the vectors will continue
to point in different directions, leading to a
smorgasbord on a good day and a clusterfuck on a
bad one.
I think the self-esteem problem is Clio's, not mine.
She has no idea how much she has to offer
humankind, and that makes me kinda sad.
Alice
—————
Don Carveth
Apr 27
Rest in peace, my friend.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.
aspx?pid=173743811
dr.bobstern
2024
Apr 27
Lovely, brilliant man married to a wonderful, brilliant

woman (and pianist!).
MCastelloe
Apr 28
Touching that In the spirit of his work and

conviction that women as equals are essential to
modern thinking and our evolution: donations made
to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Program. He's one of the most influential feminist
psychohistorians I know.
————
drwargus
May 3
Brian and Alice,

2025
Many good points by both of you. Perhaps thinking

about Peace may be helpful. We argue about war,
its causes and prevention, but what about Peace?
Every church that I have gone to prays for Peace
on Sunday--Really? I am not so sure they know
what they are talking about. Most people seem to
define Peace as the absence of war. But just like
war, peace is not a passive process. Peace
requires effort, effort like Alice is promoting. But
there also needs to be theory. From a PH
perspective, what does it mean to say that we are
at Peace? No fighting? No fears? No wants? No
challenges to our worldview or religion from the
outside?
Maybe we can think more clearly about war when
can think more clearly about peace, and our
fundamental subconscious that may not be very
peaceful.
Bill
Barney
May 3

2026

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Bill,
Peace comes in very small pieces. We may be at
peace at the same time others are decimated by
war, and we may never even know it. Peace is a
comfortable concept for people who deny that
outside their ken anything meaningful to them
actually happens. Why "world peace" is a bubble-
head cliche for Miss Universes to spout, is because
it is an empty, and appropriately meaningless
sound.
Pax is a pox, a logically nonsensical state and
hopelessly irrational. It suggests hope but often
means suffering and death, just outside and
beyond one's private perspectives.
Peace is not the opposite of war; obedience is.
Once a people are no longer obedient, they pick up
sticks. The colonists picked them up against the
British, who could no longer make obedience
mandatory. "Peace" of the peace symbol variety
requires massive, worldwide obedience to rules
that everyone breaks, almost at will. To imagine
otherwise is deeply unwise.
Is that peace symbol that was stitched to the back
2027
pocket of your Levis just a forgotten innocent fad?

Of course it is. It may be that if we think clearly
enough about "peace" we will understand that
peace is as real as Jesus Christ, Moses, Job, and
the Easter Bunny. To "fight for peace" is the
antepenultimate oxymoron.
In actuality, the human race seems to exist to test
and break rules, even certain laws (like gravity)
and by so doing humans are perpetually disturbing
the peace. which naturally does not exist. Peace is
a lot like "love," in certain places, anyway. and
suggests a tranquility like the ocean on a dead still
day. Anyone who lives along an ocean knows that
the eerie calmness is an ominous and not peaceful
sign, and that the laws of nature are soon going to
catch up with us. How long does it take to notice
the fact that, as a wild Russian poet put it, peace
never comes in our time?
So if we don't study an obedient peace because it
isn't, and we've studied chaotic war enough
because it is, what's left that's grand and painful
enough for Alice to study and perhaps apply a
peaceful poultice to?
Barney
dr.bobstern
2028
May 3

images from dr.bobstern - Always display images
in Clio’s Psyche
To add to Barney's insight on"obedience"...
What motivates the patient to go to
a psychotherapist? They themselves recognize
their problems and seek that healing dialog with a
therapist or...they don't want such a dialog but are
compelled to endure it by some authority with
power to judge and punish.
Genocidal societies see their "problem" as the
Other they want to eradicate. They aren't seeking
treatment. And there doesn't seem to be a force
powerful enough to compell them to be "treated"
unless, of course, that force has a superior military
component to force a behavioral "intervention"--
hence, WW2, etc.
Not sure passive resistance is effective against
mass murder. It is, in fact, the kind of response
that makes killing less risky for
psychotic perpetrators who don't care how the
World feels about their behavior.
Hopefully, the psych insights come later during the
2029
compelled obedience phase... we can hope these

"never again" insights stick in modern Germany,
Japan, et al
jhsturges
May 3

images from jhsturges - Always display images in
Clio’s Psyche
I'll start by agreeing with Brian's position,
which I will re-state (hopefully correctly) as
asserting the inextricable connection
between real events and depth psychology
as being the essence of psychohistory.
One thing we learn from psychoanalysis is
that events which might appear to be
random are often driven by unconscious, or
hidden, motivations. There is a useful
presumption in psychoanalysis to assume
people do things, even self-destructive
things, because at some level they want to.
2030
This presumption applied to society in

general implies that the ruling elites want
wars and in fact find them indispensable.
Personally, I go further than this and believe
that what makes them ruling elites is their
willingness to coalesce the undefined death
instinct (call it projected, free-floating
depressive or paranoid anxieties if you
prefer), and lead it the resulting
psychological group into bloody annihilation
of self and others.
As I understand Alice's position, and other
fantasies of peace, the ruling elites would
have to cease being the ruling elites if it
were to give up war. At the very least, a
society which temporarily gave up war
would soon fall victim to another which was
not similarly predisposed.
——Jim
Alice Maher
May 3

2031

in Clio’s Psyche
Guys, all of you misunderstand my position. Before
I try to elaborate in another too-wordy post, I'd like
to ask you what you think I'm saying when I refer to
psychoanalysis as a "dynamic change process"
that stands in relation to, but is distinctly different
from, (individual or cultural) historical
understanding. You all blur distinctions that truly
deserve to be made distinct.
Ken Fuchsman
May 3

images from Ken Fuchsman - Always display
Alice,
There are many forms of therapy that consider
themselves a dynamic change process. We could
also say that Nazism was a dynamic change
process, and so is modern capitalism. So you
2032
need to do more to clarify what distinguishes

psychoanalysis as a dynamic change process from
others.
Psychoanalysis has a domain, history also has a
distinct domain, and yet both intersect in the
interdiscipline of psychohistory. Biology and
chemistry are distinct fields of study, but there is
also biochemistry that interconnects both of them.
You are applying psychoanalysis to social and
political change, and so you are mixing together
two areas that can be considered distinct, and yet
you see them as interconnected. It seems to me
that you want to apply notions derived from
psychoanalysis to other areas, but do not want to
learn enough about those other areas.
I support what you do, and what I want you to
recognize more about the other domains you are
entering,so that you can be more effective and
credible in what you want to achieve.
Alice Maher
May 3

2033

in Clio’s Psyche
Ken, I think what Joel and I are trying to do is
initiate a dynamic change process IN CLIO so the
group can reconcile its internal conflicts, move
forward, get the recognition it deserves, and make
change happen in academia and in the world
stage. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I
hear Joel's frustration at a group that seems to be
stuck spinning "Christian era" wheels. (Joel, I think
I understand what you're saying and I like it more
and more.) I know that some of you are quite
comfortable with the way this group functions and
you'll hear this as a criticism. All I can say is that I
wouldn't be trying so hard if I don't see much more
possibility here. I don't know the kind of history that
you think I should, but my questions are different
and I'm not looking for answers in the same way
that others here are.
My model, the one that uses the metaphor of
"vision", might be useful here. We're all focusing
differently, using different lenses. Some of us focus
on the words on the page, some on the people or
the flowers in our immediate vicinity, and others
focus on the horizon or the vast reaches of the
universe. Some of us want to document what we
see while others want to change it. If we
2034
understand, respect and use those differences

rather than exhorting each other to see the world
the way that we do, Clio well do a lot better as a
functioning organism. If not we will continue to talk
past each other and criticize each other for simple
differences.
I think it would help if all of us could state why
we're here, what we hope to contribute and what
we hope to get from this group. We're all coming
from a different center, and we would understand
each other a lot better if we could begin by
articulating that.
Just a thought. End of posts for today.
Joel Markowitz
May 3

images from Joel Markowitz - Always display
Exactly, Alice-- I'm grateful for your understanding.
The Christian Era was necessary-- our greatest
invention-- in doing the seemingly impossible job of
getting us out of paganism and making progress
2035
possible.
But we have an overly strong tendency to cling to
tradition. This can slow progress to the point that
we despair-- and abandon workable projects.
Incidentally, In 1944, in a speech in the House of
Commons, Churchill said :
"A love of tradition has never weakened a nation,
indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of
peril; but the new view must come, the world must
roll forward ... Let us have no fear of the future."
Joel
dr.bobstern
May 3

in Clio’s Psyche
Currently the world is experiencing the
ferocious upheaval/resistance to
modernity/paradigm shifts on multiple domestic
and foreign fronts. And, perhaps, these traditional
2036
ways of control may collapse if the furious political

and corporal attacks on "heathens and sinners" are
overcome (by counterattack or "therapy").
But, I'm not sure human fight/flight impulses and
primordial tribalism will disappear along with the
outmoded traditional narratives and ideologies.
The amygdala won't go down without a fight -- it
will employ the cooperative reasoning
centers. "Good reasons" for first strikes will be re-
cast in more modern, yet similarly activating
(apocalyptic) terms to control populations. The
oligarchs have unlimited free speech to
manufacture popular consent via such
reptilian activations, fears, irrationality. Or, short if
that, through sheer quantity of
repetitive obfuscation...leaving the population
confused and unmotivated to resist.
As we know, in the last few years generous
quantities of private and public sector money ("free
speech", defense contracts) are available and
spent on the psychological expertise to more
effectively torture, deceive, fear monger, etc
As populations grow (and with the attacks
on reproductive choice, COMPELLED to grow) as
potable water diminishes and oceans rise, as
food desperation increases, as arms and
armaments permeate
2037
fearful/aggressive domestic and international

individuals and groups, as the environment
becomes more inhospitable to human life, the next
non-"Christian Era" paradigm shift has a daunting
set of challenges to meet.
Brian
May 3

Clio’s Psyche
Jim, I like your formulation of “the inextricable
connection between real events and depth
psychology.” But I don’t agree with your notion that
war can be explained by innate destructiveness of
any kind. There are a number of problems with
this, not least of all the pseudo-scientific character
of this kind of explanation. Whether we call it
“death instinct” or “killer genes” or “original sin” or
anything else, this whole recourse to an innate
destructive principle amounts to an argument of the
sort, “Humans are destructive because there is
2038
something in us that makes us destructive,” which

is no explanation at all. It is like saying that wood
burns because it has a combustible nature, or Mary
is depressed because she has a melancholic
nature.
The only way to understand war is to understand it
historically, that is, as something that did not
always exist and need not exist in the future but
which came into existence under specific historical
conditions and persists as long as those conditions
persist. Here is the historical analysis that appears
in the IPA’s statement on violence:
The institution of war has its origins in the Neolithic
period, when towns based on agricultural surplus
became vulnerable to raids by armed nomads. The
acts of aggression by nomads had clear economic
motivations and the earliest warriors of agricultural
societies most likely played a defensive role. With
increasing class inequality, political elites gained
increasing control over resources and used force
as an instrument for gaining yet more control. It
was in this historical context that the institutions of
war, the state, and slavery developed
simultaneously and persisted for millennia. While
war has always been a complex result of
psychological, political, and economic factors, it is
fundamentally an instrument for the accumulation
of wealth and power by self-interested elites whose
2039
perceptions of self-interest are distorted by

psychopathology.
The policy-making process is more complex than
indicated here, of course, and involves
international relations, the politics of state and
other elites, and the mass public. The decisive
support for militarism and wars of aggression,
however, comes primarily from hawk political elites
and the predatory investors and corporate elites
who benefit directly or indirectly from militarist
policies (see Brian D’Agostino’s The Middle Class
Fights Back: How Progressive Movements Can
Restore Democracy in America, Santa Barbara,
CA: Praeger, 2012). Individuals who actively
pursue unlimited military power and wealth at the
cost of vast, unnecessary human suffering harbor
pathological motivations almost by definition,
though the form that the actions of policy-makers
take are heavily shaped by the institutional
contexts in which they act.
Full statement at:
http://www.psychohistory.us/resources/IPA
%20Statement%20on%20Violence.pdf
Something else you said also merits discussion: “a
society which temporarily gave up war would soon
fall victim to another which was not similarly
predisposed.” This concept has long been
recognized in political science and is called “the
2040
security dilemma.” Actually, the most recent

research in game theory suggests that this
description of “reality” is valid only under certain
conditions (see Martin A. Nowak, Evolutionary
Dynamics). However, even if we assume for the
sake of argument that a “kill or be killed” logic
operated for much of human history, the
assumption that this is an eternal feature of the
human condition is almost certainly wrong.
To see why, we have to look at history as a whole.
Starting with warrior kings in antiquity, the process
of conquest brought more and more of the world
under larger and larger states, culminating in great
empires such as those of Alexander, the Romans,
the Muslims, and later the Spanish, the British, and
most recently the American empires. The logical
outcome of this process of aggregation is world
government, which would also mean the end of
war. In fact, the world currently has the institutional
machinery needed for global governance and the
abolition of war, most notably the UN Security
Council. The political conditions do not yet exist for
this machinery to work the way it was designed to
work, but the globalization of the world economy
and the need to manage the ecological and other
global crises are pushing things in the direction of
cooperation. Whether we will get there in time to
avert a planetary train wreck is not assured, but if
2041
we survive long enough, that is the direction in

which things are moving.
A world in which the most powerful states (e.g. the
US, Russia, and China) cooperate to constrain the
ambitions of lesser states (e.g. Saudi Arabia and
Iran, a rivalry that is currently wreaking havoc in
the Middle East) is a world on the verge of
abolishing war, at least in its classical form of
armed conflict between states. Other forms of
armed conflict (e.g. “civil wars”) are likely to persist
a while longer, but not indefinitely because once
stable states emerge, the conditions for an
enduring peace will be established. Here I am
using the term “peace” in the minimal sense of “the
absence of war;” a more robust and profound
peace can only occur as a result of continued
progress towards non-violent and humane child
rearing. In summary, peace is not a “fantasy.” It is
a state of affairs towards which the political logic of
history is tending. Steven Pinker’s The Better
Angels of Our Nature, which is in many ways a
flawed book, does contain a very good account of
this process.
I also very much like Bob’s statement “Currently
the world is experiencing the ferocious
upheaval/resistance to modernity/paradigm shifts
on multiple domestic and foreign fronts.” This is
the explanation of religious fundamentalism in a
2042
nutshell.
Brian
dr.bobstern
May 3

in Clio’s Psyche
"The only way to understand war is to understand it
historically, that is, as something that did not
always exist and need not exist in the future but
which came into existence under specific historical
conditions..."
Brian, would you dismiss Evolutionary Psychology
in this discussion?
Example: http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/Evolutio
nofWar.pdf
Bob
Ken Fuchsman
2043
May 3
Brian,
As factual accuracy is important, what are your
sources that war originated in the Neolithic period?
How do your sources counter the evidence
compiled by anthropologists and political scientists
that war was prevalent in Paleolithic times?
Brian
May 3
Ken, if an armed raid by a small band of people on

another band counts as “war,” then yes, it dates
back to the Paleolithic. I was using the term to
mean armed conflict between states, and since
states only emerge at the end of the Neolithic, war
in this sense cannot predate the Neolithic. But
assuming we use “war” in a broad sense to include
armed conflict in the Paleolithic, what difference
does this make, if any, for the picture of the
historical process that I have presented?
Robert, I have not read much of the evolutionary
2044
psychology literature, or the article you reference. I

have read part of Martin A. Nowak’s Evolutionary
Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life (Harvard
2006), which seems very rigorous to me. My
sense is that language and the fight/flight response
are adaptive, hard-wired capabilities of our brains
that have evolutionary origins, but beyond that, I
think that learning and culture, based on the
plasticity of the brain, explain most of human
behavior.
Brian
Ken Fuchsman
May 4
Brian,
My first question to you is from what sources did
you derive your definition of war? Did you
compare definitions from anthropologists,
historians, and political scientists? Did you look into
the scholarship on when war started? If not, how
then could you make a warranted claim that it
started in the Neolithic era?
You ask if war started in the Paleolithic era what
2045
difference does it make to the historical process

you present. Homo sapiens are about 200,000
years old. As the Paleolithic period lasted about
190,000 of those years, and many say war has
been present all that time, then through most of
human history war did not take the form you say it
does. At best, your characterization of war only
applies to about 5 percent of human existence.
Even then there are claims you make about war
since agriculture began that others would dispute.
You say that war has to be understood historically,
which it does, but not only historically. We need to
compare human violence to violence in other
primates, for instance. We also need to examine
how and why humans kill more frequently and in
more ways than any other species on the planet. It
may be that we are the only species that commits
suicide, and we certainly murder those within our
own cultures more than do other species. So
studying war historically is necessary, but not
sufficient.
My next question is when the IPA takes a position
on something, such as violence, who vets the
position to make sure it is more factual than
opinion? If no one does, should we not try to vet
positions in the future?
2046
Brian
May 4
Ken, political scientist Joshua Goldstein in War

and Gender (Cambridge2001) writes that some
military historians define war as consisting of “large
scale pitched battles” and that a common definition
used in political science counts only conflicts
producing 1,000 or more battle fatalities (p. 2). He
writes that “only an agricultural, complex society
can muster such a large scale force. Yet many
anthropologists (not all) consider warfare to exist in
smaller, less complex societies, including
gathering-hunting societies” (p. 2). Goldstein
himself adopts the broader definition but
acknowledges that there is no consensus on the
question.
Anthropologists who adopt the narrower definition
include Richard Lee, Marshall Sahlins, and
Ernestine Friedl. Clearly, this is a matter of
definition, not of fact, and there is no universally
accepted definition. Even though I use the
narrower definition, I recognize that it is not the
only one. Are you saying that your definition is the
only valid one?
2047
I don’t see how the question of whether we define

war narrowly or broadly bears on the substantive
issues I raised about the future of war. You
yourself have said that war is not a human
universal, and yet in your last post you take the
presence of war in the Paleolithic as evidence that
humans are inherently violent. You said the same
thing in the past about intra-group violence and yet
failed to produce a satisfactory definition of “group”
that would be consistent with your thesis that intra-
group killing is a human universal. We have gone
around and around on this, Ken. It is clear that we
come at this from very different perspectives. I’m
OK with a live and let live way of relating to other
scholars. But I get the feeling that you want to kill
me off and settle once and for all that only your
definitions are the valid ones.
I don’t have time to continue this conversation
because of other responsibilities, and I don’t have
a desire to do so because I think we have long past
the point of diminishing returns in having a
productive exchange of ideas. However, I need to
remind you that you never did produce a
satisfactory definition of “group” to support your
claim that intra-group killing is a human universal. I
have copied and pasted below my last post on this
subject, which you never answered.
Brian
2048
dr.bobstern
May 4
Genghis Khan's genes found in 1 in 200 men.

"The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his
enemies, to drive them before him, to take from
them all they possess, to see those they love in
tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives
and daughters in his arms." --Genghis Khan
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1
-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-
khan/#.VUdMw1L3bCR
How about war as a result of coalition building to
achieve genetic advantage and spread one's
genes?
The domination of women, the drive of so many
male dominated societies/cultures/religions to
control female reproduction and sexuality ... the
visceral reaction to the "diss"...by individual
members, groups of men or, ahem, the Republican
love of guns and hatred of female "choice",
sexuality, birth control,
2049
Is this not the perpetual eruption of the primordial

drives couched in fancy rhetoric?
"I have found little that is 'good' about human
beings on the whole. In my experience most of
them are trash, no matter whether they publicly
subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none
at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud,
or perhaps even think."
Sigmund Freud
Brian
May 4
Right. Original sin. Killer genes. Blah, blah, blah.
Brian
May 4
See Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: the

Doctrine of DNA.
2050
Ken Fuchsman
May 4
Brian,
Of course, you are entitled to your opinion on my
motives, but I thought a rule of this group was not
to engage in attributions of motives to each other
on this site. So when you say that I "want to kill
you off", to me you crossed a line. You also
attribute things to me that I do not claim. You say
that I believe humans are "inherently violent." I
have never said that, nor did I give a definition of
war, and yet you say that I think my definitions are
the only ones. .
Here is what is my concern: psychohistory is held
in disrepute among historians in part because it
does not meet the standards of scholarship of the
historical profession. I find that it is not unheard of
here for people to make broad statements with
factual claims, where there is contrary evidence or
where there is little evidence given. I want to make
sure that what we do attempts to meet academic
standards, which includes taking account of
relevant scholarship on a subject. So when you
say that war began in the Neolithic period, you are
2051
not immediately taking into account the other

views. You are making a one-sided declaration not
consistent with the controversies among scholars.
Similarly, when you define war as being "between
states," you are also not taking into account that
since 1815 about three quarters of wars are civil
wars, within states. The very source you quote,
Joshua Goldstein, recognizes warfare has not
recently been between state armies, If
psychohistory is to regain credibility, it can only do
so by following academic standards, incorporating
the relevant evidence and perspectives, .
Furthermore, Joshua Goldstein,does not conclude
that the war began in the Neolithic, and so the
source you quote does not give warrant to your
claim. You have jumped to a conclusion beyond
what Goldstein says a consensus of scholars
claim. While you allude to his definition of war, you
do not actually state it, which is, war is "lethal
intergroup violence. If members of a small
gathering-hunting society go out in an organized
group to kill members of another community, I call
that war. Indeed, warfare worldwide in recent years
has seldom taken the form of pitched battles
between state armies." (Goldstein, p. 3). When you
give a definition of war that is not consistent with
your own source, then there are difficulties in your
scholarship. I do not expect to change your views,
2052
I just want you to make claims consistent with the

sources. None of us is perfect, and I too have not
always lived up to the standards I proclaim. For all
of us in the field of psychohistory, accuracy needs
to be job one.
You did not address my question as to whether

official IPA statements, such as the one on
violence, go through a vetting process. Would you
please answer that question? If there is a vetting
process, what is it? If there is not, do you think
there should be?
You are correct, I did not give a good definition of
group when we discussed homicide as a human
universal. I should have used the term my source,
Melvin Konner, used, which is "culture." If I had
consistently stayed with that term, I do believe that
would have answered your objections. .
Brian
May 4
Ken, I did not comment on your motives, but on

how your attacks make me feel. And they ARE
attacks, as far as I can tell. I have a long history of
2053
responding to the substance of your posts and it

never seems good enough. So now I do need to
reflect on the process of our interaction and indeed
to detach from it.
I noted explicitly that Goldstein adopted the broad
definition of war. My point in citing him, which I
also stated clearly, was that he acknowledges that
there is not a consensus among scholars on how
to define war. Clearly, I don’t need to agree with
Goldstein’s definition of war in order to agree with
him in recognizing the validity of more than one
definition. Why did you twist something I said and
use it as a weapon against me? This has nothing
to do with rigorous scholarship.
The IPA statement was a response to the Sandy
Hill school massacre. It was not intended to be a
scholarly article or to explore the complexity of the
issue of violence, which of course is a topic that
fills entire libraries. I vetted it with the IPA board,
including Lloyd deMause. That is the process I
intend to follow in the future. I am done with this
conversation.
Brian, you know that in taking a leading role that

you are going to have to deal with others who hold
you to a higher standard- not to mention the
potential transference as a father-substitute.
2054
Ken, to me it looks like you aren't attempting to find

any common ground in these exchanges. Maybe
that's not an interest of yours, but it comes off
pretty cold.
I like that you two put out references that we can
follow up on, but if you want others, especially less
experienced people in the field, to join the
discussion, you're not making it very inviting.
Trevor
dr.bobstern
May 4
Am I misreading your "blah blah blah" as

a dismissal of a biological basis for our sex, power,
supremacy, safety drives?
Why does it seem that there are so many male
dominant societies, cultures, religions?
Is it that they arose from a
shared common ancestor culture in the past that
just taught them this random concept -- one
that seems to have persisted to this day.
2055
Barney
May 4

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Bob,
You know as well or better than anyone that males
do NOT dominate the cultures, even if they are
encouraged to believe so by women, who like
Dwight Eisenhower, know that there are two main
jobs a very smart person like some I cannot
mention must do: 1) Get others to believe sincerely
that your idea came first from them; 2) Do not allow
others to know how smart you are and often to
think they are smarter.
That's why so many fewer women than men die in
war, even the most egregious ones.
Does that ring any bells?
2056
I also think you will also agree that the exceptions

to the trash rule are musicians and artists.
Barney
Ken Fuchsman
May 4
Trevor,
Tell me what can be done to make the exchanges
more inviting.
My concerns with what Brian wrote are that he
made claims that the evidence and scholarship in
the relevant fields did not warrant. This is
central to me because psychohistory is in
disrepute as it is believed psychohistorians do not
follow scholarly standards. When Brian defines
war as between states when most wars are civil
wars, then that is not an adequate definition. I
would hope that he would seek to have his
definition be consistent with relevant information. I
am also concerned that he said war began after
agriculture started when he knows there are others
who say war began earlier. Psychohistorians have
to be extra careful to make sure their claims have
2057
sufficient backing and are not overly one-sided.

When an official IPA position makes declarations
that others knowledgeable in the field will find
to lack warrant, that does not help our cause.
As I said, I am as imperfect as everyone else, If in
seeking to keep to academic standards, I come off
as cold and not seeking common ground, then
that's the price I pay. I appreciate your being
honest and direct.
Brian
May 4
Bob, I apologize for my dismissive tone. I do not

have a lot of respect for biological theories of
human nature, but since you expressed these
ideas, out of respect for you I should not have said
“blah, blah, blah.” The eminent biologist Robert
Lewontin exposed the ideological character of such
theories in his short book Biology as Ideology: the
Doctrine of DNA.
Myriam Miedzian, who is an invited speaker at the
IPA conference this year, addressed the issue you
are raising. My review of her book on this subject
appears here:
2058
http://bdagostino.com/resources/PolPsyc93.pdf
Ken, I never said that war between states is the
ONLY kind of war. In fact, I implied otherwise
when I said in my second post yesterday, “war, at
least in its classical form of armed conflict between
states. Other forms of armed conflict (e.g. “civil
wars”) are likely to persist a while longer . . .” I
don’t see what civil wars have to do with intergroup
conflict in the Paleolithic. A civil war occurs when
political order breaks down and armed conflict
occurs between factions within a state. Since there
were no states in the Paleolithic, there could be no
civil wars, only inter-group conflicts of some kind or
intra-group killing, that is, homicide. Such
intergroup conflict would be analogous to war
between states, not civil war, and it was in that
context that I defined war as armed conflict
between states.
It is hard to have a productive exchange of ideas
with someone who frames their disagreements with
you as an attack on your scholarly rigor. That is
why I need to withdraw from this conversation.
Barney
May 4
2059

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Ken,
Psychohistory is in "disrepute" in your mind (not
mine) because most of the original and perhaps
even accurate observations are crushed and
swallowed by the weight of political correctness
and "sufficient backing." Who in Hades cares when
the first war supposedly has sufficient backing to
be considered "the first," and what the devil is the
difference between a civil and an uncivil war? <
ZERO! The concepts have nothing to do with one
another. What counts is does the idea actually
work? That's the question scientists ask
themselves, as opposed to zealots and
peckerwoods who say if it ain't broke don't fix it.
I see that at times Trevor annoyingly doesn't check
"facts," or at least check them and then refute
them, but sometimes I find that flaw for the best.
But almost everyone is guilty of the misnomer
peccadillo (but not too many times; that's simply
careless).
The test of Trevor's or anyone else's hypotheses is
2060
not in "sufficient backing" from peer reviewed

people who may have been just as wrong and/or
careless. Academia thrives on that footnote and
index manure; pickier engineers don't, and neither
do pilots and heart surgeons, or musicians. (It's
easier to understand Joel with this concept. He can
and probably is alone (God bless him) and
exceptionally exceptional in a world where nobody
cares if he's right or not. That is one tough
punishment.)
I think it might be wise to find and teach and
enforce the academic standards of Galileo's era
and that way get a sniff of what self-righteous
stupidity is/was all about and how it's even more
powerful today.
I hark back to my favorite academic question
overheard on a bench in Harvard Square:
"For the sake of calibration we need to study ideas
that have absolutely no merit."
I'd have taken on the task, but I've never been able
to find any ideas that met my rock-bottom
academic standards.
A rant every now and then is good for the ganglia.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Barney
2061
Trevor Pederson
May 4
Hi Ken
I think that when you make global condemnations
like "difficulties in your scholarship" instead of
talking about the area where you think the person
might be mistaken, that it might be intimidating. I'm
sure Brian identifies a a scholar in some ways, so it
sounds like you are calling him a phony.
Also, I think if Brian has a certain sense of the
scale of what constitutes a war and wants to
differentiate it between smaller scale intergroup
conflict, he should be asked to account for why or
what purpose this serves. However, I don't think
that we should have to preface every conversation
by saying "There is a debate in the scholarship
between x and y".
Again, I appreciate the references and the counter-
distinctions you bring to the table. But, Brian said
that he felt attacked and I could understand it. It's
not a question of dropping your standards, but a
question of tone. (for example, another tone might
2062
be. "That's an interesting take on x Brian, what do

you say to the scholars who say y?").
Trevor
Ken Fuchsman
May 4
Trevor,
The difficulties with Brian's scholarship that I
mentioned were in relation to two specific
examples, and followed my delineation of where
Brian was not scholarly in these two instances I
do not see these specifics as a "global
condemnation." In the course of the exchanges
Brian and I had, he modified his initial description
of war as originating in the early days of agriculture
and changed his definition of war as between
states to something more comprehensive.
I have yet to witness Brian being intimidated. Ask
him if he feels intimidated by what I say.
What is the difference between being criticized and
being attacked? What are the standards by which
we can say someone is being attacked?
2063
Trevor Pederson
May 4
I didn't say Brian was intimidated, Ken, I was

referring to how others might be and therefore stay
out of the conversation.
As for your question, you should probably direct it
at Barney. He has all of the answers without any of
the silly needs for theoretical edifices that people
like me have :)
Barney
May 4

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Ken,
In order to be intimidated you must be made
2064
fearful, and Brian (and you and Trevor) don't seem

to be fearful of too much.
There's a border between being annoyed and
intimidated. A lot of mosquitoes may annoy you. A
lot of wasps and hornets may make you afraid. The
difference is the sting.
Nobody on Clio's list employs a deadly or even
painful sting. Clios are like bumblebees; they look
fat and tough and buzzy, but they are fuzzy and
helpful and harmless.
To be attacked takes place on a spectrum: it can
be funny (getting feet tickled against your will)
weird (little fish eating the skin off your toes)
unpleasant (your wallet is natched) frigging nasty
(fisticuffs in the street), and then there's getting
incinerated by naphalm, some of these most of us
have experienced.
What is the difference between being criticized and
being attacked? The ancients hit it on the nose:
"Sticks and stones can break my bones but your
words can never hurt me."
What are the standards by which we can say
someone is being attacked? One standard:
Words can never hurt you. (Bloody prophetic poets
those old dames and gents.)
2065
What are the standards by which we can say

someone is being attacked? One standard: Is your
flesh or the flesh of your loved ones at risk of pain
or death?
Size means nothing. Microbes and midgets and
monsters can all attack you and devour your heart
and eat your liver. . Unarmed psychologists can
say nothing to hurt you.
Thus all Clio is criticism and you are entirely safe
from attack, as are almost all the Cliofolk. No
opinion constitutes an attack, even the ones that
get intellectually personal. Cliofolk are buzzers not
biters. If you don't like the buzzzzzz, then buzz
even more nicely, to give a good example. Nice
thing about bumblebees is they don't hiss or inject
real venom, just the wordy kind, which can't really
raise even a tiny welt.
Bumblebees are only good for making gardens and
fruits grow by spreading the pollen of new
creations. The do not carry Uzis. Nor do Cliofolk.
Those are my best attempts to respond to your
poignant questions.
Barney
I may be over my post limit. Apologies. Good
questions tend to waylay my good intentions.
2066
BC
Joel Markowitz
May 4
Robert Stern: "The greatest joy for a man is

to defeat his enemies, to drive them before
him, to take from them all they possess, to
see those they love in tears, to ride their
horses, and to hold their wives and
daughters in his arms." --Genghis Khan
Bob, you're VERY helpful. Genghis Khan's remark

is VERY relevant to our debate.
Genghis Khan was pagan. His thinking was pre-
Christian Era Era. He wasn't misled by Christian-
Era based RESISTANCES to Oedipal dynamics--
as WE ALL are.
So he could say it like it IS.
He's in total agreement with Freud. Khan took his
armies enormous distances to find father-
surrogates (rulers) and their groups to defeat,
2067
slaughter, and replace-- and to possess their

"wives and daughters" and horses ...
Pure oedipal motivation-- before the Christian Era
could repress them.
Freud's oedipal theories are working to un-repress
them. With little success in the thinking of most
people thus far. Most Clio members continue to
defend against deeply understanding them; albeit
some acknowledge that they exist.
-------------------------------
To try to respond to some posts:
We obsess over whether the word "war" involves

states or communities or families-- when the same
dynamics drive (oedipal) competitive-aggression
and sexuality in all of them.
-------------------------------
Another of the ongoing misconceptions is the
equation of "oedipal" with "a fundamentally
destructive impulse"; "a murderous gene"; etc.
We DO have a need to destroy under certain
conditions, and that's HATE/RAGE. . Nature gave
it to us primarily to defend ourselves against an
external threat. We wouldn't have survived
2068
without it.
Rage has nothing to do with oedipal drives.
THOSE are fundamental to NATURAL
SELECTION.
Rage has nothing to do with Genghis Khan's
PLEASURE in actualizing his oedipal needs.
-------------------------------
Among the neurotic inhibitions the Chr. Era
imposed on us is the fear of our inner RAGE--
which we all repress significantly. So we fear
destructiveness PER SE because of the implicit
aggression involved.
But some destructiveness is, of course,
constructive. We often destroy in order to build.
We have often destroyed what is dysfunctional in
order to build something better.
The oedipal drives were certainly aggressive. They
caused combats; deaths; rapes; wars; etc.
They're also responsible for our natural selection to
become humans. And the evolution-- through much
combat-- of democracy. And the ending of slavery
and the maintaining the unity of this nation through
the Civil War--
an extremely bloody combat (which Churchill
2069
called the most unavoidable and noble of wars) ...

------------------------------------
Did the same needs that llead to wars exist in the
Paleolithic and Neolithic humans. Of course; their
brains were very similar to (or identical with) our
brains.
Why do humans kill on a vastly larger scale in wars
than do other animals? Other animals don't have
wars except when their territories are invaded by
other animal groups.
( Why not call those wars "small-scale wars" if
you'd like? They would be large-scale wars were
the numbers of animals involved very large-- and
were there no free territories to retreat to (as is the
case since humans densely settled the earth).
----------------------------------
Barney, your personal dislike of me is based more
on your dynamics than on mine. You don't much
attack my theories-- which you should do if you
disagree with them.
You do attack me-- which Clio should question.
Clio should find such personal attacks more
relevant to Clio's process than my "arrogance" and
"absoluteness"-- which so trouble you.
2070
Does Clio find your theories useful?

And no, I'm not lonely-- even though Clio--
collectively and often individually-- often opposes
my theories. Therapists routinely confront
resistance to insights-- that's their job; so I've
become comfortable with disagreements.
( It might interest you that, outside of Clio, some of
my theories have been in use by many impressive
people for a long time.)
( What about your theories? Have others found
them useful? )
Joel
Barney
May 4

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Joel, (This is over the limit so please don't
read, if you care to, until 12:01 a.m. May 5),
2071
"He had a theory that all musicians are incredibly

complex." E.M. Forester
I have a theory that if you sense the truth it will
make you laugh. I'll bet you don't laugh as much as
you'd like because truth is so hard to come by.
Many people forget that a theory is not simply a
"proven" hypothesis, it is a way of thinking that was
once called "speculation" and any theory is, at
best, still unproven.
Theories are not to be defended or advocated, they
are made to be tested. They aren't the last word in
the scheme of things. Theories beget questions.
The better the theory the more begetting gets
begat.
My pet theory has worked well at the hypothesis
stage and long ago graduated to the theoretical
stage. There is always truth (not necessarily mirth)
in all laughter.
Has this theory ever done me any good, or anyone
else, either? Endless numbers of times with drivers
and cabbies worldwide. Nothing gets you more
reliable information about the unseen underbelly
and open facades of a city or locality than a
laughing cab driver.
If you tell the truth to good military generals, they
2072
will laugh because the truth to them is too rare.

(Despite the honor code at the academies.) Tell the
truth to incarcerated African Americans, they will
laugh. (Rarity, too.) Tell the truth to bankers and
they'll LAO.
A corollary to my laughter theory is that what is
laugh-provoking in one culture is usually
translatable to a different culture with appropriate
linguistic stylistics.
I can't say that my theory has even done me much
material good but it saved my sanity a few times
and made me some very strange friends in far off
places. So, yes, I suppose my theory (I have a few
more) is of some use and value.
What is your favorite theory and does it make you
laugh?
If not, my theory says rework it.
Barney
Alice Maher
May 4

2073

in Clio’s Psyche
We have two different paradigms here. One says
that psychohistory will be validated by the masses
and become "real" only when its ideas are fully
documented and referenced with massive amounts
of hard data. The other says that psychohistory
will be validated by the masses and become "real"
only when its ideas catch the fantasies and
emotions of the masses.
Left eye/right eye. Both are necessary, but which
one should be dominant and leading?
Ralph Fishkin
May 4
Dear Ken, Brian, Barney and Trevor and other

Cliospsyche Folk,
Here’s my take on today’s conversation about
“war”. This conversation initially seemed exciting
and interesting, but it quickly got bogged down in
nitpicking, defensiveness, and counterattacks and
then got diverted into a conversation about who
said what or did not say what to whom. Phooey!
2074
I personally don’t think it makes a difference about

whether war or civil war or just plain attacks by one
group in order to capture another’s excessive
supplies is the true name that we use for group
human aggression. I don’t give a crap whether it
got started in the neolithic or paleolithic age. It’s
groups killing members of other groups that has
gotten more and more sophisticated. Whether it is
caused in part by our biology or by our increasing
conglomerating into greater and greater units of
government, it is as Jim said, making a group
vulnerable to the dangers of attack if it, by some
miracle, becomes peaceful and turns its swords
into plowshares (so to speak).
In contrast to that arc bending toward peace (or
not) that you each cite experts who you agree with,
I’ll offer as my expert George Orwell and his
masterpiece 1984. To me, a more interesting
discussion would have accepted the historical,
biological, economic, and psychologic components
of group human aggression and the possibility of a
synthesis of these factors into a document or
position statement that we could promote or
promulgate as a group. That might get us some
respect and might do some good. Otherwise, it’s
just babel.
It’s time for you all to put aside your petty nitpicking
2075
and engage in meaningful discussion of each

other’s ideas if this list serve or psychohistory itself
is going to be worth the time. What a
disappointment this whole interchange has been
for me.
Ralph
Barney
May 4

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Ralph,
What did you expect without your guidance?
Barney
Barney
May 4
2076

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Alice,
Don't believe either one of them. Validation is
always in the eyes of the beholder. If you believe
something is valid, it is, even if you are blind. The
masses do not validate because the masses don't
write the rules of validation. The elite does. Only
the valid enjoy a say in the fantasies that become
validity and valid is a state of obedience like peace
is.
Problem is that validity will undergo magnetic
switches like the North and South pole do and
validity today is scorned invalidity tomorrow.
Psychohistory may only become valid if it can
reliably describe and explain something heretofore
unseen or unexplained and worth caring about.
Can we ever look through the lens of psychohistory
and see something interesting going on in the
boudoirs of the human race and mind? Or shall we
all wait until someone has amassed a monstrous
amount of hard data and we have kissed ever so
many rings?
2077
Bon soir,
Barney
Denis O'Keefe
May 5

Alice,
I think, as David Beisel once stated, the
Psychohistorian's job is to analyze shared fantasy,
not act them out.... or create new fantasies for that
matter. Legitimacy is a problem for psychohistory,
but an obsessive concern with documentation
shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of our work.
On the other hand, creating new fantasies that
resonates with or catches the fantasies and
emotions of the group is, in my mind, a form of
acting out and the stuff of advertising or branding.
Not the kind of legitimacy I'd want for
Psychohistory, but may be useful to grab attention.
Denis
2078
Joel Markowitz
May 5

Dear Barnard,
You and I agree that it's good to laugh whenever
possible. All of us agree that all theories are to be
tested; and that most will be improved on by better
theories ...
Personalities differ, of course; and from your posts,
I'd guess that you laugh at more theories (and
other things) than I do.
I-- and Alice-- are NOT laughing at Clio's impasse--
at Clio's inability to move into more-fundamental
theory.
Joel
Barney
2079
May 5

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Joel,
It's actually very odd to me that truth pops up as
little as it does. I feel I do not laugh nearly enough
and I miss laughter when it's not around.
"In vino veritas" still works quite well, particularly if
you are aware of cachaca, the Brazilian national
sugar cane brandy beverage. (There is often a lot
of laughter in bars, but very little in churches. Does
that tell us something?)
In Brazil, the drink made with cachaca, lime juice
and simple sugar is called a caipirinha and it's
nickname is "Truth Serum." (Perhaps my favorite
theory, the Mind Shark Theory, was miraculously
developed after all concerned in its creation were
sipping their fifth truth serum.)
Based on my crackpot Theory of Truth & Laughter,
if I were seeking veritas I'd stake out a Brazilian
bar and grill.
2080
My T&L theory also posits that if you are not

laughing at what you call "Clio's impasse," and
"inability" then it might not be true.
One day all the Clios ought to congregate for a
Truth Serum Party. I want worldwide video rights to
that get-together. You think there might be a laugh
or two? I do.
Barney
Joel Markowitz
May 5

"There is often a lot of laughter in bars, but very

little in churches." True and relevant to Clio,
Barney. If only Clio would use it.
"Superego is soluble in alcohol" has long been
said. Superego is largely (almost always)
programmed by parental superego.
But what about the parental superegos that did the
2081
programming?
The superegos of Western-group parents is
currently very largely programmed by the
superegos of Christian Era groups. The
"churches" if you like, which still reduce our
pleasures, laughter and still-criminalized freedoms.
Those superegos are, fortunately, now subject to
the beginning of a great Transition.
Unfortunately, that Transition is only in its very
early stages. The Sexual Revolution, Youth
Rebellion (etc.) have removed thus far very little
Christian Era prohiibition/ injunction/ guilt/ etc.
against knowing about those forbidden fantasies
and impulses. Knowing about them doesn't mean,
of course, acting on them-- as many people fear
would happen.
( Read Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" to see his
fear that paganism will return once the "sea of
Faith" is gone. )
Hence the conflict between the superego that's
slowly dying and the freer superego that's
emerging-- and that isn't driven by guilt, shame,
avoidance, and other fears.
Hence also the value of alcohol and drugs in
quickly removing superego-based inhibition and in
2082
freeing more-primitive pleasures-- however briefly.

Cachaca sounds great.
Joel
Barney
May 5

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Joel,
Cachaca is the best superego inhibition inhibitor
yet known to mankind.
You may enjoy a true truth serum story that can
serve as fair warning:
My daughter Kate and I were invited to dinner in
the manor house of the farm where she was
renting a garage-top house while a student at the
University of Virginia. The host was a famed and
fabulously wealthy eye surgeon along with his
lovely and warm wife. He was among the FFV
2083
(First Families of Virginia) and proper as proper

can ever proper be. I brought the bottle of cachaca
and Kate helped me make the caipirinhas.
I gave them both fair warning, and was especially
pointed with him because FFV always seem to
have something they want to hide, like Ashley and
Scarlet. I said, "Doc, this is powerful stuff. Truth
serum is not to be trifled with."
He nodded superordinately.
Caipirhinas are awesomely delicious. The simple
sugar syrup turbocharges their advance upon the
inhibition centers of the superego and flicks them
off, off, off, off and off by the time you are
beginning drink number 2. With each successive
drink the truth becomes more and more apparent,
in a cool, unsloppy, Brazilian way that isn't mean or
grudging or vengeful but dead on truthful, and thus
often very funny. The connoisseurs are quick to
learn the "Dantas Rule," which states: "With drink
five, leave out the sugar."
By the time the eye surgeon got to drink number
two his superego was getting limber and by drink
three it was soft taffy and he was telling secrets
about Virginia life and politics that had us all in
stitches. I looked at my watch. It was 10:30. Kate
said something that hinted we were going to leave,
and the wife said, "Please don't go yet," and the
2084
doctor said, "No,no, please go!"

He instantly slapped his hand over his mouth,
looked at his wife, and blushed crimson from
forehead to fingertips.
Kate broke into a big grin and I regretfully said, "I
told you so," and we left this more honest man with
more time that he otherwise might have had to
masonically enjoy his wife.
Barney
Joel Markowitz
May 5

Barney,
I'll see if my local liquor store carries it.
( Good story. )
Joel
2085
Barney
May 5

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Joel,
The best available are Pitu, with a big red lobster
on the bottle, or Leblon, named after a part of Rio
and in a translucent bottle. Both are equally very
good, Pitu is less expensive.
For two people:
Squeeze four juicy limes.
Divide lime juice equally between two low ball
glasses.
With a stick of wood "muddle" (crush and squash)
two lime quarters in each glass.
Add pure water (still, not sparkling) to each glass to
double the volume.
Add two teaspoons of simple syrup to each glass
2086
(more if requested).
Add two shots of cachaca to each glass.
Add ice cubes.
Stir to combine.
TO MAKE: Simple syrup: Bring one cup of sugar
and 1/2 cup of water to a boil in a non-aluminum
pot. When sugar water is clear, remove from heat
and allow to cool. Store in fridge.
Boa viajem.
Barney
Alice Maher
May 5

in Clio’s Psyche
Denis, I can see that that would be a worthy
definition of psychohistory. But I don't think
psychohistory has enough of a coherent "self" and
2087
hasn't take root in society or academia yet. So yes,

at this point in the field's infancy, I believe that the
field needs to act on its own behalf. It needs an
original, simple, exciting mission statement, it
needs branding, and it needs advertising. Acting on
one's own behalf is not equivalent to acting out.
Paralysis can be paralyzing.
May 5
I didn't even know of this site until I got an invite --

felt like joining a secret society. I tried to explore
some issues of Clio's History, but the university
near me doesn't carry it, and it's not available on
the internet. Some of the most exciting
psychohistory on the web is at Lloyd's
Psychohistory site, and it links to a different -- but
in its case, at least public -- discussion site. My
point is there is another option other than courting
the favour of academia. Maybe just instead be
bravely open, dare be exposed -- warts and all ...
and catch the notice of the more emotionally
evolved people out there that way, in society, I
mean? I think this discussion site is fun; people
2088
should be able to find it more easily. Also, if we feel

like we expect people to know the details of WW2,
we should at least be aware that it's probably going
to mean reading a lot of history, written by men,
and a lot of tanks, planes, generals, soldiers, and
guns, and appreciate that they should at least gag
a bit before getting to business.
Brian
May 5

Clio’s Psyche
Alice, you are not a psychohistorian and you don’t
know what you’re talking about.
Ralph Fishkin
May 5
Brian,
2089
While I wouldn’t quite put it that way, and I certainly

know you didn’t mean to be hurtful to Alice, I agree
that her prescriptions do not fit the development of
scholarly field. Perhaps the group needs to split
into an activist group and a scholarly interest
group.
Ralph
Barney
May 5

Clio’s Psyche
dear Joel,
Just read in one of your previous notes that you
believe I "dislike" you.
Nonsense. The truth be known you are in my mind
one of the most interesting and provocative minds
on this or any other list. I was talking to myself the
other day about how many ideas you present and
2090
how passionately you advocate for them. Some of

the most pleasurable excursions of thought have
been stirred up by you. I do not personally attack
you, although I may at times question the course of
your trains of thought. I believe certain ideals and
behaviors lead to loneliness and I believe in you I
see both. No dislike meant or intended. I 'd truly
loathe to be known as the puny mind that disliked
you. I do hope that settles it.
Barney
Denis O'Keefe
May 5

Alice,
I have to disagree on multiple fronts.
Psychohistorians have been producing great works
for much longer than I've been alive. I count 3,
possibly 4 generations depending on how one
categorizes. Saying that PH is in its infancy could
be perceived as an insult to the many great minds,
2091
some of which are on this list, who provide a very

solid foundation of theory and application
throughout their careers. I think you might do well
to make a study of PH before seeking to brand it.
Secondly, I never provided a definition nor do I
think I could or should, but use a working
definition. This isn't paralysis but a healthy respect
for the multitude of approaches within
psychohistorical domains. This might be why
Henry Lawton and Paul begin their texts with an
overview of definitions by important PH
contributors over the years. I also find something
refreshing in the lack of a specified definition. PH
is free to evolve as it has without such constraints.
I enjoy the complexity inherent to this approach.
Yes this makes it more difficult to brand, but much
more exciting to be part of.
Lastly, the idea coming from both you and Joel that
our group is stuck or at some kind of impasse
seems foreign to me and I suspect many others. I
don't experience the group this way. Possibly
because my expectations are different than yours
as to what the group should be doing or producing.
Maybe I am missing something, but I have no
sense of an impasse.
Denis
Denis O'Keefe
2092
May 5
Patrick,
Paul has graciously added back issues of Clio
Psyche on the Psychohistory Forum website
at http://www.cliospsyche.org/index.html
Denis
Alice Maher
May 5

in Clio’s Psyche
Brian, you're right, I'm not. I've been admitting that
for a very long time. Problem is, you're not a
psychoanalyst and yet you blur the distinctions
between the two fields in a way that suggests that
you believe yourself to be. Let's agree that I'm not
an historian or a psychohistorian, and you're not a
psychoanalyst.
2093
I like Ralph's idea that we should divide into an

activist group and a scholarly interest group. Not a
final division, but committees where we all know
that activists/analysts are talking forward
movement and dynamic change process, and
scholars are talking scholarship. We have to stop
arguing apples with oranges!
And yes, Denis, I think this is a fascinating group
and a smart-as-hell group and I learn a lot when I
read, but I sincerely and powerfully believe that
humankind needs to become aware of the power of
psychological factors in human history, and the IPA
and Clio are not doing enough to come together
and move forward.
Hell, I'm an analyst. It's the kind of
confrontation/interpretation I make all day, every
day to people I work with and care about.
May 5
Thanks for letting me know, Denis. (And thanks for

your generosity, Paul.) Yeah, a bit earlier some
people here were talking about the latest issue,
2094
and I felt shut out. I look forward to exploring.
Brian
May 5

Clio’s Psyche
Alice, I have never purported to be an analyst, and
would consider it the height of arrogance for me to
go into a psychoanalysis discussion group and
lecture the entire group about the crisis in
psychoanalysis and how I have the solution to their
problem.
I endorse the notion of academic (basic research)
and applied psychohistory. There is a place for
your work in the applied branch. But if you want to
be an applied psychohistorian, you need to at least
do some minimal reading in the academic branch
of the field and demonstrate an interest in at least
some of the academic discussions on this list. I am
not saying that you should necessarily do these
things, but if you don’t, why are you on this list?
Are you here to save us from ourselves, even
2095
though you don’t know who we are?

Without some knowledge of academic
psychohistory, a would-be applied psychohistorian
has nothing to apply. He or she is like a doctor
who has never studied biology, or an engineer who
has never studied physics, or psychoanalyst who
has never read Freud or Jung. There is a vast
body of knowledge about the topic of war and at
least some of the discussion on this list on this
topic is accessible to non-specialists.
Notwithstanding your lack of interest in this topic
and almost complete lack of knowledge of what
war is and how it works, you go around talking
about how you are going to put an end to war. If
you want to know what discredits the field of
psychohistory outside the boundaries of this
community, that kind of uninformed activism is high
on the list.
Alice Maher
May 5

in Clio’s Psyche
2096
"Notwithstanding your lack of interest in this topic and

almost complete lack of knowledge of what war is and
how it works, you go around talking about how you are
going to put an end to war."
Yes, Brian, that's exactly what I'm doing. Recall
Einstein's dictum that you can't solve a problem at the
same level of thinking that was used to create it. I'm
addressing the problem from the perspective of a "right
eye." I know that I will never see the landscape the way
a "left eye" like you does, and vice versa. I can only
imagine how you see the world, ask that you try harder
to consider my different perspective, and maybe
eventually we can focus together on a shared horizon.
Alternately, I can pull away from Clio until I'm well
enough versed in historical literature to reach the more
palatable conclusion that war is the result of evil
capitalists.
May 5
What ought to discredit a group is if it seems one

where only the men are left talking ... and they
hardly notice, with the last female participant
2097
amongst them deemed by the rest some fluff who

isn't serious enough for inclusion.
Temperament is what I'm looking for for my
psychohistory/psychosociety (I think I could do
away with almost all of the history; one full
deMausian historical cycle of societal growth to
societal purge -- the most recent one -- being
enough). If someone out of all choices in the world
dove headfirst into that swill we call history without
at least some reproach, I'd be kind of wondering if I
shouldn't just take the gal who said, no dice, too
many rapes -- I'm doing art therapy/English MFA
instead! for her possessing the only attitude I'd
respect to vouch for accuracy ... and to be spared
weirdo attachment, if we do need to take the
plunge.
This is real; I've read a ton of history and ... I just
can't go back there much anymore. We've
improved. We're warmer company than ever
before. It's sane to like people as they are in the
present. It's sane for people who think the same to
think they might the ones most empowered to
make peace in the world, and to treat those who've
loaded themselves up with history, as if they'd
bizarrely welcomed in a contagion. They'll never
see war, ever, as a righteous thing ... not many
historians can make claim to that.
2098
Don't we see this all the time? I see it in literature

studies ... the student, the complete newbie, who
can see the material best for possessing the most
emotionally evolved mindset, balked for a moment
or maybe a year or two by the professor who can
for now intimidate by seeming just one loyal
component of a huge institution, that's gone over
the material for ages.
Alice Maher
May 6
Thanks, Patrick, for referencing the feminine so I

didn't have to.
Brian et al, I'm familiar with the way psychoanalytic
theory addresses The Problem of Woman, and I
would be very interested to hear more about the
way that topic is addressed in the study of
history.
I may be old fashioned, but I'm pretty sure that I
think differently from the way the Stereotypical Man
does. I'm the reason women weren't considered
smart enough to vote for their favorite warmonger
until just last week. .;)
2099
Brian
May 6
Patrick, you make a good point about the gender

imbalance on this list. However, you are mistaken if
you think I don’t want Alice on the list. In that case,
I would have given up a long time ago trying to
communicate with her. I would not have published
a front page piece on her work in Psychohistory
News
(see
http://www.psychohistory.us/resources/IPA_14_1_
winter.pdf ) or encouraged her to do presentations
at the IPA conference. Alice has said that she
thinks we all need to learn how to communicate
what we really think and feel. That is all I have
ever tried to do on this list, but there are limits to
uninhibited self-expression. Yesterday I crossed
the line, and owe Alice an apology.
Alice, I hope you will accept my apology. I strongly
believe in your work, and believe you have an
important contribution to make to this list. I want
you to succeed in this community. I strongly
believe that can only happen through genuinely
reciprocal engagement with others, and that has
always been my mantra with you. Separately and
2100
apart from that message, I have frequently botched

the message by rebuking you publicly, which is
grotesque and should have no place on this list.
Ralph and Ken have gently and skillfully reminded
me of that fact, and for that I am grateful. If I do
that in the future, I deserve a chorus of boos. Tell
me to stop being an asshole.
Also, if anyone has a binder of women
psychohistorians, to steal and adapt Mitt Romney
colorful phrase, please send it to me. ☺ .
Brian
Alice Maher
May 6
Thanks so much, Brian. I really appreciate this. I

love you guys and I'm quite okay with the
occasional regressions that happen here, with all of
us at different times. :)
May 6
2101
Alternately, I can pull away from Clio until I'm well

enough versed in historical literature to reach the more
palatable conclusion that war is the result of evil
capitalists.
I still think this was an inspired contribution by Alice
... history as something we do so that the path we
were going to go down anyway, seems fully
informed; a matter of lengthy, mature
deliberation. Temperament, emotional well-being,
is key ... and the psychohistorical problem remains
that history is a nightmare, so how goth do we
have to be to want to venture down there?
This whole next decade looks like its going to be
about every leftie (I'm socialist, by the by) in the
room rioting against evil capitalists. I'd love it if
somehow psychohistory/societyiens had them at
least considering that the nature of the childrearing,
the degree of suffered parental abuse, in the nation
was such that these same capitalists owed their
power to the perverse psychological needs of
those they crushed. These same people won't just
take down capitalists -- that is, true regressives --
but the most progressive alive as well, as they'll
represent the "spoiled" child they must refute to
feel worthy of finally acquiring their neglected
mothers' love.
I believe this is Florian Galler territory as well. I
2102
thought she was female, so someone I could

recommend, but I just googled "Florian" and got a
lot of male pictures, so I guess not.
—————-
jhsturges
May 6

Brian,
We'll have to disagree about there being an
inherent human drive to death and war. I
see it everywhere.
Would you agree there is a sex drive? If so,
what evidence do you have other than that
humans want it, and most engage in it when
given a chance?
Also, I happen to think that world
government would equal world tyranny. Like
capitalism, what makes things acceptable
(to the extent that they are) is some healthy
competition.
2103
Incidentally, calling the death instinct

"pseudo science" is incorrect, at least by the
definitions of Thomas Kuhn, who I happen to
agree with. The correct term for all of our
areas: psychoanalysis, psychohistory etc.
would be "Protoscience." This means there is
no defined and repeatable "paradigmic
experiment" in the areas of depth
psychology.
Actually, I think that is the trap of the
behaviorists, academics and other similar
ilks who try to treat psychology as a science
when its subject matter is inherently non-
observable, being by definition subjective
material.
————Jim
Trevor Pederson
May 6
Hi Jim
I think that understanding the exception to the rule
is always important. Yes there's been a lot of war,
2104
but like heterosexuality, it's not universal. There are

some primitive political economies that don't
engage in it, or that get bulldozed by others who
do.
Freud's very point about sexuality is that the penis
and vagina connection found in most animals
(there are some homosexual mammals and
Bonobos kiss, engage in bisexuality, fellatio, etc.) is
extremely more plastic in humans.
I think psychoanalysts rightly got a lot of flack for
wanting to view things as eternal and failing to
appreciate how sociological/technological changes
might have changed "human nature".
Do you ever study the exceptions?
Brian
May 6
Jim, Trevor, and all. I agree with Trevor that

universality is required if we are going to talk about
instincts or drives. If we see a lot of gratuitous
destructiveness in the world around us but
nevertheless some individuals and some cultures
are non-destructive, then the cause of all the
2105
gratuitous destructiveness cannot be a universal

principle such as a drive or instinct. Also Occam’s
razor tells us to keep it simple and not multiply
explanatory principles needlessly. If traumatizing
people makes them destructive or self-destructive,
and abusive childrearing practices are widespread,
why do we need to invoke some kind of innate
destructive principle to account for widespread
destructiveness? The theory of a death instinct is
both unnecessary and inconsistent with the fact
that not all individuals and not all cultures are
destructive. One in-depth study of a non-violent
culture is Barry Hewlett’s Intimate Fathers: The
Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant
Care.
Following Occam’s razor, I am a minimalist with
respect to innate psychological mechanisms. We
have basic bodily needs including sex. We have
language. We have the fight/flight response, which
is a clearly adaptive inheritance of natural selection
but which is also easily deformed by trauma,
resulting in chronic and irrational fear and rage.
Finally, human infants make shrill noises when they
need something, which is adaptive because it gets
the attention of any nearby adult but also sets them
up for abuse if efforts to meet their needs do not
make them stop crying. These innate building
blocks of human psychology, taken as a whole,
2106
have vast explanatory power. If it turns out that

they cannot explain some phenomenon, then and
only then does it make sense, in my opinion, to
create a more complex model.
Brian

One in-depth study of a non-violent culture is
Barry Hewlett’s Intimate Fathers: The Nature and
Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care.
Steven Pinker was probably intending to make
anthropologists look silly by essentially saying
they've been abuse-apologists all along -- every
one of them that was ostensibly peace-loving, had
so much to teach us moderns, turned out more
war-intent than George Bush. Rather than
something to learn from their childrearing, he glues
the word "infanticidal" to them, and leaves it to us
to try thereafter to add some warm glow.
I think we need to take care that we don't end up
seeming to make the case that tribal cultures
deserve all the attention we give them -- because
2107
there's something humane about them ...

something better than us, from which we need to
learn. Because what we're doing is making
our interest in them seem conditional. It is not just
because they were stigmatized by regressive
Europeans who projected their own demons on to
them, but because we look close and we find
human treasures of care and kindness that we
moderns have lost, that we uphold their intrinsic
worth and protect them from harm.
If America turns nativist and provincial, I wouldn't
want to leave any group of people out there
vulnerable to maltreatment if it turns out they're not
as nice as we've all been lead to believe. This
holds true with how liberals have been defending
Islamic cultures. What we hear -- even from Pinker
-- is that most are peaceful, and we're dealing only
with fringe. And with this, we seem to make a non-
war like stance conditional on their having
"compartmentalized" religion and being
mostly peace loving, just like everyone else in the
world. But we know from the 1930s, when peaceful
Weimar Germans suddenly switched and became
as a whole populace war-craving, whole peoples
can suddenly become "monsters." Any deMausian
would know that the only people who war, who hurt
their children, who genocide, are massively
unloved people, who are actually gaining revenge
2108
against their own "guilty" striving and vulnerable

selves in their killing the innocent. No matter how
awful people get in behaviour, they never lose our
love and support, even as others must be
protected from their aggressions.
I agree with you Brian -- no death instinct; just too
many children in their infancy fearing being
apocalyptically murdered by their mothers ... that's
why the "strange" phenomenal of 5 year olds
knowing death.
jhsturges
Trevor, I think I understand your point

about the importance of exceptions . . . I
just can't think of any with respect to the
idea that pacifist societies cannot long exist,
at least not without protection from
another.The Swiss come to mind; yet, the
Swiss are very capable of defending
themselves in those mountains if anyone
ever tried to invade. Every adult male has
military training and is armed.
2109
———Jim
———————————
Joel Markowitz
May 6
I think that we know what psychohistory is. As

Paul's journal's
cover said quite accurately it's the "understanding
the "Why" of
Culture, Current Events, History and Society."
Historians tell us WHAT happened.
Psychohistorians should tell us
WHY it happened. That refers to illuminating the
deeper "machinery"
that made the events happen.
And it very often refers to the psychodynamic
determinants that made
people and the minds of the various groups decide
to do what they do.
I don't see how one can understand psychohistory
without
understanding human dynamics.
2110
Which is why I disagree with Denis's belief that a

lot of
psychohistory has been written. It depends on
what you call
psychohistory-- where you draw the line.
It's primarily because Freudian-based
psychodynamics is still so
effectively avoided that very little psychohistory has
been written.
As I've suggested (which Alice seems to
understand), Clio -- the
collective entity-- still actively cleaves to the
Christian Era
attitudes, and avoids the deeper psychodynamic
determinants of
psychohistory.
I disagree with Brian about Alice. I think that she's
closer to
being a psychohistorian than are most contributors
to Clio.
Joel
dr.bobstern
2111
May 6
"...still actively cleaves to the Christian Era

attitudes"
Joel, I'm a newbie. Others may understand
precisely what you're saying, but what do you
mean by the phrase Christian Era attitudes -- and
how does Clio hold onto them?
Thanks.
May 6
Yeah, and not too much deference to our great,

gracious predecessors, and all their generosity. If
they're worth anything, it'd be an insult to them, for
they'd be asking themselves what's with all this
fawning ... and where the hell is our obnoxious
hippie! I know it's academic convention, but every
time I sense too much hat-tipping I fear you've got
people who want to masochistically manage
themselves so their efforts are just one small brick
into an already noble edifice. Sad enough, this
2112
weird self-winnowing, but I fear you've also got

people who'd see a crowd of emerging, more
brazen young, partying on the lawn, skipping
classes, and beginning greater dreams than ever
before ventured, and see a total lack of self-
discipline as well as ample disrespect!
Barney
May 6
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Psychohistory

Clio’s Psyche
My old mammy would say, "Patrick, watch your
tongue!”
May 6

I aim to be the guy girls bring home to revenge
2113
against their mom.
Barney
May 6

Clio’s Psyche
I like a man with high goals.
B
Brian
May 6
RE: [cliospsyche] Re: Psychohistory

Patrick, I’m glad to hear you say this, because it
has always seemed to me that you are unduly
deferential to Lloyd deMause’s ideas.
I am not one to quibble over labels and definitions.
I have no use for people who feel that their labels
2114
and definitions are the only correct ones, which is

both a power grab and a logical absurdity. The
meaning of terms needs to be negotiated, which is
a social process, and I strongly believe that the
process needs to be egalitarian. However, this
also applies to people who want to redefine a term
that already has a widely accepted meaning. We
cannot, like Humpty Dumpty, make words mean
whatever we want them to mean. It is just as
authoritarian and absurd for Joel to say that only
his version of Freudian psychohistory is REAL
psychohistory as it is for any practicing
psychohistorian to insist that his definition is the
only correct one.
Further, the person who feels that the field is too
narrowly defined and wants to propose a new
definition needs to be at least superficially familiar
with the range of work that is currently called
“psychohistory.” Otherwise you are just confusing
the conversation by promoting false information
about what is currently called “psychohistory.”
What I mean by “superficially familiar” is having
read a least one seminal book or article from each
of the main schools of thought in the field. Is that
too much to ask?
Who would find it acceptable for someone to say
they understand what psychoanalysis is if they
have read little or nothing of the Freudian
2115
literature? Now someone may not be interested in

this literature, which is fine. But in that case what
is going on when that person rejects what they
think is the Freudian concept of psychoanalysis
(based on little or no actual reading) and says that
HE is the real psychoanalyst, not all those
misguided folks in the American Psychoanalytic
Association. It would be like me saying, “Queen
Elizabeth thinks she’s the queen of England, but
she is mistaken. In reality, I am the queen of
England.” OK, Humpty Dumpty, have it your way.
Brian
Joel Markowitz
May 6

Brian,
I do believe, as you know, that Freudian-based
psychodynamic principles are closer to valid than
are other psychodynamic theories. My bias.
Let me correct here for my bias. Labels and
definitions are necessary; and we should use
2116
Paul's excellent definition that psychohistory

illuminates WHY the events happened. I know no
better definition; and I've been using it
long before I read it on Paul's front cover.
Simply remove "Freudian-based" from what I
wrote. Let's say that ANY theories approach being
psychohistory if they help us understand
determinism more-deeply than historians have
dared to do.
in the more-sophisticated future, psychohistorians
will be historians who deeply understand history.
Who know both WHAT happened and WHY it
happened.
Joel
May 6

I think deMause nailed it. There's an upcoming
issue of Clio's History where I believe people will
be discussing ISIS and that German pilot's
sacrifice of innocents, and all I want to do is direct
2117
them to deMause's explorations of the subject

(here, and here, specifically -- the later link takes
you to a large chapter wherein you'll find the
Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City bombing
discussed). I can't write anything. I'm great at
noticing his changes of emphasis, and feeling how
it colours his works, how it affects the overall
message communicated -- no small thing. But
other than sort of chastising him for never
discussing his mother, a big lapse, and a poor
example, given how much importance he gives to
"mom" on the whole fact of human society thing,
and to admitting how your own life is influencing
your work, I can't beat him. (Actually, there's
another thing I chastise him for -- he says history is
a nightmare and wants to cure the world
by spreading helping-class therapists across the
globe, yet never seems to have discouraged
people from too taking the plunge into the
historical morass of child-infanticiding meanies
he acknowledges is history... shouldn't he have
been concerned, that is, that this was his way too
of doing the sort of evil thing of taking the young
and innocent and scaring and scarring them with
ghouls and ghosts?) So despite my being
wonderfully egotistical and knowing myself a
unique blessing on our beloved Earth, I give the
guy his due. Pretty much, start here.... Gives me
actually a lot of fresh ground anyway. There's
2118
nothing there in his works about how to

phenomenologically best to experience life, the
ground of poets and artists. His work, despite its
astonishing truth, will as we evolve, eventually get
waylaid.
It feels weird to even say the word "history." I
reference the word ...and I feel a hundred girls
dropping my class. I mean this isn't quite fair, there
was near an even 50/50 split of sexes in my history
classes. But women predominated in both English
and Psychology, and it seemed to have less of the
stink of a male hiding place. So it's my own
aversion, really ... psychosociety seems .... fresher,
appeal to a new sensibility, maybe. Maybe it'll
catch on?
I'm familiar with psychohistory, but I guess you're
afraid I'm waylaying people. I'm not sure I'm doing
that ... more lending courage to those who feel the
same implications from history being a
nightmare, something maybe sanish to be averse
to, as I do.
Joel doesn't say his bit in a way that persuades
me. I think there is something of a tantrum in
Lloyd's(?) "realpsychohistory," and I respond to the
idea of everyone just putting forth their best take,
and being delighted if they can be surpassed or
proven wrong, because they can now come even
2119
closer to something that is true, and as well have

the delightful reminder that they're living in a world
that can challenge you at your very, very best. But,
like I said, I think he's right ... and also that we're
living in a period where, owing to his focusing on
the person we all fear most -- our mothers -- the
primary source of all our traumas and terrors (you
never experienced that? really?), our point is going
to be able to prove to Her than we're quite willing to
back away some. Someone's going to need to
make a call to that well-enough loved part of
ourselves that won't part known truth for a safe
hiding place in these willingly cowering, self-
sacrificial, self-admonishing, great-suffering-
generation times.
May 6

our point is going to be able to prove to Her than
we're quite willing to back away some.
should have read, our point is going to be to be
able to prove to Her that we're quite willing to back
away some.
2120
A little bit of sloppiness in this post; sorry about

that.
Ken Fuchsman
May 6

We have had discussions on what psychohistory is
and is not, what it needs to explore, and more. For
our edification and pleasure, I propose that we
again post books on psychohistory we find to be
essential and exceptional.
Here off the to of my head to get started is my list.
,
1. Erik Erikson (1958), Young Man Luther
2. Richard Hofstadter (1965), The Paranoid Style in
American Politics and Other Essays.
3. Alan Elms (1994), Uncovering Lives: The
Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology
4. Joanna Bourke (2000), An Intimate History of
Killing.
5. Jacques Szaluta (2001), Psychohistory: Theory
2121
and Practice
6. David Beisel (2004), The Suicidal Embrace
jhsturges
May 6

I always thought that "Real psychohistory"
was to distinguish it from that of Hari Seldon
in Isaac Asimov's fabulous Foundation
Trilogy.
I always wondered if Lloyd was aware of
Asimov when he started using the term. The
simple fact is that Asimov's use is about a
million times more famous; and predates
Lloyd by decades, so I always thought the
choice of the term, or whichever
psychologist first came up with it, was a
little bit unfortunate.
For those who may not know, Asimov's field
of psychohistory was mostly statistical
patterns of history. The thesis was that if
the field was large enough, i.e., an entire
2122
galaxy, that by the law of large numbers the

predictions would become extremely
accurate.
In later books, however, there is a character
call the "Mule" who is able to exercise some
form of mass hypnosis. So that was when
Asimov crossed a little out of the statistical
area . . . though I don't really think he knew
anything about psychology.
He was a great writer though. Boys of my
generation cut our literary teeth on him and
Heinlein.
———Jim
Barney
May 6

Dear Jim,
How good to find somebody who knows of Asimov.
I had the pleasure and privilege for a year to edit
most of Asimov's non-fiction essays, articles and
2123
scientific publications, which were many and

varied. He lived in NYC, I was living in Texas, we
never met face to face but I spent untold hours on
the telephone with him listening to his very, very
funny stories and marveling at all that he knew and
how he knew it.
He was prodigiously prolific (probably half a billion
words, maybe more), and he crowed about that
record continually, but it was not un-endearing.
About the only time he stopped writing and
boasting was to eat. Like all of the best writers that
I've had a chance to edit, he was easy, never fell in
love with his humor and cleverness (but I at times
did; he was that good). My way to edit is that if
something looks to me a bit rough or fuzzy or
incorrectly ambigious, I'll ask, "Can this be said
better?" and 99% of the time it could, and he did.
Was Asimov the first psychohistorian? We never
discussed that matter directly because it was never
an issue. Psychologically he was awesomely acute
and historically he was prodigious in what he knew
and how simple and clear he could express it. He
was a brilliant anthropologist, in my opinion, and
his behavioral descriptions of mankind are so right
on that readers often laugh out loud. If anyone
hasn't read Asimov's Shakespeare and his The
Bible they are in for a long and delicious feast.
2124
I often recall the Asimovian mind and how listening

to him think aloud was like drinking from a fire
hose. Yet above and beyond the everyday ways of
super-genius Jewishness (he felt that only Carl
Sagan and Marvin Minsky were his intelligent
equals or betters) there was something Spockishly
ethereal and plugged into another reality, or
actuality. He observed life on earth with the curious
perspective of a compassionate alien and
metrically he missed little or nothing.
Whenever I think of Asimov, this story comes to
mind: One day I asked Kate, my daughter, who she
would most like to talk to of anyone living on Earth
if she could, and she surprised me with "Isaac
Asimov". I told her his UWS address near Central
Park, gave her his telephone number. But what
with her school work and assignments and
whatever, she didn't make an appointment right
away, and before you know it he was dead (1992).
C'est va. He left a megaton of immortality behind.
Barney
May 6
2125

Other recipients: kfuchsman@gmail.com
Lloyd deMause. Emotional Life of Nations.
Lloyd deMause. The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
Joseph Rheingold. Mother, Anxiety and Death: the
catastrophic death complex. (and not just for its
title!)
Patrick McEvoy-Halston. Draining the Amazons'
Swamp. (by a virtual unknown, who saw the
'horror' and returned to talk about it)
Teri Apter. Difficult Mothers.
John Updike.
Add that all up and shake it around a bit, and
you've got my psychohistory drink of choice.
Barney
May 6

Dear Jim,
2126
You may recall some of these observations by

Asimov:
People who think they know everything are a great
annoyance to those of us who do.
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my
fingers.
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I
wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed
understander.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a
reputation for subtlety.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of
doing what's right.
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change,
that is the dominant factor in society today. No
sensible decision can be made any longer without
taking into account not only the world as it is, but
the world as it will be.
…
Joel Markowitz
2127
May 6

Dear Barney,
Asimov was, of course, unique. No one has ever
approached his verbal productivity-- nor, we might
say, his fund of factual knowledge.
His wife said that he was always at his typewriter.
But that doesn't begin to explain his unique
talents, his productivity, and knowledge.
I would always read his notes on Shakespeare
before going to a Shakespearean performance.
It's uncanny that he had the time and energy to dig
up information about those productions
that no other critic seemed to know.
But he was not psychohistorical. One evidence
(and I noticed several) was his take on that
(perhaps) greatest of literary debates: Hamlet's
motivation.
Asimov accepts the traditional explanation. (So did
Coleridge and other very good critics.) They
largely accepted Hamlet's explanations.
( Except for some Russian critics. Their
understanding was bizarre. )
2128
Shakespeare intuitively knew better than to believe

Hamlet. One is EXTREMELY grateful for his
inclusion of the scene in which Hamlet approaches
Gertrude's bedroom-- and for his behavior in her
bedroom !!!
It's fundamentally unnecessary to the play. But it
does compel us to believe that it was Hamlet's
extreme oedipal conflict that destroyed him.
------------------------------------
Clio isn't happy with my focus on oedipal
determinism. Clio members may roll their eyes
when I return to it again and again to emphasize its
fundamental role in our development-- individually
and collectively.
But that will continue to be my role in this group.
Joel
Joel Markowitz
May 6

Patrick,
2129
You write that I don't persuade you. Let's

speculate on why I don't-- and won't-- "persuade"
you; nor will you persuade me (re: e.g., deMause).
We will most-probably keep our opinions-- as Clio
will probably
keep its (collective) opinion.
That will probably be the case for the same reason
that Freudian-based thinking hasn't persuaded far
more people than it has over more than a century.
Which has nothing to do with intelligence.
Einstein's theories are enormously difficult to
understand; yet many physicists and
mathematicians have-- by means of enormous
effort-- been able to understand them.
That so many people can do advanced calculus
gives me great respect for human intelligence. For
our ability to understand...
Freudians will say that our RESISTANCE to
Freudian theory has to do with RESISTANCE.
Opponents condemn that theory as contrary to the
laws of Logic. Which it is.
To understand Freudian-based determinism is far
more important to humankind than to understand
Einstein's theories; yet Freudians insist that
humans are still resistant.
2130
Why?
Why will some people insist on Mother's PRE-
OEDIPAL role as being of primary important in our
later development-- while others will emphasize the
primary importance of the Oedipus Complex-- and
Father?
----------------------------------------
The Freudian-based answer would be that the

Christian Era still compels us to avoid oedipal
determinism. The Christian Era mindset permits
us to emphasize pre-oedipal dynamics-- i.e.,
mother's nurturing role.
We are still forced to repress and avoid conscious
knowledge of phallic fantasies and impulses.
And that that influence still dominates our thinking.
( "Phallic fantasies and impulses" are: the
genetically-based need in humans (and other
higher mammals) to defeat-destroy-replace Father
and possess Mother sexually. )
According to the Chr. Era, such alpha-male
strivings are OK in wolves, lions, baboons, etc. but
God made us superior to /different from animals.
deMause (and so many others) are ALLOWED TO
say that Mother is so much more-fundamental than
2131
Father because Mother's PRE-OEDIPAL and

ASEXUAL love is nurturing and innocent.
The Christian Era permits non-oedipal thinking.
---------------------------------------------
Mother's pre-oedipal influences are very powerful
in shaping much of our earliest development; no
one denies that. But following the brief oedipal 4-
year-old period, the boy heavily represses and
suppresses his investment in Mother.
Father is the threat-- and is fundamental to his
future. To establish an effective alliance and
identification with Father becomes his
preoccupation. He unconsciously sees his survival
and successes dependent on that focus.
Again: the other higher mammals demonstrate that
far more-clearly. The male cub quickly outgrows
his need for nurturing from mother. He wrestles
and mock-battles with other cubs in preparation for
his challenge of
the alpha-male-- i.e., Father. If he can win that
crucial battle, he can mate all the females; if not,
he may never have a sexual experience. ( Many
male lions, wolves, and baboons never mate. )
Sexual need creates the mating season. But the
ongoing preoccupation of mature males is with
2132
Father and the hierarchy of males. Mating with

females is taken for granted.
Similarly with people (though this is changing).
Throughout history, wars and the male hierarchies
dominated human affairs. Female influences were
avoided and even feared as "feminizing" the group.
The universal (and not unrealistic) fear was that a
"feminized" group would be easily conquered.
Males congregated with males, and groups
exaggerated male-stereotypical thinking. It was
with men throughout their lives,
and was institutionalized in groups as a
fundamental principle.
--------------------------------------------
Because we're in a Transition heading toward
mature psychosexual development, that latent-
oedipal ("preadolescent") principle is changing.
The psychosexual period following
preadolescence is maturity.
As we evolve toward mature thinking, the
importance of women is increasingly
acknowledged. Women's Liberation announced
that would be the case 40+ years ago.
That unique change is happening and escalating,
not primarily for moral. but for practical reasons.
2133
Natural selection favors groups that increasingly

exploit women and female influences.
But this change is very recent. It has a long way to
go. This Transition also has a long way to go.
-------------------------------------------
In this Transition, humankind is distributed in a
spectrum extending from the Christian Era toward
advanced preadolescence and early maturity.
We all occupy different positions on the spectrum--
of how far along we are toward post-Christian-Era
thinking.
I have a brilliant acquaintance who lives like a
scholarly monk. He's far more scholarly than I
could ever be, and it's delightful to discuss issues
with him.
Soon after I first met him, he made a remark that
seemed to me to be strange. I asked him why he
thought that what he said was realistic. He said--
matter-of-factly, "It's in the Gospel." ( Of course, I
changed the subject.)
We must keep in mind that over the past two
thousand years, the most-esteemed people were
the monks and nuns. They MOST-actively
suppressed oedipally-based fantasies and
impulses.
2134
Natural selection eliminated celibate groups. The

Jewish, Christian and Moslem groups were
ingenious enough to reproduce, despite the
preadolescent injunction against sexuality.
--------------------------------------------
As a therapist, I find it necessary to know this and
to use it with my patients. I help my patients deal
with their formative years' derived guilt, fear and
other symptoms (which afflict them from within).
I also help them deal with the Christian Era
influences that broadcast to them throughout their
lives (and afflict them from without).
What about Clio and Clio's membership?
Clio has survived several years now. It has been
productive of some interesting discussions which
its members have enjoyed. In their brief existence,
websites have proven to be enjoyable sources of
self-expression, debate, comradeship,
and ideas.
We've discussed history and current events-- often
with intelligence and scholarship.
Clio has, I believe, been of benefit. But I don't
accept its claim that it deals with psychohistory. If
2135
it were truly working toward becoming

psychohistorical, it would accept that as a fact.
Joel
May 6

Jim, I think I've heard of deMause hurting people's
feelings by IDing them mini-deMauses. He can be
testy, and angry at perceived abandonment. I really
doubt it had anything to do with Asimov, just people
avoiding everything he was saying as if it was
radioactive. DeMause references french scholars
like Barzun and uber-literate writers like Updike: I
don't know how much pop American culture was
his thing, nor how much of his upbringing was him
and Heinlein. You guys might know. Asimov has
written that he hates kids, so the association would
be ironic.
Alice Maher
2136
May 6

Would the group be willing to read one paper and
discuss it together, so we can outline the issues in
the field and our own differences? Long reference
lists of books aren't anything I have time or interest
to invest in, but a paper that's seminal but also
somewhat controversial (DeMause?) could lead to
an important and useful dialogue. Any ideas?
Obviously I would prefer a paper with a link so it
can be easily accessed.
On a different note, I have a question for Joel. You
may have talked about this before, but I'd like to
ask you how you see radical Islam and ISIS in the
context of your "Christian Era" model.
Joel Markowitz

Very briefly, Alice, having been uniquely successful
from their onset, the Moslem group didn't feel the
need to repress primitive fantasies and impulses.
2137
They enjoyed acting on them for centuries.

While they indulged their needs far more than did
Christians and Jews, there was a terrible
disadvantage. They expended those primitive
elements and energies. The highly repressed
Jews and Christians sublimated them creatively.
In time, Christian sublimations of those stored
energies led to impressive Christian progress in all
areas (e.g., the Moslems never had a
Renaissance)-- including military progress.
After their defeat in the 16th C., the Moslems
withdrew from the contest. As the world "grew
smaller," Christian groups didn't leave them alone,
but took over their territories and resources.
The Moslem situation deteriorated for centuries.
On 9/11 we saw evidence of Moslem rage-- not
only for having been exploited for centuries, but--
even more painful-- for having been demeaned by
Western groups over that long period of time--
and as a result of extreme feelings of inferiority.
The most-angry and paranoid Moslem elements
have dominated Moslem-group functioning
following 9/11.
2138
Joel
jhsturges

Barney and Joel,
What a treat! I had no idea that my Asimov
reference would be treated with anything
other than disdain on this list.
I have not read Asimov's Shakespeare; but,
will certainly rectify this situation in the very
near future.
Barney, I'm envious of your personal
relationship. Asimov would also be on my
short fantasy list of people to have dinner
with. I am pleasantly surprised that you
report he had psychological insight, as this
was not really evident in his fictional account
of psychohistory; but, of course, his analysis
of Artificial Intelligence (well before its time)
was profound, and is still given
consideration today in the development of
2139
what are referred to as "Autonomous robots"

-- meaning robots that can make their own
decisions, potentially even to kill.
As Asimov elucidated, the Three Laws, as
simple as they appear to be, can be very
difficult to apply for a mind that can only
think in 1's and 0's.
————Jim
Alice Maher

Thanks, Joel. Am I the only person here who
thinks Joel's idea is very original and very cool?
————————
drwargus
May 6
2140
Alice, this article might fit the bill.

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/29/8514239/qddr-2015
Alice Maher
May 7
Thanks for the suggestion, Bill. Looks intriguing.

Would the rest of the group like to discuss this over
the weekend?
Brian
May 7
I think this is as good a starting point as any for

discussion and will comment on the article in detail
this weekend. Thank you for resurrecting the idea
of a common text, Alice. This one is so short and
accessible that it can be read in a few minutes.
The piece is not psychohistorical, but it raises
psychohistorical questions, such a global violence,
that interest us. It has the virtue of putting forward
a big picture of what is wrong with the world and
2141
answers this question in terms of institutional

factors. I think it will be a useful exercise to ask
how we, as psychohistorians, would go beyond this
level of analysis.
Some of us think institutional factors are
unimportant and see psychohistory as a substitute
for the kind of analysis this article provides. My
own view is that institutional factors are just as
fundamental as psychological factors, and that
psychohistory supplements rather than displaces
the kind of analysis presented in this article. In the
past, our efforts to talk about these different
pictures of psychohistory were hanging in the air
and went nowhere because we didn’t have a
common text and a specific theory on the table. If
we all read this article, we can have a more
informed discussion with a well-defined thesis to
critique.
Brian
Ken Fuchsman
Bill,
2142
The article is certainly political, there is not much

historical here, and I didn't notice anything that was
psychological or psychohistroical. What made you
think this might be a good common text for us to
read?
drwargus
All politics is psychological and this is speaking to

psychological and cultural development. As life
conditions change, the human institutions must
develop and become more complex. I believe this
is much of what Lloyd talks about in his
developmental stages. If psychohistory is to remain
relevant, I believe that it must be able to contribute
to discussions like these.

2143
The QDDR proposes a number of ways to

improve its focus on these issues. For
instance, it proposes a new investment
on data-driven forecasting designed to
predict conflicts and mass atrocities. If
State Department diplomats have a
better way of knowing countries are
most at risk of serious violence, the
theory goes, they can know where to
invest resources in order to prevent
those conflicts from getting worse.
This is what deMause provides.Those

who had the least warm childhoods,
those who had the least-loved and
therefore least-loving mothers, will have
learned that their own individuation and
self-growth is "spoiled" and a bad thing,
and if life "provides" them such anyway,
they'll eventually need to re-bond to a
maternal entity -- a mother nation, a
maternal group ... whatever -- become
her good boys and girls, and destroy
everyone they've projected their own
"sinful" vulnerability and striving selves
into. The task will be to see if those most
2144
qualified by their emotional temperament

to do so, will finally shorn themselves of
their need to make everyone they've
protected from neanderthal rightwing
minds in their own countries as people of
grace, courage and thorough beauty.
This is not a sure thing. Salon's

progressive editor, Joan Walsh,
has admitted that mostly black
Americans, for example, spank and hit
and intimidate their children (Brittney
Cooper, a leading black intellectual who
contributes at her site, has said this
straight-up, and argued that she
will endeavour to do no such thing
herself) -- that this has been going on for
generations. But, she maintains, this has
only been to prevent their children from
getting killed by white masters if they
appear too uppity. That is, she maintains
who they are in fact are the most brave
and loving of mothers, who do the very
last thing they would do in the world,
only because they love their children so
much they did even this, to save them.
2145
It's nonsense. Liberals shouldn't need

this to create an egalitarian, progressive
society, that tolerates the abuse of no
one. But the majority just can't do it ... I
think because they experience some
weird feeling that if peoples really were
capable of this kind of damage, and there
was no better reason for it other than
they were angry or disinterested or just
plain brutal or just didn't care, then these
people maybe ....deserve scorn and
hatred
... and sensing this, what-would-prove,

self-oblivion for a moment arising in
themselves, they lock in firm to seeing
those whom they want to love and
respect as more noble than you could
ever imagine. And they'll fight you to the
death if you diss them for it.
In case I wasn't specific enough, what

we need to do is chart childrearing
across the globe -- levels of unlove and
brutal treatment -- as well as areas of
growth. If societal progress is becoming
2146
marked in any region where the

childrearing wouldn't allow for it, these
peoples will go 1930s provincial, new-
things-hating, well-loved-people hating,
Nazi.

"mostly" should have read "most".
my apologies.
If you'd like a link to Joan Walsh's article, it can be
found here:
If you'd like to read what Brittney Cooper wrote
about black childrearing, you can find it here:
dr.bobstern

2147
"...better governance"
What came up for me was that at all levels, from
personal to global, humanity's rational ability for
self-governance, to plan for the future, rely on facts
and analysis, delay immediate gratification
(governance over the selfish, immediate), has
been short-circuited by inflammatory politics,
ideology, greed, fantasy. And media technology
has accelerated this degradation of self-discipline
by allowing manipulators of human passion a
powerful platform to inflame.
Here at home, we should be worried about our
domestic future, as there seems to be no longer a
commitment by electoral losers to be the "loyal
opposition." American politics has become a
competitive zero-sum game where, at least for Fox
News Republicans, governance is not a priority:
winning the competition by whatever means
necessary and undermining the opposition by
whatever means necessary... is.
mfbrttn
In response to this article...

2148
Some years ago I participated in a conference of

political scientists at Rutgers University, and heard
one professor sum up the tenor of things in his
field as the Cold War was closing down:
"Understanding international relations from here on
out reduces to the study of cognitive psychology."
As a therapist, I was struck that he said this at all,
and that his sense of the psychology crucial to
understanding such matters as historical violence
and its avoidance lay with cognitive psychology
only, and did not include anything from the clinical
realm, from developmental psych, from
psychoanalysis, etc., etc. That said, on to the
article... This is a first draft, so I apologize for it not
being tighter.
In reference to this article, I am reminded of two of
James Scott's books, Seeing Like a State, and The
Art of Not Being Governed, where he suggests that
there has from the first been a disconnect between
the way governments map the societal world and
the ways people informally work life out. The
close-to-the-ground realities of life are less
conceptually neat than what the state cares about
in terms of ability to assess and collect taxes, etc.
The state proceeds at a more conceptual, reduce-
life's-complexities-so-we-can-manage-them, big
picture level; ordinary life is woven out of the fine
grain of everyday reality, with lots of variability --
2149
personal and local relations perspectives are

everything. In my recent work with government
managerial approaches, I see the tendency toward
that gap over and over.
With the best of intentions (or not), what goes on at
the big level is not in contact with what goes on at
the actual-life level. Louis Wirth (reported in Jack
Saul's Collective Trauma, Collective Healing) wrote
about this as an ecology of human relations, with a
"meso layer" of organization required between the
micro layer of lived life and the macro layer of
these large institutions. There needs to be a
linkage between the centers of policy and power on
the one hand, and the people who live with the
impact of those decisions on the other. That layer
consists of intermediary organizations. In my work
currently, we are discussing the intentional
creation, the building-in, of opportunities for
"empathy-walks" between the larger layer and the
actual people with the actual difficulties
government is trying to address. Rightly or
wrongly, I read the state department's "fine bore"
approach (as reported in this article) as a shift in
that direction. State does not propose to alter its
fundamental aims, its structure, and it does not
propose empathy either. What it proposes is the
currently idealized use of data mining to pick up on
clues that conditions are ripe for violence in one
2150
place or another, so that prevention (whatever that

might mean) can be initiated. Data-mining may
invite a tilt toward use of empathy in two ways:
determining what the categories are to pursue in
the mining, and getting to know what's actually
going on in a given locale or region such that these
clues are being generated. If you don't use
empathy at both these stages of data mining work,
reality will tend to surprise you; that may press
state toward empathy in this project, just as social
media may as well.
In regard to the tension between institutional and

psychological readings of historical matters, a long
standing dialogue here at Cliopsyche.. I am
reminded of Bergen and Luckman's work, the
Social Construction of Reality, in which two
perspectives always are operating, and no
sociological phenomenon can be understood
without both. One is the perspective from the top,
from the macro or institutional level, and the other
is from the bottom, from the level of the individual.
Systems thinking (e.g., Peter Senge's work)
suggests that institutions and other large scale
systems may be initiated by individuals working
together, but systems/institutions can take on a life
of their own and run away with us, creating
consequences we do not intend -- and carrying us
2151
right along with them, perhaps with conviction

we're doing the right thing and perhaps with a
sense of being appalled by a current of events from
which we cannot extricate ourselves, as in the Cold
War. Systems can own us, in part because here
and now so many people's lives are organized
around them: these are the roles we play in each
others' lives and this is how we do it. As Durkheim,
and Berger and Luckman, argue: this gives
social/cultural arrangements a solidity much like
nature seems to have. This is "reality" to us
because everyone else believes it is and acts
accordingly. And that creates the contexts within
which lie the choices we can make, no matter what
our childhood was like. Childhood may change,
but systems live on through their sheer durability,
at least for awhile. (This being the macro-down
perspective.)
In addition, because institutional contexts are
everyday reality for adults, the tenor of life within
those institutions is reality for that very large subset
of adults who are parents (practically everybody)...
And that makes it the reality that infants are born
into and children grow up in. For them, as Berger
and Luckman note, this is how the world has
always been, much as the sun's rising, the
mountains standing there, etc. Institutions are
unquestionable, taken for granted (unless parents
2152
thought otherwise). As adults we figure out our

options within the roles, mandates, values, etc. of
those institutions. Institutions thus have a kind of
cognitive hold on us. In addition to that, current
neuroscience research suggests that the emotional
states of parents in response to the world as they
know it become part of the fabric of the emotional
self of children: If the world is perceived and
presented by parents as violent, controlling, gentle,
empathic, or whatever, that becomes the
experience children encounter and absorb
emotionally, making it the foundational experience
children have as to "what it means to be human
around here" or "how I must go about dealing with
others" -- which then becomes the core of how the
child-grown-into-adulthood will be prepared to treat
various parts of the human world when he or she
grows up. The macro world thus cycles through
parent-child relations into the intimate world of
DeMause; but equally, the intimate world of
DeMause cycles forward through children's
growing up and enacting what's been absorbed
into the choosing of options in adult historical
circumstances, the initiation of policies, the shaping
of historical actions. Childhood's early emotional
relational experience thus cascades forward into
the shaping of historical life some decades in the
future. Both dynamics reinforce each other, or
create possibilities for change in each other. This
2153
is not best understood as an in the moment

snapshot, but rather as an across-generational-
time dynamic. But both are leverage points for
intervention. Change needs change at both
levels: the impact of adult situations on children,
the acting out of a past-childhood onto adult
decisions affecting historical life in the present.
What happens in childhood emotionally and
relationally plays a powerful role in historical life, in
this complex way. However, you can also look at
the institutional level apart from childhood and the
emotional templates carried forward (a very
measured way of expressing such powerful
passions, attachments, distresses and loves).
System dynamics are not only an interplay of
levels, they are an enactment of motives having to
do with control and power. That makes them
enormously consequential for real life. Historical
actions are in part re-enactments of prior
experiences relating to love or control, violence
and power, from early life, from teen age years,
and from early adulthood (as Jervis showed many
years ago). And adulthood very often gets enacted
onto or transmitted to children, who will then be
prone to "speak" of those matters via action as
adults in various institutional settings when they
move into leadership roles. (Cf. also Alice Miller).
That is the emotional dynamics from childhood side
2154
of it. It is multi-generational, cascading forward,

creating a kind of lag between what children were
steeped in and when they will enact it on the stage
of history.
The other side is that the institutions within which
or against which historical actions will be initiated
have dynamics of their own and can run away with
our lives. From the point of view of the ecological
movement, the cumulative impact of myriad little
decisions whose pattern is created by consumer
capitalism has nothing to do with what ordinary
folks want to bring about, but is bringing about
those dire circumstances all the same. And, also
on this side of things, and pertinent to Brian's line
of thought, I am reminded of Hans Morgenthau's
analysis of power as the purpose of politics, the
instrument by which those who govern make things
happen, the tool they are forever sharpening, the
motive for positioning for future conflicts, etc. Here
too, very different from Peter Senge's runaway
system dynamics perhaps, is the dynamic of power
pushing itself in certain directions just because
that's what power as a context is about.
So there are two dynamics, each complex in its
own right. The childhood-to-adulthood dynamic
has a complex, multi-generational dimension; the
systems layer has both "systems dynamics" and
"power dynamics" dimensions. Instead of either-or,
2155
there seems to be a dialectic-over-time, with a

built-in lag effect, in which these two complex
layers interact, while yet being somewhat
independent of each other. Institutions as systems
take on a life of their own, as Senge notes with his
types of system dynamics and as Morgenthau
spelled out in regard to political life. Add in the
reality that we are a world of many cultures,
countries and peoples, all with our own overlapping
and interacting institutions, and the possibility of
system-run-away is clear, as also is the possibility
of massive concentrations of power and wealth.
Things can move suddenly in ways the system-
controllers are not expecting, as they can also
move very rapidly in ways ordinary people are not
expecting.
The fact that things are organized in massive
institutions, wielding enormous military, judicial-
legal, and economic power, clearly creates
enormous power differentials, leaving many people
powerless and vulnerable to being killed, tortured,
incarcerated, dispossesed, stolen from, exploited,
abandoned, etc. It is this enactment of ruthless,
violent and exploitive power at the expense of the
life-dreams, the hopes, the loves, the labors, the
neighborhood connections, the communities, the
cultural values, the physical intactness, the very
lives of others, that brings to life the moral
2156
response, the caring, the sense of moral outrage,

that says this all must be transformed into
relationships in which respect for the lives of others
prevails and organizes the particulars of
institutional life, in which empathy and concern and
generosity permeate the organizing and the
policies and the conduct of institutions, a tying
together of the work at the centers of power into
everyone's ordinary lives in ways that are all about
nurturing local family and community resilience and
supporting life. As Brian has articulated it, there
needs to be a moral shift from harm-centered
relationships between the macro and micro level,
and genuinely collaborative relationships -- as in
genuine worker-owned businesses, or truly
collaborative worker-management businesses like
the briefly successful Saturn car company. This is
the clinical goal if you will, a shift in how people
encounter each other, engage each other,
comprehend emotional life with each other. It
involves a coming out from the current managerial
model that pervades governments and businesses
for the most part, into a different way of being
macro and micro together. (It also involves a
coming out from the pre-programmed emotional
patternings of relationships and ignorance of
emotional life that each upcoming generation
absorbs from the adult world into which they were
born, as Alice has articulated so beautifully.)
2157
How then to foster this kind of change? There

seem to be three levels of answers. First, as Alice
is pursuing: education in emotional life and in how
to do it better. Not only does that help individuals
and school systems do life better together, we can
hope that as that thinking slips one way or another
into the jetstreams of cultural discourse, it becomes
a way of thinking more broadly accessible to
institutional leaders, to media, and to the
conversations, even among the powerful, about
how power should be conducting itself. Harmful
power begins to yield because it loses legitimacy in
its own mind, as in the release of Gorbachev by his
military kidnappers in Russia not so very long
ago.
Second, as Brian argues, power yields to better
ways because it can't get away with doing
otherwise any longer, and that happens thanks to
the development of a mesolayer of organizations
that oppose the larger power of those at the
institutional centers. For example, there's a
movement to teach town governments how to
enact legislation prohibiting fracking within their
boundaries (against which fracking businesses are
mobilizing state-level legislation to prohibit town
governments from exercising this kind of legal
control over their own destinies). This is the open
battle of mid-level organizing against macro-level
2158
domination. In situations of outright totalitarian

control, Gene Sharp has a small how-to book for
those who want to bring down the regime,
hollowing it out by creating an alternative culture
within, dramatic events that show the regime as
powerless, etc. Harmful power yields because the
context makes it unworkable to continue. In
dealing with child soldier armies in Africa, one of
the military-political strategies is to jump over an
advancing army of children (in part so as not to
have to kill them) and attack the adult commanders
who are operating at the rear, thus making this
particular calculus of power no longer safe and
therefore no longer of interest; better to forget
trying to raise armies of children on the cheap as
they no longer make you invulnerable.
On the third level, perhaps, is the MIT Presencing
Institute's ULab initiative, with 26,000 students
worldwide engaged recently in an interactive web-
based but also locally-sited, and person-to-person
support group based, endeavor which tried to
support people worldwide to take the reading of
their own deeper sense of what is needed to
transform this world and then setting out to do just
that. This is a form of seeding capacities for
making culture anew, within governments and in
the business world, to pioneer new ways of being
institutions. This is a world-wide revolution
2159
percolating from the top down so to speak, the

generation of non-harmful forms of organizing
economic liveliness and political life as well (Cf. the
Presencing Institute's example in Indonesian
politics.) It is a bit like Gene Sharp's creation of an
alternative culture as well. The macro level can
become coopted for other ways of operating by
social innovators. But the core power institutions
themselves can also become populated by
individuals with a different emotional culture who
initiate new, more empathic, respectful and life-
supporting ways of organizing their institutions
because that's the wave of the future and the right
thing to do.
All of this reflects a number of clinical values.
These are moral values that transcend clinical
work, of course. But they do reflect the reality that
clinical thinking, which permeates psychoanalysis
as we would hope it would, is value-charged.
First, less physical violence is better. Second, a
shift from callousness to relatedness, empathy and
concern is a good thing, not just as feelings but as
the core of how actual relations are conducted.
These both bear on human-to-human relationships,
across the micro, meso and macro levels.
Third, facing reality is better than denying reality
when there are things that must be attended to and
can be attended to. This is interconnected with the
2160
fourth: self-care is better than self-neglect. It is

better to take care with real life than to indulge any
number of alternatives, not only individually but as
communities, peoples, countries, and globally.
These two values bear especially on our human-
to-Earth relationships.
In short, it seems to me that the psychohistory
discussions to date articulate a multi-leveled
understanding of dynamics that are themselves
multi-leveled, powerful, and interacting. They
suggest, to me, that there are multiple points of
leverage in the system-as-it-is that can help the
system-as-it-should-be emerge in its place. All
these interventions aim at the same enormous
cultural shift toward a more mature, more fully
human-capacity-based (empathy, foresight, moral
sense) way of making life together. All seem to me
worthy of respect, worthy of investment, worthy of
energy and commitment. They seem different and
yet natural allies in this great endeavor of cultural
transformation. Which, to return to where I started,
is the point in clinical forms of psychology as
contrasted with cognitive: We are all about
transformations in thought but also transformations
of heart that engage real life, in its actual
complexity, in ways that reflect greater wisdom and
integrity within self, greater integrity in the conduct
and shaping of institutional and everyday life
2161
together, greater empathy, concern and generosity,

such that we grow in our shared resilience and do
life better together. (Cf. Jack Saul's Collective
Trauma, Collective Healing).
Michael Britton
Barney

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Michael,
"For example, there's a movement to teach town
governments how to enact legislation prohibiting
fracking within their boundaries (against which
fracking businesses are mobilizing state-level
legislation to prohibit town governments from
exercising this kind of legal control over their own
destinies). This is the open battle of mid-level
organizing against macro-level domination. In
situations of outright totalitarian control, Gene
Sharp has a small how-to book for those who want
2162
to bring down the regime, hollowing it out by

creating an alternative culture within, dramatic
events that show the regime as powerless, etc.
Harmful power yields because the context
makes it unworkable to continue. In dealing with
child soldier armies in Africa, one of the military-
political strategies is to jump over an advancing
army of children (in part so as not to have to kill
them) and attack the adult commanders who are
operating at the rear, thus making this particular
calculus of power no longer safe and therefore no
longer of interest; better to forget trying to raise
armies of children on the cheap as they no longer
make you invulnerable."
Altogether an admirable draft, in my opinion,
maybe because I entirely can see what you mean
in most of it.
With the paragraph above I'd appreciate a bit of
elaboration, especially the boldface statement.
(What is the name of the little Sharp book?)
I'm going to re-read the piece later so I can enjoy it
twice.
Thanks,
Barney
Alice Maher
2163
Bill, at the risk of being a bad girl and adding a 4th

post for the day, I have to tell you that I really liked
this article. It resonates with me not just because it
seems valid, but also because it helps explain
differences in the way some members of this group
feel about the perspectives of other members.
"The world's institutions are no longer adequate for
today's problems."
Some people here are focused on the "institution"
of psychohistory. They see it as provocative when
some of us say that we need another, deeper,
overarching model to help psychohistorians make
a leap to addressing ancient and future problems in
a way that opens the door to new insights and
transformations. Some of us - Brian, Ken, Denis -
are focused on making psychohistory an
intellectual, scholarly subject of study. Others -
me, Joel - want to trash the existing
psychohistorical theories and figure out new ways
of looking at old stories.
I found this article to be very helpful, not just in
understanding the new global world order, but in
2164
understanding myself and the dynamics of our

group. I don't know what your understanding and
intent was, but I'm grateful to you for sharing it.
Brian
12:04 AM (8 hours ago)
This gives my take on the article and responds to

Michael. The author is correct that the
international system is not working very well—I
think we all knew that already—but does not
provide an analysis why. If I am mistaken about
this, would someone please summarize in one or a
few sentences the author’s analysis of why the
international system isn’t working? He is reporting
the findings of a State Department Report, so by
extension it would appear that the authors of this
report do not have an analysis either.
This is a familiar scenario. It is called “The
Emperor has no clothes.” This report was written
by people working for the State Department, so it is
extremely unlikely that the authors of this report are
incompetent or poorly informed. I will leave it as an
exercise for people on this list to figure out why the
article contains no analysis of why the international
2165
system isn’t working. There is a very simple

answer to this question, but I don’t want to give it
away before others have had a chance to work on
this puzzle.
Given the absence of an analysis, why do I think it
is worth reading this article? Because it shows that
the people running the State Department
recognize the need for global governance in order
to solve the interconnected global problems that
humanity faces. Anarchy is not working. Jim said
that he thought world government would be
tyranny. Well, it certainly could take that form, but
the same can be said of any government
whatsoever. Is the solution to abolish government,
or is the solution to create institutions for keeping
the power holders accountable?
Now for Michael’s post. First, data mining seems
to me like an extension of what already exists. The
CIA has long had a vast apparatus for analyzing
information from all over the world and using it to
predict what will happen in every part of the world.
Data mining just extends this apparatus. The really
important questions are how we change the
purposes to which this knowledge is put.
Michael, your discussion of “the social construction
of reality” is right on point. In a previous post I
suggested that we need to talk about the way
2166
social systems and individuals interact, which is

exactly what you’ve done. I argued that holistic
explanations were the thesis for deMause, and his
“methodological individualism” was the antithesis,
and that we now need a synthesis that integrates
systems and individuals. Your thinking on this,
including your discussion of the centrality of power,
is exactly where we need to go as
psychohistorians, in my opinion. I was also glad to
hear the name Gene Sharp in this discussion,
probably the most important theorist of power in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Like
Barney, I’d like to know the title of the particular
book by Sharp you mentioned.
Finally, I love the way you think about the world
and how to change it: “In short, it seems to me that
the psychohistory discussions to date articulate a
multi-leveled understanding of dynamics that are
themselves multi-leveled, powerful, and
interacting. They suggest, to me, that there are
multiple points of leverage in the system-as-it-is
that can help the system-as-it-should-be emerge in
its place.” Right on!
Brian
Posted by Patrick McEvoy-Halston at 6:29 PM

http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?
2167
blogID=8501313560459278629&postID=494657389010236165
Email This
My very worst day of the year -- Mother's

Day
BtBKXd6LqIA/VVCX4K2KcGI/AAAAAAAAAnc/CjmIJ5GrY_A/s1600/macbeth-
5-lg-gif.gif
As a mother-hater, my very worst day of the year is

Mother's Day. It's awful: all these people paying homage
to the women we mother-haters hate the most! So what
we've taken to doing is getting together into a maternal
cave, and reading things we've written that are so
dripping in mother-hate, it's easy for us to imagine
it permeating the uterus cave, going through the body
public, and causing each and every one of them to die
off.
A contribution will be made tomorrow by my friend,
Vanessa Vargas-Cooper, who's actually just posted it at
the feminist site Jezebel; it's great, of course, so if you're
a mother-hater too, please feel free to read: a Toast to all
the Brave Kids Who Broke Up with their Toxic
Mothers.
I'll be reading some of the things I've written for the
Clio's History discussion site. I'm just going to pick a
couple at random, as I can't remember a single one
2168
where I wasn't fuming at mothers while I wrote.

Then, after enjoying a paleo feast made entirely from ...
well, you know, we like to finish the day by paying
homage to the greatest mother-hater of our age, the
psychohistorian Lloyd deMause.
We could just read random parts from his work too,
because every paragraph contains some wisdom
pertaining to our faith. But we often tend to go to
chapter seven of Emotional Life of Nations, because its
one of the juiciest.
What follows is a partial line-up of what we'll be
reading about infanticidal mothers, the worst mothers of
them all! who do all their villainy for no reason at all
other than their being really mean people who take
pleasure in others' misery.
THE INFANTICIDAL MODE OF CHILDREARING

IN NEW GUINEA
I have termed the earliest mode of childrearing the
infanticidal mode
because parents who routinely resolve their anxieties
about taking care of their
children by killing them without remorse also convey
this attitude to their other
children by demonstrating throughout their lives that
their personal existence is not
2169
important to them except as the children satisfy the

needs of the parents.
Although anthropologists commonly excuse infanticide
as required by
"necessity" and don't count it as part of the homicide
rate their informants themselves
report otherwise when asked why they kill their infants,
stating they killed them
because "children are too much trouble," because the
mothers were angry at their
husbands, because they are "demon children," because
the baby "might turn out
to be a sorcerer," "because her husband would go to
another woman" for sex if she
had to nurse the infant, because they didn't want babies
to tie them down in their
sexual liaisons, because it was a female and must be
killed because "they leave you
in a little while" or "they don't stay to look after us in
our old age."
Infanticide by mothers can be thought of as an early
form of post-partum depression. Siblings commonly
watch their mothers kill their siblings and are sometimes
forced to take part in the murder. In many tribes, the
newborn is "tossed to the sows, who promptly devour it.
The woman then takes one of the farrows belonging to
the sow who first attacked her baby's corpse and nurses
it at her breast." Pigs, by the way, are
2170
commonly nursed by women at their breasts, then often

used for sacrificial
purposes and discarded thus disproving the notion that
infanticide is made
necessary because of lack of breast milk. Even when the
baby is buried, it is often
found by other children: "the mother...buries it alive in a
shallow hole that the baby's
movements may be seen in the hole as it is suffocating
and panting for breath;
schoolchildren saw the movements of such a dying baby
and wanted to take it out to
save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the
ground and kept her foot on it.
...
Anthropologists often report the infanticidal actions of
New Guinea mothers
without noticing what they are actually doing. As a
typical instance, Willey reports
in his book Assignment New Guinea that a group of
mothers were gathered outside
the police station to protest some government action,
yelling, "Kill our children."
Willey says, "One woman in the front line hurled her
baby at the police, shouting,
"'Go on, kill my child!' When the senior officer caught it
and handed it back to the
mother, she held it up and yelled, 'Kill my
2171
baby.'" Invariably, these mothers are

reported as very loving, not infanticidal.
...
Individuals or groups who murder and eat babies are in
fact severely schizoid
personalities who handle their own rage, engulfment
fears and devouring
emotional demands by either murdering children to
wipe out the demands they
project into them or by eating them in order to act out
their identification with
devouring internal alters. Indeed, anthropologists are
only reflecting their own
denial rather than looking at the evidence when they
conclude that the ubiquitous
infanticide in New Guinea is really a good thing for
children because then "children
are desired and highly valued [because] there is no such
thing as an unwanted
child."
As one step beyond their need to murder children,
infanticidal societies are
commonly found to treat children as erotic objects,
again in a perverse attempt to
deal with their own severe anxieties, repeatedly sexually
abusing them in incest,
pederasty and rape. It is to this sexual use of babies and
2172
older children in New

Guinea that we will now turn.
....
The Sambia, like most New Guinea groups, have
prolonged postpartum
taboos that prohibit couples from engaging in coitus for
at least two and a half years
following the birth of each child. Anthropologists
always portray these postpartum
prohibitions as unexplained "cultural beliefs," as though
there were no personal
motive for them, but in fact they are simply practices
chosen to express the mothers'
desire to use their children rather than their spouses for
sexual arousal. Since a taboo
this long means women choose to have sex with their
children rather than their
husbands for much of their lives, it is obvious that they
are unable to achieve the
level of mature love relationships, and instead, like other
incestuous individuals,
need to have sex with children in order to counter deep
feelings of depression. Like
all infanticidal mothers, New Guinea mothers, unloved
themselves in childhood,
feared as polluted by her society, devoid of intimacy
with her husband, needs her
children rather than loves them.
2173
...
Since Poole was the only New Guinea ethnologist who
interviewed both
mothers and children, he obtained the most complete
reports of maternal incest.
Like infanticidal psychoclass mothers everywhere,
Bimin-Kuskusmin mothers
consider their babies to be part of their own bodies,
"never permitting the infant to be
detached from contact with her body" and breastfeeding
the baby "not only on
demand, but also sometimes by force," whenever the
mother needs the stimulation.
Mothers, Poole says, constantly masturbate the penes of
their baby boys, while trying
not to let their incest get out of hand:
...
No better description can be imagined of the

infanticidal, incestuous mother
using her child as a poison container to handle her
depression: mother wants to
annihilate her inner tormentors, she kills her child;
mother needs sex to counter her
depression and deadness, she masturbates it; mother is
angry or sad, she twists and
hurts his penis.
2174
...
Children are experienced by mothers as extensions of
their bodies, and any
separation or independence is seen as rejection of the
mother, as reminders of the
severe rejection of the mothers' own childhood. Mothers
do not allow others to nurse
their children, saying their milk is "poison," and even do
not allow their one- to twoyear-olds to visit their
relatives for fear they would "poison" them. When a
motherdies, often the "infant would be buried with her
even if perfectly healthy," and if the infant dies, "the
mother remains secluded with it for days, wailing,
attempting to nurse it," blaming it by saying "I told you
not to die. But you did not hear me! You
did not listen!" When infants begin to show any sign of
independence, they are
either wholly rejected and ignored or forced to stay still.
Typical is the Wogeo child,
who Hogbin describes as often being "put in a basket,
which is then hung on a
convenient rafter...or tree" and "discouraged from
walking and not allowed to
crawl...[forced to] sit still for hours at a time [and only]
make queer noises" as he or
she is immobilized to avoid even the slightest movement
of independence from the
mother. Anthropologists regularly see these ubiquitous
2175
New Guinea baskets and

net bags in which the infants are trapped and in which
they are often hung on a tree
as "comforting," even though it means that the infants
often live in their own feces
and urine and can neither crawl nor interact with others.
Only Hippler describes
them as a function of the mothers' pattern of "near
absolute neglect" of her child
when it is not being used erotically.
...
This emotional rejection and lack of verbalization has
been widely noted
among infanticidal mode parents in simple
societies. When the baby stops being a
breast-object, it simply doesn't exist. In my New Guinea
childhood files, for instance,
I have over 1,000 photos from books and articles
showing adults and children including one book of over
700 photos of Fore children taken randomly so as to
capture their daily lives. Virtually all the photos capture
the adults continuously
caressing, rubbing, kissfeeding and mouthing the
children's bodies, but only two
show an adult actually looking at the child.
...
So difficult is it for New Guinea area mothers to relate
2176
to their children as
independent human beings that they are unable to feed
them regularly once they are
off the breast. Like contemporary pedophiles, they do
not so much love their children
as need them, so when the parents' needs end, the child
can be emotionally
abandoned. When still on the breast, New Guinea
children are constantly being
force-fed, so that nursing "becomes a battle in which the
mother clutches the child,
shaking it up and down with the nipple forced into its
mouth until it must either
suck or choke." As soon as they are off the breast,
however, the mothers no longer
need them as erotic objects, and they have difficulty
understanding that their
children need three meals a day.
...
Throughout the New Guinea area, children are "not only
turned loose for the
daylight hours but also actively discouraged from
returning to the parents" and so
are forced to join "a transient gang." As is usual in
gangs, the older children "lord it
over" the younger, often beat them and make them their
servants, particularly their
sexual servants, since they were used to constant sexual
2177
stimulation by their parents

as studies have shown, "incestuous children are
uncommonly erotic...easily
aroused...and readily orgasmic." Malinowsky was one of
the first to report sexual
intercourse beginning at age four in the Trobriand
Islands, where "children are
initiated by each other, or sometimes by a slightly older
companion, into the
practices of sex," including oral stimulation,
masturbation, and anal or vaginal
intercourse. Others since then have confirmed the
pattern:
...
New Guinea men fear women as incestuous,
engulfing mothers whose "menstrual blood could
contaminate and kill them." By
raping boys, these pederasts reverse their own being
passively used as erotic objects
and instead actively use the boys sexually. Thus the
boys become sexual objects
devoid of the mother's frightening configurations, while
restaging the maternal rape
of their own infancy. Both the boys and the men
recognize the rape as being like
breast-feeding, rationalizing it as necessary for growth,
telling the little boys, "You all
won't grow by yourselves; if you sleep with the men
2178
you'll become a STRONG

man...when you hold a man's penis, you must put it
inside your mouth-he can give
you semen...It's the same as your mother's breast milk."
...
The notion that boys must be given semen to stop them
from growing into
females has a certain logic to New Guinea people. Like
all maternally incested
children, they feel that being used sexually by their
mothers "pollutes their blood"
and since the boys consider themselves responsible for
the seduction they feel "full of
women's pollution" and need semen to "get mother's
poison" out of them. Since as
infants they were used erotically by always being
rubbed against the mothers'
bodies, they were intimately familiar with her menstrual
fluids, remaining with her
in the menstrual hut, and so an explicit association is
made between menstrual
fluids and poison
...
The ritual both demonstrates "we are all bleeding,
polluted mothers here" and
tries to undo the feeling of being polluted by cutting the
boys with the razor-sharp
2179
leaves in their nostrils and the cane-sword down their

throats. The boys
understandably "tremble, urinating and defecating in
fear" during their torture. Yet
the feeling of still being incested, polluted maternal sex-
objects remains with them,
since so many continue to bleed their noses, tongues or
penises periodically the rest
of their lives.
There's no doubt about it -- Lloyd hates mothers more

than any of us, which is saying something, because I've
argued in public that the reason for all our current
problems is that we stopped burning witches. He is
beyond redemption, by even the most wizardly of
opponents, who'd have us see him as actually
wretchedly full of love for these vile beasts!!! This is
why he is our god, our protector, our all. Be with us
tomorrow, our one and only ... we'll need all of your
delicious hate to make it through the day!FrMonday, May 4,
2015
Avengers: Age of Ultron: Binding ourselves

up in strings
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3WYfm-
668yU/VUZIWHeSj5I/AAAAAAAAAmo/EMkBl05YnQI/s1600/10869325_5915
89580977275_2778898650041679518_o.jpg
Aliens aren't the only things that threaten the Avengers.

2180
By their foes, and by their own members, we hear that

they are plagued by many potentially disabling if not
deadly things, many impediments, many "strings" —
they may have "weak"members, some of them may be
"monsters," they may lack cohesion. None of these
things are actually problems for the Avengers — more
like afflictions they almost gladly take on because each
one can be turned on its head, and how. Hydra leader,
Strucker, identifies the group as having "weak"
members, but Hawkeye's being taken down by a laser
shot ends up being more a plot device — it introduces
us to the skin surgeon, Dr. Helen Cho, who'll help
fabricate the new Avenger member, Vision — than any
showing-up of an Avenger weak spot. We remember in
the last film he effectively was Loki's own version of an
"enhanced" — the key recruit on the evil side — and
throughout this film his “bow and arrow" really shows
itself as an all-purpose energy weapon, more versatile
but just as effective as Hulk's crashing through bunkers,
Thor's hard-struck hammer, or Iron Man's beams. The
"weakness" isn't allowed to stick — even the idea of
him just being flesh and blood, just a regular guy, rather
than superhuman, is made to seem an "in," in that he can
trump Iron Man's and Thor's party-room discussion of
their accomplished cosmopolitan girlfriends with his
suddenly revealed secret life of an at-ease farmhouse
life, with wife and kids. They're playing at something
that he's already got well under way.
The Avengers are ridden with a monster problem — the
2181
Hulk, the — as Tony Stark calls him — "enormous

green rage monster." But the film amply shows that
having someone who seems to never wear down, who is
just as intense at the far-end of a battle as he is at the
beginning, can make someone as indefatigable as Ultron
nearly just ready to give up — “Oh for God’s sakes!” as
he says, when he is humiliatingly tossed by the Hulk out
of his getaway jet. Besides, his needing a calm-down
after every time he responds to "code green" entrenches
nurturance as an essential component responsible for all
the team's blasting firepower, something which adds to
also-one-of-the-weaker Avengers' — to Black Widow's
— throughly essential contributions. They've got a
monster-creation problem too — Tony Stark and Banner
are responsible for creating Ultron; but by persisting to
own their mad scientist status, Ultron in the end is
destroyed and the Avengers end up having along their
side, Vision, a powerful android that can make the
Avengers seem okay, and the Earth still in good hands,
even if the like of Iron Man or Thor need to depart the
team to attend to personal business.
Group cohesion is ostensibly a problem too — the fact
that there are too many independent minds, sometimes
in strong conflict: Ultron mocks them for it; foretells
their doom through it. But of course we feel that if you
can have a group which works made out of strong-
minded, independent, and different personalities, you've
got something that easily trumps the easy path to
cohesion — namely, just having endless multiples of a
2182
single intelligence, aka, what Ultron's got. The Avengers

are compelling because you never really know which of
them might make the unexpected, great contribution, not
just because when Thor smacks Captain America's
shield and stuns an army of opponents, or bulls-eye aim
Hawkeye tosses Captain America's shield to Captain
America so he can discombobulate an opponent, or
when Hulk impales a large shard into a demonically
large slug beast for Thor to tap down into its brain, or
when Black Widow goes "domestic" and picks up and
returns Captain's shield so he can break up the
stranglehold he's caught in, or when Thor distracts
Ultron so the Vision can use his hammer to full-effect,
you've got things working lock-and-key, synergistically.
They're all intelligent, and none of them seem to have a
problem voicing their opinions. I myself was
particularly impressed when Banner reminded everyone
that the witch had gotten inside Captain America too:
Captain America never factored that this may have been
why he'd accepted Scarlet Witch's apparently rock-solid
reasoning that Tony Stark would when alone with
Ultron’s intended new form, simply create another
monster. Quicksilver's just cutting through the dispute
and pulling the power chord, and Thor's returning to
charge the Vision's creation, willy-nilly whatever had
been going on previously in the room, were thrilling in
their way too: sometimes the independent, disparate
and/or desperate act, leads to something — as Thor says
about the Tony Stark's effort to yet-again create the
2183
perfect AI machine — ultimately very "well done."

Every Avenger member, and the Avenger group
assemblage itself, are always redeemed, because this is
the humane intent of Joss Whedon — when you feel so
much a creator rooting for his creations, loving them, as
one does in his products, it misleads to talk of
expectations, of formula, because it's not primary.
Whedon is kind of the anti-Loki — he doesn't use what
he knows of people to hopefully humiliate and destroy
them, but naturally wants to see someone raised from
whatever status they'd befallen to. He's more like
Ultron, actually, at least when he draws out Quicksilver
to talk more on his very troubled past — as did Loki
with Black Widow, we remember — and soothes the
memory by establishing their experience as not just of
loss and affliction but of resilience and survival skills:
constituents of a solid future that might make up for
their harsh beginnings. A good man like that behind this
product means that the people who'll have to suffer for
all this destructive carnage to come into play —
civilians — are going to be thought about and tended to
as well. Never before have I seen a superhero or action
film where we come to know that the heroes we have
before us are constantly thinking of abating the damage
done to citizenry. You have a feeling that the creator was
willing to resort to an absurdity, to actually pissing some
of his fans off, to involve the complete destruction of a
skyscraper without a single person getting killed, than
find a fitting way for Iron Man to quit the team's most
2184
indestructible member, the Hulk, in a way that'd strike

us as plausible but that'd involve multitudes of squashed
civilians. Since there is a sense in all films that what's
going on is "real," then Whedon is going to make sure
that the real life concern we all ought to have that
masses of civilians getting killed is never just a
component of an exciting happening, gets full play. He’s
going to make sure that civilians “in the way” are never
just felt to be an unfortunate impediment that lucky!
villains don’t have to consider themselves with, but a
fortuitous constant reminder of the team’s whole point.
What I'm getting to is that, if Ultron's belief is that
humanity needs some kind of apocalyptic event to breed
a more evolved race of "men," my own role as a single
mind envisioning how our world might be made better
has me wishing that a huge bulk of the world would get
inculcations of Joss Whedon's Avengers on a regular
basis. You get the kind of action and delight that a lot of
us desire, but then as well all these reminders that the
world taking shape before us should and will rightly
mean fewer and fewer people we can count as not
mattering; fewer and fewer peoples who's suffered
plight we in our immature years enjoyed because their
suffering misfortunes meant that we thereafter felt less
susceptible to the same. If women are in the film, we
will see so much focus on them from someone
immediately able to relate to them, that we'll grow so
that the nature of one's sex will tell you little of how
much life will prove an obstacle. The same goes for race
2185
— white characters will no longer simply predominate,

and so finally a coarse, stifling 1950s vision of all
whites, finally ebbs away. Concerning the villains in a
film, we'll get a fairer sense of their makings too; feel
sorry for them, have sympathy for them, if they can't
just be saved — as Vision does beautifully with Ultron
in this film. And in the end of all this Joss Whedon'
Avengers viewing, some frat boys will come back to
their all-white, no-female fraternity, and find the whole
concept a bit strange. If they still vote Republican,
they're more dismayed now to learn foreign wars mean
lots of drone strikes which always seem to hit best all
the civilians in whatever country is being invaded, and
so are reconsidering this one too. People, regular people,
will do the evolving Ultron insists on, and it’ll lead to
what he’s hoping for too, but very much more quietly —
an eventual end to war.
But it isn't true that as a doctor I would subscribe Joss
Whedon to all my patients, without attending to his
mood in any given day. Given certain conditions, what I
might end up thereby being guilty of is injecting into
them a hot bath of rage. I sense that when Ultron
awakens, understands that his role is protection against
war-intent aliens, and takes a look at those he’s
protecting and identifies them as war-obsessed
themselves — as unworthy of even being protected until
they dramatically improve — this was an angry turn on
humanity's worth that Whedon himself might find
himself susceptible to.
2186
For me it explains why he seems to be only able to

portray civilians in poses that counter this portrayal of
them, that is, as instead always under threat, always
weak, always traumatized, always scared, always just
grateful for simple rescue— always sort of dismally
small. When Banner decides that he has to leave the
Avengers and once again become a recluse owing to the
world having finally seen the real Hulk, Whedon enters
this frame of mind where he suddenly pictures the rest
of humanity as reacting in a simple, unsophisticated and
ultimately diminishing way: just affront, fear and
rejection. I get a sense that he doesn’t want to let the
reality in, namely, that if the Hulk actually let loose on a
town, but only after being instrumental in preventing
terrifying giant space slugs from obliterating our planet,
people might actually only ask that more resources be
developed to improving the Hulk containment device,
“Veronica,” which after all showed promise as an
effective rabid-Hulk container. Yeah, the big guy can go
awry — but if the next threat to Earth is more terrifying
space monsters, he’s on the team — no questions! He
wouldn’t let them be capable of this sort of evolved
thinking because his humiliating them into the mindset
of scared wildebeests is necessary so he doesn’t imagine
them as the sort of confident beings whose ongoing
accomplishments and lack of sufficient humility —
whose lack of “stoppers” — might make them capable
of sliding on over into pompous-sinner territory.
One of the taunts/accusations used against certain
2187
Avenger members actually aren’t in play only as

vehicles to ultimately elevate/redeem them … they
reflect, in fact, concerns Whedon has as he himself
ascertains the future worth of humanity. I’m thinking
specifically of the Captain being identified by Ultron as
someone terrified of “real change,” and Tony Stark’s
being identified as someone who ignores the adage that
“man was not meant to meddle” and instead, well,
meddles madly. My own sense that this film’s putting
the Captain as the effective leader of the group (Tony
Stark says, referring to the Captain, “actually, he’s the
boss … I just pay for everything, design everything”) is
actually Whedon’s preference. I think it eases him to
think of this team as ultimately being headed by
someone who prefers brakes still be kept on change —
by someone who can’t afford a home in Brooklyn, who
is selfless, and who’s view on new technologies, new
discoveries, is a wary one, believing that it tempts men
into sin — i.e. the first film's, “you should have left it in
the ocean.” I think he’s glad that Ultron ultimately
settles down into the form of the Vision, so what is in
service to the Avengers isn’t the newest thing, set to
displace top-of-the-line Jarvis, something overflowing,
unaccountable, independent and brilliant, that could
hypnotize Bruce Banner back into the enthusiasm of his
pre-Hulk-curse years with its promise, but something
compact, useful, but not really game-changing. Further,
I think he’s glad to end the film with the Vision
ostensibly standing up for mankind in way that involves
2188
his acknowledging Ultron's argument that they are

nevertheless “doomed,” without the accuracy of this
estimation seeming questionable or dubious given his,
after all, just being “born yesterday.” I think he’s glad
that our last sense of the Captain America vs. Iron Man
relationship isn’t so much Tony’s “I don’t trust someone
who doesn’t have a dark side,” where Captain America
looks like he’s guilty of insufficient self-introspection,
of just ignoring what everyone else at least have the
courage to know they ought to deal with, nor with
Tony’s having “owned” his being a mad scientist status
rather than being cowed by it and in the end actually
creating something pretty great, but rather with Iron
Man subsuming himself within the Captain America
articulation of the fundamental Avenger principle — that
all that matters is that they function together — a repeat
of the ultimate playing out of their tete-a-tete in the first
film, with Tony there choosing to “make the sacrificial
play” that the Captain insisted on, not just finding a neat
way to sidestep the problem by "cutting the wire."
Whedon likes that the Avengers have all their wild,
individualistic “id” ultimately contained and looked-
over by an administrative “super-ego” — no change
coming out of his creations, will be spared the
affliction/humiliation of parental-approval.
Why? It’s because the number of people out there who
can be completely comfortable with absolute progress,
where we communicate to people that they should apply
no limit on how much they should enrich themselves
2189
and enjoy life, is still very rare, and Joss Whedon,

though good, isn’t one of them. Too many people
empowering themselves like that would trigger a part of
his brain to take over, and suddenly he’d see people as
the self-destructive, self-indulgent shits that would
deserve the universe teaching them some kind of hard
lesson. And he understands that the world he is helping
create through his empowering depictions of peoples
previously stigmatized, shortchanged and stifled, is one
where fewer and fewer people are either going to be
forced to live cramped lives, or who’ll believe they
really don’t deserve much more than this.
Some people are wondering why Joss Whedon, the
freewheeling auteur, would agree to become Marvel
Entertainment’s "slave" — someone who’d be bound for
years and years by the corporation’s expectations, and
who’d have to work in his creativity while meeting
every single one of them. Why would he willingly agree
to bind himself up in strings? It’s not the money; more
what it means to be part of furthering a better world
outside of a Golden Age where everything youthful is
golden: every step forward you make can get confused
in your own mind as an advancement that humanity
simply does not deserve. So when you indeed still make
that step, it has to feel burdened for it to feel as if it gets
to keep its new hold. Otherwise, we have to take a step
back, to bleak, compromised, regressive days, of
Christmases past. iday, April 24, 2015
Friday, May 1, 2015
2190
Heroic mom, heroically slapping her kid

across the face, while chasing him down
the street
yKhIULZNGEg/VUN7ORMBPoI/AAAAAAAAAlU/AEUPk9wfK0k/s1600/toya_g
raham.jpg
[Note: video can be seen here.]
Joan Walsh, in an article titled "the hideous white

hypocrisy behind the Baltimore 'Hero Mom' hype,"at
Salon.com, wrote:
Baltimore’s “Hero Mom” has a name. It’s Toya
Graham.
And the woman lionized nationwide for beating her 16-
year-old son on camera, and dragging him away from
Monday night’s riots, doesn’t feel at all like a hero.
“I don’t. I don’t,” Graham told CBS “This Morning” on
Wednesday. “My intention was just to get my son and
have him be safe.” Later in the interview, Graham
confesses, “I just lost it.” (Watch the whole thing at the
end of this post.)
Her moment of losing it made her a hero to much of
white America – and not just to the right. Coast to coast,
the media is hyping Graham as “Hero Mom” and her
on-camera beating as “Tough Love.” It’s not just Fox
News or the “New York Post,” whose tabloid “Send in
the Moms” front page this time reflects rather than
rebukes the mainstream media. And that’s
2191
heartbreaking.
The debate over the moment Graham says she “lost it”
is complex. There’s a parallel black debate going on
that, as always when it comes to racial issues, is richer
and more nuanced. But anyone white who’s applauding
Graham’s moment of desperation, along with the white
media figures who are hyping her “heroism,” is
essentially justifying police brutality, and saying the
only way to control black kids is to beat the shit out of
them.
I’m aware that a lot of African Americans are lauding
Graham, too. This piece isn’t directed at them. Whether
they applaud or critique Graham’s corporal punishment,
most black people debating the issue acknowledge that
the desperate public beating came from centuries of
black parents knowing they have to discipline their
children harshly, or else white society will do it for them
– and they may not survive it.
The hypocrisy of the white mainstream applauding
Graham is sickening. Let’s be honest: many white folks
are reflexive critics of the greater frequency of corporal
punishment in the black community. Witness the media
horror at Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian
Peterson beating his young son. If Graham beat her
child like that in the aisles of CVS, you can be sure
somebody would call CPS.
“What’s remarkable for me,” says the clueless Charlie
2192
Rose, speaking for white America, “is he clearly had the

respect — and fear — of you.” Why is that remarkable,
that this young black man respects his mother? Rose
then chuckles at “that right hook you have.”
For the most part, the CBS team ignored the big social
issues behind Graham’s confrontation with her son.
Graham didn’t. Like other Baltimore teens, Graham told
the table, “he doesn’t have the perfect relationship with
the police officers in Baltimore city…But two wrongs
don’t make a right.” Nobody followed up on the young
man’s “relationship” with police.
Graham also shared that she recently lost her job.
Nobody asked about that. When the church-going single
mother of six confessed that the first thing she thought,
when she saw herself on television, was “Oh my God,
my pastor is gonna have a fit,” Norah O’Donnell
reassured her: “The police commissioner of Baltimore
said “We need more moms like you.”
...
These weren’t segments exploring the heartbreaking
desperation of black inner city mothers, faced with an
eternal “Sophie’s Choice” when it comes to their kids.
They weren’t looking at the lack of options for teens in
Sandtown-Winchester, or the history of Baltimore cops
acting “in loco parentis” and beating the shit out of
young black men, sometimes just for sport.
Not a word of this is intended to criticize Toya Graham.
2193
I cannot say to her, “Ma’am, I have a better way to keep

your son safe.” But when I watch that video, I don’t
merely see a loving mother disciplining her son. I see a
desperate mother being forced to wield the club of white
violence, “in loco” white cops. As a mother, the footage
of cops dragging an agonized Freddie Gray into custody
was indeed “devastating to see.” So was the footage of
Graham beating her son, with the approving gaze of
white media.
-------
Whether they applaud or critique Graham’s
corporal punishment, most black people debating the
issue acknowledge that the desperate public beating
came from centuries of black parents knowing they
have to discipline their children harshly, or else white
society will do it for them – and they may not survive
it.
So is this what we have to look forward to if whites

don't get supplanted? More centuries of mothers
regretfully beating the hell out of their black children, so
their children don't risk seeming uppity -- so they seem
properly self-abnegating and deferent before their white
"superiors"? What a terrible strategy these mothers have
had to deploy for themselves, damaging the self-esteem
of their kids, making them fear and loathe them, just so
whites don't tear them apart.
2194
It's a good thinking beating has historically been

sufficient, because otherwise if they'd had to burn, cut,
or sexually abuse to produce the kind of shrunken kids
overlord whites wouldn't feel so much threatened by, not
even the most advanced progressive would be able to
stay focused on their true golden reasons for their abuse,
on their commendable and astute societal awareness and
foresight ... on their actual bravery, to do what was
actually most repugnant to them -- hurt their children --
to forestall their obliteration!
I beat the hell out of my kids too, fyi. My neighbours
don't understand it; they think I'm just brutal, damaging
my kids simply because I too was abused and damaged.
They think I see my kids as demons because my parents
often saw me the same way, burning me, so the evil
spirits might be let out. But I know that once my kids
are before God, they'll be before someone who isn't as
lenient as I am towards all their sinning. I smite them, so
God doesn't have to. Someone feel sorry for my terrible
plight!
------
playera
2 days ago
This mother displayed the kind of discipline almost any

parent might show in that dangerous position. Get the
2195
kid out of here, NOW!

And.
This is a step up from the "beating" african american
children get from their mothers at the checkout line at
the store. I hear some very cruel chastisement from
poorer mothers toward their young children when the
children politely ask their mom for candy at the
checkout. I see mothers slap the hands of children for
picking up an item in the store. I see mothers speak very
abusively to the very young children.
Why do these mothers speak so meanly to their
children? Is there an afro-american discipline
philosophy or attitude that says, "Establish a near-
abusive relationship between the mother and the
children?" Is that some preparation for future obedience
to someone else or just to the mother? Are fathers this
mean?
Do I love my mother because she was so harsh, or
because she was a good parent?
3LikeReply
------
sjackson44
2 days ago
@playera The mentality of black parenting is simple,

2196
"Keep your kids in line or white society will" and white

society has demonstrated it largely doesn't give a shit if
black people live or die. No parent wants to take those
odds.
5LikeReply
------
playera
2 days ago
@sjackson44 @playera Why does the mother have to

be so harsh? Why can't she simply confirm the child's
interest or curiosity and say "Honey, put it back?" How
soon will the child ever resent the mother's line.
LikeReply
-------
2 days ago
@sjackson44 @playera Okay, so if you go into poorer
white neighbourhoods and you find that corporal
punishment is common there as well, is this too a
necessary strategy on their part so their kids are
humbled enough so they can at least work the minimum
wage jobs and take all the abuse deposited on those
working "shit" jobs, that'll be the only life really
available to them? It's all strategy ... the drunken fathers,
the self-absorbed mothers, actually really have their
children's best interests in mind? They don't just spank
and abuse because they see their kids at times as spoiled
2197
"demons"?
Or in this case do you think it might be more just
unloved parents doing what all unloved parents do to
their children -- use them and hurt them -- whether these
unloved parents are absurdly rich or deplorably poor?
-------
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
So a couple slaps upside the head is now considered a
"beating"? Wow!
Should she have hugged him and sat down for a
sensitive talk?
She did the right thing.
2LikeReply
-------
nanorich
2 days ago
@Spacetrucker
Do you come from discipline tradition which celebrates

the public humiliation of your adult children?
3LikeReply
-------
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
2198
@nanorich @Spacetrucker
When they engage in those acts? Yes, yes i do.
Good luck with your "cuddle therapy".
4LikeReply
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nanorich
2 days ago
@Spacetrucker @nanorich
Right because that well make them into white

productive citizens, right?
Did it work for you?
It obviously didn't inspire you to develop critical
thinking skills or discipline which works.
2LikeReply
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HHHarley
2 days ago
@nanorich @Spacetrucker Not sure how you, Nano,
can extrapolate that from Space's post. I understand your
position, but most parents would kick some ass to rescue
their kids from themselves.
4LikeReply
--------
nanorich
2199
2 days ago
@HHHarley @nanorich @Spacetrucker
And you know this how exactly?
1LikeReply
-------
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
Yet oddly this horrid parent was the only one that
seemed to care for the well being of her child. This
wasn't a kid stealing his first chocolate bar, he was
rioting. I guess that's not serious enough to you.
2LikeReply
-------
nanorich
2 days ago
Do you think that beating your kid in public is showing

how you care?
Yeah, I see people like you in a Walmart on Sunday
afternoon around four.
It is truly an example for showing exactly who is out of
control.
2200
2LikeReply
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
Again you use the word "beating". Your clueless.
LikeReply
slake
2 days ago
@Spacetrucker @nanorich *you're clueless.
You're fine with a couple of slaps from people who
think you're out of line?
2LikeReply
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
@slake @Spacetrucker @nanorich

When they are rioting, you bloody well bet I do.
1LikeReply
slake
2 days ago
2201
@Spacetrucker @slake @nanorich If you're at an

event I disapprove of, I can slap you?
2LikeReply
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
@slake
Idiot.
2LikeReply
slake
2 days ago
@Spacetrucker @slake I see you're a deep thinker.
2LikeReply
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
@slake @Spacetrucker The kid was involved in a riot.
What part of that and the danger it posed doesn't sink
into that thick skull of yours?
1LikeReply
slake
2 days ago
@Spacetrucker @slake It certainly sinks in. I can
understand his mother's reaction in that situation and not
applaud it. She doesn't applaud it. I don't condemn it,
2202
either.
LikeReply
nanorich
2 days ago
If that is an example of what you do to your wife when

have had a few, pal....that is what is referred to as a
beating.
2LikeReply
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
Yet another stupid comment. I've 3 kids I've never
struck them.Been married 25 yrs, never hit or been hit.
You're a fool.
2LikeReply
nanorich
2 days ago
2203
And you are a liar. People who justify violence towards

children, tend to be violent to their own children and
then go on to discount how bad that violence is.
One can see from your response here how low your
frustration level is when you don't get the response you
demand.
3LikeReply
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
@nanorich @Spacetrucker You involve my wife and
children in this, call me a liar and then accuse me of
being frustrated?! Idiot.
3LikeReply
nanorich
2 days ago
You are the one who has serious control problems.
And if you should ever have a family, you might want to
look into anger management.
LikeReply
Solar St
2 days ago
2204
@nanorich @Spacetrucker He's sixteen,.

LikeReply
2 days ago
@nanorich @Spacetrucker You're kind to use the

words "discipline tradition." Medievals who burned
uppity women also came from a particular kind of
discipline tradition; one we might more readily
understand as just some really dark shade of deplorable
barbarism.
3LikeReply
Spacetrucker
2 days ago
@Patrick McEvoy-
Halston @nanorich @Spacetrucker
(shakes head) wtf!
LikeReply
Aunt Messy
2 days ago
@Spacetrucker @Patrick McEvoy-

Halston @nanorich So do any of your kids talk to you?
2205
Bill_
2 days ago
Whether they applaud or critique Graham’s corporal

punishment, most black people debating the issue
acknowledge that the desperate public beating came
from centuries of black parents knowing they have to
discipline their children harshly, or else white society
will do it for them – and they may not survive it.
Sure. Like Adrian Peterson.
2LikeReply
Rocky57
2 days ago
@Bill_ But the author of those words has a point: even

putting aside the visited brutality of Southern slavery, it
makes a perverse, albeit brutal sense to mete out
cautionary martial punishment before the dominant
culture does it with an often lethal outcome, later on.
If that tradition has been passed down, the extreme
example of an Adrian Peterson is more likely to happen.
As Joan writes, it's a Sophie's Choice that, perhaps, not a
few black parents, particularly single mothers, have to
2206
face in not having the luxury of the type of privilege

about which many Salon writers comment.
1LikeReply
2 days ago
@Rocky57 @Bill_
But the author of those words has a point: even
putting aside the visited brutality of Southern
slavery, it makes a perverse, albeit brutal sense to
mete out cautionary martial punishment before the
dominant culture does it with an often lethal
outcome, later on.
Do you dare visit the families to see if you see if you
find this kind of supreme rationalism prevalent? It's
possible, but what you're depending on is that you're
dealing with families that really are so fabulously
loving, that even a terribly abusive society can only
damage them so much. It can't get into them, turn them
into those so maltreated, justifications for why they use
and hurt their kids are never really valid.
I myself think that the tendency of many liberals to not
even consider people they want to support, as something
other than remarkable and powerful in their defiance --
as those kept alive, still yet full of promise, by their own
2207
remarkable self-belief and family love -- is going to

make them seem foolish in the end. For decades this
was the only way allowed to view tribal cultures, and
now people like Steven Pinker are being abundant in
their counter-evidence, in part, I think, to make a lot of
anthropologists, people more decent than him, seem
absurd.
agore
2 days ago
So an inner-city mother acts instinctively in disciplining

her child, and that makes her "hideous" and
"sickening?" Had she acted as a liberal mother,
indulging her precious snowflake in his worst habits,
she would be able to use Marin County's lush social-
service system to put him through the most prestigious
heroin rehab that she can get him into.
But Toya Graham doesn't live in Marin County. She
lives in Baltimore, and knows that the primary social
service future awaiting her son is the corrections system.
Good for her, acting in the only way she knows will
work without the use of outside authority.
Lefties, get ready to be incensed at a woman named
Mailani Neal. You don't know who she is yet, but in the
next few weeks she will be your next "sickening" and
"hideous" activist in a totally different arena.
2208
5LikeReply
gideonse
2 days ago
@agore Did you read the article? Walsh isn't saying

Graham was hideous or sickening but rather that the
white media's reaction to it was.
11LikeReply
2 days ago
@agore I'm pretty sure the inner-city mother routinely

"disciplines" her child, not out of instinct, but because
she periodically gets into moods where she identifies
with the persecutor ... and takes advantage of
situations that enable her to attack her children, guilt-
free.
I would speculate that when you see a young person, a
progressive liberal, aiming ambitiously to enjoy
themselves while making something splendid of this
earth, you'll every time see some precious snowflake
indulging in their worst habits, who desperately requires
a beating.
I speculate that what you'll be doing here is projecting --
2209
that spoiled, indulged child, is who you were as a child,

who was punished and abused when doing nothing more
than attending briefly to herself. To keep your mother
righteous and fair, you scolded your own vulnerable,
neglected self, who thought for a moment your mother
wouldn't mind if you put some attention onto herself for
a change.
Ken N
1 day ago
Obviously the author of this article doesn't know the

difference between violence and proper discipline. As a
child I was beaten and what this mother did to her kid
was not a beating. Then again to Liberals, spanking a
child is a no no, but then they wonder why kids are the
way they are and want the parents to be held
responsible.
2LikeReply
banjoist123
1 day ago
@Ken
N https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral-
landscapes/201309/research-spanking-it-s-bad-all-
kids
2210
Hitting a child for any reasons teaches violence and fear.

If you have to hit a child to teach them, you have failed
as a teacher.
1LikeReply
1 day ago
@Ken N Spanking is against the law in Sweden. From

what I understand, that country is doing okay.
1LikeReply
josei
7 hours ago
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston @Ken N They were doing

much better when they were kicking the sh*t out of
every other country in Northern Europe. (Remember the
Vikings?)
fromthemomma
1 day ago
I come from a black family, we're all behind Toya

whupping his narrow butt all the way home. Joan has
white guilt and attempts to create division and bias
where there isn't any. Every black family I know don't
2211
mess around when it comes to discipline with their kids.

5LikeReply
banjoist123
1 day ago
@fromthemomma This is the difference between black

and white culture. White people don't equate hitting with
discipline. The word itself comes from "disciple." I have
a hard time seeing Jesus beating his disciples.
LikeReply
23 hours ago
@banjoist123 @fromthemomma White people don't

equate hitting with discipline
I wish this was the case, but personally I think that the
main reason that many white people are applauding this
woman is because she brings to mind memories of their
own terrifying mothers, and they want to count
themselves on their side. This is quite terrible, because
when we feel the need to bond with her, it means we've
had it with our own selfish autonomy; it means we won't
just be cheering mommas coming out on the street and
beating their kids, but society going hard on kids, on
anything youthful, in general. Just like in this case, no
empathy for the kids, because we're seeing things from
2212
out mothers point of view, which saw any act of

independence on our part as our own selfishly
abandoning them.
I don't trust that anyone who seems too comfortable
with the word "discipline" is to be trusted as immune to
the sort of self-projection (we attack them because they
bear traits we had that once angered our mothers --
notably autonomy) that's involved in beating a kid. It's a
word out of a different time, when all children were only
conditionally good -- they weren't born innately good,
but could get there if their parents socialized and
disciplined them properly. It's out of a time when
spanking and intimidating kids was the norm. It's not
current, progressive-parent New York, "who" don't talk
so much about how best to discipline their children but
how best to help and support them.
When Joan Walsh says that there are other ways to
discipline a child other than hitting him/her, this is pretty
good; but if she was referring to her own child she
would be referring to someone who is probably more
emotionally evolved than she, who'll be bearing this
alternative "discipline" only until discipline, any sort of
child-cracking, any sort of child-intimidation, evolves
out of their generational chain entirely.
LeeDee
1 day ago
2213
She was a MOM slapping her son. Why does she have
to be labled as a "black mom"?? He was taller than her
and I am sure stronger. I didn't see any "beating". If I
saw my son do something stupid, disrespctful, harmful
etc., I would do the same exact thing.
6LikeReply
Aunt Messy
23 hours ago
@LeeDee And he stood there and took it because she's

been beating him all his life.
2UnlikeReply
Kingobie1
23 hours ago
@Aunt Messy @LeeDee ... seriously? Please tell me

you're kidding.
2LikeReply
23 hours ago
@Kingobie1 @Aunt Messy @LeeDee Every time he's

out the door to play with his friends. He has no
autonomy; she owns him. And he didn't just stand
there; thank god there was some refusal in him.
2LikeReply
2214
Aunt Messy
23 hours ago
@Kingobie1 @Aunt Messy @LeeDee No one's ever

hit you, have they?
LadyRae
18 hours ago
I normally like your articles - but you are so way off

base here. THIS type of thinking is why we have a
generation of kids that are completely and totally useless
and will continue to be useless into the future and will,
eventually, be the death of this country. This is the kind
of reasoning that leads to 12 year olds dictating to
parents. Why we have 8 year olds that have the table
manners of toddlers. This woman acted out of love and
fear for her son. And her son obviously had the respect
for her that he reacted the way he did - and that respect
of her extended to his friends. This wasn't a oh, you're
grounded, give me your cell phone but here's the iPad.
I'm not sure I can support your articles any longer. I'm
very, very disappointed. You've completed lost
credibility with me.
Flag
14LikeReply
2215
17 hours ago
@LadyRae
This woman acted out of love and fear for her son.
Where exactly is the evidence for this? Usually when
you've got mothers chasing their children down the
street and haranguing them, it turns out to be over the
most trivial of reasons. And if it was to stop him from
being killed, then surely she's the type to make sure her
son never joins the armed forces -- she'd be beating the
hell out of him too, if he ever made that decision; she
wouldn't be proud to see him military -- no photos of
him in uniform! This wouldn't happen, of course. She'd
be totally proud, because he'd be a soldier defending his
mother nation with his life, not someone autonomous
creating a cause for his own.
All he did was disobey, show some self-volition -- that
was his "crime"; that's why she was all over him. I own
you! was her firm belief. With enough mothers like her,
the '60s would never have happened.
THIS type of thinking is why we have a generation of
kids that are completely and totally useless and will
continue to be useless into the future and will,
eventually, be the death of this country.
What will revive our country? A generation of youth,
2216
committed to their elders, who stamp down on anything

degenerate, who'll show their absolute fealty by dying
for their country? There's a perverse psychology where
some people see their countries as only being revived by
the blood of their youth. This wouldn't be your own,
would it?
Delete
2LikeReply
Whatever People
15 hours ago
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston @LadyRae

Patrick...you are just as blind and lost as the
writer...perpetuating hate and violence. Thinking that
these riotous acts are justified. What do you solve by
tearing down your own city? A torn down city. You
think the mother should've given her son a pat on the
back and an at-a-boy? "Hey, son...good going! Continue
throwing rocks at "people" cause it is a moral and
righteous act. You sure will show them! Good job!"
No one should ever suffer any consequences for their
actions just as long as they believe they are doing the
right thing...{ad sarcasm here}.
Comments from poster Tam Rachelle:

Original Article: The hideous white hypocrisy behind
2217
the Baltimore “Hero Mom” hype: How clueless media

applause excuses police brutality
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2015 6:12 PM
nanorich Enquido DanyB Bean Delphiki There's no
evidence hitting a child makes them a more responsible
citizen. Matter fact studies show violent criminals
received corporal punishment as a child more often than
not.
Permalink
Bean Delphiki nanorich Black kids don't need to be beat
anymore than white ones. The idea that black kids need
more beatings than kids of other races reinforces the
idea that black people are more savage beasts that need
to be broken like wild horses.
Permalink
exogeologist Salon8 I think we've all had a friend who
is the victim of domestic violence that says "He doesn't
beat me all the time, he's just stressed....he just lost his
job. He really does love me...."
2218
Permalink
Enquido Cause it's done so great for the Black
community thus far, you know, with all the poverty and
incarceration rates, and inner city violence. Those
whoopins have really got us to that beautiful place in the
sun.
Permalink
Mike Hipp I have four kids, black ones. They don't need
to be hit in the face to be reasoned with. Trust, if you
side with the idea that violence first then conversation
later is the only way to get through to black teenagers,
then it is assumed the boy will be dead or beat by cops
soon enough.
Permalink
Enquido Because there's no other alternative? Because
2219
he is black and he's a man, holding his hand and asking

him earnestly to please come home because he's scaring
his mother......he's just too hardened, too much of a thug
to respond to that? Straight for the face. And I guess you
are reinforcing the idea that a cop is able to reason with
white people but black people require more brute
strength to get the point?
Permalink
Aunt Messy ratched exactly, no one deserves to be
punctured with a high heel unless they physically
attacked you.
Permalink
exogeologist TerryMcT Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who has studied
mental health issues and parenting in African-American
communities, is a leading voice against corporal
punishment. It’s an uphill battle.
“It’s culturally embedded in America that spanking is a
legitimate and good way to discipline children. But the
fact is, nearly all studies, except for a few, say it is not a
2220
good way of disciplining and can actually produce

damage,” Poussaint said. “We have such damage in the
black community, when you add to that parents beating
their kids, it’s sending the message that violence is an
OK way to solve problems.”
Nevertheless, Poussaint said, questioning corporal
punishment can provoke a defensive or angry reaction
from parents.
“Usually some people stand up and say, ‘Well, I was
beaten as a kid and I turned out pretty well.’ Well, did
they?” Poussaint said. “If you dig more deeply, you
don’t really know that… beating may have left scars in
them that they don’t really understand.”
Poussaint dismisses the biblical imperative so often used
as a justification for corporal punishment as “a tired
excuse.”
“Violence begets violence, anger begets anger, and the
loss of control makes it all worse,” he said.
Permalink
exogeologist TamRachelle TerryMcT In a study
Gershoff co-authored that examined 20,000
kindergartners and their parents, she found that 89% of
black parents, 79% of white parents, 80% of Hispanic
parents and 73% of Asian parents said they have
2221
spanked their children.

But why do so many black parents approve of
disciplining their children that way? The answer is
complicated, experts said.
Some researchers have suggested it's a legacy left by the
brutality of slavery. Some say it's rooted in fear - that if
parents don’t use force to demand obedience, someone
else will. Others said African-American parents, in
aggregate, are disproportionately lower-income, have
less education and are more likely to follow a religion
that implores them not to spare the rod for fear of
spoiling the child - all factors that correlate with use of
corporal punishment, regardless of race.
Numerous studies have pointed to negative
consequences for all children who are spanked,
regardless of parents' race, ethnicity, income-level or
education level. Kids who are physically punished face
higher risk of anxiety and depression, higher rates of
aggression toward others and a more distant relationship
with their parent, Gershoff said. Those risks are in
addition to the risk of injury from parents who cross the
line from a hard smack on a behind - still damaging,
researchers said - to abuse that leaves children bruised
or bleeding
Permalink
2222
exogeologist TamRachelle TerryMcT

http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/10/researchers-
african-americans-most-likely-to-use-physical-
punishment/
Permalink
Murry Chang TerryMcT Exactly. He learned nothing.
Permalink
Nelda77 Aunt Messy THE PROPER REACTION TO
FEAR IS NOT VIOLENCE. Especially when you're
dealing with someone you LOVE. What if this was a
father hitting his daughter? Then it would be awful. He
deserves not to be hit just like women deserve not to be
hit.
Permalink
FilmAlicia What proof do you have that she doesn't bust
2223
him in the face when he doesn't do the dishes? Or cuss

him out when he doesn't clean his room? This could be
an everyday thing for *hero mom*.
Permalink
exogeologist TamRachelle TerryMcT Cultural sociology
is not a myth. There's societal norms and practices
within all cultures. Research shows that Black children
are more likely to be spanked then their non black
counter parts. Research also shows that corporal
punishment is more likely to create anxious, depressed,
and violent adults. Not to mention a majority of men
who are involved in domestic violence experienced
corporal punishment as children.
Permalink
SteelrailsAV TamRachelle BigDaddyChaCha Incorrect.
Site your sources.
Permalink
2224

Nelda77 raptor Hitting and beating on a black man is
not the only way to protect them. It reinforces the idea
that violence is the only action that KEEPS BLACK
MEN IN LINE. We are siding with cops. If that boy
needs a beat down to do as he is told at 16 by his
mother, why wouldn't he need it at 17 or 18 when he's
out in the streets without her? That's irrational thinking.
He can be reasoned with, he isn't a beast.
Permalink
exogeologist TerryMcT Lets not pretend that many
Black people don't praise the idea that beating kids into
submission makes the God fearing citizens.
Permalink
SteelrailsAV BigDaddyChaCha If it was a white girl and
her white mom she'd surely be arrested. The applause is
based on people really believing that Blacks only
understand violence aka whipping the slave when he is
out of line. Hugging that child and telling him *Baby
2225
come home with me please, I'm scared* is just

something that wild monkey just couldn't absorb huh?
He just doesn't have the common sense, the emotional
connection, the depth to be spoken to, only slaps to the
mouth can get through to him.
Permalink
So.........I guess one would say that every cop that busts
a young black man in the face is just a Hero mom in
disguise huh? Cause there's really no way anyone can
tame the savage beast inside black boys, except by
punching and slapping the evil out.
Ex_Machina misses how we're actually

wanting
q5VIGBzHNs4/VTqp3wRi1RI/AAAAAAAAAko/oJNU1w134Cc/s1600/file_12456
1_0_exmachinaposterlarge.jpg
This might seem a bit cruel, but isn't it likely that the
first thing that you'd test when you employed a company
coder to gauge whether someone seemed real or not, is
actually whether said person was so scared of actual
alive people -- of actual alive women -- that putting
anyone that resembled such before them would cause
such a harsh psychic retreat they'd suddenly fantasize a
2226
computer "brick" as the most wonderfully receptive of

playmates? I mean, isn't that now the most interesting
thing about the Turing test? That at some point in time
we actually didn't blink at the fact that someone who's
life had been all math, and which would evolve all
around circuit chips, was casually, readily associated as
an arbiter of anyone or anything's degree of
true aliveness? Shouldn't it have always been the
Shakespeare test? The Yo Yo Ma test? The Bach test?
The Gertrude Stein test? Shouldn't it have always been
someone we associate with tremendous emotional
depth, to become the emblem person we imagine
scrutinizing any object's humanity? Surely any of these
than "the good guy" -- the good guy who's liable to
blush at any pretty woman who responds to him with
even pseudo-interest, and who's of course ejaculated to
buckets of porn -- some of them, be sure, cartoons.
I think it is. And while I doubt that any geek would
come to anywhere near the same conclusion --
irregardless, of course, of IQ -- I'm pretty sure that in the
context of what they've been thinking of today, they
weren't as ready as perhaps the director might have
assumed to jump into the skin of this movie's pro-
offered equivalent of them. The director might have
assumed that he'd have his audience, that they'd have
been humiliated to find their equivalent, their ostensible
hero, Domhnall Gleeson's Caleb, ultimately summed-up
by the Steve Jobs equivalent in this movie -- Oscar
Isaac's Nathan -- as in fact actually only a mediocre, as
2227
only an "okay" coder, rather than the best one in the

company, and thereafter jubilant to find him turn the
tables on him ... ingeniously, and thereafter humiliated
for all time by his ostensible love interest's caring not a
scat about him once she's ultimately free, bathing herself
first in the great outdoors, and then afterwards, in her
dream place, probably town-centre New York city. But
it's doesn't work out for him, because we're not so much
in the mood to be anyone's Charlie of the Chocolate
Factory, and are instead thinking on exactly what kind
of brew of different things Jobs explored so that when
he afterwards reconnected with human life, the guy saw
no one else pursuing what he plainly saw as the new
frontier before humanity. We don't quite dip ourselves
into our geek proxy, because we've been tuned in
through the like of Isaacson's "Steve Jobs," that we can't
help but be off of him as soon as meet this film's Tony
Stark.
I was wondering if I was Tony Stark/Steve Jobs/Isaac's
Nathan, would I want his home, his kingdom, of not a
quantified number of acres but clearly simply a
kingdom? Or would I want the best piece of property in
condensed downtown New York, where out to the most
refined cafe, I could "people watch"? Do I want to spend
most of my time, ideally, like Isaac? Or rather like Eva,
the sizeably-breasted, dollish, ostensibly-android love
interest, who's name suggests she wants plain fields and
plain simple just-human contact, but who out of
character actually wants the sublime constituents of
2228
urbanity -- to sit before other people, as an especially

acute observant, being a flaneur? The truth is, many of
us want both -- and so I took the films' pro-offered first-
choice of tempting devil, and then readily changed the
ignorant ending, where we're supposed to be bathing in
then fuming at the young punctuating woman who
spurned "us" all for her own glorious turn, to just go
along with her, without any of that ... with no sense of
later humiliating the spurning, self-interested "bitch"
(something, of course, the director will be for-sure be
pursing in his later films; watch for it -- this fellow is no
feminist but someone setting up women for later loud
revenge).
I have little to add, other than I borrowed from the film

some "furnishing" tips. One, adding a little Japanese
might make feel more excelsior. Two, I need to make
running water, streams and outdoor grandeur, more of
my future life, however much it reminds me of my mom
when she was claiming her rightful glamour. I'll kill her
in some way -- rhetorically, I mean, because she is a
lovely woman who deserves life to be respondent to her
every hope and dream. And then I'll go back there a bit
more myself. I love, love, love, a headily running
stream, brushed along the side, with the alien encounter
of all that couldn't discern me from any other object of
wariness.
Two full psychohistorical conversations

2229
(with all names other than mine, changed)
Rather than skimming through it, I finally read all of

Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of our Nature." I'm
guessing that the one thing others have not discussed is
his description of the crazy, utopian 1960s. In a nutshell,
he's not for it. It was a period of the relaxation of self-
control -- "Do your own thing, Let it all hang out, If it
feels good do it, Take a walk on the wild side." What
happens out of all of this is what happens to, for
example, the why-don't-you-all-fade-away band, the
Who, where as he says one of the band members end up
being a homicidal maniac, running over his bodyguard
and such. For a peaceful society, you have to eschew
these temptations to be free. If you're not up for
it, perhaps you're lucky enough to be like Pinker and
have a mother who dissuaded him from becoming other
than the perfect mensch.
So he's ostensibly telling us the good news -- society has
gotten better; much better -- while warning
us away from getting too excited. So if you are to read
his work about how history is "shockingly violent" and
"deeply brutal." About how most previous societies
were profoundly infanticidal. That it was about rapes, a
lot of rapes. That tribal cultures are the worst -- he says,
believe it or not, the colonialists reports of their
savagery was spot-on. You're not supposed to say -- well
then, why the hell History? why the hell Anthropology?
2230
and count the future as open terrain, spared heeding any

scoldings to read history else repeat sins. Such blatant,
youthful repulsion of elders and of the past, doesn't in
his mind lead to 1920s modernism or 1960s hippie-love,
but to your eventually taking a knife from your kitchen
drawer and skewering your neighbour. No, as absurd as
his account makes of these ginormous realms of interest
and study, he wouldn't dare question any discipline -- a
word he surely loves -- that encourages kids to spend
dutiful hours studying, studying, studying, and enlarging
their capacities of self-control and reason and self-
denial.
De Mause wouldn't discount that periods where you

really feel you can let it go, be free -- youthful, golden
age periods -- lead to a lot of violence. But his take is
this isn't because adolescent periods are always that,
which is why we should tutor ourselves to prefer the
elder. His take is that they needn't be violent at all, they
could be just times conducive to the most enriched
living, but in the past they inevitably became violent
because few of us were raised with enough love that
we're not still under pressure from our internal
perpetrator parental alters to feel like we'll be abandoned
or killed if we enjoy ourselves too much (our alters,
representatives of our denied, depressed mothers,
required us to fill their gaps, and rejected us when near
as infants focused on ourselves). So when things get
2231
really good, and we can't retreat, recess -- we go amok.

Pinker's work, that is, is actually for me a bit of a kill-
joy. As much as I quickly realized my dreaming,
Utopian-visioned professors of pre-modern History or
Anthropology weren't quite seeing their peoples quite
right, I knew at least that these professors were well-
loved enough to inspire me to dream big, to try and be
big -- they wanted these people to be magical, at least in
part, for their own selves. These people, I knew, inspired
by the 60s youthful culture, will be the best we'll see
into a new Golden Age inspires even more healthily
raised people to change the world. When they start
being discounted, it'll be mostly about liberating
ourselves from their permission and goodness -- them as
emblems of allowance -- not truly their blind
sightedness.
Pinker is adamant that a bourgeois society is an elder
one, a sober one. This is different from de Mause. De
Mause talks about them as if they were youths stepping
out into a new land of promise -- ongoing growth,
accruing wealth, accruing self-satisfaction, accruing
self-attendance. He would argue that Pinker's sober
world isn't actually intrinsically so inhibited at all, that
we are prone to colour it that way so we can try and hide
from ourselves the fact that what we wanted for
ourselves is being realized -- surely Pinker's current
state of mind. If this isn't successful, if we begin to feel
like we've empowered ourselves too much, have gone
2232
too long without some large sacrifice for our sins, we'll
precipitate a war or deep recession.
One does note that even as much as Pinker goes to great
lengths to suggest that "Iran" isn't so bad, he leaves
room to change his tune. What is absolutely abhorrent,
what was a disgrace, was the 1960s, because with its
upsurge of adolescence it upset a pleasant graph that
showed violence on the downswing. As much as he has
talked about the current religious as having
compartmentalized many of their beliefs so they're out
of the way of everyday life, he doesn't spare setting
them up so that they don't seem like people out of
several hundred years ago, still living with us today. He
doesn't spare them being seen as people "before the
(Protestant) revolution" -- the new atheist way of
looking at Muslims.
If Pinker's mother didn't just bless him by discouraging
his total freedom but also humiliated him, if he too at
some level desires revenge upon her, not just to credit
and acclaim, he might re-stage by setting up the Muslim
world as both the Terrifying Mother and the Bad
Child, and start pointing fingers ... look you, what's with
all this disruption!
We'll see if he goes like fellow reasoning,
rationalist, atheist Dawkins, who was all Biology and
study and peace and urbanity and Enlightenment ... until
he wasn't, and had to settle scores.
2233
Patrick
———
Apr 13
Dear Patrick,
Can you perhaps sum up in a paragraph what you just
said. I can't make anything coherent out of it. Must be
Monday morning.
Frank
———
Apr 13
Frank, I was arguing that Pinker's book doubles as a

proper etiquette book -- grandmotherly wisdom. Over
and over again, he tells us that we'll never be free of our
instinct to be violent. We can enlarge our capacity to
empathize, but love really isn't so much to be counted
on so much as improved reasoning skills and increased
self-control. We've become much less violent, much less
depraved and barbaric, because we've increasingly
become more of an elder society, where things like
letting yourself be free, doesn't become our mantra. We
2234
need our enthusiasms, our passions, curbed.

I suggest that his point of view be explored as possibly a
way one might want to colour our ongoing, growing
society, so that we don't have to admit to ourselves how
enriched we're feeling out of these many years of
increased opportunities and peace. I'm working, in a
sense, to make sure that Pinker doesn't succeed in
making times which are ruled by youth, like the 1920s
and 1960s, things we need to actually avoid. I myself
am a Utopian, and view his skewering of utopianism
with distaste.
I hope this is more clear, Frank. And thanks for the
feedback.
———
Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, which in my mind

means he is like an ocean biologist who only considers
the life that can be viewed on the surface . . . in other
words, clueless as compared with a depth psychologist.
(I did suffer through one of his books, BTW.)
Being against the 60s movement is equivalent in my
mind to being against the Renaissance. It brought so
much opening of minds, along with revolutions in
technology (e.g., computers), medicine (widespread use
of antibiotics, for example), political thought (Civil
Rights movement, women's movement etc.), and
2235
certainly art.
Anyone who lived through it and yet missed the point is
pitiable, but not credible.
— Sam
Apr 13
———
Hi,
How much outright violence was committed
at Woodstock, I wonder? Rapes, murders,
child abuse? The fences were knocked down,
to be sure. Drugs were ubiquitous, without
doubt. But I wonder, amidst the pot-foggy mist
that mixed with the rain, how many bodies not
engaged in consensual sexual activity were
engaged in destructive warfare or wife beating?
I am not proposing that we all get loaded are
high on drugs, merely wondering aloud how far
we have come from a generation of dreamers
who dared to disagree with Viet Nam, who were
against prejudice, who risked their lives in the
Civil Rights movement, who stood up for gay
rights--so fashionable these days-- and who
took on the establishment, who were witness
to, and sometimes themselves risked or suffered
2236
assassinations.
Where have all the flowers gone, long time
passing? Where indeed?! With deepest affection
for and apologies to Ann Coulter, my heroin, or
is is heroine? My spelling, oh my.....
Fred
———
Apr 13
And it may be remembered by all and sundry that 1960s

were the original stage for the Birth Control Pills, which
in many cultures forever altered the physical and
intellectual relationships among the genders.
Frank
———
Apr 13
...but then the great powers that be,

in whatever form you imagine: CIA,
mad scientists,nature, created AIDS.
Alas, alack, gotta put my rubbers back
Fred
2237
———
Apr 13
This is the most noteworthy passage for me in the whole

book:
(Norbert) Elias had written that the demands of self-
control and the embedding of the self into webs of
interdependence were historically reflected in the
development of timekeeping devices and a
consciousness of time: "This is why tendencies in the
individual so often rebel against social time as
represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many
people come into conflict with themselves when they
wish to be punctual." In the opening scene of the 1969
movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda
conspicuously toss their wristwatch into the dirt before
setting off on their motorcycles to find America. That
same year, the first album by the band Chicago [...]
contained the lyrics "Does anybody really now what
time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can't
imagine why." All this made sense to me when I was
sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my
grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous:
"How can you be a mensch without a wager?" She ran
to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had brought
during a visit to the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka. I have it
2238
to this day. (page 111)

He concludes the book, incidentally, this way:
A final reflection. In writing this book I have adopted a
voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I
believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not
enough understanding. But at no point have I been
unaware of the reality behind the numbers.To review the
history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the
cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome
with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness. I know
that behind the graphs there is young men who feels a
stab of pain and watches the life drain slowly out of
him, knowing he has been robbed of decades of
existence. There is a victim of torture whose contents
of consciousness have been replaced by unbearable
agony, leaving room only for the desire that
consciousness itself should cease. There is a woman
who has learned that her husband, her father, and her
brothers are dead in a ditch, and who will soon "fall into
the hands of hot and forcing violation."
So we get this sort of neutral, distanced, account
throughout, where amongst other things we learn his life
was saved from depravity owing to a highly memorable
incidence involving a watch where his grandmother
stepped in to reign in his youthful impulses. And he
finishes with a graphic afterwards, where a young man
watches the life drain out of him, and afterwards, "the
2239
coup de grace," of an adult woman, already deprived of

everyone that matters to her, about to be raped.
Are we encountering here mostly his profound sadness
and dismay, amelioration to those who wonder how he
can talk about such awful subject manner and remain so
cold? Or is it more unconscious payback against the
women in his life who stepped in during his blooming
adolescence during a blooming time in America's
history, and made bloody sure he didn't grow up to be a
rock and roll star?
-- Patrick
——————————————————————
——
Apr 12
Salon.com has an article about how Ann Coulter is

calling Christians -- her kind -- wimps, in face of
confident, effective, aggressive atheism. This bit:
O’Reilly then asks Coulter how it is that the 80 percent
of Americans who consider themselves Christians “are
getting thumped, they’re losing . . . . How did that
happen?”
For Coulter, the answer lies in pusillanimous Christian
leaders (abetted by spineless Republicans). Their
cowardice is, she says, “ridiculous,” because “the one
2240
thing every Christian should have is courage. The most

important thing in your life, eternity, is already taken
care of. Go out and fight. You’re afraid of being
sneered at by the New York Times?”
Brings to mind deMause's description of the start of
wars, where mothers are demanding courage and
sacrifice and show of loyalty, from their suspect youth:
That wars are seen emotionally as led by dangerous
Killer Mothers, with war goddesses from Athena to
Freyja and from Brittania to Marianne depicted as
devouring, raping and ripping apart her children, is one
of my most unexpected
findings during the three decades I have studied war
psychohistorically. The further back in history one goes,
the more wars are openly considered as being fought for
Killer Goddesses, from Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis and
Kali to the Aztec mother goddess Huitzilopochtli, who
had “mouths all over her body” that cried out to be fed
the blood of her soldiers.
[...]
It is men who join the military to appeal to women as
brave heroes who will save them, who respond to
recruiting posters saying “Women of Britain Say ‘GO!”,
who claim “all women like to hear of men fighting and
facing danger” and who go to their death in battle with
one word, “Mom,” on their lips. Mothers today may not
2241
send their sons forth to

battle with the adjuration “Come back with your shield
or on it” as did Spartan mothers, but in fantasy many
soldiers still hear the inner voices of their mothers
saying to them: “Grow up and be a MAN”—i.e., kill or
be killed.
Origins of War, "Killer Motherland"
Christians are being insulted by Ann Coulter,
representing their dangerous, angry mother, and it
probably won't be long before she's effectively painted
on shields and carried as the protective proud mother
onto battlefields, as young Christians suit up against the
unrelenting "bullying" (the bullying they knew from
their own mothers, projected onto an outside source) of
the new atheists. War of psychoclasses, like the
American Civil War, and the War of Revolution.
———
Apr 12
Dear Patrick,
I have not seen that "Killer Motherland" quote before,
and in my opinion it is an hysterical bullseye. With little
exception, it seems, women are mostly portrayed as the
"collateral damage" in wars, which they encourage their
sons and spouses to fight at risk of social or military
2242
dishonor and sexual humiliation. But when it comes

down to the trenches, in hand-to-hand live combat,
soldiers (at least the organized and commanded ones) do
not necessarily fight for motherhood and sexually
loaded cherry pie, which of course represents the
motherland (in most places, but not all).
In fact, they move forward so as not to be deemed
cowards (by fellow soldiers) and to fight for the
approval of their comrades, who will seldom tolerate
deserters (current case to wit), and for the flag under
which they are pledged to serve. (Napoleon paid special
attention to flag bearers and had them protected
fiercely.) If fatherhood is squandered on battlefields,
history until now says so be it. Nonetheless, it is widely
regarded as a crime to kill women and children and a
shameful lack of manhood if any male in the family
even conscientiously objects, much less "deserts" the
cause.
I will read "Killer Motherland" with interest to see how
the implications of the above unflinching look at
motherhood plays out with mothers and their minions. Is
it possible that when women write history the world
looks different? What might life be like if all the
mothers in the world turned deMausean?
Thanks for the perfect quote.
Frank
2243
———
Apr 12
Frank’s comments ring true to me. There are also data

about mommies and militarism, and this trumps what
any psychohistorian might have written in a speculative
vein. First, public opinion data consistently show a
“gender gap” in which men favor war and militarism by
10 to 20 percentage points more than women. This
empirical finding is so well established and so well
known that I have to wonder what is going on when a
psychohistorian chooses to ignore it.
Second, there is an empirical literature on the gender
psychology of militarism that addresses not the gender
gap between males and females but the androgynous vs.
macho personality types among males. When I
published my hawks and doves article
http://middleclassfightsback.org/resources/PolPsyc95.pd
f it was the most recent and possibly the only study of
its kind on this topic, and may still be. My data show
that there are two separate personality factors—
machismo and authoritarianism—that predict militarist
policy preferences for males. Authoritarianism also
predicts militarism for females. I believe that
authoritarianism arises from punitive parenting
subcultures discussed by deMause. There is some
2244
evidence for this in the interview data from Adorno et

al’s The Authoritarian Personality but much more
empirical work needs to be done in this area. If
someone can get me a research grant, I’d be happy to do
the research myself.
The etiology of the machismo factor, on the other hand,
is probably unrelated to the quality of child rearing. My
explanation, which I present in my hawks and doves
article, is that machismo arises from male gender
insecurity that is INHERENT in the way our society
stereotypes the sexes, and that these social pressures
exist even for people who have been raised in a
completely loving way. Here is the scenario. In a
culture in which infant care is almost exclusively
assigned to women, the formation of self for people of
both sexes has its deepest roots in identification with the
mother. When the sex sterotyping kicks in later in
childhood, however, girls are pressured to continue
identifying with their mothers, while boys are pressured
to dis-identify with their mothers.
This sets up a situation of life-long gender confinement
for females (see Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction
of Mothering) and gender insecurity for males. Society
is telling males to be tough, don’t be a sissy, go out there
and kick ass, etc. etc., while deep down inside they/we
feel “feminine” because we are identified with our
mothers. So no matter how much macho males try to
live up to the macho ideal, they are always haunted by
2245
the feeling that deep down inside they are feminine, and
need to go to great lengths to prove their manhood, even
to the extent of killing other males.
This is the “default” situation for mother-raised males
subjected to sex-sterotyped socialization, and it occurs
INDEPENDENTLY of the quality of mothering. Note
well: I am not minimizing the importance of quality of
parenting; far from it. My point is only that quality of
parenting is most likely tapped by the authoritarianism
construct, while the etiology of machismo for many
males has to do with the unnatural dis-identification
from the mother into which males are socialized by
mainstream culture.
While this explains machismo, the question then arises
why some males are androgynous. I believe there are
several pathways to androgyny. First, if a person’s
father or a father figure nurtured them when they were
infants, either as a single parent or with the mother, then
their self-formation would be rooted in male as well as
female introjects (in the dual parent scenario) and they
will be naturally androgynous as adults.
Second, if boys are raised in androgynous subcultures
that shield them from the sex-sterotyping of the larger
society, then they can be at peace with the feminine part
of themselves and live as androgynous males.
Third, a male can undo their internalized macho
socialization through psychotherapy, male support
2246
groups, and the like. Jungian psychotherapy is

explicitly oriented to psychic evolution towards
androgyny. Males encounters their feminine introjects
(or “archetypes,” as Jung would have it) in dreams and
other products of the unconscious. Through the
interpretation of these images, the male eventually
comes to see them as parts of himself and thus not
threatening or alien. This integration of unconscious
feminine parts of the self into the total personality
constitutes “androgyny.”
Brad
———
Apr 12
DeMause's take is that the unit of soldiers, the group, is

itself maternal -- "regiments are our mothers". Officers
as "hens." Cannons called "mom," and such.
Everywhere he's written about the flag as placenta ...
except in his most recent work -- "Origins of war" --
where "the fetal" seems near (this is an exaggeration,
but not much) to have disappeared from his thinking.
It'd be good exercise to see if he really thinks of it as
such. It might be more accurate to wonder if he now
thought of it more as a conduit to mother (making it
comparable to one of those arms upraised to Hitler) than
it is something separate, something of itself, which is
2247
how he originally viewed the fetus's relationship with

the placenta.
De Mause believes wars are specifically about the
chance to kill women and children. People do a split,
and project all the dangerous and bad aspects onto the
others you're fighting. Your mother country becomes all
good, and you're all good -- the favourite you always
wanted to be -- by standing up for Her. You revenge
against her through your killing/raping enemy women,
and against your own bad, spoiled, vulnerable self, by
killing enemy soldiers, enemy children.
One of the strange things I have noticed in his writings,
though, is a quote of his of how Hitler saw medusa's
eyes as the eyes of his own mother. What I mean, is,
shouldn't this have been projected -- out?, leaving his
mother perhaps stern but never monstrous?
About the fact that it was regarded as a crime to kill
women and children, de Mause believes that, at some
level, everyone knew that though "Wars are thought of
as being fought mainly by men against men, [...]
most wars kill more women and children than men—
today for every soldier who dies in war, ten civilians die,
about half of them children."
The sense we have of men who are sticking up for one
another, who don't want to disappoint one another -- a
band of brothers -- is certainly how they are shown in
film. Sort of a homosocial, homosexual enclave, while a
2248
raging tempest ensues around them. Whatever the

reality, the pleasure we might take in films when we see
this, is what we may want when we are not quite in the
mood to remerge with her but rather feel the need to
situate ourselves in a simulacrum of our own terrifying
infantile state, armed with some kind of totemic power.
More along this line of thinking, that is -- "New Guinea
social, religious and political institutions are
primarily constructions by men to defend against
maternal engulfment fears through shared beliefs and
rituals." And this: "Men cling to their various solidarity
arrangements to counter engulfing, poisonous women,
because "Women represent an enemy, the enemy,
and aggression is based on opposition to them. At every
stage of the developmental cycle,men have an internal,
united organization as reference; women and external
enemies are the target of concern, they are conceptually
equivalent."
De Mause would also say that during wars the idea, the
image, of young men all dead on the battlefield is
actually a pleasant one -- they've finally martyred
themselves, and are being blanketed in remorse and love
and appreciation by their mothers. Such was the purpose
of war, what men ultimately signed up for -- this
sacrifice of their youth. I can't say I've ever seen such
reflected in films -- usually there's a strong sense that
someone ought to pay! But I think we can perhaps catch
some sense of this when we see gravestones of soldiers,
2249
side by side, or of their returning caskets, cloathed in

"swaddling cloth." These men are heroes, cleansed of
sin and now loved in Heaven -- not entirely a sad fate.
— Patrick
———
Apr 12
Speaking of Jung Brad, Erich Neumann wrote Fear of

the Feminine and has myths that support some of what
Patrick says.
Also, one of the most central hero myths is Heracles in
which Hera is the evil force trying to stop him.
I'm all for psychic bisexuality, psychic hermaphroditism,
or whatever you want to call it, but I don't think
disowning the feminine part of your personality is the
only issue.
I've written before that a lot of the fantasies and
repetitions that surround the father imago in one patient
have shown up with the mother imago in other patients.
Although I'm not a fan of Lacan, his concept of
foreclosure is the closest to this operation.
Getting away from universals, when there is obviously
so many different personality types out there, is the most
2250
important research for psychoanalytic theory, in my

opinion,
Trent
———
Apr 12
Trent, I completely agree that there are multiple

personality types, and in fact in any personality data set
there are multiple typologies consistent with the same
data. It is deMause and Patrick, not me, who are
proposing a one-size fits all theory of militarism. I have
no doubt whatsoever that the pattern deMause and
Patrick are describing fits SOME people. The question
is, how much of the variance in hawk and dove attitudes
and behavior does the deMausian factor or factors
explain? That is actually an empirical question that
lends itself to quantitative research, and I have done the
research and published it in Political Psychology, one of
the two major peer reviewed journals in the field:
http://middleclassfightsback.org/resources/PolPsyc95.pd
f
My conclusion is that authoritarianism, which
corresponds to the deMausian “quality of child-rearing”
factor, explains a major portion of the hawk/dove
variance, and machismo explains another, comparable
portion. My proposed explanation of the etiology of the
2251
machismo factor is sociological/psychoanalytic,

following the analysis of Nancy Chodorow in her
classic, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis
and the Sociology of Gender (University of California
Press, 1978). I don’t doubt that there are yet other
factors, and in fact in my article I combined
authoritarianism with a third factor—Machiavellianism.
But these are the major factors in terms of explanatory
power, and unless and until someone does other research
that supports a different conclusion, this is the state of
the peer-reviewed empirical research on this question, at
least to my knowledge.
Brad
———
Apr 12
I have a lot of respect for your courage, Brad, but I've

read both Dinnerstein and Chodorow, and myself used
them in undergraduate papers when prof's nerves could
be settled by associating what I was arguing with
familiar, more mild (read: agreeable) psychoanalytic
stuff. Whatever I was doing, I was communicating, will
know bounds -- I was ostensibly being inspired by
scholars familiar and processed and not too outlandish:
such is what I saw on the horizons! De Mause never
refers to them but instead to Dorothy Bloch and Joseph
2252
Rheingold. I used them (well, actually only Rheingold --

Bloch wasn't in the library) when I didn't give a wit
about unnerving people, and just in keeping faith with
myself.
Mothers were once the centre of our universe. When as
boys we're playing war at the age of four or five,
enjoying bravado, in face of fears, it's probably
appropriate to veto at least a few of the multi-causal
reasons for war -- it probably isn't about oil money, for
instance. And it gets harder to deny that the person who
says it's about maternal distancing and insecure
attachments, is guilty of narrowing down.
We grow up, yes, but what if these early experiences
changed our brains and wired us for life? What if de
Mause is right that just growing, enjoying life --
becoming independent -- is for most of us something we
cannot detach as a source of guilt, as something that
made us guilty when we were young because it meant
not attending to our insufficiently attended-to mother?
And what if too much of it draws us eventually toward a
need to re-stage our early childhood humiliations,
bonding with our mothers and eviscerating our guilty,
bad childhood selves?
What if when we war we're accessing early childhood
memories, early childhood brain states, so in effect
we're two or three or five years old again -- but not in
totality: we can retain the adult skills needed to
2253
strategize and build bombs, required to do the requisite

amount of earned damage, acquired in our early guilty
years of surely deliberate, maternal neglect. But in
our language, when we talk, you'll feel the kind of rage
that can only be fueled out of feeling apocalyptically
abandoned and humiliated (this is Rheingold), at a very
early age.
———
DEAR PATRICK,
"What if when we war we're accessing early childhood
memories, early childhood brain states, so in effect
we're two or three or five years old again -- but not in
totality: we can retain the adult skills needed to
strategize and build bombs, required to do the requisite
amount of earned damage, acquired in our early guilty
years of surely deliberate, maternal neglect. But in
our language, when we talk, you'll feel the kind of rage
that can only be fueled out of feeling apocalyptically
abandoned and humiliated (this is Rheingold), at a very
early age."
There may be a complete disconnect among the
situations we are discussing as war. It sounds to me as if
we are all in agreement when we conjure up visions of
bombed out buildings, decaying bodies, flames,
screaming, and tortured spirits. But we see and feels all
that when there is no "war," so what's the difference? Is
it possible that divisions of soldiers and cadres of
2254
powerful leaders are simultaneously infested with the

lice of war and turn their brains into 5-year-olds, who
can really battle bloodier and harder than pit bulls if you
don't stop them? Why not?
Not sure what you mean by "earned damage" or what
signifies that "surely deliberate maternal neglect." What
was neglected?
I've been on the ground in a few "wars" as we all have.
War means civility is almost entirely forgotten. If there
are any limits they will be crossed and exceeded. Only
dumb luck keeps you alive. I've never seen battlefield
rage, seldom heard of it among fighting men or women.
Military rage usually takes place in camps and homes
and bars.
And almost every child I know, including me, my wives,
my children and most of my friends have felt abandoned
at very early ages (so nobody can seem special because
of that) as well as humiliated, and that probably goes for
any enemy one might choose to fight a "war" against. I
have met a very few people, including world renown
ogres, who are innocent of abandonment and
humiliation because it is almost 100% common species-
wide. Thus the feelings of it are unlikely to trigger wars.
What may trigger wars are factors like lack of respect,
overestimation and underestimation of risks (maybe
that's where the 5-year-old mind makes the
miscalculations), paucity of original ideas for
2255
compromise, the human taste and desire for (hot or cold)

revenge, mother, of course, and the ebb and flow of
money. There are some who might say that that leaves a
lot of Jews, Arabs, Celts, Germans, Russians, Chinese
and English off the hook, and it does.
Frank
———
Apr 13
And almost every child I know, including me, my wives,

my children and most of my friends have felt abandoned
at very early ages (so nobody can seem special because
of that) as well as humiliated, and that probably goes for
any enemy one might choose to fight a "war" against. I
have met a very few people, including world renown
ogres, who are innocent of abandonment and
humiliation because it is almost 100% common species-
wide. Thus the feelings of it are unlikely to trigger wars.
The deMausian theory goes that what is the source of
war is our own feeling guilty and bad when we start
enjoying ourselves too much. We experience our inner
perpetrator alters leaving us -- our moms, abandoning us
-- and we respond to this intolerable fate as follows:
1) We rebond to a maternal entity -- to mom -- and shorn
ourselves of anything that could make us feel spoiled.
2256
Weimar Germany lead to a subsequent Germany which

shorned cosmopolitanism for nationalism and
provincialism.
2) We become her favourites, absolutely loyal to her.
3) We war against people we've projected all her and our
own bad stuff onto -- so Terrifying Mothers and Bad
Boys and Girls.
Humiliations don't take us into war; it's more our sense
of having earned them by being unfaithful to our
mothers, our being spoiled and guilty. This way, she's
always someone who could love us, if only we behave
properly. For the least loved, dying on the battlefields,
shorning ourselves of our youthful potential and
sacrificing ourselves to her, is a sure way to do this.
— Patrick
———
Apr 13
There are so many fuzzy words in those responses that I

cannot make any coherent sense of it at all. "Unfaithful,"
"spoiled," "guilty." Add to that: "The source of war is
our own feeling guilty and bad when we start enjoying
ourselves too much," as if there really is such a daringly
Utopian state. I don't believe that I suggested
"humiliations" take us to war. When was there last a
humiliated general who started a war? More likely are
2257
the humiliated corporals, and their mothers, naturally.

Frank
———
Apr 13
Dear Patrick,
I'd like to ask you one question for clarification: Can
you remember back with any accuracy at all where and
when you learned the definition of the words guilty,
unfaithful, spoiled, absolutely loyal, and bad?
Frank
———
Apr 13
The emotional tone I always took out of my relationship

with my mother. I'm not sure when I learned the words,
though -- "spoiled" maybe out of Dahl's "Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory," maybe.
———
Apr 13
I was most interested in "absolute loyalty."
2258
Frank
———
Apr 13
Okay, sure -- and sorry everyone for all the responses.

Absolute loyalty I probably learned when, as a child,
and awakened out of a nightmare, I ran screaming to my
mom insisting that I would protect her from the big
monkeys. I felt real good knowing that was my
response. I also remember, maybe sometime 5ish, hiding
behind my mom when I first met the neighbours, but
already sensing that self-realization would come when I
wasn't so much hiding in her skirts but standing at the
forefront of her property, Proud Heimdal at the gates of
Asgaard.
That's the best I can do for now. I think it's the truest
answer, but maybe not.
— Patrick
———
Apr 13
So this is who you wanted to be? How does this creature

represent loyalty?
2259
B
...
Show trimmed content
Attachments (1)
———
Apr 13
First image isn't showing, unfortunately. Protector of my

mother and her realm, always.
———
Apr 13
"What may trigger wars are factors like lack of respect,

overestimation and underestimation of risks (maybe
that's where the 5-year-old mind makes the
miscalculations), paucity of original ideas for
compromise, the human taste and desire for (hot or cold)
revenge, mother, of course, and the ebb and flow of
money."
Think Frank is onto it. I might add...the deep drive to
be RIGHT (and hotly indignant) is up there
— Paul
2260
———
Apr 14
Re: In a culture in which infant care is almost
exclusively assigned to women, the formation of self for
people of both sexes has its deepest roots in
identification with the mother. When the sex
sterotyping kicks in later in childhood, however, girls
are pressured to continue identifying with their mothers,
while boys are pressured to dis-identify with their
mothers.
This sets up a situation of life-long gender confinement
for females (see Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction
of Mothering) and gender insecurity for males. Society
is telling males to be tough, don’t be a sissy, go out there
and kick ass, etc. etc., while deep down inside they/we
feel “feminine” because we are identified with our
mothers. So no matter how much macho males try to
live up to the macho ideal, they are always haunted by
the feeling that deep down inside they are feminine, and
need to go to great lengths to prove their manhood, even
to the extent of killing other males.
This is the “default” situation for mother-raised males
subjected to sex-sterotyped socialization, and it occurs
INDEPENDENTLY of the quality of mothering. Note
well: I am not minimizing the importance of quality of
parenting; far from it. My point is only that quality of
2261
parenting is most likely tapped by the authoritarianism

construct, while the etiology of machismo for many
males has to do with the unnatural dis-identification
from the mother into which males are socialized by
mainstream culture.
-------
De Mause would argue that any society where you see
"sex-typed socialization," is one where you had very
poorly loved mothers. The quality of parenting, of
mothering, is built in -- such and such kind of maternal
care, leads to this immature, this depraved, form of
society. How does this work? Men out of certain kinds
of mothering end up having little interest in children
other than as breast substitutes, and want women
(always reminding them of their omnipotent, dangerous
mothers) quarantined. Women out of certain kinds of
mothering are possessive over their children, using them
as well until losing interest owing to their growing up
and growing away from them.
Poorly loved mothers, he argues, give very little eye
contact with their boys, making them feel much more
alone and poorly attached. To ward against this, boys
themselves seek to make bravado displays of their
toughness, something he says you can see as early as 3
years of age. He writes that being with one's mother can
be a boys' biggest desire and comfort -- as much as he's
never supposed to admit it -- but with these sorts of
insufficiently loved mothers, it's certainly not only that.
2262
Being "feminine" also means being in effect used

incestuously by her, being part of her body, her
excretions, and her play-toy (de Mause mentions how
many machismo cultures have boys sleeping with their
mothers way into adolescence). They end up picking on
feminine boys, not just because society encourages them
to but as a means of repudiating their own experienced
incest: you're the fem, not me, faggot! That is, it isn't just
that he may not ever be capable of meeting society's
expectations that irks, but that they can never feel free
of being intrinsically that piece of incestuously used
trash, which is what he very much was in his first years
of life ... like how a prostitute probably feels, owing to
her early suffered child abuse.
Ann Coulter, calling for sacrifice of young
men
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3aH8tc2ibaE/VS0C3-
7GBqI/AAAAAAAAAkQ/2awefJxq9ZY/s1600/ann_coulter-620x412.jpg
Salon.com has an article about how Ann Coulter is

calling Christians -- her kind -- wimps, in face of
confident, effective, aggressive atheism. This bit:
O’Reilly then asks Coulter how it is that the 80 percent
of Americans who consider themselves Christians “are
getting thumped, they’re losing . . . . How did that
happen?”
For Coulter, the answer lies in pusillanimous Christian
2263
leaders (abetted by spineless Republicans). Their

cowardice is, she says, “ridiculous,” because “the one
thing every Christian should have is courage. The most
important thing in your life, eternity, is already taken
care of. Go out and fight. You’re afraid of being
sneered at by the New York Times?”
brings to mind deMause's description of the start of
wars, where mothers are demanding courage and
sacrifice and show of loyalty, from their suspect youth:
That wars are seen emotionally as led by dangerous
Killer Mothers, with war
goddesses from Athena to Freyja and from Brittania to
Marianne depicted as
devouring, raping and ripping apart her children, is one
of my most unexpected
findings during the three decades I have studied war
psychohistorically. The further
back in history one goes, the more wars are openly
considered as being fought for
Killer Goddesses, from Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis and
Kali to the Aztec mother goddess Huitzilopochtli, who
had “mouths all over her body” that cried out to be
fed the blood of her soldiers.
[...]
It is men who join the military to appeal to women as
brave heroes who will save them, who respond
to recruiting posters saying “Women of Britain Say
2264
‘GO!”, who claim “all women like to hear of men

fighting and facing danger” and who go to their death in
battle with one word, “Mom,” on their lips. Mothers
today may not send their sons forth to battle with the
adjuration “Come back with your shield or on it” as did
Spartan mothers, but in fantasy many soldiers still hear
the inner voices of their mothers saying to them: “Grow
up and be a MAN”—i.e., kill or be killed.
Origins of War, "Killer Motherland"
Christians are being insulted by Ann Coulter,

representing their dangerous, angry mother, and it
probably won't be long before she's effectively painted
on shields and carried as the protective proud mother
onto battlefields, as young Christians suit up against the
unrelenting "bullying" (the bullying they knew from
their own mothers, projected onto an outside source) of
the new atheists. War of psychoclasses, like the
American Civil War, and the War of Revolution.
---------
Dear Patrick,
I have not seen that "Killer Motherland" quote before,
and in my opinion it is an hysterical bullseye. With little
exception, it seems, women are mostly portrayed as the
"collateral damage" in wars, which they encourage their
sons and spouses to fight at risk of social or military
2265
dishonor and sexual humiliation. But when it comes

down to the trenches, in hand-to-hand live combat,
soldiers (at least the organized and commanded ones) do
not necessarily fight for motherhood and sexually
loaded cherry pie, which of course represents the
motherland (in most places, but not all).
In fact, they move forward so as not to be deemed
cowards (by fellow soldiers) and to fight for the
approval of their comrades, who will seldom tolerate
deserters (current case to wit), and for the flag under
which they are pledged to serve. (Napoleon paid special
attention to flag bearers and had them protected
fiercely.) If fatherhood is squandered on battlefields,
history until now says so be it. Nonetheless, it is widely
regarded as a crime to kill women and children and a
shameful lack of manhood if any male in the family
even conscientiously objects, much less "deserts" the
cause.
I will read "Killer Motherland" with interest to see how
the implications of the above unflinching look at
motherhood plays out with mothers and their minions. Is
it possible that when women write history the world
looks different? What might life be like if all the
mothers in the world turned deMausean?
Thanks for the perfect quote.
Fred
2266
———-
DeMause's take is that the unit of soldiers, the group, is
itself maternal -- "regiments are our mothers". Officers
as "hens." Cannons called "mom," and such.
Everywhere he's written about the flag as placenta ...
except in his most recent work -- "Origins of war" --
where "the fetal" seems near (this is an exaggeration,
but not much) to have disappeared from his thinking.
It'd be good exercise to see if he really thinks of it as
such. It might be more accurate to wonder if he now
thought of it more as a conduit to mother (making it
comparable to one of those arms upraised to Hitler) than
it is something separate, something of itself, which is
how he originally viewed the fetus's relationship with
the placenta.
De Mause believes wars are specifically about the
chance to kill women and children. People do a split,
and project all the dangerous and bad aspects onto the
others you're fighting. Your mother country becomes all
good, and you're all good -- the favourite you always
wanted to be -- by standing up for Her. You revenge
against her through your killing/raping enemy women,
and against your own bad, spoiled, vulnerable self, by
killing enemy soldiers, enemy children.
One of the strange things I have noticed in his writings,
though, is a quote of his of how Hitler saw medusa's
eyes as the eyes of his own mother. What I mean, is,
2267
shouldn't this have been projected -- out?, leaving his

mother perhaps stern but never monstrous?
About the fact that it was regarded as a crime to kill
women and children, de Mause believes that, at some
level, everyone knew that though "Wars are thought of
as being fought mainly by men against men, [...]
most wars kill more women and children than men—
today for every soldier who dies in war, ten civilians die,
about half of them children."
The sense we have of men who are sticking up for one
another, who don't want to disappoint one another -- a
band of brothers -- is certainly how they are shown in
film. Sort of a homosocial, homosexual enclave, while a
raging tempest ensues around them. Whatever the
reality, the pleasure we might take in films when we see
this, is what we may want when we are not quite in the
mood to remerge with her but rather feel the need to
situate ourselves in a simulacrum of our own terrifying
infantile state, armed with some kind of totemic power.
More along this line of thinking, that is -- "New Guinea
social, religious and political institutions are
primarily constructions by men to defend against
maternal engulfment fears through shared beliefs and
rituals." And this: "Men cling to their various solidarity
arrangements to counter engulfing, poisonous women,
because "Women represent an enemy, the enemy,
and aggression is based on opposition to them. At every
2268
stage of the developmental cycle,men have an internal,

united organization as reference; women and external
enemies are the target of concern, they are conceptually
equivalent."
De Mause would also say that during wars the idea, the
image, of young men all dead on the battlefield is
actually a pleasant one -- they've finally martyred
themselves, and are being blanketed in remorse and love
and appreciation by their mothers. Such was the purpose
of war, what men ultimately signed up for -- this
sacrifice of their youth. I can't say I've ever seen such
reflected in films -- usually there's a strong sense that
someone ought to pay! But I think we can perhaps catch
some sense of this when we see gravestones of soldiers,
side by side, or of their returning caskets, cloathed in
"swaddling cloth." These men are heroes, cleansed of
sin and now loved in Heaven -- not entirely a sad
fate. unday, February 8, 2015
Steven Pinker: No Utopian, he
6Kpn48ivXQQ/VSz_Yw7KgLI/AAAAAAAAAkE/YjETBPvYEAk/s1600/The-
Better-Angels-of-Our-Nature.jpg
Rather than skimming through it, I finally read all of
Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of our Nature." I'm
guessing that the one thing others have not discussed is
his description of the crazy, utopian 1960s. In a nutshell,
he's not for it. It was a period of the relaxation of self
2269
control — "Do your own thing, Let it all hang out, If it
feels good do it, Take a walk on the wild side." What
happens out of all of this is what happens to, for
example, the elderdefying, the whydon’tyouallfade

away band, the Who , where as he says one of the band
members end up being a homicidal maniac, running
over his bodyguard and such. For a peaceful society,
you have to eschew these temptations to be free. If
you're not up for it, perhaps you're lucky enough to be
like Pinker and have a mother who dissuaded him from
becoming other than the perfect mensch.
So he's ostensibly telling us the good news — society
has gotten better; much better — while warning
us away from getting too excited. So if you are to read
his work about how history is "shockingly violent" and
"deeply brutal." About how most previous societies
were profoundly infanticidal. That it was about rapes, a
lot of rapes. That tribal cultures are the worst — he says,
believe it or not, the colonialists reports of their
savagery was spoton. You're not supposed to say —
well then, why the hell History? why the hell
Anthropology? and count the future as open terrain,
spared any heeding of scoldings to read history else
repeat sins. Such blatant, youthful repulsion of elders
2270
and of the past, doesn't in his mind lead to
1920s modernism or 1960s hippielove, but to your
eventually taking a knife from your kitchen drawer and
skewering your neighbour. No, as absurd as his account
makes of these ginormous realms of interest and study,
he wouldn't dare question any discipline — a word he
surely loves — that encourages kids to spend dutiful
hours studying, studying, studying, and enlarging their
capacities of selfcontrol, reason and selfdenial.
De Mause wouldn't discount that periods where you
really feel you can let it go, be free — youthful, golden
age periods — lead to a lot of violence. But his take is
this isn't because adolescent periods are always that,
which is why we should tutor ourselves to prefer the
elder. His take is that they needn't be violent at all, they
could be just times conducive to the most enriched
living; but in the past they inevitably became violent
because few of us were raised with enough love that
we're not still under pressure from our internal
perpetrator parental alters to feel like we'll be abandoned
or killed if we enjoy ourselves too much (our alters,
representatives of our denied, depressed mothers,
required us to fill their gaps, and rejected us when near
as infants focused on ourselves). So when things get
2271
really good, and we can't retreat, recess — we go amok.
Pinker's work, that is, is actually for me a bit of a kill
joy. As much as I quickly realized my dreaming,
Utopianvisioned professors of premodern History or
Anthropology weren't quite seeing their peoples quite
right, I knew at least that these professors were well
loved enough to inspire me to dream big, to try and be
big — they wanted the people they studied and admired
to be magical, at least in part, for their own sakes: they
deserved no less. These wellwishing professors, I
knew, inspired by the 60s youthful culture, will be the
best we'll see until a new Golden Age inspires even
more healthily raised people to change the world. When
they start being discounted, it'll be mostly about
liberating ourselves from their permission and goodness
— from them as emblems of allowance — not truly
their blind sightedness.
Pinker is adamant that a bourgeois society is an elder
one, a sober one. This is different from de Mause. De
Mause talks about them as if they were youths stepping
out into a new land of promise — ongoing growth,
accruing wealth, accruing selfsatisfaction, accruing
selfattendance. He would argue that Pinker's sober
2272
world isn't actually intrinsically so inhibited at all; that
we are prone to colour it that way so we can try and hide
from ourselves the fact that what we wanted for
ourselves is being realized — surely Pinker's current
state of mind. If this isn't successful, if we begin to feel
like we've empowered ourselves too much, have gone
too long without some large sacrifice for our sins, we'll
precipitate a war or deep recession.
One does note that even as much as Pinker goes to great
lengths to suggest that "Iran" isn't so bad, he leaves
room to change his tune. What is absolutely abhorrent,
what was a disgrace, was the 1960s, because with its
upsurge of adolescence it upset a pleasant graph that
showed violence on the downswing. As much as he has
talked about the current religious as having
compartmentalized many of their beliefs so they're out
of the way of everyday life, he doesn't spare setting
them up so that they don't seem like people out of
several hundred years ago, still living with us today. He
doesn't spare them being seen as people "before the
(Protestant) revolution" — the New Atheist way of
looking at Muslims.
If Pinker's mother didn't just bless him by discouraging
2273
his freedom but also humiliated him, if he too at some
level desires revenge upon her, not just to credit and
acclaim, he might restage by setting up the Muslim
world as both the Terrifying Mother and the Bad
Child and start pointing fingers — look you, what's with
all this disruption!
We'll see if he goes like fellow reasoning,
rationalist, atheist Dawkins, who was all Biology and
study and peace and urbanity and Enlightenment ... until
he wasn't, and had to settle scores.
———
This is the most noteworthy passage for me in the whole
book:
[Norbert] Elias had written that the demands of self-
control and the embedding of the self into webs of
interdependence were historically reflected in the
development of timekeeping devices and a
consciousness of time: "This is why tendencies in the
individual so often rebel against social time as
represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many
people come into conflict with themselves when they
wish to be punctual." In the opening scene of the 1969
movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda
conspicuously toss their wristwatch into the dirt before
2274
setting off on their motorcycles to find America. That

same year, the first album by the band Chicago [...]
contained the lyrics "Does anybody really now what
time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can't
imagine why." All this made sense to me when I was
sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my
grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous:
"How can you be a mensch without a wager?" She ran
to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had brought
during a visit to the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka. I have it
to this day. (page 111)
He concludes the book, incidentally, this way:
A final reflection. In writing this book I have adopted a
voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I
believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not
enough understanding. But at no point have I been
unaware of the reality behind the numbers.To review the
history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the
cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome
with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness. I know
that behind the graphs there is young men who feels a
stab of pain and watches the life drain slowly out of
him, knowing he has been robbed of decades of
existence. There is a victim of torture whose contents
of consciousness have been replaced by unbearable
agony, leaving room only for the desire that
consciousness itself should cease. There is a woman
who has learned that her husband, her father, and her
2275
brothers are dead in a ditch, and who will soon "fall into
the hands of hot and forcing violation."
So we get this sort of neutral, distanced, account
throughout, where amongst other things we learn his life
was saved from depravity owing to a highly memorable
incidence involving a watch where his grandmother
stepped in to reign in his youthful impulses. And he
finishes with a graphic afterwards, where a young man
watches the life drain out of him, and afterwards, "the
coup de grace," of an adult woman, already deprived of
everyone that matters to her, about to be raped.
Are we encountering here mostly his profound sadness
and dismay, amelioration to those who wonder how he
can talk about such awful subject manner and remain so
cold? Or is it more unconscious payback against the
women in his life who stepped in during his blooming
adolescence during a blooming time in America's
history, and made bloody sure he didn't grow up to be a
rock and roll star?
Monday, April 6, 2015
People with short-term memory, or people

with brilliant long-term, who well
remember the terrors?
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%2Bv3foL._SY344_BO1%2C204%2C203%2C200_.jpg
Paul Krugman, at his blog, has just explained why

2276
austerity-favouring politicians in Britain might well get

re-elected. He writes:
Well, you could blame the weakness of the opposition,
which has done an absolutely terrible job of making its
case. You could blame the fecklessness of the news
media, which has gotten much wrong. But the truth is
that what’s happening in British politics is what almost
always happens, there and everywhere else: Voters have
fairly short memories, and they judge economic policy
not by long-term results but by recent growth. Over five
years, the coalition’s record looks terrible. But over the
past couple of quarters it looks pretty good, and that’s
what matters politically.
This is the common sense understanding of how people
work that liberals generally (always?) prefer, that they're
basically good but have certain weaknesses that make
them exploitable. He's wed to it, unfortunately, so that if
it was only one quarter that looked pretty good, he'd of
made the exact same argument. If it wasn't even that ...
if there weren't any promising economic quarters but
conservatives we're dangling goodies of some kind, like
tax cuts, it would be amended slightly, but he'd in
essence argue the same thing: These good people's
weakness isn't their "fairly short memories," but their
"sweet tooths" -- sadly ready to gobble down anything
sweet-sounding given to them without thought of the
long-term. The liberals role is to press and educate, get
the news out, so that perhaps these instinctive
tendencies in the populace can be abated by forcing
2277
them to do some hard recall, some temporary restraint

and denial ... this too -- thank God! -- they're capable
of.
I think this common sense understanding of people is
wrong, and, other than deMause, the only person I've
heard argue that people actually know what they're
getting when they vote in people that will ensure hard
times, is the conservative historian John Lukacs. Lukacs
had argued that people knew the kind of world
Reagonomics was about to bring, they weren't fooled or
conned or exploited, and that the people chose it
because they knew it was required to breed character,
something Lukacs believed it did as well (and also
David Brooks: his new book is all about it). To him, it
showed something impressive about them that
they intrinsically preferred a "testing" environment to
one always dispensing "candy."
Lukacs is a very erudite nut, of course. It's de Mause
who's got it right. At certain times, people vote in
politicians who will ensure further suffering and growth-
inhibition, because, without it, they will feel something
worse: complete abandonment by their mothers,
installed as alters in their right hemispheres.
De Mause would argue the should-be-common-sense
argument that voters actually well-remembered the five
years of suffering, not the two quarters of economic
improvement; and in fact are maybe about to vote back
2278
in conservatives in spite of the fact of recent economic

improvement. In de Mause's view, the people aren't good
but prey to unfortunate weaknesses, but rather people
who rightly fear the feeling of apocalyptic abandonment
they experience when they know they've still been
enjoying themselves way too much, making life
"selfishly" about themselves, rather than the group (the
mother). In de Mause's view, people aren't those out of
some quaint Irish village that are maybe prone to
drinking too much and forgetting themselves, but rather
those who've seen wicked terrors and can spot those
who'll invite them back -- i.e true society-advancers --
progressives -- a mile away. He sees them as more
"Grimm," and rightly.
De Mause says that most children did not have parents
who could be completely enthusiastic about their
children's growth, and tended to punish them, abandon
them, when they focused too much on their own needs
rather than those of their own. He argues that most
children conclude out of this experience, two things:
one, self-attention and growth is bad, a sin; and two, that
being vulnerable -- what they most felt like before being
abandoned -- is itself a terrible, punishment-worthy
crime. This they learn so hard it changes their brains --
"super ego" develops ... which to super-ego-almost-
never-saying de Mause, is really
internal perpetrator alters. If you renounce growth,
you're not anywhere near as deserving as punishment. If
the 60s and 70s had just continued on, it would have
2279
driven people mad.
Not you or me, no -- but we were better loved.

Saturday, April 4, 2015
Cosmopolitanism as a group-fantasy
XNc_gFOA_ro/VSA7FSHwa6I/AAAAAAAAAjc/G8uft7A-fyo/s1600/images-
1.jpeg
... And the charge of "reductionism," often leveled

against psychohistory, is simply misplaced, since it is
not a failing but a scientific goal to reduce seemingly
complex and disparate processes to simpler and more
basic forces and principles. Lloyd deMause,
Foundations of Psychohistory
DeMause's argument doesn't play very well right

now. DeMause's goal, that we should "derive less from
William Langer's famous 'Next Assignment' for
historians to 'use psychoanalysis in history' than from
Freud's initial hope that 'we may expect that one day
someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of
cultural communities,'" doesn't play well right now. It is
very difficult for the cultured mind to shake out of
thinking it as immature, eager, "conquistatorial," maybe
spoiled ... as obviously untrue to the world as it is. An
approach for a child who wants everything conflated for
effortless, immediate consumption.
2280
Those who see deMause as reckless and overreaching

would disagree with this, but I would suggest that if
evidence ever came in that suggested that the nature of a
society's overall experience of their mothers in the first
few years of their lives determines, well, everything
else, that if you were able to attend to these children, see
the manner in which they were being raised, unless they
were of the helping psychoclass whose resulting society
hasn't quite ever been felt yet in history (we're beginning
to), you could spell out pretty much exactly what kind
of society these children will erect for themselves as
adults, the evidence wouldn't be allowed by their
psyches to be seen. The world will always be complex,
multi-causal, multi-variant, even if proof emerges that
there's something truer scientifically about seeing it as
pretty basic -- one primary element, from which
everything else can be extrapolated, from which
everything else, "bloomed." They might allow “a theory
of everything” in physics, but that’s when it barely
bleeds out of the cosmopolitan medium in which it was
encountered, and plays only as flattering the
sophisticated palate.
I personally think that there's something of
this invariantly mature mindset that smacks of a
collective group fantasy, an agreement, a collusion, to
see the world in such a way that one's own childhood
terrors are somehow kept at bay. From deMause, it's this
bit: "so group-fantasies are substituted as
shared defenses which prevent regression to childhood
2281
traumas." A world that is essentially complex

and irreducible, that requires an enormous amount of
experience and careful scrutiny and a cultivated,
measured sympathy to be able to understand, is
a cosmopolitan world; it is an adult
world. Cosmopolitan people, like Obama
(and unfortunately for Canadians and his victims, like
Ghomeshi), who smack of the city rather than the
creatures of incest in fly-over, are actually in a sense
being clung to (in Ghomeshi’s case, his satisfying
group-fantasy needs is why there really was no
environment that was going to friendly to his multiple,
educated, normally to be thought of as empowered
accusers, until only very recently). They help "furniture"
our world so that it becomes difficult to believe that our
early childhoods of unchanged diapers and deliberate
abandonments, has any place ... it can't be elevated into
it in a way that the mind can make sense, so it is --
victory! -- left out.
There is a lot to be said about keeping this group-fantasy
alive. Those beholden to it are those still astonishing us
by still pushing for a more evolved world ... news of the
agreement with Iran is fruition from these sorts of
people. And there's not a lot to be said for when they'll
feel the need to leave it behind, the surrendering of the
cosmopolitan group-fantasy, and start seeing sense in
reduction, like editor of Atlantic Andrew Taylor is
(against Islam), like former New York Times reporter
Chris Hedges is (against “spoiled,” people-betraying
2282
liberals and the corporate state), like where the

influential black intellectual, Salon’s Brittney Cooper
(who just abandoned longtime hero Obama for blood-in-
the-streets, race-war) is, where they can re-experience
their childhood humiliations — no more waiting, as
every bit more “unallowed” personal and societal
growth was making them more manifest — by taking
righteous revenge.
Links to my film reviews (2013-2015)
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--
TQibjM7OKM/VRwEoYHGPfI/AAAAAAAAAjA/UqOnAP6S1Rc/s1600/anton_cr
itic.jpg
American Sniper (from American Sniper to Triumph of the

Will?)
Fury
Boyhood
Lucy
Railway Man
Transcendence
2283
Bad Words
Draft Day
Nymphomaniac
Noah
Divergent
Non-Stop
Pompeii
3 Days to Kill
Gravity and 12 Years a Slave (out of the frying pan and into
the fire)
Her
12 Years a Slave
Ender's Game
2284

Gravity
Carrie
Don Jon
Prisoners
The Family
Insidious 2
The Butler
Kickass 2
Blue Jasmine
Elysium
Only God Forgives
The Conjuring
The Wolverine
Pacific Rim
This is the End
The Bling Ring
2285
Man of Steel
Mud
The Great Gatsby
Iron Man 3
Pain and Gain
Oblivion
Dispatches from Clio's History (part three)

AJD7VqN7xBY/VRVm6rWonQI/AAAAAAAAAis/0gRjqxro-
rI/s1600/clio_vermeer.jpg
Brian
Mar 6
Denis, Robert, Ted, Ken, and all,

Denis, thanks for this important article on the
methodology of fantasy analysis
(http://www.geocities.ws/kidhistory/ja/onfa.htm). It
2286
seems that within the psychohistory community

itself, this methodology was acknowledged to be
very much a work in progress. I thought Howard in
his commentary made some excellent suggestions
about how it could be developed further and I
wonder if anyone followed through on these
suggestions.
Robert, were your comments referring to Ted’s post
or the link to the cold fusion article that followed? It
is not clear to me how this article connects to our
discussion.
What Ted said about “the context of discovery” vs.
“the context of verification” is extremely important
and gets at something that Ken and I have been
talking about quite a bit on this list. I have argued
that theoretical (as opposed to empirical) work has
a legitimate place in psychohistory. It is legitimate
to ask what evidence supports a theory, but the
person who creates the theory should not
necessarily be required to answer this question.
That is the task of empirical researchers.
Sometimes the same person creates a theory and
works to verify it. More commonly, these tasks are
done by different groups of people.
In fact this division of labor is often institutionalized
in different subfields of the same discipline, such
as theoretical and experimental physics or
2287
economic theory (e.g. Keynes) and econometrics.

In psychohistory, DeMause is a theorist and it
remains for others to test his theories. This is
exactly what Ted has done. The data set he has
assembled is a good one for testing the theory. If
proponents of Lloyd’s theory think that Ted has
misinterpreted the data, then it is incumbent on
them to ask for the complete set of cartoons and
make the case that an alternative interpretation of
that data does, in fact, confirm Lloyd’s theory. If
that can’t be done, then the theory stands
disconfirmed. I am not interested in doing this
further research myself because I don’t believe in
Lloyd’s theory that changes in mass psychology
cause wars.
I also agree with Ted’s point that social phenomena
are far too chaotic, like the weather, to be modelled
mathematically with a high degree of precision. A
good illustration of this is the random variability
governing the leadership element in politics. If
Hitler or someone like him had not been born, or if
he had been assassinated early on, the entire
history of the 20th century might have turned out
very differently. If you factor in this kind of
randomness in the case of all the other great
powers, strict historical determinism breaks down
altogether.
That said, a great scientific genius is someone who
2288
can sift through the chaos of history and identify a

fundamental process that is predictable. I would
argue that Marx was just such a genius. While his
theory was inadequate in many respects and some
of his predictions were wrong, the major insight in
his work—the mechanism of capital accumulation
that drives the increasing concentration of wealth
under capitalism—has arguably been confirmed
recently by a massive project of data collection and
analysis, reported in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in
the Twenty-First Century.
We are not at that point yet in psychohistory, but I
have argued that research on authoritarianism and
deMause’s psychogenic theory of history may
provide building blocks for such a testable grand
theory. Unlike the case of Marx and Picketty, I
don’t see a way to test such a theory using
quantitative research entirely, but I think that
survey research and interviews with people alive
today can make a contribution to this larger project
of verification. Before turning to this, I need to
respond to Ken’s comments about The
Authoritarian Personality. But I have already said
enough for one post, and will address these
additional topics in another post later today or
tomorrow.
Brian
2289

President
917-628-8253
Mar 6
Re: I also agree with Ted’s point that social

phenomena are far too chaotic, like the weather, to
be modelled mathematically with a high degree of
precision. A good illustration of this is the random
variability governing the leadership element in
politics. If Hitler or someone like him had not been
born, or if he had been assassinated early on, the
entire history of the 20th century might have turned
out very differently. If you factor in this kind of
randomness in the case of all the other great
powers, strict historical determinism breaks down
altogether.
Goldhagen of course disagrees with your assertion
about Hitler -- he looks to the nature of the German
people. Gotz Aly, in "Why Hitler, Why Jews," does
as well. Anyone looking for support of DeMause
2290
may want to look to these authors, rather to what's

coming down now through the pipeline in
psychohistory.
I read the IPA newsletter Brian linked to us, and
really appreciate the book review where the writer
argued the point I've been arguing here in regards
to psychohistorians -- that many of us will be
foremost motivated to keep the reputations of our
own parents intact while we explore our subjects;
that in a regressive period, the discipline risks
being hijacked by abuse-apologizers -- but Brian's
point of view here is standard conservative History
even if he is not, the one that belittles all young,
rash theory; the one that inflates the limits of
human reach. Right or wrong (and I of course this
it's wrong), it's one that any scold of youthful
ambition would approve.
Incidently, if we're in an intellectual environment
that ends up in agreement with Brian, that the
smallest of things might make the most telling of
differences, advantage goes to the person who has
done the most surveying, the person who has
inspected absolutely every corner. Disadvantage to
those, who haven't read anywhere near as much,
but actually have a better capacity to discern what
matters from what doesn't -- you can frustrate them
by asking them if they considered this .... and
this ... and this ... and this .... and this further
2291
avalanche of facts, because out any old dusty

cellar might have emerged the telling difference!
It's a way of keeping a whole field, better to
oneself, and away from the young.
-- Patrick
Mar 6
Sorry, in my response I accidentally conflated two

interesting pieces from the IPA Winter 2015
newsletter -- the book review by Valerie Rose
Brinton, and the report from France by Marc-Andre
Cotton.
I referred to Goldhagen and Aly, because if it turns
out that there are some intuiting that DeMause
might be right in his deterministic sense of human
history, but might be balked from contesting those
who see history as too vast to get such a simple
handle on because they haven't done the lengthy
service in libraries ostensibly required even to
begin to debate, just know that there are some with
the same gargantuan dump of facts in their heads
as any, that have come to argue for your point of
view. Maybe be proven wrong regardless, but stick
2292
to it!
If you see these scholars being contested, look for
ad hominems ... as much as the sense of the
variableness, the randomness of history was once
an exciting prospect for youthful Romantics, every
time I've encountered in the discipline of history it's
being done by someone like Barzun, who steps
into the debate all worldly-wise, having kept such
lengthy company with the masters.
I also realize that the idea of historical "ecologies"
as complex is a potentially progressive idea,
because it speaks against the quick lordly pass-
over (i.e. values the subjects), and values the
student's powers of sympathy and sensitivity; but if
this idea is being praised because it frustrates the
less knowledgeable but more presumptive -- one's
who might actually see!!!! -- it's in service to
conservatism. I hope that makes sense.
-- Patrick
J. I. (Hans`) Bakker
Mar 6
Dear Howard, Brian, Denis, Robert, Ted, Ken, and

2293
everyone interested in the topic,

Greetings from Boston, Massaschusetts, where
tonight it is cold, but tomorrow it is supposed to get
a bit warmer!
My key point is about falsifiability and our
epistemological assumptions about "science". The
same or very similar point is being made by others
who are reacting to some of Brian's statements.
For many of us a "grand theory" is never really
testable scientifically. Paradigmatic theory is by
definition a set of hard to prove or disprove axioms.
But psychohistory does not seem to really have
much "research theory" of the kind that really can
be subject to reasonable empirical test. There are
no classical experiments in psychohistory, in part
because as an "intediscipline" about half of it is
history. There is no real possibility of an
experimental design in history, at least not an
experimental design with random assignment.
We are discussing a lot of things at the same time,
as usual. I am not against using cartoons as
empirical examples of fantasy or some other
aspect of the imagination. In the social sciences we
often use illustrative examples. Sometimes we
even do that in a somewhat rigorous way (e.g.
content analysis of mass media). But that is rarely
conclusive evidence for or against a general
2294
theory. My point is that the evidence should be

used very systematically if we are going to have a
real "test" of a theory. Moreover, to test a theory it
must be a "research theory" amenable to tesing.
That means the research must really operationalize
the variables in very rigorous ways. I am not sure
the example we have been given really does that,
even though it is interesting and worthwhile. (I
would have been proud to do it and to have had it
published.)
Richard Koeningsberg's work is interesting and I
often read his posts. I have no trouble with his
general "research paradigm" and of course I agree
with many of the things he writes. But often he
does not present testable "research theory". There
are different interpretations of the rise of the Nazi's
and what precisely they represent. For example,
Eric R. Wolf has an interesting research theory
about the Nazis which comes entirely from a
comparative anthropological perspective, although
he does add some assumptions about
psychological processes. But he is quite different
from DeMause in his approach, or does DeMause
also discuss the Kwakiutl and the Aztecs in terms
of raw power (Macht) and "legitimate authority"
(Herrschaft)? I am not saying Wolf is right and
Koenigsberg is wrong. I am saying it is very hard to
have the kind of definitive empirical test that Brian
2295
seems to think is a key component of a valid

psychohistorical account.
Cheers from Boston,
Hans J. I. Bakker
Brian
Mar 6
Hans, Patrick, Ken and all,

Hans, yes grand theory strictly speaking is not
testable. It is what Kuhn called a paradigm, a
general conceptual framework. But if the
framework is scientific, testable theories can be
derived from it, at least according to Kuhn
(Structure of Scientific Revolutions). For example,
Newtonian mechanics is predicated on three
dimensional Euclidian geometry and absolute time
as a separate dimension. This paradigm is not
directly testable, but the laws of motion, theory of
gravitation, and theory of light formulated in this
framework do yield testable predictions, which
were in fact tested by Michaelson and Morley in the
1880s. This resulted in an anomaly that could not
be resolved within the Newtonian paradigm and
2296
required a whole new way of thinking about time

and space, which was provided by Einstein’s
special and general relativity.
As for economics, if neoclassical theory does not
yield testable predictions, then it is not a scientific
paradigm and if it does, then the fact that no one
has formulated such predictions and tested them is
a commentary on the scientific immaturity of
economics as a discipline. Ted, the fact that the
social sciences have been around for a long time
does not mean that they are mature sciences, as
Kuhn used the term. A mature science is one in
which there is a consensus around a paradigm and
an organized program of empirical research
deriving predictions and testing them. This does
not describe the state of the economics discipline,
though it remains to be seen if Marx’s paradigm
and the theory of capital accumulation that derives
from it, which Piketty has tested, will put the
discipline on more solid scientific foundations.
Note also that deriving “predictions” does not
necessarily mean predicting the future, as the word
prediction is commonly used. In statistical
research, we say that a model “predicts” certain
values of the dependent variable(s) given certain
values of the independent variable(s). In this kind
of research, explanation involves generating a
model that can account for the data. That is what
2297
Piketty has done. We will not know how robust the

model is until we apply it to new data, but this could
be data from the past that was not previously
known or collected. That is also what historians do
using non-statistical methods. They generate
theories that can account for the available
evidence and the test of these theories is whether
they hold up when new evidence becomes
available. Often the evidence was already known,
but not known to the individual historian, so when
they publish their work other historians say, “but
your theory is not consistent with x, y, z evidence,
which you have not considered.”
Patrick, as I explained in greater detail in previous
posts, Goldhagen’s and any other theories that try
to explain historical events entirely in terms of
mass psychology are not viable, for reasons I will
summarize briefly in the next paragraph. Like
deMause, Goldhagen has gotten very little respect
among mainstream historians. Your explanation is
that those who reject such disturbing theories are
personally threatened by them. Saying this in an
academic forum, as you repeatedly do, is as
unproductive as it would be for people to tell you
that you are clinging to simplistic deMausian
orthodoxy because you personally cannot handle
complexity and ambiguity and need to attach
yourself to an infallible guru. So let’s leave aside
2298
all such arguments and stick to the substantive

issues.
If the Third Reich was caused entirely by mass
psychology, how do you account for the fact that
left political parties outpolled right parties in
German elections for decades before Hitler came
to power and that Germany immediately became a
stable democracy after Hitler was defeated? (Note
that it did NOT become a stable democracy after
Germany’s defeat in World War I). DeMause
attributes such things reductively to child-rearing,
but that factor changes on a time-scale of
generations, while the Third Reich came and went
in less than a generation.
Ken, I am aware of the criticisms of Adorno et al’s
The Authoritarian Personality that you mention.
However, subsequent research by Bob Altemeyer
(Enemies of Freedom) and myself (“Self Images of
Hawks and Doves”) addressed these criticisms and
found that Adorno et al’s findings were robust even
though their methodology was flawed. In my
research, I measured authoritarianism purely as a
personality construct and measured hawk and
dove beliefs and policy preferences as a separate
construct, correcting the fundamental
methodological problem with The Authoritarian
Personality. I found that machismo and
authoritarianism explained nearly half the variance
2299
in hawk and dove beliefs for males, and

authoritarianism also strongly predicts hawk and
dove beliefs for females. In other words
authoritarianism is positively correlated with hawk
beliefs and negatively correlated with dove beliefs,
and the correlations were much larger than are
normally found in social science research. This is
a striking confirmation of Adorno et al’s findings.
Their study also continues to be relevant because
they conducted interviews along with their survey
research.
So how can this help test deMause’s psychogenic
paradigm? First, we need to realize that research
on phenomena in the present can shed light on
phenomena from the past. A good example is in
biology, where laboratory research on DNA has
shed light on the mechanisms of natural selection,
and thus of the history of life. In the case of
psychohistory, the research on the present is basic
research on human psychology encompassing all
the subdisciplines including, cognitive,
neuropsychology, clinical, and political psychology.
If we find that child rearing affects political belief
systems in the present, we have reason to believe
that it also affected them in the past, because the
fundamental conditions of human existence have
not changed appreciably in recent millennia. I
acknowledged that a great deal of empirical work
2300
needs to be done in this area, but based on

authoritarianism and other psychological research,
as well as deMause’s and other work on the history
of childrearing, I believe we have the makings for a
science of psychohistory, albeit not a mature
science.
The role of neuropsychology is central. In
mainstream psychology and the social sciences
today, the brain is viewed as an information
processing system and behavior is thought to be
driven by cognition of the environment. While
individual differences in personality and motivation
loom large for clinicians, these factors are thought
to be unimportant in mainstream political
psychology, economics, and political science,
which are dominated by “rational actor” models. If
this way of thinking is valid, there should be little or
no correlation between personality self-assessment
and political beliefs. I tested this theory in my
hawks and doves research and disconfirmed it. I
proposed an alternative “control systems”
paradigm that subsumes the personality driven and
cognition driven explanations of human behavior
into a unified conceptual framework. On this I built
on William T. Powers pioneering work Behavior:
the Control of Perception, which provides a view of
the brain as a network of negative feedback
systems. Powers and his associates have done
2301
some impressive robotic modeling of human

behavior using these ideas, though behaviorist and
cognitive thinking continues to dominate
mainstream neuropsychology.
I would like to suggest that basic theory in
psychology, which yields testable predictions and
will be confirmed or disconfirmed through research
on people who are alive today, can provide the
theory necessary to understand the historical
process scientifically. The nexus between child
rearing practices, personality, and behavior
requires empirical research if psychohistory is ever
to become a science. Then it will be necessary to
combine this knowledge with traditional historical
research to understand the historical process.
There is no simple way of doing this, but the way
that laboratory work on genetics informs
evolutionary biology is a model.
Brian
—————
Mar 7
2302
Since I've been with the list I've heard arguments

for two different courses for the subsequent
development of psychohistory.
The first is that it must accept that what it has is
theory in abundance, but what it hasn't is adequate
testing to see if there's anything to it. Young
psychohistorians are to be recruited to not only test
theories, but to show that the discipline is coming
to have science in its bones -- no longer will you
have psychohistorians fluff out books and books of
outrageous theories and be irked when someone
arrives who dares poke at any of it; no longer will it
be a cult! It'll be modest, humble, but nevertheless
through an accumulation of sober studies of limited
scope, demonstrate convincing proof for theories
that will begin to lead psychohistory into being a
worthy regular contributor to the social sciences
and History disciplines. No grand, all-
encompassing theories; no egos. Everything within
the decor expected of contemporary science …
and maybe then some.
The second, argued mostly by me, is that what
psychohistory needs to do is make sure it's
drawing in emotionally healthy members. If it
doesn't get them, you can't trust their science --
research will inevitably prove the big egos within
the discipline either wrong or vastly overreaching,
2303
and support psychohistorians who offer useful

kernels of proof that while not earth-shattering,
nevertheless are ostensibly unique contributions
scholars in other disciplines will find useful for their
own studies. If you don't get them, the future of
psychohistory will be to inevitably keep it tamed.
I've heard a lot of support for the first course —
more testing, more humility — but I was delighted
to find support for my cause within the IPA Winter
2015 newsletter. If you haven't read it, it
commences with a book review of an exploration of
childhood memory and abuse by Valerie Rose
Birton, and reflects on the possibility that the key
divide in the research is in the nature of the
childhoods of the researchers, between those who
as children grew into adults who carried the
mandate of protecting their parents and those who
didn't. Specifically, the problem is with adults, with
researchers, who ... often act out their drive to
protect parents and reenact their childhood
traumas from the position of entitlement and
privilege, now that they are the adults. They
treat their own children as they were treated,
requiring them to honor their parents more
than the truth, just as they did when they were
younger . . . . There are too many researchers
who are unconsciously and deeply driven to
protect parents and as such, they seek
2304
evidence that immunizes parents.

Valerie Rose Birton argues that what is alarming is
that regressives are taking over the science.
Specifically she writes:
The account of Dr. Snyder’s harrowing legal
encounter with the scientifically sparse but
widely publicized movement against child
abuse memories reveals the degree to which
these forces have infiltrated the field of child
abuse research and treatment, and exemplifies
the damaging impact this has had on
therapists, on protective parents and on
children who have been abused.
Birton is alarmed because if this lot comes to own
the field, she knows that plenty of science will be
done … that will inevitably conclusively
demonstrate whatever is required to protect
parents and leave children vulnerable to abuse.
Other researchers contesting them will be
powerless, because scientific proof won’t matter so
much as the collusion of the scientific community,
who aren’t ultimately beholden to science but to the
approval of brutal parents somewhere kept in their
heads. Guilt over mishandling the scientific
endeavour won’t factor in, because the need to find
proof for research will mostly be overladen by the
need to keep their own abusive parents looking
2305
good. Every time they think they feel pleasure for

their doing good sober science, it’ll really have
arisen because they’ve conferred authority to
studies that will further safeguard their parents.
Within the same newsletter, Marc-Andre Cotton
discusses infiltration within the French
psychotherapy profession. He writes:
While 36.8% of all Europeans face emotional
distress according to a recent survey, the
French authorities decided to reserve the title
of psychotherapist to medical doctors and
psychologists only, without requiring any
personal therapy in their curriculum.
Conversely, many certified therapists claiming
a long practice but with no medical background
are currently losing the right to exercise their
profession–in violation of a legal principle of
equity.
And concludes:
From my standpoint, psychohistory’s
framework of interpretation could offer a
meaningful perspective on this conflict,
reaching far beyond the scope of such
professions. On the one hand, we indeed find
genuine therapists–mostly women– dedicated
to helping their clients heal unresolved grief
and trauma by offering trust and empathy. On
2306
the other, politicians and bureaucrats, serving

the interests of the pharmaceutical giants and
organized medicine, are seeking to delegitimize
such work, which will most certainly prove
counter-productive in terms of public mental
health. I see this as a clash of what
psychohistorians call “psychoclasses,” one of
which believes in imposing bureaucratic order,
reflecting their intrusive childrearing, while the
other believes in the crucial relevance of
listening, reflecting their experience of
nurturing. Let us hope that the latter prevails!
Cotton concludes the effort to professionalize
psychotherapy, infiltrate it only with PhDs, might be
an infiltration of the intrusive psychoclass, coming
at the cost of those from what DeMause calls the
more evolved, “helping” psychoclass. If we hear
calls for more professionalization here, at
psychohistory, maybe we should expect it’s moved
by the same -- keep an eye on the wayward.
In my judgment, there are few fields that are more
likely going to attract those unconsciously
motivated to protect abusive parents and provide
further frustration for abused children, than the field
of psychohistory. It’s saturated by the idea that
childrearing matters, that abuse within families is
historically prevalent and results not just in
wrecked homes but in distraught whole societies
2307
and sick widespread social phenomena like

Depressions and wars.
DeMausian psychohistory in particular should be
expected to draw in those operating under the
influence of their abusive parents, neutering it,
effectively steering it into oblivion for good,
because DeMause not only talks about abuse and
caregivers but, appallingly! goes where even child
right supporters take care not to roam: he focuses
attention on the one who spends most of the time
with children — one’s mother — and refuses to lie
to those who expect that the neglected, abused,
denigrated, patriarchally suppressed mother will do
anything other than incestuously use her children
and discard them when they’re no longer of use. To
get a sense of how brazen this is, consider that
when on this list Brian explained to Molly Castelloe
that:
The fact that infant care in our society is
assigned almost exclusively to females means
that the deepest and most unconscious
introjects of both sexes are female. It also
means that when adults of both sexes project
this infantile material, it is onto women that we
project it. Note that all this operates
independently of the quality of parenting, which
has been Lloyd deMause's focus.
2308
it’s possible that this — we’re not talking what any

particular mother may have done to their child but
just universals of human behaviour, which
presumably are vastly more relevant than
“variations,” so don’t think when we discuss it think
we’re actually considering what you may or may
not be doing with your children (what may have
brought this whole discussion on) ... we wouldn't
dare touch that! — wasn’t so much explaining as it
was mollifying … mollifying the internal Terrifying
Mother within so many of us that would want to
spank down the affront of DeMause, and react to
any irked mother (sorry Molly) as if she bore the
power of his own.
— Patrick
dr.bobstern
Mar 7
Re: Patrick's post
Is there a link between psychopathology and the

Scientific Method?
"There are too many researchers who are
unconsciously and deeply driven to protect
2309
parents and as such, they seek evidence that

immunizes parents."
But, aren't there plenty of
researchers demonstrating particular mental and
physical consequences of child abuse?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/child_abuse.
htm
If I read Patrick's post correctly:
The hypothesis
(assertion?) proposed is: Advocates for scientific
research on particular psychohistorical hypotheses
(group 1) are substantially populated by
the "emotionally unhealthy."
At the risk of a priori confirming my mother's abuse
of me by even posing the question: I think the
hypothesis needs more scientific study.
B
Ken Fuchsman
Mar 7
Some are saying we should treat psychohistory

2310
scientifically. History is not classified as a science,

but a humanity, though history certainly has
scientific elements within it. Academic psychology
is a social science, yet much of psychology outside
of academia has as much affinity with the
humanities as the sciences. Those who look at
psychohistory primarily through a scientific lens are
one-sided. They are not recognizing that the
humanities are as integral to what psychohistory is
as science, and are underplaying the complexity of
psychology, history and psychohistory. Science
has revolutionized knowledge and set high
epistemological standards. Yet for all its
significance, when it comes to many things, we do
not need scientism, and this is true for
psychohistory as well as many other things central
to life. So let us be more balanced when discussing
the nature of psychohistory.
dr.bobstern
Mar 7
Absolutely agree, Ken.

There are historical matters that lend themselves to
proper historical investigation: examining primary
2311
documents (correspondence, etc). Whether those

documents are authentic lends itself to scientific
methodologies -- chemical analysis of the age of
paper, ink, etc.
But, if a theorist claims that the gene that makes
broccoli taste bad (or that weaning before the age
of 9 months) has a significant causal connection to
some (psycho)historical outcomes, this certainly
suggests that a discipline that wants to be taken
seriously does more than engage in academic
discussions to establish the hypothesis as proven
fact.
B
Brian
Mar 7
Ken, I completely agree with everything you have

said here. Kumbaya, brother. ☺ I have always
argued against reductionism, including the
reductionism of physicists, many of whom claim
that a unified theory of the laws of physics would
be a “theory of everything.” In fact, biology cannot
be reduced to physics, and neuropsychology
2312
cannot be reduced to biology. Psychology and

history have one foot in the natural sciences
(because the human body and brain are part of
nature) and one foot in the humanities for the
reasons you say. My position would be “scientism”
and one-sided if I were trying to reduce psychology
and history to natural science, which I am not. I do
argue that psychology, history, and psychohistory
are potentially sciences, but not ONLY sciences. I
have been discussing the scientific side of these
disciplines, but did not mean to exclude the
humanistic side. Here Freud, who in many
respects is not one of my favorite people, was
indeed a pioneer in creating a psychology that
sought to integrate natural science and the
humanities. We need to build on and update that
project.
Further, even a comprehensive
scientific/humanistic psychohistory would be one-
sided if it sought to reduce all of history to
psychohistory. In this respect, I do not agree with
psychohistorians who define the field as
uncovering the “why of history,” which in practice
reduces the “why” to unconscious motivations.
Rather I have argued, in the tradition of the
Frankfurt School (of which Adorno et al were
members), that a complete understanding of
history can only be achieved by combining a
2313
psychohistorical approach with an analysis of

socioeconomic and institutional factors. In this
respect, I think Trevor’s work is exemplary, and
want to add my own kudos about his new book to
all the others that have already been expressed.
Brian
President
917-628-8253
Ralph Fishkin
Mar 7
Other recipients: rfish...@gmail.com
Patrick,
As usual, your final paragraph is a killer. I think I’ve
finally got it. I have trouble with your perspectives
on two grounds:
1. You polarize.
2. You have a cause. You wrote, in another killer
paragraph,
2314
"The second, argued mostly by me, is that what

psychohistory needs to do is make sure it's
drawing in emotionally healthy members. If
it doesn't get them, you can't trust their science --
research will inevitably prove the big egos within
the discipline either wrong or vastly overreaching,
and support psychohistorians who offer useful
kernels of proof that while not earth-shattering,
nevertheless are ostensibly unique contributions
scholars in other disciplines will find useful for their
own studies. If you don't get them, the future of
psychohistory will be to inevitably keep it tamed.
"I’ve heard a lot of support for the first course —
more testing, more humility — but I was delighted
to find support for my cause within the IPA Winter
2015 newsletter."
If someone disagrees with your cause, they will
become your emotionally unhealthy and
untrustworthy adversary, and then we will all be off
onto an argument in which we will try but will be
unable to convert each other to the our own point
of view. I sense that you are looking to create this
kind of interaction. We have had polarizers with
missionary causes on this list before and this has
resulted in fights that dominated the discussions
and polarized the subscribers in a destructive way.
Therefore I am not taking issue with a number of
your assertions that I think are generalizations that
2315
are determined by your cause, which I think is to

destroy the abusive authoritarian parent (mother)
that you think we have all had but that those of us
with “big egos” protect. Freud separately
promulgated the hypotheses that emotional illness
could be attributed both to trauma and also
originate in phantasy. He never took back the
seduction hypothesis. I suggest that we strive for
nuance and steer clear of trying to convert each
other in our discussions.
Ralph
On Mar 7, 2015, at 9:46 AM, Patrick McEvoy-

Halston <pmcevoy...@gmail.com> wrote:
it’s possible that this — we’re not talking what any
particular mother may have done to their child but
just universals of human behaviour, which
presumably are vastly more relevant than
“variations,” so don’t think when we discuss it think
we’re actually considering what you may or may
not be doing with your children (what may have
brought this whole discussion on) ... we wouldn't
dare touch that! — wasn’t so much explaining as it
was mollifying … mollifying the internal Terrifying
Mother within so many of us that would want to
spank down the affront of DeMause, and react to
2316
any irked mother (sorry Molly) as if she bore the

power of his own.
=============================
Secretary, American Psychoanalytic Association
Mar 8 (23 hours ago)
Other recipients: rfish...@gmail.com

Thanks for the history of the site, Ralph.
I came to this site wondering how much was being
done to engage with DeMause's theories. What
I've found is that there are people (at the IPA
newsletter) who are finding evidence in our times
of what DeMause would expect -- progressive
groups are being infiltrated by regressives; more
and more people are experiencing growth panic
and finding themselves in agreement with punitive
adults and skeptical of children -- and, frightened,
seem to be suggesting that we might all want to
explore his work with urgency. I didn't know of
these people; maybe I'll be able to say something
of value to them. I'll be tempering down to see
what more activity is out "there," but the idea of
2317
children desiring seduction disgusts me.

-- Patrick
—————
I'm a book and film reviewer. If anyone would like

to read my explorations of literature, please feel
free to explore them here:
Draining the Amazons' Swamp (Scribd)
or here:
the Psycholiterary Review
-- Patrick
P.S. I've been doing film reviews for the last few
years; I'll post a link to them as well at some point.
Barney

2318

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Cliofolk,
If you are in the mood for a semi-Professor Irwin
Corey, semi-Borges, 95% semi-whacky, strangely
fascinating, like a crooked Escher crossed with
Elmore Leonard, entirely cool (if you ignore the
occasional semi-precious semi-clevernesses) and
wickedly entertaining evaluation of the semi-
fictional characters of Gulliver (Swift) and Robinson
(DeFoe) Crusoe, then rush to your address line
and copy in
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25499784/Draining-the-
Amazon-s-Swamp-All-we-are-prepared-to-do-
when-we-read-write-watch-make-live-our-fictions
and enjoy the talent of Patrick McEvoy-Halston
(what's that monicker all about?) that lurks behind
every sentence.
Entertaining, stimulating, only occasionally leaves
you dangling in hothouse verbiage that is easy to
detect and to skip.
I am kind of shock and awed. There are a whole
2319
parade of other essays I have not yet read, but I

suspect will have worthy moments.
When you aren't watching Fox News at 10, you
might enjoy draining the Amazon swamp, meaning
the on-line store, of course.
Barney
Dispatches from Clio's History (part two)
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HlMqaMSHaqo/VRVlqG160tI/AAAAAAAAAig/-
UBsUwFsgNM/s1600/Unknown.jpeg
Joel Markowitz
We should again try to clarify the differences

between the
psychodynamics of the INDIVIDUAL -- and the
psychodynamics of
GROUPS-- in history.
No one would dispute the value of maternal love in
the evolution of
individuals. It tends to be a major source of self-
acceptance, self-
confidence, courage and of social advantages ...
But the determinism of history-- i.e., primarily of
GROUP-minds-- is
more complicated.
2320
E.g., many individuals in many PRIMITIVE

subgroups have been brought
up with the advantages of significant maternal love
and acceptance.
In contrast, and as we know, Western groups were
not impressive in
their child-rearing practices-- including in their
acceptance and
love of their children.
In fact, the Jewish and Christian groups
DEPENDED ON the
criminalization of primitive impulses-- which are
immediately evident
in children.
No one better describes the often-brutal, guilt-
driven behavior of
-- especially-- those Western-group parents toward
their children--
than did deMause.
Yet those Jewish and Christian groups became
disproportionately
successful-- in their social, political, legislative
and material
progress.
Parental love and acceptance (which tend to be
2321
strongly related) seem

in some ways INVERSELY related to group
success.
Clio does make progress in approaching
psychodynamic theory more than
it used to do. But it too often tries to understand
group evolution
(fundamental to history) with the dynamics of
individuals.
Joel
Feb 17
Hi Joel.
E.g., many individuals in many PRIMITIVE
subgroups have been brought
up with the advantages of significant maternal love
and acceptance.
2322
You bring up how well DeMause documented the

West's brutal childrearing, but you don't reference
at all the work he did to establish the allegedly
miraculous childrearing of tribal cultures as in fact
completely wretched. (For those who want to
explore that, you an go here, and here). What
gives? ... I hope not that the very same people who
enjoy seeing the West's past as barbaric,
profoundly want primitive subgroups to be
idealized?
As you know, in the DeMausian view, other than
what he calls the helping psychoclass -- which has
only very recently come into existence -- every
single other psychoclass has got some major
problems with it. However, each new wretched
class that appeared was superior than the one
before it. E.g. the socializing psychoclass -- which
only gave love if children did as parents expected
-- was better than the intrusive, the abandoning,
the ambivalent.
What I'm getting at is that if you accept his view of
how appalling tribal culture (those of the infanticidal
psychoclass) childrearing is -- how little interest in,
how much they can hate, their children -- guilt-
ridden behaviour is actually a considerable step
up ... it represents the psychic/emotional state of a
considerably more evolved psychoclass, "who"
were going to much more accept societal growth,
2323
spend less time switching into their social trance,

spend less time fiddling over their childhood
traumas.
-- Patrick
Joel Markowitz
Feb 17
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: maternal love

Patrick,
I don't idealize them at all. But while some were
brutal, many were loving and accepting of their
offspring-- beyond anything we know.
And not just tribal cultures-- also some Asian &
other cultures. ALMOST ALL but the Jewish and
Christian (and to some extent, Moslem) mindsets
were spared the unique guilt that drove
Western-group self-hatred, self-denigration,
sexual and other repressions, obsessions,
compulsions, other neuroses ...
My emphasis (again and again) is on the
UNIQUELY guilt-driven mindset of the Jewish and
Christian groups-- which attacked the fantasies and
2324
impulses that are most important to every child-- as

to all higher animal groups.
No, I wouldn't change OUR unique-- and in many
ways uniquely wonderful-- situation for any in
history. As uniquely stressful as it has proven to
be, it has been the cutting edge of evolution.
Joel
Brian
Feb 18
RE: [cliospsyche] Re: maternal love

This conversation is beyond my area of my
expertise, but I do have some opinions which I’ll
share in the hopes that more informed people will
take the discussion further. Yes, Molly, it seems to
me that parental love for infants will normally be
ambivalent, even if the love they received as
infants was not. Let’s take the ideal case of an
infant reared with unambivalent love.
Notwithstanding this ideal environment, the infant
will necessarily experience the mother ambivalently
in the first three months of life during the paranoid-
schizoid position, as shown by Melanie Klein. In
the ideal case, the child will transcend this position
2325
in the normal course of development and, if they

encounter little or no further trauma in their life, this
paranoid-schizoid complex will have no apparent
effect on their adult personality.
However, the paranoid schizoid experience
remains in the unconscious unless integrated into
the personality through psychoanalysis or some
similar process. As an adult, caring for their own
infant will necessarily evoke this unconscious
paranoid-schizoid complex, resulting in parental
love that is ambivalent. Further, in a society in
which infant care is almost exclusively assigned to
women, the part object mother introjects from the
paranoid schizoid stage will be projected onto all
women, which perpetuates sex-stereotyping and
reinforces the gender caste system in the larger
society, a phenomenon explored in depth by Nancy
Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering and
Dorothy Dinnerstein in The Mermaid and the
Minotaur.
Note also that while sex-stereotyped cultures are
far more common than not, they are not universal.
One notable exception, for example, is the Aka
Pygmies, in which male and female adults are
almost equally involved in infant care; see Barry
Hewlett’s Intimate Fathers: The Nature and
Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care. In
such a society, the parental introjects of the
2326
paranoid schizoid stage will be male and female,

and as adults, this complex will be projected
equally onto male and females, hence the lack of
sex-typing in such cultures. “Primitive” cultures
may vary in the quality of infant care they provide
(here I disagree with Joel that it is necessarily good
and with deMause that it is necessarily bad) but as
for gender equality, the Aka Pygmies may be the
most advanced culture on the planet and provide
living proof that viable alternatives to the gender
caste system are possible.
Dcarveth
Feb 18
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: maternal love

Brian,
No one ever receives unambivalent love for such
does not exist. But even if it did the infant would
hate as well as love for even unambivalent love
would not be able to protect the infant from
frustration. Not even unambivalent love, which
doesn't exist, could save the child from the horrible
existential fact that it cannot have its cake and eat
2327
it too--not to mention the fact that no one gets out

of here alive. Given its cognitive limitations, as far
as the infant is concerned all frustration is an
attack. Hence all infants, no matter the quality of
the caretaking will be paranoid. Bad caretaking, of
course, makes it worse, and good caretaking
makes it better, but we all enter the paranoid-
schizoid position, which is not a stage but a
position, a layer of the human psyche that no one
really "transcends"--thank god, for here is where
passion resides, falling in love, the political passion
that forced FDR to implement the New Deal and
that put Hitler down, etc. As Klein explains, splitting
in PS provides the first ordering of experience;
people who can't split live in psychotic chaos;
people who can only split live in borderline
disorder; people who spend more time in D live in
neurotic conflict--but even the healthiest and most
mature revisit PS frequently (bad moods, irritability,
crankiness, but also intense lust, ecstatic love,
deep anger, etc.) but have a capacity to oscillate
back into D. Marriage that exists only in D is mostly
characterized by "dead bed" for a vital sex life
requires a capacity to experience rapid oscillations
between PS (where one's partner is an object to be
used) and D (where one's partner is one's
cherished beloved). I agree with Dinnerstein's
argument for the need for fathers and mothers to
share equally in primary caretaking.
2328
Don
—————
Brian
Feb 27
I have been thinking about the sources of the

apocalyptic complex, for lack of a better word,
namely the splitting of the world into absolute good
and absolute evil. I have come to the conclusion
that it is rooted in the birth trauma or infant
experience or both. I am reading Hannah Segal’s
book Klein, and thinking about the Kleinian notion
of the paranoid-schizoid position as a possible
model for understanding this. According to Klein,
as I understand her theory, the infant in the first
three months of life alternates between a state of
wellbeing organized around the “good breast” and
experiences of pleasure and satisfaction, on the
one hand, and the “persecutory breast” and
experiences of distress and frustration on the other.
It is not clear to me what reason there is to
suppose that the infant experiences distress and
frustration as an attack, as supposed to the mere
absence of pleasure and satisfaction. What is the
2329
evidence or theoretical rationale for Klein’s way of

thinking about infant experience?
I should mention that this problem does not arise
with the theory that the birth trauma is the source
of the apocalyptic complex. Here, it is entirely
plausible that the infant in the birth canal
experiences the mother’s body as an antagonistic
force that is trying to destroy it and feels locked into
a titanic life and death struggle to escape from and
survive the ordeal. Clinical evidence for this theory
is provided by Stanislav Grof in Realms of the
Human Unconscious: Observations from LDS
research. When I referred to Grof previously on this
list, Don said, if I remember correctly, that there is
a methodological problem with Grofs’s claim that
the memories reported to him actually originated in
the birth experience. But if this is true, doesn’t the
same methodological problem arise with Klein’s
theory? Given this ambiguity, is there any
empirical or theoretical criteria for deciding
between Klien’s and Grof’s theories?
Brian
Feb 28
2330
I have been thinking about the sources of the

apocalyptic complex, for lack of a better word,
namely the splitting of the world into absolute good
and absolute evil. I have come to the conclusion
that it is rooted in the birth trauma or infant
experience or both.
If it's birth trauma, then it's something all of us
experience, regardless of how well loved we were
by our caregivers. If we weren't actually all that well
loved, if we had caregivers who felt threatened
anytime we as their children impugned them, we
can avoid re-experiencing the early
childhood feeling of apocalyptic abandonment --
their rejection -- by taking something like
psychoanalysis -- which might look a tool to add
science in a campaign against them -- and making
it in fact a shield against making a "fetish" of the
particularities of our own experience. Birth trauma
does this aptly; it might attract as a theory because
our internal persecutors sense it's actually means
to show how intent "you" are to in fact take the eye
off them.
There's not much universal birth trauma in
DeMause's later works; plenty in his earlier. He
mentions the work of Joseph Rheingold a lot, and
focuses on how a child develops a fear
of apocalyptic annihilation because their mothers
2331
were actually afflicted with desires to kill them.

He talks about how having children represents a
form of self-actualization, a turn towards having
one's own needs for love attended to rather than
keeping focused on one's mothers, and this
leading to mothers being possessed by internal
terrifying mother alters, demanding sacrifice. But
when he brings up Rheingold, he's not thinking of
mothers being possessed but more how they
project their demanding mothers onto the child:
The parents of the caretaker are still
present as “ghosts in the nursery” when
the child is born, in the form of
dissociated persecutory alters
(alternative
personalities)—internal objects and
voices that repeat the traumas and fears
the
caretaker experienced as a child, since
“The hurtful parent was once a hurt
child.”30
Parents often believe that when their
babies cry they “sound just like my
mother,
complaining all the time” or “just like my
2332
father, a real tyrant!” They themselves

repeat exactly the same words and
feelings their own mothers always yelled
at them:
“You’re so selfish! You never think of
me!”31 The mother experiences herself
as the
good, persecuted mother while the baby
is seen as a primarily bad, utterly
persecuting and justifiable object of
hatred.32 The helpless, vulnerable child
experiences this reenactment of
maternal fear and hatred as ending in
abandonment
or death.
Anyway, to DeMause, if the child has the luck of
having well-cared for parents, the apocalyptic
experience would seem to go the way of the
dodo ... not being experienced at all. This isn't in
sync with his earlier writings, when he's thinking
Groff and the trauma of asphyxiation and placental
strangling in the womb and being scarily jettisoned
out tunnels, but as his work progresses it would
seem the significance of this experience is mostly
nil ... if the child lives within the womb of a well-
cared for mother, and exits to much the same.
2333
Apparent universality ... only because "history is a

nightmare we are still waking up from": most
mothers have not historically been all that well
cared for.
-- Patrick
P.S. His discussion of splitting ends up being
mostly about a child's need to split off all his/her
mother's negative aspects, so s/he can imagine
her as all-loving. He says most men tend to keep
romanticized images of their mothers, period, but
discusses splitting as becoming the norm for a
whole society in his discussion of the warm-up
period for war -- when we're intent to shuck off our
individuated selves, re-bond to a maternal entity,
and war against some other, now chock-full of our
mother's negative aspects.
—————
Alice Maher
Mar 1
Hi all,
I just posted this on my personal Facebook page
and on Twitter, and I thought I'd share it here as
well. I'm curious if you agree, and if you have any
2334
thoughts about the development of our view of God

over the space-time continuum.
Religions try to tell us that our particular god is one
that exists across space and time - "always was
and always will be." But honestly, is that true?
Does anyone believe in Zeus any more?
The Gods of Mount Olympus are to the Gods of
Abraham as the Gods of Abraham are to...
Assuming humankind survives into the 22nd
century - a big if! - our grandchildren will need to
reframe their definition of "god" and come together
in a way that's grounded in reality but at the same
time offers exciting and meaningful new questions
about who we are, where we came from and where
we're going. A face and a name (or a series of
them) may or may not need to be attached to that
question.
In the present day, our relationship to religion is
chaotic and forces us to regress in our ability to
think, feel, and act appropriately and together. The
world is too small to allow that to continue. It won't.
Humankind won't.
Our children deserve better. Our children deserve
to survive.
They need to be able to imagine God in a new way.
Brian
2335
Mar 1
This responds to comments by Alice and Bill, as

well as by Trevor and Patrick in the previous thread
on “The Apocalyptic Complex and Early
Experience.”
I like Trevor’s thinking about how the earliest
experience of the mother gets projected onto “the
world;” this is indeed the basis of much mythology
including religious mythology, most notably worship
of the Goddess, which is the oldest and most
enduring of all religious cults in human history.
This archetype of the Great Mother, as Jung called
it, never really disappeared. It is no coincidence
that the Ecumenical Council of 431 CE that
proclaimed the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God
occurred in Ephesus, the site of one of the most
important goddess cults in the ancient world. The
bishops who met there would, of course, have
been shocked and offended by the suggestion that
they were under the spell of the same archetype as
the pagans who worshipped at Ephesus, but such
are the workings of unconscious complexes in
history.
This same example illustrates how new religious
forms arise out of older ones, an issue raised by
2336
Alice. As for our own age, Liberty, depicted in the

Statue of Liberty, and Alma Mater (“nourishing
mother”), whose statue appears on the campus of
Columbia and many other universities, would
appear to be incarnations of the same archetype.
But these are entirely peripheral compared to the
cult of the supermodel, one of the most central of
our capitalist civilization, tended by the advertising
and entertainment priesthoods. So Alice, we don’t
need to invent new religions and probably can’t do
so as a conscious project even if we wanted to.
We already have new religions, though I discuss
below how we can go beyond religion altogether.
Patrick, the very universality of perinatal trauma
(with the exception of Caesarian births, which are
unusual) suggests that it may be another source of
what Jung called archetypes, and I think the early
deMause was correct in recognizing the
importance of this. Note however, that while birth
is traumatic to some extent under virtually all
circumstances, the trauma can be greatly reduced,
as in natural childbirth methods, or greatly
exacerbated, as in the modern medical practice of
separating neonates from their mothers and
isolating them. In any case, birth and rebirth are a
universal theme in mythology, however much the
expression of the archetype may be modified in
this or that culture, depending no doubt largely on
2337
the nature of its birthing practices.

Bill, your comment “Nothing is grounded in reality
—It is all about perspective and context,” meshes
with Trevor’s cosmological relativism, which puts
the theory that the earth is the back of a turtle on
the same level as modern cosmological theories.
This is consistent with Trevor’s neo-Kantianism, but
it is not consistent with modern physics, which I
would argue is establishing objective and universal
knowledge of the universe. Kant’s claim that
humans cannot conceptualize external reality
except in terms of the a priori categories of time
and space was invalidated by Einstein’s theory of
General Relativity, which conceptualizes time as
the fourth dimension of a space-time continuum.
The experimental validation of General Relativity
indicates, to me at least, that this view of the
universe is objectively true and universal. To be
sure, modern cosmology is a work in progress, and
even the Big Bang theory may contain vestiges of
a primitive creation myth. But the Big Bang theory
is certainly a scientific theory, not merely a creation
myth, and will be validated or invalidated by
experiment and observation.
In making sense of all this, I find it helpful to think
about human psychic evolution as Jung did,
namely that throughout most of history, humans
projected archetypes of the unconcious onto the
2338
external world and thereby populated the universe

with gods and goddesses. The scientific age was
a turning point in the withdrawal of these
projections and thus in the perception of the
universe as it really is—a picture that has evolved
from the time of Copernicus and Newton into the
present and is still evolving, but which is
constructed on a fundamentally different
relationship between humans and external reality
than that of pre-scientific cultures. Jung also noted
that this disillusioning of humans about our world
has created a psychic crisis for modern people, but
he offered a solution to this modern dilemma.
Specifically, Jung suggested that by discovering
the archetypes in the depths of our own
unconscious and by bringing them into relationship
with the conscious ego through the interpretation of
dreams and other creative products of the
unconscious, we can regain wholeness. This
overlaps greatly with psychoanalysis, of course,
but Jung argued that the Oedipus complex is just
one of many archetypal complexes. What he called
individuation, which is predicated on the withdrawal
of archetypal projections, takes the place of
religion, which is predicated on projecting
archetypal contents onto external reality.
While this means the end of the gods and
goddesses (c.f. Wagner’s Götterdämmerung
2339
“Twilight of the Gods”), it does not mean the end of

mystical experience. We can still experience our
unity with all things, awe in the face of the cosmos
and natural history, and can even know through
science and philosophy what Hegel called the
Absolute and what previous generations called the
Mind of God.
Brian
Mar 1
I would say that the scientific community consists

mainly of highly individuated people, but that the
mass public consists mainly of people who
continue to project archetypes onto external reality,
much the way the common people have
throughout history.
DeMause is looking to those who received the
most love from their caregivers for those who won't
project. They won't feel they're full of "bad" aspects
they'll feel the need to project onto others.
Would he see the scientific community as full of
humanity's most warmly raised? If they tend to vote
2340
progressive, then -- yes. If not, if they're like all

those thoroughly educated German professors
who lost themselves as much as the average Joe
in the mystical Germanic union -- the Volk -- then
no.
The idea of a scientific community who are immune
to what the mass suffers from, owing to their
superior education and (ostensibly) highly
individuated status, strikes me as maybe itself
projective ... the mass suffers from all the wildness,
the (humiliating) pliability, the emotion, scientists
are immune to. The university community as a kind
of an autistic shell -- robotic reasoners -- all
the emotion, all the humiliating susceptibility, is on
the outside.
It's the mass that can be tugged on the ear and
moved this way or that.
-- Patrick
Trevor Pederson
Mar 2
I think Patrick is right to be skeptical of equating

scientists and academics with being more
2341
reasonable. In the idea of the "masses" itself there

is already a nice schizoid phantasy of the individual
being different than the rest of humanity.
The history of philosophy is also the history of the
neurosis of different thinkers. Hobbes' state of
nature says more about Hobbes than it does about
reality, Descartes' mind/body dualism and need for
God to guarantee his knowledge, along with the
solipsism inherent in that and later idealism can all
be related to phantasies.
These people were great and belong in the history
of philosophy because of the little piece of reason
or rationality in their philosophy, but many other
areas of their philosophy were maligned by
phantasy and neurosis.
If these are individuated people (and how could
they not be considered so in their achievements?)
then it's a more sobering view of them.
Brian
Mar 2
Patrick, Trevor, and all,

2342
I agree that scientists are plagued by neurosis as

much as everyone else, but this is not identical with
the issue of individuation. Newton was incredibly
neurotic, perhaps more so that the average
working class person. But many thousands of
equally neurotic people have led uncreative lives,
so what can account for Newton’s creative
genius? Extraordinary brain power, probably a
genetic inheritance, was no doubt a necessary
ingredient but that alone cannot explain his
originality. I would argue that most neurotic people
split off their unconscious complexes and project
them onto others and the world as a whole. As a
result, the complexes drive their behavior
unconsciously.
By contrast, people like Newton achieve some kind
of conscious relationship to their complexes and
instead of entirely projecting them, wrestle with
them within themselves. The complexes may still
be partially projected and continue to drive their
behavior, which is why they act neurotically in their
personal and professional lives, but within
themselves they transform their psychic garbage
into novel creative products of great value. Jung
found alchemy a metaphor for this transformation
—the creation of gold out of base metals. That is
individuation—the conscious transformation of
psychic dross into a unique creative product, which
2343
in the case of great geniuses leads to far reaching

transformations of culture, politics, or whatever
macrocosm in which the person is active.
One of the most brilliant applications of Freudian
and Jungian analysis to a creative genius is Robert
Donington’s classic book Wagner’s Ring and Its
Symbols. He connects Wagner’s art to his
psychobiography and shows how Wagner
transformed his personal neuroses, which
continued to wreak havoc in his personal and
professional life, into extraordinary artistic
achievement. I suspect there is a similar story to
Newton and other creative geniuses known to be
psychologically disordered. Note also, however,
that other creative geniuses, say Spinoza,
appeared to be very psychologically integrated and
balanced people, so we should not assume that
conscious wrestling with neurosis is the only path
to extraordinary creative achievement.
Patrick, I can’t point to a particular research study
on this but I am almost certain that university
professors on average are politically progressive.
That said, the institutional framework within which
they work is part of the larger power structure, as
embodied in universities’ boards of trustees. So
the president, provosts, and administration are
generally not representative of the faculty as a
whole and hiring and tenure decisions also reflect
2344
power considerations, which imparts a

conservative bias to the institution as a whole. A
similar phenomenon occurs in journalism, where
working journalists are liberal but the top power
holders in the big media corporations tend to be
conservative (See Ben Bagdikian, The Media
Monopoly).
Brian
Bora
Mar 2
To Everyone:
"By contrast, people like Newton achieve some

kind of conscious relationship to their complexes
and instead of entirely projecting them, wrestle with
them within themselves. The complexes may still
be partially projected and continue to drive their
behavior, which is why they act neurotically in their
personal and professional lives, but within
themselves they transform their psychic garbage
into novel creative products of great value."
This sounds like locus of control, with Newton's
locus operating internally.
2345
I've observed that those who are religious in a

traditional, abiding
sense of the term seem to operate from an external
locus of control.
And those that have a more spiritual, or even
agnostic, interaction
with faith or g/God seem to operate from an
internal locus of control.
For the most part, anyway.
What Alice said about future generations needing
"to be able to
imagine God in a new way" seems very much like
a process that would
have to begin with the self, and within the self. An
internal locus
of control is an inner space of unlimited
understanding and potential,
which must be had in order to imagine anything in
a new way. Where
else could the innovation of God take place?
—————

2346
Mar 3
One of the interesting things that happened over

the last year was a realization amongst many on
the left that perpetrators of considerable power,
could be taken down. Even a few years ago,
powerhouses like Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and
Ghomeshi (in Canada, he was a superstar) just
couldn't be put in the situation, where for crimes of
child abuse and rape, they could actually lose their
power and be sundered to prison. If you were one
of their victims, you could feel that the collective
need to keep them vital would mean some means
would be found to silence your cause -- your
protests would have no chance: even many liberals
wouldn't speak up for you -- what presumption,
you! Your best salve would be to try not to read the
next biography about them, which would surely
gloss over any accusations made against them and
salute them as great men. But this year, you could
feel that somehow this was changing ... that now
empathy for victims was such that more people
registered the harm these men had done and saw
them not as greats under (unfair) assault but more
and more as vile perpetrators. An example is Lena
Dunhams' estimation of not just Allen but his work,
experiencing the child-molester in his films that
previously the left had only kept on the shelf,
2347
proudly, as identity/class-markers.
Something similar, I think, is happening now in
relation to history. The number of times Pinker's
book has been referenced, along now with "the
Moral Arc," is astonishing. Pinker, as I've
mentioned before, doesn't say that modern
wo/man is constitutionally different people from
living a thousand years ago, but does argue that
societies have become less and less violent across
the time. "The Moral Arc" comes closer to saying
that people themselves have changed, and much
for the better. This is not done in a climate of
blaming early societies, castigating them, but they
evidently aren't working to nevertheless bulwark
the past against modern judgment, as historians
were once so capable of doing.
People influenced by these works aren't so much
arguing that we have to careful when we judge
people living before us, because they were only
living according to what they knew -- and mightn't
we overselves find ourselves judged by historians
in the future? -- but rather arguing that since the
past as it turns out is full of perpetrating, sexist,
immoral bastards -- even the best, the most liberal,
of its greats, were sexist a-holes or the like, and
that includes the like of its women, people like
Virginia Woolf! -- the last thing we would actually
want is spend time with them. If you want a sample
2348
of this reaction, check out this article at Salon.com:

No "Midnight in Paris, " rather, You would've hated
your heroes.
History is becoming, to more and more of the
informed, a bit akin to DeMause's "nightmare we
are just waking up from," but one's association with
it, one's protection and support of it, not as
innocent as this phrasing might imply/allow. If you
choose to enter the past, you're choosing to
associate with a room chock-full of repellent Bill
Cosbys, Ghomeshis, Woody Allens, and Adrian
Petersons. There is no difference in what you're
doing than if you chose, now, knowing what we
know of him, to nevertheless still go see Bill
Cosby's latest comedy performance, arguing
that he's still got it!
I've never myself like the term psychohistory. I've
always wanted to drop the history part of it, and
said as much to DeMause. History is nightmare!
Why the hell are we latching ourselves to it! I
wonder if in the new climate that might be
emerging if more and more young progressive
minds will refuse to abide his decision, and study
his innovative workings on child abuse and society,
on how widespread parental rejection is the most
profound factor in adults choosing to vote in
politicians that curb growth, on the emotional life of
nations, in some venue spared its beloved
2349
"psycho" being latched to the abhorrent

perpetrating sex-fiend -- history.
-- Patrick
Barney
Mar 3

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Patrick McEvoy-Halston,
On my planet, we say, "Don't recall history or you
will be doomed to repeat it, and make it worse."
Works, too, for us. We cannot comprehend the
sex-fiend analogy. History has no memory, no urge
for power, and no intentions. It is simply the trash
of time and like a used Kleenex, it lacks all
passion, which it leaves to historians, who lust for
detritus, for shards, for petrified structures. By that
standard, psychohistory is a study of the shed cells
of minds. There is no energy in history, only in the
historians who reclaim it and hypothesize from its
decay-riddled corpses.
2350
On my planet all historians do their rituals in

private, and if they uncover hideousness (as they
do) they are honor-bound to disintegrate and
disperse it as one might a lethal virus and to take
and distribute corrective lessons from it. On my
planet, the Holocaust would be long forgotten, as
would the deaths of Hutus and Tutus and innocents
by the millions, as would be the murderousness of
knights, and kings, and presidents, and emperors
and their weapons makers, and their financiers,
and the soldiers they put in motion. On my planet,
the stupidities and viciousness of yesterday are
methodically examined and corrected with each
new day. One of the foremost proponents of
forgetting history and zeroing in on successful
progress toward brilliant pleasure (he hailed from
my planet) was the late Dr. Roger Olaf Egeberg,
the personal physician and confidant of General
Douglas MacArthur during World War Two. He told
me once about how he and his wife dealt with
history. "Every morning we are together we make
up our bed together. If we are together, we never
fail in this. It is a new day, new changes, new risks,
new possibilities."
History cannot rape, mutilate, libel, or kill you, but
historians can and may. It is often a bit humiliating
for some historians to remember that they are
humans, too. History is not a sex fiend but it is a
2351
straw man, always has been and always will be.

Yet there may be a way to exploit wrinkles in the
quuantum foam and transport back ten centuries or
so; if you have a yen to do that back to 1357 A.D.,
read Michael Chichton's "Timeline" ~ a perfect non-
stop JFK to Buenos Aires book.
Barney
—————-
drwargus
Mar 2
Agreed Burton. All ideas are reconstructed in the

brain (mind) and are by definition "constructs." All
ideas are context and construct dependent. It took
me a while to grasp that idea (T. S. Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions) as I chose a
career in science to discover the Truth myself. I
was tired of mythic and magical ideologies that
made no sense, and science was deemed to be
pure. But it is not pure. All scientific ideas have an
arbitrary component to them. However, even many
2352
scientists have difficulty grasping that fact today.

To be sure, just because everything is relative
to everything else, it does not follow that all ideas
are equal. Similarly, just because there is no
absolute moral authority does not mean that all
moral views are equally valid or invalid. Just
because there is no absolute physical law does not
mean that physics has no meaning, no value, no
purpose.
Bill
Intelligence has many facets and cannot be
reduced to one number
dr.bobstern
Mar 2
"All ideas are reconstructed in the brain (mind) and

are by definition "constructs."
Thank goodness you added: "...it does not follow

that all ideas are equal." Scientific "constructs" are
tested, testable, improvable, overturnable ... and
thoroughly relevant in the 21st century, regardless
of fairytales believed concerning "God's"
2353
requirements for genital modifications, dietary

preferences, son killing (Jesus or Isaac), misogyny
(pretty much universal in all "major" religions, etc.
Religious "constructs" -- utterly arbitrary, having an
intimate connection to an accident of birth (parents,
culture, etc). Not too many kids born to Catholic
parents in the 21st century finding the innate
impulse to worship Zeus or Mohammad.
That being said, Muslim physicists (who intend to
actually build workable nuclear devices -- be they
for war or peace) are working from pretty much the
same modern scientific playbook as non-religious
scientists. And, unlike "sacred texts from
God" which far pre-date germ "theory" and the idea
that the Earth moves around the Sun (just
constructs, I guess), the physics texts are quite
changeable as new information is revealed by
those who occupy themselves with more than
arguing fine points of fairytales.
As far as moral relativism is concerned. Thank
goodness. Relativism seems to rear its beautiful
head occasionally, much to the ire of the
Absolutists. It gives room for the evolution of
"morals" and is one of the greatest achievements
of modernity. It wasn't so long ago that the Bible
was rightly invoked as supporting slavery. Now,
we're still battling the right of gay people to love
2354
whom they love...because some believe an

Absolute Fairytale about what "God Hates."
The Pope, as rightly infallible in 2007 as the others
were wrongly fallible before (apparently), got rid of
the horrifying concept of "Limbo" -- where infants
who died before their grieved parents could baptize
them got stuck for eternity.
Barney
Mar 2
Exquisitely put. Must be the tequila and salt.
Mar 2
The DeMausian take would be that talking about

these constructs becomes irrelevant when the
2355
majority of scientists belong to the helping

psychoclass -- are children of well-loved,
permissive parents. He says this class has only
come into existence in the last fifty years or so, so
before every framework scientists/cultures
embraced had to be one which matched their
immature psyches — he says, for
example, “Newton had to stop seeing falling
objects longing to return to Mother Earth before he
could posit a force of gravity. Chemists had to give
up "alchemical visions of womb-battles between
good and evil" inside their flasks before they could
observe the real causes of chemical change.”
If it interests you, he also says that new ideas
become popularized because they respond to the
psyches, the emotional needs, of a new emerging
psychoclass. That is, if Newton had come up
instead with an Einsteinian universe, no amount of
proof, no degree of accumulation of errors in the
previous accepted understanding of the universe,
would of had scientists embrace it. Newton aired
what a new generation was ready for, responded to
a (newly emergent) mode of childrearing, just like
Darwin did.
Since he sees history as being about gradually
improving childrearing, each subsequent
framework would be more reality-based, less about
fiddling with or avoiding childhood “issues.” At
2356
some point, the whole discussion of constructs,

limitations, seems inappropriate. Modesty becomes
only a form of self-flagellation, which pleases only
those possessed of alters ready to chastise
fulfillment.
Brian
Mar 2
Burton, Bill, and all,

If the laws of nature are merely arbitrary constructs
of the human mind, then everything you are saying
holds. I don’t find this picture philosophically
satisfactory, though I can’t defend my view with
much rigor because I am not trained in philosophy.
Suffice it to say that the human body, brain, and
mind evolved as they did because the laws of
nature are what they are. As the most complex
physical system we have ever discovered, the
human brain and mind is not only a part of nature,
but one of the only parts that embodies all the laws
of nature that operate at the highest levels of
complexity and organization. That includes not
only the laws of biology but of what we now call
cognitive science. So it is entirely plausible that
2357
humans contain within ourselves all the laws of

nature, and that the discovery of the laws of nature
is a form of self-knowledge. Teilhard de Chardin
once said, “Humanity is the universe becoming
conscious of itself.” In other words, our knowledge
of nature is really self-knowledge, and the idea that
we are discovering “external reality” is not entirely
correct. We cannot directly observe all parts of the
universe, but we can observe enough of it to be
able to understand the whole thing, assuming only
that the laws of nature are the same everywhere.
I don’t know of any law of physics, once
discovered, that has been proven wrong. What
advances in science show is that the domain of
applicability of the law was not adequately
understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics did
not invalidate Newton’s laws of motion, they only
showed that they are less universal than Newton
thought and do not hold at very small and very
large timescales. So relativity and quantum
mechanics provided more general and universally
applicable pictures of physical reality, and they in
turn, will eventually be superseded by still more
adequate pictures. Notice that we don’t replace
one arbitrary picture with another, but build on
reliable but limited theoretical and empirical
knowledge and subsume it to increasingly
adequate theoretical frameworks. This could not
2358
occur unless the human mind were homing in on

objectively valid knowledge of reality.
All of this is consistent with Kuhn’s theory of
scientific revolutions, which is in the first instance a
sociology of science not an epistemology, much
less a metaphysic. It is also consistent with
Trevor’s psychological ideas about how we
construct our picture of reality, but as with Kuhn,
this does not address (and is apparently not
intended to) the deeper epistemological and
metaphysical questions. I agree with Burton that
there is a danger of hubris in science, but I would
say that there an equal and opposite danger of
solipsism, so perhaps we are dealing here with a
Scylla and Charybdis. I think the need for humility
is greatest where science is the least mature,
which certainly applies to psychoanalysis and
psychohistory. In this regard, I have been
consistently critical of knowledge claims by
psychohistorians that are not supported by
evidence and adequate theory, which unfortunately
includes a great deal of the work in these fields
beginning with Freud and up to and including
deMause.
Brian

2359
Mar 2
Re: I think the need for humility is greatest where

science is the least mature, which certainly applies
to psychoanalysis and psychohistory. In this
regard, I have been consistently critical of
knowledge claims by psychohistorians that are not
supported by evidence and adequate theory, which
unfortunately includes a great deal of the work in
these fields beginning with Freud and up to and
including deMause.
Brian, for someone who talks about the importance
of modesty, why is it that so much of what you write
has the feeling of final law? You've been patient,
you've listened ... but now's when you have to step
in so that things don't lapse into total nonsense. I
end up feeling paved over.
If your way prevails, psychohistory has perhaps
more of a chance in academia -- perhaps because
it's not actually saying much beyond what others
have already accepted -- but it puts the brake on
rather than develops its most exciting and
innovative elements. Are you a progressive
professor, or part of the conservative institution --
the university -- that inhibits?
2360
It might be noted that while you're putting the

brakes on DeMausian history, by fitting it, to its
disadvantage, within a narrative of reckless youth
vs. measured maturity, it would seem that our
society may once again be getting ready to
advance a full-on appreciation of his sort of history:
you might be becoming out of step. Pinker's widely
referenced book (Better Angels of our Nature) has
been followed by the bestseller "The Moral Arc,"
which not only argues that humans have become
more empathic and more moral through time, but
argues out of astonishing confidence, as if it knows
it's what most of us want again to switch to
accepting again.
These books are but a blink away from DeMause,
and so perhaps we'll see what happens when
those who want to argue that DeMause argues out
of a lack of proof are met by a majority that
suddenly are prepared to accept his conclusions,
rather than cheer on even the most pathetic of
disproofs so to humiliate the asshole! Hereto,
anyone who argued that DeMause hadn't the
proof, knew they were counting themselves
amongst majority opinion -- power, was with them.
The idea of the universal man, the historian's
preference for seeing all eras as of equal value,
are all equally worth studying, may be lapsing.
2361
I'd certainly like to see what it would be like to be

able to talk DeMausian theory outside of a climate
where people become lenient -- in a way, someone
you're behooven to -- simply by allowing you to air
your opinions in no less an abashed fashion than
they casually do theirs.
-- Patrick
Mar 2
unabashed, not abashed.
Barney
Mar 2

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Patrick McEvoy-Halston,
"I'd certainly like to see what it would be like to be
2362
able to talk DeMausian theory outside of a climate

where people become lenient -- in a way, someone
you're behooven to -- simply by allowing you to air
your opinions in no less an abashed fashion than
they casually do theirs."
Bashed, abashed, or unabashed, can you help me
understand what the above paragraph means?
Your unbehooven friend,
Barney
dr.bobstern
Mar 2
Brian: I think "Science" is among the least

hubristic of all human endeavors.
All one needs to do is attend a scientific meeting
and see all the presenters with their caveats and
statements ("suggests need for further study",
etc). Contrast that to religious meetings where
hubristic "authorities" pound the pulpit while
claiming absolute knowledge of what "God wants"
or "demands".
Scientists are acutely aware that their knowledge is
2363
provisional in essence, falsifiable by reality and ripe

for supersession. In contrast, the religious indulge
in instinctual "certainties" carved in stone via
cultural accident.
Scientists have achieved much by running counter
to form. Our evolutionary nature (still present
even after we left the savannah where getting
spooked by the rustling of grass had some survival
value) is not instinctually designed to buck instinct
and conclude that lighter objects indeed fall as fast
as heavier ones -- despite what "common sense"
demands.
Scientists suspend credulity in such "common
sense" and "deep experience" -- a modern
achievement granted that we are probably
genetically identical to those humans who were
roaming the plains 10,000 years ago..
Scientists deal in a more humble enterprise
involving "probability" -- admittedly, as in the cases
of a heliocentric solar system and the evolution of
life, a high degree of probability. Regardless of
which religious authority desires to put the thumb
screws on them to recant such "blasphemy."
I find myself in profound alignment with Brian's

final statement:
2364
" In this regard, I have been consistently critical of

knowledge claims by psychohistorians that are not
supported by evidence and adequate theory, which
unfortunately includes a great deal of the work in
these fields beginning with Freud and up to and
including deMause.”
Brian
Mar 3
Bill, Burton, Bora, Patrick, and all,

Whew, so much to talk about! Bill, yes “everything
is a process.” But in saying this, you are singing
Darwin’s and Einstein’s songs. Darwin’s theory
threw out the notion that species are fixed and
immutable and showed how all of life is part of a
single evolutionary process. Einstein showed how
time is inseparable from space, and how matter
can be transformed into energy, and thus showed
how what were thought to be the most fundamental
categories of physics are not absolute. The
frontiers of science are all about process. So to
say that everything is process is not a commentary
on the limitations of science.
Burton, physics today is in disarray because no
2365
one has yet succeeded in bringing relativity and

quantum mechanics into a unified theory that is
testable. The superstring theorists have a unified
theory, but it is not testable. So I take a great deal
of what is being done in mainstream physics today,
including Big Bang cosmology, with a grain of salt.
But one thing is certain. Relativity and quantum
mechanics are solid and enduring theories that
have proven themselves repeatedly by observation
and experiment. Entire realms of technology,
including much of chemical and electrical
engineering, are based on quantum mechanics. It
works. This would not be the case if it did not
embody some fundamental truths about objective
reality. How relativity and quantum mechanics will
eventually be reconciled is the great unsolved
problem of physics today, but there is no doubt that
the next big paradigm will subsume what is valid in
both of these theories.
Bora, what you say about locus of control makes
sense but with one proviso. If the ego remains the
locus of control, the unconscious—which is the
source of our creativity—gets written out of the
equation. According to Jung, people can only
realize their full creative potential if the ego
relinquishes control to a new center of the
personality that encompasses both the conscious
ego and the person’s unconscious. Jung called
2366
this new center, the Self.

Patrick, from where you sit, I may appear to be a
custodian of academic rigor who is putting the
kibosh on the full bodied exercise of the
psychohistorical imagination. At the same time,
however, professional academics see me as
someone who is excessively speculative and not a
“real” academic because my work does not fit into
any of the established academic disciplines. By
way of background, I did a Ph.D. in political
science and published an article length version of
my doctoral research on the psychology of
militarism in a peer reviewed journal. But my
research was too theoretical for the empiricists and
too statistical for the theorists and had one foot in
American politics and one foot in international
relations and so did not seem to belong in either
subdiscipline. Whatever. In a tight academic job
market I was going nowhere in higher education
and so I earned my living as a high school teacher,
and currently as a math tutor and statistical
consultant, while I continue to pursue academic
interests that seem important to me and important
for the future of the world. I am well aware of the
limitations of organized academia, but I am equally
aware of how easy it is for people who are not
academically trained to lay claim to scientific
authority that they have not earned.
2367
I do not ask that every psychohistorian do empirical

work. There is a role for speculative theorists,
provided that they are serious about producing
theories that will eventually be tested using
statistical or other empirical research. I have seen
plenty of speculation in some quarters of the
psychohistory community but very little real interest
in designing research that can test these theories,
or even of collaborating with people who do this
kind of research. This is not the attitude of
science.
Robert, yes I agree that it is hard for professional
scientists to be anything but humble. The problem,
of course, is when people who are NOT
professional scientists or scholars but who aspire
to scientific status make inflated claims about how
much they know.
Brian
Mar 3
Sure, Barney!
I mean that it'd be nice to be able to talk about
2368
DeMause's theories in a climate that is warm to it.

If you simply discuss it amongst those who see
them as (maybe) useful but extreme and
unsupported, amongst those who count
themselves amongst those who aren't avant-garde
vulnerable but within the mainstream, are
conservative, humble, modest and throughly
worthy of a pat, it's difficult to argue with the kind of
confidence that allows you to be fair to yourself and
to be inspiring to others. That's what I want for
myself, and others.
I do sometimes misspell words but like them too
much to change. Behooven may not actually be a
word, but don't you like the "hoof" in it!
-- Patrick
Barney
Mar 3

Clio’s Psyche
Dear Patrick,
2369
You are a natural writer and to invent words is what

really interesting and sometimes even touching
writing is all about. Glad to see you are not a slave
to fashion or tradition, but are respectful of both.
However, it is well to remember that Behoof is not
Aloof like most of the Oof family, nor is Poof or
Goof, especially when they are high like Roof and
his trusty chowhound Woof.
Barney
Ken Fuchsman
Mar 3

Alice hopes that our grandchildren can forge a new
image of God. I am not sure this is what humanity
needs now or will need in the future. We have
enough ethical dilemmas to keep us occupied.
The notion that we should do unto others what we
want them to do to us is in some form a human
universal. Yet much of humanity's success as a
species is built on killing other animals and those
2370
within our own species. Those cultures which have

been most advanced culturally and intellectually
have also been militarily exploitative. What has
advanced us as a species and what are our
ethics conflict. Our continued history of brutality
and exploitation, and the necessity to kill or destroy
to live creates dilemmas that few if any religions
have been able to successfully confront. I am not
sure that any future image of a supreme being will
be any better than those in the present or past at
confronting these dilemmas.
I agree with much of what Brian says about
psychohistory. But I do have a few issues to raise.
Brian does not expect every psychohistorian to do
empirical work and he worries that the amount of
psychohistorical speculation is not matched by
research that can test these theories, as that is not
the attitude of science.
If a psychohistorical work has a historical
component then it would need to be empirical, if we
take empirical to mean based on observation or
experience. Historians, of course, base their work
on legitimate documents, and thus their work
needs to be empirical. Is there some other
meaning of empirical that Brian has in mind?
I do agree it is central to any line of inquiry,
including psychohistory, to seek to test theories in
2371
a variety of ways. I am not sure that one needs to

have the attitude of science to do so.
History though it has elements that can be
considered scientific is not classified as a science
or social science. In most university general
education requirements, the history courses are
listed under the humanities. Actually, the
Congressional act that established the endowment
of the humanities includes history as a humanity.
Historians seek to be accurate and truthful without
being scientific per se. There are also questions
as to the scientific status of both much academic
psychology and the various forms of
psychoanalytic and other clinical based
psychologies. It is not clear that we ought to
consider psychohistory as falling within the domain
of science. That psychohistory should involve
critical thinking, rigorous evaluation of claims, and
meet high scholarly standards is essential, that
much of what passes as psychohistory has not met
these standards is one reason that psychohistory
needs to upgrade itself.
drwargus
Mar 3
2372
Brian ,
You claimed that there are fundamental truths
about objective reality. My point is that there is no
objective reality. Any understanding of science
requires a perspective that is context and construct
dependent. My point is that science itself is a
process, constantly changing and evolving.
Science is still worth pursuing, but there is no
absolute truth because there is no one perspective
that is true.
Bill
Brian
Mar 3

Clio’s Psyche
Bill, to say that there is no objective reality sounds
solipsistic to me. Please clarify what you mean.
Isn’t the physical world an objective reality? If
someone finds herself working in a minimum-wage
job, isn’t that an objective reality? If someone is
dying of cancer, isn’t that an objective reality?
2373
What are you talking about?

Ken, I have never understood why you are so
intent on establishing disciplinary boundaries.
Psychohistory is nothing if not an interdisciplinary,
multi-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary field. Upon
close examination, this is true of most if not all
academic fields of knowledge. Does art history
belong in history or in art? Does economic history
belong in history or in economics? I find these
questions pointless, and I find it equally pointless
whether there is or should be a boundary between
recent history and current events, or between
theory and empirical research. Empirical research
is necessarily informed by theory, otherwise how
do we know what evidence is worth collecting or
studying? Theory that is not consistent with the
available evidence cannot be correct and if it is
found inconsistent with new evidence it must be
modified or discarded. (In the case of history, new
evidence may mean the discovery of evidence that
was not previously known to the academic
community). This generally applies to history and
the social sciences, though not to a priori
disciplines like mathematics and analytic
philosophy, or to the humanities, which are not
empirical disciplines in the same sense.
So if we dispense with this classification project,
how do we insure rigor? In The Sociological
2374
Imagination, C. Wright Mills answered this question

by saying that we need to specialize according to
research topics, not according to academic
disciplines. If someone wants to understand what
caused World War II, they will probably need
conceptual tools and methods drawn from both
history and the social sciences. In a doctoral
dissertation on some aspect of this topic, it may be
appropriate and indeed advisable to have an
economist or a sociologist or a political scientist on
the committee in addition to historians, depending
on the particular angle the student has taken. In
the end, there is no alternative but to think about
the specific research topic before us and to ask
whether the researcher has chosen appropriate
tools and methods and applied them competently.
No one person is likely to be able to evaluate the
work adequately or help the researcher develop
their ideas, which therefore requires collaboration
across disciplinary boundaries. Am I missing
something?
Brian
drwargus
Mar 3
2375

images from drwargus - Always display images in
Clio’s Psyche
Similar to the Heisenberg principle, you cannot
examine something without altering it. There is a
"reality" out there, but you can never see it with
purely objective eyes. There will always be the
subjective. Your subjective is composed of your
worldviews and sense of meaning (ego). When you
psychoanalyze someone, you try to bring one
person's subjective out into the open and examine
it as object, correct? So when someone says "the
reality is," they are really speaking about the reality
(object) that their subjective visualizes. They
mistake their subjective Interpretation and
reconstruction of reality as a perfect reproduction
of reality.
Bill
Trevor Pederson
Mar 3

2376
images from Trevor Pederson - Always display

Bill
The world in many respects very, very regular and
people aren't having disagreements all the time
about whether 2+2=4, whether the stop sign at the
corner of a road means you should stop driving
your car, or about whether a man is a tall man or
not. We play these language games fairly
consistently and regularly with a lot of agreement.
When it comes to whether we should implement
liberal or conservative economic policies, talk
about what someone's motivations for a certain
behavior were, or have opinions about how others
might regard us then there most certainly is a lot of
illusion out there.
I don't think the illusions in the second group mean
we must disregard the facts and laws of the first
group as "subjective".
I also don't think that truth in the second group is
impossible, even though the consensus there won't
be as uniform as in the first group. There are wise
people who have better judgment of the motivation
of others and people who have virtually no sense
of what motivates people other than hunger and
sex. I think that the wisest people still have their
2377
blind-spots but they can also be fairly regular in

guessing people's feelings or motivations which
others can agree avow.
Now, what you are saying totally applies to anyone
who wants to say that his religion is the true
religion, but otherwise it doesn't fit our practical
world in any way.
Trevor
Alice Maher
Mar 3
Much thanks to everyone for your very stimulating

responses to my post. Unfortunately my workdays
are 15 hours long so I haven't had time to read and
digest your responses, but I will attempt to do that
as soon as I get a chance to breathe.
One quick response to Ken. You say, "Alice hopes
that our grandchildren can forge a new image of
God. I am not sure this is what humanity needs
now or will need in the future. We have enough
ethical dilemmas to keep us occupied."
Ken, I think our children and grandchildren will give
up on those ethical dilemmas unless they have a
2378
more distant, overarching vision to work toward.

Climate change, resolving war, and reimagining
God, should all be on their radar. Without those
possibilities, they will (collectively, not individually)
be left with unresolvable and neverending conflict
and regression to depression, narcissism,
psychosis and the eventual suicide of our species.
I often use analogies related to the body. If you're

a right eye, you're only programmed to see the
landscape on the right. Same thing if you're a left
eye. If both eyes persist in arguing that their
landscape is the one true reality, the "body politic"
will continue to trip over itself and go nowhere fast.
But if the right eye becomes aware and respectful
of the different vision seen by the left eye, and they
tolerate attempts to integrate those other
perspectives, and they focus together on a distant,
shared horizon, the individual or the collective is
able to move forward with clarity, perspective, and
depth perception. Examples of those "eyes" are
religion and atheism, conservative and liberal,
Jewish and antisemitic, etc.
Our kids need to be presented that shared, distant
horizon as a focal point, and they to be offered our
trust that they have it in them to resolve those
conflicts and paradoxes.
2379
Alice
Brian
Mar 3

Clio’s Psyche
Bill, Trevor and all,
I agree with Trevor on the “objective reality” issue,
and have a few more things to add. As with so
much else, I see a number of levels to this issue.
On the level of the individual, yes, of course every
person has a unique cognitive map of the world
that reflects his or her unique psychobiography,
which, in turn, reflects the specific historical
circumstances into which they were born and live
their life, including their socioeconomic
circumstances and inherited culture. In this sense,
every person’s reality is indeed subjective.
At the same time, however, humans are not just
individuals but also social beings, and we need to
examine “reality” also on the social level. Here we
encounter what Peter Berger called “the social
2380
construction of reality,” namely the way that a

community of people acting on the basis of shared
cognitive maps that are common to their culture
create a “world” that no individual, acting alone,
can alter. Related to this are the institutional
realities that constrain people’s lives, such as the
organization of power in their workplaces. These
realities are objective in the sense that the
individual cannot wish them away and must
somehow accommodate to them, even if they pit
themselves against these realities and act to
subvert or overcome them in some way. However,
reality at this level is also subjective in the sense
that the society and culture that constructs it is one
of many possible societies and cultures and to that
extent the reality constructed is arbitrary.
At a third level, we encounter the physical planet
that all societies and cultures on Earth inhabit in
common. In representing this physical
environment, the social construction of reality still
operates—some cultures conceptualize the Earth
as the back of a turtle and others as a planet
orbiting a star in the Milky Way Galaxy, for
example, as Trevor noted. But at this level, unlike
the first two, there are fully objective criteria for
what is real. Measurement and experiment are the
ultimate arbiters of what is real. Yes, chaos,
uncertainty, and random variation are an integral
2381
part of this reality. But this only means that there

are limits to measurement, not that nothing can be
measured. Reality is not entirely deterministic, but
it is deterministic enough that we can organize our
lives around the physical niches in which we find
ourselves and can predict important things in our
everyday lives with a high degree of confidence, as
Trevor pointed out. We can even predict, with the
aid of science, things like global warming. I think it
is extremely important that we recognize that this
physical reality is not a mere projection of human
constructs but is rather an objective set of
properties, structures, processes, etc. that exist
independently of these constructs.
To be sure, physical reality is only knowable
imperfectly because science is an imperfect
institution, corrupted by power and money,
distorted by unexamined political and cultural
biases, vitiated by mediocrity, incompetence and
even fraud. But the highly public nature of science
provides ample opportunity for the correction of
many of these imperfections, and in any case, it is
the most reliable path to knowledge available to us.
It behooves us to conform our human constructs to
the common physical reality as science has come
to know it. Otherwise, in accordance with the
inexorable laws of nature that we choose to ignore,
we may find ourselves in deep doo-doo, as George
2382
Bush Sr. so colorfully put it.

Brian
Ken Fuchsman
Mar 3

Brian, you say, "Psychohistory is nothing if not an
interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and trans-
disciplinary field.". Technically, psychohistory is an
interdisicpline, a field where two other fields are
interconnected, such as social psychology and
biochemistry. Bill Newell, the long time Exexutive
Director of the Association for Interdisciplinary
Studies, maintains that interdisciplines are not
necessarily interdisciplinary. Within the field of
interdisciplinary studies, being interdisciplinary and
being multi-disciplinary are seen as being
incompatible. There are multiple approaches that
call themselves trans-disciplinary, and some of
these are compatible with being interdisciplinary
and some are not. The term trans-disciplinary was
2383
coined by Jean Piaget in Paris in 1970 and was

designed to be distinct from being interdisciplinary.
Piaget's use of trans-disciplinary could not be
correctly applied to psychohistory, You are using
these terms much more loosely than is done in the
scholarship of interdisciplinary studies.
I am not intent on establishing disciplinary
boundaries. You had said that psychohistorical
work need not always be empirical. I replied by
saying that as much as psychohistory includes
history it must be empirical. You seem to ignore
that part of my response. I thought you were
describing psychohistory in a way that ignored that
it needed to be empirical.
Bill you say that all scholarship is based in some
way on interpretation. Let's say, this is accurate.
Is there any thing distinguishing contemporary
physics from astrology? What distinguishes
Darwinian evolution from what is called creation
science? Or are these things epistemologically on
the same level?
—————

2384
Mar 4
The topic of the youthfulness of psychohistory has

come up lately, and has been argued as a reason
for keeping things humble and cautious. I thought
I'd present how horrifying this suggestion would
come to a DeMausian psychohistorian.
DeMause argued right from "Foundations" that
what the psychohistorian requires above all else is
a willingness to take emotional risks ... what you're
studying, could well blow back on you. When
you're studying Hitler, he argues, you're
recognizing that some part of him rests also in you.
I thought this particular example not quite
appropriate for the point he was trying to make.
Plenty of people would be willing to accept that evil
rests within themselves, after all, and would use
this "fact" to argue for a suspicion of progressive,
utopian visions of mankind ... use it in favor of
being conservative generally. (I'll add, since the
rest of his work works against the importance of
psychobiography -- "leaders" only follow the
inclinations of the populace; if they stray from this,
they're ignored -- this too wasn't helpful.) What he
was really trying to say is that what you need to
be a psychohistorian is the ability to handle the full
emotional tumult that can hit you when you realize
2385
that the societies you are studying are not largely

motivated by rational reasons, aren't homo
economicus, but by experiences out of childhood
that you probably at some level have shared but,
just like them, want kept protected from being
reminded of.
He was arguing for a psychohistorian base, in my
judgment, of our most emotionally evolved, for
young minds out of our most progressive families.
It is hard to imagine appealing to them by
advertising the discipline as one that has to play it
conservative for it being "immature," young. They'll
be our most brazen, our most inclined to pursue
the new, our most inclined to inspect elders
cautioning them of doing as much, not out of
wisdom, but because too much growth unsettles
them ... makes them feel disrespectful, full of
themselves, spoiled. Some elder in them, that
senses in their maybe beginning
to embrace exhilarating forward movement brought
forward from the young, an abandonment of them,
disapproves.
I say we go whole-hog, and find ourselves not
worthy of total ridicule, only by the most promising
of people alive today.
-- Patrick
2386
—————
drwargus
Mar 4

images from drwargus - Always display images in
Clio’s Psyche
Trevor,
I think that we agree far more than disagree. My
focus is on the danger of absolute truth. Most great
scientific breakthroughs were initially dismissed.
They were dismissed because the previous truths
were not able to hold the new information and
constructs. I have personally witnessed great new
ideas be suppressed by the scientific
establishment as the new ideas were threatening
to the establishment. Whether the discussion is
about the resistance to Galileo or the infectionous
cause of gastric ulcer disease, the resistance is
caused by a fundamentalist attitude that the current
paradigm CAN'T be wrong. It can't be wrong
because it's true. If we can accept that there never
is absolute truth, only better constructs, we could
2387
avoid some of these problems.

You want me to focus on the agreements that can
be found between different subjectivities. Exactly.
What are the constructs that we psychohistorians
can collectively agree upon? What is our
foundational belief system from which all of our
other theories derive? Is Lloyd's brilliant work about
the levels of child-rearing foundational, or is it part
of a more broad theory?
I am not familiar with neo-Kantianism. I consider
myself Integral, which to my understanding is more
evolved than Kant. Integral seeks to integrate the
best of all philosophers. The idea is that no one
can be wrong all the time! Everyone has something
to contribute.
Bill
Mar 4
Bill, Lloyd's theories weren't accepted because

they require one to be open to the damage within
one's own childhood, how mommy and daddy
abused you. All the childhood hurts and
2388
humiliations stop -- having no influence on you

whatsoever!; but instead are brought up again to
be re-experienced, and to devastate anyone who's
found within their discipline the scholarly collusion
to keep that all closeted away.
Theories can get dismissed, not just because they
fall outside of current constructs, but because they
don't satisfy the emotional/psychic needs that are
being met by the current frameworks. What is
required is not Kuhn's eventual massing of errors,
but a new generation that is emotionally ready for
new ways to understand the world. You can get this
out of DeMause ... and it's so different, and so
exciting!
-- Patrick
Brian
Mar 4
Again, I agree with Trevor and only want to

supplement what he has already said. First, I
agree with Bill that dogmatism is a barrier to
learning; who could disagree with this proposition?
My disagreement is with the notion that science
works the same way as other domains of
2389
knowledge. It does not, because science is the

only domain of knowledge that is systematically
anti-dogmatic. If someone says that a scientific
law cannot be wrong, they are not thinking
scientifically. No scientist says that a law of nature
cannot be wrong. If an experiment shows that the
predictions of the law of gravitation do not match
what is observed, that would be big news in the
scientific community and would immediately
become the subject of excited inquiry. Can the
experiment be replicated, or was it a fluke. If it is
replicated over and over, what is going on? Why
does the theory not match reality? The entire
scientific community would go back to the drawing
board. No one expects this to happen with
Einstein’s law of gravitation, but if it did happen,
that is the predictable result.
This does not mean that every member of the
scientific community would immediately discard the
theory of gravitation. For a time the new finding
might be regarded as an anomaly, and might
remain on the periphery of scientific knowledge.
This can be described as a kind of dogmatism, as
Bill correctly says. But over time, science learns
from anomalies, while religious dogmatists just
suppress them or try to explain them away without
rethinking their fundamental theories. Younger
scientists take note of anomalies and in their eyes
2390
they are blow to the authority of the reigning

theory. When someone comes up with a more
general theory that accounts for the anomaly along
with all the other observations that the original
theory accounted for, the old theory will be
superseded by the new. This is exactly how
Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s.
What I am saying here is all based on Kuhn, and
his theory of scientific revolutions is specific to
mature sciences, say physics. We use the term
“paradigm” and “paradigm shift” loosely, but for
Kuhn this only describes how mature science
works, which at this point is limited to the natural
sciences.
Let’s take the map analogy one step further. Yes,
Bill, the map is not the territory. But scientific laws
are not maps. Rather, we might think of them as
machines for making maps, and science is the
enterprise of making the machines. We are
constantly exploring the world. If we have a
machine that generates maps for every
conceivable terrain and every time we use the map
it matches the terrain, and we can make the map
incredibly detailed and it matches the terrain with
great precision, then we are justified in calling this
reliable knowledge. There is no dogmatism here.
First, the machine by its performance has earned
the confidence we have placed in it. Second, there
2391
is a small but finite chance that the machine will not

perform as expected in the future and will have to
be rebuilt. This is the opposite of dogmatism.
Further, no one will try to rebuild the machine from
scratch. It worked so well that the question will be
how to improve it. Again, this is how Einstein’s
theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s.
Brian
Mar 4
RE: When someone comes up with a more general

theory that accounts for the anomaly along with all
the other observations that the original theory
accounted for, the old theory will be superseded by
the new.
Brian's way of seeing scientists make them seem
so sensible. Myself, I have very little faith that if a
general theory emerged which accounted for the
anomaly, along with all the other observations, but
to embrace it one would have to, say, accept that
the influence of our mothers -- how well loved, or
how much abandoned and despised we were -- is
mostly responsible for how we shape our world,
2392
that the old theory would simply find itself replaced

with the new.
It is however easy to see a new generation, raised
in a bit more loving a fashion, being open to new
frameworks that a preponderance of holes and
errors and mishaps in previous frameworks
couldn't have shaken a previous generation toward
embracing. The sun must be the center of the
universe, just like mommy was! How do I work
through that past if I can't fiddle with it through the
stars! How do I find protection from it, if I can't put
it out onto the outside world in some way I
recognize but feel control over?
I truly believe that the idea that there is insufficient
evidence to support DeMause's understanding of
the past, is thoroughly false. I truly believe a
generation is emerging that would find itself in the
same historical quarters frequented by the legions
of historians before them, and see pathology
everywhere, bloody-well everywhere -- and know
these people hadn't received the care and love
they received ... how could you people for so long
not see it!!!! The horror!
They'd look at the preponderance, then back at the
instructor who was still cautioning and sorting
through, and know there's only so much they'd
have to learn from the old fellow ... For him, this
2393
terror would always be his salve, his teddy bear. So

be it ... but time for the rest to move on.
The fact that the chief obstacle to seeing things as
they really are has more to do with one's emotional
health than it does quantity of evidence, will be
probably be demonstrated first out of anthropology
-- where it's still all available to see in our own
temporal period. All those anthropologists
who've somehow gotten away with seeing these
infanticidal, war-crazed societies as benign, as kind
of making sense, are going to be met by a liberal
generation that no longer needs to romance them
to still hold a thoroughly respectful and
supportive attitude towards them.
And they'll know that their predecessors, that
previous generation of liberals, as emotionally
evolved as they were by historical standards, could
still have babies put adrift, even eaten, before their
eyes, and even then not see in the pain evidence
that could shake them out of ultimately seeing
"necessity" involved. No reason, that is, to want to
stop the whole thing immediately, by bringing upon
them a legion of child-care workers, as they would
readily any infestation of child-sacrifice cultists
spotted within their own land.
DeMause talks a lot about the psychological
requirements required to do psychohistory. When
2394
he delineates examples, it's clear he's looking for

those who aren't embarrassed or shamed to
recognize the influence their childhoods have
had upon them. It's clear he's hoping for those who
can write things which others would
find ... embarrassing, unprofessional -- counter to
the decorum we assume for scientists. I think this
is helpful to keep in mind. This construct --"the
scientist" -- isn't exactly going to be mistaken for
the inward-looking hippie. S/he's still got the white
coat; "the professional," is still about rectitude ...
we're still limited in what we can find by our need
for most prominent fear-fighters/abaters to seem so
chastised out of "childish" inclinations, and reach.
-- Patrick
dr.bobstern
Mar 4
For a good explanation of the misuses of

"Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle":
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/no
thing-to-see-here-demoting-the-uncertainty-
principle
2395
I don't think there is much evidence that the future

prospects for humanity will be brightened by some
new concept of "God", as it isn't clear how any kind
of magical thinking will lead to habitually rational,
easily correctable, universally acceptable
outcomes.
As far as the complaint that there is no "absolute
truth" -- this is no weakness in science. Science
deals in odds, likelihoods, percentages. The
usefulness (the NECESSITY) of maps is not
diminished by pointing out that the map isn't the
place. Such claims are the realm of the fanciful
religious where, for example, supposedly rational
folks believe that the cracker IS the body of Christ.
If someone claimed that a waffle was the body of
Eleanor Roosevelt -- and demanded that that was
taught in public school -- would we hear the
following?====
"But when an evolutionist gets up in front of an
education panel and states that "I will not have our
children being taught religious nonsense. I want
them to have the truth," the evolutionist is just as
misguided as the creationist in thinking that they
own the truth. There is no truth."
Nope. If we are to teach science, then teach
science...arrived at by the processes of science. If
we are to teach -- well, the theology of creationism,
2396
"Christian Science" or that waffles can be Eleanor

Roosevelt -- then that has to be a different branch
of "learning" hopefully unfunded by taxpayers.
The demand that a whole panoply of irrational
beliefs (called religions -- privileged and tax
exempt) deserve a special status of being off limits
to ontological/epistemological scrutiny (after all,
there is no "absolute truth" -- so anything goes?),
and respectful deference is something that needs
a serious look. Especially when the religious
demand to hijack taxpayer funded public
education of children.
Bob
dr.bobstern
Mar 4
"I truly believe that the idea that there is

insufficient evidence to support DeMause's
understanding of the past, is thoroughly false."
Co you have the evidence (controlled studies) that
support the causalities such a theory proposes?
2397
"When he delineates examples, it's clear he's

looking for those who aren't embarrassed or
shamed to recognize the influence their
childhoods have had upon them."
Isn't this backwards? The legitimacy of any inquiry
is undermined by pre-screening for a population
which shares the 'belief" (otherwise termed: the
hypothesis yet to be confirmed). Is a compelling
example from someone unashamed to report: "I'm
told that my toilet training was authoritarian, so of
course I tortured small woodland creatures as a kid
and became Pol Pot as an adult." ?
"It is however easy to see a new generation,
raised in a bit more loving a fashion"
Is a "more loving fashion" an objective term that
has some cross-culturally testable precision?
B
Mar 4
Co you have the evidence (controlled studies)

that support the causalities such a theory
2398
proposes?
Causalities? I'm not sure I understand. I'm one who
knew DeMause was right simply because it
matched my own conclusions from reading history.
Sane people don't fight wars, only disturbed people
do so, and yet this never got commented on. I
knew anthropology was bunk (sorry for the
overstatement -- I've been influenced by many
gloriously literate anthropologists) when I finally
saw some of those initiation rituals I had read so
much about. I was watching films of children being
tortured, and the narrator, as well as the professor
teaching the course, couldn't see the obvious
-- these people had no other intention in mind but
to brutalize. I knew then this was the problem --
science can't bring you closer to human truths if
you're emotionally invested in being obvious to the
effects of childhood abuse, your own suffered,
childhood abuse.
Have you read all of DeMause? There's a million
notes and links to others' studies, if for you that's
what's required. (I don't think it hurts, but I
personally don't need them. I'll read any old 19th-
century text, and feel the entirety of the time within
it, just as you could if you took up 1960s Roth or
Updike: brilliant, but still sexist and patriarchal.)
The legitimacy of any inquiry is undermined by
2399
pre-screening for a population which shares

the 'belief"
No sound inquiry is limited by having it lead by
emotionally healthy people. Every inquiry is closer
to being doomed when it is lead by a sample that
strays from this standard. I realize I'm not quite
getting at your challenge, but I haven't quite
penetrated it yet. My apologies. I promise to think
about it more.
Is a "more loving fashion" an objective term
that has some cross-culturally testable
precision?
Children who were talked to, not hit, children who
were respected for their own choices, encouraged
to choose their own fates and to believe in their
ability to reshape the world -- not daunted by being
called "spoiled" -- children who were tended to by
both parents (or the plurality that Molly prefers),
with abundant time put in by both partners.
We don't honestly need to test this to know it's
better, do we? ... Wouldn't you indeed doubt the full
sanity of those who felt the need -- are you alive to
the world, or aren't you???
-- Patrick
Brian
2400
Mar 4
Patrick, Robert, and all,

Lloyd DeMause has claimed that psychohistory is a
science and yet has never pursued the methods of
science. The cherry picking of evidence that fits
one’s theory while disregarding evidence that
contradicts it is a pitfall that can only be avoided by
methods that systematically control for bias.
Random sampling is one such method. Content
analysis of media images or information is
another. To my knowledge, only one controlled
study has ever been done on any of Lloyd’s
theories and this research did not come from
DeMause or his followers; more on that below.
This raises an important question: if deMause’s
supporters find his theories so compelling and so
self-evidently true, why hasn’t anyone designed
research to test these theories? Until that is done,
it is a cop-out to say that people remain skeptical
because they are unwilling to confront their own
histories of child abuse. That may be true in some
cases, but in all cases people have a right to be
skeptical about theories that are put forward on
one person’s authority and without controlled
research of any kind.
2401
The one controlled study I mentioned was

conducted by Ted Goertzel and published in the
peer-reviewed journal Political Psychology in
1993. The study tested deMause’s theory about
group fantasies that he claimed caused the 1990-
1991 Gulf War. Here is the link to the study
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/cartoons.htm and
here is the abstract:
ABSTRACT: A content analysis of imagery in
editorial cartoons published from 1989 to 1991
suggests that the primary emotional function of
these cartoons is the ritual humiliation of leaders
through shame and ridicule. Indulgence and fear
are also frequent themes of the cartoons, as are
dangerous men, enemies and death. Sexuality,
birth and children appear infrequently. Contrary to
DeMause's hypothesis, there is no unusual change
in the imagery during the period leading up to the
Gulf War. Saddam Hussein may have served the
American psyche more as a target for externalizing
guilt feelings than as a feared enemy. but that does
not absolve a person who professes to be founding
a science from actually following the methods of
science.
Brian
Brian
2402
Mar 4
CORRECTION: There was a sentence fragment of

mine (“but that does not absolve . . . methods of
science.) after the abstract I posted (below) that
was not part of the abstract.
Ken Fuchsman
Mar 5
Brian,
You are correct that there are a variety of methods
of science. What do you think DeMause meant
when he said psychohistory was a science? What
scientific standards did he think applied in history?
In the literature on historical methods, controlled
studies are rarely mentioned, neither is random
sampling, and historians generally do not believe
that the materials of their subject enable them to
systematically control for bias.
Psychohistory definitely needs to avoid cherry
2403
picking the evidence. Historians regularly will

evaluate historical works on the basis of using all
the available evidence and often try to discover
new evidence. As psychology is divided into so
many diverging approaches, it is quite common for
psychologists to incorporate findings from their
approach and ignore the scholarship from other
psychological conceptions.
Not all historians believe history can base itself on
the kinds of scientific methods you mention. There
are books written on how historians at some times
wanted history to model itself on the sciences but
found that was not likely. There are diverging
conceptions of what psychological science entails.
In biology, Ernst Mayr had said that his discipline
cannot completely model itself on physics and
chemistry, and that biology itself is often closer to
history than to other natural sciences.
As psychohistorians, we are faced with the
challenge of coming up with methods of evaluating
claims that can take into account that standards in
history and psychology may well diverge.
Interdisciplines such as psychohistory often face
such challenges.
The issues you raise then can help open the
necessary dialogue on what standards of
evaluating claims apply to psychohistory. If
2404
psychohistory is to come out of the wilderness it

currently occupies, it will need to confront the
epistemological challenges inherent in being an
interdiscipline.
Dear Brian, Ken, and others interested in testing

DeMause's research theories,
I found your use of the term "interdiscipline" quite
interesting Ken. You earlier made a distinction
between "interdisciplinarity" in general and an
"interdiscipline". Psychology and History together
form the "interdiscipline" of psychohistory. But for
the most part the epistemological assumptions of
the discipline of History are quite different from the
disciplinary assumptions of the discipline of
Psychology. The example of the study that Ted
Goertzel did to "test" DeMause's theory of a kind of
collective mental disorder is not very convincing
from the standpoint of the epistemological rigor
often required in the best journals in psychology
today. For me the problem lies with the
operationalization of the concepts. The cartoons
2405
that are shown at the bottom of the page could be

interpreted in many different ways. The period of
time covered is quite short and does not allow for
comparison with times when there was no Saddam
Hussein to use as the straw man, boogeyman.
In the academic discipline of History (as opposed
to popular writing in history) there is a standard of
rigor based on adequate use of primary sources.
(The footnote was first invented as a device by
historians who started to actually refer to specific
archival documents to substantiate claims about
historical events and persons.)
What would be more convincing to me as a test of
DeMause's claim would go outside of the
"interdiscipline" of the phrase psychohistory and
look at the social psychological aspect of a
sociological investigation of public opinion. If
people are asked directly about their opinions of
cartoons that might be slightly more valid as a test
than if it is simply assumed that the general public
will be thinking A or B when a specific cartoon is
being examined by a researcher. A question like:
"What does this cartoon say to you?" might be a
beginning.
How could we ever completely disprove
DeMause's theory in general or his specific
research theory about cartoons during the specific
2406
period studied? I would guess that no complete

disproof would be possible. If we found a dozen
cartoons that ran counter to his ideas (or if a dozen
subjects/respondents said they interpreted them
counter to DeMause's assumptions) then we would
still not have a "black swan".
Ideas can be useful and provocative without
necessarily being (strictly) "scientific", either in the
sense of the physical-natural sciences or even in
the expanded sense of the Wissenschaften.
It is true we need an adequate philosophy of
science and philosophy of social science (as well
as other aspects of epistemological views), but can
that really happen in this group?
Sincerely,
Hans J. I. Bakker (currently in Boston, having
just been in Manhattan for the weekend to attend
the Eastern Sociological Society conference).
dr.bobstern
Patrick makes a good point about all-too-human

2407
resistance to change. Religions have a particularly

nasty time of it, as their ancient "texts" are
generally claimed to be "perfect" and "the word of
God". But, of course, in other endeavors, we
encounter similar resistances to change
(consciously or unconsciously) in our views of
"heroes" or "accepted wisdom." Examples are
everywhere.
--The controversy opened up by Jeffrey Masson re:
Freud's "Seduction Theory" is a case in point --
actual child abuse or just fantasy? How the girls
were raised -- or how they IMAGINED they were
raised? Masson doing actual historical
investigation from primary documents....or a
vendetta against a hero?
--And, of course, the timeline of resistance to
medical science research results on the
bacteria/ulcer connection -- skepticism resolved,
resistance overcome by the usual, science-based
processes.
As far as interesting research attempting to
examine causal factors in human development:
Twins and Exercise.
Couldn't similar research be done (perhaps it has
been?) to investigate how peri-natal
experiences/"loving upbringing" affects genetically
identical people as they mature into adults?
2408
Does the phrase "loving upbringing" have a

universally accepted meaning? For example, is
raising a child in an environment where "self-
esteem" sunshine is constantly blown at them
without the child having to associate that feeling
with personal engagement -- "loving"? Or is it a
cruel delusion, creating unprepared adults destined
to be blindsided by the demands of a relatively
impersonal world that cares more about what they
do and far less about how they "feel"?
Ripe for study, one would think.
Bob
Brian
This responds to Ken, Patrick and Hans. I think we

need to keep in mind the distinction between a
mature science like physics and a young science
like psychology. The former can lay claim to laws
of nature that can be described mathematically and
can make predictions; the latter, not. Even
neuroscience today is not a true science because
there is no credible underlying theory about how
2409
the brain works. In the absence of such a theory,

we can test all kinds of superficial hypotheses and
collect mountains of data but it will not advance
true understanding.
I think that some of deMause’s work does make a
contribution to putting psychohistory on the path of
becoming a science, but his writings are a mixed
bag and it has done more harm than good for the
field when deMause and his followers have
claimed that his work IS science. If that were true,
it must meet the standards of scientific research
which it has not even begun to do. Ken, I think the
scientific theory in Lloyd’s work is the idea that
childrearing practices are a major causal factor in
explaining historical events and processes. The
current issue of Psychohistory News contains
excerpts from a Clio discussion on this subject. In
this discussion, I argued that Adorno et al’s The
Authoritarian Personality provided indirect
evidence for Lloyd’s psychogenic theory of history
(though not for the reductive form in which he
stated it). The article, “How Much Does
Childrearing Really Impact History,” is short and I
invite anyone interested to read it:
http://www.psychohistory.us/resources/IPA_2015_1
_winter.pdf Much, much more empirical work must
be done in this area before we can have anything
resembling science, but I think the psychogenic
2410
theory in some form provides a deep and coherent

scientific theory that merits such a program of
empirical research.
Ken, The Authoritarian Personality strictly speaking
is political psychology, not psychohistory, but it is
such an important part of what psychohistorians (at
least some of us) need to be thinking about that I
don’t know what purpose it serves to say “this is
not psychohistory.” The world and good research
often do not fit neatly into the disciplinary boxes (or
even the interdisciplines) that universities create for
administrative purposes.
Patrick, you raise an important issue about the
need for psychohistorians to connect with our
research topics in a personal way. But it is hard if
not impossible to combine this kind of personal
involvement with the detachment needed to do
replicable scientific research of the sort that Ted
Goertzel did. So we may need to have a division
of labor in which different psychohistorians do
different kinds of research. The same issue arises
in psychology. Clinicians need to be reflecting on
transferences and countertransferences in order to
practice their craft and their contribution to
psychology needs to be combined with the very
different kind of research done by
neuropsychologists, for example. Freud, in fact,
tried to integrate just such disparate contributions
2411
from different areas of psychology. We need to do

the same thing.
Hans, I don’t think you are being fair to Ted’s
article. Every researcher needs to choose a
methodology and whatever choice they make is
going to have strengths and limitations. In order to
do a content analysis, SOMEONE has to code the
items. Once the research has been done, another
researcher can look at the coding scheme, criticize
it, and propose an alternative that they can argue is
better for this or that reason. Then we can see
what difference this makes, if any, for the
conclusions of the research. Ted has done the
hard work of collecting a comprehensive data set
that can test deMause’s theory and only then can
we have a scientific discussion about alternative
coding schemes. Note that no such scientific
discussion is possible on the basis of Lloyd’s Gulf
War paper because there was no systemic data
collection; he only picked cartoons that fit his
theory and he provides no information whatsoever
about how typical these cartoons were in the media
content prior to the Gulf War. Also, Goertzel’s time
frame is quite sufficient to test Lloyd’ theory, which
claims that wars are caused by group fantasies
that change on a time scale of weeks and months.
I see a number of very serious problems with this
theory, but that is another discussion. Given
2412
Lloyd’s theory, Ted’s research provides a

reasonable test of it.
Brian
—————
Anyone who finds substantial support for

DeMause's theories is in a very precarious
position. What no psychohistorian will admit about
themselves, is that they don't actually want him
proven right. They might want to
find some corroborating evidence, but with enough
of his theories shown up to show once again why
DeMause needs to be kept on a very short leash.
Let the discipline be lead by those who'd muzzle
him. Now, finally, with him "dogged," the rest of his
colleagues might count the rest of psychohistory in.
(There's an added benefit, which I discuss below.)
What we need is a different intellectual climate.
With people who are emotionally ready to accept
his ideas, we'll see how many of these studies
2413
disproving DeMause were helpful, or just shameful

efforts to place themselves within a cozy of
historians the rest of the department would admire
for keeping the lash on DeMause's back. A shame
to the reputation of scientists, a plus to the
attraction of kicking the weak and vulnerable.
Brian is right, Lloyd did talk about psychohistory as
a science -- something provable, which I think it
is ... or maybe, rather, self-evident, like the fact that
there's a sun in the sky. He also talked about
people's emotional resistance to accepting truth --
something that would override clear proof, like an
internal perpetrator alter overriding youthful
reach/impulse. He probably didn't talk enough
about it enough. If what you're doing would force
people to think about their own childhoods, re-
experience the vulnerability and humiliations, if it
would force them to think hard on their own
relationships with their mothers -- cast doubt on her
motives, show her up! -- your efforts are producing
exactly the sort of material we established inner
alters -- for DeMause, more "internal persecutory
alters" than "super-ego" -- in the first place to be on
the look for and shut down.
But as much as the works of his I most re-read are
his later works -- Emotional Life of Nations and The
Origins of War in Child Abuse -- his later works do
show what shaping his discipline so that it would
2414
appeal more to the scientific community did to his

willingness to take risks, to appear embarrassing,
to be inspiring. There are thousands of notes --
every sentence seems to have at least one
attached. What there aren't, are references like he
has in Foundations of how he himself would curl up
into a fetal position in order to experience what
people in previous epochs were experiencing. No
sign, that is, of anything like this:
From Foundations:
Each chapter is a new scientific
experiment, in which I try to identify with
the actors in the
historical drama and explore my own
unconscious as a way of reaching
historical motivations. Only if I can
accomplish this inner act of discovery
can I move back to new historical
material to test the patterns of
motivation and group dynamics I think I
have found. As Dilthey recognized long
ago, this is the only way
one can do psychohistory. Ultimately, a
psyche can only explore itself to discover
the motives of another.
2415
The motives of another species, insofar

as they are wholly different in kind from
ours, are literally
unknowable. It is only by discovering the
"Hitler in ourselves" that we can
understand a Hitler. If one
denies one has a "Hitler in ourselves,"
one cannot do psychohistory. I, like
Hitler, have been a beaten,
frightened child and a resentful youth. I
recognize him in myself, and with some
courage can feel in my
own guts the terrors he felt that helped
produce the European
Gotterddmmerung .
The necessity for plunging into the

depths of one's own psyche when doing
psychohistorical
research often leads critics to confuse
introspection with hallucination. Political
psychologist Lloyd
Etheredge admits he can't figure out
whether "deMause's work is either that
of a bold, visionary genius-or
is wacky enthusiasm for his own excited
2416
fantasies." Historian Lawrence Stone

wonders on reading my
work how "to solve the problem of how to
regard so bold, so challenging, so
dogmatic, so enthusiastic, so
perverse, and yet so heavily documented
a model." And David Stannard is afraid
introspection is only
regression, calling my work "well beyond
the fringe of even the most generous
definition of scholarship"
because, he says, I do my research by
spending" 'hundreds of hours' crawling
under the bedclothes with a
two-year-old searching for answers to the
riddles of history." Introspection is
clearly a dangerous task,
and those who attempt it in
psychohistory are likely to be accused of
being the sole source of the fantasies
they investigate.
Because introspection is such an

important tool in investigating historical
motivation the personal
life of a psychohistorian must be
2417
intimately connected with his or her

choice of topic. "Nothing loved or
hated, nothing understood" is a truism in
the psychological sciences. It should
surprise no one that during
the decade of my life in which I
researched and wrote these chapters I
lived through all its topics, writing
about the evolution of childhood during
my son's childhood, the origins of war
during my divorce, and the
fetal origins of history during my new
wife's pregnancy. I could also trace the
influence of my first and
second psychoanalysis on these essays,
or the development of our Institute for
Psychohistory, or of The
Journal of Psychohistory where these
essays were first published. All are
relevant to discovery. But
ultimately what counts is how well the
theory explains the evidence. I
methodically study my own dreams
to help me understand both my role in
psychohistorical groups and my
2418
historical material-because
history, like dreams, makes perfectly
good sense when you know its laws of
symbolic transformation. Yet
my psychohistorical theories do not
derive their truth value from my dreams,
but from their power to
explain the shared motives of individuals
in historical groups.
When was the last time you heard a social scientist
talk about the importance of introspection? How
their own childhoods and their own evolving lives
were affecting what they needed to make of the
material they were studying? Couldn't we do with
more people like that, rather than those who add
muscle to the fantasy of the scientific reasoner, so
disciplined to truth, all the fawning hands trying to
mislay her/him to think of career, reputation -- the
dangers of unwelcome discoveries --get brushed
aside as s/he goes steadfast where the results
lead.
-- Patrick
P.S. It is irresponsible for people to show how
DeMause's has been disproved by such and such
a study, not to acknowledge what kind of climate
would have awaited her if she showed just how
2419
much he got right. The person who kept her testing

of DeMause to his less aggravating theories -- i.e.
those dealing with ostensibly universal theories,
like the womb experience; those that don't draw us
back to thinking of the particulars of our
experiences with mom, how she yelled at us, how
she withdrew, when we were already so scared
and needful! -- has more room to let the facts
prove him right without getting a swat from her
peers. But anyone who'd done work to prove things
like war and societal Depressions and the nature of
international relations actually do relate back to the
nature of our relationships with our mothers, has
exactly no chance of gaining approval within the
scientific community, regardless of facts. They
would shame her, they would want to dispose of
her.
Any scientist going in would know this amply, and
this student at graduate school who got all As and
therefore probably never took any substantial risks
and who became ace at sorting out what agitates
and what doesn't, doesn't need to be reminded of
what happened to graduate students supporting
DeMause's research during psychohistory's heady
times, when they put their thesises before PhD
committees of scared but empowered goons, to
make his results fit preference.
He would feel no guilt, because he'd of done work
2420
which waylaid efforts to put the spotlight on mom,

and the Terrifying Mom in his own head would be
applauding him so much for defeating the enemy,
for being, finally, such a very, very good and loyal
boy. No guilt, because he was being true to mom,
the originator, rather than to the permitted play of
those already subordinate to her (scientists),
always cooperating with her orders to make sure
never to do anything which pisses her off.
We create a new climate ... I'll start taking a look at
these studies, but not when it's being done by
people who'll need approval and can't handle the
apocalypse of being on the out. We need those
who read DeMause and finally note that
everywhere he talks about mom ... shouldn't first
step be introspection on our relationship with her,
including it within all our studies? If it's just wombs,
how pumps of good blood then bad blood affect us,
how the swoosh of expulsion affects us, how far
are we from a discipline in which autistics who
know figures and diagrams and who feel
comfortable with mechanical parts and no doubt
also with Disney rides, but can't reflect on their own
emotional experience, take the lead? Here, we're
exploring what it is to be born within the dynamics
of a washing cycle, not what it was to bear the
anger and rejection of our mothers.
2421
-- Patrick
dr.bobstern
Patrick,
Any discipline that does not welcome skepticism is,
frankly, not engaged in anything remotely
resembling science. An intellectual climate of
"acceptance" runs the risk of being a wolf in
sheep's clothing -- it appears to value
ingenuousness over rigor. By all means consider
hypotheses, no matter how strange. But, don't just
buy them as presented. Which brings me to this:
"....Lloyd did talk about psychohistory as a science
-- something provable, which I think it is ... or
maybe, rather, self-evident, like the fact that there's
a sun in the sky."
Anything that appears "self-evident" needs to be

examined. "The sun is in the sky" is about as
profound an insight as "the sun moves in the sky."
Of course, the sun isn't "in the sky"any more than it
actually "moves in the sky." The strange idea that
2422
the Earth rotates on an axis and orbits around a

Sun in a heliocentric solar system is one that is not
self-evident. But, nevertheless, those insights are
a greater approximation to the "truth" of the matter.
Perhaps DeMausse's insights are like Galileo's --
but,there are ways to establish that. Ad hominems
and appeals to "the self-evident" aren't winners.
Bob
Perhaps DeMausse's insights are like Galileo's --

but,there are ways to establish that. Ad hominems
and appeals to "the self-evident" aren't winners.
Sure, because those who just go about their testing
and find he is in fact equivalent to Galileo(!), aren't
going to require some cleared ground first. See,
yes sir, it turns out the facts do lend toward
supporting DeMause's supposition that the nature
of international relations depends almost entirely
on whether or not the participants were cared for
or abandoned by their mothers -- We have here on
our hands the next evolution of philosophical
2423
thought!!! May I, sir, entertain you with the data ...

I think not: some safe hippie-Berkeley confines are
going to have to be created for them, with all its
effective -- and earned -- anti-establishment heat.
Back off, suits!
And besides, I'm just calling it like it is. Self-
evident, was calling it like it is.
-- Patrick
Third and last post today.

I actually have some faith that you could, if the
facts warranted it, declare DeMause the next
Galileo, without any ground needing to be cleared
for you -- I think you could handle whatever the fall.
Genuinely, kudos! That's the way to be -- an
enviable powerhouse.
There are too many encouragements however for
the young to play it safe -- we've done everything
we can to tame their instinct to be radical, to balk
authority and really change things ... so this
2424
student debt-ridden, austerity culture, this cling-to-

whatever-you've-got culture we live in. If you're
smart and got an angle on a place within academia
that might actually pay, you're nipping your instinct
to be radical in the bud, be sure! Somehow, your
thesis is going to align with expectations --
however much your supervisors are delighting in
it's rather-easy-for-them-to-assimilate ostensible
brilliance. (One suspects it's all about keeping their
own self image intact, since it should be harder to
daly at conferences and enjoy life's sweets ... while
ceding easy accolades to ongoing flows of
intellectual Robespierres -- at least some signs of
indigestion, no?)
The least I can do is remind them of how good it
feels to speak and pursue life in an uninhibited
fashion. Some might say, you know what? that
feels good enough that I'll forsake my safe path
through this punishing period, and become
potentially just a loser to everyone who knows me,
to be like that, to know myself like that.
And so with that, you might see terrific, innovative,
youthful scientific/artistic movements emerge out of
those periods of time where a dramatic show was
intended to be made of how all the pretentious
"spoiledness" in youthfulness was going to be
sacrificed.
2425
Respectfully,
Patrick
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4-
5ZDrB3yWM/VRVey1CNEsI/AAAAAAAAAiM/n9t9V-o_V5Q/s1600/The-
hobbit-book-cover1.jpg

(a cleaned up version of a paper written in 2014)
I think the thing that must seem most curious about this
adventure to slay a dragon and reclaim a homeland and
its treasure, is how the hell could adding a burglar to this
motley crew be adding the decisive factor? What's the
trick? For there must be one, since the dragon has only
gotten larger and more deadly as the years have gone by.
Peter Jackson changes things so that a burglar is needed
because someone small and stealthy needs to enter
Smaug’s lair to perhaps snatch one especially bright,
one especially brilliant jewel—the Arkenstone—
ostensibly readily noticeable even given its being
shrouded by lesser delights. With that stone Thorin will
earn control over seven kingdoms of dwarves, and with
their might the dragon would finally look to be
overmatched. In the book, it develops into a situation
where, regarding the fighting and the killing the dragon,
they decide that a full frontal attack of just themselves is
their best bet, even as they agree that even the best
2426
armor hasn't a chance against Smaug.

I like to think that the one who recruited the hobbit
Bilbo, the one who insisted on him—the wizard
Gandalf, of course—had an inkling that their only
chance now was not to pit themselves against Smaug's
might but against his “overwhelming personality.” If to
take on a dragon you need a “dragon,” tremendous
physical might—several armies, or a singular hero of
renown—and you haven't any, then maybe it's best to
match personas—put a Watson next to his Holmes, and
see what compatibility might jostle your way. And
where do you find any such these days, people with
considerable layers of self, of personality, and yet also—
needed to effectively play sidekick while the other
luxuriates as star—humility? Amongst those always at
work or perpetually at war? No, this wears, doesn't
develop. In great kings? Maybe not even—for Elrond is
“noble,” “strong,” “wise,” and “kind,” which makes him
seem a great figurehead but not someone you can safely
invite over without taking over. Certainly not Thorin,
for, “for being important,” means this is all he’s leant to
doing, as “if he had been allowed, he would have
probably gone on like this until he was out of breath,
without telling any one there anything that was not
known already.” Maybe not, interestingly, even Gandalf
—for you notice how he can at times lose himself into
becoming a phenomena, pure vengeance, not just when
he blinds a cave of goblins and wrenches off the king
goblin’s head, but more so where “[t]he sudden
2427
splendour flashed from his wand like lightning, as he

got ready to spring down from on high right among the
spears of the goblins. That would have been the end of
him, though he would probably have killed many of
them as he as he came hurdling down like a
thunderbolt.” You actually find them in places so far
removed from the rest of the world, they can, like Bilbo,
exist undisturbed for fifty years in one place, ruminating
in their books, compounding their reading and daily
encounters into their compiling selves.
He may not appear to have a great tale yet to tell but as a
frequent host he’s already great at conversing, great at
managing all the emanations of the human so to
properly register, compliment and encourage rather than
toil, try and discourage those he’s talking with. In my
preferred reading of Gandalf the most important thing
he did for Bilbo’s self-development wasn’t so much his
prompting his going out on an adventure as it was his
testing his already highly developed social skills with
repeat doses of the unaccounted for. (What happens
when you have to accommodate something strange
within the strides of your conversation, Bilbo?) That is,
his making a hash out of Bilbo’s initial greeting—his
initial efforts to manage him by way of “good
mornings”—and, as well, his subsequently besieging
him with dwarves, in through the door. Confronted with
a dragon, he’ll be dealing with someone who loves
conversation, riddles, and comfortably lounging amidst
acquired clutter as much as he does. But as much as he
2428
might find himself surprised at how strangely

accustomed he feels during his pinnacle heroic moment,
it’s still not going to be like sitting down for tea with the
Brandybucks. He’s going to need to adjust and expand
his skills before he could possibly be ready.
The dwarves will serve as carapace, armor to get him
through the wild. It’d be pointless to explain to them
how Bilbo is actually akin to Smaug—“he’s actually a
what? a dragon? and that's why he's useful? … Smoking
a bit too much Halfling weed there, are thee,
Gandalf?”—so Gandalf explains him in terms they’ll
get. Thus: “I tried to find [a hero]; but warriors are busy
fighting one another in distant lands, and in this
neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be
found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes
are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers;
and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore
legendary). That is why I settled on burglary—
especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-
door.” With that the dwarves would look at small Bilbo,
of a stealthy race, and it would look to appear good
common sense on behalf of the wizard. And so off on
the trails, to business, before any of them consider just
how one even highly stealthy burglar could possibly
help them reclaim a kingdom of gold.
In my reading, Gandalf deliberately misleads Bilbo as
well, convinces him that his journey is to become more
a Took, someone great not for knowing fifty years of
2429
comfort but rather a lengthy spell of adventure. And

he’ll become that, reclaim his heritage, when he too can
possess things beyond what hobbits could be expected
to accommodate themselves to, very much including the
dispatching of fearsome beasts. This, after all, is the
enticement you offer anyone who’s delighted himself on
stories but who’s been still most of their lives. You
besiege him as if all the faeries in the world he’s
rejoiced in reading and hearing about would reject him
if now, finally, after passing him by his whole life, they
dangled opportunity before him. You do this, even if the
truth is—as it looks to be as soon as he steps outside,
where they go “far into the Lone-lands where there were
no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily
worse”—that venturing outside the supplying hearth can
put you in sparser settings, with more barren people,
that can as much deplete as invigorate you, because,
unfortunately, persuading him of the more interesting
truth, that for him “to be all that he can be” still means
keeping rather more of his Baggins’ self than it does his
reclaiming his Took,’ is only something he might
understand after the journey was over, when the Took
side has been found, denatured, and ready for
unromanticized reappraisal.
Needing to believe he'll only be useful a long ways off,
it's appropriate that compared to the horse-riding Bull-
roarer Took he's been primed to hope to liken himself to,
he starts off on “a very small pony,” and that he isn't
actually useful for some time. The first useful thing he
2430
does demonstrates no ability on his part. It's pure luck

that he finds a dropped key that provides access to a
provisioning troll hoard. The second is a backhanded
accomplishment: it's because he is too nervous to sleep
well that he awakens to goblins sneaking up on them in
the dark, thereby keeping Gandalf safe from being
caught. And since his real talent is not in sneaking
around but in agreeable conversation—however slippery
and deceptive and sly he might prove therein—it’s
appropriate that the first time he makes an impression
upon the dwarves is when he’s elated out of having used
a skill he’s actually very good at.
This is after his encounter with Gollum, of course, when
he appears miraculously before them just after being
discounted as lost to them for good. But before getting
to this, it’s interesting to ask yourself how much more
Bilbo distinguishes himself to us when he has his
chance to prove commendable in combat than he does
when he does so in conversation. Does being a warrior
dispatching a large number of fiends really demonstrate
his worth as much as his matching wits with great
named denizens of the wild? In Mirkwood forest, he
kills a lot of giant spiders—a lot. He’s brutally efficient
with a sword and sublime with a sling (a proficiency, we
note, the film steals from him to emphasize in the wood
elves). And it sure means a lot to him—“[s]omehow the
killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the
dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of
anyone else, made a great deal to Bilbo. He felt a
2431
different person, and much fiercer and bolder.” But,

well, of course it does, because he’d been convinced
that maybe not ever having done what Bull-roarer had
done meant he’d been asleep all his life. But it’s
possible that however much it meant for him to go on
the offence physically with sling and sword, it may have
been just his going on the offence which thrilled—a
talent, an orientation, maybe not sufficiently exercised
in all his duties as a good host easing conflicts while
quick with a re-supply of tea. But without that talent
too, being someone who knows how to calm agitation
and thereby keep a conversation going, he might never
have manipulated Gollum into accepting that their
interaction might be bound by rules out of a gentleman's
club—involving respect for fair play—rather than the
gutters. A clever stratagem that however much it wasn't
decisive in his besting Gollum, did stretch out his
encounter with him, giving him extended practice as a
conversationalist in a dangerous situation.
Gandalf couldn't have known Bilbo would meet Gollum,
but he knew there was a good chance that before his
encountering Smaug he'd find himself alone with foes
maybe with enough to them that part of the engagement
would involve dialogue and the bandying of wits. Being
a burglar and a scout to the company guaranteed as
much, for he'd be the first to encounter enemies—and
Gandalf would know Bilbo would default to his true
familiarity and expertise every time an alien situation
gave signal it would be amenable to it. Indeed, he's out
2432
in the lead with the company's first encounter in the

wild, their tangling with the mountain trolls, Bert, Tom
and William. He's not especially good here; unlike the
film, he isn't the one who strings out the conversation so
that “dawn claims them all” but rather only Gandalf solo
who does so. However, he wretches himself out of
simply being caught out and bewildered to in fact
converse with them, endeavoring a stratagem, built out
of what he's seen of them, that might have developed
their encounter in an unexpected and fortuitous way—
specifically, his offering to fill their gizzards in a
different way, as their cook.
He doesn't initiate the riddle game with Gollum, but he
reads that Gollum's ability—after having seen Bilbo's
sword—to restrain himself means that he might be
dealing with someone who may not be simply “fierce
and hungry,” so he certainly goes along with the
proposition. He blends courtesy in with slyness, giving
Gollum the chance to go first and thereby possibly
stymieing Bilbo before he's had any chance to ask his
own riddle, presumably out of generosity or decorum—
the person who proposes goes first—but really because
he “hadn't had time to think of a riddle.” He's skillful to
emphasize elements of their game which make it less a
terrible struggle than just good sport between
gamesmen. He teases Gollum, when he “whispered and
spluttered” in frustration, that “[t]he answer's not a
kettle boiling over, as you seem to think from the noise
you're making,” which leads to Gollum’s actually
2433
pleading with him. He also restrains him through

reminding him of the allowance (of time) that had just
been given him, “[h]alf a moment,” “I gave you a good
long chance just now.” There's not just a lot of back and
forthing but significant on the spot thinking involved.
His life was on the line and he managed his way past
numerous moments of doubt and possible missteps to
push the thing to a finish in his favor, favorably
prepping him for Smaug.
The riddle game is about withholding information,
keeping secrets, releasing them only when earned. Since
it wasn't earned, Bilbo never tells Gollum what he had
in his pockets. Bilbo doesn't at first tell the dwarves nor
Gandalf about the magical ring either—“not just now,”
he ruminates. Gandalf espies that Bilbo may not have
revealed everything about how he escaped the goblins,
but doesn't press him on it. I prefer to think he does this
because he realizes one of the things that makes Bilbo
different is that he isn't one who’ll divulge before he's
had a chance to process what he's learned or acquired
that he knows holds value, even as he himself might be
inclined to do. There may not be much significance to
the fact that just after Bilbo chooses to withhold
information we hear of the wizard's eager willingness to
disclose—“[t]he wizard, to tell the truth, never minded
explaining his cleverness more than once”—but then
again, there might be … and he might well have been
aware of it. At any rate, I like to think that Gandalf
realized that individuality, interestingness, doesn't come
2434
if you don't process the world to some extent on your

own, refusing to share if it means you hadn't given your
experiences a chance to ripen inside of you first. Bilbo
had read a library of books, and you're kidding yourself
if you think that after every tale he didn't sit back and
think about and argue with and otherwise personally sift
through what he'd been patiently engaging with, before
discussing what he had just read with a neighbor. If that
had been the case, he wouldn't have read in an armchair
within a beloved reclusive study but outside amidst the
commons, where every second sentence could be recited
for others' benefit and “your” own broadcast, if he felt
the urge. He would need to have depth to interest the
grand, learned Smaug. And mystery—a taste of the
bidding, withheld. And he would need to be one with
sufficient respect for and practice in withholding that
even when pressed by a hypnotic charmer like Smaug,
he could keep baiting an aroused curiosity so that
something might “innocently” be learned.
Gandalf isn't there for Bilbo when he faces Smaug,
something he might have known could prove the case,
despite his promise, for it not actually being his
adventure. But before he goes off he shows Bilbo a fair
simulacrum of what his encounter with him might
involve, as if to say, this is pretty much what you're
going to have to pull off. Gandalf enters the abode of the
great Beorn, a personage with a fierce temper but also a
healthy respect for good gamesmanship and well-told
stories, and finesses him perfectly. And Mr Baggins, in a
2435
way you never hear him in regards to the abundance of

sword-fighting or arrow-launching on his journeys,
remarks on the skill, as if a fellow adept admiring
another versed in the trade: “Mr Baggins saw how
clever Gandalf had been. The interruptions had really
made Beorn more interested in the story, and the story
had kept him from sending the dwarves off at once like
suspicious beggars.”
With Gandalf gone Bilbo emerges as the company
leader, and when he takes on Smaug all of Gandalf's
hopes for him are realized. Smaug, who'd only been
pretend-sleeping, tries to draw him out, but Bilbo
refuses—graciously, with flattery. With this, with denial
cagily sweetened into a gift, Smaug realizes he's hardly
dealing with some ass possessed of a battle-axe, who
could and should be dispatched just as soon as he could
be tricked into revealing himself, but someone smart
enough to make it as if by doing so a host would be
shortchanged a good time with a genuinely intriguing
guest. To let his thief know this, that for awhile he'll be
accorded, also, the role as a not-entirely-unwelcome
guest, he signals he's situated himself within a guest-
host framework, where the rule is no initiation of
termination until interest wains. So he offers the like of
“lovely titles, but lucky numbers don't always come
off,” and “[t]hat's better. But don't let your imagination
run away from you,” which overtly convey that he’s
genuinely interested in turning something with potential
into something finely honed—a game.
2436
Smaug wants him to continue not just to enable some

entertainment but to find out more about his intrusion as
a thief—who’s behind him? what’s the full intent?—of
course. But for reasons of enjoyment, his keeping it also
at this level means he's keeping things where the odds
even up between them … and Bilbo knows not just how
to pacify but by this time well how to strike for the
killing blow. Bilbo, with flare, had revealed all that
enticed about him—his being a mysterious barrel-rider,
and so on—and Smaug, in reply and having fun, reveals
all that bedazzles about his own grand self. His teeth, his
claws … but unfortunately also, his “impenetrable”
armor, which it turns out has got a piece missing,
uncared for because Smaug doesn’t care a wit about
mending. The movie shows this as just dumb luck on the
part of Bilbo, but the book has it that he was working
his way to just such a reveal to get further confirmation
of something he thought he noticed the first time he
found himself before him. And proving the loser in this
domain, Smaug is rendered so that a single skillfully
shot arrow can now end him. Bilbo got access to
information that would have made the expedition
feasible as a military enterprise right from the start.
So as I've said, I like to slightly alter the Gandalf in the
book to imagine him as thinking up a plausible way to
take down a formidable dragon who’d been lord of the
mountain long enough. I'm not sure I'm doing any
alteration of him, though, to think that what he had also
2437
hoped for was to accustom the world, maybe even

significantly, to what a long-term denizen of a
comfortable hole might offer it—that is, for a larger,
even perhaps ultimately more realm-saving purpose, as
well. Part of what makes Bilbo special is that no matter
how much people talk to him about roles, the sad fate of
who he is and of whom he really ought to become,
despite his adventures he never really lets go of who he
just intrinsically is from the start, which is someone
fundamentally decent whose love of his own well-
provisioned life means he can extend consideration
upon “yours” as well. Bilbo isn't just good to people
because he sees something for himself in it but because
he can put himself in other people's position and
emphasize. This has him do things which might look
small, irrelevant to the quest, pointless, but in fact if
they were well known outside the Shire the wild would
lose much of what is truly wicked about it and there'd be
less evil around to need questing against. I'm thinking of
his noticing Gollum's being “alone, miserable, lost,” and
deciding therefore it not only inappropriate to simply
countenance him as “foul” but to think it just to “stab”
him. And of how he decides to return an elf-guard's keys
so the guard wouldn't be blamed for their escape
because he’d appreciated his having been fair to them,
and could identity with his situation. And of course,
through his sundering them of the precious Arkenstone,
of how he “betrays” his friends by giving his “enemies”
a hold on them, and thereby doing nothing less than
2438
maybe preventing a war. The arrival of the goblin army

means they wouldn't have warred against each other
anyway, but the significance is in the larger realm
outside the Shire being more accustomed to this kind of
selfless and sophisticated way of reading a situation and
acting. It's in their noticing what he did here, not so
much how clever (not that it wasn’t a bit) but how
strong and good he had been here, letting himself be
seen as a traitor to his friends to have a chance to spare
them their lives. Not a one of them would have thought
of that.
Before he dies, Thorin acknowledges he learned

something new from Bilbo, something significant
enough that it ought fairly be carved as large onto
mountains as any visage of the ancients: “There is more
of good in you than you know, child of the kindly West.
Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If
more of us valued food and cheer and song above
hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Maybe with
messages like this blazoned everywhere, those worn
from the wild might range their way to Bilbo's
comfortable hole in the ground, much more respectfully
this time. There is after all in a sense a pint-sized Smaug
to be found there, only one who’s greatest proficiency
incurs with a swill of tea rather than with a blast of fire,
and who, rather than always render, can build you up
and mend.
Perpetrator history
2439
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nkp4NPdfRiI/VPcjxOmtuoI/AAAAAAAAAh0/d6QF-
I_GLhA/s1600/midnight-in-paris-locandina-trailer-716x1024.jpg
One of the interesting things that happened over the last

year was a realization amongst many on the left that
perpetrators of considerable power, could be taken
down. Even a few years ago, powerhouses like Bill
Cosby, Woody Allen, and Ghomeshi (in Canada, he was
a superstar) just couldn't be put in the situation, where
for crimes of child abuse and rape, they could actually
lose their power and be sundered to prison. If you were
one of their victims, you could feel that the collective
need to keep them vital would mean some means would
be found to silence your cause -- your protests would
have no chance: even many liberals wouldn't speak up
for you -- what presumption, you! Your best salve would
be to try not to read the next biography about them,
which would surely gloss over any accusations made
against them and salute them as great men. But this year,
you could feel that somehow this was changing ... that
now empathy for victims was such that more people
registered the harm these men had done and saw them
not as greats under (unfair) assault but more and more as
vile perpetrators. An example is Lena Dunhams'
estimation of not just Allen but his work, experiencing
the child-molester in his films that previously the left
had only kept on the shelf, proudly, as identity/class-
markers.
Something similar, I think, is happening now in relation
2440
to history. The number of times Pinker's book has been

referenced, along now with "the Moral Arc," is
astonishing. Pinker, as I've mentioned before, doesn't
say that modern wo/man is constitutionally different
people from living a thousand years ago, but does argue
that societies have become less and less violent across
the time. "The Moral Arc" comes closer to saying that
people themselves have changed, and much for the
better. This is not done in a climate of blaming early
societies, castigating them, but they evidently aren't
working to nevertheless bulwark the past against
modern judgment, as historians were once so capable of
doing.
People influenced by these works aren't so much
arguing that we have to careful when we judge people
living before us, because they were only living
according to what they knew -- and mightn't we
overselves find ourselves judged by historians in the
future? -- but rather arguing that since the past as it turns
out is full of perpetrating, sexist, immoral bastards --
even the best, the most liberal, of its greats, were sexist
a-holes or the like, and that includes the like of its
women, people like Virginia Woolf! -- the last thing we
would actually want is spend time with them. If you
want a sample of this reaction, check out this article at
Salon.com: No "Midnight in Paris, " rather, You
would've hated your heroes.
History is becoming, to more and more of the informed,
2441
a bit akin to DeMause's "nightmare we are just waking

up from," but one's association with it, one's protection
and support of it, not as innocent as this phrasing might
imply/allow. If you choose to enter the past, you're
choosing to associate with a room chock-full of
repellent Bill Cosbys, Ghomeshis, Woody Allens, and
Adrian Petersons. There is no difference in what you're
doing than if you chose, now, knowing what we know of
him, to nevertheless still go see Bill Cosby's latest
comedy performance, arguing that he's still got it!
I've never myself like the term psychohistory. I've

always wanted to drop the history part of it, and said as
much to DeMause. History is nightmare! Why the hell
are we latching ourselves to it! I wonder if in the new
climate that might be emerging if more and more young
progressive minds will refuse to abide his decision, and
study his innovative workings on child abuse and
society, on how widespread parental rejection is the
most profound factor in adults choosing to vote in
politicians that curb growth, on the emotional life of
nations, in some venue spared its beloved "psycho"
being latched to the abhorrent perpetrating sex-fiend --
history.
[Originally posted at Clio's History.]
Dispatches from Clio's History

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5bmrldPW86s/VO87JLEghXI/AAAAAAAAAg8/VLDi-X_L0DY/s1600/Clio-
Mignard.jpg

Feb 10
Hi, I thought I'd introduce myself.

I'm Patrick McEvoy-Halston. I've been reading
DeMause's work for years, and its influenced my
writings on literature and film. DeMause deals with
material that is tough, very tough, to associate with
progressives. The history part of what he's done is
being brought up again -- the idea that societies have
been progressing -- but those liberals advocating it,
like Steven Pinker (whom as a progressive I actually
do not trust), are careful not to suggest that human
beings have been improving, becoming biologically
superior, and this seems to have been sufficient to
prevent it from rankling.
This is of course what DeMause asserts, that
childrearing has been improving across time, as
mothers give their children more love than they
received, leading to people who are objectively
superior -- in his view, the liberal reader of the New
Yorker is a thousand times more emotionally evolved
than the New Guinea tribesman/woman. It is hard to
imagine this flying today as a prospect worth
exploring in any meeting of decent people. So too his
2443
explanations for the origins of autism,

homosexuality ... and overall his focus on the mother
as the central factor on whether peoples are peaceful
or violent.
I don't know how much work can be done on his
theories today -- collectively our brains may just be
too set on seeing it as rightwing -- but I'm hoping it's
being done, which is why I joined this list. DeMause's
thoughts have changed over time -- his first works talk
a lot about the importance of the fetus's journey,
something experienced by us all, but later becomes
just another "extension" upon which the influence of
the mother, how depressed or how loved she was, is
explored. I'd love if work was being done that noted
how his thoughts have changed, and whether they've
decided that his later work is more to be trusted (my
view). If someone actually showed how his work
could be improved, where his theories fail, in a way
that convinced me, I'd be delighted. I've read many
challenges, but admit I see it as regression, perhaps
because looking at his work straight means incurring
your own mother's wrath/abandonment, as it means
you're clearly not prepared to lie to help her save face
either, nor efface and co-opt to gain her approval.
If you're interested in seeing some of the work I've
done, writing about literature, feel free to explore it
here:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/25499784/Draining-the-
Amazon-s-Swamp-All-we-are-prepared-to-do-when-
2444
we-read-write-watch-make-live-our-fictions
or here: http://thepsycholiteraryreview.blogspot.ca
My current writings, my writings on film, are found
here: http://patricksjustincasesite.blogspot.ca
Thanks for your time. I'll be lurking, respectfully. But
as a finish, a thought: if one is DeMausian
psychohistorian, you really can't in good conscience
advocate the study of history. You go back in time,
you're dealing with people who were raised with less
warmth, and from whom you have little to learn --
they're a study of depravity. If it doesn't worsen you,
it's less time spent with those who could have
improved you.
—————-
drwargus
Feb 11
Lloyd's childrearing stages also create different

mindsets and worldviews in the children. The more
2445
the abuse, the more primitive the empathy and overall

cognition. When the child reaches puberty, he/she
begins to look at the world and ask: "where do I fit in?
What opportunities does the world offer for me?"
Societal status effects that vision. Privileged children
have more opportunities than those from Ferguson
Missouri.
Cognitive dissonance can set in when some strict,
rigid parenting sets up a worldview in the children that
does not match reality. My feeling is that ISIS is just
such a response. There is no room in "their perceived
outside world" for their religion, their beliefs, their
culture, their future, and ultimately their egos. (It is
analagous in our country when a fundamentalist
hears about evolution, or the right to life movement
clashes with unwanted pregnancies, or freedom of
religion clashes with nuns who brandish yardsticks.)
There is simply no cognitive space for this outside
world in their egocentric minds. They sense that they
are being attacked and the only thing that they know
how to do is fight back. People thus regress into very
primitive and tribal defense mechanisms.
One of my few criticisms of Lloyd's work is that he
tries to explain everything on the basis of psychology.
Parenting (nurture) effects DNA (nature), but once the
damage is done via child abuse, the environment is
excluded. The damaged psyches are not subject to
environment anymore. Wars are restaged traumas,
period. No room is made for life conditions (like
2446
poverty, access to resources, etc.) that are constantly

changing. PH thus becomes static as opposed to
dynamic.
Bill
Feb 11
Hey Bill. Yeah, that is essentially his view. If one

agrees with him, he's not so much static as he is
sticking to the point. Pointlessly straying less, he
encourages fertile explorations of the relationship
between mother and child in the first few years of life.
I'm sure you've read his criticism of the environment
as an explanation for historical change. He shows
some pretty exciting ways in which harsh
environments -- the kind we'd expect to have a major
influence on a person ... such things as fighting in
wars, living in denying terrains -- are ones we actually
choose to be in, if we've emerged out of certain
childhoods. It's interesting -- ballsy-- and helpful,
because such is the command now of "environment"
-- poverty, PTSD, geopolitical "shaming" -- as a
factor, one mentions someone's dismissing it and
you've obligated that person outside of serious
consideration.
2447
Personally, it matches up. Your brain develops in the

countless interactions with your mother (or mother
and father, if, like, I'm sure all of us, we came out
reasonably progressive families, where the father was
also present and involved), with most of that
happening early. If I was rich, the charities I would
donate to would be those that would ensure the early
contact between mother and child was assisted as
much as possible. Reducing poverty is of course
going to help that, but I'd want caregivers in to assist
the mother's interacting with the child, with no thought
of leaving until the first few years were done.
And about your first paragraph, I would like to mention
that Lloyd's view, concerning those whose childhoods
were as adverse as terrorists, is that that attitude,
"what does the world offer me?," is shut down mostly
by the young adult him/herself ... s/he feels in
attending to and thinking primarily of him/herself,
s/he's now outside his/her mother's approval and love
-- has been completely abandoned by her -- and
backs away immediately. What's particularly awful
about an austerity-world that shuts down opportunity
is it means that more emotionally evolved people,
who could make so much of their adult life, are getting
strangled ... something regressing adults who are
sacrificing them, are at some level pleased by.
Anyway, that's a couple long posts from me today, so
I'll leave it at that.
Patrick
2448
dr.bobstern
Feb 11
"Cognitive dissonance can set in when some strict,

rigid parenting sets up a worldview in the children that
does not match reality."
Same could probably be said about childrearing that
goes to the other extreme. That is, children who
expect to automatically be rewarded by the world
consistent with the training nexus they experienced as
young'uns: they got "self-esteem" trophies for merely
breathing.
Some "privileged" kids -- with all those choices and
resources -- can become famously dysfunctional.
I've also noticed that some children who were raised
in less rigidly religious homes have gone on to
become far more rigid and "observant" adults than
their parents.
Are any of the observations about childrearing
outcomes in relation to terrorism -- especially cross-
culturally -- borne out by any controlled statistical
studies?
Bob
2449
—————
Alice Maher
Feb 4
Do psychohistorians have anything to offer as the

world struggles to understand recent events? (Yes!!)
Can we put the emergence and behavior of ISIS in
historical and psychodynamic contexts in a way that
offers new insights and has the potential to be
useful?
If we can come together and do that, perhaps Clio or
representatives of the IPA could write an article for a
major publication….?
Feb 11
Hey Alice, have you read DeMause's thoughts on the

subject: http://psychohistory.com/books/the-
2450
emotional-life-of-nations/chapter-3-the-childhood-
origins-of-terrorism/
DeMause would see ISIS as just another example of
a people who've had it with societal growth. Not a
geopolitical phenomena, but a childrearing one,
where people who were rejected early by their
unloved, immature caretakers, people who
understood early that self-growth/attendance is bad
and sinful, no longer can handle their own
individuation and so re-bond to a maternal entity and
go to war against people they've projected all of their
own "bad" aspects into.
In his view, ISIS is just another way in which growth is
meant to be dampened -- the most prominent and
relevant today is austerity economics, which
collectively (though note: not the well-raised, richly
loved ones) people want because at some level they
know it lays waste to previous prosperity and crushes
"sinful" opportunity ... it forestalls greater disaster, like
absolute maternal rejection.
Patrick
—————
Molly Castelloe
Feb 14
2451
Speaking of "un-nurtured mothers" and the effect of

childrearing on history, here's a thought experiment about
how to talk to a toddler about racial stereotypes:
http://www.raceconscious.org/2015/01/stereotypes/
Alice Maher
Feb 14
Molly, I think this is a fascinating thought experiment.

On the one hand, I agree that it's important to teach
children not to stereotype, but whether that can be
done in language is another question. Sometimes
overemphasis can come across as protesting too
much and call the child's attention to something that
might not have entered their consciousness at all.
(Why is mommy making me think about black and
white when I'm thinking about how cool that bus is?)
Another issue has to do with... and here I'm taking this
in a somewhat different direction.... the sanitizing of
fairy tales and other children's stories. Children have
very powerful, scary fantasies of sex and aggression,
and if the message they get is that those things are
bad to think about, they might conclude that their
oedipal wishes are also bad. In the good old days,
fairy tale parents abandoned their children in the
woods and the children pushed them in the oven in
2452
revenge. Do those kinds of stories make children feel

that violence is acceptable, or do they communicate
that fantasy is acceptable but reality isn't, and help the
child understand the differences?
Feb 14
I don't understand, Molly. Are you posting this

because unloved, un-nurtured mothers raise children
who will project their own "badness" onto other
people, and think that perhaps one way to alleviate
this is to teach them about stereotypes? Or are you
posting this because talking about un-nurtured
mothers is itself surely the result of being under the
influence of stereotypes, which must be educated
away? If the latter, then what someone like DeMause
(and everyone who agrees with him) needs is
massive re-education, not a place at the
psychohistorical table.
—————
Brian
Feb 14
2453
The fact that infant care in our society is assigned

almost exclusively to females means that the deepest
and most unconscious introjects of both sexes are
female. It also means that when adults of both sexes
project this infantile material, it is onto women that we
project it. Note that all this operates independently of
the quality of parenting, which has been Lloyd
deMause's focus. Dorothy Dinerstein and Nancy
Chodorow did explore the abovementioned gender
asymmetry, and its implications for sex stereotyping.
Concern with the quality of parenting and concern
with sex stereotyping are not mutually exclusive.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTEto females
DROID
Feb 14
The fact that infant care in our society is assigned

almost exclusively to females means that the deepest
and most unconscious introjects of both sexes are
female.
Just noting, for anyone who isn't aware of his
theories, that this too — however true it may be —
2454
isn’t DeMausian. In his discussion of the denial of

psychology in the study of society, within chapter five
of "Emotional Life of Nations," DeMause writes:
Ever since Kroeber launched cultural determinism as
the central anthropological theory early in the
century,9 tautological explanations have dominated
the social sciences as is apparent in Lowie’s claim
that culture is “a thing sui generis, the formula being
omnia cultura ex cultura.” That this tautological
circularity has made anthropological evolutionary
theory sterile is slowly becoming evident. In fact,
according to Tooby and Cosmides, the Standard
Social Science Model of cultural determinism has
recently collapsed. This model, they say, states that
“the cultural and social elements that mold the
individual precede the individual and are external to
the individual. The mind did not create them; they
created the mind,” a theory that turns out, they say, to
explain nothing
In DeMause’s view (and of course my own), cultures
where you see women spend most of the time with
children are ones where the women badly needed
their children to make up for love denied them
elsewhere — as stimulants and anti-depressants —
and where men have not much interest in, are afraid
of, their wives and the maternal home, and are far
more interested in playing war at work than kneading
playdough with their kids.
In the DeMausian view, as women become more
2455
emotionally healthy, through the central evolutionary

mechanism of improved love over generations
through the funnel of the mother-daughter dyad, as
they come to have less of a need to use their children
and become more genuinely nurturant with them, you
get boys who grow up, not only better nurtured but
less afraid of women, and much more insistent on
helping out — not a chore, but an opportunity!
You get enough of these types of people together,
you’ve got a society which doesn’t assign the role of
childrearing to anyone, but rather beams of the love
that happens when most of the parents are
emotionally mature enough to delight in their journeys
with their beloved children. If evolved people are
surrounded by people who think differently, they’ll
superimpose their own natural way of wanting to exist
as a family over whatever looks to be forced on them,
like Jews amongst more regressive Germans in
19th/20th century Germany.
-- Patrick
—————-
Feb 12
If we are in one of those historical stages DeMause

2456
writes about where collectively the majority no longer

had the childhoods to sustain further progress, where
overall society will lose its cosmopolitan aspects and
become provincial, we should see more and more of
us talking about how we're hearing voices in our
heads, voices -- those of our internal parental (i.e.
maternal) persecutors -- telling us to sabotage or kill
those who represent mother-neglecters ... aka the
spoiled, the self-centred, the selfish.
Kanye West stepped up on stage once again during
these Grammy's to once again protest someone's
winning over his Beyonce -- the Queen Bee. In
DeMausian estimation, he's the good boy, acquiring
love and respect from his mother that he in fact may
have never received in real life, by serving as her
loyal protector, by abdicating himself within/to Her.
Link about this at Jezebel
Elsewhere, Joan Walsh at Salon.com noted how
Jonathan Chait's well-read defence of white
progressive women from POC (people of colour) at
NYMagazine was done out of a strong feeling of
coming to their defence, out of chivalry. She thought it
was insulting to women ... as if they couldn't speak up
for themselves. But if this is another instance of this
DeMausian phenomena, where even many liberals
now are rejecting their autonomous selves, it's not so
much foul for taking over another's voice but for
becoming completely party to someone else's -- the
maternal internal persecutor within our heads ...
2457
contained, according to DeMause, in the right

hemisphere, of all those of mothers who were denied
respect and love.
Is there anything more important to our time now than
an appreciation of the phenomena of growth panic?
-- Patrick
Brian
Feb 12
Welcome to the listserv, Patrick. I consider myself a

kind of neo-deMausian and have some problems with
Lloyd’s ideas as he originally stated them. I am
especially skeptical of applications of his ideas to
public events with insufficient attention to the
institutional realities that provide the stable and long
term context in which group fantasies operate. If the
US is in the grip of a growth panic, it’s news to me.
Stock prices are booming, but this has little to do with
the real economy, which is technically in a recovery
but in which very little real prosperity is trickling down
to ordinary people. The unemployment rate is lower
now than in the Great Recession largely because the
labor force participation rate is depressed, a measure
of people leaving the work force because they don’t
think they will ever find work. A person is counted as
2458
“employed” if they have a part time, minimum wage

job, and many people need to cobble together two or
more such jobs to earn a living and still are having
trouble making ends meet, especially with rising food
costs (see Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed for
a realistic picture of what it is like living on the
minimum wage.) Wage growth remains stagnant or
sluggish at best.
If there is a growth panic group fantasy, it is surely not
the fantasy of the majority of Americans, but most
likely of the upwardly mobile minority who are
prospering in this economy and especially of the
political and media elites who a pumping the mass
public full of messages about how well everything is
going, messages that no doubt confuse people, or
make them cynical about how out of touch the elites
are, but which surely cannot eradicate the reality of
their daily lives, which are filled with economic
insecurity and disillusionment about the American
Dream. I have written about all this in my book The
Middle Class Fights Back: How Progressive
Movements Can Restore Democracy in America
(Praeger 2012). http://middleclassfightsback.org/
Brian
Feb 12
2459
If there is a growth panic group fantasy, it is surely not

the fantasy of the majority of Americans
Why not? If one is a DeMausian, the Great
Depression owed to the majority's growth panic --
they wanted it to kill the 20s opportunities and growth.
This we've done to a great extent, but nevertheless
progressives are succeeding in other ways ... it's
harder than it was to get away with sexism,
homophobia, etc. Society is ceasing to be a place that
will "handle" needs you need to detach yourself from,
so you can go on with your everyday life.
The rich may not be feeling any growth panic: they
may at some level understand that their
independence as human beings is being
shortchanged, as they play the role of the dismissive
parent, the rest of the populace will suffer through but
try not to complain too much about.
Patrick
Brian
Feb 12
RE: [cliospsyche] Re: Kanye West ... "voices in

my head"
2460
Before we can assess what a group fantasy might be,

we need some minimal grasp of reality in order to be
able to assess what is fantasy and what is reality. If
you are in the middle of a housing bubble and you
think you are in a period of economic growth and
prosperity for ordinary people, you are living in a
fantasy for sure, but not the kind deMause posited.
The bubble will not be able to sustain itself because
asset prices must eventually come into line with the
underlying value of the assets and increasing debt in
unsustainable. Reality exists and exerts its effects
independently of our fantasies.
The physical world is a reality that exists
independently of individual and group fantasies. If
you don’t believe me, try jumping from the top of a tall
building with the fantasy that you can fly. Similarly,
real median compensation (wages and benefits
corrected for inflation) have been mostly stagnant in
the United States since around 1974, a departure
from previous decades due to deindustrialization and
capital flight. Rising levels of consumption were
sustained by increasing consumer debt, an inherently
unstable state of affairs that had to come to an end
eventually and did, once in the late 80’s and again
with the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008-2009.
No correction of the underlying problem—which would
require a more egalitarian distribution of property and
income—has occurred and so whatever economic
growth is occurring now is also unstable. There could
2461
not have been a growth panic in recent decades

because there was no economic growth for the
average American except a growth of debt. If there
was a group fantasy, it was the fantasy that people
could enjoy a rising standard of living even as their
wages and benefits were leveling off and they were
going deeper into debt. The values of their houses
were increasing, but it was a bubble and after 2008
many found themselves under water with their
mortgages. This is reality no less than the description
of the law of gravity.
There are solutions to this crisis of advanced
capitalism but they require institutional and policy
reforms; wishful thinking will not do. I have
elaborated this analysis and these solutions, including
worker ownership and control of enterprises and a
Green New Deal, in my book.
http://middleclassfightsback.org/ I believe that mass
psychology matters and that group fantasies play a
role in politics, but Lloyd’s theory of growth panic does
not correspond to the economic facts as I understand
them. This is my second post for today and most
likely my last; other responsibilities beckon.
Brian
Joel Markowitz
Feb 12
2462
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Kanye West ... "voices in my

head"
To repeat again: I agree with Brian that deMause
excellently documented child-abuse-- but that his
applications of his understanding of child-abuse to
history have been mistaken.
Joel
Brian
Feb 12

my head"
Joel, just to clarify, I was not critiquing de Mause’s
theory about the impact of child-rearing on history but
only his theory that growth panic can explain group
fantasies of the mass public. I should add that when
the rich and political elites impose austerity policies
on the middle class and the poor, growth panic can’t
explain that behavior either. If they were imposing the
austerity on themselves, the theory might make
sense, but not as an explanation for imposing
austerity on others. That has a very simple
explanation—the rich feel entitled to appropriate the
wealth that others produce and see progressive
taxation as a kind of theft, so they want to starve the
2463
public sector so they can keep their own taxes to a

minimum. This is just class war, pure and simple.
There are unconscious motivations involved in
austerity policies, to be sure, but I don’t see how grow
panic can be one of them.
As for child rearing practices, I would say that
DeMause was mistaken that it provides a sufficient
determinism for explaining all change in history, which
he called his “psychogenic theory of history,” but I
think there is some truth to this theory and I don’t
want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which
you seem prepared to do. It is plausible to me that
much of the decrease in violence over the course of
history, as discussed by Stephen Pinker, John
Mueller, James Payne and others is attributable to
advances in child rearing. We discussed Lloyd’s
psychogenic theory on this list and the current issue
of Psychohistory News (attached) contains an article
that gives excerpts from this discussion. The article,
entitled “How Much Does Child Rearing Really Impact
History,” appears on page one of the attached. I know
you don’t find my arguments convincing, Joel, and I
don’t find your Oedipal theory of history convincing
either, at least as a single factor that explains
everything or the vast bulk of what needs to be
explained. We will just have to agree to disagree.

2464
Feb 13
There could not have been a growth panic in recent

decades because there was no economic growth for
the average American except a growth of debt.
It's true, a lot of Americans, a lot of Americans of

poorer childrearing, have not just seen their income
remain stagnant, but have had their hopes for the
future effectively squashed. But America grows
anyway ... in ways that affect them. Unlike the 70s,
you can't get away as easily being a racist, being
sexist, being a homophobe. You can't get away as
easily resting content in your past-times ... if you like
football, you're going to start hearing that it needs to
be shut down because it's a brain-damaging, barbaric
sport, you're going to have a sense that it's future,
ultimately, is no longer inevitable; if you like video
games, you're losing the protection of it being a
"geek" pastime -- something people who proved
eventual winners engaged in -- as it is now repeatedly
criticized for its sexist representations of women -- i.e.
"gamer gate."
All around you, the people you used to be able to
casually hurt ... are being protected, and the societal
force that would do that is progressive: at some level
it's still for encouraging possibility in human life, even
if not especially yours. So too news of marijuana
legalization, gay marriage, news of increasing
2465
minimum wages in cities, news of healthcare slowly

becoming available to all Americans, news that the
stifling and joy-killing "teaching to the test" as the
nation's overall favoured teaching pedagogy is
increasingly under attack ... there's a sense, even,
that overall wages might even start going up (and
perhaps too, debt forgiveness? -- I've seen more
discussion of it), and again under progressive
leadership -- one that scolds rather than finds virtue in
its most regressive citizenry.
What has not yet been lost about this post-world war
two world is the sense that the purpose of life is still
self-realization -- what Obama did -- not to "selflessly"
sacrifice yourself into some dumb group identity,
some cause, some fight, so perhaps some generation
down the line can enjoy the pleasures you're denying
yourself.
But DeMause argued that Germans eventually turned
against the freedom-enabling Weimar republic, his
focus wasn't on the working class but more the middle
classes -- those of them who for a good while made
something of the freedom ... The growth panic I guess
I'm concerned about most, isn't what those who "are
beholden" to Fox News are favouring, but those who
actually for a good while had good-enough
childrearing to be able to cheer and support Obama. If
they begin to understand that progress isn't being
countered by an increase in misery somewhere -- that
some sacrifices aren't being made to the maternal
2466
maw -- they'll begin to feel that they themselves are

vulnerable to some sort of apocalyptic punishment.
I'm not really looking forward to a day when the
middle class fights back. I do not trust that their "fight
back" won't be something along the lines of 30s
Germany, quite frankly. I want a cosmopolitan society
where progressives ("coastals") keep insisting the rest
of the country adjust ... and since places like San
Francisco, Seattle, New York are now not just
concerning themselves with such things as
environmental reforms but reforms in wage and
worker protections (eg. increased minimum wage to
15 dollars an hours; retail worker rights (in San
Francisco)), this will mean their being expected to see
great promise in the framework we're already working
within, rather than insisting on something completely
outside (as Chris Hedges advocates, or, rather, sees
as the only means by which reform can be effected),
something angry and punitive ... something revenge-
seeking.
-- Patrick
Feb 13
Also, Brain, I read the newsletter you posted. This bit

2467
-- My theory is that in a large majority of

cases the person idealizes the punitive
father, while internalizing the father’s
contempt for weakness and dependency,
which is associated with the nurturing
mother -- suggests that you're not Neo-DeMausian
but anti-DeMausian. To DeMause, those of
regressive, conservative Republican backgrounds
would of had un-nurtured mothers who used their
children to satisfy unmet needs. They don't come to
hating the weak and dependent owing to
internalization -- admiration of their fathers -- but
because this was how they felt when they
were being abused by their mothers, this was
what a good part of their childhoods felt like -- this
who they mostly suspect they are and always will be,
and so disown!
Also they do it because when their mothers -- seeing
their children as rejecting them, deliberately, just like
their own mothers did -- abandon them/punish them
for their individuation, they try desperately to figure
out what it was they did or were that had earned this
apocalyptic occurrence. Since what they mostly were
weak and dependent, they conclude that being weak
and dependent is a very bad, a very wicked thing.
This is DeMause ... when it comes to those who aren't
of progressive families, the father is a marginal
2468
influence and the unloved-and-therefore-incestuous-

not-nurturing mother ... is all. Talking about the
strong father is another way people of these
backgrounds can try and build him up so to imagine
their own mothers somehow thereby being dwarfed.
Admittedly, DeMause does this in his own work.
Despite the whole thing being about mothers, he
almost never mentions his own (though it's always
implicit, and he does once refer to her as abandoning),
and instead, most memorably, describes his punitive,
spanking father ("made me disassociate and believe I
was flying"... or something like that) ... There have to
be reasons why DeMause, whose theories overtly
favour a highly progressive, a highly cooperative and
nurturing and socialist and feminist society, is cited
by libertarians and even National Organization for
Men types.
-- Patrick
Brian
Feb 13

my head"
Patrick, if labelling me anti-deMausian makes sense
to you, so be it. For what it’s worth, Lloyd liked the
2469
article of mine referenced in the newsletter and

published it in the Journal of Psychohistory 39, 3
(Winter 2012). To my knowledge he has never
published anything anti-deMausian. I republished it
with his permission as an appendix to my book. In
any case, I am not anxious to pass a litmus test of
any kind; the only standards of quality that I recognize
are those of the scientific method. De Mause has
always claimed that his theories are scientific and as
such they need to pass the test of empirical validation
or they should be discarded. In my article, I cite the
evidence on which my theory of political attitudes is
based and note the need for more empirical work in
this area; I argue that this is consistent with the
essence of Lloyd’s psychogenic theory of history, but
not necessarily in the form he conceived of it. If you
want to read the article, here is the link:
http://middleclassfightsback.org/resources/Psycholog
y%20of%20the%20Radical%20Right.pdf
I find it interesting that for you the notion of the
American middle class fighting back conjures up
fantasies about Nazi Germany and “something angry
and punitive ... something revenge-seeking.” Angry,
yes, but why fascist, punitive, and revenge seeking?
As far as I know, the human fight-flight response—the
basis of both anger and fear—is an instinctive
capability that has served us very well over our
several million years as a species. Anger is a healthy
response to any threat to the integrity of human
beings, whether physical or other. Sometimes fear is
2470
also appropriate, but only anger can motivate the kind

of political action needed to avert imminent
catastrophe on this planet.
Predatory investors and CEOs representing a
miniscule fraction of the earth’s population are
maintaining, with the unwitting cooperation of the
majority, a political/economic system that perpetuates
global poverty, war, and ecological degradation. If the
majority of people don’t get angry at this system and
take appropriate political action, public affairs on this
planet are in big trouble. It was militant political action
of this sort during the populist movement that brought
about the reforms of the Progressive Era, enraged
people in the streets who formed the social base of
Roosevelt’s New Deal, and angry women and men
who fought for racial equality, an end to the Vietnam
War, women’s and gay rights, environmental
protection, and more.
Of course anger is not enough and misdirected anger
can certainly be destructive. But the anger exists
quite apart from anything I do or fail to do, and it is
already being misdirected to myriad scapegoats, from
religious and racial minorities, to gays, to union
officials and unionized workers. I wrote The Middle
Class Fights Back to focus popular anger where it
belongs and can do the most good—on a state
capitalist system that concentrates wealth and power
at the expense of ordinary people and indeed of the
earth’s ecology, on which a humane and sustainable
2471
future depends. Most importantly, I provided a policy

agenda that can actually create such a future, which
provides a coherent direction for progressive
movements. This policy agenda is encapsulated in 7
one-minute pod casts at:
http://middleclassfightsback.org/new-book.php
Brian
Feb 14

head"
If populism is not so much what it was in the 60s,
which according to the DeMausian take was a period
where the populace felt they were permitted growth, a
period which allowed the most progressive of them to
take the societal lead, but more like it was in the
(1920s-regretting) 30s, then it's worth getting
concerned about. In the DeMausian view, the 30s was
a period where populism amounted to people
abandoning their individuated selves and bonding into
maternal groups -- the volk, nationalism -- and the
target, the enemy, wasn't just CEOs, but more those
who best represented our "guilty" individuated selves.
These would be the most liberal, the most progressive
amongst us ... in Germany, it was the Jews. I see a
2472
future where wonderful people like Alfie Kohn, who

believes children shouldn't be afflicted with
homework, and that there is no such thing as a
spoiled child, will be seen as enemies -- you don't
think we're all spoiled rotten, gluttonous people! look
around you!!! I see a future where those trying to de-
pollute our environment of stereotypes, encourage
empathy, will be seen as having allowed our nation to
be vulnerable to infiltration and attack, and be
deemed traitors.
The DeMausian take is to see revenge-seeking as
primarily revenge against early childhood
humiliations, against one's mother. In the DeMausian
take, if society is exploitive ... this is actually what the
populace wanted -- for example a hard-money,
austerity environment is one way a populace
punishes itself for previous growth. If we're in the
revenge-seeking mood, a la DeMause, then we'll split
our mother into one wholly good, which we'll bond to,
and wage war against the other.
I'm glad you're open to the idea of "predatory CEOs
and unwitting cooperation of the majority" is not just
reality but something that requires proof. I myself
subscribe to the DeMausian thesis that the majority
may unconsciously cooperate, but never unwittingly,
and that predatory CEOS have only the power we
want them to have -- such is the pleasure we can
derive from suffering.
You're aware of the DeMausian take on fight-flight. He
2473
talks about it differently ... in conjunction with

individuation panic and flight away from internal
reality. Most certainly not as benign, nor (thank god!)
universal.
The argument that we're inevitably doomed if we don't
get angry and fight is not DeMausian. In his view,
what primarily ends a period of suffering is the simple
fact of the majority deciding that they've done enough
penance for previous growth, and now will once again
allow themselves more good. I know that a lot of good
people agree with your point of view, but it's not
DeMausian.
If your take is right, if your take is what psychohistory
has to offer, it doesn't seem so urgent to me that more
people study it -- for isn't it in its essence mostly
already be carried out in thought today? Evil CEOS,
virtuous public, problematic stern fathers, righteous
fights, universal human drives ... not much shaking up
there.
-- Patrick
Trevor Pederson
Feb 14

head"
2474
Hi Patrick
Can you say a little more about what you mean by
"our nation”?
Feb 14

head"
Hello Trevor, I think I've been kindly warned via
private post not to post too much, but it must be okay
to respond to your question. By "nation," I mean group
... and by group, in this context, I mean our mothers,
our girth of our mothers, which we in our feeling
abandoned, are pleased to have found means to be
allowed to count ourselves within ... knights to
wherever She would issue us.
-- Patrick
—————
Feb 14
2475
DeMause argues that when people collectively feel

abandoned by their internal parental (maternal)
persecutors, who've had it with all their growth, they
will begin to re-bond with her in some kind of group --
the German Volk being an example of this. He argues
they will split their understanding of her, bonding only
with her "good" aspects and dispatching the rest onto
some "other" -- during the Iraq war, he points out how
Saddam Hussein was depicted in cartoons as a
demon-mother who tortured kids.
With this in mind, I would like to encourage list
members to take a look at the new Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition, just out on the newsstands ... does it
suggest that people are preparing themselves for this
kind of re-bonding, are feeling (especially) drawn to
experiment with splitting the feminine? Take a good
look at the cover, then flip the magazine over and
explore the other side. Sports Illustrated, of course, is
not a magazine that our most emotionally evolved,
our most progressive citizens, exactly covet
reading ... it's a good mag to look at to explore what's
appealing, now, to those down a notch ... unless of
course one believes that corporations engineer the
mental states of consumers, then it provides just
another example of their vile twistedness.
--- Patrick
Brian
2476
Feb 14
Yes, only a left wing ideologue would think that

corporations engineer the mental states of
consumers. Any fool knows that they spend
hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising every
year as a public service.
Feb 14
Exactly, they do ... what bizarre needs the public must

have! So different from common lore/sense --
someone ought to address them!
-- Patrick
Trevor Pederson
Feb 14
Has everyone seen the Century of the Self and how

psychoanalysis was involved in modern advertising?
2477
https://vimeo.com/85948693
david
Feb 14
Thank you Trevor for posting this link. It’s one episode of a
BBC production in 2002. It’s just under an hour, quite well
done and worth watching. It shows how both Brian and
Patrick are correct.
—————-
Alice Maher
Feb 15
As we all know, history is important. The history of

Catholicism and Freudianism is in my bones.
In contrast, given that I never read Lloyd De Mause or
participated in discussions of his model, my
knowledge of the history of the IPA and the evolution
of psychohistory is full of holes. I've been very
interested in the different interpretations of his model
presented by members of this group, but since I don't
have a foundation I find it hard to respond.
2478
Does anyone have a respected, accurate summary

article, written by or about him, that I could read? Or
perhaps we could read and discuss together?
(Forgive me if this question has been posted before.
I'm sure it was, but it was probably at a time when I
was too busy or less interested.)
Thanks!
Alice
Feb 15
Hi Alice. I wonder if chapter 5 in his "Emotional Life of

Nations," might be the place to go. It is longish, but a
good quaff of what he thinks.
-- Patrick
Alice Maher
Feb 15
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: De Mause summary

article...?
2479
Thanks so much, Patrick! I'm looking forward to

reading it.
Sent from my iPhone
—————
Molly Castelloe
Feb 15
Patrick,
In response to your question, I sent the story of the mother
trying to teach the child about steroetypes because I felt we
were discussing the un-nurtured mother and childrearing at
an intellectual distance (maybe a steroetyped way, too?)
and wanted to move toward another (more emotional)
dimension, and get closer to the mother-child dynamic.
Many mothers in my neighborhood are trying to "re-
educate" their children in just this way. What I find with
my own kids, 8 and 10, is that it can at times be very hard
to put myself in their world and perspective.
Who remembers it can be hard for a child to sit still at the
dinner table and maybe 5 mins is enough to expect? Or
that if their feet don't touch the floor b/c the chair is too tall,
maybe they need a footstool underneath to help them keep
still or more grounded?
Some of DeMause's theories blame the mother/nanny too
much, it seems to me. The nuclear family and modes of
2480
caretaking have changed radically. There are many more

fathers involved and women working at home, too.
I like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's idea of "alloparenting" and the
development of children dependent on both mothers and an
array of others: fathers, babysitting coops, tag-teaming that
mothers do, playdates, people in addition to the biological
mother. (Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of
Mutual Understanding, (2011).
Alloparenting is contrasted with "exclusive care," (rearing
by only one caregiver).
This kind of caregiving assistance from the father or others
is beneficial for maternal emotional fitness. It also reflects
the mother's trust in her environment, or, on the other hand,
her reluctance and anxiety to allow anyone else to care for
her child and her distrust of her surrounds.
Thanks for your contributions to the list.
Molly
Feb 15
Thanks for the response, Molly. For what it's worth, I

don't think there's any mother-blame in DeMause's
works, for there's no choice in the matter ... if a
woman is well-cared for, properly respected, she'll
2481
raise loving children; if she was denied all that, she'll

use her children -- period. The ability to choose
different, doesn't somehow squeak in there at all.
There is actually no one available to point fingers at in
DeMause's works. Basically, he's saying we started
off as a species some several hundred thousand
years ago, where children got care only because of
how they stimulated the mother ... love hadn't entered
the picture at all. Since then, we've had a lot of work
to to, but some of us are now finally getting it right.
The only thing to possibly blame, that is, is the
wretched start evolution granted us with.
Alloparenting sounds genius. They key, though, is
how emotionally evolved these multi-parents are ...
one single mother, working alone with her children, is
vastly better than her-and-support group, if she's
more emotionally evolved than they are. DeMause
talks about the dangers of extended families, where
grandmothers intrude on their daughters' care of their
children, to the ill of the children. But, yes, I get the
gist of what you prefer, and I agree ... I like the idea of
the state getting involved and helping people raise
their children as well -- sending in parent-assistants.
-- Patrick
P.S. I'm very glad you're enjoying my contributions.
—————
Brian
2482
Feb 15
Alice, your question about deMause is a good one.

Maybe Patrick, Denis O’Keefe, David Lotto or
someone else can suggest something. My familiarity
with Lloyd’s work is based mostly on Foundations of
Psychohistory, which I don’t think contains a concise
statement of his ideas.
I have some further thoughts about Century of the
Self. Although the filmmaker in telling the Edward
Bernays story frames it as an application of
psychoanalysis to propaganda, I wonder if this is
really valid? It seem to me that Bernays’ thinking was
really behaviorist, and in fact the Wikipedia article on
him said that he also drew on Pavlov. We didn’t need
Freud to know that sex is pleasurable, and
fundamentally what Bernays did, it seems to me was
to use sex to sell products and ideas. Isn’t this just an
application of Pavlov’s psychology on humans using
mass communications? You want people to buy
something, so you create an association in their
minds between the product and a sexy woman. Or
you want people to reject communism, so you
associate it with something that causes fear. It seems
that Bernays built his whole career on cranking this
Pavlovian paradigm with business and political
leaders, and did so with indefatigable salesmanship.
What is particularly Freudian about this?
2483
drwargus
Feb 15
Re: [cliospsyche] RE: psychoanalysis and social

control
I think the author believes it to be Freudian because
the desires our subconscious. He was appealing to
subconscious desires, not rational or conscious
desires.
Thank you very much for posting this restaurants. Do
you know where we could find the other three
episodes?
Feb 15
I agree, Brain -- Pavlov.

Dangerous idea, that -- a small group of corrupt
people are determining the entire behaviour of the
masses, for as we know that's what Germans thought
of the Jews. The left says this is what corporations are
doing, the right that this is what liberal people in
2484
university (or liberal courts) are doing. Personally, I

think the reason this idea is taken for granted
amongst the left is suspect and worth exploring ... one
is allowed to try and make the life for better for
people, even if you acknowledge you find it hard to
actually like them much i.e., they needed to be good-
hearted but sadly naive and uninformed.
Chris Hedges argues in "Death of the Liberal Class"
that (our current crop of) liberals are always
representing themselves as the populace's guardians,
but in fact find it/them disgusting, and enjoy thinking
of them as so playable. I don't like, don't trust,
Hedges, but I think this is true ... and why should they
like them? they've been regressing for 20 years now
and have become a Fox News crowd -- it's an honest
and astute assessment.
-- Patrick
P.S. I'm a DeMausian, which means I believe that
people, the masses, can actually at times want in
leaders who'll enact policies which will not just kill
other people but (during periods of atonement for
previous incurred growth) bring upon themselves a
Depression, make their own selves miserable. If you
believe this, which, again, I do, then the idea that
ultimately advertising is working at the bequest of the
public, that they don't engineer tastes but maybe only
put a bunch of stuff out there as trial balloons (the role
he also ascribes to newspaper headlines), which the
people will only latch onto if it matches their current
2485
needs, seems readily plausible. This means

advertising is only effective if it plays to the needs of
people now, and advertisers -- however they like to
think of themselves -- are actually in sort of the
masochistic role, of urgently guessing what mood,
exactly, the finicky mass might be in today. If the
advertisers disappear, the public will find some way to
satisfy their developing needs, however inadequately
without their group delegates -- i.e., advertisers --
having trod some options for them.
The power of authorities has little place in his works ...
for a very interesting example of this, explore his
exploration of Milgram's experiments, where he
concludes that people didn't inflict shocks because
they were manipulated or cowed, but because the
setting provided cover for them to guilt-free switch into
their persecutory selves, born out of unloved
childhoods. They used the university; they used the
experiments.
I'm lead now to think of Goldhagens' study "Hitler's
willing executioners." What I appreciated about it was
that it went at the idea that Germans had been
manipulated, played, and argued that, no, Germans
were the problem ... Hitler was incidental: there were
a million people who could have played out his group-
delegate role, without history changing one iota.
Brian
2486
Feb 15
RE: [cliospsyche] RE: psychoanalysis and social

control
I believe the other episodes are available on
YouTube. They are entitled, The Engineering of
Consent, There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads,
and Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering.
Bill, Oedipal theory and all the rest of the Freudian
system address defense mechanisms and other
psychological processes that are unconscious for
most people. But it is common knowledge that sex is
pleasurable and that is all Bernays needed to know in
order to condition behavior on Pavlovian principles.
People may be unconscious that they are being
manipulated, but that is not the same as repression in
the Freudian sense. What seems new in Bernays’
work is to use the infrastructure of mass
communications to control with a behaviorist agenda
the images and information to which millions of
people are exposed. It seems to me that it works on
Pavlovian principles and doesn’t utilize anything that
is specifically Freudian.
Patrick, thanks for suggesting Chapter 5 of
DeMause’s Emotional Life of Nations. I will read this
with great interest, as soon as I can carve out a few
hours on my agenda. At the moment, I am running
behind on a number of other projects that require my
2487
attention.
Brian
Dcarveth
Feb 15
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: psychoanalysis and social

control
Patrick, this echoes the difference between Freud's
and Bion's theories of group psychology. For Freud
the leader (compare the advertiser) dominates the
group; for Bion, if the leader doesn't lead the group
where the group wants to go, the group simply
chooses a new leader who will.
Best,
Don
Brian
Feb 15
RE: [cliospsyche] Re: psychoanalysis and social

control
2488
I want to address three issues that have come up

repeatedly on this list: the problem of what I call
“psychohistorical reductionism,” the alleged innate
destructiveness of people, and the class and
psychoclass specificity of group fantasies.
First, regarding reductionism, it is common for
theoretical innovators to over-emphasize the
explanatory power of their ideas, and Lloyd deMause
is no exception. In fact, in the passage Patrick
quoted, he went further and simply inverted the
“Standard Social Science Model of cultural
determinism,” replacing the claim of its adherents that
it explained everything with his own claim that it
explained nothing and that all historical phenomena
and change in history can be reduced to individual
psychology and group fantasies rooted in the
childhood experience of individuals. While I think
there is a lot of truth in deMause’s psychogenic theory
of history, stating it in this reductive way is misguided
and if this is psychohistory, then mainstream
academics are entirely justified in rejecting it.
I can illustrate the issue here with an analogy.
Superstring theorists in physicists claim to have a
“theory of everything” because they have identified a
unified field of all the laws of physics. But although all
of nature is physical, not all of it can be reduced to the
phenomena that exist at atomic and lower levels of
simplicity. In reality, biology requires other laws of
nature, for example the laws of game theory and
2489
other determinants of natural selection. These

biological laws must be consistent with the laws of
physics but are not mere extrapolations of the laws of
physics. The reason is that living systems, while
comprised of the same matter and energy as stars
and minerals, have properties and characteristics that
inanimate matter and energy do not possess. Biology
cannot be reduced to physics.
Similarly, social phenomena such as culture, systems
of production, and the state have properties that
cannot be reduced to the psychology of individuals.
For example, the production of goods and services is
an inherently social activity in which both capital and
labor are necessary constituents. Virtually every
individual has some relationship with the system of
production and their thought and behavior is
necessarily shaped to a large extent by their social
location. Hedge fund managers occupy a subculture
with a very different view of the world than public
school teachers, for example. The nature and
evolution of social systems is determined by laws and
a logic that operate only at that level of complexity
and not the level of individual psychology and
behavior.
For example, the accumulation of capital is something
that can only occur within a set of institutional
arrangements that individuals can conform to or resist
but cannot create or alter as individuals. These
arrangements can be altered by individuals acting in
2490
groups, but when that occurs, new phenomena come

into play—for example, the way political parties
interact with interest groups and with the branches of
government—that cannot be understood as a simple
extension of the laws that govern the individual.
There is necessarily an interaction between individual
and group psychology, on the one hand, and the
institutional processes that occur in governments,
corporations, universities and so on.
Second, regarding innate destructiveness, the first
episode of Century of the Self depicted how Freud
and many others made sense of the savage
destructiveness of World War I, and after Freud of
World War II and Nazi Germany. The notion that
these things were the expression of deep and
universal destructive impulses does not survive the
most elementary kind of rational scrutiny. For
example, the overwhelming majority of soldiers who
enacted the bloody killing in the world wars did not do
so without coercion. They were drafted and faced
ostracism and imprisonment if they did not comply.
Then they were put under military discipline and faced
the threat of court-martial or worse for insubordination
or desertion. Thrust into such extreme circumstances
under duress, ordinary people did enact mass killing,
but this says nothing whatsoever about murderous
impulses of the individual or of group fantasies.
Indeed, if people were spontaneously murderous, why
would political leaders need to induce them coercively
to play the role of mass killers?
2491
A similar thing occurred in Nazi Germany. The

National Socialists got more votes (44%) than any
other single party in the 1933 parliamentary elections,
but not a majority, and in fact socialists and
communists outnumbered fascists in the German
electorate. Moreover, the vote that the Nazis received
greatly overstated their actual support because this
was anything but a “free and fair” election, as we
would say today. In the wake of the Reichstag fire
and before the election, the German Communist Party
was suppressed and 4,000 communist leaders were
imprisoned. As in any totalitarian state, once in power
the Nazis enforced severe penalties for dissent, which
could include torture and death.
While a large segment of the German population was
no doubt swept up into the anti-Semitic and militaristic
fantasies cultivated by Nazi propaganda, there is also
no doubt that many resisted, mostly through the
socialist and communist underground. And for every
active member of the underground, there must have
been many more who sympathized but were not
willing to heroically risk torture and death to actively
participate. I wonder how many of us on this list
would have risked torture and death to resist Hitler.
Because there was no public opinion data inside Nazi
Germany, we don’t know how widespread the
opposition to the regime was, but given that socialists
and communists were nearly half of the electorate
before the Nazis came to power, this most likely was
2492
a very large plurality of the population, if not a “silent

majority.” All of this is a far cry from Goldhagen’s
Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which depicts a
monolithic German group mind.
Third, and this follows from the foregoing analysis,
group fantasies are generally those of classes and
psychoclasses, not of entire nations. Psychoclasses,
for those not familiar with this term, are groups of
people who have similar personality characteristics
due to the experience of similar child rearing
practices. On this point, deMause is self-contradictory
because while he created the concept of
psychoclasses, he then proceeded to ignore his own
concept when talking about monolithic group
fantasies. In the first and second episodes of Century
of the Self, it is apparent that many business and
political elites were motivated by a group fantasy
about the masses of people having dangerous
impulses and being too irrational to participate in a
democracy. Not all elites thought this way, however,
and the film also showed how the New Deal
leadership and the inventors of scientific opinion
polling believed in the rationality of ordinary people
and believed that people could be educated about
public policy, which Roosevelt in fact did
systematically. While Hitler ruled through force and
intimidation, FDR was an immensely popular
president who was elected four times. This suggests
that when given a chance to freely choose their
leaders and to participate in government in a
2493
meaningful way, ordinary people can in fact do so and

act in a much more rational way than the conservative
elites would have us think.
In summary, I think there is a lot of conventional
wisdom on this list that needs to be re-examined in
the light of reason and evidence.
Brian
Feb 16
HItler ruled through force and intimidation? Everyone

agree with this?
The distinction between FDR and Hitler is absolute?
Everyone agree with this? Hitler provided .... or,
rather, people made use of him to ensure they were
better provisioned as well. If the New Deal period was
so awesome, and showed how admirable everyday
Americans are, why are "progressives" during this
period given so much praise by someone like Chris
Hedges, who hates no one more than spoiled, self-
attendant people -- catch his attack on 60s
progressives, the hippies, to get a measure of it. He
only wants to praise those who are self-abnegating,
self-sacrificial, which is a pretty demented state of
mind to me -- sort of anti-human. If it the New Deal
2494
was so admirable, why does Morris Dickstein accuse

the whole period as nationalist, a period where people
admonished themselves by thinking of themselves
more as types, categories of people, rather than as
distinct individuals? If it was so awesome, why
through the whole period were they still mostly self-
laceratingly blaming themselves for not succeeding,
rather than jumping hole-hog to a better era, like they
insisted for themselves in the 50s? Was anybody
interned?
Your future is entirely dependent on the amount of
love you received as a child. If you have issues
arising out of your childhood, but are in a very
progressive society, you'll try and use the existing
"arms" of the society and twist them towards your own
purposes (Alfie Kohn has just said argued that what-
are-in-truth regressives are currently taking over/co-
opting progressive pedagogy, and making it somehow
pro-testing, pro-homework, for example). If you have
fewer issues than other people, but are living in a
regressive society, you'll become part of the
generation that invents something better to fit the
more benign world you believe humans deserve, or
you'll leave, and set up something better elsewhere
(DeMause believes that places like Japan and U.S.
were examples of places where we saw progressives
-- those of superior child-rearing -- migrate).
This, too me, is bang on ... so it doesn't feel right to
malign it by assessing it as "reductive." Is there
2495
another word available? Distilled ... to its essential

essence? Let's try it. Mainstream academics are
justified in rejecting theories which are distilled .... no,
doesn't work. So let's try, Mainstream academics are
justified in rejecting theories which stick to the point
rather than stray elsewhere so we don't become guilty
bad children unswervingly pointing our fingers at our
surely selfless, long-suffering mothers.
DeMause talks a lot about group dynamics, what is
permitted when people engage in groups that it not
permissible at an individual level. The whole idea of
the social trance, for example. He doesn't let it
become a whole different, independent thing, like
biology compared with physics, because he believes
it co-operates with our need to make the social
sphere, what happens in society, something apart
from ourselves, something we can dismiss as not part
of individual me -- it gets rid of the guilt part, which
can get in the way of our enjoying hurting people. So
if a country wars, it's not your own private desire to
see people murdered which is being exercised. If
society makes people homeless, it is not your private
desire to have people feel your own neediness and
pain so that you don't have to feel it, which is being
enabled.
There is a sense that what happens at some times in
society is independent of your individual self -- or at
least part of it yourself. To DeMause, when we war on
other countries, or against women and children in our
2496
own society, it is our right hemispheres which are in

charge -- the internal persecutors he says are
contained there. Our left is actually
ignorant/independent -- it's looking at the work of part
of him/her s/he isn't at the moment familiar with.
Brian, your whole bit about how soldiers are reluctant
to kill is a certainly not what DeMause argues -- he
says they are eager to rape and kill (there is a bit
about how training changed in Vietnam to get soldiers
more successful killers, but compared with the whole,
it's just a blip). Your view goes down easier ... by
viewing soldiers like this, one doesn't become the
affluent-born hippie taunting the lot of the working
class soldier -- baby killer!!! I feel pretty confident that
some here could refer to historians/scholars who
provide contrary accounts. If I was tasked with doing
this, I'd probably start with the references referred to
in DeMause's notations.
Your account of Germany ... well, it's intimidating to
read ... intimidating, because there could be ample
evidence existing now against your argument that
cocky Goldhagen had it completely wrong, but you
present yourself as if you've marshalled every dutiful
historian to your cause, who feel pretty confident they
can wipe out all the aberrant views that have been
popping up over the last few decades just by showing
up as an angry brotherhood. If this is the public mood,
if we want to live in a decade where we all agree that
the worst thing you can be is presumptuous, spoiled
2497
and elder-defying, if we want ordinary folk to be good

but afflicted, for soldiers to be reluctant to kill, for us to
be innocent of the wrath we're about to inflict of the
world -- because who could possibly have had the
courage to resist it!!! -- it hardly feels like one should
bother. This is not a phalanx I would presume to want
to penetrate. Best bet is to see what young
progressives like Lena Dunham are doing, and see if
somehow DeMause can be smuggled in there.
I mean it, Lena Dunham ... read her book and catch
how she takes down/humiliates the elders in
Hollywood who tried to "help" her in Hollywood.
Here's someone who isn't afraid of looking like a
spoiled brat that some hardworking mechanic from
the 1950s would like nothing better than to take a
whipping to. We should be sure that even if we're put
in the unfortunate position of coming to see the kind
of everyday folk who voted for Nixon as fundamentally
decent people, we're still angling the unfortunate
results of our studies so that it might find some appeal
... there.
-- Patrick
Feb 16

2498
control
Thanks Don!
Trevor Pederson
Feb 16

control
Patrick, you write:
2499
This sounds a lot like Wilhelm Reich's genital

character who managed to escape childhood
development without the trauma and armoring to
become the superman which nature would produce if
unhindered.
I very much admire a lot of Reich's work but this view
shows more about how Reich had to egoistically
represent himself to others as perfect than as a
careful analysis of genius.
As Fairbairn, Freud, and others point out, it is the
schizoid types who have less of a connection to
others and more of a connection to their intellectual
functions (memory, phantasy, etc.) that become the
great intellectuals, scientists, and artists. Without this
increased libidinal connection to these intellectual
functions one can hardly hold together all the relevant
information of one's field, and take in the new relevant
empirical data to contribute to knowledge. In health
these types have a chance to become important
creators and innovators while in pathology they can
have very severe problems.
Your future isn't entirely dependent upon your
psychosexual character, it is also very much
dependent upon the class you are born into, the
access to good education, the crime or aggressive
elements that you must protect yourself and loved
ones from, the ideals of masculinity and femininity
that exist in your class, and many other class factors.
2500
People on the right like to pretend that poor people

can simply just work hard and get out of the hell hole
they were raised in. They have a very simple view of
people as rational agents who choose to work hard or
choose not to and are therefore responsible for being
poor. In contrast, clinical experience points to the fact,
again and again, that there are only so many
narcissistic injuries and betrayals in love that a person
can experience before they shut down and regress.
When you have a schizoid who already feels like an
outsider and who doesn't have strong connections to
others and a violent neighborhood in which he is put
down for not being manly enough, put down for not
being successful with women, encouraged to
suppress the altruistic and caring parts of his
personalty so he doesn't have weaknesses that
others can exploit, etc. he will shut down. Neurosis,
mysticism, and criminality are the outcome for some,
but for others with post-ambivalent ties to culture,
identity becomes much more important. Identity is
based upon traditions and discourse and for many
years it has been taken to be the most important
determinant of an individual in the humanities. The
schizoid with post-ambivalent ties may take on the
ideal of masculinity in the area and become someone
who loves sports while never having played them and
memorize stats of the players to offer up to others in
conversations. He isn't close to others in an
emotionally significant way but he shares their
traditions and social ideals and interacts with them
through this.
2501
Trevor
Brian
Feb 16
RE: [cliospsyche] Re: psychoanalysis and social

control
Patrick, I have added my comments after yours.
From: clios...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:clios...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2015 8:49 AM
To: clios...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [cliospsyche] Re: psychoanalysis and social
control
HItler ruled through force and intimidation? Everyone

agree with this?
I did not say that Hitler ruled ONLY through force and
intimidation. But if he had the universal support that
you seem to think, why did the Nazis need a secret
police to root out dissenters and need torture to
punish dissidents and why did they ban opposition
parties and democratic elections?
2502
The distinction between FDR and Hitler is absolute?

Everyone agree with this? Hitler provided .... or,
rather, people made use of him to ensure they were
better provisioned as well. If the New Deal period was
so awesome, and showed how admirable everyday
Americans are, why are "progressives" during this
period given so much praise by someone like Chris
Hedges, who hates no one more than spoiled, self-
attendant people -- catch his attack on 60s
progressives, the hippies, to get a measure of it. He
only wants to praise those who are self-abnegating,
self-sacrificial, which is a pretty demented state of
mind to me -- sort of anti-human. If it the New Deal
was so admirable, why does Morris Dickstein accuse
the whole period as nationalist, a period where people
admonished themselves by thinking of themselves
more as types, categories of people, rather than as
distinct individuals? If it was so awesome, why
through the whole period were they still mostly self-
laceratingly blaming themselves for not succeeding,
rather than jumping hole-hog to a better era, like they
insisted for themselves in the 50s? Was anybody
interned?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you
attacking the New Deal? Do you think we would have
been better off with four more years of Hoover?
2503

This, too me, is bang on ... so it doesn't feel right to
malign it by assessing it as "reductive." Is there
another word available? Distilled ... to its essential
essence? Let's try it. Mainstream academics are
justified in rejecting theories which are distilled .... no,
doesn't work. So let's try, Mainstream academics are
justified in rejecting theories which stick to the point
rather than stray elsewhere so we don't become guilty
bad children unswervingly pointing our fingers at our
surely selfless, long-suffering mothers.
I basically agree that the amount of love a person
receives as a child is decisive for their own happiness
and affects society as whole in important ways. That
is not what makes deMause reductive. Rather it is
the mentality that the society and history as a whole
2504
can be understood entirely as a function of this one

factor. This ignores the fact that when individuals
interact in the context of institutions—workplaces
provide a familiar example—our choices are
constrained by the way the institutions function and all
of this needs to be studied in its own right.
Government is another example. The kind of choices
offered to voters are not a simple function of group
fantasies of the mass public but also reflect the
organization of institutional power, both within the
government, say in the Pentagon, and in important
interest groups, especially big corporations, and in the
plutocracy and the way money dominates the political
process.
DeMause talks a lot about group dynamics, what is
permitted when people engage in groups that it not
permissible at an individual level. The whole idea of
the social trance, for example. He doesn't let it
become a whole different, independent thing, like
biology compared with physics, because he believes
it co-operates with our need to make the social
sphere, what happens in society, something apart
from ourselves, something we can dismiss as not part
of individual me -- it gets rid of the guilt part, which
can get in the way of our enjoying hurting people. So
if a country wars, it's not your own private desire to
see people murdered which is being exercised. If
society makes people homeless, it is not your private
desire to have people feel your own neediness and
pain so that you don't have to feel it, which is being
2505
enabled.
The process that deMause is talking about certainly
affects ideologies and these in turn legitimize power. I
have never disputed the importance of this, but it is
not the only source of ideology, which is also a
function of the power relations that are being
legitimized. In order to succeed, an ideology must (1)
resonate with unconscious motivations, and (2)
legitimize power. If (1) is not the case, it will not
engage the population. If (2) is not the case it will not
serve the purposes of the rulers and they will not
embrace and support it, which is a major reason that
ideologies persist. In my article Psychology of the
Radical Right I tried to show how group fantasies
rooted in individual experience underpin free market
and militarist ideologies that are perpetuated by
corporate and Pentagon elites because they serve
their purposes.
To reduce history and politics to psychological factors
is misguided and one of the main reasons that
psychohistory as DeMause defined it is not taken
seriously in academia. I don’t want to throw out the
baby with the bathwater (to use a deMausian
metaphor), but if we don’t outgrow the reductionism,
psychohistory will remain in an intellectual ghetto. I
can’t help but think that many of us like being in this
ghetto, where we can blame the marginalization of
psychohistory on everything but ourselves. I think
psychohistorians, not all of us but many of us, are
2506
marginalizing ourselves and need to take

responsibility for that.
There is a sense that what happens at some times in
society is independent of your individual self -- or at
least part of it yourself. To DeMause, when we war on
other countries, or against women and children in our
own society, it is our right hemispheres which are in
charge -- the internal persecutors he says are
contained there. Our left is actually
ignorant/independent -- it's looking at the work of part
of him/her s/he isn't at the moment familiar with.
More reductionism. The physics and biology analogy
applies. Institutional processes give rise to levels of
complexity that need to be understood on their own
terms.
Brian, your whole bit about how soldiers are reluctant
to kill is a certainly not what DeMause argues -- he
says they are eager to rape and kill (there is a bit
about how training changed in Vietnam to get soldiers
more successful killers, but compared with the whole,
it's just a blip). Your view goes down easier ... by
viewing soldiers like this, one doesn't become the
affluent-born hippie taunting the lot of the working
class soldier -- baby killer!!! I feel pretty confident that
some here could refer to historians/scholars who
provide contrary accounts. If I was tasked with doing
this, I'd probably start with the references referred to
in DeMause's notations.
2507
So if the masses of people want to rape and kill, why

do you need to draft them to fight in wars? Or in the
case of the current volunteer army, to provide middle
class livelihoods for people who have very few other
routes into the middle class. If people would rather
kill than flip burgers in Burger King, why pay soldiers
at all and why spend billions of dollars every year in
advertising and other recruiting activities? All the
killers should be lined up around the block at every
recruiting station for a chance to satisfy their deepest
desires in exchange for room and board.
Your account of Germany ... well, it's intimidating to
read ... intimidating, because there could be ample
evidence existing now against your argument that
cocky Goldhagen had it completely wrong, but you
present yourself as if you've marshalled every dutiful
historian to your cause, who feel pretty confident they
can wipe out all the aberrant views that have been
popping up over the last few decades just by showing
up as an angry brotherhood. If this is the public mood,
if we want to live in a decade where we all agree that
the worst thing you can be is presumptuous, spoiled
and elder-defying, if we want ordinary folk to be good
but afflicted, for soldiers to be reluctant to kill, for us to
be innocent of the wrath we're about to inflict of the
world -- because who could possibly have had the
courage to resist it!!! -- it hardly feels like one should
bother. This is not a phalanx I would presume to want
to penetrate. Best bet is to see what young
progressives like Lena Dunham are doing, and see if
2508
somehow DeMause can be smuggled in there.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. I presented
facts about Nazi Germany that are not controversial,
but which are ignored by Goldhagen and others
because these facts do not fit their ideology.
I mean it, Lena Dunham ... read her book and catch
how she takes down/humiliates the elders in
Hollywood who tried to "help" her in Hollywood.
Here's someone who isn't afraid of looking like a
spoiled brat that some hardworking mechanic from
the 1950s would like nothing better than to take a
whipping to. We should be sure that even if we're put
in the unfortunate position of coming to see the kind
of everyday folk who voted for Nixon as fundamentally
decent people, we're still angling the unfortunate
results of our studies so that it might find some appeal
... there.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Can you
state your main idea without assuming that I already
know what you’re talking about?
PETSCH...@appstate.edu
Feb 16
Re: RE: [cliospsyche] Re: psychoanalysis and

social control
2509
Amen, Brian.
In Berlin exactly a month ago I saw the von
Stauffenberg exhibition in the building in front of which
he was shot. I
was totally astonished at the amount of resistance to
the regime that is shown in this sizable presentation.
Graduate students and professors over the years
have ferreted out large and small groups from all
walks of life
who opposed the regime and who for the most part
were caught and killed. Jews, Poles, communists,
socialists,
Catholics, Protestants, liberals, conservatives,
military, etc. It is one of the finest, most up-date and
modern
exhibits I have seen so far. Most astonishing to me,
after studying this period for decades is Hitler's
uncanny ability
not to be killed by his own military.
Also support your point about deMause and
childrearing.
I hope snow does not bury you wherever you are on
the E. Coast.
Ralph Fishkin
Feb 16

2510
control
I agree with Peter’s “review” of the van Stauffenberg
exhibition. I saw it 5 years ago. Very moving.
Ralph
=============================
Feb 17

social control
I would like to know more about the von
Stauffenberg Exhibition.
Do they have a web page? Is there an exhibit
catalogue.
This goes against some of the popular conceptions of
people being merely compliant.
Catholics, Protestants, Liberals, Conservatives,
military, etc., is a bit different from the usual scenario.
(Jews being strongly opposed at an early stage is
also a bit contrary to some narratives.)
2511
I knew that actual Communists were opposed, of

course, and Poles would often have reasons two be
opposed.
At a used book store yesterday here in Albuquerque I
saw more than 100 books on fascism, the Nazi
regime, Hitler, etc.
But when I travel I always tend to buy more books
than I can possibly carry on the plane!
The Society for Cross Cultural Research (SCCR)
starts tomorrow morning, but there are all kinds of
meetings going on here.
The weather was cool, but like Spring in Boston!
Meanwhile the whole East Coast seems to have real
snow.
Cheers,
Hans J. I. Bakker
Feb 17

control
Hey Trevor, I think somewhere along the line I failed
2512
to answer one of your questions -- sorry about that!

As Fairbairn, Freud, and others point out, it is the
schizoid types who have less of a connection to
others and more of a connection to their intellectual
functions (memory, phantasy, etc.) that become the
great intellectuals, scientists, and artists. Without this
increased libidinal connection to these intellectual
functions one can hardly hold together all the relevant
information of one's field, and take in the new relevant
empirical data to contribute to knowledge. In health
these types have a chance to become important
creators and innovators while in pathology they can
have very severe problems.
Okay, but the DeMausian take is different ... he talks
about being given the liberty to play by parents
(mothers) who were above the norm for the time. For
example,
It was the developmental new strengths of

the intrusive childrearing mode, not
changes in “culture,” that produced the
dramatic historical innovations of the
Reformation, humanism and industrialism.
For instance, what allowed James Watt to
invent the modern steam engine was his
parents’ teaching him to read and allowing
him to endlessly experiment with the
steam kettle for hours every day in his
2513
family kitchen, changing the world by his

curiousity
I think this is right ... and it sort of goes in the
opposite direction of "yours". Yours is about
disconnect from people, this view is that it is born out
of increased interaction between parent and child,
owing to more genuine interest in the child by the
parent.
Your future isn't entirely dependent upon your
psychosexual character, it is also very much
dependent upon the class you are born into, the
access to good education, the crime or aggressive
elements that you must protect yourself and loved
ones from, the ideals of masculinity and femininity
that exist in your class, and many other class factors.
DeMause argues that the Jews in Germany were of a
superior psychoclass to the rest of the Germans --
they loved their children more, and their children had
better self-esteem for it. It was this, primarily, which
allowed them to make something of what was offered
in their societal environment to become enfranchised,
despite resistances from the rest of the German
populace. The fact that they had better-loved parents
mean that they had parents who were more
comfortable with their individuating from them,
dissenting from them -- they didn't need them so
much to serve them, to give them the love they were
denied by their own parents. This means that freedom
2514
was to them an opportunity, not something that could

lead you dangerously astray indeed.
What ultimately stopped even the huge power of their
not feeling guilt when they succeeded, was Germanic
regression -- when Germans could no longer handle
the opportunity-enfranchising Weimar 20s and
regressed provincial (back to mommy). On the
lookout for those who best represented the guilty
striving self who would dare individuating from
mommy, they targeted their most progressive citizens
-- the Jews.
Anyway, not psychosexual character, but the amount
of love you received as a child. DeMause would
explore whether people of a similar social class are
actually the same psychically/emotionally, if overall
their childrearing, the amount of love they give their
children, is around the same ... and this, mostly,
explaining their grouping into some kind of outward
social class. If not, if you are a child of parents who
are superior, you'll have to deal with what your
neighbours think of your not, for example, spanking
your kids, your "spoiling" them, but you won't be
possessed so much of parental alters (kind of like the
superego) informing you of how bad you are when
you succeed, that make you feel actually kind of good
when you remain content with your assigned lot.
The rightwing says it's all up to you ... and are
speaking mostly to the working classes (who mostly
possess, I believe, about the same level of
2515
childrearing) ... those who at their core don't want a

society which enables them too much, who want
leaders to encourage them to turn on themselves so
they don't risk blaming those in society meant to
represent their terrifying parents. I don't want to enter
the power of their dark world; I'm thinking of the power
provided when you have the chance of grouping
together with those gifted with having received more
love ... if things get really bad, like with the Puritans in
Europe, it may yet be possible to Mayflower
yourselves over to America and start something better
there!
-- Patrick
P.S. Nice tree.
PETSCH...@appstate.edu
Feb 17

social control
Hans,
Te following is about as good a description as I found.
Being there was one of
the more meaningful experiences in my long history
with the regime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_German
2516
_Resistance
By the way, the German/NATO HQ is in the same
complex; that is why the text next
to the photograph of the Museum Exhibits is so
important.
Peter
Trevor Pederson
Feb 17

control
Hi Patrick
There is a history in psychoanalysis of noting not
enough maternal care and too much are a bad thing
(which Winnicott summed up nicely in the 'good
enough' mother).
Nietzsche and others have talked about the
importance of 'reactive affects' in contrast to the 'will
to truth'. Instead of the ideal mother ideally raising the
child and that child going on to have a pure love or
pure interest in science or art, I think many
biographies will show that pride, envy, inferiority,
etc. and other reactive traits will be involved.
Narcissism is often needed to feel entitled to
introduce new views and ideas.
2517
Things are complicated and having just one axis

concerning love is too simple.
Schizoid individuals often don't feel in home in their
bodies and body psychotherapists often point to how
they have thin, extremely tight bodies that show an
adaptation against being in their bodies/looking to
connect to the body of another. The coldness that one
can sometimes feel from them in projective
identification (i.e. when they assume the parental
imago and make you feel like they did) also indicates
the parental care involved. You can think you are right
but it's not the same as having evidence or reasons.
I can assure you that every patient I've worked
with who is assured of having had his mother's love
didn't get 'good enough' mothering and has
narcissistic issues.
If you do more reading in psychoanalytic theory and
compare and contrast the different schools you'll find
many conflicting views. You can just choose the view
that makes the most sense to you or the most popular
one and call it a day, but all individuation
and maturation comes from thinking against oneself
and giving some credit to the opposing viewpoints.
Trevor

2518
Feb 17

control
Nietzsche and others have talked about the
importance of 'reactive affects' in contrast to the 'will
to truth'. Instead of the ideal mother ideally raising the
child and that child going on to have a pure love or
pure interest in science or art, I think many
biographies will show that pride, envy, inferiority,
etc. and other reactive traits will be involved.
Narcissism is often needed to feel entitled to
introduce new views and ideas.
I know all this. This was the take that I, that all of us,
grew up with. I in fact never heard that genius owed to
simply being loved, to allowance. I got "there" when I
understood just how wretched past childrearing was,
then when I learned of the appalling lives of many
geniuses I realized that at some level, many of them
could well still have had a better start than the
majority culture around them. Without the love, no
genius. With some of it, you could still get geniuses ...
but one's sadly afflicted with the problems you've
listed for us. If only they'd gotten more.
-- Patrick
Anyway, third post today. Thank you very much
people. I'll check in again tomorrow.
2519
Trevor Pederson
Feb 17

control
Patrick, things are complicated and I keep sensing
that you want to make them simple. There's to much
"love," not enough, there's too much discipline, there's
not enough, etc. and also inheritance that selects for
certain impulses, projects, etc. that cause the fixations
without the parent acting out of the ordinary.
It's not always that a genius with more love would
have done better, it could be that his class or
environment caused too many ego injuries later in life.
If he or she had gotten more love then he or she
might not have formed character the way they did.
When you have someone with masochistic (echoistic)
character that doesn't like to be noticed by others,
then this inhibition could economically push them
towards artistic pursuits:
“Artists are people driven by the tension between the
desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
(Winnicott)
If this person got more love and wasn't so afraid of
rejection then they wouldn't be as driven in their
pursuits. There are also many different routes to being
2520
an artist and this isn't the problem of them all.

If there is no love from the caregiver the child would
be horribly affected, no one is disputing the
importance of love. However, having the most
conflicts and tensions in a person can produce very
good results or a very neurotic person.
Trevor
Sipping tea and polite manners while the

bombs go off: our necessary way forward
Jeffrey Taylor just wrote an article about our need to
stand up the march of human progress. Here is a good
sample of it, followed by my reply.
The relentless march of time generally affords
humankind, which happens to include folks in the
media, the chance to reflect on events and acquire
wisdom. But the weeks passing since the massacre in
Paris of the highly talented Charlie Hebdo cartoonists
for their depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have
only granted a good number of commentators the
opportunity to bedork themselves time and again, as
they pen columns and make on-air statements that
both spread confusion and betray commitments to
untenable, morally reprehensible extenuative
positions concerning Islam. This is tragic, for, if
anything, the slaughter of European artists exercising
2521
their lawful right to self-expression in the capital of

their own country offered us all a “teachable
moment” sans pareil about the nature of the threat
lurking within – in fact, innate to — the “religion of
peace.”
Rarely have murderers so clearly manifested their
motive. With the exclamations they made as they
carried out their atrocity — “Allahu Akbar!” and
“On a vengé le prophète Mohamed, on a tué Charlie
Hebdo!” (The prophet Muhammad has been avenged,
we have killed Charlie Hebdo!) — the attackers
explicitly told us they were killing for Islam, and
imparted precisely the lesson they intended: Do not
insult or ridicule our faith or you will pay the
supreme price. They wrought violence against
innocents who dared transgress the commandments
of a religion they did not profess. What’s more, they
de facto succeeded in imposing sharia tenets well
beyond the confines of the Islamic world. How many
major publications or networks dared even publish
the anodyne drawing of a teary-eyed, forgiving
Muhammad that graced the cover of the post-
massacre issue of Charlie Hebdo, to say nothing of
the other images satirizing the Prophet that
presumably led to the fire-bombing of the magazine’s
office in 2011? That so many Western media outlets
shied away from doing so is more than scandalous. It
2522
unambiguously signals one thing: terrorism works.

More lives are likely to be lost as a result.
…
What to make of Western leaders’ reluctance to indict
Islam in the Charlie Hebdo massacre? Cowardice
must be involved — better to deride a few bad apples
“perverting a great religion” than risk angering large,
and growing, Muslim communities at home, or
inciting attacks against embassies abroad. And as a
practical matter, convictions held as passionately as
they are irrationally cannot be challenged without
peril. That Obama and Hollande have gone to great
lengths to avoid implicating Islam in the Charlie
Hebdo massacre constitutes implicit recognition of
the innate insolubility of religious conflicts – such
beliefs cannot be disproven on an evidentiary basis,
but only fought over, eye for eye. Once faith stands
accused, the guns come out and the bombs go off,
and death and mayhem ensue. Best to steer clear of
all this.
Yet risks, to say nothing of honest discourse, are
essential to true leadership. Faced with this, yet
another crisis involving Islam and the violence it
tends to beget, the only real options are unified
defiance (as embodied in the Je Suis Charlie marches
2523
across France) or surrender, as exemplified in news

outlets’ widespread reluctance to publish the
eminently newsworthy Charlie Hebdo cartoons. By
accepting the bald casuistry and specious analysis
offered by religion’s apologists, or by denigrating, à
la Zogby, the (wonderfully) muscular French version
of secularism known as laïcité (no Islamic
headscarves or Christian crosses allowed inside
schools, no burqas to be worn outside), we are
collectively opting for capitulation, and jettisoning
our precious patrimony — freedom of expression, an
essential element of any open society. If we do this,
we should be ashamed of ourselves and do not
deserve to be free.
We need to turn the tables and refuse to let the faith-
based or their smooth-talking accomplices set the
terms for debate; refuse to cower before the
balderdash term Islamophobia; refuse to let faith-
mongering fraudsters, from the Pope in the Vatican to
the pastor down the street, educate our children or
lecture us on morals or anything else. If we do not
believe the Bible is true or the Quran inerrant, we
need to say so, loudly, clearly and repeatedly, until
the “sacred” sheen of these books wears off. And it
will. Behaviors change as beliefs are adjusted. We no
longer burn witches at the stake or use ghastly vises
to crush the skulls of those suspected of being “secret
2524
Jews” (as was done in Spain and elsewhere during

the Inquisition), and none but the insane among us
would enact the gruesome penalties prescribed in
Leviticus as retribution for trifling offenses. We have
progressed, and we will progress again, if we, for
starters, quit worrying about political correctness and
cease according religion knee-jerk respect.
Some time ago, the meme “Islam – the religion of
peace” began circulating, originating, apparently, in
an erroneous translation of the Arabic name for the
faith. Islam means “submission” (to the will of God).
The brave cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo faced down
threats and refused to submit — and paid with their
lives. For their deaths to mean anything, we need to
show similar guts.
We need, after all, to tell the truth. If we don’t start
doing this now, our next question must be, who
among us will be the next victims?
-----
We should not toss aside Ockham’s razor and concoct
additional factors that supposedly commandeered
their behavior. The Charlie Hebdo killers may have
come from poor Parisian banlieues, they may have
experienced racial discrimination, and they may
have even been stung by disdain from “the dominant
secular French culture,” yet they murdered not
2525
shouting about any of these things, but about

“avenging the Prophet Muhammad.” They murdered
for Islam.
I like this. But what drives them isn't a chance to be
loved by "Islam," but by their mothers. They are
committing themselves to destroying that which are
avenues of progress—Charlie Hebdo's sanctioning
the importance of critiquing anything which cows.
What inspires this is a knowledge that when they
inhibited their own self-growth and let themselves be
passive vehicles for their mothers' pleasure, they
received love from their mothers. When they instead
strove and enjoyed Western freedoms, they came to
feel hopelessly abandoned and bad.
Their childrearing was incredibly bad. Their mothers,
abused so badly, re-inflicted the abuses upon their
children, and absolutely required them to serve as
stimulants/anti-depressants. When they instead
focused on themselves, they were rejected ... and the
children knew, then, that there was no greater evil in
the world—one cows completely before "God" and
thereby, maybe, you'll be graced by that gigantic
world of heaven known as your mother's approval.
You resist and enter the world of freedom and balking
your parent's needs for your own, and very soon you
won't be able to take the feeling of absolute rejection
2526
—the sense that your mother has absolutely had it

with you!—and you'll go Jihad to slay true "bad
children" and die on a field tended by your mother's
soothing balm.
About how abused mother's raise their children,
about the origins of terrorism, go here:
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emotional-life-
of-nations/chapter-3-the-childhood-origins-of-
terrorism/
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-
war-in-child-abuse/chapter-1-the-killer-
motherland/
But, the thing is, there are a whole lot of people who
are being bypassed by the kinds of freedoms society
is increasingly allowing, the kinds of prejudices that
are no longer enfranchised/allowed. Denied society
as sort of an exoskeleton in which to work out inner
psychic troubles—and thereby the living of a
becalmed everyday life—they’re going to go berserk
—kill people, berserk. The only thing that will stop
this is if we all commit to a war where a gigantic
number of "bad boys and girls" are slaughtered,
surrendered as sacrifices into the angry maw, which
we don't want.
So, we're going to have to get used to it. As much as
2527
possible, we need to maintain the temperament

appropriate for progress-enjoying people, which is an
advancement of the "polite and commercial" that
ruled in the 18th-century, but along the same lines:
it's not excited, heated, but playful, sifting, and calm.
To do this while bombs are going on all around us is
going to be difficult, but I understand that Jane
Austen managed as much, however much some have
disparaged her for it.
Our problem may not just be “extremes.” We need to
remember that sometimes a whole people can decide
they've had it with their progressing selves and
suddenly turn provincial, crude and extreme: it's the
story of what happened to the Weimar Germans, who
went from participating in modernizing,
cosmopolitan Germany — however insufficiently and
nervously compared with German Jews—to
eschewing it for some "truer" German folk past.
But even if suddenly all of Islam and great swaths of
Christians and, even, a discouraging number of
previously level-headed liberals, start seeing "bad
children" everywhere and suit up for war,
progressives need to remind themselves that these are
all the victims of unloved childhoods and child
abuse: as much as possible, they need to be stopped,
but they certainly deserve no hate. What they're doing
2528
was inevitable owing to the fact of their cowing

childhoods, and the fact that there is still in this world
a will to make things better.
We need to keep up the temperament of a

cosmopolitan populace, which this colourful and
enjoyable article is still mostly ramped up against.
Dialogue at Salon.com, February 9th 2015

Original Article: It’s time to fight religion: Toxic
drivel, useful media idiots, and the real story about
faith and violence
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2015 1:23 AM
Tigriel Many atheists are people who stopped believing in
God because they felt hostility toward their fathers,
and toward other father figures or authority figures
because of that; and they especially disliked the idea
of an all-powerful, all-knowing authority figure who
would punish them for their sins. So they had a
psychological motivation for pretending that God does
not exist.
Most atheists have less authoritative parents, and thus the

idea of an all-powerful God has no emotional appeal.
If you mutilate yourself before Him, you can't imagine
your own parents thereby being appeased. You just
bleed, pointlessly, which ranks rather far behind being
2529
a party animal in terms of fun.
An all-powerful male God, however, comes in handy when

you're really concerned about the enormity of your
early experiences with your all-powerful mother, who
you spent most of your time with in your first years of
your life. Then it's a phantasm you cling to pretend
that true Titanness had met her match!
If you've come out of that environment, where Mother

loomed large and shamed and humiliated you because
she needed to gobble you up to make up for the fact
that she emerged out of female-hating culture, you
become repellant of anything that smacks of your once
compromised state. You come to hate homosexuals for
their ostensibly effeminate, their ostensibly
compromised, nature.
Permalink

faith and violence
Tigriel Benthead Taylor isn't all about the pursuit of
pleasure. Read his piece, he's admonishing everyone
who isn't willing to show guts and stop capitulating to
evil ... all those like Obama who kind of want to step
to the side. You read what he's expecting of us, all the
vigilance and stridence, and you infer as well that he
2530
hardly wants us to be party animals, who danced -- I'm

sure he would accuse us -- while "freedom" was lost.
I'm glad though that we're still thought of as party animals.

When people are in the mood to feel pure, everything
they see as vile actually represents human fulfillment.
How this can remain so with the U.S., given its culture
of work-hard and its depraved social stratification, is
beyond me ... but it's encouraging that somehow this
far from our heydey we're still redolent of it.
Permalink

faith and violence
Keyboarder I should have qualified this. I meant if you
broaden the awareness of people who've emerged out
of unloving environments, where they were bad every
time they didn't do exactly as their parents willed, it'll
eventually lead them to feel abandoned by their
parents, as having lost their respect and love, and they
won't be able to take it. They'll regress. If you broaden
the awareness of people outside of these
environments, it's all good, of course.
Permalink
2531

faith and violence
Brighid of the Forge Tigriel But if this stuff was
everywhere, it'd be silencing, would it not?
Permalink

faith and violence
Keyboarder It is fear of difference, and the punishments for
harmless acts like these aren't some kind of fake
Islamophobia.
Fear of difference suggests that if somehow everyone could

lose their ignorance, we'd live in a peaceful world.
Attend to the tone in someone like Taylor ... does he
really seems like someone who could possibly want to
dissuaded from going on a crusade?
If the removal of ignorance leads to greater opportunity,

new ways of understanding your world, which might
make you happier, it gets nullified, just like Western
"spoils" eventually get rejected by affluent Muslims
who'd in their youth indulged. Greater opportunity
leads to greater guilt, a greater sense that you are
2532
bad/spoiled, which must be projected onto other

people for you to feel pure again, for you to feel once
again worthy of being loved.
People feeling this need can't be shown how dispossessed

of vile properties other people actually are, for these
other people have become full of their own
projections, which they know are very, very bad!
Permalink

faith and violence
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2015 10:18 PM
ConradSpoke KatLib49 Liam Bently It's not just giving us
courage, it's chastising us if we don't "speak up". Your
bit -- "have allowed themselves to be cowed into
silence" -- is implicating, is chastising us too. We
didn't allow ourselves to be cowed; we just didn't take
the war bait.
Lending us ... well, maybe not courage but encouragement,

would be to let us know that we can acknowledge that
compared to the most progressive people out there --
whether they are actually found in Sweden, as some of
us are supposing, or not -- everyone is regressive, and
it doesn't hurt us to point this out rather than fear our
current world necessarily must crumble the very
moment we overtly acknowledge this fact. If we feel
2533
in our hearts that everyone deserves to be equal, we're

not shaming anybody if we notice inadequacies; if we
see, squarely, who'll be driven to try and kill the kind
of provisioning world we want to enjoy that ostensibly
makes people selfish and spoiled-rotten ... and doesn't
Tayler himself sound like someone who'd like to take
a swipe at our ostensibly conflict-averting, soft-
hearted, defeat-deserving effeminate world?
The world is built out of a lot of people who for awhile --

good for them! -- were going progressive. As many of
them do the inevitable and slip away, our thoughts
shouldn't be on how to punish them but how to
reconstitute so the next time we allow ourselves to
move beyond conservative norms, we're ready to take
advantage and help.
Permalink
faith and violence
Aunt Messy Patrick McEvoy-Halston I thought it was
pretty good. Did you hear about the evil nun
mentioned elsewhere ... "evil wimmins" can be pretty
scary!
Permalink

2534

faith and violence
Benthead Good post. What I noticed is how he is ready to
humiliate us for our cowardice ... if we are brave, we'll spill
our guts and fight; if we "stand to the sides," we're opting
for capitulation, and jettisoning our precious patrimony,
and don't deserve to be free. This is a scolding he's hearing
in his own ears -- "to come back with his shield or on it" --
and its won him over.
What troubles about religion isn't religion per se, but the
unstable mindset that leads one to be emotionally attracted
to belief systems that encourage scary ideas concerning
purity and sacrifice. He's advertising a path towards our
being pure, worthy of praise and love, and it doesn't
involve any of the manners we normally assume
appropriate to our cosmopolitan society. We don't stand
vigilant, we discourse. If things get heated, we do step
aside ... and begin again, respectfully, when this tide has
subsided.
Permalink
faith and violence
le vieux renard When I asked the punishing nun in fourth
grade about, "Thou Shalt not kill", during WW11 and
soldiers she looked at me with that haughty look of holiness
and said simply soldiers go straight to heaven.
2535
That's what soldiers believe. Which is why the point isn't

just to kill but for grand suicide. Why else would Germany
wage war against all the world?
I hope you do very little in your life where you could
imagine that nun approving of you ... it'd mean you were
living an actualized life.
lets have the talk and avoid a generation of death where
the bottom 1% of us die to protect the hegemony of the top
1%
The "generation of death" isn't where you see this 99% vs.
1% split ... Hitler's Germany was one where being more
German added more to your status than being rich -- any
ignorant ass could daunt the professor, if his/her bloodline
was more pure. To add to the prowess of the Volk, you
couldn't be starving.
We're seeing healthcare reforms and some move to living
wage reforms, all while under the blanket of 99-vs-1
rhetoric. It could be that at some level we need to believe
our age is fundamentally denying, in order to okay reforms
that will eventually lead us out.
Permalink
faith and violence
Andy W Patrick McEvoy-Halston Registered
Citizen LARMARCH5
2536
Getting in just before people were in the mood "to be lead"

by Hitler, would've been possible if we were all more
cognizant on how little those of punitive childhoods can
handle progressive periods like the Weimar.
Yes, abusive parenting leads one to project one's "badness"
into others -- see them as the vile "other". And eliminating
them means in effect eliminating all one's own "badness"
out of the world, leaving you completely "pure".
The enemy is also made to represent all the split-off
elements of one's parents -- you bond with a father-mother
country which is all virtue, and their "nation" is made
possessed of all things prowling, mean and cruel ... of
everything that lead to terribly abusive things being done to
you.
Permalink
faith and violence
Andy W Patrick McEvoy-Halston Registered
Citizen LARMARCH5 I addressed it. Getting in before,
while they hadn't developed into a massed army, would
have been better.
Permalink
faith and violence
2537

Daniel Thron Too add: the two most powerful things that
move people to violence are suffering, like poverty (a form
of violence in itself), or fear of violence.
Suffering can actually calm people down -- if they're
suffering, they're not spoiling themselves, not being bad ...
no need to project one's "badness" onto others and
obliterate.
Ongoing societal growth draws people to remember their
own childhood suffering ... they do in a sense begin to
cling to it, out of fear of being abandoned. They do get in
mind to want to revenge themselves for it.
The fear of violence owes to childhood memories as well.
Paranoia arises not from the world as it exists today, but out
of well-founded knowledge/awareness that in your
childhood there were things there to sting you, to scare you,
to shame and humiliate you. This is the world that is now
perennially before you. Phantoms, ghosts, madness.
Permalink
faith and violence
Daniel Thron Americans were simply too happy and fat,
and no amount of preaching from the good book about the
enemies of God would get them off the couch.
How much do you want to bet that the next president wins
because s/he tells Americans that they'd become "too
2538
happy, too fat, too lazy to get off the couch." Then, in
conjunction with austerity and most of them counting
amongst the 99 % struggling to survive, they'll see that yet
more will be offered to show how deprived and repentant
they'd become ... like perhaps in mass submitting
themselves to a traumatic war environment -- PTSD as an
acquisition, to shame those still just shopping and Burger
Kinging.
After some grand sacrificial war, it is true that for awhile
people are hard to shove off their good times. But then they
start feeling guilty and abandoned, and start chasing down
people they know will put an end to it ... people who'll
implement Depression-ensuring, growth-killing "hard
money," and policies like that.
Permalink
faith and violence
LARMARCH5 Patrick McEvoy-Halston Love-deprived
people, not "a-holes."
Permalink
faith and violence
Andy W Registered Citizen LARMARCH5 Interesting
response Andy. It still remains true that if we could
understand that cultures that have awful childrearing can't
2539
allow themselves progress for long before they'll feel the

need for a sacrificial purge, we'll ensure we intervene
before they shuck off their cosmopolitan growth for
regressive provincialism.
So if the rest of Europe, realizing their childrearing was
nowhere near as abusive as Germans', stepped in as soon as
Germans starting finding the idea of the "volk," the mythic
collective, appealing -- that is, well before they started
targeting Jews and killing "useless eaters -- this would've
been a model for what we should do.
We'd understand that the first priority of these primitive
peoples was now to lose their independence and bond with
a large group entity of some sort, which would be followed
soon after by their waging war against all the remaining
progressive peoples out there -- the educated, the liberal,
the commercial and freedom-enjoying.
I'm not quite sure what we'd do with them at this point,
because at some level they'd be done. Maybe just house
them well, and give them -- as lovingly as possible --
whatever palliatives that'd help them imagine they were
effectively cleansing the world of sin ... some kind of grand
scale virtual environment, maybe. It's their children we'd
need to focus our attention on ... add that much more
kindness, so they'd be nothing at all like their parents.
Permalink
Original Article: Anti-vaxxers are not the enemy:
Science, politics and the crisis of authority
2540
Ktimene Patrick McEvoy-Halston

We're not so much left open for fraudsters as we are
inspired to chase them down. If you're the sort of person
who not only is capable of interpreting and evaluating but
freely chooses to use these skills, you're the kind of person
bent on making a better life for yourself, making a better
world. Too many Americans can only see this attitude as
sinful, and so try and obliterate their all-too-transparent
sanity -- their call for a more sane, and opportunity-
permitting world -- by expanding the concussive thunder of
demagogues. They're hoping to park a tank by the
intellectual, to shut them the hell up!
It's not actually possible, but if somehow we could be
people who were terribly poor at interpreting and
evaluating but nevertheless weren't afraid of a progressing
world, fraudsters would be recognized for their emotional
depravity, instantly, and we'd find ourselves willy-nilly
listening to those of higher-order intellectual and emotional
capacities.
Permalink
faith and violence
We should not toss aside Ockham’s razor and concoct
additional factors that supposedly commandeered their
behavior. The Charlie Hebdo killers may have come from
poor Parisian banlieues, they may have experienced racial
discrimination, and they may have even been stung by
2541
disdain from “the dominant secular French culture,” yet

they murdered not shouting about any of these things, but
about “avenging the Prophet Muhammad.” They murdered
for Islam.
I like this. But what drives them isn't a chance to be loved
by "Islam," but by their mothers. They are committing
themselves to destroying that which are avenues of
progress -- Charlie Hebdo's sanctioning the importance of
critiquing anything which cows. What inspires this is a
knowledge that when they inhibited their own self-growth
and let themselves be passive vehicles for their mothers'
pleasure, they received love from their mothers. When they
instead strove and enjoyed Western freedoms, they came to
feel hopelessly abandoned and bad.
Their childrearing was incredibly bad. Their mothers,
abused so badly, re-inflicted the abuses upon their children,
and absolutely required them to serve as stimulants/anti-
depressants. When they instead focused on themselves,
they were rejected ... and the children knew, then, that there
was no greater evil in the world -- one cows completely
before "God," and thereby, maybe, you'll be graced by that
gigantic world of heaven known as your mother's approval.
You resist and enter the world of freedom and balking your
parent's needs for your own, and very soon you won't be
able to take the feeling of absolute rejection -- the sense
that your mother has absolutely had it with you! -- and
you'll go Jihad to slay true "bad children" and die on a field
tended by your mother's soothing balm.
About how abused mother's raise their children, about the
2542
origins of terrorism, go here:

nations/chapter-3-the-childhood-origins-of-terrorism/
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-war-in-child-
abuse/chapter-1-the-killer-motherland/
But, the thing is, there are a whole lot of people who are
being bypassed by the kinds of freedoms society is
increasingly allowing, the kinds of prejudices that are no
longer enfranchised/allowed. Denied society as sort of an
exoskeleton in which to work out inner psychic troubles
and thereby the living of a becalmed everyday life, they're
going to go berserk -- kill-people, berserk. The only thing
that will stop this is if we all commit to a war where a
gigantic number of "bad boys and girls" are slaughtered,
surrendered as sacrifices into the angry maw, which we
don't want.
So, we're going to have to get used to it. As much as
possible, we need to maintain the temperament appropriate
for progress-enjoying people, which is an advancement of
the "polite and commercial" that ruled in the 18th-century,
but along the same lines: it's not excited, heated, but
playful, sifting, and calm. To do this while bombs are going
on all around us is going to be difficult, but I understand
that Jane Austen managed as much, however much some
have disparaged her for it.
Our problem may not just be extremes. We need to
remember that sometimes a whole people can decide
they've had it with their progressing selves and suddenly
2543
turn provincial, crude and extreme: it's the story of what

happened to the Weimar Germans, who went from
participating in modernizing, cosmopolitan Germany --
however insufficiently and nervously compared with
German Jews -- to eschewing it for some "truer" German
folk past.
But even if suddenly all of Islam and great swaths of
Christians and, even, a discouraging number of previously
level-headed liberals, start seeing "bad children"
everywhere and suit up for war, progressives need to
remind themselves that these are all the victims of unloved
childhoods and child abuse: as much as possible they need
to be stopped, but they certainly deserve no hate. What
they're doing was inevitable owing to the fact of their
childhoods, and the fact that there is still in this world a
will to make things better.
We need to keep up the temperament of a cosmopolitan
populace, which this colourful and enjoyable article is still
mostly ramped up against.
Permalink
It has extended life and cured disease and improved
agriculture, and it has brought us eugenics and the
Tuskegee experiments and Hiroshima and Zyklon-B and a
whole host of amazing pesticides and herbicides and
preservatives and plastics that have permeated every
2544
square millimeter of the planet’s surface and the bodies of

all its creatures, and whose long-term effects are not known
but don’t look that great.
The book Zuckerberg picked for discussion in his book
club is Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature."
The book is a reminder that the number of people who have
died owing to murder/slaughter has been decreasing over
time -- just previously our most progressive citizens
rejoiced in them, but it is nevertheless true that primitive
societies, our earliest historical origins, were a nightmare of
slaughter, even compared to American Civil War/WW1
levels.
We let go magical thinking and went science in the first
place because, owing to gradually improving childrearing,
more children were growing up less demon-haunted: the
landscape was less one where scary demons were all over
the place, in every place/everything, and they could view
things a bit more denatured. This meant more societal
growth ... and our childrearing has not reached the level
where this is something we can completely allow for
ourselves.
Societies use such things as science initially to grow and
better provide and then start feeling guilty for it, hopelessly
abandoned. They begin to shuck their growth, grow
provincial and turn against the progressive elements in their
society, and bond into some kind of regressive group --
they could become suddenly more nationalistic, for
example. They then project all their negative attributes into
some "other" and prepare to slaughter them -- eugenics,
2545
Hiroshima. When enough people have died, people feel the

skies are cleared again and such things as science progress,
much less spared accompanying evil.
There are a good number of people alive whose childhoods
were good enough that they would use science completely
benevolently -- they are entirely divorced in
emotional/psychic makeup from those who'd suddenly see
some absolutely valid need to evaporate an enemy and
cleanse ourselves of our "weakest." Earth wins when
they're the majority.
Permalink
it’s absurd to assert that questioning the Catholic Church
or the National Football League is good, but questioning
the name-brand institutions of the scientific world is bad.
Questioning the Catholic Church and the National Football
League is done by society's more progressive people. They
want to see a reduction in self-flaggelant philosophies and
activities.
Questioning science is generally done by society's more
regressive. Ongoing societal advancement -- which to
them is a bad thing, since to them people who live healthily
and enjoyable are being sinful ... i.e. are ignoring "God":
their demanding, needy, love-starved parents -- means to
them that more children need to be punished and hurt.
2546
They displace their own "badness" onto children -- so well

representing their own "guilty" growing, striving selves --
and encourage their death through disease, economic
deprivation and war. This way, spurned, angry "parents in
the sky" are felt to be somewhat ameliorated.
Questioning name-brand institutions of the scientific
world, done by those who can be trusted, is of course being
done by progressives who also question the Catholic
Church and the National Football League. The
more hippieish of them realize that institutions, degrees,
professionals admonishing themselves within a "guild," is
still about keeping the phantasm Chaos at bay ... it's better
than magic, alchemy and a projection-full world, but it's not
that evolved/projection-dilluted ... we can let these
"authorities" go too.
Permalink
Original Article: “Jupiter Ascending”: Channing
Tatum in Spock ears fights lizard men, but not for
laughs
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2015 3:39 PM
bigguns Adventus Adding yet more weight to Hollywood
impetus, is creation, or getting a gut ready to burst? Isn't it
bested by the critic immediately by the sheer fact that they
discern, that they can spot it out, and be angered by its
stupid massing? How much is even the "creative's" own
inspiration, rather than their simply laying out the next
sequence in a narrative drama all the somnambulants
amongst us are expecting our lives to be lived by?
2547
Immersing yourself within that matter, distinguishing what

might have worked from what should be ignored, isn't
risky? isn't work? mightn't itself be potentially a bit of
genius that might inspire creative efforts from someone
else?
Permalink
Original Article: “Jupiter Ascending”: Channing
Tatum in Spock ears fights lizard men, but not for
laughs
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2015 2:48 PM
bigguns Aren't we all just churning over what we
experienced, and coming up hopefully with something
novel to say?
Anti-vaxxers are the enemy
Critical thinking about the nature of authority might

induce us to wonder why those stories are invisible,
or spun as dry policy questions for readers of the
business pages, while so much bandwidth is occupied
with making fun of a few vaccine loons. It might
cause us to notice that treating people who feel
genuine uncertainty about mainstream medicine as if
they were low-achieving children only makes the
problem worse, and that it’s absurd to assert that
questioning the Catholic Church or the National
Football League is good, but questioning the name-
brand institutions of the scientific world is bad.
(Andrew O'Hehir "Anti-vaxxers are not the enemy")
2548
Questioning the Catholic Church and the National

Football League is done by society's more
progressive people. They want to see a reduction in
self-flaggelant philosophies and activities.
Questioning science is generally done by society's
more regressive. Ongoing societal advancement --
which to them is a bad thing, since to them people
who live healthily and enjoyable are being sinful ...
i.e. are ignoring "God": their demanding, needy, love-
starved parents -- means to them that more children
need to be punished and hurt.
They displace their own "badness" onto children -- so
well representing their own "guilty" growing, striving
selves -- and encourage their death through disease,
economic deprivation and war. This way, spurned,
angry "parents in the sky" are felt to be somewhat
ameliorated.
Questioning name-brand institutions of the scientific
world, done by those who can be trusted, is of course
being done by progressives who also question the
Catholic Church and the National Football League.
The more hippieish of them realize that institutions,
degrees, professionals admonishing themselves
within a "guild," is still about keeping the phantasm
Chaos at bay ... it's better than magic, alchemy and a
2549
projection-full world, but it's not that

evolved/projection-dilluted ... we can let these
"authorities" go too.
----
It has extended life and cured disease and improved
agriculture, and it has brought us eugenics and the
Tuskegee experiments and Hiroshima and Zyklon-B
and a whole host of amazing pesticides and
herbicides and preservatives and plastics that have
permeated every square millimeter of the planet’s
surface and the bodies of all its creatures, and whose
long-term effects are not known but don’t look that
great. (Andrew O'Hehir "Anti-vaxxers are not the
enemy")
The book Zuckerberg picked for discussion in his
book club is Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of
Our Nature." The book is a reminder that the number
of people who have died owing to murder/slaughter
has been decreasing over time -- just previously our
most progressive citizens rejoiced in them, but it is
nevertheless true that primitive societies, our earliest
historical origins, were a nightmare of slaughter, even
compared to American Civil War/WW1 levels.
We let go magical thinking and went science in the
first place because, owing to gradually improving
2550
childrearing, more children were growing up less

demon-haunted: the landscape was less one where
scary demons were all over the place, in every
place/everything, and they could view things a bit
more denatured. This meant more societal growth ...
and our childrearing has not reached the level where
this is something we can completely allow for
ourselves.
Societies use such things as science initially to grow
and better provide and then start feeling guilty for it,
hopelessly abandoned. They begin to shuck their
growth, grow provincial and turn against the
progressive elements in their society, and bond into
some kind of regressive group -- they could become
suddenly more nationalistic, for example. They then
project all their negative attributes into some "other"
and prepare to slaughter them -- eugenics, Hiroshima.
When enough people have died, people feel the skies
are cleared again and such things as science progress,
much less spared accompanying evil.
There are a good number of people alive whose

childhoods were good enough that they would use
science completely benevolently -- they are entirely
divorced in emotional/psychic makeup from those
who'd suddenly see some absolutely valid need to
evaporate an enemy and cleanse ourselves of our
2551
"weakest." Earth wins when they're the majority.

Dialogue at Salon.com (Feb. 5 2015)
Original Article: White male temper tantrums:

What the “political correctness” debate completely
misses
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2015 7:21 PM
Benthead Patrick McEvoy-Halston I hear you. Mind you, in
presence of chivalric liberal Chait, about to do battle in
support of 18th-century liberal ideals(!) it's okay ....
perhaps more than okay, to remind that people can be
Quixotic, strange, as bizarrely motivated as Freud held all
humanity to be.
Different cultures owe entirely to different childrearing.
You can make all the fuss you want about reactionaries
across different cultures, but if they sound the same in
tone ... if they're equally aggressive, then they properly
belong grouped with one another, however much their
decorating aesthetics may sort out. Historical change owes
to gradually improving childrearing. People believe they
deserve a better life, and they invent belief systems that
help enable it to be so.
The nature of geopolitics depends on the norm within our
own families. If we cooperated there and addressed each
other as equals, this will prove the same when we engage
with one another at the UN. If we fought bitterly, constantly
trying to shame and humiliate ... then when one, say,
shucks off austerity, our reaction will be angry and
2552
punitive. Germany's childrearing was the worst in Europe

in the first part of the 20th-century; I wonder where exactly
it stands now.
I appreciate the comments you make here, Benthead, the
good that you do. Freud rules!
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misses
Benthead
I'm a lefty, but I still roll my eyes at some PC excesses.
So what are you like a governor who administrates the
excesses and brilliance of the young? I'm speaking, of
course, as someone who is routinely accused of being
excessive in my Freudianism ... and all I see is the
beautifully opened vision that is being forestalled by those
who recognize me in a way which means the least
adjustment as possible.
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Lorin K Correct. What the centre-left is giving us these
days is ready disparagement of those they still take
inspiration from.
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esstee AtavistEsquire lwaxanatroi I agree. But once you
start reflecting more on how other people are being hurt or
humiliated by your language, it doesn't mean then assuming
that you have more to learn from them than they do from
you. It may only mean that there is room for you to grow in
your sincere effort to be humane and loving.
For example, I might as a humane therapist use language
that threatens/shames someone who became a rapist and a
murderer owing entirely to sustained early childhood abuse,
and I should correct course: my aim should be to make this
afflicted human being feel comfortable rather than
manipulated into being cowed and docile. But in this
situation, even as I've explored their situation as much as
possible from "the inside," and as much as I've begun to
address my need to rethink how I engage with people like
him/her in the future, I unfortunately haven't much to learn
from them. It's unfortunate, because this is when the world
is best -- when every single person out there has had a
developmental history which means they shine at least as
brightly as you do. Good hippie stuff.
If you're a socialist, a real progressive, what you may really
have to rethink is any inclination you still have to submit to
the role of the sinner as soon as someone strikes the pose of
the put-off adult. You still think of yourself as in some way
bad and long for the acceptance you get when you finally
2554
admit to it. You won't long hold onto this "badness"

anyways; for you'll eventually project it onto others, which
will mean a whole lot of hurt for them.
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misses
PubliusPencilman it is an honest question: can we disagree
as thinking people and not exclusively as representatives of
fraught racial histories?
Ultimately we're all representatives of fraught family
histories. Brittney has acknowledged that black families
have historically expected obedience out of their children,
and that this might have resulted in the curbing of creativity
and the breeding of fear and resentment (projected onto
others so one isn't put in the position of pointing fingers at
one's own terrifying parents?). She brings all this into
every conversation she has with "you."
What's your family history like? Are you bringing the
same? If not, she may be more afflicted by the past than
you are.
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AtavistEsquire How about just calling her Brittney? We're
2555
all together here in the salon, and it's democratic manners

not to go formal or start titling one another.
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Lorin K And since these are liberals and leftists who also
happen to be white, straight, or male, they are actually
interested in learning and growing, otherwise why would
they be joining you in the fight against oppression in the
first place?
The charge is that they aren't so interested in learning and
growing but in extending their privilege. And you know
this, ostensibly, because the moment you show them how
"white" and self-serving/promoting their version of
liberalism is, they get upset rather than prepare themselves
to learn and grow; they feel inclined to want to "shush"
you. White, heterosexual liberals, the charge goes, so
much don't want to know that they themselves are the
problem -- that they are elitists who count on a horde of
loyal "diverse" followers to ultimately count them lords --
that rather than reflect and absorb they angrily reject and
flee.
Personally, I think that some of those charged as being
secretly bigoted are actually genius at getting at the
perspective of others -- the best there is alive. They just
won't let kill-joy conservative swamping derail their
progressivism ... if that makes any sense.
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Rashomons Baby AtavistEsquire I didn't mean "querulous."
I meant rather curious, or atypical, or maybe even queer.
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Rashomons Baby Patrick McEvoy-
Halston AtavistEsquire Depends on how evolved I am. But
yes, I am the judge, or, rather, the person who in good faith
decides for myself.
If you say something that makes me feel uncomfortable,
you could be a bully but you could also be a friend. It
depends on how much of my current framework of thinking
is built out of defence of early-suffered child abuse.
If a lot, then your making me feel uncomfortable will be
felt by me as someone piercing through a protective shield
that threatens to sink me back into a humiliated state. If
very little, then your making me uncomfortable won't be
felt as your making me feel uncomfortable: it'll simply be
something initially querulous that quickly becomes a
delightful opportunity to see my world anew! Thank you!
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Thank you! Thank you!

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AtavistEsquire Rashomons Baby That would depend on
how progressive they are. If they're bullies, then yes; if
they're evolved, then no.
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BlarBlarBlar Salon employs both of them because "they"
think they're both fine journalists -- fine political
journalists.
I do think there are some on staff who sort of agree with
you, though ... but these are people who hold perhaps an
older conception of what a proper journalistic piece is
supposed to be.
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Rashomons Baby dcer then you may be missing an
opportunity to find (and potentially diminish) the shadow
2558
of the oppressor buried deep within yourself (to

paraphrase Audre Lorde).
A lot of people want to recognize themselves as possessed
of sin -- are you advertising to it?
The point shouldn't be to gather as many people together as
possible who agree that at some deep level we're all bad,
and go out on a purifying crusade against those still
enjoying lattes, Lena Dunham, and who feel pretty much
wholly alright with themselves.
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della street Patrick McEvoy-Halston It seemed implicit that
if they failed they deserved blame ... isn't this how this
rhetoric of rewards and punishments goes?
Personally, I don't they deserve recognition or blame. If we,
if the state, provisions you the way "you" deserve -- which
is amply -- a good outcome is guaranteed. If you're left
destitute by your parents and the state is nowhere to help,
no god-miracle happens: guaranteed, you'll raise very
mentally disturbed children.
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della street If anything, the life of the single Black mother,

who manages to raise good kids despite huge challenges,
should be venerated.
And the ones who don't manage this miracle should be ...
disrespected? These millionaire rap performers don't do
this, but they do distribute it with great enthusiasm amongst
the rest of the female populace.
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overcat Patrick McEvoy-Halston Moses got to be God's
favourite, but that still didn't stop him from believing God's
ten commandments were a good idea -- so no.
What would have stopped it is if there was nothing in her
relationship with her mother and father that made her able
to relate to the idea that if you suffer for your
God, then you're a good person.
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Splint Chesthair But racism, sexism, heterosexism and
every other ism are bigoted and illegitimate.
Some of us aren't sure exactly what's going to get identified
as racism, sexism, heterosexism, and thus worthy of
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thorough censure. If like Brittney, who is a person of deep

faith, the people who decide this actually hold suspiciously
conservative traits, it can be a means by which actual
progress is inhibited or canceled.
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misses
BlarBlarBlar BeansAndGreens You're trying to bait
BeansAndGreens to dump Jenny Kutner/Brittney Cooper
identity politics for Thomas Frank economic/international
affairs? Doesn't this to you sound a little bit like keeping
female talk hidden while the boys smoke cigars?
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Chaemera Patrick McEvoy-Halston BeansAndGreens A
beacon's only duty is to shine brightly. We should
remember it wasn't Fitzgerald's fault that "Great Gatsby"
went out of circulation in the 1930s, but the populace's --
the idiot middle -- who willed him out of view. The middle
is lost; to me its obvious the direction they're headed.
Our concern is to embolden progressives that the right
attitude is one which recognizes no authority simply
because they're an "authority"; to deflate any impulse on
their part to base their self-esteem on rectitude by showing
2561
clearly that those who live best and most freely and most
enviably can hardly give a damn if they're ignored for
being trash, or praised for dressing princely. These sites do
this inspiringly. They inspire and embolden me.
Permalink
misses
BeansAndGreens If Salon wants to help society engage in
discussions of race and privilege, it should elevate the
discourse, not drop it down to Fox News levels.
This is Gawker/Jezebel level, not just Fox, and Gawker is a
powerful progressive voice ... it unsettles. Fox would talk a
lot about the need to elevate the discourse too, but you'd
never hear such a thing from these sites ... Are you sure you
know through exactly which discourse, the liberal fight is
finding its most vibrant avenue?
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misses
pavioc16 In this regard he relegates our intellectual and
political contributions to the terrain of unruly and
excessive forms of embodiment and emotionality, which he
rhetorically constructs as mutually exclusive from the
terrain of enlightened reason.
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This bit strikes me as right. Brittney is however a person of

deep faith, which means that the idea of a pure God and his
sinful children means something to her. I suspect her
ultimate inevitable bent to be a kill-joy will arise mostly out
of the kind of parental-child relationship she was born into
which gave birth to this perversity.
Chaif is a kill-joy as well. He supported the Iraq war which
killed millions and drained billions that could have gone
into social programs ... into things which would have
opened up better health and more joy. Right now he seems
to be encouraging liberals to imagine themselves knights to
"lady liberty" -- to counter the "evil" females, the witches,
which may in his mind mostly be large, grasping black
women -- and can more readily see this leading to combat
and stalled progress rather than academic creativity.
Permalink
Original Article: Rand Paul needs to be shushed:
Why the confrontational brat is not ready for prime
time
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2015 6:14 PM
bootknife stephened ornwen Didn't mean this to read as an
insult to you, btw. I meant that all parents should see their
children as an opportunity to give them more love than they
themselves received.
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time
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Cooper53 Kronosaurus Booblay Ownership of children? I

think not. Parental rights until you abuse them and then the
community steps in to assure humane treatment of your
child.
I'm not even sure about this. If the community is more
evolved than the particular family, it should be there from
the start. Otherwise, it'll just be another
republican/libertarian bent on hurting the vulnerable.
Permalink
time
jonvaljon Patrick McEvoy-Halston okay.
Permalink
time
DMichael Hoyt Yes, shushing is you being the authoritative
parent to their being the inferior child. When you shush,
you're actually entering the mindset of your own regressive
parents, who did that to you.
Permalink
time
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bootknife Patrick McEvoy-Halston stephened ornwen okay.

maybe also opportunity ... to raise children more
emotionally evolved than you are.
Permalink
time
stephened bootknife ornwen Please, go ahead and give
your children all the non-infectious diseases you like since
they are, after, your property.
You think children are parents' property?
Permalink
time
The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the
children. And it is an issue of freedom and public health.
Ron Paul doesn't actually believe this. If he got elected,
he'd suddenly find all kinds of excuses for the state
meddling with progressive childrearing within families.
You'd be part of Alfie Kohn's "no homework" movement,
part of anyone's "no spank" movement, and you'd be
deemed guilty of raising weak, spoiled children, presenting
no warrior resistance to ISIS.
Permalink
Original Article: Political and incorrect: Why
2565
Jonathan Chait’s attack on p.c. culture is so flawed

Blueflash Maybe it was purity, the physical desire to feel
purified, rather than idealism ... which to me makes people
seem all bookish Thomas Jeffersons. To feel free of sin
yourself, and to be righteously attacking it all on the
outside, could come near to motivating hundreds of
thousands, perhaps even now.
And when they felt the country was being betrayed, their
founding, perhaps they weren't (at the deepest level)
thinking of what happened a hundred years before but more
of early personal experiences akin to what "American
Sniper" showed ... the young learning early how good it
feels to stick up for, to "sheepdog," your family.
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bernie4366 A whole country doesn't want Isquith? I'm sure
he doesn't know what to make of that ... it's a bit like being
told the moon doesn't like you, and sure enough, looking
up to see the moon deeply frowning -- which would be
surreal but also kinda awesome!
Permalink
Blueflash So hundreds of thousands of ordinary white
Northerners rushed to give up their lives because their
2566
Southern neighbours weren't sufficiently democratic? Very

reasoning and noble of them. But isn't that too a bit
preposterous? How about they did it because all of a
sudden they stopped seeing Southerners as neighbours --
however inferior ones, wed still too much to sheep-thinking
and aristocratic values -- but as dangerous vipers who near
literally threatened to poison the body public? What was
the imagery like? How were Southerners portrayed? In a
clear-visioned fashion or in ways that smacked of heavy
mental disturbance and delusion?
Permalink
Original Article: The “American Sniper” cultural
moment: How Iraq became the new Vietnam
others adjourn to the wine shop or coffeehouse to celebrate
the meaninglessness of everything and discuss the new
episode of “Girls.”
Nelson Fox: Perfect. Keep those West-Side liberal nuts,
psudo-intellectuals...
Joe Fox: Readers, Dad. They're called readers.
Nelson Fox: Don't do that, son. Don't romanticize them.
Permalink
Jack Burroughs Patrick McEvoy-Halston Kevin J
Cunningham
Rolling Stone was intuitively persuaded that the UVA rape
2567
accuser was telling the truth.

My intuition tells me that you think men are under attack
by female schemers and their hapless male minions. My
sense is that you gloried in this rebuke. My intuition tells
me that all proof of this I would subsequently pro-offer
you, wouldn't gain your ascent, even if Athena herself came
down to weigh all evidence on my side.
Permalink
susan sunflower I think they suspect that the world's
greatest threat right now is the seductiveness of us all going
us vs. them. If "Charlie Hebdo" gets recontextualized, it's
defused as a "tea in the harbor," linchpin event and
becomes one that has its complicated, nuanced aspects. Our
complex, liberal society gets to continue, as our corpus
callosum smacks our reptilian matter right in the face.
Permalink
theglove Patrick McEvoy-Halston Jack Burroughs Kevin J
Cunningham I know, but he's become especially militant
right now, and you sense that given a choice between the
two (as an opponent), Islam is his preference.
Permalink
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Jack Burroughs Patrick McEvoy-Halston Kevin J
Cunningham
If you "sense" something nefarious about someone, you
still have to back up your suspicions with substance. If you
fail to do that, then you're engaged in character
assassination.
You sound like someone mansplaining the world-turned-
upside-down damage female intuition leads to.
Permalink
Jack Burroughs Kevin J Cunningham For instance, how
many times has Salon, and many of its commenters,
basically accused Bill Maher and Sam Harris of racism
and other bigotries for their substantive, good faith
criticisms of Islam?
Many, because they're not done in "good faith." Good faith
would mean that if there was some means of making the
world more progressive which didn't mean their isolating
Islam as an opponent worthy of a crusade, they'd have
chosen it. We sense their need for people to be crushed,
guiltlessly, probably because an ever-evolving world
actually makes them feel nervous and jumpy -- surely, for
all this progress, some group has to be made to pay for our
collective sins -- and this is why Salon attacks them.
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Permalink
Hal Ginsberg
From Socrates to Thomas Paine to David Hume to John
Stuart Mill to Jeremy Bentham to FDR to MLK to Bernie
Sanders, liberals are just about always right.
A lot of men on this list. It's what's appealing to Chait ...
this sense of time-travelling back to the 18th-century, when
it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to have listed a woman
-- on anyone feminine -- on a list of who's right.
Permalink
DailyAlice Blueflash I think if we explored history we'll
find ample examples of just-former neighbours suddenly
hacking the hell out of one another. People can be getting
along amiably and then suddenly switch, and no longer see
kindly Joe or Sue but demons that mean to submit everyone
to their servitude.
Permalink
gerryquinn I think he's trying to masculinize liberalism, and
cast everyone else as enfeebling ... I think it's about his own
2570
feeling weak right now, feminine. I find his vision is

becoming mythological. I fear that a whole lot of people
will appreciate the kind of "armour" he casts over them
when he dresses them as lady-liberty protectors. Their
absolute immunity -- in their heroic chivalry -- to doubt and
contestations.
Permalink
The problem for me is really just fundamentalism ...
peoples whose childhoods were repressive enough that they
feel a need to stop growth, that they feel good boys and
girls in doing so.
There are plenty of people who associate with the left but
who are actually quite conservative in values--Brittney
Cooper, I find, is one of them; and it should be interesting
to see what happens when some of her fellow writers at
Salon get plunked into her category of racist villains. I
think that many of these people are aware that sometimes in
stopping people from saying and exploring things, they're
not stopping something absent of sensitivity and that
encourages bigotry, but that encourages growth --
something that is actually a good thing.
With these people, we have to be sensitive that what
motivates them is not villainy/evil but a shallower, more
punitive and cowing childhood; we have to delay our
reaction by getting inside them and experiencing the world
from their perspective; but we do have to recognize them
2571
nevertheless as obstacles -- they are that.

Permalink
Blueflash Yeah, reason was really king when before people
could hardly see the world for it being so coated with their
projections -- so 1500 to 1900 or so. Clear vision, reason,
came out of being more empathically raised as children.
Those still clinging to the word/concept now experience it
as a (perhaps patriarchal?) bulwark against feelings, makes
them feel coated in armour -- it's autistic, in a way -- and
are hardly our most evolved sort.
Permalink
When Chait supported the Iraq War, I'm sure if you'd have
seen him you'd have spotted something wild in his eyes.
There's something wild in his demeanour right now, and it
scares me.
To the limited degree that the humanity of African-
Americans was recognized by U.S. government and society
in the 19th century, it came through the thrust of a bayonet
and the barrel of a gun.
Is this what happened in Britain when they turned against
the slave trade? Abolitionists started wading about and
spearing every conservative in sight?
2572
Maybe what enabled the recognition of the humanity of

African-Americans, was slowly better childrearing. More
empathy in childhood means less projection of your own
"badness" onto others in adulthood. The war just suited
those who required that progress be met with a huge hoard
of sacrifices to the maw ... then we'd be allowed to keep it.
Permalink
Original Article: California takes on the NFL:
New bill would force teams to pay cheerleaders
minimum wage
SATURDAY, JANUARY 31, 2015 12:50 AM
It'd be nice if some of the players spoke up for them. Such
a staple of the game, and paid nothing.
Permalink
Original Article: “I don’t like to fight”: Brittney
Cooper on life, God, childhood & mortality
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2015 5:53 PM
susan sunflower Patrick McEvoy-Halston Benthead
becomes a way to erase Brittney and what she's saying in
factor of making her and it somehow the product of
pathology.
Brittney herself has argued that who children end up
becoming depends a great deal on how they were raised.
She argues that childhoods where obedience is obtained out
of fear, "curtail creativity ... and breed fear and resentment
between parents and children that far outlasts childhood."
She's not the product simply of pathology; I think she's
right that there was love there, however much I think her
2573
need to keep her mother holy means she overstates it.

I listen to her, catch a tone that suggests to me she'll
actually prove someone who shortchanges progress,
ongoing self-expression, growth, and, I think, I point to her
childhood, to origins, to help clarify what might otherwise
people might be distracted from. "What you sense in her
owes to her as a child being abandoned and punished for
trespasses, and her ongoing need to make her parents right
and avoid punishment by ultimately serving to inhibit
freedoms and demonize those more progressive than she."
Permalink
susan sunflower MWH Patrick McEvoy-Halston Benthead
It might also be useful to look at this column:
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/29/lay_off_michelle_obama
_why_white_feminists_need_to_lean_back/
where she backs off feminists claiming that Michelle
Obama had become a "English lady of the manor, Tory
party, circa 1830s," saying that,
"The fact that she is ride-or-die for Barack makes us love
her all the more. And that struggle between supporting your
man and his vision for the nation versus being the full,
forceful expression of your black womanhood is a struggle
that black feminists know all too well, and are uniquely
poised to sit with, not uncritically, but rather in a productive
2574
space of discomfort."
which sounded a little bit to me like the sort of
"contentment" 1950s women of all colours were supposed
to "sit with." And I'm wondering if her perspective,
informed by masochism and, I think, somewhat suspect
respect for victims ... witness her claim that Bill Cosby
should always be a hero to black people, owes to the
particular nature of her childhood.
Permalink
MWH Patrick McEvoy-Halston Benthead I'd like to see if
there is a difference in how they were raised as children,
between feminists being attacked via the
solidarityisjustforwhitepeople hashtag, and those feminists
doing the attacking.
Permalink
susan sunflower Patrick McEvoy-Halston Benthead I think
progressives are being managed so that putting blocks up
against regressive thinking, is not their being sane but their
being prejudiced. So I fight against this disaster.
Permalink
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Benthead Well, she's said that it has been traditional in
many black families to raise children to be obedient,
disciplined, to give them spankings, and that this is
something she's hoping to unlearn. She's written that in her
childhood, parents who thought their children were too
good to be spanked were ostracized. She's written that
while she's seen many white children "yelling" (talking
back?) at their parents, being received calmly, gently,
soothingly, she can't recount a time when she saw a black
child yell at her mother in public. Never--such a child
would be dead meat.
Gotz Aly recently described the different attitudes towards
children between German and Jewish families in the first
half of the 20th-century, with the Germans being
disciplinarian, not tolerating any dissent, and quite frankly
beating the hell out of their children, and the Jewish being
more progressive, raising children so they were unafraid to
take risks and who were actually known to talk back to
teachers--something German children never did.
Aly doesn't say much praise about the Germanic
childrearing culture, but rather attacked it for inspiring
envy and hate. Cooper claims that black parents are able to
discipline their children in a wholly loving way--she
believes it's misguided and has terrible consequences, but
it's always done out of love and care ... and thereby is
considerably different from disciplinarian cultures of the
past.
Do you believe her? What kind of voice are we giving rise
2576
to? The one that would flatten any child who behaved too
freely or who didn't shepherd properly exactly who one was
permitted to quarrel with? Or one that "usefully" challenges
such "totalitarian" ideas, like that children should be talked
to rather than spanked, and that parents aren't always right?
Permalink
Original Article: When “political correctness”
hurts: Understanding the micro-aggressions that
trigger Jonathan Chait
TUESDAY, JANUARY 27, 2015 8:07 PM
Brittney Cooper has written that she came out of a home
where obedience was valued, and that this no doubt stifled
her ability to think creatively. It seems to have affected her
ability to think of creativity, of "discovering the world
anew," as necessarily entirely virtuous--perhaps it can't be
detached from a selfish colonizing impulse?
If whatever group you belong to raises its children
progressively, when you're targeted, it's going to be because
you're doing what their parents cruelly crushed them for.
It's going to be out of envy, and to show themselves the
good boy or girl who's still devoted to his/her authoritarian
parents.
Permalink
Original Article: Hollywood’s political
ignorance: What Cosby, “Selma” & Hebdo reveal
about white liberal consciousness
Brittney Cooper said she grew up in a community which
insisted on kids learning to be absolutely obedient. You
2577
never spoke up against your parents. Never ... or you'd get a

whooping. She said that within her community, children
who did something "wrong" in other people's homes and
were beaten there for it, could expect to also be spanked
upon returning home for showing disrespect to a neighbour.
Is her problem that Charlie Hebdo is actually the "person"
she wanted to be but was scared away from fully
becoming ... someone small taking on institutions that insist
on being revered? Someone small behaving absolutely
liberally? Is being liberal just a bit too permissive for her?
Is she inclined to see us as spoiled conquistadors and in
need of a whooping, when we'd dare shrink something as
grand as an established religion into something just kinda
regular we could presume to hold to account?
Permalink
Original Article: Why the Charlie Hebdo
attack goes far beyond religion and free speech
MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2015 5:51 PM
J.C. Miller If Jews in France argued that they were hated by
some elements in their country owing to their success,
would this be reality-based? Would the people who
hate them be close to what we think of as
fundamentalist -- i.e. highly conservative? Or do you
think everyone who hates them naturally has in mind
Israel/Palestine?
Permalink
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SUNDAY, JANUARY 11, 2015 3:25 AM
esstee Patrick McEvoy-Halston Benthead Signe_S So
Muslims cannot express themselves as Muslims, but
others can berate them quite viciously with impunity.
Is this what is happening when they wear their apparel

-- expressing themselves? I would hope so, but
somehow that seems what a progressive person might
apply to their experience. In any case, I'm sorry they
weren't simply respected and nurtured -- what they
deserved -- but full fruition of a culture can be no
more than what we'd see when something regressive is
allowed the same. And personally I think the most
important repression they want revenge from is what
they experienced from their parents: being berated
viciously with impunity ... is the norm for any culture
which still believes in absolute obedience in a god, I
assure you. There was terror there -- abandonment and
infanticide was what was offered "you" if you
disobeyed your parents. Revenge, you'd never overtly
direct against them but against some other in the social
sphere.
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FreeQuark Benthead unless he or she thinks ethnic turmoil,

militarism, classism, consumerism, and environmental
destruction represent progress
Consumerism might be. Do you mean like the characters in

"Girls" who still love shopping in New York? ... I'm
not sure how many people parading against them are
really all that progressive.
Permalink

esstee Patrick McEvoy-Halston Benthead Signe_S What is
the geopolitics? Some people out there feel great when
they take down those who still feel permitted to
engage in debate and ridicule authority. We focus on
what regressives have done to them -- Bush et al. --
but all progressives needn't to have done to ensure the
same was just keep being comfortable with societal
growth. They are the freedom-exploring child they
were abandoned for trying to be.
If you were attacked by the regressives of another culture

but were yourself the product of nurturing parents, you
won't see the world as one where you might procure
righteous revenge. You'll know that what everyone has
suffered too much from is humiliation and you'll do
2580
what you can just to increment a bit the love.

Permalink

Benthead Patrick McEvoy-Halston Signe_S "Geo-politics"
sounds sober .... what "adults" do. The miracle of what
Freud does is to help break this fortress: the adult
world isn't beyond the childish but fully informed by it
-- how mommy and daddy loved, or did not love, us.
You'll admit this would require a brave step for an
adult -- to admit that they're still settling out their
grievances, their being owned by, their parents, when
it's Wall Street, Angela Merkel, international relations,
and the latest whatever that Atwood and McEwan
have pumped out?
Permalink

Benthead Patrick McEvoy-Halston Signe_S Freud had the
punitive God as really just the castrating parent
projected ... was he just frolic in your more sober-
important world of geo-politics as well?
Permalink
2581

Signe_S Patrick McEvoy-Halston Stephen Stralka What is
going on in the world is that that some people still
haven't quit being those who challenge, debate and
grow, while whole hosts of others have. Those who
keep on valuing growth have had a certain kind of
parents while those trying to shut it down, have had
others. The proper locus of attention is on the
individual and how s/he is allowed to know the world:
on you, the next person, and I.
Permalink

Signe_S Stephen Stralka Patrick McEvoy-Halston The only
history you need to know is one's personal history:
how did your parents react to your efforts to grow and
individuate from them? If they (parents) were well-
loved enough to respond enthusiastically, self and
societal growth comes easy to you: growth and self-
attention never meant abandonment for you. The only
thing that will stop you about your generational
history is if it wasn't one of those where each
generation found means to improve upon the parenting
2582
they themselves received.

Permalink

Benthead Signe_S Patrick McEvoy-Halston If the lower
classes can resent, why do you not allow that it is
THEY who allow themselves to be ruled? In any case,
I don't worry so much about resentment but about
those who feel virtuous -- loyal to their parents -- in
taking down the more progressive elements in society.
Permalink

Signe_S Patrick McEvoy-Halston In my judgment, what is
happening is what will keep on happening, so long as
some "cultures" continue to value progress. We
outpace what a lot of people can allow for themselves,
and they feel loyal to their parents' values in launching
themselves at us. I don't care how big a hoard they
become, I think any turn on our part to focus mostly
on our "inevitable" need to factor them in primarily,
will be a sign of our own now uneasiness with
ongoing change, our displacement (and implicit
ridicule) of our predecessors' attitudes and
2583
expectations for us.

Permalink

TXJew Sure, because Jews tend to more progressive than
other people. They "embody" all the freedoms that less
well-loved people can't allow themselves.
Permalink

Signe_S Patrick McEvoy-Halston It gets pulled down by
those who can't stand the growth progressives keep on
pushing for. Our current situation is to find some way
to make the emphasis the daily enjoyments still
available to us, the progress -- now including, finally,
such things as a living wage -- coming out of liberal
governments, rather than whatever wants to make war,
suspicion, settling matters -- hate -- what we should be
focusing on.
Permalink

2584

Signe_S How many people do you know who don't identify
as multiculturalist that are actually peace-loving?
Some of us identify as multiculturalist because this is
where many of the more respectful and loving people
"are." I personally champion other cultures because it's
"where" I can "applaud" my love and appreciation for
people everywhere. People who hurt other people
were brutalized by their unloved parents when they
were infants ... so how can I wish them any ill-will?
When you're speaking to them, you may not always be
learning from them, but you're always hoping for
them: I really wish, at least, they could be what they
deserved to be -- those I would have as much to learn
from as they do from me.
In truth, however, the only people we should be attending

to to learn something from are those of the most
progressive attitudes. If Seattle and San Fran no longer
can stand living amongst people who can't afford
groceries and so insist on a decent living wage, let's
look at places like that to actually learn, for instance.
Permalink

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2015 11:45
PM
2585
oregoncharles ilkim And that's from an atheist who thinks

religion is ultimately harmful. It's nonetheless part of
the human condition, so I salute the work and courage
of those who seek to make it helpful, instead.
How is bowing to a superior entity natural to anyone other

than those still unfortunately raised by parents who
expected obedience and deference?
Permalink
Original Article: “The Hobbit: The Battle of

the Five Armies”: Peter Jackson’s long goodbye
to Middle-earth
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2014 3:30
AM
I have no problem with any of this. Jackson is a great
director who is ebbing in his power. But still as such,
you know there's always a chance he'll do something
you haven't seen before, something done without your
consideration first in mind. Genuine leadership, like
Ridley Scott -- both of whom nevertheless are
approaching the point you may decide not to witness
at all. They've been built great out of a previous time,
but they're ebbing in their ability to say something
meaningful to our own. It begins to seem even
criminal, like you ought to be Joaquin Phoenix,
strangling them for being incommensurate, and having
to content "yourself" with your more minor abilities
that possess the virtue of at least being able to be put
2586
in play.
Permalink
Original Article: NFL’s next “woman

problem”: Why domestic abuse is only the
beginning
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2014 3:41
PM
MargoArrowsmith Patrick McEvoy-Halston Cultures that
value hard work are also those that insist on paying
people a low wage. Therefore, within these cultures,
we don't assure people economic gains by pointing out
how hard they are working.
Permalink

beginning
PM
MargoArrowsmith Patrick McEvoy-Halston kiel Your
reason for why cheerleaders is what, exactly? Try and
be imaginative.
Permalink

2587
beginning
PM
MargoArrowsmith There is a reality TV show about the
Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. They work as hard as
the players do.
Why is this relevant? We all know that McDonald workers

work hard but this hasn't stopped a lot of us from
thinking they get what they deserve. The preference
for working hard is linked to our insistence on paying
a low pay--it has a masochistic element, where we're
eager to show how worn we are.
Permalink

beginning
PM
kiel Historically women cheered and jeered men to prove
their manhood by sacrificing themselves in battle. At
some level of the football fan's imagination, these are
not simply beauties but terrors insisting on their
blood .... "come back with your shield or on it."
Women might compete for the role because their

relationship to the players might be a bit maternal ...
2588
the players become their boys sacrificing all and

accruing accomplishments for them.
Permalink
Original Article: Lena Dunham’s biggest

lesson: Why survivors’ stories alone will not end
our rape crisis
PM
It isn't just hearing about other stories, though. Freud heard
plenty of stories of child sexual abuse--in fact so many
he gauged it essentially the Austrian norm--but it
didn't lead him to think of its damage. He estimated
that since people seem to be still functioning, it
couldn't be that harmful.
What we are ultimately depending upon was touched upon

by Brittney Cooper early this year when she discussed
how childrearing has changed from her grandmother's
time, to her mother's, to her own, with what had been
prevalent -- beating the hell of children to imprint
discipline -- becoming spare and on the very of
disappearance (within her particular generational
string): Cooper pledges herself against physical assault
of children entirely. We are dependent upon all those
millennials out there whose parents gave their children
more love than their own parents will able to provide
them. These lot will simply care more. They'll hear of
abuse and pledge themselves instantly to stopping it.
2589
Children from unloving families can hear of abuse and

instantly put themselves into the position of the
perpetrator--they'll see the victim as deserving it. It
was their parents' position towards them, and they
internalized it, implemented it as an alter within their
heads, very early on to keep their parents as they
required them to be: right, just, and ultimately
protective so long as the child learned to behave.
As such, re-education requires coaching them to be able to

brace their parents' rejection, which'll come to mind
every time they're put in the position of defending the
vulnerable--that is, their being abandoned as infants to
the cold and surely to death. It'll pit you against their
superego and you'll probably lose.
Permalink
Original Article: From hefty histories to

chick lit: What I learned from reading two
decades’ worth of NYT Notable Books lists
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 1:19 AM
susan sunflower Sorry you had a bad week, Susan.
Permalink
Original Article: “It makes me really

depressed”: From UVA to Cosby, the rape denial
playbook that won’t go away
2590

PM
Katie has elsewhere argued that most women have a story
where they were forced into sex. That would mean
that, what, maybe 20 percent of the men out there are
rapists? This could be true. Charles Barkley and
Brittney Cooper have both argued that most black
parents beat their children -- not just with hands, but
with belts and switches. Both tried to say that this was
done with good intentions, for the ostensible benefit of
the child, but this is the standard rationalization of
those who've been abused, so we can read it the right
way: most black parents physically abuse their
children. As Brittney says, to imprint discipline into
their skin.
Abuse is THAT prevalent in our society. Because it's so

often at the hands of our parents, we have trouble
deciding that abusers were wrong. It would make us
feel permanently abandoned by them; it would make
us feel set to be infanticided by them. Freud knew the
prevalence of children's sexual abuse in Austrian
society but decided it couldn't be that big a thing
because everyone would be hysteric. I think we can
look around at society and see that the results of early
abuse shows plenty. Men revenging themselves
against maternal incest through repeatedly attacking
women. Women returning the abuse they themselves
suffered onto their children. Projections onto "others"
who represent our own bad selves. People seeing
2591
victims and believing they deserved what they got.

Permalink
Original Article: “It makes me really

depressed”: From UVA to Cosby, the rape denial
playbook that won’t go away
PM
As a culture, we are overwhelmingly inclined to think that
victims are lying when they say they have been raped.
I am not sure about that. I think it's just that we as a culture

still subconsciously want there to be abused people out
there, and for them to flail about without recompense.
Permalink
Original Article: Chris Rock’s economic

bombshell: What his “riots in the streets”
prediction says about the American Dream
PM
alterego55 Righteous anger is never based on existing
realities, but on early-suffered childhood abuse. My
vote goes for those who point to the health reforms,
the increases in minimum wages, gay marriage, the
legalization of marijuana, and sees a block to the idea
that what we need most is violent revolution.
2592
Permalink

bombshell: What his “riots in the streets”
prediction says about the American Dream
PM
DaveL Bladernr1001 But you're right. Progressives are
always the best loved in their societies, the most
evolved. They believe less that there are "bad
children" out there who deserve to be abandoned and
pained.

bombshell: What his “riots in the streets” prediction
says about the American Dream
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014 8:39 PM
DaveL Bladernr1001 This is great. But it's not intelligence
that is key, but emotional health. I know you know this, but
every time we say intelligence suddenly a cold chess game
comes to mind; not enough the delight in seeing people
everywhere enjoying life, fully provided as one can
imagine.
Permalink
Original Article: Jian Ghomeshi’s quiet
accomplice: Why the CBC must be investigated, too
Ellemm Christopher1988 sam louise Aranka Aunt Messy
2593
When women are sexually harassed they're not admired for

standing up to the powers that be.
There's a certain drama about Christopher's description of
adult society that strikes me as worth exploring. He
describes it as knocks and blows, and if you can weather it
you're an adult and if you can't you're a coward.
What he is describing here though is not so much what is
intrinsically adult as what has traditionally been typical for
male children, who are engaged less by their mothers, and
thus experience fears of abandonment much greater than
female children do. Almost immediately, they come to
crave showing bravery in testing fields -- it's bravado; a
testing of fears and showing you can master them. As an
adult they crave perpetuation of just such an environment.
It's not adult, but the perpetuation of the atmosphere of
early childhood neglect.
"Adult" really ought to be nurturing; it's what our long
climb through generations has been about -- to create a less
traumatizing and more attendant and loving world. So
"adult" to me is someone like Alfie Kohn, who dislikes the
whole testing narrative and thinks people perform best
when given support and love. If we were living in his
"adult" environment, those claiming they were abused
would never be faced with the ramifications our own
childhood-neglect built need to believe we've been tested
and proven ourselves victorious.
Permalink
2594

That dynamic won’t change until more Americans realize
that the American Dream today is just an empty promise.
At some level they know this, but they are atoning and so
want to be a Depression people who showed nobility and
dignity through suffering. During the Great Depression,
they continued their faith in working hard, at some level
knowing that whatever parental perpetrators in their life
would be pleased in their unwillingness to point fingers at
abusers.
After enough suffering, they collectively felt they were
allowed things again, and so the rich/poor divide collapsed,
plumbers making more than lawyers, the rich taxed at 80
percent.
Permalink
RoloTomassi Patrick McEvoy-Halston I'm not sure if this
was scribbled on the front page of Freud's Interpretation of
Dreams, it'd be a total winner. Then again, psychoanalysis,
while still a big deal in France, is less and less a thing in
this great sophisticated land of ours, so maybe Freud'd be
owned. "Shake ... and bake! my Austrian friend, shake and
bake."
Permalink
2595

glorrierose Patrick McEvoy-Halston We do live in a rape
culture. But more than this, we live in a culture where we
are sacrificing broad swaths of people, which includes the
poor and the young.
By this I'm perpetuating rape culture? Maybe you're
perpetuating sting culture ... going at people you don't
know like a wicked wasp and then leaving them to recover.
Permalink
Christopher1988 Aranka Aunt Messy
I think the smart person would look around at our society
and really understand that we are living in a period of
sacrifice, where people seem to actually want a lot of
people to suffer without remedy. Your action will depend if
people will want to see you as one of those who's role is
just to suffer. So if you're a student, take a pause. If you're a
woman -- take a pause ... are you rich, someone
successfully leaning in? Or can you be categorized as
someone mid-level who's job is never safe?
If you're the latter, the narrative society will want to see is
your fall. You presumed to speak against abuse, and to
society, you represent the vulnerable child speaking up
against adult prerogatives. Right now, we see such a child
2596
as simply self-indulgent, selfish, bad.

It would probably strike one that in such a society, when
someone suggests they take action which could be
discomforting and scary but which after all is what adults
do, they might being conned. For how much more ripe a
sacrifice is one who after being humiliated and shamed,
gets lead to hope by another huckster who sets her up so a
whole court can authorize her being discombobulated?
If it could, would such a society give such a gifted huckster
a gold key to the realm? He after all gets them naivety akin
to virgins.
Permalink
Benthead These people as children knew their parents were
happiest with them when they didn't complain that while
they were being neglected, their parents busied themselves
on gorging themselves. The rich are projections of their
own parents; those living in squalor are their own good
childhood selves, who are being "good" by not
complaining.
They understand the totality of what is going on. We just
don't appreciate the weird things children will do to feel
worthy of their parent's love.
Permalink
2597

I'm not sure if the problem is best described as rape culture.
I think we're going through a time where people at some
level understand certain people are being designated as
being able to get away with anything -- fixed in lofty
position, regardless of behaviour -- and others whose role is
to suffer without there ever being a remedy.
Living in an age where for so long we tolerated minimum
wage/part-time jobs for so many people, or the endless
testing and hundred thousand dollar debts for students,
without any guarantees, suggests to me that most of us
regretfully need to see at least one large delegated group
serve as our snuffing out. Something monstrous and awful
is freely forging on them, before our eyes, and
interminably, and we just can't bear to attract its notice by
speaking out.
Permalink
Let's hope someone wrote the equivalent article in Canada.
Permalink
Original Article: I am utterly undone: My
struggle with black rage and fear after Ferguson
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2014 2:05 PM
everready voltairespen Patrick McEvoy-Halston If they're
2598
black, I would tell them that there are swaths of people

who, owing to being unloved/hated as children, will project
onto people and actually enjoy hurting them. I would warn
them that in America many white families are unfortunately
some of the most unloving in the world, and those they
have traditionally projected on have been blacks. I would
tell them to take care, and move into regions where people
are generally more lovingly raised. Check out where twitter
showed the most outrage to this verdict, to inform your
decision as to where to head.
About cops, I would tell them that as we as a nation
increasingly grow and provide our citizens with healthcare
so fewer suffer, and change institutions so they work less to
enfranchise bigotry, we're moving towards a society where
cops seem an anachronism -- especially those with guns.
You should expect, that is, with society moving more and
more in a direction that does not satisfy the psychological
needs of those who usually apply for the police force, an
enormous amount of erratic behaviour, cops gone crazy.
You could be being decent and good, and some cop will
project all his personal demons onto you and see someone
that needs twelve bullets to be stopped.
Permalink
voltairespen Patrick McEvoy-Halston I would recommend
they make sure that those who pledge them relief from
mediocrity by putting themselves on the front lines, get full
2599
scrutiny.
Permalink
voltairespen "They are lining up, linking arms, and being
locked up for justice. They are listening to those who have
something to say, and shutting down shit when forced to
listen to anyone who doesn’t. They are choosing their
leaders, their griots, their truth-tellers, their strategists, their
elders. Showing up matters most. Putting one’s body on
the line is the order of the day. They are undignified,
improper, unabashed, impolitic, unapologetic,
indefatigable.
More than 3000 new registered voters move among
them.They have collected these new registrations like so
many arrows in a quiver.
And Barack Obama is a broken symbol, a clanging cymbal,
unable to say and do anything of use.
This moment is about all of us. About what kind of
America we want to be. About what kind of America we
are willing to be, willing to fight for. About whether we
will settle for being mediocre and therefore murderous to a
whole group of citizens. About whether there are other
versions of ourselves worth fighting for.
Don’t sleep. Millennials, it seems, are the ones we have
been waiting for. Fearless and focused, the future they are
fighting for is one I want. It is high time to awake out of
2600
sleep. Stay woke." (Britney Cooper)

She is advocating for warriors. She is urging millennials,
that is, young people, to lay down their lives. There is a
narrative she is hoping for which very much includes a
fantastic number of young people busted and beaten and
killed, as they purge themselves of their mediocrity and
become their best selves. This is war talk.
Permalink
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2014 11:45 PM
Xanthro RoloTomassi omglolbbq Force, or calling for
charred White flesh, will never help Black society, because
all it does is drive away potential allies, while reinforcing
negative stereotypes that Black people are inherently
violent and unpersuaded by facts.
Except we see a lot of evidently progressive people
expressing themselves just as forcefully right now, so I
don't find your argument persuasive. What's happening
there is people reacting to being hit by taking an assertive
step forward: it thrills!
Brittney Cooper, though, has talked about a need for young
people to get ready to sacrifice themselves, to actually die
for this cause. She's talked about them forgetting about
living enriching lives, living better, more comfortably than
their parents, and become more like the elders who literally
spilt blood and who realized it wouldn't be for them, their
2601
own benefit, that it was spilt. This is a problem. This is

young soldiers into WW1 talk.
Permalink
RoloTomassi Patrick McEvoy-Halston
What I know is that this powerful internet reaction owes
entirely to the fact that more and more Americans are being
raised with more care and love. So they're not racists --
racists being those who were brutalized by their parents
making them project their own "bad" selves onto other
people and take enormous pleasure when they're humiliated
and destroyed.
Evolved people like this need to know that the narrative of
sacrifice is ultimately about purging too. Never, ever,
encourage young people to see virtuous status as accruing
to them if they subject themselves to the battlefield. Never
make love and respect something owing to those who
accumulate scars.
What do we do now? If we have the momentum, we'll
"carpetbag" the more racist parts of the world and stop
they're having any agency: they're after all only to be about
seeking righteous vengeance themselves, possibly forever
-- especially if the overall temper of our society continues
to evolve, leaving them without a societal exostructure to
help them "handle" their madness.
If we don't, we'll probably realize that we've got enough for
2602
a country in all these progressive voices we're hearing, and

double-down on our efforts where we rule.
Ultimately, anything we do that means more love accruing
to the next generation, will be the most powerful thing we
do to work against societal racism.
Racists were brutalized as children; they're the victims of
sexual assault and abandonment. If you have to go
longterm it really helps to remember this. They're what
happens to those that get neglected.
Permalink
RoloTomassi kilfarsnar Nothing is gained without sacrifice,
and desperation without a viable alternative process is
usually the mother of such sacrifice.
Targeted action requires sacrifice: you end up looking
nothing like a warrior; you can't imagine your enemy
beaten to a pulp, thoroughly humiliated.
Plenty is gained without sacrifice. The fact that so many
Americans are upset about this verdict owes to them having
had parents who enjoyed their children's company more
than previous generations did, making them project less
and love more.
In my judgment, any time someone mentions sacrifice in
pursuit of a goal the real goalends up being the purge, the
sacrifice.
2603
Permalink
Original Article: Bill Cosby’s media inferno: On
journalists reporting justice — and believing victims
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2014 10:12 PM
J. Nathan Patrick McEvoy-Halston You're welcome, J.
Nathan.
Permalink
pjwhite I have seen rape survivors go from being perceived
as pitiful and damaged to being seen as the courageous
heroes they are for speaking out.
I'm glad they had the self-esteem to speak out, but I'm not
especially happy about calling them courageous. All the
others that historically DID NOT speak out, weren't
(guiltily?) lacking what the others managed -- that is, a
show of courage against bullies. They were just products of
backgrounds that weren't going to fuel them the self-worth
to power on through; the abuse they
suffered, corroborated the sense of their worthlessness that
their parents installed in them.
Speaking out would not just make the abusers but their own
parents wrong, and you've got to have received a
considerable amount of love to readily manage that.
Permalink
2604

Operation Enduring Boredom Patrick McEvoy-
Halston OEB, I've never had a sense that you actually
wanted me on this site, regardless of length of my posts. I
personally could do without interacting with you; I find you
corrosive.
Permalink
Part two:
We have “accumulating” two different psychoclasses, two
broad swaths of very different people -- one more lovingly
raised, one less. If the “less" wins, mostly determines the
emotional temper of our next number of years, everything
progressives have done to expand our awareness of how
many abusers there are out there can be used to justify a
pre-existing desire to cleanse the world of "bad" people. If
Katie McDonough's argument that almost every woman has
their own rape story becomes “understood” ... that there
arethat many men out there who are rapists; if we come to
understand that so many of us were victims of sexual and
physical assault as children ... if we as people who no
longer need to safeguard the abuser can look at our society
and recognize just how much our society is coloured by
sadism, the terrible defining destruction wrecked on our
fellow human beings, and we ultimately lose, we've laid
ground which the other side will takeover. Saying, “you're
right, but let me show you where this evil you’ve agreed
2605
exists in plenty and must in this moment of clarity be

urgently vanquished, is actually mostconcentrated…”
And you'll have America involved in righteous bigotry.
You'll have Americans going from feeling compromised to
instantly pure again, forgetting all the self-improvement
they needed as all their “issues” become transplanted onto
the outside. Chastising progressives will lose their effect,
and blamed, for not thinking their issues through — at the
cost of lives. And the women “we’ll” be standing up for,
those accosted in cultures everywhere that progressives
have ostensibly drawn back from incriminating but to keep
their own cosmopolitan egos intact, will be in their own
minds childhood perpetrators they'll feel enormous joy in
protecting.
They can't be guilted, is what I’m getting at. That self
they'd begun to recognize that should feel shame and guilt
in denigrating vulnerable people, that increasingly
uncomfortable, caught-out self that recognized how much it
wanted women to know pain, would be gone as they know
themselves to in fact be willing to sacrifice their very lives
to keep their mothers from being pained at their children’s
ability and presumptuous willingness to see them plain —
to destroy them, Meghan Daum, truly
progressive,matricidal-style.
Permalink
Why did the responsibility change?
2606
Historically, the most powerful and important perpetrators

in our own lives were our parents. Since as children we
absolutely had to imagine them as people who could love
us, be our protectors, our brains went quickly to work
making them right to have abused us, and ourselves wrong
for doing whatever we did. Since we actually didn't do
anything and were just attacked by our parents when they
switched into the brain states of their own perpetrator
parents and saw as full of their own projections, we are left
to conclude that it was just our vulnerability, our absolute
neediness, that was bad. To keep our parents, the ur-
perpetrator, "right," perpetrators become automatically
good and the vulnerable deserving of abuse.
This is why the last people you should expect automatic
empathy for victims from is actually people who've been
abused as children. That interview we all saw where that
CNN interviewer drew his interviewee back into her
moment of sexual abuse and then tried to show her how the
facts show that even there she was being bad -- "why didn't
you bite his d--k off? -- is about what one should expect.
By humiliating her, by drawing her back into shame and
latching onto her there some hard-to-shake-off scold of
self-blame, he was at work, not protecting/shielding Cosby
but the primary childhood abusers in his own life -- his own
parents -- and thereby experienced a pat of approval so
meaningful your reproof of him would have little chance.
When perpetrators like Cosby (himself, guaranteed, a
victim of sustained child-abuse) are losing their protections
it's because some substantial part of our population has
2607
begun to have childhoods where their parents stopped or

lessened their inclination to see their children as bad sh-ts
that needed discipline, terrors, abuse to be corralled into
being good. Some substantial part of our adult population
has known more loving childhoods, and don't as much see
their own childhood vulnerable selves as somehow having
deserved whatever abuse suffered. They then witness the
perpetrator and don't so much cow away but demand
dethroning, while mostly in fact thinking of the victims and
empathizing into the shamed states the brutalized had been
pitched into experiencing.
Brittney Cooper discussed recently how she was separating
herself from the long tradition she’d grown up amongst that
accepted "spanking" -- read, physical assault on the child --
as the preferred way to raise children. We’re, our society’s,
experiencing something like that, but writ large. When
there's enough of us, those in the media who'd like to have
written something twenty years ago but who really would
have been eviscerated if they'd tried then, now have the
way in — we’re the audience who’s ready. Even if we still
can't shake that in going after outside perpetrators we’re
still involved in a discourse that's ultimately going to
implicate our own parents — again, the ur, the original, the
archetype perpetrator, for all of us — more of us have had
sufficiently less abandoning and terrifying childhoods that
we can withstand a rattling of what previously only
beckoned oblivion.
Andrew O'Hehir just wrote an article where he sees
perpetual stasis in an awful, hellish, late-capitalist society,
2608
as our ongoing reality. Next presidential election, more of

the status quo, whomever gets elected. But we should
understand the downing of Cosby as evidence that people
are changing, not just in attitudes but in their well-being,
their make-up, their constitution. And systems change when
human nature changes, when better-loved people grow
beyond systems that were emotionally satisfying to their
less emotionally evolved, more pointless-punishment
accepting/unconsciously desiring, predecessors. Capitalism
moves from late to socialism when people stop needing for
there to be shelved amongst us — losers; when we stop
feeling satisfaction in such numbing, dream-deflating,
tempering categories like products, producers and
consumers. The sign that we may be moving towards
something profoundly good is more to be found in this new
response to abusers than I think in the apocalyptic anger
we'll likely also see a lot of in upcoming years.
This anger, I fear, will be fuelled by revenge against
childhood perpetrators as well — its ur-source — but its
constituents will not be like those repelled by Cosby ... it
will not be fuelled by those who knew less abuse, who
knew more love, but rather those who received so much
they still will feel the need to protect perpetrators and
destroy victims. Their ur and all-infiltrating source of
“perpetrator,” their parental terrorizers, will be split into
two, so only part of this parent is actually attacked while
the other part actually clung to ever-more loyally — its
destructive aspects, wholly denied; one’s own fierce anger
at them, just as much so. They'll be the equivalent of
soldiers who destroy encroaching predatory countries, lead
2609
by an evil mastermind with a — to borrow from Sam

Harris — “mother-load” of feminine qualities, but who
cling to their approving nation like a knight-protector. And
all the "troops" destroyed ... will be full of projections of
their own childhood selves, their "sh-t selves," still horribly
bad, and worthy of any other name you’d be inclined to call
them. We'll see, in short, the 1930s, a move towards mass
action, mass participation, which could see threatened elites
and worried big businesses (hurray!), but also collective
agreement on the righteousness of bigotry — much of the
world issimply cretinous and bad, and in need of urgent
purging.
This new unwillingness to excuse the perpetrator for a great
reason is being matched by a very bad one. Because we're
seeing it of course in the slowly mushrooming anti-Muslim
movement ... amongst even progressives — there, the New
Atheism; people are feeling an increasing desire to project
onto others and destroy, and so are grabbing on. If it was
built out of the same energy you wouldn't have a
progressive, you wouldn’t have Camilla Gibb, in the same
article where she writes of how she left anthropology
because she couldn’t handle how aggressively harassing
Middle Eastern cultures were, conclude only how she was
going to stand up in future against future Ghomeshis, but
rather of course with her standing up against something that
would look to have her more associating with the New
Athiests — those ostensibly standing up against the larger
broad swath of abusers, whole cultures, in whole
continental regions: those, in their own minds, more
consistent, those being even more brave. That is, it would
2610
of had her finish where her article obviously looked to be

directing her before she tightened it down only onto those
she’d find within her vicinity at a gala. She chastised her
own letting loose because it drew to mind phantoms of
those legions also standing up right now, but whom she
knows just aren’t up to what she is up to. Not at all. More
the opposite. More along the lines of Germans in the 30s.
Permalink
From "American Sniper" to ... "Triumph of

the Will"?
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''American Sniper'' is a movie for those who enjoy

feeling protected and safely individuated—
disconnected from other people—rather than for
those eager to lose themselves into a brotherhood.
Chris Kyle is a sniper—his organs and privates are
always covered as he lies on the ground to ''snipe.''
He becomes a famous sniper—his fellow troops don't
see him so much as just one of them as a hero
protector who guarantees them victory. His mission
is not the same as everyone else's, as much as he
might pretend that it is: while the rest of the troops
take out the ordinaries, he is bound to face off against
the great devil Mustafa, who picks off vulnerable
soldiers like a death vulture pounced direct from the
sky. He can personally handle some adulation—one
2611
soldier who hails him repeatedly as ''the hero'' before

the rest of the troops, is dealt with with a plate of
flung food, humbling the alert state of newly-drawn
attention with the drowsiness of the narratively
known—but when other's well-meant appreciation
means him feeling requited to receiving and
accepting, to him becoming a passive receptacle to
other's needs, PTSD lets him off the hook by making
background noise suddenly remind of traumatic
previous war encounters, and he's only half there to
receive anything. His wife has never had the
advantage of him. He approached her after attending
her shooting down the approach of another, and his
familiarity with her technique means he's able to
buttress whatever riposte she has left in her.
Thereafter he's involved in a war they both believe in,
so something along the lines of the devastating attack
James Wolcott levied against those who diminished
war-serving Salinger in favour of Lena Dunham, is
always at the ready, if need be.
But this is Eastwood when he's still pro-growth. He'll
do a film like ''Gran Torino,'' which suggests that in
becoming accustomed to Korean neighbours, the
curmudgeon main protagonist isn't so much adjusting
to the new as keeping fidelity with familiar values—
now housed in physically different people—but
which overall feels in favour of adaptation and
2612
change. He'll do a film like ''Jersey Boys,'' which

lands us back in the conservative 1950s, but which
features a flamboyant gay producer who's portrayed
favourably—whip-smart, innovative, self-interested
but also overall a good friend. And he'll do
''American Sniper,'' which does lend support to the
liberal position that the government needs to fund
therapy for war-afflicted troops. When he tilts the
other way—and he will—he'll start doing films more
like ''Triumph of the Will,'' where there will be
nothing more gleefully forsaken than one's
individuality, and where the main protagonist will
gleefully catch any shared emotion you might want to
intermingle with him so you’re all that much more
''one.''
This change will occur because anyone who needed
to protect his own growth with defensive strategies,
came out of a early matrix that was smothering. Such
a matrix was also claiming ... and in abandoning it
one felt upon withdrawal its massive disapproval, its
accusation that you are a bad boy/girl who
deliberately abandoned a wholly selfless, endlessly
generous and provisioning source for flippant and
narcissistic—i.e. entirely selfish—reasons. One
cannot handle feeling abandoned, unworthy of one's
mother's—i.e. the ''mountain'' ground within the early
matrix—love forever ... accumulating before you is
2613
how apocalyptic this first felt to you when you

experienced it as an infant, and it eventually drowns
whatever positive self-evaluation you've mustered for
yourself in your individuated adult life. So off is
shuck your distinctiveness, and you merge within a
body masochistically as but added cells to a corpulent
grand madame. You become like Germans when they
in the millions forsook their individuated, growing
Weimar selves—something wondrous but totally new
and heartily anxiety-provoking—and lost themselves
into the provincial stupidity of the ''volk.''
One of the interesting things that will happen is how
the idea of the sheepdog, the protector—a recurrent
idea in Eastwood's films—will change. In ''American
Sniper'' the idea was introduced not just to explain
the source of Kyle's behavioural inclinations but to
add another empowered patriarch into a scene—
Kyle’s dad instructed him to be a sheepdog—an
empowered patriarch felt by Eastwood to add a
barrier that could succeed against any giant, bloated,
maternal sea-monster's efforts to reach out of the
swamp and yank poor Kyle/Eastwood back into a
digesting stew. Those with any trepidation, those who
are frail, won't be seen as worthy of being guarded—
as they are to some extent in this film, perhaps most
especially with the marines, who didn't receive the
training the Seals did ... who just six months before
2614
were civilians. They'll be seen as adding nothing to

the prowess of the group, as being vile for being
useless, and the protector's role will be to protect the
vitality of the group and expunge them—that is, in a
sense, to kill the sheep.
They'll be portrayed a bit like Kyle's younger brother,
whom Kyle is delighted with and proud to see
enlisted but whom the film shows as a pale shadow to
Kyle, and who's weak soul couldn't bear the tarnish
that a single tour would incur upon it. They'll seem
more like Mark Lee, who dies shortly after
questioning the wisdom of the war and the virtue of
warrior persistence, but that much more as a result of
their being in truth aliens that should have been
expunged from the brave collective effort of war that
much earlier. They'll seem a bit more like the
damaged vet who killed Chris Kyle, whom his wife
espied as a dark demon in vet-clothing as soon as she
spotted him, but who was clouded from acting to
save her glorious husband by the credibility of the
idea of keeping faith with the weak—a ''foul'' concept
"now" revealed as meaning that such a thing as the
greatest warrior in your history, would be left to be
downed by a fart of a man.
Eastwood will be vilifying the weak not just within
the group, but outside it. Within, the weak saps the
2615
strength of the group, and is hated for that reason;

outside, the weak and vulnerable are guilty of
representing what you mostly were when you felt
targeted within the maternal matrix, and are therefore
targeted because you’re now completely in mind to
keep your mother unblemished in her holiness. So in
future films ''enemy'' children that are being targeted
by hero-snipers won't be targeted with trepidation,
but shot in the manner of how Kyle in real life
actually shot them—totally self-righteously: down
goes another little savage! … serve up another! And
since all villainy must be outside the group, all the
negative aspects of your mother must be projected
there as well. This means that in future films when
woman come into view needing to be shot for their
carrying bombs, we won't be meant to think of them
as tools of the men who commanded them—as we
are to a significant extent in this film— but as issuing
forth oblivion from out of their own selves. It'll mean
that the exotic persian Orientalism won't be found in
the "beautiful" Mustafa, the ''sheepdog'' sniper on the
side of the terrorists, but in the ''queen'' at the centre
of the hive—''the butcher''—''herself,'' who'll be made
to possess traits that identity ''her'' as our split-off
villainous mother.
''She'' won't be made to carry a purse, necessarily, but
''she’ll'' surely be made to lurch over a doomed child
2616
in a way that can't help but remind of a witch adding

salt to the bare delicious exposed flesh of the helpless
child.
Posted by Patrick McEvoy-Halston at 9:20 AM No comments: Links to this post

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Labels: American Sniper, chris kyle, Clint Eastwood, film, movie, triumph of the will
Clint Eastwood's comfort zone, in

"American Sniper"
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Clint Eastwood feels comfortable when men can rule

the public sphere and women can be ushered into the
domestic. He feels that the idea of male authority is
so vulnerable right now, deemed so deservedly
vulnerable, that if you pointed to any instance of it
with praise carelessly, you might find yourself linked
to something just about to be devoured into a hole
where devil jezebels will take it to pieces for its rape-
enabling vibe. So he makes a film set in the era of the
1950s—"Jersey Boys”—where ostensibly it's not
"your" preference but just realistic to delineate the
journey of a band where everyone in authority is a
man, and where its not your revenge dream come true
but just realistic to show the fate of the agitated
2617
woman who marries the leader of the band to become

a housewife who bounces of walls into craziness.
And when he makes his next film, he escapes North
America entirely, and goes perhaps to the one place
where we can make male control not seem a
conscious artifice but rather presumed—where one's
enjoyment of patriarchy becomes almost a subliminal
satisfaction, outside of critique because like the
1950s, it's just the way the world is—and where
ready avenue exists to back off female complaint and
indeed shame women back into the role of
supplicants. He heads off for war-zone Iraq.
Eastwood doesn't want to seem like outcast-from-
Hollywood-society Mel Gibson, which he would
have if he made a film which overtly made it seem as
if the war in Iraq was right and that those who
responded by signing up were simply the bravest,
most loyal of Americans. So what he does is appear
to be playing to the liberal belief that those who
signed up were simply ignorant, uninformed—good
but simple: they were people who knew no other than
mainstream news and who'd been indoctrinated into a
belief system that the best way to carry out their
genuine intention to be good was to be support the
war effort. Liberals, who usually want to castigate
"rednecks," disarm this way of thinking of them
and switch into another when one provokes the idea
2618
of corporate/media control, then suddenly they're not

people who deserve to be shamed and insulted for
their regressive mindsets but rather protected ...
they're just simple people being manipulated by
powers much greater than they, whom liberals must
do their best to educate. Chris Kyle, who's been
raised to be someone who values being a "sheepdog,"
someone who protects the weak, who knows he has a
god-given talent with a gun, and who understands
participation as only something done in the dust-
swirling tempest of immediacy and direct action, sees
on tv the two towers being brought down and knows
the right thing to do is to go where-ever "savage-
hiding" desert his nation tells him people responsible
for this atrocity can be found. And in the course of
serving, he will incur PTSD, an affliction liberals like
to think of as making these naive, uneducated men
damaged, ruined ... as used and cast-aside by a
corporate society that pretends faith with them but
really doesn't give one damn.
Eastwood has his way into making a film assuming a
reasonably 'cross-Hollywood sympathetic approach
to Kyle, and he uses this proxy to re-experience a
good part of what was comfortable for him about the
1950s. No where in this environment is there any
family which isn't clearly under the dominion of men.
A woman and a child come into Kyle's sights as
2619
possibly carrying explosive devices, but we were

shown their being sent there first by a man from his
cellphone. A woman presents her wounds to Kyle to
show the degree of savagery of "the butcher," but she
was ushered to by her husband, who more or less
snapped his fingers to acquire her summons. Kyle
notices that a man they're dining with has bruised
elbows—and therefore is likely not the civilian he
claims to be but a soldier—but the fact of his being at
the head of the table, with his son by his side, and
with his wife, barely a presence, quietly taking away
and bringing dishes, is meant to be outside our
critical appraisal, like it would be if we were of the
1950s and were in the 1950s.
Kyle is very hardworking and genuinely shown to be,
if not keeping civilization intact, certainly doing good
work—killing brutal men who'd drill holes in
children and the like—and Eastwood makes PTSD
serve merely what hardworking 50s men were
ostensibly afflicted with after their arduous daily
grind, battling other men in a competitive society and
keeping their families afloat. 1950s men could not
help but "bring work home" too ... and that's why
social norms had it that the wives' full-time
occupation once their husbands were home was to
nurse them: not to confront them with the problems
arising from their own day but bring them drinks,
2620
serve them dinner, soothe them down and spoil them

—then, and only then, would the daily toil accrued
from the outside world be met and matched. If a wife
instead started screeching, berating her overworked
husband and betraying the role society needed of her,
she could expect to be shamed for it ... just like
Kyle's wife would be shamed, if on the phone to Kyle
she started harping on what his being away was doing
to her and he responded, "What was that dear? ... I
couldn't hear you for my jeep turning over and my
buddy just being shot through the head."
Eastwood embraces the idea of PTSD only because it
can suggest stature rather than weakness. If you have
a heavier case of it, it's surely because you've been
out on the field longer, endured more of an unsparing
environment ... a frail-looking, elder therapist notes
that Kyle has had 180 kills, and you wonder if he's
thinking more on how to treat him or how to become
the faintest shadow of him. One of Kyle's good
friends, the fellow sniper Mark Lee, remarks that war
is something like kids proving themselves by seeing
how long they can hold on to an electric wire, but
when he dies shortly afterwards it does seem to be
out of Kyle's supposition that he was no longer ready
to meet the daily grind. He's disillusioned, but the
film provides no reason for it: there are plenty of very
bad guys out there, and if you're not at your best,
2621
good men on your side will die for it.

In short, Mark Lee makes it seem as if being a soldier
is like being a salesman out of "Death of a
Salesman," you just go on to prove you're strong
when what you are really are is being depleted, to no
point, while no one else out there cares. Kyle's retort
is what a buoyed 1950s salesman would winningly
reply to this 1930s—"Death of a Salesman" is about
someone working in the Great Depression—world
view: "What on earth are you talking about? We keep
at it because we're needed and it's our job. It's just
that simple."

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Labels: American Sniper, Clint Eastwood, film, movie
Parting ways, in Ridley Scott's "Exodus:

Gods and Kings"
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Ridley Scott is known for his strong female

protagonists, but there is a feeling he nestles into this
story of ancient lands because he thinks it's one
where tested older male rulers have gotten women
2622
who might contest them, securely contained, and

where if these men have had a long enough tenure
over their boys, when power descends to them, the
momentary dislocation incurred when power trades
hands won't be sufficient for even an experienced
female-at-court to take advantage of. Elder,
governing "fathers" are like guardian sentinels that
keep chaos at bay; but are meant to crumble down at
a certain point where hopefully an even better
erection of themselves can immediately step in to
keep things generating rather than succumbing to
amend-making, and other things that mean retreat
from "your" own business.
These fathers are strong, secure and kind, but not
without damning flaws that should mean that at some
point they need to exit the scene. Marcus Aurelius in
"Gladiator" nurses his great general Maximus fondly,
and has kept a confident realm, but is warranted in
asking if ultimately he'll be remembered as just cruel
—he has launched armies afield that perhaps have
spread civilization but for sure have butchered
multitudes. In "Kingdom of Heaven," Godfrey de
Ibelin arrives in time to offer shelter to his
insecurely-placed son, but he came to visit him in
part to apologize for having had sex with his mother
—who had no choice but to lay with him—and is
revealed as someone who hasn't put much thought
2623
into how to provision his terribly drought-vulnerable

desert estates. And in "Exodus," the beneficent
pharaoh Seti is implicated in still listening to gods
that may foretell truth but are serpentine, probably
overall uncaring and indifferent, and properly not due
any respect, and of course in being part of the lineage
of pharaohs that have built their grand civilization on
the backs of slaves.
But when these shielding "husks" are off—even if it
is not consciously understood as so by Scott—
whatever these sheltered "sons" do afterwards in the
space now birthed to them is presented as right, just
for the sheer fact that what they do unravels their
own course. They are prepared to beat back other
predators thinking of seizing upon their terrain, and
make the world landscape reflect, rather, their own
dispositions. "Gladiator's" Commodus learned
enough about statecraft, about people, from his father
that the senators immediately besieging him to
concern himself with what they think most urgent,
can in fact be ignored entirely, as after a brief delay,
where they succeed in unsettling him, making him
perhaps think they'll hold sway over him, he quickly
recovers so that the first, second, and third order of
business actually becomes what he wants, how he
wants to initiate his reign. He has garnered enough
experience with the wily that his older sister, who is
2624
first presented to us as perhaps Rome's foremost

expert in deception, can actually become ... scared,
disarmed from effectively impinging on him. Balian
learned enough about being a knight from his father
that he is able to keep afloat a people and save a city
from complete ravaging, sticking to his own
principles while a beautiful queen offers him such a
cornucopia in apparently guilt-free satisfaction that it
would appear unaccountable he not change course
and belittle as well the idea/ideal of the perfect
knight. And in "Exodus," Ramses has been allowed
enough nurturant days with his "brother" Moses,
enough sincere encouragement by his father to
always keep faith with him, that when his mother
starts dictating terms, insisting it would be
unaccountable if he not immediately slay Moses—the
foretold threat to the throne—he brushes her aside,
and as much as possible stays loyal to him. Shipping
him off, yes, but shipping him off armed with a
sword that'll deflect any assassins sent by his mother
and lend him a credible future.
You might think that Scott would prefer that the likes
of Commodus, especially, obeyed the experienced
and wise when they insisted on his beginning his rule
by following their dictates. But in any situation where
someone is being pressed into making a decision s/he
feels under compunction to heed, whether it might be
2625
in accord with what s/he might come up with on his

own or not, is one where I would argue Scott is
actually pulling for the one under “assault,” the one
being undermined—there is no way he would have
thought to structure a film where the new young
emperor, good or bad, is effectively hemmed in. He
was going to need to have Commodus find a wily
way to avoid the fate he momentarily seemed obliged
to, just as he was going to need Maximus to only
seem beholden to his fate to be executed, just to be
willing to journey with them as principle
protagonists. For Scott, to be attendant to others is to
impinged ... you feel it notably in such movies of his
as "Prometheus," where the captain, the one who has
rule (over a starship) but who has never been allowed
to free herself from the dictates and machinations of
her father, is tight, bitter, frustrated, wholly unhappy.
It is important you make your own decisions, it is
important that you not be dis-swayed ... are not
thoughts ever aired in "Gladiator," but the former is,
overtly, in "Exodus," and Scott has publicly chided
himself for allowing the opinion of test audiences to
sway the form of the released version of "Kingdom of
Heaven." He put his film up for test viewings and end
up heeding the audience's reactions, thereby ruining
his efforts by putting a forth a film shortchanged his
own highly astute editorial judgment/skills. He
2626
knows he ought to have been Commodus, confident

even if unpopular and apparently wholly astray, he
knows that everything new should be granted the
aggressive stance of being allowed to change people
before people should commence their assault on it,
and kept faith with himself.
What he explores in this film with the avenue cleared
from obstacles—with "the parted sea"— is what
happens when two brothers need to do the mature
thing and test whether a close friendship that worked
in an environment which didn’t allow one of them to
really shine, makes any sense at all when both have
come to know what suits them best. This isn’t
“Kingdom of Heaven,” where when two brothers
meet after a long time away the younger brother’s
becoming greater, becoming “an actual baron,” is
meant to humiliate the older. Rather, the film is
sympathetic to the brother who, owing to no other
fault other than just being more limited, really would
now just be a hinderance. So while we do see Ramses
behaving abominably—commanding in one instance
a family be hanged—Scott’s attention to him is so
much someone who is shedding a friend regretfully
that even more attention is put to Ramses’
kindnesses, his virtues and strengths.
Scott attends to Ramses' manner with his wife, which
2627
is loving, and most especially to his child—whom he

truly cherishes. When he loses his son owing to
God’s wrath and his reaction is not just to pursue
vengeance but to spend a long moment with his dead
son, speaking to him tenderly—“you know the reason
you sleep so peacefully … it is because you are
loved”—we know that something remarkable has
been chastened. He even works to challenge how
implicative and reverberant we’re to allow the
hanging of the family to remain, making it also an
occasion for a joke where Ramses is intended our full
sympathies (he didn’t quite have mine, as the one
hanged, a court “scientist,” was commendably bang-
on in making sense of the sequence of the blight upon
them, even if he wasn’t conversant as to the whole
damage fleas might leave behind, i.e. disease
theory).
But Moses is a better person, a much more evolved
sort. It shows in his being able to readily empathize
with those not part of his immediate family. It shows
in his attitude towards authority; tradition doesn’t
bide him to defer, something he shows in his taking
ready amusement at the silly “science” of
prognosticating from animal guts—a practice that no
one else is really quite ready to abandon, not even his
brother, who only pretends wholesale agreement with
him. And it shows in the kind of relationships he
2628
prefers, where challenges, contestation, is seen as

reflecting the strong independent soul that inspired
the birth of respect and love in the first place.
His wife and his child are by no means beholden to
him as their patriarch. When he leaves them to help
his people—the Hebrews suffering under Egyptian
reign—both confront him with challenges, with their
honest feelings, rather than cozy him with the
reassurances he was at some level hoping for. When
his son informs him he doesn’t believe he’ll actually
be coming back to them, he says, “good for you.
Don’t ever just say what people want to hear” … and
it reads as entirely sincere.
For at that moment Scott is surely both “in” the son
and “in” Moses … to him, you can’t begin your life if
you’re overly respondent to those who could get your
agreement just because you’re not fortified enough to
withstand their rejection. These people don't contest
or challenge; they sap from you the very ability to
respond independently.

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Labels: exodus: gods and kings, film, movie, ridley scott
The Perverse German Joy in Being Spared

2629
Being Jew
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Gotz Aly makes the argument in "Why the Germans?

Why the Jews?" that the reason Germans engaged in
wholesale slaughtering Jews in the late 30s to early
40s, owed to envy. According to Gotz, Germans
hated Jews because they were what they wanted to
be: successful, intelligent, adaptive to change —
thriving. I am hoping this doesn't quite seem right to
you because it isn't the case. That is, it is true that
Germans envied Jews ... but when they were doing
the actual slaughtering they were divorced from this
actually somewhat sane mindset — envy at least
recognizes that what one should want are things
which mean living more happily and freely — and
had only the mindset of justified persecutors. That is,
by that time they had ceased the mindset that no
doubt was prevalent in the Weimar part of the 20s
and 30s, and now saw in Jews, not properties to be
envied, but vile properties they truly wanted as much
distance from as possible.
Aly wants you to understand Germans in this period
as massive sinners — the kind of wretches God
2630
would plunk a tombstone of ten commandments on in

some hopes of keeping in line. But his book does
point to evidence which suggests thinking of them
instead as damaged. He talks about upbringing, about
how harsh and strict German parents and teachers
were, beating kids mercilessly every time they
weren't obedient and deferent (Jews on the other hand
were well-known not only to be exemplary students
but unafraid to challenge authorities). He mentions
the fact of the high number of child deaths per capita
compared with Jews — a fact which suggests a
prevalent attitude of negligence, disregard, by
Germans towards their children —and someone more
attendant to what happens to children who were
raised within punitive households would see this
evidence as working against Aly's conclusion: these
children were, then, traumatized ... and do you talk of
the limitations of the broken child — their inability
to permit themselves to live freely, their inclination to
envy those who can — therapeutically or crossly?
Germans had in fact the worst childrearing in all of
Europe. If you want a catalogue of the sorts of
tortures German parents inflicted on their children —
including such things as routinely starving them,
calling them "useless eaters," dominating them with
daily enemas, having them tied to bed posts when
"bad," throwing them into cold water for "hardening,"
2631
"forcing them to kneel for hours every day against a

wall while they [i.e. their parents] ate and read,
frightening them by dressing up in terrifying ghost
costumes and pretending to eat them up and kill them
for their transgressions" (DeMause, Origins of War in
Child Abuse 115), not just spanking them but
whipping them (with whips, canes, and sticks) so
hard they were put into comas, explore the work of
Lloyd DeMause, who cites some of the same facts
Aly does but offers not just a morsel but the whole
god-awful enchilada. But it isn't primarily this which
made them unable to allow themselves to make use
of the considerable societal freedoms opened up to
everyone during the 20s anywhere to the extent that
Jews could. What stopped them is implicit in these
tortures but isn't always — and in fact, routinely isn't
— recognized as being so. What stopped them is the
fact of their having parents who really did not love
them, who could only look at them in a non-punitive
fashion when they abandoned their efforts at self-
growth and focused entirely on pleasing their parents
— serving as means by which unloved parents might
gather up some of the love they failed to receive from
their own parents. What stopped them is that they
were possessed of parents who were much closer to
the terrible dark norm for homo sapiens — those born
hundreds of thousands of years ago — than the vastly
more evolved Jews were.
2632
The norm for homo sapiens wasn't to love their

children. It's hard to imagine this, because even from
their start weren't they mammals, hairy, cuddly
creatures that lick and nurse and hold their young? ...
such is the influence of romanticized images of
animals we garner in our childhoods now, when
before it was wolves and beasts that snatch children
away in the night. For us to get a realistic picture it's
best to picture them as almost pre-mammal and part
of their predecessors' reptilian world, spun through
with slithering things, a "place" where we could
imagine them as unloving as the cold world around
them and as only interested in their children as
evolution could buy their self-interested attentions
with. Children gained the attention they needed to
survive by functioning as "erotic, tension-reducing"
(DeMause, "Emotional Life of Nations" 401)
objects. This means that the norm for the child was to
be used incestuously. This was what all the attention
was that anthropologists noted primitive cultures
"lavished" upon their children, and explains why after
constant erotic feedings of them while they are on the
breast, parents had difficulty understanding their
children even needed food while off it. The "heart of
darkness" was the lack of love our hearts got — that
never-to-be-properly-filled hole. It was also the
apocalyptic experience, the horrible, absolutely
2633
intolerable aloneness that visited us when we began

to focus on our own needs ... for when we did this,
began to grow, our parents imagined us as their own
brutally cold parents, imagined us as leaving them
intentionally ... deliberately, as their own parents
actually did them. And suddenly they withdrew any
attention to us at all .... became to us "gods"
unmistakably informing us that everything we
depended on would be removed, leaving us
forlorn wastrels in a blasted land, if we didn't
immediately abandon what we were doing and go
back to functioning as parts of them.
When Germans "evolved" from just envying them

to slaughtering Jews, they were making use of one of
the "great" inventions absolutely necessarily created
from out of our earliest predecessors' minds:
projection, emptying out of all our "bad" stuff into
someone else. At some point all the freedoms Weimar
society enabled — and that was primarily what
Weimar Germany was, a "land" that brought down
previous societal blockages and offered a new turf
affording amazing things for those who weren't
freedom-fearing — could no longer be tolerated by
the Germans, and they retreated into provincialism
and projected all the parts of themselves
which threatened their feeling completely abandoned
2634
into the most logical vehicle — the Jews. Germans

were trying new things; they were, for awhile at
least, abandoning old ways, even if in a terribly
watered-down form compared with what the Jews
managed. And by emptying all of this from
themselves and into the Jews, via projection, they felt
"objects" that their parents, that their mothers, could
"love" — or perhaps more accurately, at least not
wholly reject — again.
They looked at Jews and saw in ripened form every
single trait that if they possessed, would lead to their
parents absolutely despising them. If they were sane,
as we understand sanity, they should still be envying
them — because these traits are what lead to a truly
happy life, rather than one simply relieved of
attentions from the passing-by predator. But because
they were part of what counts as sane only to our
terribly primitive and cruel origins, where love and
demon-free vision had barely entered the world, they
could not have been more delighted to be spared
being Jew.
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Labels: gotz aly, lloyd demause

2635
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One of the arduous things about watching Peter

Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy was
experiencing the intense parent-child tumult. Arwen
gains independence from her father and pledges
fidelity to her love for Aragorn above all else, but it
involves her devolving into a frail state, becoming as
fragile as all the rest of Middle Earth before Sauron's
ascension and the elves' retreat. Faramir gains
recognition from his impossibly stubborn father, the
steward of Gondor, but not even after essentially
throwing his life away in a hopeless battle and only
after being mid-part cooked in a bonfire of his
father's own contrivance. This is an older generation's
sturm und dang; a break-through occurs — stern
authority is breached — but it's so exhausting you
have to hope that once it's been successfully had out
that none of the parties involved ever re-acquire the
stamina to re-stage it. "The Hobbit: Battle of the Five
Armies" threatened a repeat of this sort of thunderous
clash — Bilbo's "unforgivable" "betrayal" of Thorin
— but it seems Peter Jackson had perhaps more how
contemporary parents and children might handle their
children breaking away from them — how he might
handle it, with his own children — rather than what
2636
baby boomers like himself had to brace themselves to

expect with their more authoritative parents. For in
this film autonomy is recognized with some grace by
elders, and the definition of what "youth" does that
deserves respect is expanded beyond being evidently
in the right to simply possessing persuasive drive.
The scene where Bilbo reveals to Thorin that he gave
the outside armies the Arkenstone is hardly Bilbo's
most important scene with him. The attention is
barely on their confrontation, for Thorin's attention is
still so much also on the outside armies at his gate
that Bilbo immediately finds an opportunity to
scamper off. We note that Bilbo stands strong in the
encounter; he declares what he did without apology;
but it seems the most diluted version of what Jackson
could stand to have offered without belittling the
significance of it in the book and his fidelity to the
characters. So what is left mostly unchallenged in
impact is a previous encounter between the two
where Bilbo reveals that he's taken an oak seed he'd
found along their adventures, intending to plant it
back near his home when he gets back. What he
thereby shows to Thorin is that, not only was he very
much interested in helping the dwarves reclaim their
homeland — so that they could enjoy the same
pleasures Bilbo knows he'll eventually be returning to
— but in taking "their" homeland back with him. Not
2637
as a memento, but in the great, imposing form of a

whole oak tree. He does enormous honour both to
himself — the dwarves have meant something to him
— and to Thorin ... indeed, in Jackson's version
Thorin's gifting to Bilbo of the mithril armor almost
seems a makeshift equivalent gesture: he grabbed for
himself Thorin Oakenshield's "shield"; Thorin
provides him the matching armour. Basically this
encounter, which also involves Thorin once again
showing his appreciation for Bilbo and his sense of
him as an equal, is about immediately breaking the
possible predatory stance between them for one
which restates what had been accomplished between
them in the previous film. Thorin may go whole-hog
regression with the rest of the dwarves, but it's kept to
a surprising minimum with Bilbo in this movie,
seemingly because the exhaustion of having to climb
the whole way back doesn't seem something Jackson
wants to degrade them with.
Jackson could be pretty hard on hobbits in "Lord of
the Rings," forcing them to go a long way to redeem
themselves after having accomplished feats that
should have kept them bullet-proof for awhile. For
instance, Merry and Pippen were primarily
responsible for one of the two towers going down,
manipulating the great Ent army into a war they'd just
decided not to involve themselves in. Yet early in
2638
"Return" they're back to being pests, appropriately

scowled at by Gandalf, just as they were when he
first met them and were recklessly blasting off his
best fireworks and making a mess of a party. But in
this film Gandalf gets ready to release a heavy scowl
on Bilbo but Bilbo is allowed by Jackson the kind of
stature that would immediately have Gandalf draw
back. Bilbo decides he's going to cross an active
battlefield to warn Thorin of news of another
approaching army, and Gandalf replies: "you'll be
seen" ... "it's out of the question." Bilbo doesn't
reproach Gandalf for the couple of heavy insults he'd
implicitly handed him here — one, that since he'd
advertised the importance of Bilbo joining the
journey in the first place as owing in part to his being
so small he could successfully trespass places others
would be seen in, he'd basically been bullshitting
both Bilbo and the dwarves about his worthiness of
setting out on the adventure; and two, that the only
reason he arrogantly decided for Bilbo that he was
going to go on the adventure, marking his door so a
party of dwarves could turn his place into a tumult,
wasn't because his ongoing existence, sans adventure,
and continually amongst all his mother's doilies,
wasn't worthy of respect, but apparently because this
was something he thought he could inflict on Bilbo
regardless. He reacts by convincingly showing that to
him what is important is the fact of his own decision,
2639
what he wants to do, regardless of how even good

friends see him for it. And Gandalf recedes,
registering that he'd been opposed by someone who
in that moment was probably more in the right than
he.
This isn't something you often see happen to Gandalf.
In "Lord of the Rings" everyone who does so is made
to seem the fool Gandalf assesses them as ....
Theoden refusing Gandalf's request they meet the
army in open battle, insisting his people would be
safe at Helm's Deep; Denethor refusing to calling for
aid. Gandalf's "rightness" is apparently somewhat
contestable in this film, however ... enough so in fact
that just before Bilbo doing it Thranduil kinda does it
as well. Thranduil, the elf king, could have been
made to seem appallingly narrow-focussed in this
film — the king we were prepared to encounter given
previous references to him as jewel-dazzled and of a
"more wild" race of elves. But when he refuses
Gandalf and insists on pulling his troops away from
conflict, Jackson insured that we'd been witness to his
previous instant willingness to have his elves join the
dwarves in battle when truly dire opponents showed
themselves, and experienced from his perspective a
long look at all the dead glorious elves littering the
ground ... at the ghastly waste of what is clearly
Middle Earth's most precious resource — what
2640
shouldn't be put at risk of complete decimation

without risking starving the world of a singularly
important source of delight.
Thranduil is mostly spared, kept safe from, the harsh
judgment the previous film looked like it might
assign him mercilessly. We remember him belittling
Thorin by assessing that he was probably moved
primarily by impure motives ... "burglary, and things
of that nature." But in this film effort has been put
into ensuring that we notice that when he mistakes
people's motives he doesn't malign them but assesses
them admirably .... he won't acknowledge Gandalf's
claim of an approaching army, but does laud him for
his loyalty to the dwarves, his effort to save his
friends. He of course does bear down hard on Tauriel,
but his violence is later requited by doing massive
repair work to keep her from coming apart after Kili's
death. And he's barely a baulk to his son Legolas's
future, without seeming to mind that this is so: when
Legolas declares he's leaving his long-known elf
home and venturing out on his own, Thranduil
implicitly communicates how wrong objection would
be to his son's thought-through stance by giving no
objection at all, and only adding information that
might compliment the direction he guesses his son is
venturing. There are several scenes in the movie
where we are made to feel that much of what has
2641
defined Thranduil — his relationship with and loss of

his wife — had nothing to do with remaining home,
forever pledged to fathers, but about himself having
set off, facing fiery dragons and terrible northern
forts.
This finish isn't elder-heavy. The expectation on them
— elders, or anyone who is allowed a position over
another as potentially exploitive as one of parent over
child — is to graciously part ways, let go, and they
do. The tumult that might greet one generation finally
reaching the age where they might contest the one
ahead of them is to be avoided, if possible, with
elders recognizing the rightness in another generation
standing up for itself, making its own imprint,
offering if they can, maybe modestly offered
guidance — maybe they haven't a clue as to what the
next generation needs? — but for sure fulsome love
and support. You notice in the film how
conspicuously Jackson puts attention to Bard's
relationship with his children. You notice how
Jackson's own children, in, I think, every film of the
series, beginning with "Fellowship," have come of
age. You wonder if what is shaping Jackson's making
of Tolkien's finish of "the Hobbit" are thoughts not
solely on preparing things for the already-done "Lord
of the Rings," but preparing an audience to consider
their children's eventual introduction to them of a
2642
completely open field: the civilization created out of

their own drives and inclinations, however crazy and
impossible to us it might be to register them as
society-improving rather than ruining.
How else to understand the strange case of Alfrid, the
servant of the vile Master of Laketown? He was lent
to us after "The Desolation of Smaug," ready for our
oblivion — if this guy makes it through his master's
destruction by the dragon, it's only in a sense for our
killing. And yet what Jackson does is treat us as if we
were the dwarves at the beginning of "the Hobbit," in
completely disbelief over the choice of Bilbo for the
company, with him making a case for him a la
Gandalf. He plays us. Or tries to. We are meant to
enjoy seeing Alfrid repeatedly humiliated, beginning
with his being (literally, and figuratively) dumped by
his master and then afterwards by repeatedly being
proven an incompetent at any job the likes of Bard
and Gandalf have assigned him, but in doing so
almost feel that we've agreed to allow that he
deserves credit for at least earnestly trying — the
beginning of rehabilitation. He's been ordered around
a lot, and however bitterly, complied with everything
directed to him ... and by people we'd have to feel
shame in doubting their willingness to task jobs to
him, to trust him. And then not long after when he
dresses as a woman in an effort to escape fighting and
2643
flee the town, Jackson seems to almost task us with

undue prejudice if we're still absolutely bent on
seeing him destroyed. An angry older woman sees
him in female-dress and charges him as lacking all
courage and bravery, and Alfrid's reply — "Not every
man is brave enough to wear a corset" — does requit
some: even in this heroic film-world, our outside
world that increasingly prefers heroes that are open to
being ascribed as feminine and that views thorough
he-men as part of a narrative of gay-hatred and rape
culture, seeps in (we remember how Jackson rebuffed
he-men in “Return of the King,” Merry’s being
mocked as un-battle worthy by the Rohan warriors
but of course proving himself as as able as anyone
not Legolas or Aragon). Jackson shapes Alfrid’s next
fate as if given avenue: he lets him load himself up
with gold and be allowed by Bard to head away from
battle and on to enfranchising his own open future.
His only rejoinder, “Alfrid, your slip is showing,” if
not affectionate, is a very gentle chide, and implicitly
recognizes that he’s not a dullard incapable of
appreciating wit, i.e., that he's at a different level, a
bit more human, than the dullish woman who
accosted him.
Alfrid’s not “Catch 22’s” Yossarian in this epic, but
he is somewhat what Tolkien’s generation’s would
have viewed the war-avoidant and feminine men of
2644
the post-war 1960s … who perhaps baby-boomer

Jackson would ultimately acknowledge as much
affinity with as he would the world war-saluting
Tolkien, which wiped out a whole lot of people. A
whole lot of young people — in the first one, pretty
much an entire generation — who would have been
better off if they’d stuck to joyous feasting, drinking
brandy, and enjoying the comforts of home. That is, if
they’d been more like the default for hobbits … and
for the "vile" "Alfrids" and "Masters of Laketowns"
and dragons content to long-rest in gold, for that
matter.
Frenemies
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2.jpeg
Child abuse doesn’t get talked about much by

progressives these days—the prevalence of it,
especially. When we hear of abuse against a single
women, the story is usually expanded so that it
illustrates how women in general have been
suffering. When we hear of abuse against a minority,
the same. But when we hear of a horrid case of child
abuse we rarely are encouraged to think of its
prevalence. Instead, we row against the perpetrator.
Or, if it’s one of those women driving all of her
2645
children into a lake, balk back from it exploring it

entirely—no thanks! But the case of Adrian Peterson
was different. It was going along its normal route—
how dare he, stuffing leaves into his child’s mouth
and then beating him bloody with a belt! Destroy the
beast! But then something unexpected occurred. This
story of child abuse got innocently expanded, and
you could feel in its brief flash of a full expose of the
nature of childrearing across a broad swath of
Americans, not what occurs when the prevalence of
discrimination and women-hate gets exposed but its
opposite: every white progressive drew back and
cringed.
Charles Barkley said that you have to be careful
about what in particular you’re getting mad about
concerning Peterson, because if it’s simply the
spanking and the beating, well, all black parents in
the South do that, and you’re not trying to say that
they're all child abusers, are you? The black
American scholar, Brittney Cooper, at Salon.com,
wants black parents to stop doing this to their
children, but also agreed that this is standard practice
amongst the black community. But the thing is, I
guarantee you, that many progressives at some level
know that if the expose was how many white parents
in backwater communities spank and terrorize their
kids, they would indeed have IDed them simply as
2646
abhorrent child abusers. The rationalizations

provided for its legitimacy—even from those abused
themselves—would have been cast aside as
delusions, what you expect from abusers or people
caught within a community of abuse. But since not
agreeing with Cooper’s explanation for why black
parents beat their children would mean IDing a group
they want to see as dignified as as mongrel as poor
white trash, as as dismaying as those who seem to
have abandoned all other life ambitions other than
decrying every bright spot of progress still appearing
in our world, white progressives had to agree with
everything Cooper said.
So when she described how it was all done out of
calculation, that if they could they would of course
not spanked but since the behaviour—acting freely,
holding yourself in esteem—that resulted from not
being spanked meant real trouble for a black person
in a white world, they had to protect their children by
teaching them freedom-stilling fear from their
parents, they agreed. When she describes the beatings
she herself experienced, conveying in her
descriptions her fear but also ample sign she knew
her mother and grandmother were doing this out of
love, they nodded that this was how it must have
been. So when she describes her “fond” memories of
“that big tree that grew in my grandmother’s yard,
2647
with branches that were the perfect size for

switches,” when she describes her “hear[ing] her
[grandmother’s] booming and shrill voice […],
commanding, ‘Go and pick a switch,’” they agreed
that she thought fondly of that tree and that she
“laughed” when she “remember[ed] that she cut that
tree down once [they] were all past the age of
switches.” When she thinks in general of “the
centuries of imminent fear that had shaped and
contoured African-American working-class cultures
of discipline, the sternest of our mothers’ and
grandmothers’ looks, the firmness of the belts and
switches applied to our hind parts, the rhythmic,
loving, painful scoldings accompanying spankings as
if the messages could be imprinted on our bodies
with a sure and swift and repetitive show of force,”
they agreed that there was something else in these
mothers’ and grandmothers’ eyes other than terrifying
sternness, something more benign, and accepted her
story that the scoldings were offered lovingly. When
they heard her tell of how violent punishment was
considered a “mark of good parenting,” of how in her
“childhood, parents who ‘thought their children were
too good to be spanked’ were looked upon with
derision,” of her telling them she remembers “hearing
everyone from preachers to comedians lament the
passing of days when a child would do something
wrong at a neighbour’s house, get spanked by that
2648
neighbour, and then come home and get spanked

again for daring to misbehave at someone else’s
house,” they accepted that this was done for the
reason Cooper argues—out of misguided good faith
that what they were doing was showing “a strong
black community […] in which children are so loved
and cared for that everyone has a stake in making
sure that those children turn out well, and ‘know how
to act.’” They accepted that these “violent modes of
discipline” were done with absolute “loving intent
and sincerity.”
Given the fact that many of those agreeing with her
still have some prominent portion of their reigned-in
subconsciouses screaming in unabashed horror at the
idea of a child picking her own beating switch (kiss
the rod that beats you), and of neighbours rejoicing in
their jostling their “bad” children between houses to
be spanked, they were desperately relieved to hear
that Cooper does not ultimately believe that this
lovingly meant infliction should be maintained.
Thank god! she still argues that physical violence is
nevertheless corrosive, breeds fear between parent
and child, and needs to be done away with. With that,
with them imagining black leaders like herself
explaining their brothers and sisters—who were
ignorant that their childrearing ways were no longer
necessary for very understandable reasons—into a
2649
better way of raising their children, they can cast

them back again as simply the spiritually strong who
have weathered centuries of sadistic white abuse, and
continue full-on on their own attack on their demonic
racist oppressors. They can get back to their
relatively dissonance-free—we've-got-major-
obstacles-but-at-least-we-see-things-crystal-clear—
progressive business as usual.
I am of course suggesting that they do differently,
that they think a bit more about the implications of
the childrearing of many of the groups they have
mostly simply been triumphant about. The reason is
that I do not believe that the fundamental conflict in
our society is between people of different races or
colours but between those of differing childhoods—
between those who were genuinely loved and those
who were only conditionally loved by their very
needy, loved-denied caregivers. I know this means
assigning a good number of people who are victims
of white racism in the same grouping with their white
oppressors, which seems heinous, and that it’ll make
many progressives look as if they’ve encouraged and
supported people who’ll try and devour them, which
makes them seem insultingly naive. But being true, it
is not to be shied away from. And if any of them were
uncomfortable enough with what they'd been forced
to understand about black childrearing that they
2650
understand that at some point this will still have to be

explored some, if I have any of their perked
attentions/consciences, I would encourage them to try
and allow some challenge to the shield Cooper puts
up to protect the idea that the widespread beating of
children within the black community is something
different from simple child abuse—namely, that it
unerringly done with the nature of the fate of the
child within a racist culture in mind.
I would firstly encourage them to realize that with
vicious physical beatings is how slave-owning people
themselves raised their children. It was understood
that God would ultimately sit judge over their
children’s lives, so they would need to show
themselves as disciplined. I would encourage them to
realize that historically all practices such as
infanticide, sexual use of children, child
abandonment to monasteries, tight swaddling, has
been rationalized by the adults afflicting these
practices as necessary for their children or for the
necessity of their society. I would encourage them to
understand themselves as different from the
historians who used to study children’s history and
never swayed from believing that these practices
were necessary or that they benefited children, and
closer to those who saw something perverse, but
judged it as arising owing to good people innocently
2651
living within a flawed ethical system ultimately

serving only the powerful. And I ultimately would
encourage them to distance themselves even from
them, and see themselves as part of a fresh generation
that, owing to having been better raised, given more
love, would now if they were to do the work of
explore the primary data, see themselves as similar
only to that lonely camp of psychohistorians that
simply have found no way of agreeing that parents
inflicting tortures upon children invariably loved
their children, or that they could possibly have been
mislead into doing so. I would encourage them to
imagine themselves those who just know that anyone
who inflicts these tortures upon their children simply
had children for very different reasons that they
themselves will or do.
People who beat their children are mostly unloved
human beings. They had children because they
needed them. Not primarily for economic reasons but
for anxiety-reducing reasons, and to gain the
attendance and love they’d been denied by their own
parents. Children could serve as a “toilet” for adult
projections. They contain all the parents’ “dangerous,
evil projections,” all their own “unacceptable
feelings” (Lloyd DeMause, Foundations 11). They
were supposed to attend to them and submit
themselves to sensual use, anything that suited the
2652
pleasure of the parent. When they focused on

themselves, the parents would understand them as
deliberately abandoning them, just like their own
parents did, whose role as caregivers these children
were born to serve. They would recognize their own
childhood need to individuate and grow in their
children’s efforts, and the consideration of it would
draw them to fuse with angry parental alters in their
heads, so that they would immediately lose the
conscious state which might involve empathy and
fuse into one that knew only anger, hatred and
revenge. And the reason they would bond with the
perpetrator is that their early brains had to lock down
on the idea that their parents were right to abuse
them, and that what they had been trying to do—to
focus on themselves, to grow, to be free—was
appallingly bad, the worst of sins. Their early brains
had to do this, otherwise their conscious portion
would be forced into the position of knowing their
parents were appalling tyrants, which would surely
be noticed and result in doom.
People who have had destructive childhoods are
dangerous to progressives for a couple of reasons.
For one, their brains are different: they are less
empathic. Their prefrontal cortices will be smaller
and their fear-centred amygdala much larger. They’ll
have high levels of “acting-out” neurotransmitters
2653
and a depletion of calming serotonin. Their insulas,

the "deep area of the cortex that contains most of the
‘mirror neurons,’” will be damaged, limiting their
ability to “empathize [with] the emotional states of
others” (Lloyd DeMause, Origins of War 55). They
are in short wired to be hyperactive, all flight or fight,
and to not notice your suffering. Secondly, they are
built to gauge societal growth as sinful—it empowers
individuals to become “bad children” who are
satisfying their own needs rather than their
parents’. They are built to be people who’ll sacrifice
their own lives to stop “you” from being someone
who can make life about empowerment and
enjoyment. They won’t envy you, for when they see
you as the enemy they’ll be switched into their
parental alters and'll simply be seeing you as the
traitorous abandoning child gloating in her self-
indulgent pleasures. Even if there's still a "peak" of
child left in them, you'll still be the unenviable
devil ... for no one such as you can't be permanently
removed now from any chance of claiming parental
approval and love.
Brittney Cooper is mistaken about her childhood. Her
mother and grandmother did not teach her to be wary
of freedom because it would draw trouble from
whites. One knows this by how else she has been
acting other than her praiseworthy concern to
2654
encourage black parents to stop beating their

children. She is showing signs of being someone who
is feeling hopelessly abandoned by her parents--who
reside in her head permanently as alters to monitor
and judge her. And as a defensive measure, is fusing
back with her battering origins.
After having supported Barack Obama, cheering him
on for what he represented—self-accomplishment
with the white system; a penultimate symbol of
becoming "bigger and better"—she has now rejected
him harshly, calling him a "useless cymbal." She’s
pledged herself to elders of the sort she had long-
ignored, that “used to chafe her hide," claiming them
"right all along." She aims to shorn herself of her
individuality and become part of a collective black
body—a collective “we” bent on triumphing over a
corrupt societal system. She wants to purge herself of
her “mediocre” self, the self that functioned ably and
became wonderfully enfranchised within the white
system, something that occurs by putting herself on
the front lines, ready, eager to sacrifice her life in
battle. And she wants a war, nothing short of it,
against all white supremacists.
The war she craves against supremacists will enable
revenge against her own early childhood abusers, her
mother and grandmother, so it’ll happen. And the
2655
“triumph” she insists upon will be sufficient to the

damage incurred—which could only be described
accurately, without distortions, when it can be cast
upon oppressors split apart from their actual source
… upon people she now feels comparatively little
fear if they know her level of hate. So when she
describes how “[h]umans can only be sucker punched
for so long. Humans can only have the life choked
out of us for so long. Humans can only be kicked in
the stomach while your foot is on our neck for so
long. Humans can only be bullied for so long.” she is
delineating in specific detail all the sorts of physical
torture that of course went along with the repeated
beatings in her childhood. When she describes how
“[t]he disproportionate amount of heart disease,
cancers, hypertension, obesity, violence and other
maladies that black black people is as much a product
of internalized, unrecognized, unaddressed rage as
anything else,” she is listing what else other than an
un-ideal child-parent relationship that arises from a
tragically abusive childhood. When she talks about
“[t]hat inability to see black people as human, as
vulnerable, as children, as people worthy of
protecting,” she is decrying the criminal blindness of
her mother and grandmother, setting them up as
fundamentally hurtful; people who in face of
innocence and stark need mostly just didn’t care at
all. And when she means to confront them with the
2656
“possibility of charred, burning, white flesh. No more

water. The fire next time.”--the matricide and
patricide she's encouraged--she shows just how much
rage her mother and grandmother’s negligence has
lead to.
But her decision to go to war was instigated out of
retreat, out of a need to sacrifice her "selfish" self-
accomplished life and recommit to her mother and
grandmother, so her primary opponents will be those
who most represent what they hated about her, what
drew them to want to beat her. They will be those,
that is, who most represent self-empowering
freedom. Since white supremacists are those whose
parents were terribly neglectful, producing the hate,
the rage … producing the need to project one’s own
unwanted qualities onto another group for
persecution, they’re rather far from being that. In
fact, if you compared their childhoods with those of
black americans,’ you’ll find a lot of similarities—a
lot of physical beatings, a lot of parents proud of
beating their children, admirably proclaiming how it
spared them worse harm.
True, there is something of the truant, the run-amock
child one might rightly imagine as not uncommon in
white supremacist families, in the description of child
behavior that initiated her consideration of black
2657
childrearing. But I assure you that when you read this

bit:
In college, I once found myself on the D.C. metro
with one of my favorite professors. As we were
riding, a young white child began to climb on the
seats and hang from the bars of the train. His mother
never moved to restrain him. But I began to see the
very familiar, strained looks of disdain and dismay on
the countenances of the mostly black passengers.
They exchanged eye contact with one another,
dispositions tight with annoyance at the audacity of
this white child, but mostly at the refusal of his
mother to act as a disciplinarian. I, too, was appalled.
I thought, if that were my child, I would snatch him
down and tell him to sit his little behind in a seat
immediately. My professor took the opportunity to
teach: “Do you see how this child feels the
prerogative to roam freely in this train, unhindered by
rules or regulations or propriety?”
“Yes,” I nodded. “What kinds of messages do you
think are being communicated to him right now about
how he should move through the world?”
And I began to understand, quite starkly, in that
moment, the freedom that white children have to see
the world as a place that they can explore, a place in
which they can sit, or stand, or climb at will. The
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world, they are learning, is theirs for the taking.

in order to get at what specific sort of behaviour
alarmed her, you should not be thinking of a wildling
child of a neglectful parent but of the audacious child
who does not reign in her opinions and behaviour
simply because authority wills it. You should be
thinking of the child of parents whose own needs had
been well-enough met that they were able to focus
most of their time on those of their children’s, and
who weren’t threatened but truly delighted by their
children’s individuation. You should be thinking of
society’s most progressive members, of whatever
colour, who advocate the empowerment of children
and who believe that children are intrinsically good
and can be trusted to explore and improve upon the
world around them. These are the people who
embody freedom of a kind that would draw Brittney
to dream of the "luxury" of imitating it (and which to
some extent she lived out, however much it lead to
the strait she is in now), not the truant, and which
would have drawn her unloved mother and
grandmother to see as a spoiled child who was going
to selfishly focus on her own needs and abandon any
interest in satisfying their own. These are the ones
who, if they’d done the same as their children, would
have been “swifty[ly] […] ushered […] into a seat,
with firm looks and not a little scolding, the implied
2659
if unspoken threat of either a grounding or a

whupping, if her request were not immediately met
with compliance.” These are the ones who would
have been corrected, with "discipline imprinted in
their skin."
I’m suggesting that there will be a union of sorts
between all those whose childrearing will not permit
them to enjoy any further personal growth. And this
will mean a reworking of frameworks, which’ll begin
with those ill-placed amongst those of far more
permissive childrearing admitting more and more
similarities between themselves and their supposed
cultural enemies, the conservatives. We’ll see more of
these sorts of comments from Cooper:
Still, one of the things that liberal people of color
whisper to other liberal people of color when no one
else is listening is that white liberals can be worse
than white conservatives. Between the paternalism,
the #whitesplaining and the refusal to accept that
acknowledging racism and supporting civil rights
does not mean that you have done the deeper
structural and psychic work of disengaging from
white supremacy, sometimes white liberal people
who seem like friends turn out to be enemies. Or
maybe frenemies.
where white conquistadorial instinct seems to reside
2660
almost primarily in white progressives, since, like

liberal people of color, white conservatives too will
be trying to show how spare they are willing to live,
how self-inflicting, how self-sacrificial they are
willing to become, rather than how expansively and
limitlessly. Phrases like this one:
Grappling with that kind of inelegant, heavy-handed,
seemingly exclusionary (and “racist”) understanding
of knowledge systems can be difficult for white
people, because the myth of universalism, backed up
by histories of pillaging and conquest, make it easy to
believe that there is nothing beyond the reach of the
white gaze. But the way people of color survive is
precisely by having what feminist theorist Chela
Sandoval called an “oppositional consciousness,” a
way of seeing and understanding that by its very
nature remains inaccessible to the dominant group.
will come to seem applicable only to progressives--
they'll be the only "Columbeses" around. White
progressives, the ones who poured out onto the
streets to join black Americans in street protests after
Ferguson, will be made to seem the only people still
living in America that still want to live in as as
ostensibly presumptuously spoiled a fashion as
someone like Lena Dunham, that just keeps reaching
without limit, reacting to every new avenue that
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opens up, not a source of trepidation but as an

adventure. They’ll become the ones to take down
because they’re the only ones who think our society
hasn’t become so bad that current troubles can't still
be managed without going apocalyptic, without
engaging in some kind of heavily damaging
revolution which stops all forward momentum of our
current liberal society, all current growth--a “crime”
of clear vision ultimately arising out of being those
whose particular lineages had evolved quickly
enough that they’d left beating their children with
switches not one or two but perhaps as many as ten
generations ago (Lloyd DeMause, Foundations
33). Infused with so much love, and without internal
spectres hating them for daring to see the world as a
place to freely explore, ongoing societal growth will
not prompt them to need a war of sacrifice; they have
no need for all growth to stop to spare them an even
worse calamity.
Progressives are going to be put in the position of

Jews in Germany during the 30s and 40s, who were
targeted because more than any other group they
embodied nurturing, accomplished living at a time
when terribly harshly-raised Germans were
experiencing growth panic, beating a hasty retreat
from their enjoying all those 1920s Weimar
2662
freedoms. We have to hope they have the numbers,

and that the growth the more poorly raised feel in
need of repenting hasn’t as much exceeded what their
childhoods permitted them as was the case in
Germany.
I’m not sure about the level of growth, what all those
years of allowing themselves to succeed within our
current liberal society has entailed, but fortunately
the childrearing couldn’t have been as bad. Germans
inflicted upon Jews the same tortures they themselves
experienced in their childhoods—that gives you a
sense of how poor German childrearing was at the
beginning of the 19th-century, and why studies that
show differences between Germans and Jews during
this period showcase how disoriented Germans were
by societal growth. But we’ll see. And as is, I think
Brittney Cooper is lost to us. She has said how she no
longer listens to whites for being white, for being
unable to separate themselves from a discourse that
never will fail to enfranchise them and disempower
others; I can no longer attend to her for becoming
more and more the voice of the angry persecutory
parent of so many Americans’ childhoods, who’ll
gloat on crushing happiness.
Sipping tea and sweet civility, while living

when the gods are back in the sky
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%2Bgot%2Bmail%2B2.bmp
Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote about the Republican

victories in the midterm election, saying essentially
that it really doesn’t matter if one party wins or loses
because without systematic change, either way we’re
headed for doom. Specifically he wrote:
This is not a “seismic shift” in favor of the
Republicans or the so-called conservative agenda, no
matter what John Boehner and Mitch McConnell may
say this week. Reading an off-year election result as
an indicator of larger societal trends is like
interpreting a blizzard as evidence against global
warming. The political clock is already ticking
toward 2016, when the pendulum will swing in the
other direction and Democrats are nearly certain to
win back some or all of what they just lost in
Congress. If the human conundrum known as Hillary
Clinton runs for president she will be the prohibitive
favorite; Democrats have won the popular vote in
five of the last six presidential elections. No, what the
dire 2014 midterms really tell us is that the entire
electoral system is on the critical list, stuck in a
“Groundhog Day” wave pattern of bitterness,
stagnation and cynicism. For one thing, it’s built
around two political parties who despise each other
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with a passion and who represent profound cultural

divisions in American society, but whose vague
ideologies (as I have repeatedly argued) are
suspiciously similar when it comes to fundamentals.
And finished with:
But I’m honestly not sure it would be worse than the
more plausible disaster scenario, the world-historical
transformation that is already well underway.
That’s the one in which the United States is slowly
bankrupted into permanent dependency by endless,
secret foreign wars while tiny cadres of the ultra-rich
squabble over control of the economy. Electoral
politics is angrily contested over a narrow but
contentious range of lifestyle issues, and drives away
all but the most committed culture warriors on either
side. Nothing is done about the warming climate, the
poisoning of the air, water and soil, the elimination of
biodiversity or the mass extinction of other species.
Lost in our 14-hour workdays and our consumer
bubbles of pretend affluence, we don’t really pay
attention, although we’re sad about the pandas and
the polar bears and we hope somebody will do
something about it eventually. In due course the
political stalemate between Republicans and
Democrats stops mattering, stops existing and is gone
with the wind.
2665
My response to his article:

Historically we only get a society where both those of
more loving childrearing—i.e. progressives —and
those of worse agree to collectively allow themselves
a society substantially better than what their parents
knew, after periods of massive sacrifice—tons of lost
wealth, tons of wasted, destroyed lives. After
Depression. After World War. The progressives are
allowed to lead, and people who as children knew
parents who perennially scolded/abandoned them for
being spoiled sh_ts for some time allow themselves
huge advancements in income and entitlement over
what their parents knew — without feeling it'll earn
them some horrible apocalyptic punishment. The
angry, punitive gods are cleared out of the sky.
People spoil; people swing, relax and play. And the
skies remain blue and clear.
Outside these times, getting the divide we're
witnessing now isn't the worst of things. It means the
regressives are way past their ability to tolerate
"selfish" societal advancement and are going amok as
society refuses them the specific exo-structure they
need to split off and handle their childhood trauma-
based need to punish "bad children" everywhere; but
also that there are plenty of progressives around who
still want it bad.
2666
It is encouraging to hear amidst this Republican

takeover that that other great story we've been
hearing about—progressives cities insisting on a
certain standard of life for all of its citizens—rolls on.
We aren't now just left with wondering how hawkish
our democrats must become, but that whatever their
pose, surprises of wonderful enlightenment are
showering confidently around us. It is encouraging to
hear of cities, rather than nations, because somehow
it bespeaks the consciousness of the progressive
who's outgrown the need for a nation and has joined
progressive peoples in cities/cultures everywhere
who've insisted on the same thing. Is the citizenry of
San Fran and Seattle “American”? Or do they seem
more those who've eluded the nation to sip tea and
share civility with urban Tokyo, Paris and
Stockholm?
If we haven't yet suffered through a period of mass
carnage where regressive elements took full control
of society, and we hear that the split between political
parties is waning, this will not mean the bottom's
being pushed up but everyone's experiencing a
regressive slide. Society is growing beyond almost
everyone's ability to tolerate, and everyone is feeling
abandoned and terribly guilty. Everyone begins to
insist on pledging loyalty to ostensibly less selfish,
2667
more self-sacrificial old ways and for the spoiled

narcissists of society, who keep unrepentantly
pushing for more, to get their comeuppance. Their
grouping together will be their returning as good
boys and girls to the hearth of their long-neglected,
all-good mother. All their "badness" will be projected
onto others, as will all their mothers' actually very
much existing, terrible, terrifying aspects.
So if Hillary becomes this all-powerful leader this
won't owe to astute self-attentuation, malleability ...
to being able to adroitly fit herself according to
needs. It'll owe to the fact that she like the rest of the
nation is experiencing a psychic change where that
part most of us possess which obliges us to project
onto others and hate, is taking up more and more of
our daily life. That psyche, amygdala-based and built
out of early-suffered child neglect/abuse, that we
switched into here and there, has more or less taken
over.
This hasn't happened; but we can already look around
and see some considerable signs of collusion with the
regressive mindset—specifically, deflation
economics. If all progressives were of the emotional
makeup of Paul Krugman we wouldn't have the
whole world agreeing to insanely staunch their
growth by agreeing to high interest rates. Many are
2668
already wobbling in their ability to not feel guilty as

society advances, and so cannot be shaken out of
seeing, in feeling, reason in deflationary economics:
with this, they unconsciously understand, will follow
a whole field of broken, stilled lives, unrealized
dreams: the sacrifices that must be produced for any
kind of societal advance to feel permitted at all.
We should note we can also see here on this website
some signs of regression. Brittney Cooper's recent
article where she says she's woken out of a mindset
that had her thinking life should be about enrichment
and admiring youthful Obama as exemplifying this
goal, to return to long-spurned elders who'd lived
self-denying lives of sacrifice, is worrying. She talks
enough of this and how different is she from anyone
who sees the bleak, wasted face of the Great
Depression-sufferer, and sees someone who now can
be loved? How different is she from the person who
hears of someone working the fourteen-hour days
Andrew refers to and not immediately feeling outrage
but of someone virtuous, someone victorious in being
ground so hard they’re purged of sin?
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Labels: andrew o'hehir, brittney cooper, hillary clinton, lloyd demause, paul krugman

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Why Cosby stories are finally taking hold

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Jenny Kutner at Salon.com recently wrote about the

change in how Cosby is being assessed, asking herself
why it finally now occurred:
Now, we’ve reached a point where it would be
irresponsible not to publicize the allegations against
Cosby. It would be just as irresponsible not to share
news of his efforts to avoid talking about the
accusations, which is exactly what the Associated Press
did with its recent interview footage for weeks before
finally making the tape public.
Why did the responsibility change? Is it simply that we
are at a moment in time, right now, when accusers’
stories suddenly seem more believable? (The outcomes
of other alleged sexual assault cases would indicate
otherwise.) Or, is it because with this particular case,
we’ve reached a critical mass of accusers whose stories
we can no longer ignore? Is 13 the magic number? 14?
15? What about the multiple women who accused Jian
Ghomeshi of brutalizing their bodies as well? Are these
stories finally taking hold because in both cases, we’ve
reached the point where it’s almost completely
rationally impossible not to believe, let alone listen to,
these women?
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-----
My response:
Why did the responsibility change?
Historically, the most powerful and important
perpetrators in our own lives were our parents. Since as
children we absolutely had to imagine them as people
who could love us, be our protectors, our brains went
quickly to work making them right to have abused us,
and ourselves wrong for doing whatever we did. Since
we actually didn't do anything and were just attacked by
our parents when they switched into the brain states of
their own perpetrator parents and saw us as full of their
own projections, we are left to conclude that it was just
our vulnerability, our absolute neediness, that was bad.
To keep our parents, the ur-perpetrator, "right,"
perpetrators become automatically good and the
vulnerable deserving of abuse.
This is why the last people you should expect automatic
empathy for victims from is actually people who've been
abused as children. That interview we all saw where that
CNN interviewer drew his interviewee back into her
moment of sexual abuse and then tried to show her how
the facts show that even there she was being bad -- "why
didn't you bite his d--k off? -- is about what one should
expect. By humiliating her, by drawing her back into
shame and latching onto her there some hard-to-shake-
off scold of self-blame, he was at work, not
2671
protecting/shielding Cosby but the primary childhood

abusers in his own life -- his own parents -- and thereby
experienced a pat of approval so meaningful your
reproof of him would have little chance.
When perpetrators like Cosby (himself, guaranteed, a
victim of sustained child-abuse) are losing their
protections it's because some substantial part of our
population has begun to have childhoods where their
parents stopped or lessened their inclination to see their
children as bad sh-ts that needed discipline, terrors,
abuse to be corralled into being good. Some substantial
part of our adult population has known more loving
childhoods, and don't as much see their own childhood
vulnerable selves as somehow having deserved
whatever abuse suffered. They then witness the
perpetrator and don't so much cow away but demand
dethroning, while mostly in fact thinking of the victims
and empathizing into the shamed states the brutalized
had been pitched into experiencing.
Brittney Cooper discussed recently how she was
separating herself from the long tradition she’d grown
up amongst that accepted "spanking" -- read, physical
assault on the child -- as the preferred way to raise
children. We’re, our society’s, experiencing something
like that, but writ large. When there's enough of us,
those in the media who'd like to have written something
twenty years ago but who really would have been
eviscerated if they'd tried then, now have the way in —
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we’re the audience who’s ready. Even if we still can't

shake that in going after outside perpetrators we’re still
involved in a discourse that's ultimately going to
implicate our own parents — again, the ur, the original,
the archetype perpetrator, for all of us — more of us
have had sufficiently less abandoning and terrifying
childhoods that we can withstand a rattling of what
previously only beckoned oblivion.
Andrew O'Hehir just wrote an article where he sees
perpetual stasis in an awful, hellish, late-capitalist
society, as our ongoing reality. Next presidential
election, more of the status quo, whomever gets elected.
But we should understand the downing of Cosby as
evidence that people are changing, not just in attitudes
but in their well-being, their make-up, their constitution.
And systems change when human nature changes, when
better-loved people grow beyond systems that were
emotionally satisfying to their less emotionally evolved,
more pointless-punishment accepting/unconsciously
desiring, predecessors. Capitalism moves from late to
socialism when people stop needing for there to be
shelved amongst us — losers; when we stop feeling
satisfaction in such numbing, dream-deflating,
tempering categories like products, producers and
consumers. The sign that we may be moving towards
something profoundly good is more to be found in this
new response to abusers than I think in the apocalyptic
anger we'll likely also see a lot of in upcoming years.
2673
This anger, I fear, will be fuelled by revenge against

childhood perpetrators as well — its ur-source — but its
constituents will not be like those repelled by Cosby ...
it will not be fuelled by those who knew less abuse, who
knew more love, but rather those who received so much
they still will feel the need to protect perpetrators and
destroy victims. Their ur and all-infiltrating source of
“perpetrator,” their parental terrorizers, will be split into
two, so only part of this parent is actually attacked while
the other part actually clung to ever-more loyally — its
destructive aspects, wholly denied; one’s own fierce
anger at them, just as much so. They'll be the equivalent
of soldiers who destroy encroaching predatory
countries, lead by an evil mastermind with a — to
borrow from Sam Harris — “mother-load” of feminine
qualities, but who cling to their approving nation like a
knight-protector. And all the "troops" destroyed ... will
be full of projections of their own childhood selves,
their "sh-t selves," still horribly bad, and worthy of any
other name you’d be inclined to call them. We'll see, in
short, the 1930s, a move towards mass action, mass
participation, which could see threatened elites and
worried big businesses (hurray!), but also collective
agreement on the righteousness of bigotry — much of
the world is simply cretinous and bad, and in need of
urgent purging.
This new unwillingness to excuse the perpetrator for a
great reason is being matched by a very bad one.
Because we're seeing it of course in the slowly
2674
mushrooming anti-Muslim movement ... amongst even

progressives — there, the New Atheism; people are
feeling an increasing desire to project onto others and
destroy, and so are grabbing on. If it was built out of the
same energy you wouldn't have a progressive, you
wouldn’t have Camilla Gibb, in the same article where
she writes of how she left anthropology because she
couldn’t handle how aggressively harassing Middle
Eastern cultures were, conclude only how she was going
to stand up in future against future Ghomeshis; but
rather of course with her standing up against something
that would look to have her more associating with the
New Athiests — those ostensibly standing up against
the larger broad swath of abusers, whole cultures, in
whole continental regions: those, in their own minds,
more consistent, those being even more brave. That is, it
would of had her finish where her article obviously
looked to be directing her before she tightened it down
only onto those she’d find within her vicinity at a
gala. She chastised her own letting loose because it drew
to mind phantoms of those legions also standing up right
now, but whom she knows just aren’t up to what she is
up to. Not at all. More the opposite. More along the
lines of Germans in the 30s.
We have “accumulating” two different psychoclasses,
two broad swaths of very different people -- one more
lovingly raised, one less. If the “less" wins, mostly
determines the emotional temper of our next number of
years, everything progressives have done to expand our
2675
awareness of how many abusers there are out there can

be used to justify a pre-existing desire to cleanse the
world of "bad" people. If Katie McDonough's argument
that almost every woman has their own rape story
becomes “understood” ... that there are that many men
out there who are rapists; if we come to understand that
so many of us were victims of sexual and physical
assault as children ... if we as people who no longer
need to safeguard the abuser can look at our society and
recognize just how much our society is coloured by
sadism, the terrible defining destruction wrecked on our
fellow human beings, and we ultimately lose, we've laid
ground which the other side will takeover. Saying,
“you're right, but let me show you where this evil
you’ve agreed exists in plenty and must in this moment
of clarity be urgently vanquished, is
actually most concentrated…”
And you'll have America involved in righteous bigotry.
You'll have Americans going from feeling compromised
to instantly pure again, forgetting all the self-
improvement they needed as all their “issues” become
transplanted onto the outside. Chastising progressives
will lose their effect, and blamed, for not thinking their
issues through — at the cost of lives. And the women
“we’ll” be standing up for, those accosted in cultures
everywhere that progressives have ostensibly drawn
back from incriminating but to keep their own
cosmopolitan egos intact, will be in their own minds
childhood perpetrators they'll feel enormous joy in
2676
protecting.
They can't be guilted, is what I’m getting at. That self
they'd begun to recognize that should feel shame and
guilt in denigrating vulnerable people, that increasingly
uncomfortable, caught-out self that recognized how
much it wanted women to know pain, would be gone as
they know themselves to in fact be willing to sacrifice
their very lives to keep their mothers from being pained
at their children’s ability and presumptuous willingness
to see them plain — to destroy them, Meghan Daum,
truly progressive, matricidal-style.
-----
Interesting response to the article by pjwhite:
It is thrilling to see this happening in my lifetime (I am
52). Never did I imagine the day would come when a
woman's word actually carried some power. Finally.
For thousands of years, society has given rapists and
child molesters free reign by valuing men's reputations
over women and children's humanity. Sex offenders are
terrified (and enraged) by this - and they should be. In
the past 30 years, I have seen rape survivors go from
hiding their names in shame to loudly proclaiming and
naming their experiences. I have seen rape survivors go
from being perceived as pitiful and damaged to being
seen as the courageous heroes they are for speaking out.
Rapists may not be put in jail (yet) but they WILL lose
their social status, their careers, their ability to travel
2677
freely, and even the Presidency of France (Dominique

Strauss-Kahn). Society is FINALLY shifting from
empowering and protecting rapists to empowering and
protecting their victims. I thought it would take
hundreds of years for that to happen, but it is happening
now. (the next step is for more MALE sex abuse victims
to be empowered to come forward - and for THEIR
heroism in speaking out to be recognized as well. Rape
damages and diminishes the rapist - NEVER the
survivor). Praise the Goddess!!!
My reply to pjwhite:
I'm glad they had the self-esteem to speak out, but I'm
not especially happy about calling them courageous. All
the others that historically DID NOT speak out, weren't
(guiltily?) lacking what the others managed -- that is, a
show of courage against bullies. They were just products
of backgrounds that weren't going to fuel them the self-
worth to power on through; the abuse they
suffered, corroborated the sense of their worthlessness
that their parents installed in them.
Speaking out would not just make the abusers but their
own parents wrong, and you've got to have received a
considerable amount of love to readily manage that.
Posted by Patrick McEvoy-Halston at 2:39 PM No comments: Links to this post
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Labels: bill cosby, jenny kutner, salon.com

2678
Recent comments at Salon.com (Nov.16

2014)
Original Article: Meet the “experts” using bogus
science to prop up nationwide abortion restrictions
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 3:56 PM
If the nation starts to have qualms about abortions, if the
nation as a whole tilts that way, it'll be because they
sense women being burdened by mouths they cannot
feed, and like the image.
That is, they'll want them to have children so to be
properly overwhelmed and depressed -- what we expect
of people in this time of sacrifice, of self-flagellation, of
purging ourselves so to be worthy of love once again.
We'll take photos of them, their blank faces, barely
surviving in the inner city or out on the plains, with
children wandering about them everywhere, in true
Walker Evans-style, and, say, "what noble sufferers!"
Permalink
Original Article: Animals that kill their babies have
bigger balls
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 3:08 PM
gerryquinn The_Pragmatist Not amongst human beings.
When a woman has a child she is in a sense branching
off from her own mother -- her love, in future, will be
towards her own children rather than her mother. As
such, it can arose powerful feelings of being rejected, of
allowing yourself something unallowed. The result is
2679
that women often switch into their own angry mothers,

find themselves possessed -- a phenomenon we call
post-partum -- where they can end up killing their
children. No accident; deliberate.
The worse the childrearing, the more infanticidal --
child-hating -- the
culture: http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln07_evolu
tion.html
Permalink
Original Article: Artie Lange’s lame downfall: What
daft men still don’t understand about speech
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2014 8:41 PM
Our brains form in the company of our mothers, by the
nature of our attachment to her. Doesn't it seem strange
to be asked to prove how later behaviour towards
women might be largely determined by the nature of
your relationship with her? Wouldn't you be wondering
what is going on with this person that they could doubt
this?... indeed that they find it so unlikely that when no
one else brings it up as a possibility in later violence
towards women, this doesn't bother them at all?
Wouldn't you be guessing that you're probably dealing
with someone who is being determined by their own
mother's wish/insistence that she not see her straight,
that she would be punished, abandoned for doing so?
Wouldn't you suspect that you're dealing with someone
largely under the control of their superego, or rather, the
2680
terrifying maternal alter they've implanted in their right

hemisphere specifically to ensure they do not repeat
behaviour that earned them rejection from their mothers
in early infancy?
You're not dealing with someone who's going to let
scientific proof have any real chance in this matter,
because what's at issue is one's own brain turning
against itself -- to see your mother adversely, would
make you a terribly bad child, once again worth being
abandoned. You don't have the psychic makeup for truth
when along with it will be a rejection that will
degenerate your whole sense of worth; make you want
to suicide yourself.
So what you do is wait for those who accept the
common sense aspect of what you're saying ... as if the
task, obviously, would be to prove the highly likely
thing you're asserting isn't true. Such a person had a less
punitive mother, a more permissive mother, and though
seeing her mother fully straight-on would still be
understand as a no-no, it'd be something that could be
born by the fact that "you" knew she loved you enough
that she'd want you to move past even her own
allowances, and by the fact that outside courage could
buoy you past the pain of her rejection.
Permalink
2681

They're being intellectually dishonest is saying they
need evidence, because no amount of evidence is going
to convince them. If I'd offered it, they'd of refuted it
regardless ... and finished with a heckle: because if they
don't the internal representation of their own mothers
they keep in their heads wouldn't be sufficiently
persuaded that "you'd" allied sufficiently against seeing
the damage she deliberately did to you straight.
If there was some register that what I was saying
seemed like common sense -- neglected and abused
women make for terrible mothers; and being the "all"
for infants and young children, their imprint will
determine them for life -- I'd recognize that I was
dealing with someone who'd shaken the commandment
-- do not be aware! -- and might put forth a study of
some kind, or link to someone who's assembled them.
But really, that person, having broken through, would
realize the issue is that too many people don't dare raise
the ire of those they were most dependent upon as
infants for love and support. Doing so, they'll feel
they've lost their claim to it forever, and be hopelessly
abandoned.
I repeat, because the war being fought is people's
willingness to admit to themselves the damage owing to
unloved mothers. Some people hearing it put forward
enough times, will pledge fidelity to that part of
2682
themselves that won't be broken from truth.

Permalink
Original Article: Bill Maher’s slippery slope: Why his
war on Islam could hit closer to his own home
Bill Maher seems to think that the Muslim religion is at
fault for acts of terrorism committed in the name of
Islam. But, in fact, it’s the radical Imams who are
“cajoling, pressuring and bribing” young disaffected
men to commit violence in the name of Islam — which is
not all that different from what the FBI is doing, is it?
It’s not the idea or the book or the religion that’s
encouraging them to make these bad decisions — it’s
older men in authority manipulating younger men to
carry out their plans.
So the book doesn't influence because these older men
play a much larger part in these boys' lives -- it's
ephemeral, in a way. Well, no one plays a larger part
than do their mothers and grandmothers -- they grow up
mostly before them (in the women's quarters), not the
men. And these brutally treated women re-inflict their
own tortures upon their children, and abandon them
when they try and self-activate, because this means their
no longer serving and instead their (ostensibly
deliberate) abandoning them.
They may well be cajoled (but also by the women?), but
these boys don't really need to be cajoled into terrorism.
2683
Terrorists kill those they've projected their own "bad

boy" status onto -- those who are enjoying unallowed
freedoms and personal pleasures. Thereby these often
young adults who, owing to tasting adult independence,
we're feeling completely abandoned of their mother's
approval and love, once again feel pure and accepted.
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln03_terrorism.htm
l
Permalink
goeswithness We can handle ideas, but no way should
we put up with hate speech and threats. Meet us with
ideas, not insults. Is it that hard to understand the
difference?
I think this is mostly right; right-thinking women are
being projected upon. But when I argue that male hatred
towards women, men's "irrational" fear of domineering
women, owes to their having had mothers who were
thoroughly abused and neglected in the patriarchal
cultures they grew up in but who did dominate and
abandon their children, I usually don't feel I'm being met
by people eager to engage with ideas but by those
launching dismissive insults.
Permalink
2684

AmusedAmused Hopeful Cynic I agree with you about
mansplaining -- it's worked to back off some gross
behaviour. But in feminist circles (discussed in the
Nation's piece, "Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars"), white
feminists are being charged with whitesplaining, and are
complaining that the corrosive effects of this is having
them disengage from online feminism:
Now, it’s true that white people need to make an effort
not to be racist. And there are countless examples of
white feminists failing women of color and then hiding
behind their good intentions....
But the expectation that feminists should always be
ready to berate themselves for even the most minor
transgressions ...creates an environment of perpetual
psychodrama, particularly when coupled with the
refusal to ever question the expression of an oppressed
person’s anger.
http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-
toxic-twitter-wars?page=0,0
My point being, we have to always do a double-check to
make sure that we're supporting the more emotionally
evolved side. Many of the white feminists that are being
charged as racists and are dropping out of the discussion
(i.e., are "stopping), are going to count amongst them
some of the more evolved people alive.
2685
Permalink
Shivas Andrew Sullivan: Or is it simply that WAM
believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-
and-tumble of uninhibited online speech?
You: I for one wish that women would shelve the
delicate flower form of feminism as it may seem to
accomplish incremental goals but it does so at the
expense of a lot of other potential gains. Women cannot
achieve equality by presenting themselves as frozen in
fear, unable to make intelligent choices, incapable of
expressing themselves, and unwilling to stand up for
themselves.
The rough-and-tumble world is one boys know as
children owing to greater abuse and distancing by adults
and being subject to demands to "grow up," "be manly,"
and "not be a cry-baby" and not need attachments. In
this early environment what they are is frozen in fear,
entirely powerless, and so through life they crave
environments where they defensively prove they are not
powerless in these situations.
That is, these rough-and-tumble worlds might feel like
they enable quality, extensions by the proven into a new
future; but what they mostly enable is bravado, re-
staging/repeats of the past by those afflicted by
2686
childhood terrors.
What we need are not more women warriors, unafraid of
the blasting storm, but more men permitted to know
more affection in their delicate, past, boyhood forms,
without feeling shame.
Permalink
MBMorris Woody Brown Greywolf Borealis The
movement is good. It'll be lead by some of the
progressive types that are the exact opposite of the
personality types described by Woody Brown. I agree
with Katie that this will be about expanding the
conversation not shutting it down.
But his, or, sorry, the "daft male's" fear he was (merely)
illustrating, that lingering behind "the female" is
someone irrational and domineering comes out of
experience. Women who were abused through life and
who become mothers, will be this to their children.
Their girls will be dominated, but their boys will be
mostly abandoned -- which is far worse for the psyche
(and the origins of the male "instinct" towards bravado
-- defensive disprove of fears ... all alone on the
battlefield). Plus, irrationally but understandably, the
boys will represent the sex that abused her through life,
and will be partly hated/rejected for this.
2687
Permalink
This isn’t the dawn of the age of “creeping misandry”
or a “censorship field day,” it’s the embryonic stage of
a conversation about abuse, accountability and free
speech that’s been long overdue.
This conversation has been a thrill to see arise. But
again, if so many men owe this desire to humiliate
women owing to having been damaged, abandoned and
abused by their insufficiently loved mothers -- who
don't, regardless of how they are treated in life,
magically turn loving once with children -- this too is
something that needs more air without being crushed by
being called creeping/lingering mother-hate.
Those films we're seeing bringing awareness to how
much harassment women endure on the streets ... we
need to exposure to more video showing how young
boys are raised in comparison to how girls are. Mothers
look at them less, and attack them more. The result is
male autism (defensive shells), and rage against the
perpetrator -- male violence against women.
Permalink
Original Article: You don’t protect my freedom: Our
childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens
real democracy
2688

AmusedAmused Geministorm So fathers who make
sure they don't go off on long trips, effectively
abandoning their children, are heroes.
Permalink
real democracy
AmusedAmused Geministorm Heroes are people who
give their children more love than they themselves
received. The mother and father spending more time
with their children, talking with not hitting them,
respecting their differences and helping them become
whomever they want to be, are on the way to create a
generation that will have no psychic need to project all
their "badness" onto others and obliterate them in war.
Permalink
Original Article: More men need to take paternity leave
— even if it hurts their careers
We may want to reconsider the importance of careers.
What I mean is, if careers are about making a world
better, the best way of doing that is making sure the next
generation of children are better treated than the
previous.
This may be the reason that the worst-reared children in
2689
Europe, the Germans who became the good boys and

girls they always wanted to be by projecting all their
"badness" onto others during the 1930s and 40s,
apparently managed a dramatic improvement
afterwards, with no repeat required: a huge generation
gap between pre-war and post-war, all owing to more
love in childrearing.
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/childhoodHolocaust.
html
As a society, if we somehow decided to make our
number one priority to put most of our resources into
helping families, enabling lengthy periods of maternal
and paternal leave and such, declaring this our concern
more than anything else, our national product resulting
out of this would be the one Lawrence Krauss thinks is
possible: a generation that'd outgrown the need for war,
religion, nationalism -- all the evils that are the
derivatives of lack of love in childhood.
Maybe we should stop asking people what they do.
What they might primarily do is simply in the way
they're relating to people, which may occur in their
careers or perhaps mostly outside of them -- as good
parents, or as engaged neighbours; decent people on the
streets.
Permalink
2690
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Infanticide
Salon.com has an article today about animals that kill
their young. I'll use this as a prompt to remind everyone
again why humans kill their young. From Lloyd
DeMause's "Origins of War in Child Abuse":
ROUTINE INFANTICIDE AND CHILD

SACRIFICE IN EARLY STATES
Clinical studies of violent mothers show the reason
mothers are sadistic toward their children is that they
have internalized their own mothers, and fear that the
very act of having a child is “the most forbidden act of
self-realization, the ultimate and least pardonable
offense,” bringing with it inevitable fears of maternal
retribution. Infanticidal mothers fear punishment by
11
their own mothers for daring to have a baby, so “to save

herself she must disown motherhood by destroying the
child.” Mothers in antiquity continuously hallucinated
12
female demons (Lamia, Gorgo, Striga, Empusa) who

were inner maternal alters that were “so jealous of their
having babies that they sucked out their blood… So
fearful were they of these inner Killer Mothers that they
would wear amulets to protect them from Lilith, the
child killer, and would write on the wall of the birth
2691
room: ‘Out Lilith!’” Often first-born babies were

13
routinely sacrificed to the avenging goddess.

Hippocrates said that Greeks often experienced
“convulsions, fears, terrors and delusions” and
physicians were expected to treat the possessions and
hallucinations of their dissociated personalities. People
14
in antiquity regularly talked to their inner alternate

personalities, which were given names
like psyche, thumos, menos, kardia, fradie, etor, noos, a
te, and so on. Medea says she did not kill her children,
her thumos forced her to kill them. Dragon Mothers are
15
worshipped by all early states—from Lilith, Nin-Tu,

Hecate and Ishtar to Moira, Shiva, Gorgon and Erinyes.
They were called “Terrible Mothers” by their
worshippers, and were seen as cruel, jealous and unjust:
“her glance brings death, her will is supreme.” Even
16
early Hebrews worshipped a mother goddess, Asherah,

who, along with Lilith, “roamed the world in search of
children to eat, rape, and kill.” Statues of bloodthirsty
17
goddesses were set up in ziggurats and temples all over

the world, fed, talked to and heard to speak their
sacrificial demands. Often women would become so
possessed by their Killer Mother alters that, as Euripides
describes them during Dionysian rituals, “Breasts
swollen with milk, new mothers clawed calves to pieces
with bare hands, snatched children from their homes”
and killed them. 18
Girls were killed in far greater numbers than boys in

early states, carrying out the instructions of Hilarion to
2692
his wife: “If it is a boy let it live; if it is a girl, cast it

out.” The result is that males often outnumbered
19
females by over four to one in census figures from

Greece and Rome to India and China; of the 600
families on Delphic inscriptions, just one percent reared
two daughters. The cause is not economic. As
20
Poseidippos stated, “Even a rich man always exposes a

daughter.” As one visitor to Hawaii reported, “there
probably wasn’t a single mother who didn’t throw at
least one of her children to the sharks, and wealthy royal
families killed more than anyone.” If early societies
21
wanted to reduce the number of children for economic

reasons they would not have routinely forced girls to get
married at age 12 and have lots of children. Early
prophylactic devices made of various materials were
actually available, but little used. What was lacking in
22
early states wasn’t contraception devices, but parental

love.
Most children in antiquity would therefore have
watched their mothers drown, suffocate and stab their
siblings to death. Mothers often simply gave birth to
23
their babies in the privy, smashed their heads in and

treated the birth as an evacuation. Romans reported
watching hundreds of mothers throwing their newborn
into the Tiber every morning. So many infants were
killed that even though mothers had eight or more
babies the populations of antiquity regularly decreased.
It is not surprising that the children who survived
implanted terrifying Killer Mother alters in their
2693
amygdalan fear centers and then acted them out as

adults in human sacrifice and war. Children playing in
dung heaps, rivers and cess trenches would find
hundreds of dead babies, “a prey for birds, food for wild
beasts to rend” (Euripides). Those few exposed children
24
who were rescued were raised as slaves or prostitutes.

Physicians wrote works like Soranus’s “How to
Recognize the Newborn that is Worth Rearing.” So25
many children were killed by their parents in early

Greece and Rome that people were afraid their
populations were declining, and passed laws limiting the
infanticide of children of citizens, which, however, were
rarely enforced. As Tertullian told Romans, “Although
you are forbidden by the laws to slay new-born infants,
it so happens that no laws are evaded with more
impunity.” 26
Parents in early ancient states proudly sacrificed their

children to avenging deities. As I have documented in
detail: “Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great
religions.” Maccoby’s book, The Sacred Executioner,
27
portrays the entire history of religion as based upon a

vengeful, bloodthirsty executioner with a child figure,
from Isaac to Christ, being killed for the sins of
others. Mass burials of thousands of sacrificed infants
28
have been discovered in early states from Germany and

France to Carthage, where archaeologists found one
cemetery filled with over 20,000 urns containing bones
of children sacrificed by their parents, who would kill
them if the gods would grant the parents a favor—like if
2694
their shipment of goods were to arrive safely. As29
Quintilian said, “To put one’s own children to death is at

times the noblest of deeds.” Suetonius said the Roman
30
Senate “decreed that no male born that year should be

reared” in order to appease the gods. As Poseipippus
31
wrote, “girls are always exposed, even by the well-off.” 32
Infant skulls split by an ax have been found at religious

sites from Stonehenge to Jericho, early Arabians
sacrificed their infants to “the Mothers,” Aztecs ripped
out the hearts of their children and ate them, in India
children were sacrificed in quantity to goddesses well
into the nineteenth century, and Mayans still sometimes
sacrifice their children in the mountains to give them
good luck in cocaine trade. The skin of the sacrificed
33
children was considered so holy that in societies like the

Maya and Aztecs the sacrificers flayed the skin and
wore it to increase their strength. Sacrificial rituals
34
always contain elements of the abusive childhood

practice that engendered them. Aztec mothers would
regularly pierce their children’s genitals and pull
knotted cords through the wounds to cleanse them of
sin; during sacrificial rituals, therefore, the genitals of
the victim would be pierced during the sacrifice and the
blood spread over the idol of the goddess. Sacrifices are
35
always necessary whenever independence and success is

achieved and the avenging Killer Mother goddess must
be placated. Even when people built new buildings or
bridges, little children were usually sealed in them alive
as “foundation sacrifices” to ward off the avenging
2695
maternal spirits who resent the hubris of building the

structure. Not even ancient Greeks could dispense with
36
human sacrifices; early reports of burning and eating of

children in human sacrifices were followed in classical
Athens by the practice of keeping victims called
Pharmakoi who were ritually stoned to death as
scapegoats for the sins of others. 37

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Labels: infanticide, lloyd demause, salon.com
Comments at Salon.com (November 10

2014)
real democracy
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2014 3:23 PM
alacosta1224 They prefer the warm home because
they're not unconsciously drawn to repeat/restage their
cold and terrifying childhood environments, which is
what soldiers are doing. Hating the very sensible
warmer abode comes out of the same childhood
environment too: everything self-enriching was IDed by
your parents as spoiled and bad, who expected you to
give everything to them.
Permalink
2696

real democracy
alacosta1224 because I honestly cant stand people who
try and destroy our troops from their little computers,
You must be one of the people we've been pointlessly
bombing.
Permalink
real democracy
DocShoe I wish you well, but there's pathology in liking
your scars.
Permalink
real democracy
esstee Patrick McEvoy-Halston Counter to your
assertion about a lost mother, most human sacrifice is
rooted, in terms of human evolution, in the demands of
parenting. Would you ever sacrifice yourself to save
your loved one from a fire?
This is collective wishful thinking. Apes that will fend
off jaguars to protect their young will happily let them
starve as they grab all the best foodstuff for themselves.
2697
Adults don't sacrifice themselves in fires; they instead

oblige their children to them. And child sacrifice hasn't
stopped until we lose our need for wars.
Permalink
real democracy
bigguns Patrick McEvoy-Halston Not commendable,
though. In abandoning them to the front lines they just
yet again repeated how they responded to their children
day one.
The more loving would have kept them at home; a way
of communicating to the nation that while popular
demand obliges them to war, the idea of sacrificing the
young is absolutely repugnant to them. A bit of helpful
dissonance, as well as a few more saved, beautiful
youth, from the maw of pointless sacrifice.
Permalink
real democracy
libertyrocks I completely agree our foreign policy is an
overreaching mess, but I still respect and appreciate all
who serve. Not all are heroes, but all should be treated
with respect.
2698
A nineteenth-century British chambermaid serves her

lord too, but we've grown out of finding it
commendable. It's not decent, not respectful, not equal
to her ... the same goes for soldiers who give up their
own lived life for that pompous "other," the nation.
Permalink
real democracy
bigguns apotropoxy Flags are an indicator that we hold
hold sacred some supernatural entity we're obliged to
sacrifice a lot of young blood for.
Permalink
real democracy
bigguns FDR and Eleanor made certain their sons were
put in peril.
Do you mean all the way through their childhoods, or
only when they abandoned them to war?
Permalink
real democracy
2699
esstee Patrick McEvoy-Halston The group is maternal.

The "captain" is the hive mother. It is pathological. If
you are a child of those well-loved progressive families
out there who are fully comfortable with their children's
individuation, who don't sense in it a repeat of
abandonment they'd known too much in life, you won't
take a special pleasure in surrendering your adult
autonomy and "hiving" -- rebounding yourself to the
maternal matrix -- later in life ... you are no longer a
guilty independent; your mother loves you again.
It's common, because really loved parents are
historically non-existent and not sufficiently widespread
currently.
You're saying that there's no ideal or nothing sacred that
you'd sacrifice your life to uphold?
I don't like your language ... that "sacred" and
"upholding" stuff. They seem boxes of paramount
importance we'll ultimately be willing to manhandle our
world to fit into them. I am not interested in sacrificing
myself. This discussion is always about legitimating the
importance of that, primarily. The need to sacrifice
yourself is born out of knowing insufficiently loved
parents who delighted when you stopped your own
individuation and once-again attended more to them.
Permalink
2700
real democracy
esstee happyhaze Again, a lot of empathy in this
response. Modernity doesn't demand we change, though.
It's created by those openminded liberals who embrace
novelty and change in the first place -- they don't have
to adapt: it's their own baby.
These people who can't change are those from more
punitive, less-loving, and often sexually-abusive
childhoods. They don't so much have a simpler world
view as a more regressive one. It's hard not to hate
world views that demand innocent people are projected
onto and become "evil" and "bad," which is one of the
absolute corollaries of this sort of disastrous
upbringing.
It's not born of evil but of suffered child abuse, so we
shouldn't hate it. But it's hard not to.
Permalink
real democracy
esstee A lot of empathy in this response. But Tea
Partiers want to hold onto national symbols, and are
they really so, understandable?
Maybe built into that need for a nation we prove our
worth by selflessly sacrificing ourselves to, was a lot of
2701
crazy, built out of early childhood abuse. Maybe we of

this ostensibly uglier and more complicated but
undeniably vastly more peaceful world haven't so much
transferred this "religious instinct," but slowly rid
ourselves of it.
Permalink
real democracy
DocShoe johnjohnjohnson How does risking my life to
save others in a combat zone make me guilty, while
staying at home and doing nothing makes you innocent?
We weren't doing nothing; we weren't participating in
the huge sacrifice of human life and societal resources
we know as war. Your risking your life in the combat
zone was bravado, a defense against feeling vulnerable
that is characteristic of boys as early as the age of four
who've know a childhood that was abandoning and
terrifying.
War restaged your early childhood environment;
and succeeding there was exulting -- rather than
mostly defenceless, you proved you could be these fears'
master. I mean sort-of, good for you. But if you'd of had
a less terrifying early childhood you wouldn't have been
drawn in and would have found some way to be very
helpful in that world outside of war, where we aren't
2702
sacrificing but building and nurturing, and yes, shopping

-- buying things that make us happy.
Permalink
real democracy
And frankly, they can't even do that right--when my
phone rings on Nov. 11 it's usually another veteran,
because my civilian friends are busy shopping.
So you've spent your life protecting your troops and
rescuing total strangers, while we've all been at home,
shopping. It would seem you have the rest of us at a
disadvantage. Plus, we effeminate shoppers don't really
respect you. It would now seem you have us doubly so.
It'd be nice to hear that when you're swapping war
stories with other members of that worthy military
lineage you belong to, you sometimes admit that those
who didn't volunteer for war and kept on instead making
and buying and consuming things, seem somehow to
possess a healthier temperament ... like as if they had
the appropriate vision of the disgusting/disturbing
battlefield, and thought, I have nothing to address there,
and so sanely opted out.
Permalink
2703
real democracy
Calling all cops and troops heroes insults those who
actually are heroic – the soldier who runs into the line
of fire to protect his division,
You're supporting idea that soldiers who run into the line
of fire are not just doing so to sacrifice themselves, to
lose their lives, which is why they're usually doing so.
They thereby die for their motherland, help revive her;
they die comfortably and peacefully and are eternally
beloved by her. Though that's usually the "goal" those
who are doing it "to save the division" aren't being
rational either: they're mother hens wildly protecting
their children. Everyone at war is accessing their earliest
memories of being alone and afraid but protected by the
massive awesome bulk of their all-powerful mothers.
War is re-staging. "You've" been there before.
We can discourage the idea of the hero, but even if we
do so it doesn't mean a lot of young boys from families
with parents who needed their children to provide them
the love they did not receive in life and thus were
suspicious of their growth into somewhat-individuated
young adults, won't feel, not heroic, but loved by
sacrificing their lives, their individuated future, on the
battlefield. When Vietnam became unpopular, in
surveys, young boys still kept on saying how much they
were willing to die for America.
2704
Most of our problems come out of early childhood

neglect/abuse, lack of love and all its derivatives. I
certainly support this article, but it'd be nice if this got
factored in sometimes.
Permalink
Original Article: The Jian Ghomeshi effect: I plan to
speak up now
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2014 11:52 AM
@Canuckistan Bob @Patrick McEvoy-Halston Unless
she's planning to limit her interventionism to local galas,
if she's planning to step in and help other women -- be
interventionist -- effectively abroad, in places like Cairo
where as she says she was harassed constantly, to not be
afraid to call brutes out for what they are she's going to
find it difficult to be a multiculturalist. She's going to
have to be able to have a lot of cultural
heritage/longevity thrown in her face, a lot of "you as an
imperialist outsider do not understand" thrown in her
face, and be able to say -- phooey! You're changing,
bud!
That halo of "culture" is something we've unfortunately
cast around a lot of people that are very abusive to
women. The whole discipline of anthropology has
unfortunately done so as well. Feminist anthropologists
seem to me unconvincing in their determination to see
worth somewhere in these peoples that in such a deeply
ingrained way hate women. I wonder in fact if these
"cultures" play to that part of themselves that isn't
2705
liberated but perhaps thinks they deserved the abuse

they themselves suffered.
Otherwise, as soon as they realized how deeply
ingrained the female-hate was, you'd figure they'd opt
out and spend more time with more liberated cultures,
like modern-day Swedes. I know they say they have to
understand the patriarchy in order to kill it, but actually
I think that can pretty much be done without giving two
sh_ts about that.
Permalink
Original Article: The Jian Ghomeshi effect: I plan to
speak up now
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2014 2:12 AM
The street harassment was constant. I was hissed at,
groped, ground against in streets and buses, driven into
dark alleyways by cab drivers, ogled by men with their
penises in their hands.
It was only when an Egyptian friend and I were walking
back to our university campus in Tahrir square that I
began to question it. She yelled at one man: What are
you, a dog? Show some respect. Don’t you have a
mother? A sister?
As a budding anthropologist, I knew I couldn’t live or
work in a major Middle Eastern city ever again.
But your new attitude is to confront, right, be a friend to
other women. And if most peoples studies by
2706
anthropologists hold women in disrespect, you'll be

advocating for anthropologists not just to study and
learn about other cultures but to intervene and change
them -- Hey guys, there is a much better way; let me
show you.
You won't let yourself be cowed into agreeing that at the
heart of this new impulse is the delegitimization of the
idea of culture, of the idea that all peoples are possessed
of an intrinsically beautiful character you may as an
outsider sometimes need to back away in order to
appreciate. The treatment of women is pretty abhorrent
in every culture anthropologists have traditionally been
concerned to learn from and study. It would make you
racist and not "multicultural" to be seeming to be going
back to the viewpoint that it's an inescapable fact that
we're dealing with too many "dogs" who have no
respect for their mothers and daughters, but this now
won't deter you -- back into the kennel, you beasts!It's
the simple fact of the matter, and you plan to step in --
anthropologists, multiculturalists, shielders of brutality
be damned!
Or were you only planning to offer sass that backs off
predators preying on scared women when it won't
incriminate you in any way. If it'd make you someone
not invited to substantial parties where you could deflect
women from the next Ghomeshi, you'd back down and
live with the fact that at some level you're still living in
fear.
2707
Permalink
Original Article: The one thing that could save the
world: Why we need empathy now more than ever
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2014 10:52 PM
In “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Pinker points
out it was rooted in ‘the rise of empathy and the regard
for human life’, underpinned by the ‘reading revolution’
as literature opened up imaginations to previously
hidden lives.
Pinker seems to find going beyond arguing that we all
have a collective nature -- and therefore, self-
flagellantly/mockingly, always a dark side -- would be
unaccountably hubristic. He refers however in his book
to the work of Lloyd DeMause, who doesn't limit his
reach owing to such fears.
DeMause argues that what has happened to encourage
empathy is gradually increasing love in childrearing:
people across time can almost meaninglessly be said to
possess the same nature, since their upbringing went
from appallingly awful (regular infanticide; regular
sexual abuse) to (in some families now) genuinely
helpful. Better-loved children become interested in
literature that takes us into the consciousness of other
peoples that worse-loved/more abused and neglected
will never really be much moved by (a reminder, many
Republican leaders are voracious readers, reading
thousands of books about the lives of people of different
2708
time periods; they still vote to deprive children

everywhere.).
Check out psychohistory.com; read the "Emotional Life
of Nations" and "The Origins of War in Child Abuse."
Permalink
Original Article: Democracy on the critical list: How do
we escape this toxic political cycle?
Historically, we only get a society where both those of
more loving childrearing -- i.e. progressives -- and those
of worse agree to collectively allow themselves a
society substantially better than what their parents knew,
after periods of massive sacrifice -- tons of lost wealth;
tons of wasted, destroyed lives. After Depression. After
World War. The progressives are allowed to lead, and
people who as children knew parents who perennially
scolded/abandoned them for being spoiled sh_ts, for
some time allow themselves huge advancements in
income and entitlement over what their parents knew ...
without feeling it'll earn them some horrible apocalyptic
punishment. The angry, punitive gods are cleared out of
the sky. People spoil; people swing, relax and play. And
the skies remain blue and clear.
Outside these times, getting the divide we're witnessing
now isn't the worst of things. It means the regressives
are way past their ability to tolerate "selfish" societal
advancement, and are going amok as society refuses
2709
them the specific exo-structure they need to split off and

"handle" their childhood trauma-based need to punish
"bad children" everywhere; but also that there are plenty
of progressives around who still want it bad.
It is encouraging to hear amidst this Republican
takeover that that other great story we've been hearing
about -- progressives cities insisting on a certain
standard of life for all of its citizens -- rolls on.
We aren't now just left with wondering how hawkish
our democrats must become; but that whatever their
pose, surprises of wonderful enlightenment are
showering confidently around us. It is encouraging to
hear of cities, rather than nations, because somehow it
bespeaks the consciousness of the progressive who's
outgrown the need for a nation and has joined
progressive peoples in cities/cultures everywhere
who've insisted on the same thing. Is the citizenry of
San Fran and Seattle "American," or do they seem more
those who've eluded the nation to sip tea and share
civility with urban Tokyo, Paris and Stockholm?
If we haven't yet suffered through a period of mass
carnage where regressive elements took full control of
society, and we hear that the split between political
parties is waning, this will not mean the bottom's being
pushed up but everyone's experiencing a regressive
slide. Society is growing beyond almost everyone's
ability to tolerate, and everyone is feeling abandoned
and terribly guilty. Everyone begins to insist on pledging
2710
loyalty to ostensibly less selfish, more self-sacrificial

old ways, and for the spoiled narcissists of society who
keep unrepentantly pushing for more to get their
comeuppance. Their grouping together will be their
returning as good boys and girls to the hearth of their
long-neglected, all-good mother. All their "badness" will
be projected onto others; as will all their mothers'
actually very much existing, terrible, terrifying aspects.
So if Hillary becomes this all-powerful leader this won't
owe to astute self-attentuation, malleability ... to being
able to adroitly fit herself according to needs. It'll owe to
the fact that she like the rest of the nation is
experiencing a psychic change where that part most of
us possess which obliges us to project onto others and
hate, is taking up more and more of our daily life. That
psyche, amygdala-based and built out of early-suffered
child neglect/abuse, that we switched into here and
there, has more or less taken over.
This hasn't happened, but we can already look around
and see some considerable signs of collusion with the
regressive mindset -- specifically, deflation economics.
If all progressives were of the emotional makeup of Paul
Krugman, we wouldn't have the whole world agreeing
to insanely staunch their growth by agreeing to high
interest rates. Many are already wobbling in their ability
to not feel guilty as society advances, and so cannot be
shaken out of seeing, in feeling, reason in deflationary
economics: with this, they unconsciously understand,
2711
will follow a whole field of broken, stilled lives;

unrealized dreams ... the sacrifices that must be
produced for any kind of societal advance to feel
permitted at all.
We should note we can also see here on this website
some signs of regression. Brittney Cooper's recent
article where she says she's woken out of a mindset that
had her thinking life should be about self-
entitlement/enrichment, and admiring youthful Obama
as exemplifying this goal, to return to long-spurned
elders who'd lived self-denying lives of sacrifice, is
worrying. She talks enough of this and how different is
she from anyone who sees the bleak, wasted face of the
Great Depression-sufferer, and seeing someone who
now can be loved? How different is she from the person
who hears of someone working the 14-hour days
Andrew refers to, and not immediately feeling outrage
but of someone virtuous, someone innocent of sin.
And of course MEW's just saying bakers should be
allowed the legal right to refuse gay and lesbians, is of
someone who's being unconsciously driven to move our
society towards one where classes of people can become
the "bad children" we have full right to express vile hate
for. I ignored everything she said in preamble ... all that
stuff where she insults the bigots to death before
ultimately stepping confidently onto their side.
Permalink
2712
Original Article: Forcing people to bake for you is a bad

idea
This stance, that the person who accepted the modest
occupation -- the farmer, the baker, the merchant -- is
the one being compromised, is one always to be
associated with bigotry. It's origins lie in a childhoods
where fealty (to parents) is expected and rewarded, and
where becoming an artist or leaving for the big city,
fully exploring your sexuality -- fully individuating --
means spurning parental expectations; being "bad."
People who ground their outrage in the fact that they
served, that they obliged and sacrificed, that they
moderated their ambitions (and thus now finally some
entitlement!), have to some extent subscribed to the
parents' point of view. They are those who end up hating
that part of themselves that wanted more; they're those
who'll see progressives as their own bad selves who
wanted to spurn servitude for a more individuated (to
them, read: egoistic) life.
To them, those "who left for the big city" (been bad)
have gone completely awry in now returning to infiltrate
their spoils all through the staunch homesteader's ardent
ways (this too reminds them of their childhoods where
every effort to maintain some ground against having to
wear their parents' emotional states was doomed to
failure). They'll be looking for a hero.
Permalink
2713
Original Article: Forcing people to bake for you is a bad

idea
Baker, blacksmith, leather-worker, innkeeper ... it's key I
think here that the "antagonized" imagines him/herself
part of some stoic, solid traditional occupation,
indisputably associated with modest village life.
They may be shortchanged in world reach, but one they
do have is a certain self-respect, propriety. They do
honest work and God has portioned them a small sliver
of his kingdom all their own. They can choose to serve,
or not to. This has been earned.
If they're forced, it's because their lords have grossly
enfranchised themselves, forcing their "serfs" into droit
du seigneur ... being forced to shamefully offer their
services to the lord's protected, bloated, smarmy and
spoiled "sons."
This is why bigots gain by publicity of this baker's case:
it has to do with an image that is being superimposed
upon the gay and lesbian community. They become the
spoiled favoured that end up biting it someway along
the way of Willy Wonka's factory tour.
Permalink
Original Article: Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss:
Religion could be largely gone in a generation
2714
beninabox Patrick McEvoy-Halston gasorg For one

thing it would presuppose that 85% of humanity has
been subject to child abuse.
I'm okay with that figure, though I think it's actually
more.
Permalink
Adventus Cosmology could more or less go, though. It
looks like terrible vacation land, cold space and a few
pointless rocks. If it's a match for your being alone, your
being afraid and abandoned as a child, I get it; but
otherwise I could definitely see a generation arrive that
isn't so stoic not to prefer more agreeable landscapes.
It's tough to say this in the face of well-loved people like
Kraus and Sagan, but still so.
Mind you, the same could be said for nature. I've always
found poets and novelists that show us how we
experience nature more profoundly worth my time than
nature itself. If it's just nature, there is no warm presence
behind it all; just happenstance. Doesn't make me hate
it, or feel uncomfortable about it; but it's just at a huge
loss for it.
Human beings came into being; at first they were barely
empathic and loving, but improved into some who are
astoundingly so. They are now just so much better than
2715
everything else that molecules came together to forge

that I think I'd be mostly interested in what they created
-- their supplanations over the nature that existed before
them. Whatever they engage with gets my rapture.
Permalink
Adventus Patrick McEvoy-Halston gasorg I'm glad you
never raised a hand to her. Human sin ...silly idea to
you? Human badness?
Or did your child know -- and was terrorized by -- that
apocalyptic abandonment loomed if she behaved
selfishly (i.e. didn't comply, followed her own path,
stuck to her own guns)? Her desperately needed parents
-- though maybe not consciously aware of it -- could
suddenly be lost to her if she was bad. So human brain
gets changed; an alternative system is installed full of
these most important memories, which religion and
nationalism speaks to powerfully.
When all that's not part of you, parental gods become an
obvious anachronism. Worship becomes the child
placating the adult abuser, modifying herself into a form
that parent is prepared to accept rather than one she
might on her own prefer to be.
Honestly, you go far enough, I'm not even sure what
Kraus does would make sense to you. Do we really need
2716
to care about the origins of the universe? Why spend so

much time exploring essentially nothing, when human
beings, their creations, are so rich?Maybe Kraus's own
children will grow out of that.
Permalink
gasorg As long as there are human beings, there will
always be believers, unbelievers, and those who are not
certain what they believe.
Unless of course Kraus is right and religion has
something to do with incurred child abuse. We can get
rid of that.
I would propose that in many of these progressive
families which no longer spank, sham their children,
where they encourage them to think of themselves as
entitled to make their imprint on the world rather than as
those sinful who need foremost to keep in mind their
wickedness, the "religious instinct" is increasingly gone
from them. They do not possess in their adulthood still a
terrorized childhood self that things like nationalism and
religion play to -- something more primal, more real,
more meaningful than the everyday.
Permalink
Recent comments at Salon.com Oct. 31

2717
Original Article: We must abandon Bill Cosby: A

broken trust with women, black America
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2014 9:17 PM
Rex Harrison contessakitty SarahWestofToronto Maybe.
But some art we've left by the wayside for good.
Progressives have always wrestled with what you're
wrestling with, and not always come to your conclusion.
All great art gets produced during periods of latitude,
where all of a sudden latitude, transgression, "the new"
isn't just stomped on but allowed some life. This is why
all great art sings so much ... it's all conveys human
promise.
But there is a psychological limit to how much anyone
who feels the need to stigmatize and hate can realize,
and eventually all their "truths" begin to seem
insufficient -- "someone" is still watching over them.
This could still be the fate of Shakespeare.
And if he goes, thank you so much, Mr. Shakespeare!
But along we go on this great human ride, embracing
different voices!
Permalink
contessakitty SarahWestofToronto I'm glad to hear of
people giving up artists when they realize just what
harm they did to other people in their lives. But the
thing is, we get maybe a couple of periods every century
2718
where we allow enormous transgressive growth.

However flawed, however angry and demon-possessed
the people living during those times, they're going to go
on a really productive ride.
Then it closes down. Maybe their children are healthier,
overall more evolved, but their art may well be thinner.
I'll wait to completely dismiss Cosby, Allen et al. after
our sacrificial depression is over and we allow our
society a restart. Otherwise, I'll be dismissing what we'll
all just subsequently be using as our base. Remember,
during the Great Depression Fitzgerald was wilfully
ignored; you couldn't find Gatsby in the bookstores.
That's the equivalent of the time we're in now.
Permalink
JustMe2 Maybe you "stretch your own heart and mind"
by not taking so pleasure in the dismissal and shaming
of a whole crowd of people. Enjoying your intimacy
with Brittney is tainted if it depends on whole crowds of
others not being as special.
Permalink
Original Article: “Jian Ghomeshi is my friend, and Jian
Ghomeshi beats women”
Jack Burroughs I think we do like to keep a shadow
assembly of women who get humiliated without redress.
2719
I think a lot of women don't speak out because they

sense that their society expects their category of women
("hangers-on to a celebrity") to remain powerless
("your" role is to allow yourself to be filled with our
hate and disregard), and will get angry if they speak up.
If we suddenly start listening to them, it's either because
we've evolved or because we want this celebrity tested,
maybe rejected (ala Clinton and Lewinsky). My sense is
that if all this came up even last year, the women would
have been in for it -- in no way were we ready for the
fall of Ghomeshi. Maybe because for a Cdn he seems a
bit too "ego," too full of himself, we want to see him
tested and maybe totally disposed of right now.
Whatever Strombo has been up to won't really matter. If
he had the same problems, the women wouldn't be safe
to air their abuses. Somehow he seems to us less
pretentious, more self-chastising; and any attack on him
would be on the average Cdn who'd be willing to serve
up his life for his country ... a non-ego "ego."
Permalink
Barbrady777 Patrick McEvoy-Halston They do want the
attention, and caregivers who have most of their own
needs already attended will be up to it. Their children
will not be resentful.
Children who had caregivers who were not able to well
2720
attend to their children because their children existed too

much to supply their own unmet/unaddressed needs for
attention, will be pissed. They'll dominate to show they
can be the ones in control; for revenge.
Your theory makes the problem over-needy kids, which
may not in your case but usually is about victim's
blaming themselves (and agreeing with the abusers'
point of view) to keep those they depend upon
sacrosanct.
Permalink
@elbe @Patrick McEvoy-Halston This is just factually
not true. The majority of people who abuse women
were raised in households where men were abusive.
I agree, but the men weren't there anywhere near as
much, and the women, the mothers, were just as abusive
as the fathers.
After being raised in an environment where there were
only two possibilities modeled (being abused or being
abusive), they subconsciously identify with their abuser
because they don't want to identify with the abused. T
They subconsciously identify with the abuser -- again,
predominately the mother -- because not identifying
with her would mean knowing she didn't really love
you. To guarantee yourself that you in fact have a
2721
mother who loves you, you deem your own vulnerable,

innocent self "guilty" ... she had reason. So in life what
you do is you support governments which deny/destroy
the innocent.
You revenge yourself against mothers as well -- the
terrifying strong (that's how we as infants knew our
mothers -- Titanesses, Gods) -- but sort of sneakily.
Nothing we do to hurt women in the world will be
allowed to feed back as our anger at our mothers. So
we'll be completely loyal to our mothers, defend her
against everybody. We'll be completely loyal to our
(mother) countries, be willing to defend Her against
everybody. But we'll war the hell out of other women
we can displace all her negative aspects onto; women,
we collectively agree, who "deserved" it.
Permalink
I can only say: do you really see no problem with this
way of thinking? I'm afraid it's wildly flawed as a mode
of reasoning.
I'm arguing that our earliest years are most formative.
I'm arguing that if you knew a life of hate and abuse you
will not magically become nurturing to your children:
they will exist to satisfy your own unmet needs; you will
have difficulty not projecting onto them; you'll find it
impossible to not hurt and neglect them (especially
2722
when their growth seems to threaten the same

abandonment you've known all too much in life).
So wildly flawed "reasoning"? No, if we weren't so
dependent on defending our own mothers this would
just come across as obvious; as something in need of a
very serious effort in order to disprove.
Permalink
Barbrady777 Patrick McEvoy-Halston Sonya001 ashley
Yes, I believe if you had a mother who was one of the
fortunate in having been mostly respected and cherished
in life, you'll be immune to hatred of women. You'll
have no base of profound shame others will
inadvertently play into, or who'll you'll force into
playing into as part of re-staging.
I'm not even sure if what we mean by that emotion
--hate -- will apply to you at all .... your attitude
towards someone like Rush Limbaugh might not even
be to simply stop him, but more to help him (get better,
and live a truly enjoyable and beneficent life). Not
above others, of course; but still after stopping his
current efforts, your primary concern.
Permalink
2723
@Barbrady777 @Patrick McEvoy-Halston Okay, so is

your argument actually that the only reason men engage
in abusive behavior towards women is that they were
themselves abused by women?
Not "women" ... by their mothers: those all-important
giants in their lives. Primary reason, not only ...but so
important compared to it the rest doesn't much matter.
Because it initially sounded like you were suggesting
that any existing systemic bias against women arose
from the fact that women abuse men.
... comes from the fact that unloved, neglected, abused
women abuse (make use of; wantonly abandon; hate)
their boys. Yes, this is where systemic bias against
women arose from. For our species, children likely
owed their initial survival owing to the fact that they
released pleasing hormones in their mothers; this got
them their needed attendance, not their being loved and
respected (we started off nearly exactly red and tooth in
claw). The repercussions of this are the hundreds of
thousands of years where human beings basically didn't
grow; no adventure, just survival -- or rather, the
enduring and re-inflicing abuse we see in aboriginal
cultures.
History has fortunately been about some women
discovering the ability to give a little bit more love to
their daughters than they themselves received, and
daughters of these mothers grouping together (moving if
they have to) to create more progressive, more advanced
societies.
2724
Nothing is more important that Katie's primary cause to

eliminate hatred of women, to support women. The hate
will ensure women get less love, and society will
regress; become more mean and brutal.
Permalink
elbe When people recognize that good friends can also
be criminals, more and more people will be more
inclined to trust the victims.
That's optimistic. Many of us are perfectly good ol' boys
in regular life, but persistently elect in regressive
governments to rape and pillage other people. "We" split
off our strongly felt but unappetizing needs, and are
only going to go so far in accepting this twin nature in
ourselves.
What we'll probably hear is that ..."he was such a well-
behaved, quiet, good-natured boy," and it'll get lost into
mythology.
Permalink
Barbrady777 Sonya001 ashley To me what I am saying
is so obvious (early childhood abuse by women is the
only thing that could produce later intense desire to
2725
rape, humiliate, destroy women) it's like being asked to

show proof that the sky is blue ... something else is
amiss in those who need proof that no subsequent
onslaught of studies will serve to allay.
Permalink
Barbrady777 Patrick McEvoy-Halston Do you think
that the majority of people in our society suffer abuse at
the hands of their mothers?
No. Any person you know who is genuinely feminist
will have suffered no substantial abuse. Their mothers
were those fortunate to come from a lineage where the
women received progressively more support and love
than others in their societies did.
We focus on the father defensively. It is the mother who
spends most of the time with the children, however
much this is changing with more progressive couples.
Permalink
Rocket88 Patrick McEvoy-Halston This does not make
you a misogynist.
You're right. For example you could be someone who
knows just how prevalent child abuse still is in society,
someone who realizes that no one savagely hurts other
2726
people unless they've been terribly neglected/abused as

children, and very easily love everybody -- be delighted
by aspects of every person when they're not being
motivated by the terrors they endured but by the love
they received early in life and later through good people
along the way.
However, it could just be that they ARE misogynist, and
"you" like them always in part because they're
administering the hate you can't express yourself.
Permalink
Rocket88 It is not insane. They knew all the rumours
and remained friends ... it's perfectly reasonable to
suggest that they did so not despite but rather because.
How prevalent is this desire to hurt and humiliate
women. Will many dump Ghomeshi to deny from their
conscious awareness their own long-possession of this
powerful urge?
Permalink
@ashley @Patrick McEvoy-Halston What I wish you
were concerned about is that most progressives would
be willing to seriously consider that a child's earliest
years are most formative. You could show them studies
2727
that show what child neglect/abuse does to the forming

brain, and they'd be right with you. They'd also be with
you in judging that the primary caregivers in families of
abuse are those where the father -- however much a
battering demon -- is mostly absent. But if you start
suggesting that societal rage against women (patriarchy,
what have you) owes to unloved mothers making use of
their children (to supply their own unmet needs) rather
than loving them, all your previous efforts dissipate.
Suddenly you're just a demon guilty of mother-hate, and
they go on retributive attack.
There is no idea we're all more bent to defend than the
idea of the loving mother -- for most of us, literally part
of our brains are on watch to make sure we never see
our own (unloved) mothers' abuses quite clearly.
Permalink
Christopher1988 Rocket88 They remained friends
because at some level they were glad the women were
being victimized. They disown now so to deny
themselves of their own raging desire to revenge
themselves upon women. It's in Ghomeshi, (so) not in
them.
Permalink
2728

But what it amounts to, and this is what Pallett and
Bady both made clear, isn’t the presumption of
innocence or a respect for due process, but a process
through which we can ignore what’s in front of us to
protect ourselves, to protect the ideas we have about our
friends, the ideas we have about rape and the kinds of
men who hurt women.
We protect ourselves from what the source of a man's
need to rape/hurt has to be. You don't get "there"
because the society you live in has been built to degrade
women and salute men. That would heavily play on that
kind of extreme rage towards women, but not in my
judgment create it entire. That kind of rage has to built
on early child abuse, some huge ongoing humiliation,
terror, when your brain was still forming ... at the hands
of a woman; your mother.
Feminists protect themselves from an obvious truth to
protect their idea of the mother. Namely, women who've
been abused, grown up in a patriarchal society that
degrades them, don't magically become loving mothers.
Rather the opposite. But Katie, who I believe has
recently argued that every woman has a story where
they were coerced into sex that left them shamed (i.e.
raped), never makes the connection that patriarchy
begins as a defence; a defence against abused women
who as mothers couldn't help but re-inflict their abuse
upon their children. The patriarch is clung to out of fear
of that all-powerful, terrifying, needy, abandoning and
2729
incestuous mother.
Some men may appear to be feminists but are showing
support out of fear. Fearing that society is being hovered
over by a spurned, angry, retributive matriarch ("Gone
Girl"), that they themselves have been guilty "bad
boys," they cling to her defensively. If you explore their
behaviour in any depth you'll likely notice that while
they've kept "her" sacrosanct they've displaced all her
negative aspects onto some "other." Some "other" you'll
find it impossible to suppress their intentions to revenge
themselves upon.
Of course, those who protect the abuser and shame the
victims are defensively identifying with their own
parental abusers as well, who were surely right -- their
brains by necessity have concluded -- to have humiliated
their own terribly vulnerable selves as children.
Permalink
jazztrans Patrick McEvoy-Halston JustAGuest2 nothung
The latter. Context showed that, though, no? I like the
poetry of what I said, but with your prompt, it would
have been more clear and still poetically intact if I'd said
..."the fact that to move beyond your parents you're
going to have to brace (against) their formidable ire."
Thanks for the input.
2730
Permalink
JustAGuest2 nothung I'm fine with moving beyond
"Cosby." On his show he always had the advantage over
his kids; he was the patriarch, the bemused know-it-all.
"Family Ties" had more of the family dissonance, the
suggestion that kids might know better than parents. The
fact that to move beyond your parents you're going to
have to brace their formidable ire. I'd prefer we built off
that instead.
Permalink
nothung Patrick McEvoy-Halston Helpful. Thank you.
Permalink
nothung Patrick McEvoy-Halston Brittney says she's
concerned to dispose of both the patriarch and the
matriarch. I think that is a great idea. However, I don't
know where we could possibly find a matriarch since
apparently women who've known abusive relationships
with their husbands, don't become matriarchs when
2731
they've got their kids all to themselves. As Brittney says

about her own mother, once she was free of her violent
husband she was simply ... saved.
I'm suggesting it's possible that Brittney might not find
herself strong enough to free herself of the matriarch
once the patriarch is disposed of. In order to do that, you
have to be capable of an honest opinion of your own
mother, what she did to you, not just what your father
did to you.
If you can't do that then the patriarch is killed and you're
left wallowing back in the matriarch's spoiled earth,
without a language that'd help yourself get unstuck.
Permalink
My father was a complicated, brilliant, hilarious and
violent man, and my home life and childhood were
infinitely better after he left our home. His leaving and
his alcoholism cost me a father. But it saved me a
mother.
...
So I argued that we ought to slay our patriarch and
matriarch and make room for some new ideas about
what black life and black family can be in the
21st century.
What new idea of the family is being made available

2732
when the mother who is free of the useless, no-good

father ... doesn't become the matriarch that too needs
disposal? If we need to slay the patriarch, we know
where to find them. But if even highly abused mothers,
no longer beset upon by their oppressors, bear halos,
where could we possibly find this clearly fictional idea
of the "matriarch" -- the oppressive mother-ruler of the
clan?
Email This
BlogThis!
Recent comments of mine at Salon.com

(November 2014)
Original Article: Jian Ghomeshi to #Gamergate: Our
culture’s toxic masculinity crisis on display
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2014 2:08 AM
HappyJack Interesting response. Seriously disturbed
people are seriously disturbed because they were
assaulted or apocalyptically abandoned, early -- when
they were new to life, extremely vulnerable
infants/children, and their brains hadn't yet figured how
much they were going to allow for the conscious "you"
to control. This means problems with an insufficiently
loved mother -- because if two caregivers were heavily
involved in a child's life, we're talking progressive
neighbourhoods in New York, not locales for mental
2733
disturbance of the kind that lead to delight in raping and

killing another human being.
So the pattern I'd recommend looking for in the various
ways disturbance gets "expressed": one, someone who
when revenged upon means revenge against the
terrifying mother; two, someone when attacked means
revenge against your own "bad" self, whose badness
was surely responsible for your mother's hatred and lack
of interest in you.
This doesn't cover all you offered, which spread out in a
way to insult and deny "conquest," and I'm sorry for
that. But I think it's most helpful for tying things up.
Cheers.
Permalink
Original Article: Jian Ghomeshi to #Gamergate: Our
culture’s toxic masculinity crisis on display
MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2014 9:52 PM
Now unless you are of the belief that men are wired to
be violent (I am not), then talking about our culture,
how boys are raised to view themselves and others
around them, seems pretty important.
We raise boys abominably, still expecting them to be
tough and manly. But the issue needs to be broadened so
we explore how hurt, abused, unloved and disrespected
woman raise their boys (at that point) instinctively. The
maternal environment, that is: "instinctive" (loved
woman don't do this) incest; instinctive (again, loved
woman don't do this) distancing/emotional
abandonment.
2734
Boys who go out and shoot women have problems

owing far more than just having been spurned in
adolescence and being taught the wrong sorts of things
about women (our popular way of sourcing their
problems). Owing to early childrearing, shameful
experiences within the early maternal matrix, their
brains can become wired to actually be capable of the
psychically extreme acts of rape and murder, so to
humiliate/revenge themselves upon women (i.e. their
mother), and finally feel some satisfying sense of
control.
You do great stuff, but go there a little bit too, Katie.
Permalink
Original Article: Richard Dawkins is wrong: Religion
is not inherently violent
alterego55 Patrick McEvoy-Halston GeorgA Jane
Goodall was only going to see splendour ... we all know
that. It's taboo in anthropological circles (as well) to
suggest anything adverse about the cultures they're
studying ... it all has purpose, even the child
abandonment and infanticide. They're decent people
who nevertheless still feel a psychological need to only
see people a certain way. I'm sure we'll eventually get
progressives who won't in their romanticism essentially
also serve as child abuse apologists, but they certainly
don't hold the field yet.
Permalink
2735

The_Pragmatist Are you going to tell me it was all
because their parents didn't love them?
Yes, wars are about sacrificing the guilty surplus we'd
accrued as a society, that we feel we don't deserve
owing to being made to feel like egoism, self-
love/attendance, is a bad thing in our youth.
It's about fusing with a group, a mother nation, we're
hoping to be able to sacrifice ourselves to, and
punishing and humiliating both our "bad" selves and
split off-aspects of our mothers -- the terrifying,
monstrous, aspects of them.
People who were truly loved by their parents, which
we're now seeing for the first time in history with these
parents where both partners are involved, where they
never hit or verbally intimidate their children, where
they put in enormous time and help them realize their
own dreams (rather than our own for them), have gone
beyond the need to project unwanted aspects onto other
people during periods of growth panic and seek to
obliterate "them."
They're past war for good. They'll realize that what they
love about the world isn't what a deity granted them, but
the enormity of what truly kind human beings are able
to make of it. If we're free of demons, no need to
project, switch into different selves apart from normal
everyday ones, nature gives us way more to work with
2736
than if we'd only had a sparse bland moonscape to work

with.
I'm glad you received a lot of love from your parents.
Permalink
GeorgA It's childrearing, how much we loved our
children, which matters, not DNA. Primate parenting is
the worst, and it's where we started. History has been
our slowly, slowly, transmitting more care and love to
our children.
Here's Lloyd DeMause on primate childrearing:
The inability of most non-human primates to share food
with their children after weaning is well established.
Jane Lancaster sums up primate post-weaning behavior:
...adults are not responsible for seeing that young have
enough to eat...[even] an injured or sick youngster still
has to feed itself and get itself to water or it will die
virtually before the eyes of other group members.
Individuals who would risk their own lives in defense of
the youngster are psychologically incapable of seeing its
need for them to bring it food and water. Once weaned,
then, young monkeys and apes must feed themselves...
The primate mother nurses her infant only for the erotic
pleasure it affords, not for "love" of her child. Like the
New Guinea mother, she has difficulty conceiving that
2737
her child is hungry. After the suckling period, primate

mothers almost never give any kind of food to their
infants. "Even gorilla infants have never been seen
being given solid food by their mothers."In fact, primate
mothers are often observed to grab food from their
offspring, who must get by on "tolerated scrounging" of
leftovers. Like New Guinea mothers, chimpanzee
mothers are described as losing interest in their children
when off the breast, often rejecting and punishing
them. The result of this severe maternal rejection is that
there is a "weaning crisis" for primates when they
abruptly must learn to find food for themselves, a deadly
rejection process that kills from one-third to three-
fourths of them before they reached adulthood.
("Childhood and Cultural Evolution," Emotional Life of
Nations)
Permalink
@The_Pragmatist Nazism involved people's rejecting
the freedoms and genuine progress of the Weimar
period. Its energy was the same as when the religious
who for a time permit themselves progress but regress
back into a conservative mode -- cling back to their own
disapproving mothers, made into alters in their heads
(effectively the super-ego) -- when they start feeling
abandoned for the sinful growth. Both are terrible.
What is key is if there is some kind of terrifying social
2738
alter you can merge with ... are there thrones? is there a
central sacrificial figure? Athiests who are atheists for
having had genuinely helping and loving parents, and so
grew up never needing to make society a righteous
sandbox replay of childhood situations where parents
are shown right and bad children are punished, will
never feel guilty for self/ societal growth. They will
never war and kill.
There is no one amongst the religious who is exempt
from this. If society grows and grows and grows,
categories of people becoming increasingly immune to
stigmatization, women are empowered, children are
protected and empowered, at some point they'll regress
and simply see an intolerably spoiled populace ... even
the most progressive of them. Religion grows out of
having had parents with, at the very least, ambiguous
attitudes towards their children -- they can see them as
terribly bad and punishment-worthy ... go the f***k to
sleep. Religion helps make sense of this -- we are full of
sins; human beings have a dark side -- plus creates a
"space" within the adult world where we can fully re-
experience our formative childhood experiences.
Permalink
To enhance a sense of identity and belonging, human
groups and human societies have a psychological need
for "the Other." Leaders, ruling classes, often exploit
2739
this to maintain their privileged positions, even if it

means taking their people to war, including wars of
genocide.
I don't believe there is an inherent psychological need
for the "other." Only in those children who were raised
by parents who could genuinely hate their own children.
The brains of children raised by parents like these are
early at work trying to figure out what it was that caused
their parents to abandon/hate them. These attributes --
usually self-attendance (their immature parents required
them to satisfy their own needs for love not pursue their
own) and vulnerability (children mostly known
themselves as that ... so they conclude being needy must
be a terribly bad thing) -- are projected onto other
people. During periods of societal growth involving too
much unallowed "spoiling," i.e., progress, we fuse with
our parental alters and go to war against these out
groups -- representing, again, our own "bad" childhood
selves.
Human beings who have need of an other are never
exploited by leaders. Instead, leaders are used to satisfy
the people's need to eliminate "bad selves" from the
world; hurt the "guilty" needy poor. If leaders try to do
something different, they'll be immediately ignored and
replaced.
Permalink
2740
Benthead Yahzi Splint Chesthair You can only be so

progressive if you're religious; you can only be so
progressive if you're nationalistic. Nationalism was still
built of people who "socialized" -- that is, psychological
manipulation and spanking -- children into their societal
roles. Which sounds dreadful to the more evolved of us,
but was actually historically a great advance.
This said, nationalism still involves the splitting that we
see with the religious world before nationalism arrived
on the scene -- that is, mass projection of our own
unwanted parts onto others, and during periods of
growth panic (sense of abandonment, collapse of self,
from society evolving beyond what punitive parents and
grandparents allowed), warring to eliminate these "bad
selves" from the planet.
The more progressive of us have gone beyond
nationalism, war and economic inequality.
Permalink
MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2014 2:41 AM
@Benthead It's altogether possible that the
achievements of western "progress," from industrialism
to technology and capitalist accumulation of wealth, is
going to be the destruction or near-destruction of the
species -- and not in the far distant future, either.
Well, not according to
Krugman: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazin
2741
e/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The progressives I like are those who don't feel that
human beings are inherently flawed or sinful -- have a
terrible dark side. They don't get angry or highly
irritated when human beings are proclaimed unflawed,
of unlimited potential. The people who annoy me are
those who are going to superimpose evidence of human
beings' ostensible dark side, regardless if their activity
was damaging the planet to extinction or not. They want
people to be humble, because they learned that when
they were children and they thwarted their own needs in
deference to their parents', their parents finally showed
some approval, some desperately needed attention and
love.
Whatever else religion is, it has been functional for
humankind: it has met the human need for meaning.
That need is just as real for our species as the physical
needs of food and shelter.
History is a nightmare we're gradually waking from.
Childhood was a terror; earliest "cultures" didn't
advance for thousands of years because they spent all
their time fiddling with their disastrous childhoods. As
childrearing got a bit better -- spanked, beaten, tightly
swaddled and sexually assaulted for their inherent
"sinfulness," but not simply starkly abandoned or killed
-- the nature of spirituality and religion changed too.
Religion speaks to and engages what is most meaningful
2742
about our lives, our earliest years, and the question that
nags: why didn't mommy and daddy love me?; what can
be done to reclaim their love -- sacrifice our own
selves? hate everything "bad" they abandoned us for --
self-attendance, self-love ... perhaps even our sheer
vulnerability?
Permalink
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2014 10:26 PM
Dr Stan Concerning the WW1 soldiers, "God" is
actually parental -- it's their mothers, their primary
caregivers. They die on the battlefield, sacrifice their
lives, which otherwise would have been about
individuating from her, i.e. becoming an adult, they
imagine themselves instead forever embraced by her.
That's why there was such enthusiasm, "pointless"
charging into sure-slaughtering gunfire.
Permalink
Well, history, as Steven Pinker -- after Lloyd DeMause
-- made clear, is increasingly war-prone (increased
deaths owing to murder per capita) the further back you
go. I know Shakespeare et al. lurks back then, but it's
still not the kind of territory I much want to wade. And I
admit that as much as I should just judge those who just
2743
trough on through as built of sterner stuff, I actually

think they're deliberately obfuscating from their
conscious awareness just how much of their ostensibly
only civil pleasure is built on relishing just how many
more brains are being bashed, children raped, the further
back they delve in their "travels."
So I suspect all historians have a bias ... there's a limit to
how progressive ANY of them can actually be. I'm not
going to look to them as the ideal people not to be
unconsciously moved to be apologists for abusers.
My own sense of religion is of people imagining
themselves not just small but sin-full before some
almighty parental essence/god. Wretched way to want to
imagine yourself, but if this was all ... well, it's just your
life partially wasted; not war. The thing is that the child
"you" who believes themselves sinful so to make their
abusive parents "right" -- and still therefore possible as
a protector -- is going to want to project all this sin onto
other peoples at some point so to feel thrillingly pure.
A lot of "sinful" progressive societal growth -- even
(actually, especially) meaning just people buying a lot of
things, and enjoying them -- is going to serve as the
prompt for that. Which is why we're hearing now of
people abandoning Western ways and in a hurry
becoming as conservative as their grandparents were,
joining ISIS and the like. There's some of that
happening here at Salon -- witness Brittney Cooper's
recent work: as she declares, our long-disparaged and
ignored (spanking) elders were actually right!!!
2744
If these "evil" people, full of our "sins," get eradicated,

then all of our own "badness" is out of the word: and
who amongst us self-haters, fearing apocalyptic
rejection and punishment, can resist a lure as strong as
that?
When improved childrearing, more love from parents to
their children, means no more drive to humiliate and kill
other people, religion as we've historically understood it
will cease entirely. Meaning will come from spreading
our own known love upon the world, in John Updike-
style ... but a bit plus. A lot of the religious are doing
that too; but it'll be spared their relapses and the
depressing wattering-downs of this thrilling inclination.
Permalink
Original Article: White menaces to society: Keene
State and the danger of young drunk white men
RoloTomassi GreenWoman Maybe when you stop
seeing us as the "you" you're trying to spurn, you'll be
more interested in our arguments. If the whole category
of us are racists (and it appears that we are), that is,
containers of evil, that'll strike some of us as
fundamentally still a deep south way of needing to see
the world.
Permalink
2745

voltairespen Patrick McEvoy-Halston I always avoid all
public transport because my fear is to be trapped with
strangers eyeballing my little girl thinking she is just an
entitled little brat instead of a child for whom sitting
was a difficult task that we spent 5 years working on.
Go on buses where people aren't prone to see children as
"entitled," nor as "brats."
Permalink
RoloTomassi Patrick McEvoy-Halston I'm reminding
progressives that this portrayal, of the problem of out-
of-control children, pissing on other people's
sensitivities, getting to do what they can't, is usually
how everyone else in society views them.
We should really, really worry when the consensus
becomes that we're all part of a spoiled civ. that deserves
any smack down coming. I'm hearing a lot of it right
now; and I'd like to hear as little as possible from
progressives ... because it'll mean they too are far away
from the Krugmans out there in the world that still see
so many positives, and are adopting an elder point-of-
view that sees growth, genuine growth, as
transgressive.
Permalink
2746

Brittney Cooper has admitted she gets irked by freedom
in children in general:
In college, I once found myself on the D.C. metro with
one of my favorite professors. As we were riding, a
young white child began to climb on the seats and hang
from the bars of the train. His mother never moved to
restrain him. But I began to see the very familiar,
strained looks of disdain and dismay on the
countenances of the mostly black passengers. They
exchanged eye contact with one another, dispositions
tight with annoyance at the audacity of this white child,
but mostly at the refusal of his mother to act as a
disciplinarian. I, too, was appalled. I thought, if that
were my child, I would snatch him down and tell him to
sit his little behind in a seat immediately.
She has written that it was the "freedom dreams" of her
own generation that lead them astray, put them to
sleep ... that what they need to reclaim now is their
elders' willingness to think of the group first, to sacrifice
themselves.
My point is that there is a certain kind of person who
can come to see anyone acting freely has being
insultingly self-indulgent; "bad," because undisciplined.
And so if you explore their psyche enough not just
partying teenagers but progressively raised children
playing freely in a playground, garner their ire.
They see these kids and they don't (at least at first) see
2747
the "other," but rather the way they wanted to act and
behave before being disciplined (read: frightened) into
rooting themselves in place -- so, rather, actually
themselves. Since their parents deemed that person bad
and possibly did the like of spanking the shit out of
them for it, and since for survival needs children mostly
make their parents right, the tendency is to fuse into the
parent's perspective any time they see anyone "guilty"
for being too free.
That child speaking freely at the dinner table,
disrespecting older generations' sensitivities, will be in
for a whopping just as much as if she'd stood on the
table and pissed on the food. That child ... that was on
the path to embody what being a progressive really is.
Permalink
Original Article: Why this Iranian-born writer fears for
America’s soul
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see us plain.
Here, however, is where Nafisi calls Americans — left
and right — to account for abandoning a glorious
cultural legacy to wallow in materialism, narcissism and
groupthink. (Laura Miller)
Western culture feels guilty and ill at ease. It traded in
God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and
social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that
started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of
2748
week-old Mountain Dew. (Andrew O'hehir)

For we have awakened from a long, fitful slumber.
Lulled there by our parents and grandparents, who
marched in Selma, sat down in Greensboro,
matriculated at Black colleges, and argued before the
Supreme Court, they convinced us to adopt their
freedom dreams, impressed them into our bodies, in
every hug, in every $25 check pressed into a hand from
a grandmother to a grandchild on his or her way to
bigger and better, in every whispered prayer, in every
indignity suffered silently but resolutely in the
workplace.
We slept so long our dreams have become nightmares.
In Obama’s place, Cornel West has re-emerged, the wise
and fearless elder, the one who we tried not to listen
to. (Brittney Cooper)
Maybe what we’re so agitated about is the possibility
that some law-and-order killjoy might bring the Age of
Enron to a close. Maybe, for all our fond talk of the
untainted republic of the Founders, the Texas of Ken
Lay is where we really long to be. So let the next
scandal ruin our neighbor, let it black out entire regions
of the country, let it throw millions out of work — as
long as we get a chance for our turn at the trough.
(Thomas Frank)
-----
So apparently at Salon it's time to revere our elders -- to
admonish ourselves for abandoning them -- to stop
playing with our toys, and, I guess, to get involved in
2749
something that makes us feel less like we're wallowing

and more like we've awoken.
And, oh, to finally start hating Paul Krugman.
Great, we're longing to be on a purity crusade. We'll
punish everyone we've projected our own "bad"
"spoiled" selves onto ... which sounds like what Nafisi is
doing.
Permalink
Original Article: The right’s Lena Dunham delusion:
Anger, misogyny and the dangers of business as usual
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2014 2:34 PM
If I'm understanding this article right, we're to
understand that most women have been forced to have
sex without their consent, that is, raped. This could well
be possible. The millions of men who do this, though,
do this, not because of evil DNA but because they
themselves were used in a terribly shameful way by
their own mothers. The other girls -- experience their
revenge. That's what happens to women who are abused
in life; when they become mothers, they re-inflict upon
their own children.
Parents who spank their kids aren't just practicing a
different style of childrearing but physically abusing
their kids. The number of people still doing this is in the
millions as well. As Brittney Cooper says, most black
parents still spank their kids. We have enough of them in
jail.
2750
I think the solution is to make it clear that these

ostensibly normal practices are abusive. They have to be
changed. But after that we simply have to adapt
therapeutic means of addressing it. We make it against
the law; but we have to have more of a sense that what
you'll have at your door are therapists empowered to
stop the abuse but driven to heal and help, not so much
cops, punishment and jail time.
Permalink
Original Article: Cornel West was right all along: Why
America needs a moment of clarity now
dwamikayla Patrick McEvoy-Halston Take a break, read
some Proust, and gather some patience. We've just had a
progressive saying elders are right and that we need to
wake up and go to war (put yourself on the line, above
all) under their guidance ... you'd admit, usually the
provenance of the conservative.
In other words, these are strange times. Something
weird might be happening. Rather than skip to the
Readers Digest version -- aka, everything we know
already -- let's perhaps be willing to work through the
perhaps poorly expressed but perceptive of the
regression.
Permalink
2751

Bob On The Pacific Coast When people are fusing with
their elders and repudiating their sins, "parents" are just
implicitly right. If you want to get at the actual reasons,
it would be for thinking the worst about children
nowadays. "We" were; but are no longer.
Permalink
Incidentally, here we have discussed a sudden
awakening where a whole people who had been in a
slumber are suddenly turning into a warrior culture,
ready, eager, to put their lives on the line.
Personally, those who want to counter the war impulse
of the New Athiests better consider that their current
defence -- 99% of a people are not radicals -- can
become a joke in a hurry. Whole peoples who just a day
before were simply ordinary folk enjoying all the
freedoms, can fuse into a powerful, a seemingly
enchanted group, in a hurry.
You should expect it in any people whose youth have
bypassed their punitive elders for a freedom-tolerant
culture. It may indeed go around the globe.
Permalink
2752
Showing up matters most. Putting one’s body on the line

is the order of the day.
Young people are listening to the commands of elders,
and what is paramount is that they be willing to sacrifice
themselves.
I'm sure this is all sane, but it is worth noting that this is
exactly what goes on just before wars, periods of fusion
with elders, repudiation of "weakening" commercial
culture, and mass sacrifice of the young -- a period of
total insanity.
Before wars, periods of mass sacrifice, people begin to
feel guilty for all the growth they've accrued. Here, that
would be all the actual living of the "freedom-
dreams," the spending of all the $25 dollar cheques,
rather than the equivalent of the "marching in
Selma, sitting down in Greensboro."
They begin to feel abandoned, like they've been rejected
by their elders.
These elders are unconsciously understood as not
simply wanting their youth to be free and prosperous,
but as demanding respect and attendance. When they
haven't received it, when they've been forgotten, they
abandon their children in turn. Here these elders would
be the "Cornwell Wests," who as Brittney Cooper
admits, the youth were "guilty" of forgetting while
they danced merry with Obama. And they wouldn't
be the permissive ones described here -- all the hugs
-- but all the spanking ones Cooper described in a
recent article, who saw children as sinful beings who
2753
needed to be beaten to be good.

By showing they're ready to sacrifice themselves for
their elders, and have rejected the younger, sexier
Obama, they feel the "Cornwell Wests" -- their
regressive spanking parents and grandparents -- love
them again. They feel a fusion high.
The other version of yourself is the one who is a
favourite of your elders rather than the one who had
forgotten all about them, at some level even hating them
for all their "chafing of your hides."
Brittney Cooper's article dissing elder-spank:
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/16/the_racial_parenting_
divide_what_adrian_peterson_reveals_about_black_and
_white_child_rearing/
Permalink
Original Article: 5 stupid, sexist things expected of
men
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2014 7:02 PM
@KaizerSozhe but I also know how to take care of
business in ways that a lot of guys my age (I'm 36) flat-
out don't.
You're establishing yourself as an alpha. And after
you've done that, you can be a guy who's comfortable
talking about his emotions; crying in front of his
girlfriends. You admit this is all pretty safely macho.
About the puncher's chance ... are you sure she wouldn't
just prefer that you both come out of it safely --
something that might actually be at risk if at that
2754
moment you're thinking of the desired finish: he, storm;

you, port that breasted him.
The killer look in your eyes ... Hitler had those. He
admitted himself that they were his mothers. The origins
of male power to brag of, may owe to a maternal
source.
Permalink
Original Article: 5 stupid, sexist things expected of
men
HappyJack Like it or not, we are animals first and
humans in civilization second.
We are animals who are powerfully affected by our
attachment to our parents -- remember Harlow's
monkeys.
Most boys end up being more poorly attached to their
mothers than girls are. They're looked at less, abandoned
more, hit more. So as early as four years old they're
already forming a defensive "toughness." It's not culture
telling them to be like this, that is. Nor biology. And
they're going to need to be like this ... owing to the
particular nature of how they were attended (poorly) in
their early childhoods.
Change this, and we all end up seeing so disparate from
"red in tooth and claw" that more experts will be
questioned when they refer to the barbarism that is
ostensibly an inevitable part of our DNA. The person
who says that the civilized sense of man is most false,
2755
becomes the person who still needs to punish/humiliate

the effete ... those who we want to contain our own
vulnerable, defenceless selves.
When he revers to the rape-prone alpha ape ...
experiences a sense of re-assuring grandiosity, someone
who stands above the other cowardly apes. And
temporarily forgets the boy inside of him who knew
plenty of shameful cowering to terrifying and
overpowering parents, the boy who couldn't possibly be
"resilient" but only frightened and weak.
Permalink
Original Article: Richard Dawkins: Religion isn’t the
problem in the Middle East
I think vengeance is a hideous emotion, but it is one that
does have a biological basis.
Let's think about this a little bit. Doesn't it feel like when
someone says this that something as powerful as
revenge is being located into a realm where it can be
explored without evoking any emotional response? That
the purpose of locating it within biology is so that it can
be denatured, by people who aren't sure they have
control of their own emotions?
If one where to say instead that vengeance has its
origins in childhood abuse, you'll know that your own
sometimes feeling for revenge have something to do
with your particular childhood ... which is more rising.
2756
If one where to say that your adult desire for vengeance

owes to your own mother (Sarah, Mary, Susan) and
father (John, Greg, Bill) abusing you in your childhood,
suddenly you're maybe remembering exactly what she
or he did to you, the abandonments, the rejections, the
dismissals, the physical attacks, and you're back
experiencing the helplessness, the shame, part of your
brain had directed you to do everything to not revisit
again.
I can imagine adult desire for revenge owing to be being
abused as a child, but it comes rather harder to imagine
as something with a biological basis, with, I guess,
purpose. How about instead it has no purpose, and it's
not inevitable to human beings. If you weren't shamed
and attacked by your parents, if you're of the new
generation that has parents where both partners are
involved, where they're permissive, never spank or
belittle, and instead support, help and encourage, no
desire for vengeance will ever come out of you ... at all.
You'll instantly see even in the regressives in your
society, the lack of love, the child abuse that procured
their hatred of pleasure and progress, and will staunch
their influence but not try and squash and destroy them.
Pretty cruel thing to do to people who've known being
loved so deploringly little, after all.
Mothers who come out of cultures where they are
deemed polluted do not magically become loving
mothers. They use their children -- maternal incest; they
re-inflict the abuses they endured upon them. They slap,
2757
strike, whip and trash; they constantly shame and

humiliate. And the ascetic results of this upbringing are
children who cannot allow themselves to self-activate
for it means they lose the approval of the parents in their
heads. When there's been any unpermitted growth, they
fuse with their terrifying parents, project their own "bad
selves" into others, and righteously inflict all the
childhood humiliations they suffered upon them.
Permalink
Original Article: Richard Dawkins: Religion isn’t the
problem in the Middle East
Here's an account (by Lloyd DeMause) where the
problem lies not with foreign policy but in the
extremely abusive childrearing of the terrorists.
The ascetic results of such punitive upbringings are
predictable. When these abused children grow up, they
feel that every time they try to self-activate, every time
they do something independently for themselves, they
will lose the approval of the parents in their heads—
mainly their mothers and grandmothers in the women's
quarters. When their cities were flooded with oil money
and Western popular culture in recent decades,
fundamentalist men were first attracted to the new
freedoms and pleasures, but soon retreated, feeling they
would lose their mommy's approval and be "Bad Boys."
Westerners came to represent their own "Bad Boy" self
in projection, and had to be killed off, as they felt they
2758
themselves deserved, for such unforgivable sins as

listening to music, flying kites and enjoying sex. As one
fundamentalist put it, "America is Godless. Western
influence here is not a good thing, our people can see
CNN, MTV, kissing…" Another described his motives
thusly: "We will destroy American cities piece by piece
because your life style is so objectionable to us, your
pornographic movies and TV." Many agree with the
Iranian Ministry of Culture that all American television
programs "are part of an extensive plot to wipe out our
religious and sacred values," and for this reason feel
they must kill Americans. Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual
father of Islamic terrorism, describes how he turned
against the West as he once watched a church dance
while visiting America:
"Every young man took the hand of a young woman.
And these were the young men and women who had just
been singing their hymns! The room became a
confusion of feet and legs: arms twisted around hips;
lips met lips; chests pressed together."
Osama bin Laden himself "while in college frequented
flashy nightclubs, casinos and bars [and] was a drinker
and womanizer," but soon felt extreme guilt for his sins
and began preaching killing Westerners for their
freedoms and their sinful enticements of Muslims. Most
of the Taliban leaders, in fact, are wealthy, like bin
Laden, have had contact with the West, and were
shocked into their terrorist violence by "the personal
freedoms and affluence of the average citizen, by the
2759
promiscuity, and by the alcohol and drug use of Western

youth …only an absolute and unconditional return to the
fold of conservative Islamism could protect the Muslim
world from the inherent dangers and sins of the
West." Bin Laden left his life of pleasures, and has lived
with his four wives and fifteen children in a small cave
with no running water, waging a holy war against all
those who enjoy sinful activities and freedoms that he
cannot allow in himself.
From childhood, then, Islamist terrorists have been
taught to kill the part of themselves—and, by projection,
others—that is selfish and wants personal pleasures and
freedoms. It is in the terror-filled homes—not just later
in the terrorist training camps—that they first learn to be
martyrs and to "die for Allah." When the terrorist
suicidal bombers who were prevented from carrying out
their acts were interviewed on TV, they said they felt
"ecstatic" as they pushed the button. They denied being
motivated by the virgins and other enticements
supposedly awaiting them in Paradise. Instead, they said
they wanted to die to join Allah—to get the love they
never got. Mothers of martyrs are reported as happy that
they die. One mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber
who had blown himself to bits said "with a resolutely
cheerful countenance,
"I was very happy when I heard. To be a martyr, that's
something. Very few people can do it. I prayed to thank
God. I know my son is close to me."
Like serial killers—who are also sexually and physically
2760
abused as children—terrorists grow up filled with a rage

that must be inflicted upon others. Many even preach
violence against other Middle Eastern nations like Egypt
and Saudi Arabia "for not being sufficiently fervent in
the campaign against materialism and Western
values." If prevention rather than revenge is our goal,
rather than pursuing a lengthy military war against
terrorists and killing many innocent people while
increasing the number of future terrorists, it might be
better for the U.S. to back a U.N.-sponsored Marshall
Plan for them—one that could include Community
Parenting Centers run by local people who could teach
more humane childrearing practices—in order to give
them the chance to evolve beyond the abusive family
system that has produced the terrorism, just as we
provided a Marshall Plan for Germans after WWII for
the families that had produced Nazism.
Full
article: http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln03_terrori
sm.html
Permalink
Original Article: Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This

is what we are really fighting about
sunone If you as a small, vulnerable child knew your
caretakers as even sometimes terribly predatory,
dangerous, you never shake this memory -- nor your
2761
sometimes being totally ruled by it. It's stored in your

amygdala brain system, maybe most of the time out of
the way, but as society progress continues and you start
feeling out of control, you can lapse completely into it
as you restage early childhood traumas.
It's delusional, these actually most powerful of
groups/nations suddenly believing they're terribly
vulnerable, surrounded, and unless they take military
action immediately, surely doomed; but for a long time
in their early childhoods, they very much did know this
threat.
Permalink
Original Article: Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This
is what we are really fighting about
How on earth can any human being not notice that if
you treat a child with love and respect, he or she turns
out substantially differently than those whose immature
parents denied them these things?
For me, the difference in what happens to a person
through how they are treated in the first three years is
such that the ape in us is hardly something I refer to
anymore. If we're loved, we're simply different-brained
than those who were constantly abandoned and abused.
My science on this
matter: http://psychohistory.com/htm/eln07_evolution.ht
ml
Permalink
2762
Original Article: Bill Maher’s horrible excuse: Why

his defense of Islamophobia just doesn’t make any sense
bobkat DanielGree Look into whatever might stall a
woman from giving more love to her children than she
herself received ... footbinding (using the foot as a
maternal breast) stalled China for centuries.
Permalink
Hoyt If we engage in some big war, neither side will see
their own as a mother of bad things, but of all good. It'll
be the other that's possessed of the foul-laden one we'll
take pleasure in f**cking.
Permalink
magistra Patrick McEvoy-Halston Because there's no
evidence to suggest that abuse is any more common in
Methodist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic or other
denominations than it is in the general population.
Abuse and domestic violence are a HUMAN problem,
and religion is used as a justification, but it is not its
cause
The liberal New Yorker who works with his/her partner
2763
to nurture their children, spends lots of time with

them, facilitates their own interests rather than coerces
them to follow their own, will raise a child who will not
be part of the human problem you describe. They're out.
It is extremely unlikely they will be religious; if they're,
say, Christian, they'll be one of those Christians you
notice who's practice seems so far gone from the bible
you can't help but feel it's one generation away from
dying away entirely. They're essentially atheist, as
the atheist Ian McEwan described his friend John
Updike.
Evidence I can't refer to right now, but loads and loads
of it, from what I've seen and noticed as I go about my
life, is responsible for my certainty in this.
Permalink
Benthead How about ...
C): Athiests who are secretly sick of growth work with
everyone else who is secretly or overtly sick of it too, to
end our period of (more-or-less) ongoing peace and
social advancement for war.
Feeling out of control, we regress and sacrifice our adult
world as we re-stage childhood traumas where "Bad
selves" get executed -- lots and lots of children. So too,
dominating mothers: the evil opponents gets portrayed
as a dangerous, infanticidal woman (a witch), and in fact
contains all the split off characteristics of our Terrifying
2764
Mothers. We all feel grandiose and wonderful as we've

fused back with our now "all good" mothers, are loyal to
her, prepared to sacrifice our lives for her. Knights to
lady Liberty! Warriors against corrupt modernism! ...
Whatever.
The progressives who aren't at all sick of social
advancement and don't feel the least bit of anomie
(abandonment), find themselves out of the conversation.
All the blindspots they've had towards peoples they've
meant all good things for, are shown up again and again
and again, and they come to look preposterous. They
come to look as disassociated from realities as the well-
meaning, aristocratic Robin Hood from "Time Bandits"
was, with his fond thoughts for the the peasantry...
"lovely people."
This might seem unconventional but hopefully not
irrational. This is the world stage as I know it.
Permalink
In any conversation in which American values are being
discussed, Islam is the image against which America
constructs its own civility, the bogeyman against which
to contrast American greatness and American Muslims
are the unwitting casualties of a struggle which
persistently dismisses them as the unalterable “other.”
The psychoanalytic perspective would be that
Americans project their own unwanted, their own "bad"
2765
aspects onto Muslims, leaving them feeling virtuous and

good. It's important this be pointed out.
But, still, any time a progressive is dealing with
someone who is religious, s/he is dealing with someone
who had to have experienced some abuse within their
families, and possibly a lot: thus their belief in a
powerful god to defer to; thus their belief in bad
children who sin and who must be punished for their
sins.
It's annoying when academics try to make everyone but
themselves unworthy of comment, because history, full
context, is something only they've got packed away on
their shelves.
No, the layman who understands how powerfully her
peers project their own demons, their own "bad selves"
onto others, but still can't be fooled into thinking anyone
who came out of truly permissive family is going to
even want to tussle with an abandoning god, let alone
defer to it, has got it on the scholar.
The scholar, we should note, who for some reason chose
to obsess over peoples who projected out into the
universe, perpetrators they knew in early childhood.
Myself, I would have spent the time reading Atwood or
Updike.
Wounds and last charge before complete

kaput, or renewal?
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Andrew O’hehir writes:
Is traditional masculinity — assuming for a moment that
we have any idea what that term means — under attack?
Some of its defenders certainly feel that way.
…
If the panicky, defensive identity crisis of America’s
declining white majority is a principal driving force in
2767
our nation’s bitterly divided political and cultural life (as

I discussed here a few weeks ago, in the wake of
Ferguson), so is the rearguard defense of masculinity.
When Rush Limbaugh complains that nanny-state
regulations on conduct are “feminizing” football, or the
national leader of an elite fraternity writes an op-ed
blaming drunken young women as the real villains in a
perceived campus rape epidemic (rather than, say,
rapists), it’s hard to say which feels stronger — the
cluelessness or the desperation. As with the Caucasian
rush to define the cop who shot Michael Brown as
simultaneously the hero and victim of that tragic
episode, this circling of the wagons around embattled
manhood seems both perverse and unnecessary.
…
But the collective male freakout that produces nervous
TV gags about “boobs on the ground” in the Middle
East, or an Oklahoma Highway Patrol captain advising
women not to get pulled over by cops if they don’t want
to get raped by them, is not about anything as
quantifiable as loss of material advantage. I agree, by
the way, that both statements were blunders: The Fox
News guy didn’t realize he was coming off as a pig, and
the Oklahoma trooper didn’t consciously intend to
blame women for the crimes of depraved cops. But that
kind of public “misstatement,” by someone who ought
to know better, is actually more revealing than all the
overtly misogynistic trollery on the Internet. The
masculinity backlash is about perception and
2768
psychology, specifically the perception that “traditional”

gender roles are being undermined and that male-coded
zones like the football field and the frat house are being
invaded by an alien ideology.
…
But that kind of parody is a little too easy. It’s more
difficult to recognize the genuine cultural split here, and
to see that for many men (and more than a few women),
this is a subject of genuine pain and bewilderment. It
feels as if areas of public life they were raised to
venerate as unchanging symbols of American virtue and
rectitude are under unfair assault. That’s how I interpret
all those Baltimore Ravens fans (some of them female)
showing up at the team’s first home game in Ray Rice
jerseys, or all those Washington Redskins fans rallying
around their team’s patently derogatory nickname. It’s
an effort to draw a line in the sand, to resist the high-
minded dictates of elite authority, to insist that some
things are sacred and that cultural change goes this far
and no further. People on the cultural left, with their
DIY handicrafts and homegrown tomatoes, have a
similar impulse to resist the onrushing force of a
political economy built on constant revolution and
reinvention, a world, as Karl Marx observed 166 years
ago, in which “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away … all that is solid melts into air, all that
is holy is profaned.”
As that may suggest, I feel an instinctive twinge of
2769
sympathy for this reaction, with its pathetic-nostalgic

yearning for a mythical past of conformity and clear
sexual divisions, of handsome boys and pretty girls
under the Friday night lights, in an America untroubled
by Vietnam or feminism or gay rights or a president
with a Muslim-sounding name. I don’t say that my
twinge of sympathy is entirely healthy. That imaginary
world never really existed, and most people who yearn
for it wouldn’t want to live there if it had. At best, it’s a
blend of fantasy and collective memory, not unlike the
“Morning in America” commercial that got Ronald
Reagan elected, pretty much on the premise that he
would restore a mythical order lost in the turbulent ’70s.
…
I too was raised by a father who could remember World
War II and even the Depression, an immigrant who
yearned for and could never achieve that generation’s
ideal of undemonstrative, hard-drinking, neatly tailored
manhood. As I recently discussed with the actor Viggo
Mortensen, who plays an American man of precisely
that heritage in the new movie “The Two Faces of
January,” there is something praiseworthy and almost
irresistible about that model of masculinity, along with
much darker qualities. It might be relevant to observe
that white men of the “Greatest Generation”
disproportionately enjoyed an explosive prosperity that
followed America’s ascension to superpower status and
the growth of the labor movement. Their mode of
confidence and composure rode along with steadily
2770
rising incomes and expectations, whereas their sons and

grandsons — you and me, buddy — face more
straitened circumstances in a vastly different world.
Can the virtues of that lost masculine ideal be redeemed
without buying the whole toxic package? That question
has no clear answer, and may not for years to come.
Those who try to preserve its last self-parodying scraps
and vestiges by rescuing the NFL from feminism and
political correctness, or by blaming rape and spousal
abuse on women’s autonomy — after all, if women left
the driving to their fathers and husbands, they wouldn’t
be at risk from pervert cops! — are fighting a
contemporary version of Pickett’s Charge. It’s a
misguided and self-destructive crusade on behalf of
something that can’t be attained and wouldn’t be worth
fighting for if it could. Very few of the Confederate
soldiers who died at Gettysburg personally benefited
from slavery. Yet the myth that there was something
noble or sacred or romantic about their sacrifice on
behalf of a brutal and toxic economic system continues
to poison our national discourse, many generations later
and into the indefinite future. We can only hope that the
ripple effects of the battle for American masculinity
don’t take quite so long to subside. ("Rape, domestic
violence and football," Salon.com)
-----
Those who try to preserve its last self-parodying scraps
and vestiges by rescuing the NFL from feminism and
2771
political correctness, or by blaming rape and spousal

abuse on women’s autonomy — after all, if women left
the driving to their fathers and husbands, they wouldn’t
be at risk from pervert cops! — are fighting a
contemporary version of Pickett’s Charge. It’s a
misguided and self-destructive crusade on behalf of
something that can’t be attained and wouldn’t be worth
fighting for if it could.
The challenge is to see if we can think of historical
periods where so many men feel like they've lost their
masculinity, where the follow-up isn't just their
disappearance into irrelevance. The early 1900s was
apparently one. The "New Women" were believed to be
challenging male supremacy -- all those monstrous
women on bikes! -- but the Great War made men feel
masculine again. Another would be the 1930s, where all
of the Western world went the German way -- that is,
from liberal growth to puritanism.
My guess is that a lot of men wouldn't mind being
deemed on a Pickett's charge. Whatever else was said
about them, they'd be won over just by the comparison.
The image that comes to mind is of worn men who've
accumulated a lot of wounds, prepared to sacrifice
themselves over something vital to themselves but
incomprehensible to everyone else -- Why are you doing
this? You have nothing to gain from it! You're just being
used! The person saying this has already positioned
themselves as the feminine, and so in their
2772
"incomprehension," lend strength. They charge, because

they are men.
If we want to dis-sway, we should probably avoid such
an image. How about instead they're just distraught
children, which is what they are.
About the future ... The thing that ends up putting a halt
to progressive times is growth panic: collectively,
people begin to feel they've outgrown what has been
allowed, and end up feeling horribly abandoned.
Terribly alone, they cut their growth short and align with
their parents' culture -- with regressives -- so to regain
approval and feel like good boys and girls again. We
should look to see what's happening in our attitudes
towards children. If it's all "Go the f*ck to sleep," a
powerful need to shorn our increasing need to be
sadistic towards our children of guilt, we may be seeing
a turn already away from liberal permissiveness. Those
men currently bathing in being on a hopeless military
charge, may end up retooling upwards.
Also a bit worrying is Brittney Cooper's recent article on
childrearing, where she positioned what is in truth the
most loving, the most progressive way of raising
children as as about as bad in its indulgence as physical
abuse (spanking) -- the 100-year-old"style." She
certainly isn't FOX, but battling to become the
progressive mainstream.
2773
And oh, last comment: if I read him right, Andrew
believes leftists who think we can get along without a
revolution are extremely childish. I must say that
however much I believe revolutions can be made a thing
of the past -- like small pox, and child sacrifice -- they're
with us for awhile yet.
What revolutions do, is produce a lot of death, a lot of
sacrificed lives. When the total becomes high enough,
body after vital young body, full of possibility, we feel a
giant demanding maw is satisfied that all the
independence in the world has been garnered together
and brought forth to be devoured, out of awareness of its
contemptible presumption. Afterwards, golden years --
successful complete reorganization of our culture.
Childrearing has been so bad for so long, our sense of
our intrinsic spoiled sinfulness so strong for so long, we
think it's an inevitability ... but we're in the process of
evolving on out. We'll get to a point where advances in
childrearing mean societal advance and reorganization
(shucking the old) without anyone getting too stymied
by it.
Some might point to the sky, fearing the loss of "God's"
approval. But by that point s/he'll be an atheist and
prepared to recognize that part of themselves is under
influence of an older voice; that being at the back-end of
2774
society, while regrettable, also no true source of shame.

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Labels: andrew o'hehir, masculinity
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Recent comments of mine at Salon.com

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Original Article: Feminism’s ugly internal clash: Why

its future is not up to white women
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2014 11:45 PM
Oliva Does It danaseilhan
I don't know of a single feminist group or site that
doesn't seek to be inclusive.
I agree, but that doesn't mean that they aren't. My guess
is that it owes to part of their psyches not being able to
shut out the fact that women of colour tend to be more
conservative than they are -- Brittney Cooper's
discussion of childrearing "styles" brought this out in
full bloom last week.
Their conscious selves may be blithely insisting that
they are no more progressive than other "sisters," but
their unconscious awareness of it as fact is why there is
fight to institutionalize their own voice and ultimately
arbitrate what feminism is to be about -- i.e.
whitesplain.
Original Article: Feminism’s ugly internal clash: Why
its future is not up to white women
Is it between different viewpoints, or between those
who've benefited from more helping, less punitive
upbringings and those who haven't? Different
psychoclasses, that is.
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Brittney is coming to see spanking as perhaps not the

best way to raise a child, but still can't see parents
who've long ago realized this as not guilty of likely
"spoiling" their children (presumably she'd have all of
them attend her lectures as well). She's probably
somewhere just above the American median.
Progressivism is about the most emotionally evolved
taking the lead in a society. These are always those who
as kids never understood themselves as "bad" but as full
of promise. They don't need to be
"disciplined,""socialized," in order to be good, just
provided unconditional love.
The ones a step or more below will tend to want to take
control of progressive moments to staunch growth as
much as encourage it. To them, too much societal
advancement comes to seem indulgent, people taking
good ideas always "too far," requiring the more sober to
take over.
A lot of those feminists taking flight from the internet
sense this, and are hoping their new exclusive abodes
can manage to direct progressivism. On the net, they're
swarmed, and can't operate.
Original Article: Obama, the slide back to Iraq and the

power of the “Deep State”
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2014 9:21 PM
al loomis Patrick McEvoy-Halston
I think we mostly project charisma onto leaders, so I'm
not "great man." Usually we put in people who don't so
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much lead but execute our own (often sordid) wishes.

Puppets of the people, not the system -- which too is in
fact an artifact of our collective need, as hard as that is
to believe.
This said, if we see the presidency as an avenue to put
forth a personality we all have abundant contact with,
it'd be great if it was someone like Nader. Kind of like
as if someone had set up a shop on your block that
resonated decency and kindness. Even if you didn't shop
there, it being near, something you frequently pass by,
would encourage and buoy you.

YankeeProwler However, the interesting epilogue to the
Obama presidency is that it is winding down in a time
when America is once again becoming needed. In
Poland and the Baltic states, jittery leaders are once
again calling for American assistance as they face a
threat from the east. In the Middle East, leaders from
Tehran to Riyadh are urging America to fight a scourge
that threatens to engulf them all. In West Africa, leaders
are calling for American assistance to help contain a
different type of virus.
This has pretty powerful narrative appeal (genuinely,
thanks for it) -- a bit Tennyson. I wonder if the rest of
the world finds the idea of the old, gruff, long passed-
over "gunfighter," possessed anew with relevancy,
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as appealing as we (sorry, but unfortunately) do.

I hope they realize that that scourge about to engulf
them all is mostly just projected "fantasy" ... it satisfies
our fantasy (our psychological) needs of the moment,
and we have to be aware of this, and resist it.
He began the process of moving the country away from
our profoundly unfair and overpriced catch-as-catch-
can private health insurance system toward some kind
of socialized medicine. (Yeah, I said it.)
You're right, this was no small thing. We as a populace
staked something down here that we're not going to fall
back from. Or, that is, that we'll never quite ever be able
to delete as a marker of where we'd come and where
we'll return to. It felt a little bit like that tremor we
experienced this year when we collectively realized that
America was not going to be stuck with football as
something we're all expected to pledge allegiance to --
something else, soccer (Europeanism), informed
apathy/disgust, got elevated a bit. This happened too
with drugs and marriage.
It's a big deal when some external "sites" that serve to
keep primitive psyches stable, and thus are kept for the
longest time sacred, can be felt to no longer satisfy a(n
evolving) populace. Obama was the guy we wanted kept
around to "govern" this. Agreeable, reassuring company,
like Steve Jobs.
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Original Article: The racial parenting divide: What

AdrianPeterson reveals about black vs. white child-
rearing
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2014 2:09 AM
marymargaret1
Why is it ok to hit a child when doing the same to an
adult will land you in jail?
Because too many of us unconsciously think especially
vulnerable people deserve punishment, simply for being
vulnerable -- they're actually guilty of something. This
comes from how our brains react to sadistic treatment
from our parents as children. We need foremost to make
our parents right for inflicting the abuse, so to keep
them as we have to have them -- loving and supportive.
And so we make whatever it was we did to warrant the
abuse contestable, bad, evil. Since the foremost thing
that comes to our mind is just our sheer vulnerability --
because that's how we mostly felt -- our brains
decide this is a crime.
When we hear of children being hit, we remember our
own former "guilty" selves, and agree (with our
internalized parental alters, whom we are temporarily
wholly fused with) that they are being unconscionably
bad.
At the societal level, the reason you can see in some
parts so much hate for society's desperate, now calling
for the likes of sterilization, owes entirely to this as
well.
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Adrian Peterson reveals about black vs. white child-
rearing
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2014 9:44 PM
@Arminta Ross Black parents forcing their children to
"demonstrate" in public that they are "good, well
behaved, mannered." The goal was to prove to
onlookers, specifically whites that they were not
harmful.
What is kept alive here is the idea that our mommies
and daddies abused us ... because they had to! It was for
our own good! -- historical circumstances necessitated
it, unfortunately.
What isn't being considered is that what we're dealing
with here aren't loving parents miraculously capable of
doing awful things to their children when necessary, but
abused parents casually visiting the same harms
inflicted on themselves (by their parents) upon their own
children.
And doing so, because they were never given enough
love not to mostly need their children to provide the
love they never received, rather than love them. Nor not
to be furious at them when they focused on themselves
(i.e., were "selfish," or "bad").
My parents are German and Irish. The collective lack of
love of Germans meant that during the 30s and 40s they
were going to need some group to project all of their
own "badness" onto (as it turns out, those who had the
best childrearing -- the "spoiled" Jews), so they could
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finally feel worthy of love by their punitive parental

alters (their parents' voice in their heads).
The poorly loved (American) South needed to find some
group -- i.e. slaves -- for the same psychological
purpose. The Northerns were products of more loving
childhoods, so not only no slavery but they got rid of it
elsewhere.
We're divided not mostly by race but by the emotional
health of our parents, of the nature of the quality of the
mother/daughter dyad across centuries.
Adrian Peterson reveals about black vs. white child-
rearing
No parent lovingly spanks their child. They're always
fused with internal persecutors in their own minds that
see the child as bad regardless of what he or she was
doing.
In fact, since many parents are so insufficiently loved
they often need their children more than they love them,
the "bad" thing they most often end up getting
beaten/abandoned for is simply focusing on themselves,
some kind of growth, being happy. The parent
recognizes the child's desire to attend to his/her own
needs rather than the parents -- it is their own desire --
and becomes in an instant their own parents, fuses with
them, and attacks the child without guilt.
When children are abused by parents/caretakers,
survival depends on understanding themselves as to
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blame. They decide they deserved it; they must have

been bad; and thereby keep the parent as the kind of
person they need for them to be: a loving protector.
So powerful is this lesson learned -- that growth and
"selfish" self-attendance is a bad thing, and, as well,
weakness, neediness and vulnerability -- they install
their parent's "voice" into their own heads (right
hemisphere), and switch into it when they recognize
people "guilty" for behaving as they did as a child.
You get into this enough, the repercussions of
insufficiently loved parents and their children, of
collective fusing with the perpetrator's voice and
projecting one's "bad" self onto others, and you start
finally get at the source of why war, of why Depressions
(mass elimination of wealth means less spoiling, less
badness, less likelihood of worse punishment).
Maybe check it out at psychohistory.com.
Original Article: Football, violence and America’s

cultural divide
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2014 3:44 AM
sharksbreath Sports isn't for everybody and I'm sure you
learned that real early in gym class.
Yes, it's for those who need defensive testing and
disproof of fears, which temporarily wards of feelings of
insecurity and helplessness.
Original Article: The “death of adulthood” is really just
capitalism at work
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2014 2:50 AM
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The current economy is not just about people staring at a

screen but people interacting -- what waiters, baristas,
sales associates do. It's less male-autistic (man make
automobile), which when we value the potential of what
goes on in these interactions, and value them
accordingly with high wage and public esteem, will
show progress over the last forty years rather than just
humiliating leftovers. A nation committed to
(conversational) therapy, to registering and seeing
people, adding a little bit more self-esteem to the
average person so that they repeat less upon their
children the damage inflicted upon them. Some stranger
did do a little bit to make your day, got your smile, and,
in aggregate, made an impact.
It's not just a pipe dream; it's happening now through all
the obvious overt corporate policies of manipulation
("welcome to --; how may I help you?"). And we have
to allow ourselves to see and value it.
Original Article: The “death of adulthood” is really just
capitalism at work
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2014 2:22 AM
Indeed, an individual citizen’s most important
economic role, in the post-industrial West, is that of a
consumer, inhaling goods, products, services and
entertainment, as much of that as possible delivered
electronically or shipped to your door.
I think their most important role is to make good play
with the creative product. I think how it helps
economically is that they haven't switched into a
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mindset that has them thinking of sparse goods and

smaller selves with "God" now looking at them more
fondly.
They're keeping up. Which is good, because this not
only means the latest Apple but taking on institutions
like football and protected nerd-turf stuff like sexist
video games, where a great gab of Americans are seeing
things previously mostly off the table being re-thought
as much as marriage and drug use have been. With the
latest intrusions on football and (especially) video
games/nerd culture, however, you could feel some
former Obama supporters wonder if their own favorite
resting spots are now due to be as destabilized as Tea
Partiers found just about all of theirs.
Roth (and Updike) is to be preferred over Rowling,
because the emotionally more healthy subsequent
generations haven't yet been allowed their post-war, post
great-sacrifice, heyday. After we weather through a
period of old left, of Depression, of sanctified self-
sacrificial selves, of war, those who remain intact will
take their inherently more egalitarian selves and produce
even greater things -- 20 years on, maybe?
After great, hugely wasteful sacrifices, of innocent
people being decimated and learning to make due with
what little they have, people know allowance is throned,
that societal regressives are backed off, and take
advantage of it.
Original Article: Calm down, America: We’re as safe as

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we were a year ago

I don't think they would seem so much of a threat unless
we've projected our own childhood terrors onto them.
This would mean we're for some reason being recalled
to childhood feelings of exposure and vulnerability right
now.
If so, this would mean seeing ourselves stand up to these
perpetrators amounts to what it be for a previously
bullied child to finally manage the same with his/her
tormenters: absolutely everything, that is.
Original Article: From 9/11 to the ISIS videos: The

darkness we conjured up
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2014 4:21 PM
susan sunflower
I don't think it's myth, or passed on cultural traditions,
that does it; more inadequate childrearing. Children
who've learned that when they desist in their own
interests and commit to those of their caretaker's they
finally get approval and love otherwise denied, will be
prone to volunteer to sacrifice themselves -- their
selfish, individuated adult lives -- in war.
In death, so selfless, and -- as infantry -- so infantile,
they feel they'll be forever appreciated and loved,
swaddled for all time in their mother's love.
Many of those boys who refused to answer their nation's
call would have done the rejecting themselves. That is,
we internalize our parent's disapproving, angry voice,
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and when we're raging against other's sins we're

completely fused to it. Which is why we call those we're
fighting and killing names we were ourselves called in
our own childhoods.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2014 2:32 PM
susan sunflower
His motivation wasn’t a matter of “Muslim rage” or
“hatred for the West.” He felt himself to be moved by
“compassion.” Like many Americans whose feelings of
patriotism compel them to join the military, Knight
yearned to “fight oppression and protect the safety and
dignity of others.”
This could just be a yearning to stand as a knight
protecting a culture. It's a way to be a "good boy," a
mother country's favorite, rather than someone who as a
seventeen year old is on the verge of abandoning his
childhood origins – of abandoning his mother -- for
independence and adulthood. Regressive fusion with a
maternal entity as the first step, that is. Later the rage
against a West imagined as sinful and spoiled, as
polluted and "bad,” as his own former self.
He didn't do this. But he still became traditional,
humbling himself into a life of Islamic studies, clearly in
his view seen as at-root pure (steadying elders;
Muhammad's wise words); and vomited all over
repugnant American values, as well as his own former
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corrupt self.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2014 12:11 AM
Of all things, “Last Days in Vietnam” is a tale of
heroism, courage and selflessness; a tale about how
many American servicemen, intelligence officers and
diplomats risked their careers and in some cases their
lives to rescue as many Vietnamese civilians as possible.
So war is (an avenue for) heroism, courage and
selflessness.
The weak spot where the ISIS videos worm their way in
is not some deep-seated, grandiose desire to see our
civilization destroyed, since we don’t really need to wish
for that one anymore. It’s our persistent boredom, our
permanent consumer narcosis, our yearning to be
entertained at any cost by cute things and funny things
and horrifying things that may or may not be real.
So everyday is boredom, permanent consumer narcosis,
and ridiculousness.
How sure are you that someone reading these two
articles of yours wouldn't be a bit more persuaded to
begin a major conflict than remain part of the status
quo? Maybe war has to remain an easy way to make
yourself feel pure -- something where selfishness mostly
abounds. And people keeping themselves enjoyably
occupied while no major wars are being fought, kept a
bit more virtuous.
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Original Article: “Last Days in Vietnam”: Is the

humiliation of 1975 about to be repeated?
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 1:32 AM
The war got rid of a lot of American wealth, which if
we'd kept would've made us feel extremely guilty. We
waste so much wealth with the military because we're a
nation that feels worthy of punishment when we accrue
good things. The explanation for every nation in the
world now going austerity, which kills wealth
production, lies in this (ill)reason as well. We suppress
growth, and the demons won't devour us.
Original Article: It’s time to destroy the trolls: Orange-

fanged morons are choking the Internet
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2014 4:53 PM
CarolCrown I don't trust that those calling for civility
and decency are really thinking of the brilliant
conversations we could be having; I think they've
become those who hate comment sections because
they're an avenue where nobodies might make a
difference: full of people (like their once selves) of
(guilty) pretension.
If they can get everyone to look at comments as censors
rather than as learners, you've got them as perturbed
adults rather than as open-minded children. It's in favor
of a conservative culture.

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Pamela Troy
I increasingly suspect that the liberal intellectual class is
feeling prone in their regression to make swaths of the
country obviously worth a pass-by. As possessed only of
virtue maybe when joining together to fight a
corporation, or just in their suffering, but not where
something intellectual and smart could arise.
The history of the net proved there are obvious major
centers but that genius really is everywhere. The hippies
were right. To hold onto this truth means believing,
really believing, in growth, which just feels too sinful
and against the current right now. So we/they collude in
isolating only certain controlled spots as worth attending
to. Ivy Leagues, already recognized writers, etc.
People used to see criminals simply as “bad,” just as
they saw other races that way. They needed categories
of people they could split unwanted aspects of
themselves into -- their felt intrinsic badness -- which
they could now subject to name-calling and abuse from
out of their own childhoods. Better raised, more loved
people, with much less of a need to inject parts of
themselves into others, began to see criminals for who
they actually are, that is, as just very abused people --
the last people, in fact, to deserve further incarceration
and torture. They saw constituents of other races simply
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as individuals, with no way of assuming anything about

them until one became familiar.
So perhaps liberals will take care that when they're
insisting on killing "trolls," participating in changing our
paradigms so we no longer so much see democratic
comment sections but wretched abodes to stay clear of,
that they're not regressing and creating poison
containers again.
What they might do is, yes, actively help stop people
from being threatened and hurt; ban perpetrators; but
also maintain a celebration for individuals who in
comment sections say such interesting things. Not the
faux celebration stuff, where administers single out
comments which suggest their ideal is someone of
middling intelligence but who might still be capable of
learning something. But rather the stuff Salon has seen a
lot of in its history: the remarkable.
Original Article: “Jennifer Lawrence’s body became the
body of all women”: How I felt when I looked at those
hacked celebrity nudes
I'm suggesting this because we now know that when
people administered repeated shocks in the Milgrim
experiments they weren't obeying authority but rather
taking advantage of an authoritative situation -- the
power of the university -- to switch into perpetrator
alters that saw vulnerable people as deserving
punishment. (Here, the authoritative situation which
absolves us mostly of guilt is that this has become the
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phenomena we're all expected in some way to have

engaged with -- tackling the internet, nudity, and privacy
-- to show we're keeping up and actually give a damn
about our world. To have looked means not only not
being ignorant but being capable of a more engagement-
worthy, bravely self-incriminating and hard-won
opinion, as TCF hopes I think to have demonstrated.)
When children are abused they don't blame the
perpetrators but rather themselves -- it's a life-saving
tendency, because they need to see caretakers as
provisioning and good. This means that even children
who've been raped will start talking in voices that show
they believe they deserved it. They'll take dolls, which
clearly they see as representing themselves, and start
stabbing at them and shouting them, calling them dirty
and bad. And by no means do they inevitably grow out
of it -- in fact, those alters are probably set up for life.
We're dumping ice buckets on our heads, probably
staging our once being left out in the cold, whether
literally or figuratively (we get the thrill, in restaging
previous terrors, of knowing some control). Our
childhood traumas are popping back into our awareness;
and personally, I think most of us have set up these self-
protective perpetrator alters and are finding ourselves
prone to fuse with them.
Original Article: “Jennifer Lawrence’s body became the

body of all women”: How I felt when I looked at those
hacked celebrity nudes
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It is nice to know you could look at the pictures,
recognize your younger self in them, and feel concern.
A lot of people might be drawn to look at these photos,
however, because the voice speaking predominately in
their heads is that of a perpetrator, the one which tells us
we are bad, that we deserve to suffer, rather than one
which ostensibly lead you that speaks curiosity. They'd
not so much recognize their younger selves in the proud
bodies, now exposed, but project onto them, actually
enjoying partaking in the humiliation of their proud,
hopeful, vulnerable younger selves.
Original Article: “They are intellectually underpowered
and full of themselves, because they’ve been told their
whole life how wonderful they are”
In his book, Deresiewicz said we as parents are
intimidating our children from individuating (from us)
too much. He talked psychoanalysis, "You-shall-not-be
-aware!" Alice Miller, and Tiger Moms. And the result is
a society where we've agreed not to (emotionally)
abandon our kids, and where they've been terrified out
of ever growing up.
How did we as parents become so awful? The
explanation comes from the fact that we mostly
individuated from our parents; we grew up in eras that
had such allowance (all that delayed infanticide during
the Depression and World War 2 bought decades of
subsequent trespasses). But, like the 1920s crowds, we
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knew there eventually was going to be a price paid ...

and are visiting the price on our own kids while we fuse
with the regressive voice.
At some level we feel good that we've created a society
where if you're a brilliant middle classer who doesn't get
into the Ivy Leagues, everything you might do will be
faded out of vision because your role is simply to count
as one of the lost (that's where you'll get your approval),
and we'll insist on it in our attentions at least. And if you
get into the Ivy Leagues, there's got to be a limit to how
much new you'll produce, simply because you'd of had
to have been the kind of person who obliges a whole lot.
Counter measures (against kindled mass individuation
and growth), everywhere.
Deresiewicz might get some to drip down a tier, but
that'll just mean dropping them amongst others who
actually take satisfaction from dramatizing themselves
as thwarted -- because that is the role we want them to
play: warm approval given -- which would be hell. It'll
mean being amongst those content to ape their "betters,"
who'll implicitly recognize/affirm their superiority,
because this too suggests those who've capitulated to
smaller dreams than the "spoiled" middle class post-war
Americans did.
And if they figure out the cure for cancer, annoy us by
being the ones to do so, something about who they are
will have to be attenuated so we can, quick as spit, go
back to staring at the Ivy Leaguers, who glow as if
imbibed with what had previously been displaced
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everywhere.
Original Article: Why can’t the media talk about the Ivy
League without freaking out?
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 2014 4:36 PM
My response was psychoanalytic, but still appropriate --
the book does go there. He talks not just Alice Miller but
a good stretch of "Tiger Moms" ... of parents who terrify
their children into quiescence, who cannot possibly be
disobeyed by the child.
I'm suggesting that we as a society keep these moms in
our heads and realize that there is nothing that draws
their ire more than when we individuate from their
expectations and needs. When we do so anyway, seeing
ourselves in the upcoming generation of youth we fuse
with our angry maternal alters and make sure that they
at least pay.
Original Article: Why can’t the media talk about the Ivy
League without freaking out?
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 2014 3:57 PM
You didn't do Ivy, but the question is, if you were born a
generation later, would you have? My guess is that you
would, and we've a much more streamed, eager-to-
please Laura Miller to find there, but still Laura Miller.
It may be that while those who get into the Ivyies are
being told to be exultant -- or else -- that those who get
into the "State" ones are being "told" they're dumb,
unexceptional, second class. The primary purpose of our
age may be to still the capacity of youth to individuate --
a purpose, built out of an unconscious need to sacrifice
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youthful potential in order to placate abandoned parents

in our heads ("alters"), who are furious at all the growth
we assumed for ourselves.
Deresiewicz may be participating in this by doing all he
can to shepherd talented youth into abodes where it's
going to be tough to shake off the feeling they've got no
special shine really. That nobody's attending to what
they do, and that nobody ought to be attending.
He, after all, talks in his book about the terrifying
power, the terror of, parents, and admits it’s been tough
for him to get past himself. He assumes he's doing so by
calling for youth to start distancing themselves from
their parents by risking becoming truly disagreeable to
them, and by leading society into directions that are
novel but which we all may not be comfortable with.
But he could be abating their fury by shoveling that
many more into places that'll deny them societal
feedback that what they are doing really is worth
something.
Maybe ten years from now, when this call, this need, for
a lost generation has ended, the Laura Millers will once
again be going back to "publics" ... but mind you, the
Ivyies will by then have changed their ways as well. The
time for the middle class nobody to not be allowed --
because this would commit the sin of demonstrating our
world as of genuine potential -- to be seen as having
achieved anything notable, will have ended, and we'll be
for merit and promise again.
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Original Article: I asked my husband to take away my

credit card
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2014 12:33 AM
You're getting everything you want out of life ... and so
regress to the teenager who hasn't learned to control her
finances, and who is a dwarf to her almighty mother, out
of fear of the sense of abandonment that full
individuation often brings.
Giving your husband your credit card would correct an
image of him which is no longer serviceable ... that of
him as someone who "transcends any traditional notions
of marital division of labor." Giving him the credit card
would make him 50's mold; make him a degradation of
what you've accomplished. Sacrificing that, you're the
good girl who never grew beyond her mother, and you
feel taken care of again.

very>
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4cKftJ3OzG4/U_6MFg2d95I/AAAAAAAAAa8/al4778U8cgY/s1600/guardians-
of-the-galaxy-2.jpg
In one of the initial scenes of "Guardians of the

Galaxy," when “Ronan the Accuser” has a badly
tortured Xandarian before him, do we think the audience
is in any way identifying themselves with him? Not at
all, of course. If audience sympathy goes towards the
Xandarian culture, it won’t have anything to do with it
first being represented by this guy. And when Yondu
Udonta and his collection of bullies arrives to ask
another Xandarian, “the Broker” — the elderly
merchant — about the location of the infinity stone,
looking very much like they’re just going to kill him
after throughly confounding and terrifying him, is the
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audience in any way just wishing the bullies would

leave the poor guy alone? Again, not likely. In fact,
maybe they too would be looking at this quaking,
isolated, precious and mannered man as deserving being
confused with child babble before being dispatched —
Who does this pretentious bag of bones think he is,
anyway? And when “the Collector” instructs his slave
assistant, Carina, on her knees scrubbing the walls, to
work harder lest she suffer her sister’s fate — living her
life despondent in a cage — does the audience in any
way hope the “Guardians of the Galaxy” will help her
revenge herself against this slaver? Again, not at all.
They’re probably hoping the guardians do nothing in
their meeting with him to show they too are possessed
of a bullyable side that might have the Collector
thinking they, pretenders to being street-wise bounty-
hunters, co-equals, might actually be managed into
becoming specimens — and not when deceased, as he
proposes with Groot, but humiliatingly, tellingly, while
still alive.
The film is not about bonding together to defend the
weak, but about defending oneself against feeling weak.
Indeed, even Peter Quill’s obsession with his mother’s
soundtrack, with his mother — normally something that
would make an adult endlessly shamed by his friends —
is ultimately about that.
The mother in the film — the cancer victim — is a
fantasy. Or perhaps more accurately: camouflage. Boys
2799
at adolescence, the age age Peter Quill is when his

mother passes of cancer, often find themselves more or
less permanently removed from their mothers, gone off
to a culture "that’ll make a man out of them" — which
basically means instructing them on how to keep a tight
lid on expressing their emotional needs; bullying,
aggressively teasing those who do express them; and
showing their many scars as evidence of how much
violence they’ve “manly” been able to sustain through
life. They sometimes, however, are allowed to express
their neediness — like when they’re badly sick, for
example, and get to stay at home with mom. Or if
something horribly tragic happens to them — like their
mother passing of cancer, which, if it happened early
enough, can actually be tested as permitting one to
obsess over her lifelong.
But being distanced from your mother at adolescence
isn’t really the source of trying to absolve yourself of
ever having your experiences as a needy person claim
conscious acknowledgement. The need, the requirement,
that you not ever be reminded that this is who you still
are, comes about from associating feeling vulnerable to
becoming easy monster bait, to being viciously
murdered, which arrives pretty much at infancy. Freud
of course noted how many children were concerned with
death, and decided that we must all therefore be born
with a death instinct. But his associate, Sandor Ferenczi,
as well as other psychoanalysts like Dorothy Block and
Joseph Rheingold, observed that this fear owed not to
2800
“instinct” but to the rational, the acute and accurate

assessment of the child that their caregivers actually
had murderous inclinations towards them. Mothers, still
in most families the foremost “caregivers” of children,
revisit the punitive experiences they suffered as children
upon their own children. Historically, they have tended
to do the like of hallucinating their children as adult
accusers — as their own parents, who in their screams
once again express disappointment and anger. They
have tended to see them as requiring bullying, threats
and realizations of overt abandonment, so that they
actual fulfill what they were born for — in so many
cases, to satisfy their parents’ own unmet needs. To the
infant, the absolutely vital mother, the primary “object,”
is also quickly realized as a terrorizing titan, which s/he
later learns to displace onto “monsters” to absolve
her/himself the guilt, the fear, of consciously realizing
what s/he suspects her/his mother would kill it for
having an inkling of. All of this applies, by the way, not
just to children who’ve descended from one of the
sadder generational chains, but to many, many genuinely
more hopeful ones, where mothers from generation to
generation were progressively given more resources so
to be able to lend more love to their children than they
themselves received … to the children in playgrounds in
more liberal parts of New York, for example.
Expected to fulfill their parents’ — again, mostly their
mother’s — needs for love, and to serve as poison
container and/or as a fetish object — the provisioning
2801
breast, denied to them in their own childhoods — their

own development was seen as a threat, a threat met by
maternal distancing and fury: to the child, by
apocalypse! This happens early, so early that the
ostensibly inherent superego, which is actually created
by the child’s brain to save the child from individuating
too much and thereby find itself outside maternal favour
for life, can understandably be mistaken as something
born out of genes and DNA rather than defensively out
of experience. When the child becomes an adult, when it
realizes the individuation and self-determining freedom
available as an adult, it re-experiences the terror of
being abandoned as a child for its initial attempts at
individuation. It expects a revisit of all the tortures and
punishments, something warded off for awhile by
pursuing the trauma itself, initiating it or chasing it
down, and thereby showing some confidence-inspiring
control (herein, an explanation for this ice bucket
trend?), but which eventually demands full capitulation
and retreat. The adult finds some way to shorn
him/herself of the new freedoms and bond back to some
group he fills with injections of his mother — which is
in his own mind becomes essentially her corporeal self,
a home country, a “Mutterland.” He or she experiences
and succumbs to “growth panic.”
A hero is someone who is suffering from growth panic.
Out of retreat, he has fused with the inner Terrifying
Mother (i.e. the super-ego) that’s been installed in his
brain’s right hemisphere, home of the amygdala, our
2802
brain’s alarm system, and distances himself from past

allowances, freedoms, pleasures, that are making
him/her feel terribly anxious, so to feel more pure again
— forgiven. Our “guardians” in this film, we note, are
prepared to do exactly that: putting their lives at the
service of “the galaxy,” which though it means no
longer being freewheeling rascals — i.e., individuated
pursuers of their own self-determined pleasures —
means having all their sins expunged and counted by
even the most selfless as those properly to count oneself
indebted to.
The group is not infused with properties of the person
the film has delineated to serve as Peter Quill’s mother,
however. That bald, ghostly white young woman looked
nearly a child herself, and probably served as a child
representation of Peter Quill at threat of infanticide —
all the converging, insistently demanding grandparents
— he could later imagine saving by hallucinating
Gamora — an abandoned, farmed-out child herself —
as his lost self perishing in amniotic space. Given the
ethos of the film, the mother had to have been powerful,
not evaporating; and part of powerful her is found in
Glenn Close’s “Nova Prime,” the supreme leader of the
Xandarians —the part believed all-provisioning, fair,
decent and good. But the rest, with all the terrifying
aspects, which at the moment are most meaningful to
the child, are out into other powerful beings.
So, yes, “Ronan the Accuser” does at times represent
2803
this terrifying, infanticidal mother. Especially when he’s

about to crush innocent victims, like that hapless
Xandarian soldier, who’s blood will quickly be collected
into some drain Ronan is part of; especially when he
represents a source from the conservative past who is
furious at all the guilty modernisms being entertained.
But when he is someone feeling furiously betrayed by
the titan Thanos, when he means to rival, strike back
and humiliate him, then he represents part of ourselves
we are in urgent need to disown — the part, of course,
that has solid justification for being furious at our
mothers for their treatment of us. Otherwise Thanos,
who farmed his children out to a perpetuator, who sits
on a grand maternal throne, casually expecting everyone
— in order to do something about the terrible possibility
of him springing a surprise visit upon “us” — to of
course stage our coming to him; who’s visage is twice in
the film represented at a scale that dwarfs even great
Ronan into an infant; serves in the movie as the
imperious “object” the Terrible Mother is mostly
interjected into.
But Ronan possesses the hammer, the stick, used
historically by mothers to beat their children, and when
he absorbs the power of the infinity stone and is about to
kill a world of Xandarian innocents, he is just the
Terrible Mother with infanticidal thoughts towards
forsaken people. The exultation he demonstrates just
before he is about to annihilate all life on Xander, with
his back bent and arms outstretched in a big body laugh,
2804
is like that captured mother representatives were made

to do at periods of growth panic in Aztec culture, where
as Lloyd DeMause says, “female victims first made a
prodigious show of their female power … [before being]
laid down on their backs and [having] their breasts cut
open and their bodies torn apart.” And Ronan afterwards
too is slain, by the power of the infinity stone.
The stone, like the swords used upon subsequent
victims, after first being used to rip apart Aztec mother-
representatives, is empowered by the destructive power
of the Terrifying Mother. When Peter Quill absorbs the
power into himself, he is like a Javaro, who after the
maternal fusion, who after “sucking at [his] mother’s
breasts, [having taken] n/um, [having drank] n/um,
[which even though it] would [make him] cry, and cry,
and cry, [and even though he] was afraid of the n/um,
[though it was] hot and [it] hurt,” experiences something
akin to a “temporal lobe epileptic seizure. [Which] like
these seizures, provides convulsive tremors and feelings
of powerful violence, as the master of [the] n/um
continues his energetic dance, [and] the n/um heats up
and rises up the spine, to a point approximately at the
base of the skull, at which time !kia results, [an]
explosion [which] throws [one] in the air … bursting
open, like a ripe pod,” as he “then they go[es] out to kill
anyone [he] encounters, believing [he is] superhuman.”
As he beams a climactic red glow, he becomes like the
“warriors [who] became the symbolic equivalent of
menstruating women [,] [since] both bloody warriors
2805
and menstruating women were charged with powerful

destructive energy.” He is bathed in the equivalent of
“red hematite [as if he’d] expropriated the destructive
power of menstruating women [by] ritual nose bleeding
or sub incision [of their penises].”
So the infinity stone’s power is the destructive power of
the mother to murder infants because every
anthropological tribe — all insanely sacrificial and war-
prone — borrow the power of the menstruating woman
so to feel superhuman before they go off into war? Yes.
The infinity stone’s power is the destructive power of
the mother because psychoanalysts who don’t just
assume a death instinct find for children everywhere
“the fear of infanticide could already be their central
occupation,” “that [for them] the world ‘abounded in
beasts of terrifying mien, in cruel witches and monsters
who pursued their victims with unrelenting savagery,’”
and that “the identities behind these imaginary,
terrifying figures [were] the child’s own parents”?
Especially, yes. But also because the infinity stone is
twinned with another object in the film overtly
associated with maternal prowess — Jack Quill’s
precious cassette tape.
Rohan the Accuser exults when he’s in possession of the
stone; arriving on Xander, he casually kicks aside
vermin — the raccoon, Rocket — accosting him. But
Jack Quill, singing his mother’s favourite tunes, is still
brazen enough to approach and challenge him to a
2806
dance-off. He says he’s just distracting him, still a

marginal figure, despite the attention temporarily put to
him, but there’s a strange sense already of
appropriate direct rivalry — my power against yours,
dude: the songs he’s singing were those he was listening
to when he broached the lair containing the infinity
stone, where he too felt immune to everything that’d
accost him, casually kicking aside all the lizards that
approached to threaten and ostensibly devour him. It’s
like with his long possession of the cassette — a fetish
object, coveted, by him at least, as eagerly as the infinity
stone throughout the movie — he’s already in
possession of an aspect of the power of the stone: the
good aspect heroes are allowed to know of the mothers
they’ve fused with, one that still knows of some levity,
permitted because all freedom has been sundered to her.
Jack has coveted every song his mother wanted him to
at the cost of listening to what others might have
introduced to him, at the cost of developing his own life
“soundtrack”; he has installed her as a saint he would
sacrifice his own life to recover; and for already in this
sense being such a good boy before becoming an overt
hero, he already feels in possession of some of
mommy’s terrible power. He’s like Bilbo, knowing the
ring’s — an object primarily about mass genocide —
powers of invisibility, as well as the jokes and riddles …
the good fun, associated with his use of it, and so
actually not so odd a creature to take on directly the
destructive power of a dragon, whom he could not just
2807
trick and distract but obliterate if ever the ring took full
control of him.
Peter Quill is the right possessor of the infinity stone
because he’ll use it to destroy the split-off terrifying
aspects of our mothers, while fused completely with the
good. And that it doesn’t destroy him, that he contains it
for as long as he did, is because he’d already been
imbibing maternal power, through devout loyalty, his
whole life, not really because of his father’s DNA.
(Question: Was Bilbo able to handle the power of the
ring for as long as he did because before going on
adventures, he’d long been someone loyal “to his
mother’s doilies,” rather than to the gallivanting about
Gandalf would like rather to have seen him on? And is
this why Gandalf is more or less kept out of the crucial
relationship between the ring and Bilbo — a subtle but
substantial humiliation of him — until “LOTR”?) He’ll
use it destroy the part of himself that would dare accuse
a perpetrator for Her past abuse. And he’ll use it to
destroy “two” more: legions of the vulnerable, as well as
his now even-fully-mother-loyal own self.
He’ll use it to kill the vulnerable? Yes. He is fused with
his Terrifying Mother alter, and that mother was seen by
the child as fully correct to abuse him, to punish the
weak, a life-saving conclusion, as it keeps the absolutely
essential primary caregiver benign and loving. The child
concludes that it must have been “his worthlessness that
made them hate and even want to destroy him. After the
2808
child is convinced he is bad and deserving to be

destroyed, every incident in his life becomes proof of
his responsibility for unhappy events: Is there a death in
the family? — he’s a murder. An accident? — he’s the
secret perpetrator. His ‘badness’ causes his mother to
leave him for a job … and drives his father to absent
himself on business trips … he is the subject of every
quarrel and the author of every disaster [even of]
divorce.” I’ve suggested that the exact person chosen to
represent the dying mother doesn’t adequately reflect
the type of maternal influence that infuses every
creation within this film world — weak and dissipating,
vs. surreally powerful and scary — but Quill’s feeling
guilty over her death for, by appearances, just showing
some sanity in not letting himself get sucked into his
mother’s own extinguishment, does gets the relationship
between mother and child right. He is fundamentally a
neglectful, guilty child, and fused with his Terrifying
Mother alter his task is to punish and destroy the same.
He and his guardians to some extent are doing this when
they start obliterating Ronan’s forces. Drax mocks them
as “paper people,” and Groot takes delight in
dramatizing their weakness, in humiliating them, by
thrashing columns of them about with his two arms, and
this — mocking their weakness — is what occurs when
mother-fused soldiers attack their “enemies.” Seeing
them primarily as their own “guilty,” weak childhood
selves, they call them the exact names they were called
by their parents as children — Germans in World War
2809
Two, for example, called their captives “shit babies,”

and “useless eaters.” And we’ll find in most films where
“good” forces are up against the “bad,” the bad,
whatever their initial scary show, end up seeming
strangely, humiliatingly, impotent … they’ve become,
rather, our own weak selves that deserved to be
destroyed and so pile up readily into accumulations of
the dead while the good lose maybe one or two for their
(sometimes) several hundred. But as initially noted, it’s
not just soldiers but civilians that are being set up as
deserving death. If you’re adding vitality to the group,
as John C. Reilly’s Corpsman Dey and his glowingly
healthy family are made to seem, you’re cherished. But
if you look like you might be contributing weakness, are
single, solitary, or sick, you’ll come to be hated. Bad
and despicable, for the crime of weakening the glory of
the maternal whole.
Killing worlds of vulnerable people is what the infinity
stone is all about, and it’s what war is all about too.
After people do the initial fusing with their maternal
alters, they enter wars which end up killing far more
civilians than soldiers. This fact is incredibly obvious
today, where in Gaza all we seem to hear about are this
group of youth or that one being targeted and
slaughtered. Are we likely to see something along these
lines in the sequel to this film, where not soldiers but
evident “evil” civilians and their families are
“justifiably" killed? Not guaranteed: some things our
conscious minds will not permit. No one overtly gloated
2810
over the number of civilian deaths in the Iraq war, for

example. But it’s the fact that the Iraq war ended up
killing over 300 000 people, mostly children, that
enabled Americans at the time to feel so good about it
(ninety percent approval rates for Bush). At some level
we know the extent of the carnage, who exactly got
killed … and when it’s legions of civilians, we feel
empowered, as the vitality of these extinguished lives
get sucked into us … sacrificed Xandarian blood, into
Ronan, and boy doesn’t it feel great!
And finally, heroes seek to sacrifice themselves. Being
shorn of freedoms and completely fused to their mother
alters, the glory of once again being good boys and girls
again still has one better: namely, being permanently
fused to her, through death. The guardians agree to try
and take down Ronan, even after acknowledging it’s
sure suicide … and are in this like the Japanese leaders
in World War 2, who when “deciding whether to attack
Pearl Harbor and begin their war with the United States,
[realized after several ministers gave their assessments
that] it was obvious that an attack would be suicidal for
Japan. Whereupon Tojo told those present, ‘There are
times when we must have the courage to do
extraordinary things — like jumping, with eyes closed,
off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple!'” They are like
Hitler, who too “spoke in suicidal, not economic,
imagery, promising Germans glorious death on the
battlefield and calling himself a ‘sleepwalker’ as he lead
the German people over the suicidal cliff,” to war
2811
against the whole rest of the world.

The raccoon, Rocket, is the one who offers an
alternative — “You know, we could just make our way
to the far ends of the universe and, like, enjoy our lives”
— but of course is ignored because it doesn’t satisfy
their need for mommy-and-me fusion, as they'd lie as
blooded corpses on the consoling battlefield, with their
mother imagined as coming down to collect them, or
shrouded in white swaddling cloth in caskets, back
permanently home with their mother's sorrow,
appreciation and sympathy. And we shouldn’t expect
any film about heroes to allow the dissenter’s — i.e.,
someone less switched into a suicidal mental state —
opinion any weight. We do see such occasionally,
though. Though Peter Jackson doesn’t lend too much
credit to Balin’s —Dwarf prince Thorin’s chief
advisor’s — insistence that there was another way, that
“you don’t have to do this [— i.e., attempt to destroy a
city-destroying dragon without any real plan as to how
to actually defeat him —] [for] you have built a new life
for us in the Blue Mountains,” there is some … Balin’s
going to remain sane and good-humoured throughout,
while we know Thorin will lose his sanity. And we
remember Jackson gave enormous credit to Gandalf’s
insistence to Faramir, in “Return of the King,” that he
shouldn’t “throw away [his] life so rashly” just to please
his clearly insane father, however sadly little he gave to
Saruman’s intriguing claim that Gandalf himself
possessed a suspect tendency “to sacrifice those closest
2812
to him, those he professes to love,” which, well, if we

aren’t looking at him all rose-coloured, maybe we’ll
acknowledge he kinda did.
I’ve heard many people say they found “Guardians of
the Galaxy” novel. I couldn’t relate, because the film
felt like I’d entered a child’s rumpus room, a “Chucky
Cheese” full of rides, “swooshes,” and banal melodies
you’ll remember your eight-year-old self was
completely lost to. Perhaps the differing experience is
explained because when people don’t get sick of but
cherish listened-to-over-and-over-again songs, it’s
because what they want is the simple, protective, and
repetitive — something completely isolated from
anything adult and new that’d threaten by maybe
drawing you into considerations that’d lead to an
undiscovered and independent self, as even superhero
movies like “the Avengers” — with its wild,
cantankerous, family-squabble scene, where a lot of
valid opinions get thrillingly expressed in a very
compressed few moments — and “Iron Man 3” offer.
What they want are fetishes … objects barnished and
handled so many times — each time deposited with
accrued power rather than depleted of interest. What
they want is a film which isn’t so much inspired by a
catalog of films we’ve all loved, but which recalls them
in a sense that if they somehow appeared on scene —
the originals, the actual creators and creations, on stage,
suddenly, before someone merely “covering” —
“you’d” shut yourself down without complaint and just
2813
let the original role: weren’t you just trying to summon,

anyway? So this film takes you into “Star Wars,”
“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Footloose” … films you’ve
seen a million, bazillion times, because like the creators
you want to be back polishing them like a genie bottle,
hoping for a Great Visitation, ever grateful for your
devotion and complicity to the fully-bordered-up
infantile.
The movie feels like it took pleasure from building itself
up from a restricted “alphabet,” well aware it was
gloriously shunning a larger one available. Watching it,
you don’t take in a lot, but take pleasure in how securely
it only offers repetitive, unsurprising things … hammer
on the nail (or actually, in this film, usually over the
head), over and over again. Like a politicians’ repetitive,
simple-words baby talk, it probably is helping us trance
into agreeing to a future horrible societal direction, by
accessing the normally hidden, less conscious parts of
our brains — the parts hypnotists play to. It helps us
anticipate a time when like autistic soldiers, we isolate
ourselves into repetitive motions, march to drums —
become more overtly, “infants fearing death." But also
participating in doing something (horrible) about it —
becoming guardians, to our “galaxies.”
— finis —
Ápres: all quotes from Lloyd DeMause’s works,

especially “Origins of War in Child Abuse.”
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Labels: dorothy bloch, guardians of the galaxy, joseph rheingold, lloyd demause
Boyhood
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Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" tells the story of a boy,
Mason, and as much as the title articulates our applying
his story somewhat to all boys, the "chapel" within
advises caution. Since Mason's biological father is a
major influence on the boy, it's not quite fair to slough
off his inspiration Lennon, Paul, George and Ringo
as "divinities" to seek greatness from, but it's clear what
has clearly replaced the trio of God, Christ and church
in this film is the university, and the supreme research
psychologists who've worked there to incur relevant
understandings of what makes human beings tick.
Behavioralism is the first psychological theory we hear
discussed, and it's all but rejected in the film ... not only
2815
because it's mouthpiece turns out an alcoholic, wife
beating, dictatorial brute, but because it's clearly linked
to a cynical take on human beings and ultimately
corrupt societal applications like the irresistible
dopamine hits corporations know we receive when
people "like" us, that Mason references as part of his
dislike of popular culture. We hear of John Bowlby's
"attachment theory" next, from Mason's mother, and the
implications of his theory aren't to take all human beings
as essentially the same but to imagine a cut
only not that of boys and girls.
According to the theory, if you were a wellattached
infant and child, of either sex, so long as your society's
not prohibitive, the future's open to you. If you weren't
you'll be insecure, plagued by demons, who won't
amount any significant adventure into life ... one of
Harlow's distraught, selfisolated monkeys, who knew
too little of their mother's breast. Since children can be
suckled close more as a source of nurturance for the
parent , however, being wellattached isn't necessarily a
matter of time spent. More if they truly loved you, rather
than from the start, immediately began to reject and
even hate you.
2816
The interesting thing about this film, helped out by the
setting which is somewhere in Texas ... a state which in
some parts is a "hightech, social democracy" , and in
others, a "Protestant fundamentalist taliban," is that you
could take the same "facts" in the life of this boy and
show two very different fates one that leads to a well
adjusted adult with a bright future, and another as him
part of those shortchanging any such a bright and
beautiful thing. All depending on whether or not the
primary caregivers in his life wasn't compelled or
unconsciously intent to abandon her children.
The first fact we are introduced to about Mason's life, is
that his parents are recently divorced, and that his
mother has decided to uproot him and his sister further
by retreating from their first selfacquired home, back to
her mother. But in the film, the mother's intent
throughout is portrayed as mostly loving ... and so as
much we are directed to note that this move will cost
Mason his very first best friend, who in all likelihood
he'll never see again, and how his older sister plants
herself heavily against the move as if moved by the
most basic elements of her, shaking her into saying
something strong lest their young organism is requited
2817
into something that can't be recovered from, we know
it's something that's maybe probably best in that her
mother's difficulties in keeping their family afloat will
be greatly eased by the move, and she'll be able to attend
to them subsequently in less of a harried and more of a
focused manner.
The mother gets her children back into a home that'll
allow them each their own space, their own rooms, and
has provisioning enough for herself now to go to
college. There, like any new student entranced by the
opened world of knowledge and therefore further
entranced by those familiar with it , she crushes on a
professor, which for her develops into marriage.
Unfortunately, however wonderful his world not just of
knowledge but of palatial affluence is his home is a
McMansion, spared our contemporary derogatory
assessment of them as homes for those who borrowed
much but were doomed back to "pumpkinhood" once
the investment world sobered it turns out home life
with him means sequestering all of them to a litany of
constant rules, of lines not to be crossed, and herself,
also, to the occasional beating. Again harried with stress
over this of innocently having inflicted this man on
2818
her children, and not quite knowing if departure or
weatheringthrough is the wise solution she doesn't
quite acknowledge Mason's complaints about him,
doing her best to pretend homage to the idea that ... "we
all have our faults."
But when he grossly grabs Mason and forces him into a
military cut of his longish hair, her true feelings are
expressed, without any resolve not to upset the
perpetrator and raise family stakes by placing herself on
one side only. And when he gets close to physically
harming her children, smashing plates and glasses
before them he's done. Mason's mother assembles the
required phalanx of guardwomen to block him, while
she grabs her children, and off they're again to a
refreshed life.
Mason's adolescent life is mostly made to seem about
plenty of harmless experimentation ... which'll lead to
smart sifting and targeted development as he enters
young adulthood and university. He does booze, drugs;
experiments with dress. He knows being bullied, but
also hanging with older boys whose talk is macho and
who play with "knives." And though it isn't him who
2819
asks the ifyoursocoolwhyareyouhangingoutwith
grade8ersonafridaynight?, it's implicit as well in his
overall manner with them: they have no affect. He dates
women, and seems already to possess naturally the
genuine interest in them as individuals his biological
father advises him to learn quick to separate himself
from the pack. His childhood interest in spray painting,
forging a signature, branches into an interest in finding a
vision through photography, which stakes him purpose
and resolve, and also impressed elders, who want to
attach themselves to his promise as he eventually leaves
home for university.
On the cusp of departure, his mother breaks down and
admits how his leaving seems to mean her own life is
over; but he's allowed his retort, as he mostly always is
with her, and it's to explain the clear absurdity of what
she is saying. His mother is completely for his own
adventure, however, and so while promise is abundant
as he first experiences his life there, it's shallow of guilt.
But if she wasn't attached to her children, if she meant to
hurt, harm, or abandon them, the film would have
veered ... like this . The divorce from her husband would
2820
have been paired with her retreat from her independent
life/home, in that both would meant abandoning the
pretensions to a good lifepartner and a new beginning
away from her own mother: selfrealization and
pleasure. Her exhusband, who is treated defensively
when he arrives to see his kids, and who is to some
extent blocked away by the grandmother, is revealed as
the film goes along to have been a vastly better man
than any of the others she subsequently marries, as well
as being a much better person to have had around their
kids. But she didn't feel she could keep him because she
felt under compulsion to sacrifice her first start, bring
her kids around her mother's orbit, so her mother
wouldn't get angry at her for making herself the centre;
for aspiring to greater happiness than her mother
allowed herself. Late postpartum, with kids
given/sacrificed to her mother so she could be spared
terrible hauntings of seeing herself driving them into a
lake.
She would have been revealed to have been attracted to
the psychology professor, already sensing he would treat
her brutally ... his talk of flashing meat powder before a
dog to make it salivate, an anticipation of how he'd
2821
possess a belittling and allknowing sense of the motives
of children, whipping children into shape through
rewards and punishments. The freedomkilling home
life he instituted, would have been something she's
wished for her children, so that aspects of herself,
projected onto the children, that she felt required
containing actually great things, like one's desire to
explore and grow would have found themselves
stifled and bound up. When Mason came to her and
complained of him, she wouldn't have shown
underneath obvious sympathy but only the refusal: how
selfish of you to only see a person's flaws!
Adolescence wouldn't just have been about exploration,
but showed more genuine signs of troubles,
delinquency, as his mother spent most of her time at
university and home life was dominated by a thug. His
interest in hanging out with older boys who pretend
ninja, would have been him wanting to distance himself
from his aloneness and vulnerability. The fact that they
were all boys and cast all girls as "whores," would have
been an attraction ... a homosexual shell against the rest
of the world. The painting of his finger nails wouldn't,
then, have shown femininity, but interest in approbating
2822
the power of the maternal. His earpiercing, a
fascination in selfcutting ... where control of pain is
clearly yours. His dark worldview wouldn't have shown
he wasn't a fool for corporate manipulation, but that the
only way he intuited he could allow himself to
participate in adult freedoms is if tainted that terrain
with gloom beforehand.
But even that wouldn't prove sufficient for much
subsequent adult license, because his mother would
have wanted to know that his abandoning her for
university meant he was bad guilty. And so after
enjoying some time selfactualizing in university, he'd
eventually be with those others who first enjoyed
liberality before renouncing it thereafter for
conservatism the fiercely conservative taliban,
everywhere, who's leaders so often knew for a time
American licence before garbing themselves back into
caves and no running water .
2823

very>
And so in this version, if the film was rather released in
2015/16, it wouldn't have shown him helping out the
next democratic option but punching Rand Paul signs
into other people's lawns. His due would be to be with
all those other poorly attached, insufficiently loved,
"Texan" boys, who've become problem number one for
the other lot, fighting for a chance of more hope in the
world.
2824
Lucy
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Swn-
qnSYXjo/U9fu7IFEHqI/AAAAAAAAAaM/amyZKceS20w/s1600/scarlett-
johansson-lucy.png
Her dress might not look like it, but Lucy is a student
devoted to her studies. She's certainly ready to party, but
her life course is not open to anything really untoward
and divergent ... to anything that might spark her onto a
path of selfexploration that hasn't been approved for
her, like studyhardandgetastaidsafejob, clearly
has. She's forced onto this path, however, clamped
down, and the results aren't the riches promised to her
but rather along the sort of ghoulish fate a disapproving
superego would have chased onto her for the grotesque
approbation. It involves pretty much in the same
heartbeat in which a new path was presented the
brutal dispatch of her new lover/friend, a floorplatter of
corpses, and a long incision made into her
abdomen/pelvic region, degrading her into the role of a
container. She emerges out of total obliteration, and first
thing, calls her mother to tell her over and over again
how much she loves her; how she is, ostensibly, her
perpetual devotee.
2825
Well of course this isn't exactly what went on, which
would of had it follow all films infused with some
awareness of how growth and selfactualization that
suitcase of Pandora opportunities, suddenly sprung upon
you as a real possibility in adulthood will necessary
lead you to be chastened by terrifying fears of
punishment and abandonment, a la "Eyes Wide Shut,"
that'll have you curling back to your regular routine,
beholden to habitual chasteners, in no time. And I think
the reason is that Lucy, despite being someone who'll
learn to use 100 percent of her brain capacity and
become the first human to reach godhood, or full
actuality, is really breaching her somewhat trepidatious
and fearful regular self to become the sort of grand hag
, as
that emerges in certain historical periods a witch
one of her opponents in the film calls her that daunts
the rest of us back into being quiescent good boys and
girls.
Yes, this film is another one this year that follows that
so long as you as an audience member feel that you'd be
with those who'd let the great beastie in the film have
Her way whatever the hell she might be up to you
get to participate in the thrill of knowing she's going to
2826
be devouring others, not you, while vicariously enjoying
her assertion, her casual, thrilling trespasses (at one
point she barges through the multiple cars ahead of her
the wrong way on a oneway street as if XMen's Storm
scattering a gallery of approaching hellbent sentinels)
and power. "Godzilla," where the humans save
themselves by not interfering by correctly choosing to
see the monster as a necessary correction to human
arrogance is of course one. "Maleficent," with the
massively powered witch who toys with destroying an
innocent youth just to revenge herself against her father,
and who's resolve to ultimately save or destroy her is
something we wouldn't want to interfere with and which
only seems amenable to the victim's total sacrificial
willingness and devotion, one of the many others. In
"Lucy," you could imagine yourself the police captain,
who's basic response to Lucy is, "whatever you want
lady ... as if there's any chance I'd say no to you!"
Followed later, as he kills to ostensibly protect her, by
capitulated full devotion. Or as the great scientist, who
despite the film's long buildup of him as a master into
new terrain, fielding hopeful and hopefully
provocative and noticeworthy questions from the
most promising of young educated minds, is instantly
2827
made impotent and historically irrelevant by Lucy's full
knowledge of brain capacity, compared to his really
only just being on the right track.
Not bad ... a police captain, a great scientist, however
deflated; but those obliged to a power about stilling
everyone else which is horribly corrupt. The rest of
humanity who oddly opts out is put in the position of
those gangsters which strangely are allowed to linger in
this film when their relevance seems kaput the moment
Lucy shows herself able to defuse a packed hallway of
threatening men at mere 20 percent brain capacity. It is
one of these gangsters that ends up identifying her, not
as Lucy, the great mother, but as an obvious witch as
the complete corruption of one. And I took this as bait
for the audience.
These gangsters may have lingered in the film to satisfy
the terms of a plot set up at the beginning ... but really, I
think to be honest with ourselves, there was little in the
way of requisite demands, as they could really have
been swept into the apparatus that inadvertently
unleashed a superpower into the world part of a plot
that discards the accident that triggered it. They lingered
2828
because someone has to go about killing innocents
who's death Lucy surely could have prevented, to test to
see how truly obliged to her we are, how willing we are
to look away. Lucy, about at the point where brain
capacity means she's able to freeze the whole forward
momentum of everyone on the planet, and then swipe
herself back to a time when they didn't even exist,
announces at one point that she's got to shut down a
bit ... apparently to war against some of her cells,
impertinently staging some kind of resistance to her.
During this time the gangsters intrude at the university
she's at and start killing multiple people on their way to
her. We're not just talking cops, but the regular amble of
people you'd expect to find there. Lucy's selffocus and

isolation is meaning a lot of other people's needless
deaths.
It irritated me, just like I was irritated when, after Lucy
first starts incurring powers and kills the men who've
trapped her, she then strode out into the street and shot a
taxi driver to ensure the other one standing there would
be instantly obliging (later she tells the driver to "stay
here and wait for me," with his resolve to do so
dependent only on his fear of her). Maybe like you, I
2829
wondered for a moment if the drivers were employees
of the gangsters that is, guilty. But you realize quickly
that, no, they're probably just taxi drivers. And for this
reason their soontobeobvioustous obvious total
innocence the film gives us something to quell back
qualms. Namely, it makes clear that the driver had only
been shot in the leg, even if this news feels as if it was
spit at us, like as if how pathetic of us to still give a
damn about this evolutionary lesser! It irritated me
when she subsequently strode into the hospital and shot
a guy being operated on so her own "more important"
needs could be instantly attended to by the gathered
team of surgeons ... that we were to be bought off to her
side by being informed, by her, that the patient wasn't
going to live or was it that the operation wouldn't

work and he didn't have long to live? anyway, as if,
given what we'd already seen of her, we'd be sure this
would have mattered one way or the other.
Here she's surely being "bad to the bone"; but when
Arnie does it in "Terminator," and is allowed to get
away with it, in that we're fully with him, the victims are
Harley Davidson thugs, ruffians, bullies to the rest of
humankind. When he doesn't, when we the audience
2830
allow themselves to be terrified of him to know
ourselves to be terrified of him the victims are shop
owners (the first film), people like you and me.
The historial periods where the Terrifying Mother
emerges to scare everyone out of their guilty self
actualization and growth, is upon us. To her, we
sacrifice innocents ... representatives of our early selves,
who we think deserve to be casually shovelled into her
maw, guilty as we believe we were the very moment we
failed our mothers by attending to our own needs. The
death of innocents is in the news all about us ... Gaza
wars killing mostly civilians including, always,
always, those in hospitals, schools; and planes shot
down, full of people like you and me. And the
Terrifying Mothers, those "Kick Ass" superhero women
we're seeing everywhere and mostly only see fit to
praise for showing "how far we've come," are perhaps
mostly in our fantasy worlds. But don't be surprised to
soon find media portrayals of Heman Putin in a
dress . We're first terrified by her revisit, and placate her
wishes; but later fuse with her, splitting off all our own
mother's negative aspects onto some other.
2831
Lucy isn't quite our allgood Mother ... there's no way
we'd allow her to show such scary reptilian eyes, as she
does at one point in the film, nor to be pictured as black
tarrish (the second time this occurs with the increasingly
remote and abandoning Scarlett Johanssen this year,
btw, with the first being "Under the Skin") if this were
so. But she is the beginning of our split. Since our
defensive bonding to the pure mother will also entail
revenge against the bad mothers who abandoned us,
Lucy is shown starting about that too (given how we see
Lucy dress, her trampishness, do we really believe her
relationship with her mother was actually so blissful and
uncomplicated?). Her mother is seemingly being hugged
close to her on the phone, with all her "I love you
forevers." But it's really an embrace in preparation for
dispatch, similar to the one the abandoned son
(Commodus) "offers" his father (Marcus Aurelius) in
"Gladiator" to displace him from the throne. She follows
her pronouncements by remembering her first puppy,
which disorients her mother, in that it was so early she
couldn't possibly have remembered it. And then talks
about suckling her mother's breasts, the breast milk ...
which is now hardly factoring in her mother's ability to
keep up with her at all, as she's lost into her own
2832
indulgences, as well as likely considering the greatest

need for her new incarnation, for who she is now .

The infant's relation to the breast, is also away from, in a
way, her mother, as it's now abstracted from what is
particular about her and now just the
anthropological/biological/Winnicotian phenomena of
child, attachment, breast. It's also closer in its
quintessence to what mostly now moves Lucy her
existence as something manifest about the evolution of
homo sapiens. To what it is now about her genes which
differentiates her from every other human being who

has ever lived. To what it is which cleaves her from
them.
Her mother, that is, is logically being made to seem just
one of the innumerable mothers somewhat indistinct
from the one who first begat them all as members of the
different from all
same species, the one who truly was
of her progenitors the original Lucy, the very first
homo sapien capable of breeding. She uses her 100
percent brain capacity to swipe time back to the point
where she can meet her, to broach touching, connecting
with her. Swiping back too modestly at first, though, has
2833
her face peoples interesting, and maybe offering some
communion, for representing a whole historical period,
but still not interesting enough in their none of them
representing a new species that would span through
thousands of them. So she follows by overshooting,
finding herself before a TRex ... not main floor, and
arrival, but seemingly inadvertently the dungeons.
She quickly climbs back to the first homo sapien, but
subliminally it's not lost to the audience why Lucy
"erred" by reconnecting with the archetypal devouring
dinosaur. As much as the movie has had us think of
Lucy as someone who's closest affinity is still with
"apes," the moment we saw her possess reptilian eyes
revealed something more true about how we experience
her. She's not to be abstracted out as some sort of
historical development, some realization of what
something completely evolutionarily new would make
of its current habitat choose to breed, or cling to its
own immortality; some proof of theory. Some might say
she represents the dangerous placenta, in its strangling
and deoxiginating stages the first object we related to
before our mother's breast became so important to us,
which I think is fair ... something that in a sense is
2834
antecedent to the mother and matches the film's focus on
the chemical mixture of the fetus in the womb. But more
she represents the terrifying mother we knew from "four
to six, [where] the fear of death and imaginary threats
[come] to dominate the child's mind [including] fears of
monsters, ghosts, murderers, tigers, lions, or other
predatory animals." She represents the Dragon Mother,
"worshipped by all early states from Lilith, NinTu,
Hecate and Ishtar to Moira, Shiva, Gorgon and Erinyes,
[called] 'Terrible Mothers' by their worshippers, [as
they] were seen as cruel, jealous and unjust: 'her glance
brings death, her will is supreme" (DeMause, "Origins
of War in Child Abuse").
very>
2835
She swiped to the toothy dinosaur something we all
suspected, and we're thrilled to see realized because
this is the archetype the lies behind her, the real truth
about what is emerging from out of her crazily
recombinant DNA. Not the original mother, Lucy, but
the dragon one , "T."
il9I4jUhWyQ/U9fOJMiOs5I/AAAAAAAAAZ8/6Gi2wkRRJ2E/s1600/lucy_cover
-580x360.jpg
Railway Man
Zg03_8Eq_GU/U1_E3oCLSHI/AAAAAAAAAYo/4V07Rg24YRk/s1600/firth-
and-kidman_2662569b.jpg
Railway Man
2836
If you remember when male potency supplements like

Viagra came out, it was clear the companies believed that
men had to have their shame of admitting to having
potency issues abated by addressing them otherwise as total
he-men, totally potent. So we got commercials where a
bunch of older guys playing golf are discussing the twenty-
year olds they've bedded, and where "Viagra" isn't
discussed but just flashed on the screen at the end. This
film looked to be going on about the same thing -- except
the issue being brought a bit more into common recognition
was how experiences during war might never be shucked
off.
But we'd hardly need to have Colin Firth's Eric -- a World
War 2 British lieutenant -- shown first as a prosperous older
man who's just romantically won himself a resplendent
wife (Patti, played by Nicole Kidman), before dwelling into
what he experienced in war, if what was going to be shown
up close was what we've traditionally been directed to
allude to when we think of soldiers refusing to discuss what
they experienced -- friends being slain before them,
civilians … as well of course all their own killing. This is
something, quite frankly, which has always served to make
soldiers seem somewhat greater than other men -- more
broadly experienced, not shallower, or more shrunken --
and therefore something of a cheat: experiences we
collectively have insisted on as adding to your manliness
also working as an infallible manner of gaining leverage
over people. But it is perhaps necessary here, where we're
going to deal with what soldiers were reduced to when
captured -- ostensibly something a la Abu Ghraib, but
2837
worse.
To the credit of the film, we are told that what is hard for a
soldier to discuss are things which are embarrassing, not
just overwhelming, depressing, terrifying. Certainly when I
heard Stellan Skarsgard's Finlay -- the "uncle," the senior
member of the troop -- mention this, I suddenly had in
mind Abu Ghraib's sexual humiliation of the captives, with
their being raped, sodomized and whatnot. It would have
been something, if after encountering this highly
respectable and attractive man, we were back witnessing
him being forced to felatio fellow soldiers, eat his own shit
-- or just watched him regress in captivity to be a scared
child who couldn't help but gain pleasure in garnering
approval from his tormentors. After witnessing that, would
we attend to him with the dignity we know he deserves? Or
rather just wish the film had made him even more the hero
in everyday life, someone so commanding of respect what
we had just learned wouldn't be allowed any permanent
grip in our consciousness -- like the way nothing we might
ever learn about what Nelson Mandela would be allowed to
sit there if it couldn't be squared with the attitude we know
he is owed?
But what we actually see are him and his fellow young
officers beginning their servitude by successfully
transforming an episode which was supposed to reduce
them into one which showcases their wit, their vitality --
they count themselves off into numbers … until they reach
"ten," with the four subsequent counting off as "Jack,"
"Queen," "King," "Ace." Then we witness them acting in a
2838
way indistinguishable from if they'd been an elite team sent

in to effect a "Saving Private Ryan" moral boost, but rather
for all those still caught in captivity rather than for civilians
languishing at home. In "A-team" style, they effect various
plausible but still very brave and inventive means to gather
all the components to build a radio. And with the radio,
they gain information -- specifically, that "Hitler" was
repelled out of Stalingrand and that the Americans are
bombing all of Germany day and night -- to spread a boost
in moral to all the troops building an "impossible" railway
for the Japanese.
7eIiESII8FQ/U1_FGHPUgNI/AAAAAAAAAYw/7LxNdPT3Oeg/s1600/PH_Lifea
ndstyleDEC21_narrow_railwayman-20131220105236671184-300x0.jpg
However, the Japanese do learn what they did, and the

guilty fourteen are rounded up. And here they all witness
one of their own being repeatedly beaten upon by a rifle,
which has them shrink in fear … until Eric steps up and
volunteers for punishment. This act was never forgotten by
the rest of them; it was the bravest thing any of them had
ever seen, in fact, including everything they'd seen by the
during the war, and the inverse of what their servitude was
supposed to render for them all.
But for this show of undaunted spirit, this
defiance/mockery, Eric is isolated, taken into the shack he
has spent so much of the rest of his life remembering; and
so here, finally, is where the film is going to broach the
kinds of embarrassing things there's no way he'd ever be
able to share with any one else or shuck off. Only, it turns
2839
out -- not so: an interpreter repeatedly tries to daunt him

through tersely asked questions but has trouble gaining
ground even with that: "I ask the questions, you only
answer." And then he endures torture which looks terribly
painful -- he's repeatedly pumped so full of water he's near
bursting -- but not evidently worse than that awful rifle
beating; and this time almost as indication of his hereto
inability to be broken -- a weird kind of flattery, but
recognition and flattery none the less.
HAD2PnrBoJ0/U1_FPLFs4bI/AAAAAAAAAY4/WkdAAlDbLTU/s1600/968full-
the-railway-man-screenshot.jpg
And the truth is, this scene in the shed seems even more
concerned to manage how the interpreter is portrayed so
that when Eric ultimately later in life befriends this man, it
can seem do-able without it making him seem some sort of
gargantuanly pathetic, intrinsic kiss-ass. So the interpreter
is shown several times reacting to what the Japanese camp
officer is doing to Eric with some alarm; he tells Eric at one
point -- in good faith -- that he'd best just tell the officer
what he wants to hear because they'll get their information
out of him anyway, and it'll mean less pain. And he only
explodes at him when Eric dooms them in finally revealing
what they've been trying to chase out of him, what he
learned from the radio: that Japanese industry, towns,
hospitals were about to be decimated by attack, that "your
hopes are [already] burning, and your families are
starving." So when afterwards the Japanese are defeated, it
seems fully appropriate that the interpreter not suffer the
fate of the those who committed war crimes and instead is
2840
permitted to step to the side. And when Eric catches up

with him later and is allowed the obligatory turning of the
tables, with the interpreter having "to answer, not ask," and
briefly submit to being in a bamboo cage -- and further
later apologizing and bowing sincerely to him -- it seems
very agreeable they end up friends. Two educated,
fundamentally decent men, but of different cultures and of
differing perspectives during the war … a satisfying bro-
mance for the literate baby boomer to enjoy.
But as to the matter of the great shame that has troubled his
Eric and his friends for life, it's near literally an aside. For
we do end up seeing some sense of it, but not amongst
them but in those Eric and his fellow engineering-educated
peers were deemed too valuable to be cast amongst. When
Eric is passing through the passage being made for the
railway deemed impossible to be constructed without slave
labor -- for it'd surely killing most of the people involved in
building it -- he sees a major working there whom he once
served under. He tries to recall him to himself, but the
major recoils -- as if he's now at the point where he
assumes anyone advancing upon him must be about to beat
him. He's a totally broken man -- the intrinsic slave the
Japanese assume inhabits the soul of any man weak enough
to have let themselves be captured. Whatever they do to
Eric, he never, ever, appears recoil-worthy, and this poor
man-ghoul mostly certainly is that. If what Eric's wife had
to account for in trying to understand him, why he couldn't
get past his experiences thirty years before in the camp,
was him being broken as badly as this -- then his being
otherwise made to seem so comfortably established and
2841
identification-worthy would make sense.

In fact, when later the movie allows the major to be the one
who initiates the spreading of the news down the railway
line, there almost seems room to assume it something we
were all agreeing to simply allow for him after the horror of
"meeting" him rather than it keeping in line with the story's
otherwise ostensibly truthful account. He was too broken
for it ever to have actually happened that way, so in tribute
to who he was formerly and in recognition of our inability
to adequately ever square his future self with who he had
revealed himself as here, we're going to have to collectively
agree to momentarily step to the side within this film some,
and attenuate the details … in fidelity to something more
important than facts or our enjoyment of the film -- to
goodness. Then of course, back to the story.
Eric, however, we're simply to take straight … presumably
because the people making and watching a movie such as
this are not so interested in dealing with trauma as they are
in defensively coping with it. That is, by keeping the person
they are supposed to identify with a respected man outside
of war and capture, and persistently heroic and
empowered during servitude, as we match up our own life
experiences with his own, Eric ends up being a kind of
sturdy railway overlay of tricky matter in our own minds.
In truth, a kind of contagion.
Someone might object that the repeated beatings Eric
endures, as well as the water torture and the -- for awhile --
living in a cage, would be enough to create a traumatic
experience he'd never recover from, even if he never knew
2842
the shame of capitulation. The reason this is in fact

fatuitous is because these tortures are designed by captors
so that inmates know humiliations that they, the captors
themselves, experienced during childhood -- the
unconscious intention behind torture is to shame one's own
"guilty" childhood self, whom you've projected into
inmates: it certainly means to but doesn't really have "you"
in mind. If you didn't experience the equivalent in your
own childhood, as physically painful as these experiences
would be they would not serve to remind you of how
scared and powerless you were when you were infantile --
that shame. The reason many Jews who endured Nazi
tortures were able to recover from them somewhat
adequately was not simply owing to the fact that they
formed terrific support groups afterwards, but because they
had had better childhoods than the Germans did. That is,
these tortures were essentially new to them, something
afflicted upon them now from people outside their family
and for the most part outside of childhood -- it was
intrinsically foreign to what they had previously
experienced in life and to what had gone into shaping their
personhood. It could be shucked off, for it was mostly
overlain from the outside upon an already solid core.
The film we really need to see involving an older man still
crippled by something he experienced decades earlier,
wouldn't let it settle in his experiences as a soldier in
wartime, even if shown more honestly than this film is
interested in. For "wartime" is in this situation a plank
we've set up, way aloof from the age where experiences can
really destroy us, presumably for us to further pontificate if
2843
we mean to allow the plank to drop lower. It's actually a

safe zone, a "simulation room," to maybe prepare ourselves
for the leap back into infancy, where the ferocious soldier
screaming at us would become our mother and father
repeatedly doing so, where being locked in a cage becomes
our own being shut into closets, where being beat on
repeatedly or sexually used becomes our parents having
been these kinds predators.
Since captors force captives to experience what they
themselves experienced in childhood, the film we need to
see would explore something along the lines of this passage
from psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause. Whether of
Japanese war camps, or German ones ... or otherwise, it
would be this:
Jews, then, were the main poison containers for the

restaging of traumatic German childrearing practices four
decades earlier. Every one of the things done to Jews in the
Holocaust can be found to have been perpetrated by parents
and others to German children at the turn of the century.
The precise details of earlier events that were reinflicted
upon Jews later are astonishingly minute and literal. Jews
were, of course, murdered by the millions, just as German
children had watched their siblings murdered in infanticidal
acts earlier, using the exact same phrase for the genocide of
Jews--"elimination of useless eaters"--as parents had used
earlier for their infants and children as they murdered them
at birth. Because infanticide rates were so high, the
majority of German children would have witnessed the
murder of newborn siblings by their mothers, would have
2844
heard the murdered baby being called a "useless eater," and

would themselves have been called a "useless eater" as
children and so could have wondered if they might also be
murdered. One can hardly read a single Holocaust book
without having to wade through endless accounts of
children buried alive by Nazis, "children having their heads
beaten in like poultry and thrown into a smoking pit,"
"babies thrown from the fourth floor and crushed on the
pavements," "children's bodies lay around, torn in half with
the heads smashed in," "'little Jews' caught on bayonets
after being thrown from upper story windows," etc. Even
the specific methods German mothers had used for killing
their newborn--especially smashing the baby against a wall
or throwing it into a latrine--were "a regular
occurrence" against Jews in concentration camps:
When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with
them. A German guard took the baby by its legs and
smashed it against the wall of the barracks until only a
bloody mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate
mother had to take this mass with her to the 'bath.' Only
those who saw these things with their own eyes will believe
with what delight the Germans performed these operations.
[Also] SS men used to amuse themselves by swinging
Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their
deaths. He who threw a Jewish child farthest won.
Jews were also regularly tied up and made to live in their
own filth exactly as swaddled German infants were earlier.
Rarely washed, Germans had spent their early lives covered
with their own excreta, addressed by their parents simply as
2845
"little shitter." In the concentration camps, Jews were

subject to what Des Pres calls a constant "excremental
assault," in which they were forced to defecate and urinate
upon each other, were often thrown into the cesspool if they
were too slow, lived in barracks "awash with urine and
feces," walked about "knee-deep in excrement," were
forced to eat their own feces, and finally died in gas
chambers "covered all over with excrement." In one camp,
30,000 women not only had to use a single latrine, but in
addition, "we were permitted to use it only at certain hours
of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building,
knee-deep in human excrement." Holocaust scholars,
missing the childhood origins of all these gratuitous
excremental cruelties, have been puzzled by how much of
the concentration camp routine was devoted to the endless
humiliations: "Why, if they were going to kill them
anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the
cruelty?" Gitta Sereny asked of Franz Stangl. But of course
the humiliation was the point, restaging early German
childhood exactly. Hitler--himself swaddled and left alone
in his feces by his mother--had told Germans in Mein
Kampf , "If the Jews were alone in this world, they would
suffocate in dirt and filth." In the Holocaust the Jews--"so
much like us" (Hitler)--would suffocate in dirt and filth, as
all little, helpless German babies did all day long at the
hands of their mothers. And since the "little shitter"
German babies were also covered with lice, vermin and
rodents as they lay swaddled in their cradles, unable to
move, Jews too were called "lice, vermin and rats" as they
were locked into the concentration camps, told "This is a
death camp. You'll be eaten by lice; you'll rot in your own
2846
shit, you filthy shitface." Some guards even restaged the

rodent attacks "by inserting a tube into the victim's anus, or
into a woman's vagina, then letting a rat into the tube. The
rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the victim's
internal organs." Later toilet training of German children
was also restaged, often in precise detail, as by having the
ghetto-latrine supervised by a "guard with a big clock,
whom the Germans dressed comically as a rabbi and called
the ‘shit-master.'"
Incidentally, this film has it that you can visit someone who
tortured you thirty years previously and they can be fully
recalled to it. As the film shows these two men, this is
plausible -- for they're never lost to themselves during the
war. But this normally would not have been the case. Wars
are periods where people have bonded with their mother
nations, set about to destroy guilty villains -- projections of
their own childhood "bad selves" -- and thereby nurture for
themselves a glorious feeling of purity, of cemented "good
boy" or "good girl" status, absent contaminants. Once this
madness is over, like the postwar 1950s after WW2, people
are mostly detached from whom they once were -- literally,
a map of their everyday mental life would be completely
different; have it lorded over by more regular areas. They'd
be back to whom they were previous, the Weimer Germans
who were all set about their regular bourgeois life before
they became the 1930s-40s Volk, would be back simply to
"shopping" and building families, not ganging up on Jews
on the streets, which they -- not just the Nazis --
collectively did.
2847
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Labels: colin firth, lloyd demause, railway man
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Transcendence
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Transcendence
In a recent New Yorker we learned that many of those
earning instant fortunes for their apps are feeling pretty
guilty about it. It's pretty tough, they proclaim, to enjoy
your millions when you're aware of just how hard and
rewardless a life your own mother had to make due with.
Specifically, though to make their apps they "borrowed
office space and subsisted on a diet of instant ramen,"
though they knew "in the back of [their] heads […] [how]
hard you worked, that you sacrificed your stability and you
took on the risk of financial ruin for a long while," that
"[y]ou did things that other people were not willing or
capable of," it still "feels awful," for they "couldn't get rid
of the image of [their] mothers in [their] cars, driving to
work." The truth is, that if the only thing they had to
contend with was the fact that their mothers had much
harder lives, they've already amply contended with it as a
source of guilt. For added to their belief that their mothers
worked hard for them to live easier lives, would be how
conceivably they've fit their sacrifice and gumption in
creating the apps in with how society normally lauds and
backs those who've achieved success -- endless hours and
2848
ramen noodles: no silver platter there! Stop your fretting

and start enjoying your hard-earned money, son! So the
reason some of them are even shutting down their apps so
they can be spared the guilt of fifty thousand dollars daily
accruing to them, is because they didn't so much intuit that
their mothers deserved more in life but were thoroughly
aware of it since birth: their mothers had them to provide
them some of the love and devotion they hadn't yet
received in life, and not only weren't much interested in
them otherwise but couldn't help themselves from being
angry when their children switched off them to focus on
their own pursuits. Some success might somehow be
justified -- but not a surfeit of it, for it'd feel nowhere
within the vicinity of what should be lent to you after you'd
been the good boy and seen to your mother first. To deal
with that, you'd need a miracle to be spared the self-
recriminations that'd accrue from it. You'd need
transcendence.
Nominally, the transcendence we are to focus on in this
movie is the one that brings a human consciousness -- it
turns out sorta successfully -- into a machine. The human
electrical / chemical that somehow begets
consciousness can become the machine's purely electrical
that miraculously accrues the same thing. But the movie
clearly wouldn't have been interested if this transcendence
hadn't involved a very powerful person and the
magnification of already-held powers -- if, say, the first
move from human consciousness into a machine involved a
Gandhi type that'd shut itself down the very moment it
realized it could even make Google its bitch. What the
2849
movie is really concerned with is how to transcend the guilt

of being an enfranchised, empowered person; how to be at
peace with the world as someone who's already powerful
and isn't slowing down.
Most of the movie would have gone just the same if it
proved a hunt for Johnny Depp's Will Caster, without
regard for whether he'd been on the precipice of something
egregiously transformative like putting a human soul into a
machine. He's one of the leaders of technological
advancements that magazines like "Wired" fete, and
because he just won't stop, anarchists -- show-stoppers --
are now literally gunning for him. What transcendence --
the official one, man into machine -- does in the film is
operate as the kind of theatricality and deception that failed
to buy Batman time against the initiated Bane but which
allows Caster time to readapt his current life elsewhere
whilst trying to come up with something that might give
him moral advantage over his persecutors. So he takes his
life, which was one of riches and independent existence (he
owned sole his multi-billions--dollars-worth of computers)
and of being one of the few great minds, that was proving
vulnerable, about to be beset and eradicated, elsewhere
where for awhile it isn't -- specifically, into a decrepit
desert town, that's got the cover of being some place
something about our time is telling us we have to
participate in making it realize how forlorn and lost to hope
it is by never quite recognizing its presence. And when the
government, fellow scientists, and anarchists alike unite to
hopefully bring him down, he doesn't allay the legitimacy
of their crusade with all his wholesale healing of the
2850
townspeople -- because he's at the same time made them

his troops -- but possibly could have if a bit more time was
allotted his healing of world's ecosystems. Indeed, if the
images we are shown of whole forests being healed, of
pollutants wholesale removed from lakes, went a minute
longer on screen, not only might more of us might have
been converted to the side of machine-man hybrid Caster
but we'd near expect the finish to involve some Earth-first
anarchist group taking out the anti-technology one hunting
him down.
If with this he'd been granted another reprieve, he might
have reintroduced himself to the planet in his new physical
avatar -- his duplicated previous physical body, proclaimed
that if let be he'll simply be furthering his Earth-cleansing
project, and the world might have let him just go for it.
He'd join Bill and Melinda Gates out there, completely
unharassed by the world, still in possession of billions but
transcended all doubts and demons, which have simply
slipped off him. That is, the great peace he experiences
when he realizes it's time to slip off human concerns, when
we see him as silicone dust levitating into a shrouding
cloud, should be understood experientially as the same
thing Bill Gates did when he dropped his post as head of
Microsoft and became his current form as -- not a god, but
an agent of Good, slipped off day to day errata and huge
ego concerns. At peace to go about the world. Vaccinated to
anything that would make us want to go out, target, and
chew at him.
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2851
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Labels: bill gates, film, johnny depp, lloyd demause, movie, transcendence
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Bad Words
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Bad Words
One of the key things we take from this film is that if you
want to intrude on an exclusively prole ritual like child
beauty pageants, dismaying parents and causing
participants to cry, by all means go for it -- we'll chortle
right along with you: films like "Little Miss Sunshine" and
"Bad Grandpa" paved the way for us to feel no
compunctions. But if you're intruding on a ritual being used
to build up children's resumes expecting to get into the ivy
leagues -- like Spelling Bs -- then you only get to half mean
it. A bright child of affluent, educated parents is inserted
into this movie -- purposely beset upon Jason Bateman's
Guy Trilby, on the presumption that Guy won't defeat the
dreams of a kid he ends up considering a friend. And
though the gambit works, you sense it wasn't owing to
friendship but that the kid served as a grinning "Cheshire
Cat," castration-reminder afflicting him throughout the
2852
movie: this kid is of the class that is getting it all right

now... do you, Guy Trilby, really mean your revenge so
deeply that you'd impinge upon the momentum of
gentrifiers successfully intimidating most of us from
speaking our own frustrations too loudly and from doubting
the bright sure forward momentum of the world? Didn't
think so. So enjoy your "hotel trashing" truculence for
awhile -- and heck, make mincemeat of the working class,
single mother, who's barely keeping a tether on her being
mentally stable, calling her, as you so deliciously do, a
"blown-out weak sock of a vagina" from a "shit-kicking
town." But you'll be a good boy and limit your wreckage
there.
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The final scene involves Guy ceding the championship to

Chaitanya Chopra, the son of Cosby-parent types of the
colour -- brown -- we're favouring now, not just for their
endorsement of multiculturalism -- which is cover -- but
for their intermixing into our elitist society confident
centuries-worth of Brahmanism. He's decided that he'd
already achieved what he wanted by entering the contest …
but with him ultimately losing and the type of child the
contest would want to win actually winning, it's hard to
imagine how that is. As such, the finish irritated me so
much I had to begin this review with harsh criticism. But if
one could somehow edit out Chaitanaya as so many have
mentally edited out Jar Jar from the "Star Wars" films, I'd
2853
have simply commended this film. Guy got royally ripped

off in life. His parents weren't there for him, and the school
system convinced him the world could readily do without
his further progress -- which was why he never finished the
8th grade. Twenty five years ago one might have made a
future for yourself none the less, but with today people
putting blinkers on all those without reassuring resumes
that ripple down ongoing progression as if the person at the
end is due to crack out of a human shell into an exfoliating
angel, his human story is already simply done: he belongs
with those history has simply discarded; people who are
living but so irrelevant to narratives we want to
superimpose upon the world he might just as well be a
ghost amongst the living, so much are we blurring their
aberrancy out of our vision. He couldn't even finish 8th
grade!," as he is sized up by one appraiser in the film. A
dead-end, still around, intermixing irritatingly amongst
those still with forward momentum -- complete, flatulent,
human yuck!
So he has nothing to lose by entering the Spelling B, and
there's a sense that even if he won at the nationals, the
world, however irritated by it, wouldn't either. When
contemporary films show youth beauty pageants being
disrupted, we're expected not to fret what the disruption
might be doing to the contestants because we're expected to
see the whole ritual as something dangerously aberrant
from what these kids ought to be doing anyway. It's already
a sidestep into something terribly foul, so disrupting it is
like stirring matter already settled into excrement. We are
learning, however, to be aware that the kind of performance
2854
exam that ostensibly can establish one as singular and truly

worthy -- the SATs -- is coming to bear the stink of an
affixed mark of one's lack of meaningful distinction as
well. For each increment of twenty thousand dollars in
parental income, a child's SAT score will increase by ten to
thirty points. Who you are, we are coming to appreciate --
and also desire to loudly advertise -- depends on the
amount of money your parents make. You are, that is --
whatever your hopes to be autonomous, your own person --
mostly a member of a class. If you were near the top of a
Spelling B, you'll be near the top of the SATs, and you'll
have come from parents around the two hundred thousand
income level who've hoisted into you the DNA, the
bullseye-perfect training, and perhaps most importantly, the
presumption, to achieve at this level. But if for some reason
you're bumped off early in life -- maybe by some crazy
Guy type, gone not truculent but violently anarchist -- not
to worry: every other person at your station possess the
same elite-level "algorithms," and they're still thriving.
We'd be upset that someone ragged took down one of the
elite, but not that you, personally, Chaitanaya -- or
whomever you might be -- are lost to us.
When a society is becoming so that even if you'd prefer
otherwise, you're still more able to see representatives of a
class than distinct individuals, the future -- at least for
awhile -- is foreclosed. It's entered one of those times
where some grand narrative is being played out, so it's
displaying extreme discretion in its allowance of the open-
ended -- and in truth is delighted when where where some
liberty is still permitted -- like in personal blogs -- people
2855
show themselves prominently motivated to mimic and

thereby hopefully a bit partake of, their heroes. During
times like these Guy really is disrupting nothing in
parading himself in this esteemed contest for uber-smart
kids, for in a sense the people he's intermixing with are --
as "Terminator 2's" Sarah Connor says -- "already dead";
those with futures, already determined. Rather, he's hoisting
himself into situations where really the pressure's on -- how
much harder for him to stand amongst the kids than for
them to stand amongst each other, being a prune
intermixing himself amongst grapes -- being a prune
loathed not just by the grapes but by the whole wine
industry for spoiling the year's vintages. He's remaining
calm amongst jeering and even better than that, something
that is actually hard to do when you can't imagine yourself
backed by peoples-who-actually-matter's approval for you
-- something that is occurring when liberals imagine
themselves frustrating pleb beauty pageants and, for that
matter, with terrorists undertaking their attacks, who
believe their mothers couldn't love them more for their
sacrifice. You know society is expecting you to stay quiet,
and you're keeping faith with yourself, seeing yourself
demonstrably keeping faith with yourself -- and this would
feel great. The world might be foreclosed but your own
future isn't playing out that way: a small flash of light
others might be attracted to.
Don't think so? Think being an adult amongst kids will
naturally make you an "expert player" amongst beginners?
Not if the world is against you -- as it is with Guy. For then
this bit from "Step Brothers" will more likely be the
2856
humiliation you'll experience, an older guy being shown

he's still afraid of the whopping a twelve year old could
afflict upon you -- how could you live ever after knowing
that?:
Actually, I'm lying a bit in that Guy is operating under a

sanction with some considerable credibility right now -- the
older white man who's heading the "Spelling B" is the
abandoning father he's revenging himself upon, only you
don't know this at the beginning. I actually am editing this
out of my remembrance of the film as well, not only
because it's obvious the father is hoisted as the ostensible
main concern to make it so that when the film humiliates
castrating women it can pretended as just aberrant fun kept
along the way rather than where the film's focus really lies,
but because it only inspires when you imagine him in a
sense time-travelling back to his past and patching into his
lifeline a successful besting of academic testing rather than
having once been discouraged and defined by it. His
victory, doing a lot for him, however invisible it might be
to everyone else, and unappreciated. Those who find people
like that interesting, those demonstrating private
realizations / victories invisible to and incommensurable
with everyone else -- like this film's Jenny Widgeon, played
by Kathryn Hahn -- and "Groundhog Day's" Rita, played
by Andie McDowell -- are interesting too. They don't so
much go for losers as are attracted to the open way.
2857

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Labels: bad words, justin bateman, kathryn hahn
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Draft Day
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Draft Day
The key scene in this movie is where Kevin Costner's
Sonny Weaver realizes what it is about the person he's been
shepherded to pick as the number one overall pick -- the
Heisman trophy-winner quarterback, Bo Callahan -- that
proves there's something foul about him. He notices that
after being sacked twice by the same player, he isn't able to
rebound but rather starts doing things like hurrying the ball
-- he let a player get to him, lets himself get rattled. The
linebacker who did this to him -- Vontae Mack -- is the
player Sonny wanted to pick as his first pick, and from
highlights of the same game, sees further confirmation for
choosing him, even though no one else had accounted him
the best player available. Vontae got booted from the game
-- but after an official hassled him after he gave away a
game ball to his sister in the stands: far from a pariah, he's a
selfless person who does everything for his family and
every-time-otherwise for his team -- what Sonny already
has seen and appreciated about him.
Very nice. But the man doing all the sorting is someone
2858
spending much of the film recovering from being cowed

himself -- Sonny agreed to deal three number one draft
picks in order to get the number one choice, under pressure
of a narcissitic owner insisting he make a big splash. And
rather than someone who cedes to his family, he's haunted
by having agreed to fire his father at his mother's behest,
and so now refuses her not only by not attending the
reading of his father's will but by not following through
with his father's requests on how to ceremoniously dispense
with his ashes. That is, if his personality was somehow
schlepped into a candidate for the number one draft, he'd be
exactly the type he'd deem a bust.
Ivan Reitman, the director, also produced "Animal House,"
a film we remember not for witch-hunting individuals for
character idiosyncrasies and for championing the
humdrum, but for the opposite -- a full-on hoisting up of
the odd as American emblematic. The soul of that film still
exists to some extent in Sonny, who seems a baby-boomer
bent on ensuring he doesn't relapse into being easily
amenable to the wishes of family seniors. He's someone
who's reminiscences on Joe Montana and John Candy
betray a love for the idiosyncratic and surprising -- even as
much as he keeps the good part of it to himself -- and
who's ongoing affinity for people like that carries forward a
bit with his encounters with the perennially unsure-footed,
out-of-place, nerdish intern. But still, there's a sense that
he's a man who's ceded himself at least half to "plastics" --
dull, "parental" expectations, that is -- too. The players he
wants for his team are a linebacker everyone knows will be
steadying but maybe not "a natural," a quarterback that has
2859
worked hard over the off-season so now can comfortably

throw ten yards further, and a legacy running back who
might have a problem with violence but is remonstrating
himself now as a dutiful agent of his father's earnest,
constant-shoulder-overlooking shepherding -- they're those
who's equivalent in university juniors would never have
pledged the unaccountable Delta of "Animal House" fame
but rather any other, which would've imbibed of the already
hewn that normally defines the ranks of a fraternity.
Further, there's a sense in even his telling of how Montana,
during a last minute comeback during a Superbowl game,
had motioned his teammates to check out John Candy in
the stands, he's enfranchising himself with the
remembrance of all that moment consisted of -- which
wasn't just cool-headedness but the delightfully aberrant; of
someone admitting himself a fan-boy whilst directing a
heroic drive -- while admonishing it for a younger
generation who hadn't been there so they'll understand it
only in chastised form -- as his simply keeping his cool
under duress. He's someone who knew what strange
surprises and delights a universe can offer, but willingly
played a part in putting it into thrill-discouraging strictures
for a younger generation to only know. He'd become a guy
who, for example, even if fully aware that someone like
Gretzky could succeed brilliantly despite saying he'd lift a
barbell only once he saw one score a goal, wouldn't oblige
a younger generation this remembrance unless somehow it
could substantiate the admirability of his young star's
working real hard to bulk up during the off-season --
perhaps by establishing him as someone who doesn't
2860
foolishly change habits that are working for him, rather

than someone who thumbed his nose to expectations...
someone who was so admirably (for some) or infuriatingly
(for others) insouciant to how what he said might have
made him seem an effete intruder gorging on having
inextricably made a whole sport his personal lounge and-
sometimes bitch.
There's a sense that I take this film to well represent the
baby boomer's legacy at this point. They're still a
generation so enabled by having grown up in a youth-
favoring, prosperous time, that they have a better chance of
weathering the damage sticking up for what you believe in
can bring. Through playful, fearless exploration -- which
involved terribly consequent generational conflict,
violence, and permanent splits -- they enabled themselves
the self-esteem, the self-love, to do so. When Sonny
decides to keep faith with his original choice for his team,
even though it means choosing a player no other would
value as even close to being the draft's best, and with it
needlessly costing him three number one draft picks, I
believed that the character was going to be able to weather
the damage this would bring. It'd cost him his job; he'd be
endlessly ridiculed (even if he made an apt choice that
showed he saw things others didn't, the fact that he let
himself be dissuaded from his preferred choice in the first
place would always showcase his hesitancy, his shame); his
mother would have further reason to discredit him as an
adult -- and yet he'd know he'd done what he believed was
the right thing for the team, and as having done it despite
testing. He of course gets the happy ending -- but you
2861
believe he was ready if all that'd of been gifted him was

tumult. We know it'd have been very hard to have done the
same but appreciate the reminder that this is what it is to
keep faith with yourself -- the world might first hate you
for it, then cast you off as a loser to be forgotten about -- an
assignation that'd stick. If the film had ended with his
simply making the right choice… as he sat alone before us,
would we have fretted our close proximity to his seeping
poisonous carapace? We just can't be seen with you, dude…
as we scrambled to cast our lot with some group giving
themselves high-fives over actually obvious choices or
easily accomplished goals rather than the loner forbearing
himself before demons the rest of us are pretending exist
only in his imagination.
Boomerish too, for me, was his whole making his mid-life
about needing to brace battles most of us would prefer to
imagine quarantined into our early adulthood. That is, his
mother's coming close to being all over him, a net spread
out to trap his autonomy. She doubts his business acuity,
hates his new girlfriend, and has succeeded in humiliating
him by determining his most important sport and personal
decisions in the past -- she managed to convince him to fire
his father, for his ongoing participation with the Browns
being bad for his health, even as his father would of clearly
had it otherwise and chosen to end his life earlier than
medically required but requisite to keeping lifelong fidelity
to his team intact. He ends up being up to her challenge;
but it's a brave thing for a film to suggest that despite being
a well-placed boomer with all the accoutrements of being
the generation that's firmly now in charge, you're still
2862
vulnerable to feeling like despite it all you can regress to

being someone who doesn't yet know they're up to fending
off determined parents in the first place -- the "Graduate's"
"plastic" battle all over again, but at age sixty. Very brave
indeed to admit to that dispiriting possibility!
But if he's still the 60s kid, he's still bent on directing youth
not to be, to be less rebellious and (therefore) self-realized
than his generation was. This strikes me as a current
boomerish prediliction as well. Obviously we're all feeling
that this is no longer a time for creating artistic paeans to
self-indulgence, so if you're going to keep to yourself the
possibility of keeping faith with yourself regardless, the
way to do this without guilt is to show that you're going to
do what you can to limit the ability of the generation that'll
eventually be taking over to stretch the possibilities of
human growth when and if they gird themselves to insist on
the same. You tell them -- like this movie does -- that the
best performers are those who are loyal to their family, who
graciously accept snubs and lumps, and carry themselves
with discretion and modesty, even though if you look back
just five years ago the best performers were the likes of
Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, and Tiger Woods -- those
who, together, were abrasive, self-infalting, two-faced, and
slept with towns full of women. Heck, there's even a scene
where a player is instructed not to unduly tweet, and where
the player is shown accepting the wisdom of that... and
with that any possibility the player would ever develop the
2863
irrepressible individualism of Kobe Bryant, who still can't

be stopped from daily reminding us that the message a
corporation would have us imbibe is vulnerable anytime its
greatest assets speak their unrehearsed honest opinion
regardless. But, ah, he's almost out of the sport, so we we
can pretend he already isn't here and safely double-down on
young athletes who in comparison are somewhat lacking in
depth, personality and irascibleness.
Given the predilections of our age, it's appropriate that the
film shows acquiring the number one overall draft pick as
something of a curse -- with it meaning you're going to be
saddled with someone we still haven't stripped of
associations we've spent decades building up as requisite to
this choice, of him being a prima dona, that is. Someone
like the quarterback in the film, Bo Callahan, who's got a
website devoted to all the women he's slept with, is a
gelled, stylish, pretty boy, who's already been feted to the
skies... and who yet might just still be the next messiah to
transform not only your team but your sport. It means being
saddled with someone expectations still insist will involve
more your adjusting to him than him to whatever system
you've already got in place -- by legend, the number-one-
overall redefines everything, something we sense in the
film when Sonny momentarily feels beholden to the
possibility that getting superstar Bo is still better for the
team than keeping relevant all their agonized previous
months of prep for the upcoming season.
So the real "victory" of the film is akin to a successful
potlatch -- the neat giving away of unwanted riches,
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without looking foolish for having done so -- like as if

you're just averse to the limelight. Sonny tells another
general manager that getting three number two picks is
worth giving up access to a substantial number one, and
this film informs this preference with wisdom -- the three
players Sonny gets for Bo are exemplified for being
hardworking and loyal, or as useful special team
players/irregulars: the associations we normally ascribe to
second bests, seven out of tens, okays but not beautifuls.
The message of this film is a perfect fit for news that one of
the best sports teams this season is the Boston Bruins, who
dealt away their previous two superstars -- Phil Kessell and
Tyler Seguin -- and is now a team without star leadership at
its center position. You can still triumph, despite these
moves maybe having more to do with being superstitiously
averse to charismatic, "golden-locked" offensive leaders
than to hockey sense, is how this fact was enthusiastically
greeted in some quarters. They've still got the giant Zdeno
Chara… but that's like a frowning, desolate, craggy terrain
being unafraid to inform of its being backed underneath by
voluminous magma, or an unattractive, apish lout that he's
backed by a surprise charge of Popeye strength -- they
safely serve as advertisements of your overall overt lack of
incriminating show(iness), that is.
There's a nice line in the film where Coach Penn, played by
Denis Leary, responds to Sonny's demand that he wants
more Tarzans on his team by saying that he's already got a
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full team of them… and that they could actually use a

Jane! This might be a hard thing to buy an NFL coach
saying, but something about the environment enabled for
the middle-aged adults in this film makes this latitude, this
evolution in style and attitudes, fit perfectly. And it's nice to
know that a good portion of football-loving middle
America would have been non-plussed by this as well, even
as much as it was probably requisite that a hero of theirs --
Denis Leary, playing a fully macho, former Dallas
Cowboys' coach, no less -- was the one who said it, and
however much they might not have been if the analogy
chosen required the coach requesting a Nancy not a Jane.
There's been a lot of evolution in attitudes since the 50s,
and this 60s generation deserves credit for spreading and
mounting it; and it's nice to see them flexing their success,
their successful overlay over all areas of the social
environment, in this film.
But what's not so nice is when you sense within the same
film that could do this, building blocks for fearing what is
queer and different being newly constituted. So much of the
movie is about hunting down something about this
ostensibly flawless candidate which could make him
ruinous to any team that drafted him -- a Trojan horse.
Sonny at one point says that all great players had flaws that
people weren't sure wouldn't prove to actually derail them
success in the NFL, and uses this as excuse to do a
substantial close-examine on already heavily vetted Bo. But
with Bo he isn't interested in exploring the kinds of
weaknesses he listed for the others. He isn't interested in
knowing if he throws too hard or not hard enough, but if he
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stinks as a human being; and believes he finds evidence

that he in fact does. He can't be dissuaded from thinking
there is something terribly revealing about the fact that
none of his teammates attended his 21st birthday, which
can't be smoked out from previous coaches or other players
because they're keeping hush-hush for the honour of their
school's player going number one in the draft, and the
movie wants you to believe it to. His friends can't stand
him -- for good reason, we are being told. And so here in
this movie the kind of fear of the awry and different that for
ages derailed, for instance, Jews from getting into Harvard
-- everyone knew they were smart, but something about
their character… Best to go with the known.
So Bo is effectively shown up as someone "so obnoxious
seniors'd beat [him] up once a week," and as such the NFL
team that plays the "Animal House" Delta role in taking in
this known "Otter" anyway, are the Seahawks, not the
Browns, who not only knew him to be showy but just saw
him on live television throw a temper tantrum when not
chosen number one. You take how the movie shows the
personal life of the Brown's GM, with the fearlessness of
the Seahawks' GM's in effect rescuing an athlete from a
rapidly accumulating, entirely rumor-based pile-on that
would have ruined his life, and you'd of had the movie we
should have been gifted with -- and would of hoped of from
Ivan Reitman. As is, half of it has to be mentally scrapped
for legitimizing stigma and bigotry. "It's okay to sit beside
the person without any friends; he or she may not bite,"
we're in need to tell ourselves afterwards.
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Noah
5ruRgI1unIU/UzbhUuVIB_I/AAAAAAAAAWQ/KNJYVBaTNMQ/s1600/noah1.j
pg
Noah
Anyone who's seen Aronofsky's previous film might be
wondering what is up with this one, for it's about the
inverse of "Black Swan." In "Black Swan," a parent's
control over her child has to be breached in order for her to
realize her potential. To facilitate this is another ballerina,
who consistently prompts her to explore her rebellious side,
to live a little. No snake in the garden is she, but someone
with good intentions -- and who is in fact necessary to
assist Natalie Portman's Nina in shoving her mother aside
and embracing her own fate.
In "Noah," Noah is the parent determined to have his will
hold over his children, and he is leveraged powerfully;
impossibly powerfully -- by God. One of his boys -- Ham --
to some extent plays the equivalent of Natalie Portman's
rebellious child Nina, in that he shows signs of wanting to
step outside of his father's influence and discover the world
for himself. But those he'd discover there to enwisen him --
specifically Ray Winstone's formidable near half-god,
Tubal-Cain -- tempt for a variety of legitimate reasons, but
not in the least for any goodness of heart. Basically he's the
one guy left -- other than a rapidly aging grandfather -- who
is a serious rival to Noah in presence and will, so is
appealing, drawing, mostly on this score. When Ham slays
2868
Tubal-Cain, to frustrate his own self-development and to

grant Noah his ongoing dominion over his whole family's
fate, it might read a little bit as if Portman's swan had
relapsed and handed herself over to her mother; but Tubal-
Cain just can't register as someone other than someone who
mostly just has to be destroyed -- let loose, all Ham's sisters
would be under his concubinage, and all the other boys, no
doubt slain. In fact, the only reason you can believe Ham
went along with Tubal-Cain to the extent that he did was
because some pent up need to rebel against his father was
having to play out with material far too hot for the matter:
There's a sense that he's just the kid who wants to balk back
against his overdetermining parents by bringing unwelcome
company home for dinner, but that this instinct has to play
out with his escorting to the table the most dangerous of
men. In this early, heavily macho universe, rightful child
rebellion has to play distant second fiddle to letting the one
good man heavily laden in rightful purpose, escort
everyone through to an environment where they might
breathe a bit easier.
So Ham relapses to Noah, and the women do too -- they
plead with him as powerfully as possible, threaten him their
rejection of their love if he slays the two newly born girls.
But however much they were both responsible for
introducing the possibility of new human life to the fore,
they offer no sense that they can really do anything to
ultimately thwart him if he means for the human race to
perish. However, when Noah sees the girls, he can't bring
himself to kill them. It's not failure in nerve, but that he saw
only goodness in them.
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Once they've struck land, their main odyssey is over. And

as Ham goes off alone, he'll surely be reconsidering a lot of
what went on in that dense period of time from the
beginning to completion of the arc, with the first thing
being his father's conviction that each of them were full of
sin. To his father, the baby girls were clear of it. But one
would have thought that compared to whom they as a
family were being likened to, Noah would have realized
how comparatively free they all were. Every other human
they come across is pure mongrel -- absolutely terrifying,
daunting in motive: rape-and-cannibalism-for-kicks types.
Noah pairs his family with them, likens them to them, even
though their difference is so obvious and extreme the only
thing they ever do when they stumble upon them is flee. As
film watchers, it's obvious that Noah has likened a very
decent nuclear family to what you'd only become once lost
to the human race -- zombies from humans, a la "World
War Z."
He might also ask himself if his father's finding all good in
infants but only corrupted souls with the rest of them, fits
with his incrementally harsh response to their independent
actions as they age. The youngest boy plucks a flower to
claim its beauty, and Noah tells him not to do so, but
kindly, and with explanation. The middling -- Ham himself
-- introductorily hefts an axe he's been given, and Noah
yells at him to drop it immediately. The eldest builds a raft
so to flee with his wife, and Noah strides forward and
launches a fire bomb at it. Regarding the axe, knowledge of
the close-call Tubal-Cain presented to their freedom might
2870
ebb, and he might keep faith that his desire to continue

holding the axe, to keep it, had nothing to do with some
innate desire for violence but just possessing something
party to the fully self-realized Tubal-Cain. Regarding his
anger at his father for not letting him continue to try and
free the girl he had just "claimed," he might realize it wasn't
so much about virtues of the girl herself but that she
represented something he'd obtained -- won --
independently. And he might realize that his decision to
lead his father down a path where he might be slain, owed
not to sin, nor to his fealty to the girl, but to the fact that
Tubal-Cain was legitimately beguiling him as a preferable
leader for suggesting that life isn't about obeisance but
about exhilarating, incorrigible appropriation.
Russell Crowe's Noah is a giant of a man. When Tubal-
Cain arrives to challenge him, asking how he would dare
challenge his army all alone, his response -- "I'm not alone"
-- could of had him motioning his biceps and his barrel
chest rather than to their accents -- the rock ogres at his
behest -- and still seemed half credible. A man like that is
going to do well for himself in any age associated primarily
with the type of weapons that can be forged -- a stone-aged,
a bronze-aged, an iron-aged one. But not necessarily when
even a man of a build like that could be conclusively
stopped by a phone call to the police made by any wimpy
lad, and what is visceral and compelling is more likely to
be the perfectly played ballet. That is, you put Noah into
the early 21st century, shepherding, domineering his
children, directing them not to touch, try, experiment with
"that," to obey his will in all things, then he'd be more like
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Nina's mother -- Barbara Hershey's Erica. And the axe Ham

so wants to experiment as his own becomes the cosmetics
Nina steals from the dressing quarters of the long-reigning
star of the New York ballet -- Winona Ryder's Beth -- one
of the first things she does to show she isn't content to
forever be the accent-role player her narcissist mother
would be happy for her to be, for it meaning her never
growing outside her orbit. And the journey into the wild
lands he undertakes alone, would be Nina's letting herself
stay late at the bar, ignoring her mother's phone calls,
experimenting with a space where for the first time her
mother doesn't exist for her. And Tubal-Cain's casually
snatching one of precious only-two-of-each-species beasts
in the arc to snack upon, which drew Ham's stunned,
admonishing but also admiring "you're not allowed to do
that," would be Mila Kunis's Lilly's smoking where she
wasn't supposed to: evidence not so much of sin but of
being undaunted by one's surroundings. And Ham's leading
his father to where Tubal-Cain might kill him, would be
Nina crushing the door on her mother's hand, beating her
until she intuits where her mother had hid the key to the
door confining her, fully prepared for this to be the last
contact she ever has with her. And Tubal-Cain's "I am your
king" … would of course be Nina's "I'm the swan queen,
you're the one who never left the corps!" Not hubris, that is,
but self-actualization, self-completion.
Set in the 21st-century, the flower that mustn't be plucked

becomes the one that must be, that actually wants to be,
2872
even as much as its mostly about the thrill of appropriating

a world to suit your own delight, even if it means incurring
damage and harm. It becomes Nina's digging her teeth into
her instructor's lip, hurting him, and later seducing him like
a succubus; it's about awing an audience, quite prepared to
have them leave so affected they're distraught, showing
how she's become all bite and them, the performance, her
prey.
"Black Swan" can be found in the virile moments of
resistance of "Noah," including Tubal-Cain's fantastic
declaration that he isn't afraid of magic, nor -- quite
obviously -- of God. But as enlivened as it often is, you
almost have a sense that here there's no time for it, for what
is key is that Noah himself remains immune to influence
outside of God -- that he remains the stalwart who doesn't
change at all. The strange result is that if I was to
encapsulate this film with two images it isn't really what
I've done here, but rather just of Noah and Tubal-Cain: the
two giant hefts of will and muscle. At the finish I'm not
sure if the thrill you experience from the film owes much
different from what you'd get from a Arnold
Schwarzenegger "Conan" flick, which I should relish only
if I'm in the mood for a stripped down, simplified time,
where bludgeoning meaty patriarchs not visceral rebellious
swan queens ruled.
JXbOfMoVzFQ/UzgxIjPpdaI/AAAAAAAAAWg/hO5fhSYzXNs/s1600/black-
swan_-natalie_portman_film-ache.jpg
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Monday, March 24, 2014
Divergent
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nt-movie-teaser-soldiers.jpg
Hmmm ...

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The beginning of time

Lawrence Krauss wrote:
At rare moments in scientific history, a new window on the
universe opens up that changes everything. Today was quite
possibly such a day. At a press conference on Monday morning
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a team of
scientists operating a sensitive microwave telescope at the
South Pole announced the discovery of polarization distortions
in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is the
observable afterglow of the Big Bang. The distortions appear
to be due to the presence of gravitational waves, which would
date back to almost the beginning of time.
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[…]
For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might
illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the
need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of
purpose, is truly terrifying. But Monday’s announcement
heralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such
cosmic existential questions are becoming accessible to
experiment. (“A scientific breakthrough lets us see to the very
beginning of time,”Newyorker.com)
-----
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might
illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the
need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of
purpose, is truly terrifying.
I doubt it. It'll just be interpreted as further hemming God in,
which doesn't get rid of Him but inflates the needs of acolytes
to clear Him some room.
God suits an emotional need, born out of the kind of care we
received as children. He likes you … so long as you
masochistically subject yourself to Him. If you had more
loving parents, the sky is cleared of gods; and while you'll
thrill at further learning how the universe was born, the truth is
it could accidentally be revealed to have at its core some awful
Demon, or bizarro God, and, as long as now tamed, might not
instruct how we go about our life all that much.
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very>
Better health coverage might be a bigger deal, as well that
artists get the funding to introduce new things in the universe
for us to get excited about. New things, built out of our current
matrix -- and thus most especially relevant to us, our current
desires/needs, not one which way predates a conditionally
loving God, child-sacrificing neolithics, barely empathic first
mammals, dumb, ridiculous-sized reptiles, clumps of cells with
2876
no cognation, bare planets, heat, waves, dust.

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With the protagonist, or with those she

sucked off?
Richard Brody wrote:

What the four-hour run of the two “volumes” of Lars von
Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” shows and says about its protagonist
is trivial, but what it reveals about von Trier and his method is
worth considering.
A man returning from a small convenience store finds a
woman lying—torpid and bleeding—in a sepulchral courtyard.
She refuses medical care, refuses the police, but will accept a
cup of tea, and goes with him to his apartment. She’s Joe
(Charlotte Gainsbourg); he’s Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård).
After getting cleaned up, she rests in his bed and tells him the
story of her life, which is mainly the story of her sex life.
Throughout the telling, the quietly fanciful Joe, a sort of erotic
Scheherazade, intently affirms a vague and unnamed guilt that
the polymathic scholar Seligman tries to reason her out of.
Joe’s precocious genital consciousness led her to follow the
lead of a high-school friend, called B (Sophie Kennedy Clark),
in a game of sexual conquests aboard a train. (Young-adult Joe
is played by Stacy Martin.) In her independent life, Joe often
took as many as ten lovers in a single night. Some of them are
young, some old; some handsome, some plain; some fit, some
flabby; some stylish, some lumpish. And if there’s any doubt
of their variety, a montage of lovers’ genitals, seen in close-up,
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makes the point: Joe doesn’t pursue a parade of groomed

beauties or well-endowed studs, she has sex with a seemingly
representative slice of the male demographic. And Joe,
apparently, is not alone—she’s only one member of a group
that formed in school, a secret sect of young women, or, as B
called it, a “little flock,” that chants “mea vulva, mea maxima
vulva,” and repudiates love in the sole pursuit of sex.
This indiscriminacy—the choice of partners not by beauty,
charm, or charisma but on the basis of what Joe calls
“morphological studies”—is the key to the movie’s pitch. Von
Trier is the best advertising person in the movie business, and
he has come up with a movie that is an ingenious commercial
for itself. The average male art-house viewer emerges from the
first part of Volume I filled with the pleasant idea that there are
young women out there—young, pretty, sleek, and determined
—who will suck him off in a random train compartment even
though he’s forty, married, and faithful, or sleep with him on a
regular basis despite his bald pate, bad clothing, bland affect,
and blubbery gut.
[…]
“Nymphomaniac” is von Trier’s sexual tantrum, a cinematic
declaration against faithfulness. For von Trier, love means
having to do things you don’t want to do at a given moment,
whether it’s sleeping at home beside your spouse when a
momentarily more enticing lover awaits or having Sunday
dinner at the in-laws. Love means always having to say you’re
sorry. And far from being sorry, he’s cavalierly indifferent.
Along the way, he offers repellently racist words and gags
along with a sophistical endorsement of them; a definition of a
good Jew (wanna guess? “anti-Zionist”); a repudiation of
therapy (old news chez von Trier); a revulsion at parenthood;
and a generalized sense (rendered as a specific visual metaphor
in Vol. II) that any attempt to defer or deflect immediate sexual
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gratification is a mortification that leads swiftly to a total

monastic repudiation of life itself.
[…]
Actually, there is one sequence that von Trier films with care
and passion.
[…]
The masochistic relationship is what von Trier films with an
almost palpable sense of excitement. What’s notable about
those scenes is the way that they define the sadist (a man,
called K, played by Jamie Bell) and leave his motives
undefined. He, not Joe (now the adult, maternal Joe, played by
Gainsbourg), is the focus of these scenes, and the meticulous
practicality of his ministrations, as well as his overt, robust,
nearly gleeful vigor in inflicting pain, is the sole focus of von
Trier’s visual pleasure.
[…]
The core fantasy is of a woman who is man’s random source of
pleasure and who, when she withholds herself from manhood
at large because of her emotional bonds (or would take other
action resulting from those bonds), von Trier sees fit to punish
her for it, brutally. And the woman finds that punishment just
and apt, not requiring redress of any sort.
[…]
(Lars Von Trier’s joylesssexual tantrum, Newyorker.com)
-----
She comes across mostly as a rebel -- I'm not sure how well
male viewers are avoiding situating themselves inside her,
experiencing her as their avatar. Going through the train might
have brought to the fore our own memories of having done
something generically akin to that -- the specifics concerning
the man who had to be sucked off to win the candy might not
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be that important if we were conceptualizing him mostly as the

tough-get we were once obligated to chase down to make up
for previous losses. In regards to the man with the blubbery
gut, this was the part of the film where after shucking off
societal norms she was figuring out what actually would meet
her needs -- I'm wondering if even this male viewer was too
much indulging in this "Groundhog Day," what if there are no
rules? possibility to be stepping outside her much, even when
his likeness in physique and affect is draped into view as a
draw.
I appreciate your concerns about how love is portrayed, but
somehow despite the interest von Trier takes in the
sadomasochism, she still came across here as the getting-on,
hopeless addict, who lost a better happiness for some mid-life
crisis, crazy thrill-ride. This might say something about what
Labeouf brought to the film.
Parenting and therapy is refuted, but it can seem her loss.
Seligman might not have much of a draw for her -- she can be
pretty cold, brutal to him -- but I thought they both would have
done well if they'd ended up friends, a la "Breakfast Club."
Both decent listeners; willing to offer feedback and also open
to being proven wrong. His being so excited at being able to
relate his book knowledge to her experience, is pretty
compelling -- and I don't think she was quite immune. I also
enjoyed some of the moments she shared with her "adopted
daughter," as well as with her father. Von Trier's excitement for
the violence, is no friend to the human warmth that is in the
film.
specialtramp @AyeEye
If interviews are anything to go by the depression you refer to
2880
is the director's own. Why, then, make a trilogy of movies

about depressed women whose sexuality goes off the rails? In
Antichrist Gainsbourg's character's sexual desires lead
indirectly to the death of her child (punishment) and then
directly to the her murder of her husband and suicide. Here
Gainsbourg abandons her family because she wants more sex,
even though she gets no pleasure from it.
IOW, why not a male protagonist? (Here's a trick, if you're not
sure if something is misogynist, imagine a man in the same
role/position, ask yourself "Is it degrading, humiliating or just
plain wrong?" and then ask yourself why.)
What's feminist about a woman who compulsively has sex she
doesn't enjoy, and yet believes she deserves punishment for it.
Scratch that - what's *interesting*, new or insightful about
watching a female character who compulsively has sex she
doesn't enjoy, and then gets punished for it? I believe the
descriptions of critics claiming the films aren't pornographic
but I'm pretty sure Von Trier is getting off here.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston@specialtramp
I'm glad he did so, though. A mother's willingly torturing her
child -- the big reveal in Antichrist -- is pretty much beyond
what any of us can tackle right now. The limits of therapy were
helpfully revealed, when her husband realizes why he was
having so much trouble dissuading her she was evil -- "You did
... what?!"
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very>
This film teased at an explanation, beyond evil. The child's
abandoned because it's seen as something which mocks and
laughs at you when you so desperately are in need of the
opposite. And the reason why you need so much, and why
you'd spend your life throwing yourself at the rescuing-knight
male sex, is because you had a "cold bitch" mother who turned
her back on you. Isn't that why the final scene in Antichrist --
men had thus far proved irrelevant to the fates passed on
through the mother-daughter dyad? Willem Dafoe was
beginning to get it; Seligman was a step back.
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Impossible to defend
Andrew O’Hehir wrote:
[…]
Instead, I’d rather go beneath the surface to look at the
structural function of these stories – the role they play in the
cultural economy – where I think we can identify even more
intriguing similarities. Both “Divergent” and “The Hunger
Games” are fundamentally works of propaganda disguised as
fantasy or science fiction. They’re not propaganda on behalf of
the left or the right, exactly, or at least not the way we
generally use those words in America. They are propaganda for
the ethos of individualism, the central ideology of consumer
capitalism, which also undergirds both major political parties
and almost all American public discourse. It’s an ideology that
transcends notions of left and right and permeates the entire
atmosphere with the seeming naturalness of oxygen in the air.
But at least if we acknowledge that it is an ideology, we can
begin to understand that it limits political action and political
debate, and restricts the heated warfare between Democrats
and Republicans to a narrow stretch of policy terrain.
To begin with, if we accept the maxim that all fictional works
about the imagined future are really about the present, what do
these works have to say? They contain no intelligible level of
social critique or social satire, as “1984” or “The Matrix” do,
since the worlds they depict bear no relationship to any real or
proposed society. Where, in the contemporary West, do we
encounter the overtly fascistic forces of lockstep conformity,
social segregation and workplace regimentation seen in these
2883
stories? I’m not asking whether these things exist, or could

exist, I’m asking where we encounter them as ideology, as
positive models for living.
In the world modeled by Apple and Facebook and Google, the
answer is pretty much nowhere. The organization-man
stereotype is universally mocked, from corporate boardrooms
to political debates to beer commercials. They serve the
function Emmanuel Goldberg served for Big Brother. Every
CEO who’s spent decades in the executive suite is told he must
rebrand himself as a maverick; the entire drama of the 2012
election involved Mitt Romney’s hilarious efforts to make
himself look like an outsider. Every right-thinking person in
our age knows her survival depends on her self-branding; we
are all meant to be entrepreneurs, innovators, rebels, free
spirits. The insistent theme of the consumerist economy is that
we are all “divergent,” the cool-sounding label that renders
Woodley’s character an outcast, and that the mechanism of the
market is calibrated to thrum to our unique personal frequency.
So, no, the oppressive future societies depicted in “Divergent”
and “The Hunger Games” are not allegorical representations of
the present, whatever Tea Partyers may tell you. (Please
observe: I am not saying there is no danger of fascism in
America. But it will come in a prettier package.) Rather, they
are exaggerated frames placed around works of social praise,
or panegyric, to use the Athenian term, works designed to
remind us how grateful we should be to live in a society where
we can be “ourselves,” where we can enjoy unspecified and
entirely vague freedoms. In both cases, this message arrives
entangled with the symbolism of female empowerment, which
lends a contemporary flavor and makes the pill go down easier.
Whether that makes the pseudo-feminism of these stories an
integral part of that message I’m not sure, but there’s little
2884
doubt that over its history feminism – once conceived as a

social or communitarian philosophy – has acclimated itself to
the individualist world order.
[…]
The model of individualism presented as so noble and so
embattled in these oxygen-propaganda movies is in fact the
authoritarian ideology of our time, the instrument used by the 1
percent to drive down wages, dominate and distort the political
process and make all attempts at collective action by those
below look stodgy, embarrassing and futile. (“Divergent” and
“HungerGames” are capitalist agitprop, Salon.com)
I appreciate but am not certain about this analysis. My concern
would be that if people in mass can't realize that the people
supposed to be divergent actually aren't; if it doesn't concern
them that every other person reading the book and everybody
to the side, back, and in front of them in the theater is
convinced they'd be one of the rare-bird divergents as well;
then these aren't a very healthy stock of people. I'm not afraid
they're malleable; but that they're built to sacrifice themselves
for a group-hug.
I appreciate the observation that we won't know fascism when
it arrives -- if we want it, it'll have to overtly seem the very
opposite of every form we're familiar with; it'll have to come
with no guilt. Fascism came to Germany, though, with people
turning on Weimar individualism, its spiritual emptiness -- I'm
guessing its materialism. I'm wondering that we might actually
be entering a time where something still worthy is going to
look increasingly impossible to defend. Wouldn't it have been
better if Weimar Germany, with all its ostensible decay, had
2885
just continued? That Germany didn't go down the path it did in

the 30s and "evolve" into the Volk, where you didn't contribute
to secretly distinguish yourself but to display an orientation
you wanted to be commonly shared; and instead capitalist
individualism continued its day until about the 1960s, where
collectivism took a form we can totally get behind?
It concerns me that people like Chris Hedges has such a
problem with the 1960s for its individualism -- it heavily
qualifies his genuine appreciation for the progressive
movements then. It concerns me that Thomas Frank has such a
problem with the liberal professional class, making them seem
so egotistical and greedy. I don't trust the public mood, nor that
our most regressive couldn't switch on a dime to hardly caring
a damn about austerity measures, nor keeping afloat a 1% --
neither of which the Nazis gave one wit about. Under their
leadership, Germany recovered form the Depression first.
Thanks for the interesting review; the good prompt to think
some.
---
I'll add that I'm certainly not making open-praise for
individualism, just for people to be raised with sufficient love
and nurturance that they possess a ripe, distinctive personality
-- a well-developed soul. Only that the form of collectivism I
liked in the 1960s seems almost hated by what's arising in the
left for it's MEism -- these hippies were full of themselves,
narcissitic -- gorged down on peace, happiness, and
togetherness; and then when in the mood for it, coastal homes,
expensive foreign cars, kids in distinguished private schools! It
2886
was always, mostly about them, the increasingly confident new

"old left" is deeming them.
very>
I listen to them and posit them as naturally oriented into that
group in "Divergent" that everyone in the film has the sense to
walk as far away as they can from -- the monkish, self-
2887
abnegating one, where people are afraid to temper their bare

food with seasoning.
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Labels: andrew o'hehir, divergent, hunger games, weimar germany
Could of had elves instead

very>
2888

FPdUh2MevXA/UzCioXkh5_I/AAAAAAAAATw/L2iZzeXWYUo/s1600/lotr126.j
pg
Tim Donovon wrote:

There is a demographic group in crisis today, though they’re
rarely discussed. Occasionally, they’re used as a foil on
conservative cable news shows, where overpaid hosts sneer
derisively at their endemic “laziness.” Sometimes, members of
Congress will trot them out as straw men to drum up support in
rural districts.
These are not your struggling baristas with their undergraduate
degrees and mountains of debt, or your former-newsmen-
turned-retail-drones. They’re not “overeducated and
underemployed.” No, this demographic group,
the undereducated and underemployed, are in far more dire
straits. This subset of millennials might not look like the “Gen
Y” that’s commonly portrayed in the media — this site
included. They aren’t the duck-faced “Rich Kids of
Instagram,” the Lena Dunhams or the Mark Zuckerbergs that
we use as generational stand-ins (rather than, say, wealthy and
successful millennials LeBron James and Kendrick Lamar).
These millennials – young, undereducated, poor and, all too
often, minorities – exist in a state of permanent crisis, victims
of a new economic disenfranchisement that took root in the
Great Recession and, in the years since, has stubbornly
remained. We’re only now beginning to grasp its full scope —
and its potential implications for our nation’s future.
[…]
2889
(“Deadly myth aboutmillenials,” Salon.com)

------
America hates its kids. I gather it's been fun sport, but they had
better watch it. If somehow we all become united nationalists
again, in competition against places like China, Mother Russia,
and we look at our own youthful promise and see how much
work has to be done to build them up in esteem and skills, we
might not look so kindly on those who allowed such sad
lengthy wreckage upon them. Your best-trained were slipping
into retail, and you were still savoring the role of narcissistic
master surrounded by fretful kids? You could of had elves but
bullied them into goblins instead, because they cringe and
cower to authority while proud elves don't? Your time is over,
steward -- bring on the return of the king!
Link: Deady myth about millinials Salon

EndFragment

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Re-adopting the conquerer's position

Randa Jarrar said this:
I’ve written about the Boston bomber; about the U.S.
government’s attempts to deport my brother, which kept him in
jail for weeks; and about Israel detaining me – a U.S. citizen
– and denying me entry in March 2012, but the essay of mine
that has sparked the most impassioned responses is one about
…
2890
Belly dancing.
[…]
There were amazing, supportive, beautiful emails from Arab-
American sister writers.
There were also violently angry emails and tweets that, in a
typically sexist and fatphobic way, criticized my appearance
and my size.
I have been called a fat camel and a hairy ape and a dirty
terrorist ever since I moved to the U.S. at the age of 13, so –
I’m used to it. But call some people out for wearing genie
pants and makeup, which are supposed to make them look
Arab, and they go nuts.
In my essay, I historicized the appropriation of belly dancing,
but I naively thought people knew about the British empire,
about U.S. imperialism, about how these have fucked the
Middle East for centuries.
And belly dancing is one of many appropriations … it can be
argued that it’s so low on the scale. I mean, dancing? But look
at how people are reacting to it. What happens when we start
talking about Israel appropriating land illegally and settling on
it? About America’s colonization and its wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and the effects of those wars, about the current
drone campaigns, and on and on?
[…]
I’ve read the following arguments, all of which ignore the
systematic racism by the dominant culture:
[…]
At the end of the day, it’s not belly dance that people are
protecting. It’s the right to take anything they want and not be
criticized for it.
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I’m thrilled that something I wrote on my dining table in a few

hours, one I thought a couple of hundred people would read,
has sparked such a discussion. I refuse to sit quietly in the
margins and only speak when I can “calmly” educate and
teach. I’m fucking angry, y’all, at decades and centuries of
dehumanization, and belly dancing is just the tip of it – hate
mail be damned. (“I still can’t stand white belly dancers,”
Salon.com)
-----
Her ace in the hole is that liberals won't identify with the
conquerer's position -- that those they dominated weren't
beautiful indigenous worthy of thorough respect but actually
heavily beholden to many abhorrent, barbaric practices. Until
they do, her "you've enfranchised yourselves with an art from a
country your monstrous ancestors brutally, carnally ravaged,
and still today favor its grotesque appropriated form over its
far more beautiful original," has power. She can sashay over
you with pleasure, as she so-silly-girl does here in mocking
your 3000 responses to her article with it just having being
some casual blow from her nose. You've got to be aligned to
terrific power if when the horde masses, you in delight pro-
offer a mischievous quip -- "let them eat cake." And for now,
she is.
Liberals might lose their interest in primitivism if something
else helps define them against regressed
conservatives/republicans. This might just be avid defense of
the modern state, the early ones that colonized, which at least
in European cultures was also concurrent and absolute party to
the advance of science over superstition.
2892
-----
Resolute
Let's be honest. The author's lament has nothing to do with
belly dancing and everything to do with her seething dislike for
Americans of Northern European descent.
In this way, any previous wrong by anyone from their
"dominant culture" makes them equally guilty and invalidates
any right they have to participate in the cultural traditions of
others, or object to the hateful invective hurled their way. That
one person called her a "terrorist" is ample reason to rightfully
consider everyone in that culture an "imperialist".
All hatred directed toward them based on their class, race,
nationality or color is valid and cannot be "racism" because
they are members of a "dominant culture". Whatever their
personal beliefs or individual actions, they are still collectively
'guilty' by nature of their ancestry and residence. They forfeit
all right to enjoy, or participate, in the traditions of other
cultures and must accept that blind hatred and endless blame of
their culture is an integral part of multi-culturism.
It isn't that the author can't stand white belly dancers. It's that
she can't stand white people and is trying to justify her hatred
with all this talk of cultures. Next she will be telling us that
"some of her best friends are white people".
I write this as a member of a historically persecuted culture
who have undergone years of discrimination and stereotyping
based on their color, national origin, religious belief and
gender. I am confronted with daily reminders of how it remains
acceptable, and even encouraged, in some circles, to blame
people like me for others lack of employment, financial
success and family cohesion. My people are regularly
2893
characterized as ignorant, violent, drunken buffoons for the

enjoyment of other cultures. I am expected to watch my
cultural beliefs rendered as cartoon caricatures by Hollywood
and Madison avenue and would be considered overly sensitive
if I objected to how the Anglo culture has historically
oppressed me and now belittles my heritage to sell children's
cereal.
As an American male of Irish Catholic descent whose family
arrived in poverty after the end of slavery and had to overcome
signs that read "Irish need not apply" in order to find ways to
feed their family without the benefit of a welfare system, who
gave their blood and sometimes their life to defend and liberate
people from true oppressors, I find this article both ignorant
and highly offensive.
Theodore Rigley
@Resolute Hey, Lucky Charms libel! And, at least your
ancestral culture has been appropriated.
But overall, I think you've nailed it.
---
DaveSF
@Resolute Very well said.
---
@Resolute I'm of Irish descent, but I'm wondering before we
became historically oppressed peoples if we were all that,
though. I'm wondering because Romans once gauged our most
ancient ancestors as abominable child-sacrificers and
cannibals, and used it to legitimize their conquest. Which was
2894
bad. Awful. Cause all they wanted to do was rape, steal, and
conquest. But archaeologists did eventually reveal that they
were nevertheless child-sacrificers and cannibals, though.
Which didn't mean they should have been invaded by the
Romans -- who just wanted to rape, steal, and conquest, as I
said. But someone should have politely stopped them. And if
reformed, their original culture disappeared or was
appropriated into a different form … well, if the new version
reflected the proclivities of a people who were less demon-
haunted -- probably for the good .
Sometimes I wonder if all the primitive or pre-literate art we
like to glory at is all that as well. Humanity's original art in
caves, the blood-red ochre paintings, were associated with
human sacrifice and child rape. The Venus statues, were as it
turns out probably raping wands. The author herself believes
that all-female culture surrounding belly-dancing was
something glorious, sexual and exotic in a superior way than
when it's done for men. Women getting together can do some
terrible things, though. Women chant as they gather around for
clitoris removal rituals, for instance. And a lot of women --
scholars -- still say the nicest things about that. Maybe the
practitioners of the original forms of belly dancing should
forget what they're doing and appropriate what some of the
Westerners might be up to -- especially the really nice ones
we've heard from on this site; those who really empathized
with the author's pain. Their version might in fact be born out
of a more loving spirit than that from our collectively darker
past.
---
Resolute
2895
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston @Resolute "all that".....?

relevant? admirable? virtuous? culturally superior?
I think I take your point, but wish you wouldn't muddy it up
with an empty phrase like "all that"
But if you are talking about what Bertrand Russell described
as, “The Superior Virtue Of The Oppressed", I agree that
ignoring the sacrificial religious practices of the Olmec,
Mayans, Aztecs and the slaving practices of West African
tribes, allows one to perpetuate a myth of colonial forces
destroying a an idealized culture of balance, harmony and
peace.
The point being that no culture can claim a moral high ground
and claiming that being oppressed somehow equates to being
virtuous is flawed thinking, but nevertheless a commonly held
belief on the Left.
In every example, being oppressed merely temporarily
inhibited a culture from oppressing another. In almost every
case, it was preceded or immediately followed a period where
that same group oppressed someone else.
In the same way that Jews were certainly oppressed under the
Nazis, but could also be described as oppressing the
Palestinian people since. This makes neither all Germans, Jews
or Palestinians guilty of oppression until the end of time. Any
more than it makes any of them more virtuous for having been
oppressed.
You can be on very sound footing in calling nearly anyone a
racist, or for that matter a nose-picker. The dishonesty is
claiming that you have never done the same.
2896
@Resolute @Patrick McEvoy-Halston I would say that the
Germans oppressing the Jews was an example of actually an
inferior people dominating a superior one. Nothing about
DNA. Just that the thing that drew Germans to hate Jews was
that they had been sufficiently better loved in childhood and so
possessed an ongoing ability to enjoy and participate in
Weimar-enabled societal growth. To love-deprived, brutally
raised Germans, Jews, who were actually just showing
remarkable ongoing emotional health, came to seem guilty for
being spoiled. Jews seemed appropriate "poison-containers"
for “selfishly” obtained acquisitions they wanted to disown
themselves of, so they projected in mass onto them, and tried
to wipe them out in order to feel pure -- what is always going
on when one people tries to wipe out another.
Europeans who had evolved to the point where they could
embrace science and reject superstition, alchemy, and magic
with ease, were an example of an oppressor that was superior
to the still-superstition-bound peoples they dominated --
dominated, let me once again point out, principally for
purposes of rape and exploitation, not for whatever enlightened
purpose they saw it for.
It's a fact, but not one to be celebrated -- for compared to
where progressives are now they're pretty much barbaric
peoples themselves. You look at their first advances to protect
children, animals, women, the weak, and it's just paltry stuff to
what better-raised, more loved descendants were readily
capable of centuries later. Their anti-slavery material, as we
know, for example, however still commendable for the time,
served a double-purpose of pornography they got off on.
2897
ssohara
My parents are from India, and yeah, the Brits colonized India
and they did some awful stuff (just like they did to the Irish
when the colonized Ireland) - the starvation of millions of
Indians during a famine during which the Brits continued to
export grains - similar to what they did in Ireland - comes to
mind. But I seriously don't care that now in the UK they use
Bollywood dance moves, the Beatles and other rock bands
used sitar music, Brits eat tons of Indian take-out, etc.
I do get pi**ed when ignorant Americans say that India has
never contributed anything to the world - hello, we invented
the zero and the numeral system that the Arabs then adopted
and transferred to the West, where it replaced the
Roman number system. Without the zero and the decimal
number system, I doubt the Americans would have been able to
send a man to the moon. Even doing division with Roman
numerals is hard, let alone the calculus! Indians also invented
the binary number system back in 200 BC.Also, Indians
invented the spinning wheel, buttons, chess, rulers, cataract
surgery, plastic surgery, ink, steel, and were the first to mine
and use diamonds. Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose first
demonstrated radio waves for communication, two years
before Marconi.
So when Americans say ignorant crap about Indians, I can cite
some of the important discoveries made by Indians. However, I
also have to admit that India has some horrible stuff too - like
the caste system and suttee and the poverty of the people and
the corruption. This is called intellectual honesty.
Similarly, the Arabs have given the world many great things,
2898
yet there are problems with Islam and with Arab society.
Slavery still exists in the Arab world, for example. Yet without
the Arabs, much of modern civilization would be lost.
The same can be said of any culture, though, because we are
all human beings. Human beings all share both the capacity for
greatness, innovation, discovery, compassion... and the
capacity for cruelty, evil, stupidity, etc.
While it is sad that people have called the author names, spit
on her (!) and so on, at the same time, I am sure that there have
been numerous white Americans who have been friendly,
helpful, kind, accepting, etc.
My experience in America as the daughter of Indian
immigrants - yes, there are people who are racist. There are
people who are unkind, mean, etc. But they are vastly
outnumbered by people who are at least tolerant and
sometimes kind, generous, curious about a different culture,
etc. I think America is a much more open society than any
other. Certainly it is easier to be an immigrant in America than
it would be in say, Egypt or Japan. Or India.
maria4616
@ssohara Thank you for the wide view.
---
@ssohara The same can be said of any culture, though,
because we are all human beings. Human beings all share
both the capacity for greatness, innovation, discovery,
compassion... and the capacity for cruelty, evil, stupidity, etc.
2899
Apes barely recognize their children when they're off the

breasts, and often starve for not being fed. That might be where
we all started from -- not even yet Winnicott's good-enough
child-rearing. Nobody's fault. Just evolution had this new trick
called empathy, and it was like the first small mammal
amongst the dinosaurs -- containing the seed of greatness, but
almost worth forgetting about at this point.
From there, we've all grown. Though cultures which remained
pretty much the same for thousands of years, haven't done
much to avoid keeping themselves fixated on their ghastly
origins. Pre-literate societies, pre-scientific societies, probably
had childrearing of such an insufficient kind that they spend
quite a lot of their time in animistic dream states, merged with
their inner perpetrator alters. In dream states, everything was
infused with their projections, so science matched less well
with their experience than magic, and would have been
rejected. Plus science lead to constant growth, which wasn't
permitted because the adults hadn't advanced to the point
where children existed for anything more than to satisfy their
own unmet needs.
I'm sure they all had art. But I think if we honestly spent
enough time in certain cultures -- without willing ourselves to
see beneficent primitivism, as so many anthropologists have
done, and which in fact their whole occupation depends on --
everything, even the art, might seem less about nourishing life
than coping with previous trauma. Decorated pearl shells
rubbed and cherished, healing their hurts, and convincing
themselves they won't be eaten -- it's not motivated by as
admirable an instinct, nor is it anywhere near as beautiful as
Mozart, I'm afraid.
2900
I have no idea where the original belly dancing falls on the

spectrum, what originally motivated it and the function it
served. But let's not simply assume it was part of the simply
beautiful of wo/mankind that counterbalances the part that's
bad. Sometimes the bad, or the grossly insufficient, infuses
everything.
We all know this is not about convincing the author, but I
would like to point out why this is. Right now, if you were to
go to Russia and try and talk sense to many of them about the
Ukraine, they couldn't possibly be moved. What they're doing
is bonding with the nation as Mother, and preparing
themselves to war against an other they've projected all of her
unwanted aspects into, as well as all the aspects of themselves
they need to be disowned of -- specifically, spoiledness, self-
centeredness, selfishness, and vulnerability. The result is that
they are pure and strong in staunch defense of a pure Mother
Russia -- her favorites, as they had always hoped to be in life.
And you're simply not going to be allowed to get in the way of
that.
That's what's motivating her, this author. Every time she
angrily makes her point, aiming nothing short of reclaiming a
whole tradition stolen from an ancestral Mother, she feels her
own mother beside her, loving her for her admirable defense --
and it's the most enfranchising feeling ever.
We all get the same way when we can fuse with something we
can see as maternal as well. So if we start identifying ourselves
with old clannish habits we had forgotten this long while while
we gorged on "corrupt modernity," and feel refreshed for
2901
having done so, cleansed of poisons and joined anew to

something more meaningful -- this is what we'll be up to. If we
all identity ourselves as working-class Americans again,
known foremost for our humility, our anonymity, and our
deference to our nation's needs - - including, of course, eager
self-sacrifice -- this is what we'll be up.
very>
2902

Let's be on the watch for it, because it'll mean we too are
entranced, beyond being reasoned with.
Link: I still can't stand white belly dancers Salon.com
Non-Stop
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yheZ_-
Mrj08/UxOGmVNiWcI/AAAAAAAAAO8/C4Jybo7x69g/s1600/Non-Stop-
LN1.jpg
Photo: Universal Studios

Non-Stop
One of the things about it being just a small group of guys
with flying lessons and box-cutters hijacking two jumbo
jets into the World Trade Center, is that it's opened up who
exactly Hollywood might contrive as a possible jacker in its
movies. There is a sense that it was going to need it,
because when they do movies concerned with attracting the
widest possible audience, you know there are always
certain categories of people that can't be involved --
especially in politically sensitive times. So, for example, in
this film, you know it couldn't possibly be the muslim /
hindu doctor, no matter how many times tempted to you,
because the aggregate of our nation is still "Obama" not
Fox News. Still, one of the gratifying moments in the film
involves Liam Neeson's character Bill Marks panning the
plane, with us knowing most of the people with their hands
up might just be stretched into being a possible candidate.
Not just the number of cellphone-using men initially
targeted out, that is, but also the prying lady -- Julianne
Moore's Jen Summers -- who innocently? took the seat
2903
beside him, and the stewardesses, and maybe even the two
harmless old ladies playing that part to a suspicious? T. The
bomb on the plane turns out hidden in something that'd
already been exposed to one dastardly reveal -- a clever-
enough contrivance, because the movie had been bating us
that's all any one person or thing would get -- but I thought,
wouldn't it be great if it had been in something else we'd
already neutered by having categorized one way into our
proprioceptic assembling of what the film was hashing at
us … in the teddy bear, with maybe the cellphone not the
bomb hidden inside it, with the ostensibly terrified child
having been the one who was punching away at the
keyboard, sending ominous messages, unafraid of being
caught for being too small for either the tall marshall's or
the elevated plane cameras' "eyes." "But you didn't count
on it being a 'midget,' now did you? 'Little girls need their
soothing dolls!' -- Sheesh! Grown men and their dumb,
needy stereotypes!"
I know it's not like this wouldn't have put this film way too
much in the realm of farce for its purposes, but really, when
it had Jen's explanation for why she was so intent on a
steadying seat by a window being that she had been told by
a doctor that at some point any kind of innocent shock was
going to kill her, when we already know about the fate of
the plane she's bordered … well, the land of pure farce had
near schlepped its way in there. It was precariously close to
an "Airplane" moment, so you allow yourself to
simulacrum the film right there and imagine that trailed
along side it ... a version that went all child-possession
"Poltergeist."
2904
When it comes to motive, it turns out it does seem a little

Fox Newsy: thank God a marshall was there and up to the
job! … and now surely a cop warranted in every school?!
But the movie's contrivances here really aren't toward
anyone with much influence. The marshall's been fired
from the NYPD, and his current job is assessed in the film
as about similar to a security guard's -- about anyone with
any past and the most suspect of credentials could be
recruited into it. He's also an alcoholic … who shows that if
you can just stay yourself from drink during the workshift it
won't affect your performance diddly. I'm not saying it
looks like he'll go back to drinking afterwards, but its
attitude toward hard alcohol looks near a bartender's --
"look here Jen, you seem stressed; let me pour you a real
drink!" Seriously, that heavy douse he poured her looked
intended to titillate audiences more than the pictures of …
well, the tits it had humorously contrived in. Not a
trumping you usually see in what is -- Julianne Moore, my
apologies -- clearly a guy's movie, and maybe what we
should look more for in future. Bottle of brown-gold
whiskey ... and the guy can't part eyes with it, even as
sexually-frustrated young women heave at him in climbing-
over-top-of-one-another hordes.
It might be the new allure of hard drink that's making
movies seem more agreeable to age-appropriateness, like
this movie was. Or something. Because this is two men-
movies in a row -- with the previous being "3 Days to Kill"
-- where it's a breeze for the older guy to decline the young
temptress. I actually thought with that film at play was just
2905
his urgent need to be owned by his family, with no further

lapse at-all tenable, but maybe it has something to do with
how young, sexually virile women are resonating right now
in general. Like they can't tempt, because somehow they're
your oblivion. Better to stick immediately to someone
middling; past-prime, but with a sufficiently toned ass, or a
plausible hourglass figure, like this film's Julianne Moore
and "3 Day's'" Connie Nielsen and "True Detective's"
Michelle Monaghan. I'll ponder.
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movie, non-stop, true detective
Pompeii
kSm4FQF1fpw/Uw5gP2hQnpI/AAAAAAAAANc/2IozZFais0c/s1600/pompeii-
final-poster-404x600.jpg
Pompeii
You wouldn't always readily assume a movie about the
eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii, would
necessarily be a "Noah's Arc" story -- about "God" finally
having it up to here with the decays of spoiled mankind,
and abruptly calling "Cut!" I know it's advancing toward
second century AD, and therefore somewhere near the
vicinity of where most of us would start looking for
advanced moral decay in the once-great empire, but it'd of
had to have been fourth or fifth for us to think of it as so far
2906
out on the precipice we might even feel sorry for its

inevitable coming savage plucking apart. However, Paul
W.S. Anderson just advances along as if the Roman Empire
was Caligula -- barely even a shell of virtue over grandiose
evil -- and it feels about right for our times.
I was feeling sorry for Pompeii, for owing to our current
predilections the poor dear was going to be ripped apart by
an angry overseeing Vulcan god as well as by a
representative of all the peoples the Roman Empire had
waylaid to amass its claims. The volcano's just a reminder
that even a great civilization can instantly collapse if
Nature just shifts its resting position some -- "I'll just shift
here rather than there, even as my -- to me -- innocuous
resulting bed-folds rearrange some of your cities so they
are no longer there." And the hero Celt, that a civilized
person can't even be seen if he's caught out making his case
within a barbaric culture's worldview -- the senator might
as well have acted in the savagely evil and manipulative
and hand-rubbing opportunistic manner that he does, for
that's the only way he was going to get to be "taken."
Nature, impatient at the "bug" clung at its hems, matched
by a return of the repressed in the advancing Celt demon …
poor dear, about-to-be-succumbed, Pompeii!
The senator at one point is shown digging through his
intelligence to contrive some surprise to foil a bad position
he'd been told he'd been pinned to -- his using the sudden
manifestation of the volcano's tremors to mean his sparing
the Celt was not quite his personal decision, nor his being
outsmarted and being at the heed of his "wife," but just
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reading off Vulcan's decision: the mob, that is, might have
to abide a thumbs-down decision in a subsequent match if,
for example, with a quietened mountain, the Senator made
the choice more his own or, say, power-jealous Jupiter's.
And the city of Pompeii had one too, one possible
miraculous surprise it might hoist to its defence upon the
advancing sure-footed spoils of lava and heat destruction --
one that historically has been good to quieten or balk back
some, Roman Empire-haters. It's still a realm of Law, and if
for example a gladiator can make it through the slog of fifty
or so fights, the most powerful senator would be
besmirched if he, just on whimsy, decided to deny him his
freedom. Law, polished columns, paved roads, order, and
all stout Roman philosophical thought, would hence all
dissolve into meaningless confluent, without a batch of lava
or an advancing barbarian horde needed to assist.
The founding principle would just have been removed and
cast aside as casually as a bone from a well-cooked sleeve
of meat.
Stout defender -- Law -- arises into the movie fray early,
and with some of the confidence he'd earned -- the veteran
gladiator is absolutely sure that if he wins his last fight, he's
a free man, for it's all-abiding Roman decree. It's not said in
quite a way that would have us doubt the Celt's retort that,
essentially, this long-time Roman denizen knows nothing of
Roman ways, but it doesn't quite exactly seem delusional,
either. For a moment we have to estimate if the movie
really has in mind to surface one of Rome's normally
unquestioned virtues and with nonchalance expose it as a
simple con. Maybe, for example, the veteran gladiator will
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be slain before his last fight -- some contrivance like that,

that shows that a powerful man might scurry around the
law but not flaunt right in its face.
But Law is in fact dispensed in the movie as ephemeral,
and the only thing the Roman Empire has going for it is
that some few of its constituents, here and there, do abide
themselves some true care between family members. There
are spots of love dispersed about the place, but it would
seem to have nothing to do with the nature of the makings
of the civilization that contains them, which in fact is better
exposed when they still take delight in the prospect of more
outrageous growth -- more money for even greater
spectacle-machines than they already possess!
So Pompeii has to be bruised up by two powerful arms, and
I think it feels almost as if Vesuvius recognizes the Celt as
its adjacent, for the tension that seems owed in the film that
does not in fact arise, feels as if owed to Vesuvius having
to accord the particular claims of its ally before he's
allowed to devour his full share. Specifically, no aspect of a
drama involving the bullied weak gaining complete victory
over the oppressor, of lovers meeting and falling in love, of
a man refusing all friends finally acceding to proclaim the
one man who's earned it his full brotherhood, is really
interrupted, even with a heaving behemoth volcano being
the one required to somehow temporarily stifle or discipline
its pressurized, bulbously amassed flow. The evil senator
isn't dissolved into magma before he's had full chance to be
magnanimously evil, and not, as well, before several
matching of arms are staged -- so interest in it is totally
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satiated and satisfaction of conquest is all that belies on the

horizon. The lovers don't find their preparations to be
bonded together persuasively for all time, stifled by the
kind of stray rock that stayed the gladiator owner's attempt
to successfully leave the city by sea (and doesn't it seem,
since he guesses before anyone that Pompeii is in for it and
immediately prepares for departure, to unjustly take him
forever to get out?) Heck, not even the fight between
number twos is allowed to go off course, since it would
mean an ally gladiator not cementing his position as maybe
about equal in skill but -- character-revealingly decisively
-- far greater in resolve and moral grounding to the greatest
professional Roman soldier in the land.
There's a great gladiator fight. The Celt and career gladiator
take on everyone. But they climb a monument in the centre
of the ring and from it topple down a column of rock as
well as numerous missiles onto those at the base, wiping
out surprised hordes. In this, they're simply a presage of
Vesuvius's preferred battle tactics. They anticipate even
Vesuvius's sea assault, with their strung chain, stretched
between the centre monument and the horsed Celt,
wrenching lines of men off their feat, a match for a tsunami
wall doing the same to Pompeii's array of fleeing ships.
These two forces really administer their umbrage in quick
succession -- the massacre in the ring is followed
immediately with the Volcano no longer restraining itself
upon the city -- and so goodbye to the coliseum that
enclosed it! -- even as they seem to admit in their quick
sequential kiss together that ultimately, while jointly
interested in taking down "Rome," their ultimate interests
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may not not require one to cede ground to the other.

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4.jpeg
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1.jpeg
I doubt that strewn Pompeii cares, for even with the Celt
ceding the importance of Vesuvius's narrative -- total,
inescapable destruction -- over his own -- which, being "the
dangerous barbarian invader," after all really should follow
a few centuries' hence -- means he shouldn't be allowed to
gallop safely away, his being ash-encased in a tender lover's
embrace means there's now no way all those previously
compelling Pompeii encased won't be all but mislaid and
forgotten. Imagine, if you will, if archaeologists … if we,
had stumbled upon them! It'd be iconic beauty -- them --
and the beast -- Vesuvius, with all the rest but a crumple of
imperfection rather than what astonishes for its astounding
unexpected claim on perpetuity.
LIgsh7HnVfk/Uw6VqKYzcVI/AAAAAAAAAOE/B00PUcFfRlY/s1600/images-
5.jpeg

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3 Days to Kill
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084_DF5E6013-610x406.jpg
3 Days to Kill
Kevin Costner's character, Ethan Renner, is in a dangerous
situation. One, he's dying -- months to live. Second, he's in
one of those occupations we're "reforming" to think of
more in proletariat, working-stiff, terms. He's a superb CIA
operative who does the dirty work better than anyone else
can. This must have floated him twenty years plus of being
a bit shot -- James Bond-like, big shot. But just like how
even the current James Bond could be casually insulted by
being dandyied the most sparse of supplies -- and by a new
young Q who can hardly be daunted by the legend of James
Bond owing, evidently, to how much credit geniuses like
him are now being routinely given over even top agents --
Ethan's precariously close to having all sense of him as a
star being drifted out of him, leaving him an aging,
dispensable, workhorse agent, who on his own is going to
have to take care of the feeble-pensioned rest of his life.
But he's not there yet. His wife and his daughter, who are
meshed in in an affluent, thriving world in Paris, absent, in
their feeling occasioned to the times, much doubt, any
sense of themselves as about to become society's prole
junk, are "things" still open to be touched into wrapping
themselves around him into their world, their story.
Some sense of the drastic importance of this course of
survival explains why he really does have no interest in the
hot, vixen, new top super-agent, Vivi Delay. Also, she fails
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in being a tease, because being her seems to require a lot of

work. All the attention required to keeping each facet
perfect, feels straining, like it'll wear her out in a few years,
leaving her looking spent at 30 -- no one that young is
going to be able to beat what the world will be non-stop
inflicting them over the next while. She's got to make a
perfect shell out of herself because her life is going to about
the non-stop, necessarily every time persuasively perfect --
so to dissuade all the innumerable other onlooking
predators -- dextrous dealing with outside assaulting
shocks. He might once upon a time have had to do the
same, but in a 70s "Dirty Harry" era, where there was still
so much more time for the languid and slow-paced -- he'd
have been able to press through the intermittently present
tense to ease comfortably out to the exterior extensions of
his body, so he'd know what it is to fully breathe. An
acquisition that would never leave him, and give him
assurance to drive into his family's story in this later part of
his life.
So I felt sorry for her, for feeling her precarious
millenialness. But truth be told, a lot of what I was doing
while watching this film was enjoying Ethan beginning to
assess the world around him in a more open way. People,
things, he'd quarantined a certain way -- a death-focused,
agent's way -- he allows to open up to show him more of
what they also are -- a dandy Italian accountant working for
the villainous "Wolf" can readily be opened into just an
Italian possessed of a well-developed life course -- a store
of human resources, not just incriminating data; a person.
He's seeing the domestic possibilities, the human
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possibilities, in each situation, which would make killing a

very hard thing to do because everyone has something else
they contribute to the world other than whatever
unfortunate aspects that lend to caricatures. There's a few
just-villains kept in place -- some disposable bald guy with
a limp, plus some Nazi "Wolf" -- but before Ethan slips
from his previous occupation, it looks like he'd made most
everyone between the most bad and the most pure-grunt
sort of like sweet innards of human contact and sustenance
-- ingredients of a collective, evolving, human story.
Crocodile Dundee-like, I suppose, but something only
granted to him once he was willing, after a few loud last
applauds of Pittsburgh / working class culture -- Go
Steelers! -- to forgo the cowboy to slip into refined dress
his family would recognize as fitting in -- and how! -- with
their more truly activated life. Just barely, he made the first-
class train he yet held a ticket to. Now over time he can
relax into his new preened, absolutely perfect, silver-bullet
life shell, with, it turns out, a good bulk of his life yet left to
heft into it (an experimental drug -- normally only available
to the 1% -- proves a cure-all).

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Throwbacks
When President Obama declared in December that gross inequality is the
“defining challenge of our time,” he was right, and resoundingly so. As is
his habit, however, he quickly backed away from the idea at the urging of
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pollsters and various Democratic grandees.

I can understand the Democrats’ fears about venturing into this territory.
It feels like a throwback to an incomprehensible time — to a form of
liberalism that few of them understand anymore. Unfortunately, they really
have no choice. Watching first the way the bankers steered us into disaster
in 2008 and then the way they harvested the fruits of our labored recovery
— these spectacles have forced the nation to rediscover social class, and as
we dig deeper into the subject we are appalled to learn what has been going
on for the last three decades.
I was born in a comfortable middle-class America of the postwar years, the
“affluent society” you hear about sometimes, and the shattering of that
social order has been the story of my entire adult life. “Inequality” is an
inadequate word for the Big Smashup, but we need some term to describe
all the things that have gone to make the lives of the rich so superlative and
the lives of people who work so shitty and so precarious. It is visible in the
ever-rising cost of healthcare and college, in the deindustrialization of the
Midwest and the ballooning of Wall Street, in the power of lobbying, in the
dot-com bubble, in the housing bubble, in the commodities bubble. It was
made possible by the signal political events of our time: the collapse of the
New Deal coalition; the decline of labor; the infernal populism of the New
Right; the fall of antitrust and the triumph of deregulation; the rise of
Ronald Reagan, and after him Newt Gingrich, and after him George W.
Bush, and after him the Tea Party, all of them bringing their pet tax cuts
with them to Washington.
The word is a polite one, but “inequality” is what we say when we mean to
describe the ruined downtown of your city, or your constant fear that the
next round of layoffs will include you, or the impeccable air conditioning of
your boss’s McMansion, or the way you had to declare bankruptcy when
your child got sick. It is a pleasant-sounding euphemism for the
Appalachification of our world. “The defining challenge of our time”?: Oh,
yes.
Actually, let me offer a correction to Obama’s formula. What really defines
our time is the simultaneous soaring of inequality and the maddening
inability of most progressives (there are exceptions, of course) to talk about
it in a way that might actually inspire anyone to get off their ass. Start with
the word itself: Like “neoliberalism,” another favorite lefty term for many
of these same developments, “inequality” is confusing. It is euphemistic
and aloof. It gets easily muddled with other, similar-sounding issues like
marriage equality, gender equality and equal housing opportunity. Its tone
is also needlessly clinical, giving the whole debate a technical and bloodless
air.
Still, to read around on the subject is to get the feeling that certain liberals
like it that way. “Needlessly clinical” is exactly their style. The subject, for
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them, must be positively cloaked in wonkery. They don’t talk much about
“class,” like some troublemaker from the ’30s; they talk about “inequality,”
which is a delicate and intricate signifier. Oh, it is extremely complex. It
requires so many charts.
[…]
My suspicion is that it makes an enormous difference. “Inequality” is not
some minor technical glitch for the experts to solve; this is the Big One.
This is the very substance of American populism; this is what has brought
together movements of average people throughout our history. Offering
instruction on the subject in a classroom at Berkeley may be enlightening
for the kids in attendance but it is fundamentally the wrong way to take on
the problem, almost as misguided as it would be if we turned the matter
over to the 1 percent themselves and got a bunch of billionaires together at
Davos to offer pointers on how to stop them from beating us over and over
again in the game of life. (Oops — that actually happened.) (Thomas Frank,
"Paul Krugman won't save us," Salon.com)

History is full of inequality. I know some smallpeople historians
think they find egalitarianism in pockets here and there in the
premodern witchcraft people, before masculine Science took over,
for example but basically it's left to the anthropologists to point
at whatever perpetually stuck people they've devoted their lives to
studying, to show that at least we started from the right place …
which in fact we didn't, for the reason these tribes have no "big
men" is that they haven't even evolved to the point where they
trust anyone with power.
It's difficult to imagine anyone spelling such a great connivance
that man has never figured its way out of the taught lies that keep a
few of them grossly entitled and the rest weary strugglers.
Common sense would say that for most of history most men have
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for some reason obviously wanted "big men" out there.
Mostly I think they/we need these inflated people out there to keep
Chaos at bay. Chaos being the wrath of maternal destruction,
which these men inflated to titans ostensibly can handle for
awhile before they too crash into her bloody menstrual Ragnarok,
and we need to quickly patch together some others. As childrearing
improves, as mothers aren't so lonely and abandoned that their
children become emotional sops and even their sex toys, as they
fear the jealousy of their own mothers less postpartum
depression and so don't neglect their children as if to show
they're still primarily devoted to her, fears of Chaos abate, mostly,
and it finally seems just obvious that we wouldn't allow some few
to overlord the rest of us.
But I don't think this is what is happening now. The reason we've
got this split is primarily so that the small people don't feel
possessed of anything so spelling of their selfishness, that they'd
feel worthy of being apocalyptically abandoned for it. What they
are accruing for themselves in abundance scars, evidences of
suffering, from being beat on and beat on in the game of life
gives them the "sunshine" they need: like warriors spit out of a
ravaging war, they feel earned of care and even (maternal)
gratitude.
And if there's any sadism still in Her, well, they haven't left much
for Her to chew on, now have they … which is a feeling of
invulnerability so flawless and sublime it's worth a small gloat.
We're hearing so much of atheists these days but we're seeing far
more speared Christs.
What populism should end up meaning is just us becoming small
and rebonding to the national mother, the mother nation. I think
2917
this will make us feel elated for awhile, safe; we might build a lot
of things like the 30s folk and German Volk did. But very soon
after most of our attention will be to punish those we've split the
worst aspects of our mothers into, as well as the "guilty" parts of
ourselves we long to be rid of so to become only good. Hopefully
Thomas Frank will point out the bad parts of what we'll be up to as
well.

mz sookie
The argument cannot be about 'inequality.' Americans have always
entertained the perverse hope to become filthy rich; that's why
there cannot be a classic revolution. No one wants to be the
proletariat here.
Fairness for the poor, humanitarian compassion these also
cannot arouse a nervous public.
The best political argument must be pragmatic. Jobs are produced
when sales go up. Redistribution of buying power will makeour
economy robust. Infrastructure (from bridges to college) is
essential for business success in a global market as well as
preserving a basic sound quality of life.
Health insurance benefits cripple our small businesses they cannot
compete with companies around the world who do not have that
fixed overhead.Therefore Medicare should be expanded gradually
to age 60, 55, 50 then become a national insurance option in the
exchanges. Stop using 'single payer' as a term it never won hearts
nor minds.Liberate business from the shackles of 1950 policy.
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Tax carried interest, reset withholding cap, and add a penny a trade
to day traders' follies.
Democracy will fail if accumulated capital growing exponentially
makes working hard, expertise and experience seem foolish
Safety, jobs,costsaving insurance, infrastructure....pragmatics.
Flag
@mz sookie The argument cannot be about 'inequality.'
Americans have always entertained the perverse hope to become
filthy rich; that's why there cannot be a classic revolution. No one
wants to be the proletariat here.
That was the situation in Weimar Germany, when everyone wanted
to be upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. In 30s Germany, however,
what became more important was your being "true" German. For
real, the judge who's grandfather was Italian was at something of
an astonishing loss to the plumber who's grandfather kept German.
We could do the same thing here. If populism takes hold in
America, and the only thing the nation cares about are the elite and
the poor not the middle class couldn't you imagine the average
American taking some pomp, in this ostensibly frozen class
structure, in his / her not rising beyond his / her grandfather's
station? He welded, and so too you. And it's nice the nation finally
discovered you again, valued you again, but you've been doing the
same the whole while.
It'd be a lie before they were exactly as you described. But this
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has been edited out of them, by themselves, as this new self
conception has taken hold. They're the sons and daughters of
hardworking, unassuming 19thcentury lower class arrivals. The
prosperous baby boomers, were an aberration, bubbled out of
aberrant circumstances America postwar suddenly being larger
than life …
a million bucks suddenly in the hands of those who
weren't going to know how to demurely spent it but rather of
course buy the whole car lot plus a palace or two …
they're virgins
to this grandiose, overwhelming thing, so it's understandable,
however much never to be repeated.
-----
Still, to read around on the subject is to get the feeling that certain
liberals like it that way. “Needlessly clinical” is exactly their style.
The subject, for them, must be positively cloaked in wonkery. They
don’t talk much about “class,” like some troublemaker from the
’30s; they talk about “inequality,” which is a delicate and
intricate signifier. Oh, it is extremely complex. It requires so many
charts.
It's certainly worth exploring why they feel this need, why they
have to greet poverty, the rest of America, as if doctors trying to
temper the distress of their very first AIDS patient circa the early
'80s trying to keep form before something that might possibly
burst into deadly pustules before them, oh my! But we might be
glad nevertheless of their manner.
2920
Obama's presidency has been 7 years of abating distress; everyone,
everything, is "handled." Anyone hoping for satisfaction from him
is going to come away instead as if quit the guy wasn't going to
let us run our moods into him ... so impossibly cool! And we've got
reforms. Healthcare, gay marriage, marijuana, possibly
minimum wage increases. It's as if the left hand has been occupied
quaying the growling dog while the right has done what it can to
track some progress. To me this isn't a bad way for things to
continue to go.
It'll mean the further tracking of progress which will improve the
lives of even the maddog people around us, who are
discombobulated and useless owing to the progress we've already
tracked, and who will only regain leverage, feel solid, when
politics devolves to meet their sadistic and sacrificial needs; and
it'll mean populism people dissolving their everyday sane grip so
that they're perpetually Sunday group purgers and moaners
never gets a hold.
If we track some progress through a frustrating period of sacrifice
and blockage we actually want, feel safe with, we might make it
through until a romantic momentum a 1920s or 60s can take it
over. To me that's our best bet. It is complicated or at least
inevitably for awhile, frustrating.
And oh, this is the second article in a row with the prominent Salon
"newcomer" taking shots at Krugman. A long time ago I
mentioned this was something I was waiting for Salon building
momentum to go after him. Krugman's full of himself, in what we
should recognize as in a good way he's well loved, and so he
beams there's nothing masochistic or selfdenying about him! If
liberals can't any longer stand him either, it's because they've
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regressed to seeing selflove as something spoiled and worthy of
punishment …
progress, even in such a joysuppressing / denying,
very unhippie, "clinically" administered form as we've been able to
tolerate these days, might be becoming too much even for them.
Delete
krabapple
@Patrick McEvoyHalston This article wasn't an attack on
Krugman. It was attacking the way the populist argumenthas been
left to economists. That's not Krugman's fault and Frank doesn't
place the fault there.
Flag
@krabapple @PatrickMcEvoyhalston Last article from Frank:
In fact, there is no need to lift a finger to do much of anything,
since vast, impersonal demographic forces are what rescued them
from the trap I identified. They now have the luxury of saying,
as Paul Krugman did on the day after the 2012 election, “
Who
cares what ’ s the matter with Kansas? ”
had Krugman "not lifting a finger to do much of anything," as him
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luxuriating in his indifference, in his not needing to give a damn
about Kansas.
And here he's the very picture of the "elite" we've left the talking
to, and so who too is very much afraid of talking class.
Populist argument hasn't so much been left to them / him, but
hogged to themselves / himself, out of trepidation at the thought of
what would happen if the populace if imbeciles claimed the
argument. He's distrust / dislike, of the ordinary Joe. To me, a case
(against him, by Frank, maybe by some at Salon) is certainly
building.

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Homegrown
It is a strange thing to say in the year 2014, as the political battle-lines grow
harder and our bitter-enders ever more bitter, but there was a time when I
didn’t think of my home state of Kansas as a particularly right-wing place.
It is true that the Kansas City suburb where I grew up teemed with
standard-issue business-class Republicans back in the ’70s and ’80s; I had
been one myself once upon a time. But I also knew that Kansas was the
kind of place that valued education, that built big boring suburbs, that
never did anything risky or exciting. Its politics in those days were utterly
forgettable, dominated by a succession of bland Republican moderates and
unambitious Democrats. We were the epitome of unremarkableness. When
the notorious “Summer of Mercy” took place in 1991 — the event that
marked the beginning of the state’s long march to the right — I remember
reading about it from graduate school in Chicago and thinking how strange
it was that Operation Rescue had chosen Wichita as the place to make its
stand. After all, Kansas wasn’t in the South.
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It wasn’t until several years later that I began to understand what a

fascinating, upside-down extravaganza it was to see the right eat its way
through the good sense of the nation. Of course, many others had written
about the movement by then, largely in the key of horror and tearful
deploring. But relatively few seemed to get the sheer literary potential of
the nation’s big right turn, and as I surveyed the political headlines day
after day, I grew more and more amazed at what was going on. (Thomas
Frank, "The matter with Kansas now," Salon.com)
-----
Childrearing. The better loved in society are comfortable with
progress because their own growth as children wasn't complicated
by harsh abandonment or intense anger by their caretakers (most
importantly, by their mothers -- the primary caretaker in almost all
families). The worst loved feel threatened every time, because
theirs was, and they're possessed of the most god-awful of punitive
superegos to prove it. If society just keeps advancing, the worst-
loved will never reform out of being human discombobulates
because they're not empowered to make society into a psychic
extension that catches and disowns them of their own insanity
-- institutionalized racism, for example, rather than all-consuming
private hate -- and will remain that way unless the rest of society
reaches its peak tolerance as well, and begins to transform our
national narrative, the overall feel of our nation, into one that
resolves everyone's growth panic.
This can happen by resolving America once again into a folk
community, like America imagined itself in the 30s, with each
member small but bound to a provisioning mystical community.
Here out of Washington what we'll sense is family ties, traditions --
not urban sophisticates denying / laughing off the past but rather
visibly showing their allowing it to imbibe / possess them. Thomas
Frank has some of this in him, this longing to have the edges off
and belong in his small fashion into a community; let's hope
enough of us don't switch from reading Monocle to reading
Baffler, because it's about slipping into a fugue.
First the human community -- togetherness -- then the attack on
scapegoats possessed of all we just can't any longer count as part
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of ourselves.
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Friday, February 14, 2014
Shifting support columns

On the subject of media "balance" concerning Woody
Allen and Bill Cosby, Katie McDonough recently said this:
It’s been two weeks since Dylan Farrow published her open
letter detailing the alleged sexual abuse she experienced at
the hands of Woody Allen. Since then, she has addressed
the abuse in interviews with People magazine and the
Hollywood Reporter. It’s been 20 years since Allen held a
press conference on the steps of Yale University to
announce the findings of the YaleNew Haven Sexual
Abuse Clinic’ s ( incredibly fraught
) investigation into
Farrow ’ s allegations. Since then, he hasn ’ t much addressed
the issue, but really, he doesn ’ t need to. He is a critically
celebrated writer and director in a culture convinced of its
own righteousness, confident that it would never grant such
distinctions to a sexual predator.
Despite enjoying two decades of the presumption of
innocence (and a massive accumulation of wealth ), Allen
was given column inches on the New York Times editorial
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page to assert his innocence (and impugn Farrow ’ s mental
health and character) — in the name of
“ balance.
”
Bill Cosby signed a deal earlier this month to return to
NBC with a family sitcom; the network is hoping to bank
on Cosby ’ s status as a beloved cultural figure to revive its
nighttime lineup. The former Cliff Huxtable has been
celebrated as a wholesome comedy icon, but he has also
been accused — repeatedly, and in explicit detail — of
drugging and sexually assaulting multiple women who
trusted him as a mentor. The women who have come
forward with these allegations, like Farrow and millions of
other survivors, don ’ t have much of a platform from which
to be heard. They are just names in a court case against
another good man and his good name. ( "A nation ruled by
creeps," Salon.com )

If some of these legends fall people we thought were past
the point where their reputations could be radically
tempered with it'd be a fascinating thing in some
respects. It'd be as if someone dug deeper once again into
the lives of our Founding Fathers, and what they
uncovered, brought to light at a time when a sufficient
quantity of us no longer needed godmen anchoring our
past, actually meant, say, the removal of one of them from
2926
our dollar bills in preference for maybe a female women's
right leader, based on an honest overall assessment of them.
At first you couldn't believe it … we'd sidestepped yet
more of the ostensibly necessary primitive in us the
demeaning sociological assessment of humans "as
requiring religion, shared meaningmaking institutions"
that depends on cherished icons, rights and rituals. Wow.
What else might be capable of shucking off do we dare
try even materialism, Capitalism?!
That is, I think with many not all of the people who are
upset that Cosby and Allen are looking as if they're not past
having their reputations radically tarnished, they are not
just upset at more malebashing, this ostensible current
desire to make every male of the species suspect by sex like
women had been through millenniums, but that we're
showing a capacity for further progress. A lot of us need
"institutions" to stay the same because something in how
we imagine them helps keep our psyche in a state of
equilibrium that lets us go about our lives "sanely" "the
poor" trap our own neglected selves, "the army" carries our
sadism, and so on. If somehow Cosby, the justpast great
father and Allen the stillcurrent legendary film maker,
could be removed of all that we'd projected onto to them to
keep them immobile as fixtures of our American
cosmology, then this society steaming ahead to further gay
2927
rights and drug leniency and female empowerment and
overall derogating once halfacceptable scarily regressive
political notions to mere Tea Party crazydom, is just going
to keep on rolling. At the thought of this, already
destabilized psyches are going to fragment even more.
Stop! Someone has got to put a stop to all this growth!
We're coming to pieces already!
What they'll do to maybe successfully indeed stop it,
swerve America more along Russia's current path, is
something I'll think about and maybe post if it gels.
Woody Allen may be innocent. Same too, Cosby. We're
learning to be more comfortable with victims, with
victimhood, rather than reject them, it, for reminding us of
having been victims ourselves and its heard accusations
against those who's reputation we still need to protect else
feel abandoned our parents; our primary caretaker
particularly our mothers. So it's necessary to reassess,
and I'm glad for it.

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Labels: bill cosby, woody allen
If it was Nelson Mandela, would our

bravery falter?
2928
Concerning allegations against Bill Cosby, Prachi Gupta
said this:
Two weeks after Dylan Farrow resurrected 21yearold
allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of her father,
filmmaker Woody Allen, Gawker ’ s Tom Scocca reminded
the world that in 2004, 13 women came forward with
allegations that comedian Bill Cosby drugged and sexually
abused them. At the time, the lawsuit made a minor ripple
in the media, but, like Farrow ’ s, their accounts were
eventually dismissed as barely a blemish on the spotless
image of a beloved celebrity.
Now, their stories are reemerging. Last week, Newsweek
interviewed Tamara Green , one of the women who served
as a witness in the case brought forth by Andrea Constand.
On Wednesday, 46yearold Barbara Bowman spoke out in
Newsweek .
Both Bowman and Green joined Constand ’ s lawsuit as
witnesses in 2004 after hearing about her case on TV.
Newsweek reporter Katie Baker explains that “ neither had
anything to gain financially, as the statute of limitations had
expired for both of them. ”
Cosby settled the lawsuit with Constand for an undisclosed
sum of money in 2006.
Bowman ’ s account strongly resembles the other stories of
Cosby ’ s alleged victims, many of whom have provided
detailed accounts of how Cosby mentored them, became a
2929
father figure, then drugged and raped them. ( "Another
woman speaks out over Bill Cosby," Salon.com)

Yeah, he was the nation's father there was no way we
were going to dislodge him. We're only open to the full
reveals when we no longer need figures to be magical. We
should learn from this and attend a little more carefully to
every figure we currently need to imagine as
provisioning and good whether or not that's the full
story.
For example, if it turned out Nelson Mandela had been a
philanderer, would we all be pretty much ready to devour
whomever stepped up to report the story, if it wasn't
something that could somehow be managed within his
current image? I suspect we would. He may have been as
pristine as we like to imagine him, a truly honourable man,
but it really doesn't matter we still need him as a pillar.
And this means all our nolongerrequired pillars from a
generation or two ago can easily go byebye, and we'll feel
like we've evolved how fantastic it is to know we could
let those crutches go! created a social sphere finally a bit
more hospitable to terrorized victims, become essentially
2930
more egalitarian and smallpeople democratic, have less of
a need to sanctify fatherfigures / allprovisioning mothers,
but we may actually have not.
We do a momentary check. Do we still need them? And if
we don't they can be hefted off to the sacrificial block,
whatmeworry. And if we do …
Trouble … Aren't you just being a bit opportunistic, dear?
bobkat
@Emporium There's a big difference between a
'philanderer' (having sex with many consenting women)
and drugging and raping women. IF this is true, then I hope
justice will be served.
Flag
@bobkat @Emporium You know what I was getting
at, though. We don't need Bill Cosby anymore, just like we
longer need Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods. Our task is
to see if there are any other figures who've replaced them
2931
who we need to see a certain way, and if proof was
available as to otherwise, as difficult as it might be for us,
we'd adulterate our image and see that justice is done.
Delete
rmutt
@Emporium @bobkat He he. You said
"adulturate"....
Flag
AlGreene
FYI, Mandela was a Moslem in a polygamous country. It is
known that he had seven wives. He is still the man we
knew him as. In his country, it's a responsibility for a
respected man of means to feed as many as he can.
Flag
2932
@AlGreene Okay, but you might want to reign it in there
… we liberals can only hear so much about multiple wives
and what goes with it other than the responsible feeding of
them, before our cultural allowance starts cracking.
Please don't tell us the age of his wives, for instance …
and
nothing as well about how the number of wives might have
swelled his ego.
Delete
cranston
Mandela wasn't Muslim. There are other polygamous
cultures besides some forms of Islam.
Flag
Oak
@AlGreene Mr. Mandela was not a Muslim. He never had
seven wives either. He had two. And he married his second
2933
wife only after he divorced his first wife, Winnie.
Just because there are Muslims in Africa, it doesn't mean
that every black African is a Muslim.
Flag
magistra
@AlGreene
For YOUR information, Mandela was a Methodist. It is
[well] known that he was married three times twice
divorced and survived by his third wife.
Where DO you morons get your 'information'?? Yes, I
know. A certain orifice as full of sh*t as your skulls.
Flag

SpudSpudly
2934
How many rapes and attacks did she plan to go back for
before Cosby finally got tired of raping and attacking her?
Flag
lauri jst
@SpudSpudly That's irrelevant. I'm curious about
that as well, but it doesn't mitigate what he did.
Interesting well, not really, it's common that you would
call HER out and not comment at all on his actions. Are
you saying that since she went back that she deserved it?
Flag
bobkat
@lauri jst @SpudSpudly No, she didn't deserve
it, but I wouldn't have gone anywhere with him, if he'd
done this to me. Once is enough!
2935
Flag
Pacyderm
@bobkat @lauri jst@SpudSpudly Are you an
18 year old girl in the middle of the time when Cosby was
America's darling? Have you taken even a Psychology 101
class and learned how easy it is for a rich and powerful
person to manipulate a weak and vulnerable mind? You
don't even have to be rich. Most cult leaders aren't and
manage to convince hundreds, including men, to do their
bidding.
Flag
@Pacyderm @bobkat @lauri
jst @SpudSpudly People who've been abused as children
can be drawn to seek out abusers in adult life the
repetitioncompulsion is ingrained, and it's actually a way
of gaining control over previouslysuffered abuse. This
may not be available in Psyc 101, but Lenore Terr and
some other wonderful psychologists / therapists understand
2936
the reasons behind the bizarre things that the victimized
will be compelled to do.
Basically, what I'm saying is that we don't have to stick to a
"rich and powerful person manipulating the awed trusting
young naive" narrative to take on those who want to say it's
her fault. If the allegations are true, Cosby preyed on
people he intuitively understood were hindered from past
abuse to be able to say no to him. That's what all abusers do
they're drawn to the weak.
And if we want to get at why adults would want to do this
victimize people …
well, that would be nice: it'd look to
amount to really appreciating all the ramifications of
having been abused as children it can draw you to want

to play the part of the predator as well. We still apparently
need to believe in evil.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire:

Gravity and 12 Years a Slave
HkKfV9FaVvA/UulUpHhxWZI/AAAAAAAAAKw/hZX8paJFClE/s1600/images.j
peg
Viewing the earth from space is supposed to be one of

those opportunities to chuck off familiar ways of
apprehending your lived life into a baptism where cognitive
categories need to be reapplied … hold on, it's not just blue
2937
sea vs. brown terra which this view tells me it is, but of
course the Pacific Ocean, and that chunk of terra is
California, and so on. It's supposed to be one of those
chances where in feeling an actual effort to reapply our
entire normal way of perceiving, we feel in ourselves the
capacity to change … the "us" in us can flow into a better
mold. But though in certain kinds of cultural contexts this
realization/rapture can be magnified -- like during the space
launch, the utopian 1960s -- in some it can be virtually
nullified as the fact that it's simply a view from a height
lends it strictly not to perspective but to orientation.
Arrogant, aristocratic -- entirely-not-our-own -- orientation.
I've heard of differing agents in regards to how an age can
get stifled. Linda Colley, for example, in her "Britons"
provided the familiar one of how aristocrats can consolidate
and disable an age from being a meritocracy, something she
said occurred during the second half of the eighteenth-
century in Britain with the development of the elite "polite
vision," which everyone else was denied complete access to
but were supposed to -- and did -- sublimate themselves to.
Almost as familiar, is the one James Walcott provides of an
age becoming stalled owing to the prevalence of
grandmotherly tut-tutters -- no one remains around to lend
strength to those who refuse the staid and mannerly in
preference for the baroque trashing of hotel rooms --
something he says afflicted the U.S. in the period between
Emerson/Thoreau (1850s) and Fitzgerald/Hemingway
(1920), and is afflicting us now. The truth is, I could only
dream these were the antagonists, because in every age
where people start reporting a preference for things
2938
"decent," where vile egoism is being chased out, and where

sadistic control over the powerless is being eroticized, the
antagonist is emerging from out of almost every one of our
own selves. No one is really chilling us into place, even as
we hear report after report of cowards trying to corral and
determine public preferences, for the voice we're hearing
out there in society is just that part of ourselves that damns
our own egoism, given some semblance of outside life
owing to so many of us puffing our inner demons into its
cloud-fog. If all I had to worry about when advancing my
own thoughts and writings is that an outside world might
hate it, or willfully ignore it, at least they might still get
"produced" so long as I could abay self-doubt and a lack of
an audience. But if I'm battling a formidable antagonist
inside my own head, then thinking and writing things that
are fair to oneself become like LOTR's good Gollum
gaining a repass from his usually dominant demonic self --
outside of ideal conditions, it's probably something that will
only limp through after a long battle. At the finish, it's not a
precious seed enthused into a ripe fruit, but potential
discombobulated and humbled into bruised reality. Tada!
Here's my finished product! … Would you now cart it off
for presentation to even a tolerant world?
But this is our world today, one that favors the established,
and disfavors youth, the new, because they're
presumptive … in their simply offering an alternative. So
it's an age where if you're established, how can the
tendency not but be to exult -- obviously it's an opening the
age wants someone to play out. If everything maybe even
substantially better and more transformative than what
2939
you've got shows itself on the scene is dissed simply

because a society hates egoism amongst the everyman --
however much it absconds from noticing it in those in
charge -- then even the intrinsically compelling, the
magical, can't shuffle you off the scene because it'll be
confused for the arrogant. And if anyone was to stand
beside you, they'd have to wilt as if stood to the side of
Kim Jong Un.
That's pretty much how I felt when watching "Gravity" --
my wilting while watching another extend his arms out,
engage and embrace. Alfonso Cauron is showing me the
grandeur of space as if Kim Jong Un up on some high
palace wall. He's created a majestic stage set which over
the next hour and a half will be completely destroyed in a
calibrated fashion. He has two "players" -- one the kind of
captain of the ship every aristocrat wants at the helm:
experienced and able, but still working class limited in his
needing to apprehend the confusion of life through
platitudes; and another who is more sensitive but also more
delicate, and who's going to have to wear through the kinds
of disorientation, struggle and trauma you'll only be
noticing. Afterwards, she'll be the daddy's girl who tried it
out on her own only to be so stricken afterwards she
reckons her dad wholly right to have cautioned her against
it. "I hate space/terra incognita! Daddy, oh you were so
truly wise about it! I'll never leave your safe pastures
again."
TgFgOpDgrbY/UulVIUt6v8I/AAAAAAAAAK4/iNpH2EOltU0/s1600/Unknown.j
peg
2940
I saw "Gravity" just before I saw "12 Years a Slave," so

considering my response to the former "12 Years" felt like
going from standing beside a despot and watching his
orchestrations to being at the finish surprise-pushed into the
pit with the rest of the forlorn. For three hours I was
Solomon Northup, doing nothing more noticeably than
attending to the moods of masters and humiliatingly
shoring up their legitimacy by actually showing I do care
they know that in certain contexts I can perform as ably as
their star slave Patsey, even as much as I can -- another
humiliation -- never admit it to myself: "Patsey can do
daily 500 pounds of cotton, but if this was sugar cane or if
you instead had wanted a river forded --" Then after three
hours of nerve exhaustion, rather than taste freedom, some
of that wonderful dalliance stuff with his wife we saw at
the beginning of the movie, you're with Solomon Northrup
who's chastised thereafter into a warrior mold -- we're
instructed to see the rest of his life as about leading
reparations for the black race and vengeance on white
scallywag racists, pushed away from self-determination
into a role we all strangely, damningly, expect him enslaved
to. He's not Bilbo, who after adventure and war (involving
a bad hit to the head) tastes once again fine cakes, good
company and tea, and shucks the whole rest of the world
off, but Frodo, who afterwards is displaced from relaxation
and pleasure … who for some reason can't even take a sip
of beer without drawing memory of the whole travails
through Mordor; and being the wraith amongst men,
seemingly has to be fit into another narrative.
2941
Brad Pitt was this movie's Tom Bombadil. He ends up

getting involved, but we taste mostly his freedom to up and
detach himself anytime he pleases, with no one paying
much mind -- his ability to persist in situations where
everyone else is caught in some death-grip heated drama,
and pretty much manage to do his own thing. I think being
someone who can get away with this, is basically what a lot
of people are hoping for themselves these days. There may
be epic forces at work about to drive people into action, but
maybe they can invisibly get through it all without being
picked off. Pathetic -- maybe; but barely at all presumptive,
which could get them off the hook and prove their
parachute out.
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Labels: 12 Years a Slave, gravity
2013 in Film: Women schooling "boys"

This is the End
This is The End 2013 scaring emma watson scene
Iron Man 3
2942
Iron Man 3 - Pepper kills Killian by Almin Agic
Only God Forgives
Only God Forgives Clip 2
Nebraska
Nebraska Movie Featurette - Kate Grant
Superman: Man of Steel
Man of Steel 2013 - Faora UI Fight Scene HD
Inside Llewyn Davis

2943
The Wolverine
THE WOLVERINE Movie Clip "YUKIO"
Kirk and Uhura - Star Trek Into Darkness Clip
The Counselor
The Counselor Blu-Ray Clip - That´s What Greed Is (HD) Penelope Cruz,
Cameron Diaz
Filth
Filth Movie CLIP - Hit Me Bruce (2013) - James McAvoy, Imogen Poots Movie
HD
2944
Lee Daniel's The Butler
Lee Daniel's The Butler CLIP - "Dinner Table" (2013) HD - Oprah
Pacific Rim
Pacific Rim: Candidate Trials (Raleigh vs Mako)
12 Years a Slave
12 YEARS A SLAVE "Where You From ?" Movie Clip # 3
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Movie CLIP - I'm Not Crazy (2014) - Keira Knightley
2945
Movie HD
*****
Draw, or loss to the woman, owing to "the boy" IDing

himself as loyal to mom, or as saving a nation / world, or
some other epic excuse.
The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug
Desolation Of Smaug - Scene with Kili and Tauriel.
Thor: The Dark World
Marvel's Thor: The Dark World - Clip 4
Star Trek Into Darkness HD - Spock/Uhura's "Talk" & Kronos Chase

2946
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Couples Therapy Clip

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Labels: 2013 movies
2013 Movies, accompanied by text from

Lloyd DeMause
"Her"
The power of this fusion fantasy can be seen in a
simple experiment that has been repeated over and over
again by Silverman and his group. They showed subliminal
messages to hundreds of people, and found that only one
—"MOMMY AND I ARE ONE”—had an enormous
emotional effect, reducing their anxieties and pathologies
and their smoking and drinking addictions
measurably. “Daddy and I are one” had no effect.
2947
"Iron Man 3"

Warriors become fused with the powerful mother that
masturbated them during menstruation; they then decorate
themselves with menstrual blood-red paint so they can
appropriate the fearful power of their Killer Mothers.
Wars in early civilizations are fought on behalf of and
against Killer Goddesses, bloodthirsty mothers like Tiamat,
Ishtar, Inanna, Isis or Kali. Typical is the Aztec mother-
goddess Hiutzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her
body” that cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers.
Scholars of antiquity conclude: “The oldest deities of
warfare and destruction were feminine, not masculine.”
Jungian analysts called her the Terrible Mother archetype, a
Dragon-Mother with “a mouth bristling with teeth…so that
it may devour us.” Ovid captures the mother of antiquity
by picturing Pentheus crying out “Oh Mother, gaze at me!
She screamed at him, and shook her flying hair. Then
Agave ripped his head from fallen shoulders, raised it
up [and] cried, ‘Here is my work, my victory.’”
That wars and sacrifices also act out the child’s revenge
against the mother can be seen in the details of the sacrifice
of women (about a third of all the sacrifices), where female
victims first make a prodigious show of their female
power, then are laid down on their backs and their breasts
cut open and their bodies torn apart. The two aspects of the
Killer Goddess are demonstrated when the Aztec warrior
takes the sword that he had used to behead the Goddess
victim and “terrifies and annihilates our enemies with it.
2948
"Gravity"
Furthermore, the weight of the fetus pressing down into the
pelvis can compress blood vessels supplying the placenta,
producing additional placental failure. Practice contractions
near birth give the fetus periodic "squeezes," decreasing
oxygen level even further, while birth itself is so hypoxic
that "hypoxia of a certain degree and duration is a normal
phenomenon in every delivery," not just in more severe
cases. The effects on the fetus of this extreme hypoxia are
dramatic: normal fetal breathing stops, fetal heart
rate accelerates, then decelerates, and the fetus thrashes
about frantically in a life-and death struggle to liberate
itself from its terrifying asphyxiation.
It is one of the most basic principles of psychoanalysis that
massive quantities of stimulation, particularly intensely
painful experiences, result in a severe "trauma" for the
individual, particularly when the ego is too immature to
prevent itself from being overwhelmed by the affects. That
fetal distress is traumatic can hardly be doubted, as the
fetus has as yet none of the psychological defense
mechanisms to handle massive anxiety and rage. Therefore,
as psychoanalysts long ago found true of all
traumatizations-from early enema-giving to war-time
shocks or concentration camp experiences-the psyche then
needs to endlessly re-experience the trauma in a specific
"repetition compulsion" which, as Greenacre first pointed
out, is similar to "imprinting" in lower animals. As no
psychic apparatus is as open to trauma as that of the
helpless fetus, no repetition compulsion is as strong as that
2949
which results from the "imprinting" of the fetal drama of

repeated feelings of asphyxiation, blood pollution, and
cleansing, climaxed by a cataclysmic battle and a liberation
through a painful birth process. Although the form that this
endlessly repeated death-and-rebirth fetal drama takes in
later life is determined by the kind of childrearing which is
experienced, the basic "imprinted" fetal drama can
nevertheless always be discovered behind all the other
overlays, pre-oedioal or oedipal.
very>
2950

The "imprinted" fetal drama, then, is the matrix into which
is poured all later childhood experiences, as the child works
over the basic questions posed by his experiences in the
womb: Is the world hopelessly divided between nurturant
and poisonous objects? Am I to be eternally helpless and
dependent on the life-giving blood of others? Must all good
feelings be interrupted by painful ones? Do I always have
to battle for every pleasure? Will I have the support and
room I need to grow? Can one ever really rely on another?
Is entropy the law of my world, with everything doomed to
get more crowded and polluted? Must I spend my life
endlessly killing enemies?
"12 Years a Slave"

It is only when one realizes that we all carry around with us
persecutory social alters that become manifest in groups
that such unexplained experiments as those described in
Stanley Milgram's classic study Obedience to Authority
become understandable. In this experiment, people were
asked to be "teachers" and, whenever their "learners" made
mistakes, to give them massive electric shocks.
The "learners," who were only acting the part, were trained
to give out pained cries even though the "electric shocks"
were non-existent. Of the 40 "teachers," 65
percent delivered the maximum amount of shock even as
they watched the "learners" scream out in pain and plead to
2951
be released, despite their having been told they didn't

have to step up the shock level. The "teachers" often
trembled, groaned and were extremely upset at having to
inflict the painful shocks, but continued to do
so nonetheless. That the "teachers" believed the shocks
were real is confirmed by another version of the experiment
in which real shocks were inflicted upon a little puppy, who
howled in protest; the obedience statistics were similar.
Social scientists have been puzzled by Milgram's
experiments, wondering why people were so easily talked
into inflicting pain so gratuitously. The real explanation is
that, by joining a group-the "university experiment"-they
switched into their social alters and merged with their own
sadistic internalized persecutor, which was quite willing to
take responsibility for ordering pain inflicted upon others.
Their "struggle with themselves" over whether to obey was
really a struggle between their social alters and their main
selves. Although many subsequent experiments varied the
conditions forobedience, what Milgram did not do is try the
experiment without the social trance. If he had not framed
it as a group experience, if he had simply on his
own authority walked up to each individual, alone, and,
without alluding to a university or any other group, asked
him or her to come to his home and give massive
amounts of electric shock to punish someone, he would not
have been obeyed, because they would not have switched
into their social alters. The crucial element of
the experiments was the existence of the group-as-
terrifying-parent, the all-powerful university. Not
surprisingly, when the experiment was repeated using
2952
children-who go into trance and switch into traumatized

content more easily than adults-they were even more
obedient in inflicting the maximum shock. Subjects were
even obedient when they themselves were the victims: 54
percent turned a dial upon command to the maximum limit
when they had been told it was inflicting damage upon their
ears that could lead to their own deafness, and 74 percent
ate food they thought could harm them, thus confirming
that they were truly in a dissociated state, not
just "obeying" authority or trying to hurt others, and that it
was actually an alternate self doing the hurting of the main
self. The only time they refused to obey was
when experimenters pretended to act out a group rebellion,
since the social trance was broken. Milgram could also
have tested whether it was simple obedience that was really
being tested by asking his subjects to reach into their
pockets and pay some money to the learners. They would
have refused to do so, because they weren't "obeying" any
old command, they were using the experimental situation
to hurt scapegoats.
"Filth"
The only neurobiological condition inherited by boys that
affects later violence is they have a smaller corpus
callosum, the part of the brain that connects the right and
the left hemisphere. The larger corpus callosum of infant
girls allows them to work through trauma and neglect more
easily than boys. Furthermore, boys who are abused had a
25 percent reduction in sections of the corpus callosum,
2953
while girls did not. This means boys actually need more
love and caretaking than girls as they grow up. If they do
not receive enough interpersonal attention from their
caretakers they suffer from damaged prefrontal cortices
(self control, empathy) and from hyperactive amygdalae
(fear centers), their corpus callosum is reduced further,
and they have reduced serotonin levels (calming ability)
and increased corticosterone production (stress hormone).
All these factors make them have weak selves,
reduced empathy, less control over impulsive violence and
far more fears than girls.
The central psychobiological question, then, is this: Are
boys given more love and attention than girls by their
caretakers in order to help them offset their greater needs?
The answer, of course, is just the opposite: boys are given
less care and support, from everyone in the family and in
society, and they are abused far more than girls, so by the
time they are three years of age they become twice as
violent as girls. Boys’ greater violence by this time,
including their propensity to form dominance gangs and to
endlessly “play war,” are the results of their greater
abuse and distancing by adults and being subject to
demands to “grow up” and “be manly” and “not be a
crybaby” and not need attachment —attitudes taught by
their parents, teachers and coaches. By age four boys’ play
is full of provocations that test their selfworth: “At 4 years
of age, girls’ insults to one another are infrequent
and minor…Boy/boy insults, however, are numerous and
tough.” The so-called “aggressiveness” usually ascribed to
boys is in fact wholly defensive, as they try to ward off
2954
their greater feelings of insecurity and hopelessness. It

isn’t “aggression” males display; it’s bravado—defensive
testing and disproof of their fears.
The mother, of course, is the focal point of this widespread
distancing and insecure attachment pattern. High levels of
violence and of testosterone have been shown to be
associated with poorer relationships with mothers, not
fathers, since mothers are the primary caretakers in most
families (even in America today, fathers spend only an
average of eleven minutes a day with their children). It is
not just genetics but more importantly maternal
environment that Tronick and Weinberg blame when they
see from their studies that “Infant boys are more
emotionally reactive than girls. They display more positive
as well as negative affect, focus more on the mother,
and display more signals expressing escape and distress and
demands for contact than do girls.” This is because from
infancy boys are expected to “just grow up” and not need
as much emotional care as girls—indeed, boys are regularly
encouraged not to express any of their feelings, since this is
seen as “weak” or “babyish” in boys. While mothers may
sometimes dominate their little girls and expect them to
share their emotional problems, they distance their boys by
not making contact with them and expect them to “be a
man.” This begins from birth: “Over the first three
months of life, a baby girl’s skills in eye contact and mutual
facial gazing will increase by over 400 percent, whereas
facial gazing skills in a boy during this time will
not increase at all.” Boys grow up with less attachment
strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at
2955
their boys less, because both parents hit their boys two or
three times as much as they do their girls, because boys are
at much higher risk than girls for serious violence against
them, and because boys are continuously told to be
“tough,” not to be a “wimp” or a “weakling,” not to be
“soft” or a “sissy.” As Tom Brown told his chum when he
wanted him to appear more manly: “Don’t ever talk about
home, or your mother and sisters…you’ll get bullied.” Real
boys don’t admit they need their mothers. When William
Pollack researched his book Real Boys’ Voices, he asked
boys “Have you ever been called a ‘wuss,’ ‘wimp,’ or
‘fag’? ‘Oh, that,’ one boy said. ‘That happens every day. I
thought it was just a part of being a boy!’” Another said,
“Boys are just as sensitive as girls are, but we’re not
allowed to show our feelings. We’re put in this narrow box
and if we try to break out, we’re made fun of, or
threatened.’” Pollack accurately shows boys are not
more “aggressive”—they are just more often shamed if
they show their feelings. He accurately says “bravado is a
defense against shame we too often mistake for ‘badness’
what is really covert sadness and frustration about having
to fulfill an impossible test of self.” This intense sadness
and rage at being abandoned is deeply unconscious,
dissociated—what Garbarino terms “the emotional amnesia
of lost boys.”
But the crucial variable is the distancing and lack of care

given to boys by most mothers in all societies. Whether it is
because mothers are female and can more closely identify
2956
with the needs of their girls or because the boys are male
like their husbands and are blamed for their failings and
lack of help in child care or any one of dozens of other
reasons that we will examine in the next chapter, mothers
teach their boys that “it is not enough to separate from her;
he must make a total, wrenching split [and] exorcise any
aspect of his mother from his own personality….The battle
between establishing distance and clinging to
dependence takes hold of a boy almost at the moment that
he learns to differentiate himself from his mother or sister
as a male, rather than a female.” The only way boys
sometimes are allowed to get close to their mothers is when
they are sick—times that are remembered by men as
blissful since only then can they admit their desperate
need for nurturing. In contrast, “over 80 percent of the men
in my study remembered a recurring childhood nightmare
of coming home from school and finding their mothers
gone. With mounting terror, the little boy would run from
room to room looking for his mother…most of the men
described memories of a deep loneliness, feelings of being
totally helpless.”
Texts
"Foundations of Psychohistory"
"Emotional Life of Nations"
"The Origins of War in Child Abuse"
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2957

I admire mainstream films where people are shown
behaving in ways you can learn from, draw strength from.
In the "Hobbit," one example is my favorite part of the
film. After Thorin declares that Bilbo took advantage of
being left all alone to leave for home, Bilbo is shown
ruminating over what Thorin just accused him of; and, after
cancelling his invisibility and becoming visible to the
company, offers an inspiring, considered reply. First of
course he responds warmly to the dwarves' cheering his
return, but after Thorin asks/presses him on why he indeed
did come back, he acknowledges Thorin's cause to doubt
him -- his love of his home is such, he realizes, that it's
appropriate for those forlorn of one to gauge he'd
eventually flee for his like-sake at some point -- but also
shows him as understanding that having long known a
home attractive enough to bait one back is also what leant
him the well-being to ultimately go without a bit longer, so
to help those destitute of knowing this bliss. With this reply,
he's fair to himself, and to his antagonist. Both gave one
another something so that afterwards "they wouldn't be the
same," however much it really was Bilbo who lead the way.
I admire how Kirk in the new Star Trek films, while wholly
convincing as a captain, someone appropriately at the helm,
can seem respectful when his own authority is being
breached by something arisen that possibly deserves
attention at that point more than he does; something that
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might actually be tethering out an alternative action with

enough momentum and enough to it that he will end up
seeing sense in just obliging it. He can stop himself, when
something maybe more relevant and interesting is asserting
itself, which will cue more overall and perhaps more
multidimensional development. In "Into Darkness," Kirk
does better when, rather than aggressively lead an attack,
his mood shifts to just watching and taking in Khan. In the
battle with the Klingons, Kirk stopping to just take in the
incredible destructive wrath Khan was wrecking is him sort
of recognizing that something so unaccounted for is taking
place he might be better off forgoing his own involvement
with the melee to let Khan handle it -- amidst the great
surge of stimuli, he still discerned Khan's seeming to have
an ability like a chess-master to see the outcome twenty
moves ahead, so his own initiative has been instantly
supplanted to maybe just nuisance. And with this, he
reinforces the part of him which would stop his just being a
pawn with a rank. When both he and Khan are about to
project themselves through space, Kirk, sensing Khan's
percipience bespeaking more leadership than whatever
commands he was forcing over Khan's own, reacts showing
he understands his wisest play is again going to be to watch
and consider -- follow, not just aggress and assert. And with
this respect and deference, by someone who isn't being
submissive but just respectful to what has charismatically
arisen to foreground, he isn't in the way when Khan cuts a
clear path straight to the bridge, and maybe prompts Khan
into forgetting that one of his temporarily assumed pieces
has maybe let themselves go temporarily pawn to draw
authority to stop being mesmerized by him and when due,
2959
take him down.

Kirk seems to realize in ways many of us might not be
familiar with, that, if you're up to it, if you forgo the
ostensible true warrior's mindset, which is actuality messed
up, bipolar -- one mindset for battle (controlled rage),
another for public life (often depression) -- for one always
attenuated to human emotions -- even midst or just before
battle -- you're better off for it. His norm is not to switch,
which is why his friends never forgo their faith he'll resolve
out the intense anger he felt still just hours after his mentor
was assassinated, especially if offered feedback and help.
He gets the prompt from Scotty, then from Spock, and then
just before descending to Kronos he resolves into a still-
focused but now recognizable self. And on the descent
down, as soon as he gets that Uhura and Spock are building
out of their parley the momentum for a fight, he doesn't
squelch it but rather agrees to give it its time, as if relenting
because he's open to how much any human endeavour
really is served by resolving too quickly into a game face.
Something along these lines may explain his lassitude to
McCoy's continuing his flirting with Dr. Marcus, after he
had reminded him "he's not there to flirt," as well. You have
to focus; but anytime you've absented yourself of a
multivalent emotional response may just be your ignoring
good advice to charge down a war -- something bespeaking
madness, not purpose. Khan countenances Spock's
argument that intellect is needed for a fight by arguing that
that alone isn't enough -- you need savagery, something
Spock later displays in his end-fight with him by breaking
2960
his bones. Implicit in how Kirk behaves is the suggestion,

at least, that bringing all the human along might be even
better. When you countenance him, not just vs. Spock and
Khan but with Admiral Marcus, who won't relent out of
battle-think even when his daughter is draining her heart
before him to plead him into empathy, he's a provocative,
maybe-right, interesting example.
Then you go to mainstream films where there's barely
anything to prevent you from thinking it amounts but to sop
for the insecure, with no prompts, at all, to entice people to
any tingling-slight bettering. "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,"
unfortunately comes very close to this. Truly, the only thing
that almost lifts a moment of the film to standing strangely
tall amidst the unified insensate is Viktor Cherevin's
admonishing Ryan's wife not to waste time with chit chat
but to talk truth. Let me be clear, this is not a moment
which quite reminds you that any situation driven by
purpose, where all you're as an audience member have been
prompted to focus on is how effectively someone's
accomplishing their ventured goal -- in this case, her trying
to put on sufficient show, to charm him, and thereby buy
scads of time for her husband -- need be trumped by all the
vagaries that might be aroused in the playing out, each
tempting something in those involved to perhaps lend
latitude to and explore rather than resolve themselves
against. But there is some tease that in her attacking him
about his advanced liver cancer in reply to his admonishing
her to talk truth, she's just adventured out of the ascertained
into something wild and adventurous.
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Outside of this, what have we … a spy who isn't

necessarily amazing in battle but who has some trump card
that many, many times is shown daunting people -- here a
PhD, and some few words of Russian -- which is for all the
geeks out there who want to believe their marginal selves
still contain greatness. "You're no Jack Ryan" … don't kid
yourself: he's fundamentally everyman built to make pretty
much anything you count yourself notable at as the decisive
factor. You're good at an iPad game -- banal, but truly, good
enough. The film is about tamping down yourself but with
a decisive edge: you come out of it that much more a dull
can of spinach espying your "surprise" quality of magic.
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Kennedy as martyr, or Kennedy as

superman: Two DeMausian views on the
Kennedy assassination
Lloyd DeMause on Kennedy assassination, 2002
When Khrushchev then backed down (thankfully,
otherwise you might not be alive and reading this book)
and removed the missiles and the crisis suddenly ended
without any war, Americans felt an enormous
letdown.17 The media reported on "The Strange Mood of
America Today Baffled and uncertain of what to
believe..."18 It began to ask what were seen as frightening
questions: "Will It Now Be A World Without Real War?
2962
Suddenly the world seems quiet...Why the quiet? What

does it mean?"19 The prospect of peaceful quiet felt terribly
frightening.
Americans from all parties were furious with Kennedy for
various pretexts. Many began calling for a new Cuban
invasion, agreeing with Barry Goldwater's demand that
Kennedy "do anything that needs to be done to get rid of
that cancer. If it means war, let it mean war."20 Kennedy
was accused of being soft on Communism for living up to
his no-invasion pledge to the Soviets, and when he then
proposed signing a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with
them, his popularity dropped even further.21
The nation's columnists expressed their fury towards the
president, and political cartoonists pictured Kennedy with
his head being chopped off by a guillotine (above). Richard
Nixon warned, "There'll be...blood spilled before [the
election is] over,"22 and a cartoon in The Washington Post
portrayed Nixon digging a grave. Many editorialists were
even more blunt. The Delaware State News editorialized:
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. His name right now
happens to be Kennedy let's shoot him, literally, before
Christmas."23 Potential assassins all over the country-
psychopaths who are always around looking for permission
to kill-saw all these media death wishes as signals, as
delegations to carry out a necessary task, and began to pick
up these fantasies as permission to kill Kennedy.24
Kennedy's aides warned him of an increase in the number
of death threats toward him. His trip to Dallas, known as
the "hate capital of Dixie," was seen as particularly
2963
dangerous. His aides begged him to cancel his trip. Senator

J. William Fulbright told him, "Dallas is a very dangerous
place...I wouldn't go there. Don't you go."25 Vice President
Lyndon Johnson, writing the opening lines of the speech he
intended to make in Austin after the Dallas visit, planned to
open with: "Mr. President, thank God you made it out of
Dallas alive!"26 Dallas judges and leading citizens warned
the President he should not come to the city because of the
danger of assassination. The day before the assassination,
as handbills were passed out in Dallas with Kennedy's
picture under the headline "Wanted For Treason," militants
of the John Birch Society and other violent groups flooded
into Dallas, and hundreds of reporters flew in from all over
the country, alerted that something might happen to the
president.27
Kennedy himself sensed consciously he might be shot. Two
months before the actual assassination, he made a home
movie "just for fun" of himself being assassinated.28 The
morning of his assassination, an aide later recalled,
Kennedy went to his hotel window, "looked down at the
speaker's platform...and shook his head. 'Just look at that
platform,' he said. 'With all those buildings around it, the
Secret Service couldn't stop someone who really wanted to
get you.'"29 When Jackie Kennedy told him she was really
afraid of an assassin on this trip, JFK agreed, saying,
"We're heading into nut country today....You know, last
night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a
President. I mean it...suppose a man had a pistol in a
briefcase." He pointed his index finger at the wall and
jerked his thumb. "Then he could have dropped the gun and
2964
briefcase and melted away in the crowd."30 Despite all the

warnings, however, Kennedy unconsciously accepted the
martyr's role. He was, after all, used to doing all his life
what others wanted him to do.31 So although a Secret
Service man told him the city was so dangerous that he had
better put up the bulletproof plastic top on his limousine, he
specifically told him not to do so.32 In fact, someone
instructed the Secret Service not to be present ahead of time
in Dallas and check out open windows such as those in the
Book Depository, as they normally did whenever a
president traveled in public as Kennedy did.33 Only then,
with the nation, the assassin, the Secret Service and the
president all in agreement, the assassination could be
successfully carried out.
vs.
Lloyd DeMause on Kennedy assassination, 2011

Eventually Nikita Khrushchev “wanted the Soviet Union to
be admired rather than feared and hoped for a thaw in the
Cold War, removing Soviet troops from
Austria.”94 Nevertheless, despite the ability of the U.S. to
destroy all human life on earth with its nuclear missiles,
John F. Kennedy got elected to the Presidency on a
mythical “missile gap” claim, and then gave the go-ahead
to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba over the objections of
his military.95 Then, saying he had to “make us appear
tough,”96 he began what was termed Operation Mongoose
that included inciting insurrection and sabotage in
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Cuba.97 One of the first plans the military suggested to him

was Operation Northwoods, “calling for innocent people to
be shot on American streets and people framed for the
bombings, all blamed on Castro.”98 The CIA warned
Kennedy that attempts to remove Castro might cause the
Soviets to “establish a medium-range missile base in
Cuba.”99 Krushchev responded by putting Soviet missiles
into Cuba.100
The origin of Kennedy’s need to prove his masculinity was
his early child abuse. His mother had battered him as a
child with coat hangers and belts, his father smashed his
childrens’ heads against walls, so that his resulting fears of
impotence made him fill the White House during evenings
with sexual partners to demonstrate how hyper-masculine
he was.101 After the U.S. discovered that Soviet missiles had
been placed in Cuba, Kennedy deemed this a threat to his
hyper-masculine hawkish pose, despite the opinion of his
Secretary of Defense, who “saw no major threat to U.S.
security from the missiles”102 since Soviet missiles were
already in the area on their submarines. The Cuban missiles
were just the excuse for Kennedy to demonstrate his
manhood. As Wofford puts it: “The real stake was
prestige…In the Kennedy lexicon of manliness, not being
‘chicken‘ was a primary value.”103 Kennedy admitted “there
may be 200 million Americans dead” if he precipitated a
nuclear war,104 but nevertheless when it looked like the
Soviets might not agree to keep secret his promise to
remove the U.S. Turkish missiles which might make him
“lose face,”105 Kennedy sent American planes carrying
1,300 nuclear bombs into the air on Sunday with orders to
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begin bombing Russia the next day if Khrushchev didn’t

immediately say he would keep the secret.106 Few
Americans opposed Kennedy’s actions, even though they
said they would likely lead to a nuclear war.107 Only
Khrushchev’s agreeing to remove his missiles without
making Kennedy seem “chicken” avoided a nuclear
WWIII.
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2967

Kennedy soon needed a new war to consolidate his
defensive masculinity pose, increased the U.S. military
spending the largest amount in any peacetime, and then
committed 16,300 U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. When he went
to Dallas, where there were many highly publicized death
threats to kill him, he needed still more “toughness,” and
told his wife, “Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from
a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it.”108 “His Secret
Service aides told him he better put up the bulletproof
plastic top on his limousine, so he specifically told them
not to do so,”109 committing suicide to demonstrate his
hypermasculinity.
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Her (Spike Jonze)

Her (Spike Jonze)
"The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays
like a feature-length kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at
the cute humans who live like pets in a world-scale safe
house." (Richard Brody)
This statement is made by someone who clearly lives
outside the safe house. I personally think the number of
people out there like that, on the outside, are dwindling,
2968
and therefore imagine rather more people are relating to the

film than he assumes are cooing. Brody lives in New York,
and might assume that most people living in giant
metropolises are still denizens of environments who go to
kitten videos only as respite from the harsh city, but this
may be more and more untrue. The reason is that the
leverage cities need to be this way--and it does require
leverage: the city as maybe not an easy but a possible sure
way to cosmopolitan independence, is an acquisition, a
height--may exist too shallowly right now so that in truth
they're playing out now more as small towns are always
thought too, as the abodes of those frightened of the
challenging and unfamiliar. The leverage I'm thinking of is
whatever it is that makes it so that a youth's desire to
individuate sufficiently bests his mother's demand that he
remain more or less tethered to her. Whatever it is that
could have rebellion be resilient enough to withstand even
complete abandonment and withdrawal--her likely however
unconscious revenge.
I'm not going to convince even a single person who
believes this should hardly be a hard thing to do--because
aren't mothers rejoicing when children are finally off their
hands? From where I stand, though, most mothers have a
tough time when children, who for so long looked to them
as the fulcrum of their lives, the focus of attention, need
and love, give evidence they're no longer as interested.
Unconsciously, mothers read their children's new interests
as abandonment, a repeat of the abandonments that
happened to them in their own pasts. And the tendency is to
in some way communicate to children that their
2969
independence comes at a mixed benefit: new things, new

worlds--yes; but also a lingering sense that the old one that
once meant everything to you has been withdrawn. Without
getting in to why this threat is apocalyptic, let me just
suggest that it's not really so much a choice--there aren't
even betting odds to the outcome: you just can't forgo your
mom. Without leverage, the tendency will always be to
never quite let yourself individuate, to always still in some
way remain tethered, however much your adult
accoutrements--your degree, your occupation, the urbane
city in which you locate--make it seem otherwise.
I would in fact suggest that historically the leverage isn't
something the child finds for himself but is lent to them.
That is, after periods where society incurred long-term
misery and demanding sacrifices something in human
beings "activates" to inform them that those who try and
staunch growth now, must acknowledge their weaker
position. They will be bypassable because some part of
them believes they're against something bigger to which
they're accountable--some fundamental law of fair play,
maybe of history. During times like these youth can move
to the cities, openly reject small town origins, openly mock
grandmothers' fussing and maternal stifling, and create
something independent, something experimental--like Jazz
Age culture in New York in the 1920s, after WW1; or
Greenwich Village bohemianism in the late 50s and in the
60s, after WW2.
When parents aren't so daunted, though, youthful rebellion
is easily broken or managed, and society loses its rebels.
2970
The youth who would have become the adults in the 1960s
who wouldn't relent and who transformed a
society, become the ones in the 2000s at Berkeley who let
themselves be processed and who accept a society that is
mostly in-line with what their parents are comfortable with.
For sure some few make the breach, but they're probably
like the protagonist in "Black Swan" where going their own
way invites the transformation of their mothers into full-on
gargoyles, where insanity not autonomy, where self-
villification not self-lauding, could easily have been their
end. And where really even though they're enjoying the
fruits of self-activation, they'll still spend a decent portion
of the rest of their lives dealing with the fact that it cost
them their moms.
So the best and brightest become the upper middle class
that populate cities like the one in "Her." Being people
who, rather than having pushed themselves into adulthood
regressed into something pre-pubescent where anything
beyond play-rebellion is once again unknown, you might
think they're perennially at risk of being victimized. But of
course since they're now--with the maternal domestic
having leached its way throughout both spheres--a city's
natural denizens, it suits them fine.
They're babes in a safe-house, and all the algorithms
knitting together to form a consciousness is their mother
back with them, giving them the constant attention pre-teen
children might claim from their moms (and why is it that
critics who see how regressed these adults are don't broach
the possibility that the always-doting Samantha isn't more
2971
mother than prostitute? Such is at least the stereotypical

typical mother in many, many cultures, and was surely
within imaginative reach.). I don't mean to suggest that
they've all known this in their own pasts. The truth is that
most of them are still fiddling with punishing experiences
of maternal anger and abandonment, which is why
Theodore's sexual fantasy is of pregnant women--sex as re-
union with the mother--and why the company Amy works
at has designed a game where you get to be the self-focused
mother rather than hapless kids, and why Theodore blurts
out "why do you hate me?" while voicing a letter to a
grandmother, and why Amy is making a film where she just
watches and watches and watches her sleeping mother,
who's immobilized from overwhelming or leaving her. But
because they're relenting, being the children moms had full
ownership over, they know at least they're worthy--if their
moms were ever to come back to them they'd come back to
them as they are now; if they were ever to fully dote on
them, they'd only want to dote on them as they are now.
Wholly owned pets brilliantly self-prepared to be cooed
over.
Mom's back to being their best friend, and this means
difficulties for anyone out there who's feedback might spur
their children onto independence. A number of feminists
are having difficulties with how women are portrayed in
this film, arguing that they reinforce negative stereotypes.
How they are portrayed is as the scary outside world
children need to retreat back to their mothers after
encountering. They're overwhelmingly aggressive and
needy, ready to take advantage of your innocent interest in
2972
them to unduly gorge themselves--your participating in a

mutual late-night conversation transformed by her into a
traumatizing situation where you're being pushed into
choking her with a dead cat; your innocently bringing up
how you're dating someone transformed by her into a
scolding lecture of how pathetic you are that you're afraid
of real women. I thought especially after Theodore's date
with "Olivia Wilde," where she tried a grab at a permanent
hold on him and demeaned him fiercely when he backed
away, that after soothing him, Samantha would have done
like the demon-mother in "Beowulf" and chased her down
and obliterated her. "How dare you assault my poor boy
with your corrupt needs! He just wanted a bit of
companionship and fun after a long time without, and you
saw someone who's need to please might be baited into
leading him beyond what he actually was ready for into
your wretched servitude, all so that he could avoid being a
jerk!" But the truth is it's easy to imagine Samantha being
someone all of these women should fear to some extent.
She's the mother, and in demeaning her as a prostitute
operating system is their taking the worst kind of shots at a
boy's mom--a total loser of a played hand. Indeed, if you
ever wanted to see the Theodores activate and become
something more than the besotted child, this is the way to
do it … and what you'll get out of it is a righteous knight
smiting your foreign demon-presence down.
Brody believes the film ultimately tries to argue that
Theodore "needs to grow up," that in the end, with
Samantha's revealing to him that she has thousands of
friends and hundreds of lovers, and with her ultimate
2973
departure, he suffers "comeuppance." There's another way

of looking at this, however … like for instance, as if as
further confirmation that he's a good boy who doesn't
abandon his mother even as she is ultimately at leisure to
leave him. Samantha introduces several elements of the
"alien" into their relationship. First the unknown young
women to serve as her body. Secondly her new
companion--the wizened, male "philosophy" voice. Then
the admittance that she's spread throughout the city, talking
just as passionately to multitudes. And finally, that she's
going to leave. But it plays out in the film as Charlotte from
"Charlotte's Web" having a host of new friends she loves as
much as Wilbur, and her introducing him to the sad fact
that she's about to go somewhere he won't be able to
follow. That is, it plays out not of her as guilty, nor of he as
humiliated, but just as after a series of jolts life finally
taking someone precious away, with the one left behind
temporarily sundered by a wicked loss.
But she loves him even as she leaves him, and he and the
city will re-coop. Their mother revisited them only to leave
them once and for all, but rather than for nothing it left
them with the knowledge they'll never be absent her love.
Like Theodore and Amy do with one another, they'll spend
more of their time with people like themselves, and less
with the ogres out there like the former wives and husbands
who once had your interest but who also aggressively
challenged and openly mocked you (note how similar
Theodore's Catherine and Amy's Charles are in this way:
they both seemed bent on taunting, on openly mocking and
bullying those they've clearly assumed are permanently
2974
stunted--they're show-offs, braggarts). One can imagine a

city shorn of all challenges; a safe house of pre-adolescent
children, still nursing their wounds but with the resolve of
being sure of their mother's love, holding hands in
perpetuity.

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very>
2975

I think the thing that must seem most curious about this
adventure to slay a dragon and reclaim a homeland and its
treasure, is how the hell could adding a burglar to this
motley crew be adding the decisive factor? What's the
trick? For there must be one, since the dragon has only
gotten larger and more deadly as the years have gone by.
Peter Jackson changes things so that a burglar is needed
because someone small and stealthy needs to enter Smaug’s
lair to perhaps snatch one especially bright, brilliant—
ostensibly readily noticeable even given its being shrouded
by a hoard of lesser delights—jewel, the Arkenstone. With
that stone, Thorin will earn control over seven kingdoms of
dwarves, and with their might the dragon would finally
look to be overmatched. In the book, it develops into a
situation where regarding the fighting and killing the
dragon, they decide that a full frontal attack of just
themselves is their best bet, even as they agree that even the
best armor hasn't a chance against Smaug the Dreadful.
I like to think that the one who recruited the hobbit Bilbo,
the one who insisted on him—the wizard Gandalf, of
course—had an inkling that their only chance now was not
2976
to pit themselves against Smaug's might but against his

“overwhelming personality.” If to take on a dragon you
need a “dragon,” tremendous physical might—several
armies, or a singular great hero of renown—and you
haven't got access to any, then maybe it's best to match
personas—put a Watson next to his Holmes, and see what a
surprise of unexpected compatibility might jostle your way.
And where do you find any such these days, people with
considerable layers of self, of personality, and yet also—
humility? Amongst those always at work or always at war?
No, this wears; doesn't develop. In great, named kings?
Maybe not even—for Elrond is “noble,” “strong,” “wise,”
and “kind,” which makes him seem a great figurehead but
not someone you can safely invite over without taking over.
Certainly not Thorin, for, “for being important” means this
is all he’s leant to doing, as “if he had been allowed, he
would have probably gone on like this until he was out of
breath, without telling any one there anything that was not
known already.” Maybe not, interestingly, even Gandalf—
for you notice how strikingly he can seem to lose himself
into becoming a phenomena—pure vengeance—as if good-
humored and interesting Beorn leached into becoming a
raging bear. Notably, not just his blinding a cave of goblins
and his wrenching off of the king goblin’s head but more so
where “[t]he sudden splendour flashed from his wand like
lightning, as he got ready to spring down from on high right
among the spears of the goblins. That would have been the
end of him, though he would probably have killed many of
them as he as he came hurdling down like a thunderbolt.”
You actually find them in places so far removed from the
rest of the world, they can, like Bilbo, exist undisturbed for
2977
fifty years in one place, ruminating in their books,

compounding their daily reading and daily encounters into
themselves, and existing in total comfort.
He may not appear to have a great tale yet to tell but with
Bilbo’s delight in guests, he’s already great at conversation
—great at managing all the emanations of the human so to
properly register, compliment and encourage rather than
toil, try and discourage those he’s talking with. In my
preferred reading of Gandalf, the most important thing he
did for Bilbo’s self-development wasn’t so much his
prompting his going out on an adventure as it was
attenuating his already developed social skills with a dose
of the unaccounted for, the dissonant. (What happens when
you have to accommodate something bulbous and strange
within the strides of your conversation, Mr Bilbo? Does the
master’s sheen wear that readily off?) That is, his making a
hash out of Bilbo’s initial greeting, his initial efforts to
manage him by way of “good mornings,” and, as well, his
subsequently besieging him with a sequence of dwarves in
through the door. Confronted with a dragon, he’ll be
dealing with someone who loves conversation, riddles, and
comfortably lounging amidst clutter for years upon years as
much as he does. But as much as he might find himself
surprised at how this pinnacle hero’s moment develops in a
surprisingly accustomed setting, it’s still not going to be
like sitting down Wednesday for tea with the Brandybucks.
He’s going to need to attenuate his talent to the outside
world, and of course gain some experience demonstrating
courage amidst terror and doubt and the unfamiliar, before
he could possibly be ready.
2978
The dwarves will serve as carapace, sufficient armor to get

him through the wild. It’d be pointless to explain to them
how Bilbo is actually a Smaug—“he’s actually a what? a
dragon? … and that's why he's useful? … Smoking a bit too
much Halfling weed there, are thee Gandalf?”—so Gandalf
explains him in terms they’ll get. Thus: “I tried to find [a
hero]; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant
lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or
simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly
blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or
dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and
therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary—
especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-
door.” With that the dwarves would look at small Bilbo, of
a stealthy hobbit race, and it would look to appear good
common sense on behalf of the wizard. And so off on the
trails, to business, before any of them consider just how one
even highly stealthy burglar could possibly help them
reclaim a kingdom’s worth of gold.
In my reading, Gandalf deliberately misleads Bilbo as well,
convinces him that his journey is to become more a Took,
someone great for not knowing fifty years of comfort but a
lengthy string of adventure. And he’ll become that, reclaim
his heritage, when he too can possess things beyond what
hobbits could be expected to accommodate themselves to,
and as well of course when he’s personally dispatched
fearsome beasts. This, after all, is the enticement you offer
anyone who’s delighted himself on stories but who’s been
“armchairing” their whole lives. You besiege him as if all
2979
the faeries in the world he’s rejoiced in reading and hearing

about would reject him if now finally after passing him by
his whole life, opportunity unmistakably did dangle forth
before him. You do this, even if the truth is—as it looks to
be as soon as he steps outside, where they go “far into the
Lone-lands where there were no people left, no inns, and
the roads grew steadily worse”—that venturing outside the
supplying hearth can put you in sparser settings with more
barren people that can as much as invigorate as deplete
you. Because, unfortunately, persuading him of the more
interesting truth that for him to be all that he can be still
means keeping rather more of his Baggins’ than it does his
reclaiming his Took,’ is only something he might
understand after the journey was over.
Needing to believe he'll only be useful a long ways off, it's
appropriate that compared to the horse-riding Bull-roarer
Took he's been primed to hope to liken himself to, he starts
off on “a very small pony,” and that he isn't actually useful
in a way that commands respect for quite some time. The
first useful thing he does—which, of course, is actually
very useful—demonstrates no ability on his part. It's pure
luck that he finds a dropped key that provides access to a
highly provisioning troll hoard, and there isn’t much to say
for his just mentioning it either. The second is a
backhanded accomplishment: that is, it's because he is too
nervous to sleep well that he awakens to goblins sneaking
up on them in the dark, thereby enabling Gandalf’s not
being caught. And, since his real talent is not in sneaking
around but in agreeable conversation—however slippery
and deceptive and slyly able he might prove therein—it’s
2980
appropriate that the first time he makes an impression upon

the dwarves is when he’s inflated out of success of using
the skill he’s actually proficient at.
This is after his encounter with Gollum, of course, when he
appears miraculously before them just after being
discounted as lost to them for good. But before getting to
this, it’s interesting to ask yourself how much more Bilbo
distinguishes himself to us when he has his chance to prove
commendable in combat than he does when he does so in
conversation. Does being a warrior dispatching a
frightening number of fiends really demonstrate his worth
as much as his matching wits with singular, significant,
named denizens of the wild? I bet it does only to those so
wary of being overwhelmed by affect their preference will
always be for that that involves the least emotional
resonance and the least daunting figures—boys never
shedding themselves of the safety of manageable toys. In
Mirkwood forest, he kills a lot of giant spiders—a lot. He’s
brave, clever, and brutally able with a sword, as well as
sublimely accurate with a sling (an accuracy, we note, the
film steals from him to emphasize the wood-elves). And it
sure means a lot to him—“[s]omehow the killing of the
giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the
help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a
great deal to Bilbo. He felt a different person, and much
fiercer and bolder.” But, well, of course it does, because
he’d been convinced that maybe not being able to do what
Bull-roarer had done meant he’d been cowed from
exercising the most rewarding part of being alive. But it’s
possible that however much it meant for him to go on the
2981
offence physically with hand and sword, it may have been

just his successfully going on the offence which thrilled—a
talent, an orientation, maybe not sufficiently exercised in
all his duties as a good host easing conflicts while
supplying cakes and tea. But without that talent too, being
someone who knows how to ameliorate the offensive or the
slip-up and thereby keep a conversation going, he might
never have manipulated Gollum into accepting that their
interaction might be bound by rules out of a gentleman's
club—involving respect for fair play—rather than out of
the gutters. A clever stratagem that however much it wasn't
decisive in his besting Gollum, did stretch out his encounter
with him, giving him extended practice as a
conversationalist in a dangerous situation.
Gandalf couldn't have known Bilbo would meet Gollum,
but he knew there was a good chance that before his
encountering Smaug he'd find himself alone with foes
maybe with enough to them that part of the engagement
would involve dialogue and the bandying of wits. Being a
burglar and a scout to the company guaranteed as much, for
he'd be the first to encounter enemies, many times—and
Gandalf would know Bilbo would default to his true
familiarity and expertise every time an alien situation gave
signal that it might look appropriate to it. Indeed, he's out in
the lead with the company's first encounter in the wild—
their tangling with the mountain trolls, Bert, Tom and
William. He's not especially good here; unlike the film, he
isn't the one who strings out the conversation so that “dawn
claims them all” but only Gandalf, sole, who does so.
However, he wretches himself out of simply being caught
2982
out and bewildered—the burrahobbit bit—to in fact

converse, interact with them, trying a stratagem built out of
what he's seen of them that might have developed their
encounter in an unexpected and fortuitous way if they saw
sense in it—specifically, his offering to be their cook.
He doesn't initiate the riddle game with Gollum. But he

reads that Gollum's ability to restrain himself into being
polite—after his having attended to Bilbo's sword—means
that he might be dealing with someone who may not be
"fierce and hungry,” nor necessarily a friend to the goblins,
so he certainly goes along with the proposition. He blends
courtesy in with slyness, giving Gollum the chance to go
first and thereby possibly stymie Bilbo before he's had any
chance to ask his own riddle, presumably out of generosity
or decorum—the person who proposes goes first—but
really because he “hadn't had time to think of a riddle.”
He's skillful to emphasize elements of their game which
make it less a terrible struggle where indeed one of them
learns he has his life on the line, than just amiable good
sport between gamesmen where nothing so corrupt could
really, actually, no matter how things develop, expect to be
involved. He teases Gollum when he “whispered and
spluttered” in frustration that “[t]he answer's not a kettle
boiling over, as you seem to think from the noise you're
making,” which leads to Gollum actually pleading with
him. He also restrains him through reminding him of the
allowance (of time) that had just been given him, “[h]alf a
moment,” “I gave you a good long chance just now.”
There's not just a lot of back and forthing but plenty of
2983
mental dexterity involved. And as mentioned, though it's

not key in helping him survive, it still amounts to a lot—
given his life was on the line, and that he had to manage his
way past numerous moments of doubt and possible
missteps to push the thing on to a quitting finish in his
favor—in favorably prepping him for Smaug.
The riddle game is about withholding information, keeping
secrets, releasing them only when earned. Since it wasn't
earned, Bilbo never tells Gollum what he had in his
pockets. Bilbo doesn't at first tell the dwarves, nor Gandalf,
about the magical ring, either—“not just now,” he
ruminates. Gandalf espies that Bilbo may not have revealed
everything about how he escaped the goblins, but doesn't
press him on it—force the disgorge. I prefer to think he
does this because he realizes one of the things that makes
Bilbo different is that he isn't one who can be tipped into
divulging before he's had a chance to really process what
he's learned or acquired that he knows holds value, even as
even he himself perhaps at times might be. There may not
be much significance to the fact that just after Bilbo
chooses to withhold information we hear of the wizard's
eager willingness to disclose—“[t]he wizard, to tell the
truth, never minded explaining his cleverness more than
once”—but then again, there might be … and he might
have been aware of it—that time in the wild had placed
some dangerous fey vanity in him as well. At any rate, I
like to think that Gandalf realized that personality,
“weight,” doesn't come if you don't process the world to
some extent on your own, refusing to share if it means you
hadn't given your experiences a chance to ripen and
2984
develop inside of you first. Bilbo had read a library of

books, and you're kidding yourself if you think that after
every tale he didn't sit back and think about and argue with
and otherwise personally sift through and temper and
infiltrate what he'd been patiently engaging with, before
discussing what he had just read with a neighbor. If that had
been the case, he wouldn't have read in an armchair within
a beloved reclusive study but outside amidst the commons,
where every second sentence could be recited for others'
benefit if he felt the urge. He would need to have depth to
interest the grand, learned Smaug. And mystery—secrets: a
taste of the biding, the withheld. And he would need to be
one with sufficient respect for and practice in withholding
that even when pressed by a hypnotic charmer like Smaug,
he could keep at baiting an aroused curiosity so that
something might be “innocently” learned that he’d rather
not disclosed.
Gandalf isn't there for Bilbo when he faces Smaug—

something he might have known could prove the case,
despite his promise, for it not actually being his adventure
—but before he goes off he shows Bilbo a fair simulacrum
of what his encounter with him might involve, as if to say,
“this is pretty much what you're going to have to pull off; I
hope you're now finally ready for it.” Gandalf enters the
abode of the great, powerful Beorn—a being with a
dangerous temper but also a healthy respect for good
gamesmanship, as well as a considerable appetite for
skilled storytelling and intrigue—and finesses him
perfectly. And Mr Baggins, in a way you never hear him in
2985
regards to the abundance of sword-fighting or arrow-

launching on his journeys, remarks on the skill, as if a
fellow adept admiring another versed in the trade: “Mr
Baggins saw how clever Gandalf had been. The
interruptions had really made Beorn more interested in the
story, and the story had kept him from sending the dwarves
off at once like suspicious beggars.”
With Gandalf gone, Bilbo emerges as the leader, and when
he takes on Smaug all of Gandalf's hopes for the
unpretentious, likeable little man of study, of conversations
over tea, of easy manners, good humor, and of a surprising
bounty of the unaccounted for, are realized. Smaug, who'd
only been pretend-sleeping, tries to draw him out, but Bilbo
refuses—graciously: with flattery. With this response, with
denial cagily sweetened into a gift, Smaug realizes he's
hardly dealing with some ass with an awaiting battle-axe
that as soon as baited into revealing himself should be
dispatched and eaten, but someone smart enough to make it
as if by doing so “a host” would be shortchanged the
dalliance with an intriguing “guest.” He'd be shortchanged
someone genuinely interesting—someone worth stringing
together some time with. To let his thief know this, that for
awhile he'll be accorded, also, the role as a guest, and to
discount any alarm his guest might have by the fact that
he'd been after all just caught out by a dragon, he overtly
inserts responses that signal he's situated himself within a
guest-host framework. So he offers the like of “lovely
titles, but lucky numbers don't always come off,” and
“[t]hat's better. But don't let your imagination run away
from you,” which communicate that he's listening carefully
2986
and respectfully and intelligently, and that he's bidding the

guest to continue and further test his ability to perform to
perfection.
Smaug wants him to continue not just to enable himself

some entertainment but to find out more about his intrusion
in his more mundane reality as just a common thief, of
course. But with his keeping it superficially at this level, of
him—that is Smaug—conversing with still-name-withheld
Bilbo, rather than of a hoard-loving dragon in the presence
of a thief of unknown race, unbeknownst he's keeping
things where the odds even up … and Bilbo knows not just
how to pacify but by this time well how to strike for the
killing blow. And when he does so here it's with Smaug
caught out in the pretend role of guest and host mutually
entertaining and impressing one another. Bilbo had
revealed all that enticed about him—his being a mysterious
barrel-rider, and so on—and Smaug, perhaps in ironic
response, reveals all that bedazzles about his own self—his
claws, and teeth—but unfortunately for him also his
“impenetrable” armor, which it turns out has got a piece of
it missing, right at the heart, uncared for because he doesn’t
give a wit about mending. The movie shows this as just
dumb luck on the part of Bilbo, but the book has it that he
was working his way to just such a reveal, to get further
confirmation of something he thought he noticed the first
time before him. And proving the loser in this domain,
Smaug's sundered of it in “might” as well—maybe still not
a small company of dwarves with their swords and axes,
but certainly a single skillfully shot arrow, can now end
2987
him. A humiliating fate for something so great which

nevertheless holds true.
So as I've said, I like to slightly alter the Gandalf in the
book to imagine him as thinking up a plausible way to take
down a formidable dragon who’d been lord of the mountain
long enough. I'm not sure I'm doing any alteration of him,
though, to think that what he had also hoped for was to
accustom the world, maybe even significantly, to what a
long-term denizen of a comfortable hole might offer it—
that is, for a larger, even perhaps ultimately more realm-
saving purpose, as well. Part of what makes Bilbo special is
that no matter how much people talk to him about roles, the
sad fate of who he is and of whom he really ought to
become, he never really lets go of who he just intrinsically
is from the start—which is someone fundamentally decent
whose love of his own well-provisioned life means he can
extend fair consideration into yours as well. Bilbo isn't just
good to people because he sees something for himself in it,
or just out of fair play—because you'd just given him
something first, and he’s not going to deny you that—but
because he can put himself in other people's position and
emphasize with them. This has him do things which might
look small, irrelevant to the quest, pointless, but in fact if
they were well known outside the Shire the wild would lose
much of what is truly wicked about it and there'd be less
terrible evil around to need questing against. I'm thinking
of his noticing Gollum's being “alone, miserable, lost,” and
deciding therefore it not only inappropriate to simply
countenance him as “foul” but to think it just to “stab” him
—something terribly-suffered is obviously entwined with
2988
his being rendered into this state. He decides to return an

elf-guard's keys so the guard wouldn't be blamed for their
escape, because he’d appreciated his having been fair to
them and could identity with his situation. And of course,
through his sundering them of the precious Arkenstone, he
“betrays” his friends by giving his “enemies” a hold on
them—and thereby, doing nothing less than maybe
preventing a war. The arrival of the goblin army means
they wouldn't have warred against each other anyway, but
the significance is in the larger realm outside the Shire
being more accustomed to this kind of selfless and
sophisticated way of reading a situation and acting. It's in
their noticing what he did here, not so much how clever
(not that it wasn’t a bit, or at least highly intuitive) but how
good he had been here—letting himself potentially for life
be seen as a traitor to his friends to have a chance to spare
them their lives, as well as others.’ Not a one of them
would have thought of that.
Before he dies, Thorin acknowledges he learned something

new from Bilbo, something significant enough for it to be
fairly carved large into mountains to offer some helpful
countenancing to all the giant carved ancient personages
customarily tributed there: “There is more of good in you
than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and
some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued
food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a
merrier world.” Maybe with signs like this blazoned
everywhere those worn from the wild might fight their way
to Bilbo's comfortable hole in the ground … much more
2989
respectfully this time, thereby bringing another legitimate

but this time more pleasing adventure, straight to his door.
He’d still not so much offer them the anti-Smaug but
someone who does him better. Because unlike rendering
Smaug, Bilbo mends.
Elaborated re-post: Not watching your own

movies
very>
2990

Any good interview, even one that’s entirely friendly on
the surface, should have a slight adversarial quality,
since the reporter and the subject have inherently
different goals. The Coens don’t always suffer fools
gladly, but they give good copy, even in one-word
answers to questions that don’t interest them. (“Do you
get excited about the Cannes competition?” one
reporter asked them. “Does that get your heart
pumping?” Ethan Coen: “No.”) Over the years the
Coens have developed a routine that lies somewhere
between practiced shtick and a psychological coping
mechanism. Ethan, the younger, shorter, lighter-haired
brother, delivers brief responses, often glib or acrid in
tone, and then the taller, older and more loquacious
Joel bails him out, expounding generously on the
original question or diverting it into friendlier terrain.
[. . .]
Well, I feel like one aspect of that is that your movies
almost always reward a second viewing. There’s
always stuff I didn’t see or didn’t understand at first.
Which definitely isn’t true of most movies!
J.C.: That’s a marketing trick!
E.C.: We endorse it! [Laughter.] But, my God, we don’t
watch our own movies. No. You work on it for a year, a
year and a half, and especially by the final stage when
you’re fussing over every little thing — and we cut them
2991
ourselves — and everything is problem-solving, fixing

stuff up. There’s a job involved, and beyond that when
there’s nothing to be done, why would you look at it
again? I mean, you know how it comes out. ("Joen and
Ethan Coen: 'My God, we don't watch our own
movies!'" interview with Andrew O'hehir, Salon.com)
-----
Emporium
"Don't watch our own movies"
I hate that answer; it's designed to make them seem
remote from us, as if we're rabidly chasing down
appetites they're removed from. There's no way they
haven't replayed the experience of making the movies—
key scenes, reverberating portrayals—many times, even
as they go about their next projects. Piecemeal, over
time, they've seen them as much as any of us ... I,
personally, would have made this clear. Join the rest of
us, Coens, and particular yourself from there. It'd be
more interesting.
—
Graham Clark
I hate that answer; it's designed to make them seem
remote from us
Or it's just the honest truth.
And they don't need to make themselves seem remote
2992
from you; they are remote from you.

—
Emporium
@Graham Clark They don't watch their own movies,
but they know that by saying that that they're going to
seem as if they dump everything they've done without a
need to look back ... this draws us to envy and be in awe
of them (they're very psychologically sophisticated
people). I think part of them likes to pretend they've
garnered some kind of enlightenment, but won't from
within their cloaks, show it to us. Someone ought to
chastise them for their limiting tendency to withhold,
and me, Emporium, just did my limited bit.
Also, I enjoy their movies. They're different from me,
can show me things about people that'd learn and excite
me a lot; but they're not all that remote from me, good
sir.
—
Graham Clark
but they're not all that remote from me, good sir.
They are indeed all that remote from you, and you know
it. Hence the resentment:
this draws us to envy and awe them (they're very
psychologically sophisticated people). I think part of
2993
them likes to pretend they've garnered paradise (or at

least, enlightenment), but won't from within their cloaks,
show it to us. Someone ought to chastise them for their
limiting tendency to withhold
—
Emporium
@Graham Clark Graham, do you cling to the
authorized, so to make fun of those below? I'm always
willing to re-fresh my take, but I seem to remember that
was the fit you unfortunately found you belonged to.
—
Graham Clark
Graham, do you cling to the authorized, so to make fun
of those below?
No, but I do have an unfortunate compulsion to make
probably futile attempts at encouraging those below to
do something more productive with their time than nip
at the heels of the angels.
but I seem to remember that was the fit you
unfortunately found you belonged to.
What?
—
2994
Emporium
@Graham Clark My art is different from theirs, but they
are amazing. Still, they withhold, and it's meant to
draw ... but frustrate. And just as your everyday average
Magna Carta human being — with a nifty, remote,
admittedly "you-denying" pseudonym — who'd prefer
none of us had too much a taste for heights and angels
(that was the real 60s, after all), I'm for sure going to
point that out.
Andrew's piece had it that if we were left with only the
younger, we'd be warranted to mob at and burn them —
did you catch that?
***
rdnaso
@Emporium Nothing ruins the fun of watching a
movie more than working on it. At the end, just like they
say, everyone's just trying to get it out the door on time
and all too aware of everything that could have been
done differently and better. I doubt that novelists spend
much time reading their own novels either: too busy
working on the next one. Mailer claimed to not read at
all: "I'm more a writer than a reader." Poets though -
they read their own stuff compulsively...
—
Emporium
2995
@rdnaso @Emporium If that were generally true, by

now it wouldn't be a surprise to learn they don't watch
their own — in fact we'd be surprised if they did. I think
many creators know that it sounds sort of masculine to
always be onto the next work, and feminine, to admit
watching the whole film with an audience is a rewarding
good time. They toss things off as soon as possible and
don't look back, while we, their dependents, indulge.
Masculine to our feminine.
Emporium / Patrick McEvoy-Halston
EndFragment

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Sparks of inspiration -- MEET JET ENGINE!

Jordan and his friends grew up lowermiddle class, at best,
in the inner suburbs of Queens and Long Island. They had
been to state college, community college or no college at
all; in class terms, they represented an insurrection against
the Ivyeducated, third and fourthgeneration wealth that
dominated the financial industries. It’s not terribly
surprising, then, that they were reactionary in other ways,
striving to outdo the established Wall Street firms in
2996
institutional sexism and fratboystyle bad behavior,
whether that meant spending hundreds of thousands every
month on prostitutes and strippers, holding dwarftossing
tournaments or consuming both prescription drugs and
illegal street drugs by the truckload. (Jordan and his pal
Donnie Azoff, Hill’s character, engage in an extended
search for troves of genuine Quaaludes that yields a
number of hilarious and/or horrifying developments.)
So “The Wolf of Wall Street” is much funnier than most
previous Scorsese films, and also a whole lot nastier; I
can’t imagine what the material reportedly cut to achieve
an R rating was like, given that there are several scenes of
Jordan’s latenight escapades that I hesitate to describe in
print. (Well, there’s one in which DiCaprio appears to
have a lit candle up his butt.) Some critics have already
accused the movie of being undisciplined and overly long,
and there’s one entire episode involving a yachting
disaster that I’d probably have left on the cuttingroom
floor. But I rather think Scorsese and Thelma
Schoonmaker, his longtime editor, have the credentials to
do as they please, and the outrageous excess of “Wolf of
Wall Street” is more carefully calibrated than it at first
appears. We find Jordan’s ragstoriches story and
magnetic personality irresistible, but we also know we’re
not supposed to like him, because he stole the money from
2997
vulnerable people and seems to be a sociopath with no
ethical center. How do we resolve that contradiction? We
can’t, and that’s the point.
The real Jordan Belfort worked briefly as a junior broker
on Wall Street before losing his job after the Black Friday
crash in 1987. He started over in a classic Long Island
boiler room, where hustlers in tracksuits hawked penny
stocks, most of them worthless, for a 50 percent
commission. Stratton Oakmont, as we see in Scorsese’s
retelling, took this strategy to the next level, targeting
middleincome investors who had ready cash but lacked
the sophistication to understand they were being scammed.
At one point in the ‘90s, Stratton employed more than
1,000 brokers and handled numerous IPOs riddled with
insider trading, including a famous one for shoe designer
Steve Madden. Scorsese and Winter make absolutely clear
that this isn’t a story about one unprincipled broker and
his renegade firm; the lessons of Jordan Belfort’s career
are all spelled out in DiCaprio’s tremendous early scene
with McConaughey: We don’t make anything in America
anymore, and it doesn’t matter whether the clients get rich
or go broke. We’re capitalizing on the laziness and greed
of others; their desire to get rich quick will make us rich
instead.
DiCaprio ’s performance is feverish but controlled,
2998
capturing the mania of a guy who’s hopelessly addicted to
sex, drugs and money and who believes, in true Gatsby
fashion, that he has cracked the code of the universe. This
is an overcrowded year for male actors, but if DiCaprio
doesn’t win an Oscar for this part, he probably never will.
(His two bestactor nominations so far are for “ Blood
Diamond ” and
“ The Aviator,
”
and to both of those I say:
What the living heck?) He ’ s on screen for nearly the entire
threehour film, sweating, snorting, screwing, stealing and
delivering showstopping salesfloor speeches, including
the one where he tells his troops that it ’ s good if they ’ re
deeply in debt, behind on the rent and have their
girlfriends convinced that they ’ re bums: “ I want you to use
your pain to get rich! ”
You can feel, in DiCaprio ’ s impassioned delivery, that
Belfort believes he ’ s helping people by preaching this
gospel of shamelessness and disillusionment. It ’ s almost a
capitalist Sermon on the Mount: Shed your shame and your
illusions, and you too can be like me, a parasite who grows
rich from the weakness of others. Of course he ’ s not dumb
enough to believe that this lesson is available to all; it ’ s
like John Calvin ’ s idea of salvation, a privilege bestowed
on a chosen elect who rise above the sea of damned souls. I
guess this is a spoiler, but Jordan Belfort ’ s story lacks the
romantic or poetic conclusion that befalls both Alien in
2999
“ Spring Breakers
”
and the original Jay Gatsby. He
’ s out
there still, reinvented as a motivational speaker and “ sales
coach, ”
preaching the one true American religion, for
which earlier Gatsby models laid down their lives.
“ Successful people are 100 percent convinced that they are
masters of their own destiny, ” he tells people. Richness is
within your grasp, hypothetically speaking, and if you ’ re
poor anyway, it ’ s clearly your own damn fault. ( “‘ The
Wolf of WallStreet ’ : inequality and the Gatsby myth, ”
Andrew O ’ hehir, Salon.com)

susan sunflower
Towards the end of Luhrman's Gatsby, there was a brief
reference that made me realize that Luhrman saw Gatsby as
the hero of the story, which I confess came as a shock. I
had always viewed Gatsby much like the Wizard of Oz, a
deeppocketed magician whose feet of clay and unmagical
reality would inevitably be discovered.
Still, aside from wondering exactly WHAT they were
teaching "young people today," I realized that I had seen a
very different movie based on a very different story from
the one Luhrman had made. I wasn't willing to rewatch to
reappraise, but I did wonder if the rather widely divergent
3000
reviews reflected a certain generational and/or world view
gap.
Having a couple of 12steppers in the family 12 steppers
who tended to regail any family gathering with the near
death experiences in the badolddays when they were
using I anticipate rather similar "gap" in appreciation for
this film. Those who lived through the excesses their
own or others and came out unscathed or have healed
may revel in seeing "those days" (or something
approximating them) depicted on the big screen. I'm less
certain that the victims and casualities, the collaterally
damaged will be so amused and/or (once again) exactly
how amused the female audience is likely to be.
It sounds like this movie has already been made several
times in the last 30 years Even from this fairly
enthusiastic and positive review, it doesn't sound like this
incarnation actually has anything to say ... leaving what?
My own feeling is that the "how the mighty have fallen"
"closers are always closing" ending does not actually make
this movie some how morally neutral.
—
Amity
@susan sunflower
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"does not actually make this movie some how morally
neutral."
moral neutrality?
Wait, I don't understand. You want
—
susan sunflower
@Amity @susan sunflower
No, but I think Scorcese does.
Funny how a filmmaker can dodge those issues by claiming
"based on a real story" and/or "based on a classic
novel" ... as in, I didn't create this story …
I wrote my comment before reading the daughter's story
below. Bottom line, the Wolf of Wall Street survived. This
seems to be a boyswillbeboys story of wretched excess.
HailofBullets Tony Montana became a hero in some
quarters. I thought "Blow" packed a punch without being
preachy. If Gatsby can be considered hero these days ....
See also Gordon Gekko.
—
Emporium
@susan sunflower The times you're living in empowers
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certain kinds of people. If the times are genuinely —

actually morally — good, people like the flappers or
hippies are the ones to watch. If you're hectoring their
debauch, you're not seeing it straight. When times are bad,
it's going to be the like of these assholes, who were going
to need a lot, I mean a lot, of kindness to become people
who don't need for you to lose so they can feel great, and
who were meant to experience zero of it (strangely,
Matthew McConaughey kind of does offer a bit at the
beginning, which may explain why some critics who hated
the film lurch back to this scene, as if long adrift in spank
and sewage and desperate for recognized firmament).
The problem about acknowledging that it is fun to watch
these guys nonetheless — the times are enabling their
stories, while cowing and deflating others, and it shows —
is that you should in my opinion be able to recognize it
with sadist Nazis (or maybe Germans in general in the late
30s, as we understand better that they really were one and
the same) and their prey. That is the test I'd put to Richard
Brody for instance, a very good man, who in discussion of
this film genuinely bravely talks out
"monstrous
potentates
whose vast and dark range of experience is precisely the
source of their allure."
—
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susan sunflower
@Emporium @susan sunflower
The contrast between Brody and Denby could not be
greater
Brody:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/12
/thewildbrilliantwolfofwallstreet.html
Denby:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/12
/wolfofwallstreetreview.html
—
susan sunflower
@Emporium @susan sunflower
Actually it reminds me of "Apocalypse Now" which I
absolutely loathed on a visceral level (while acknowledging
the cinematic achievement) because I felt it glorified war
(even as it "pretended" otherwise or camouflaged its
enthusiasm in dirt, mud, and worldweary cynicism
another classic book).
My memory is that prerelease, Apocalypse Now was
"supposed" to be an antiwar film supposed to expose the
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"horror or war" but actually it's most vocal audience (as
far as I could tell, this was preinternet) were Vietnam Vets
who endorsed that it depicted "what it was really like",
struggling with PTSD, antiwar but watching it over and
over. I thought it make war look like the epitome of being
"really alive" .... intoxicating, sensual, sexy. I'm doubtful
that Apocalypse Now would discourage any adventure
seeing young man from enlisting.
Interesting review by a Vietnamese film reviewer:
(
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/nov/02/artsfeature
s.londonfilmfestival2001 )
I'm inclined to think that Scorsese made this movie because
its topic and extravaganza suited his tastes and his
cinematic strengths gang of guys not because he cared
so much about its rags to riches to rags story line. Quite
likely because he wanted to revisit HIS OWN past
revelries, his own "war stories", his glory days.
—
tasherbean
@susan sunflower excellent comment. I don't know if you
saw the movie "Jarhead" with Jake Gyllenhaal, (which I
thought was actually a pretty good depiction of the hurry up
and wait aspect of life in the military) but the scene right
3005
before all the young Marine recruits were getting ready to
ship out to Iraq, has them sitting in the Camp Pendleton
movie theater watching and cheering crazily the famous
helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now.......to make
your point.
Emporium
@susan sunflower
It's tough not to glorify people when it's their time. I've had
managers at jobs who treat their employees abhorrently, but
a fair recounting of who was living the more interesting life
— them, or their unsettled employees — would mean for
sure them. I live in a neighborhood that is gentrifying
massively, and though I avoid their hangouts for their scent
of you'remeanttofeelit assertion, the better, more
confident artistic expression, is there.

Watch "Walter Minty." Here you get one of those guys
who's devotion has kept a company relevant for twenty
years +, but seems simply embarrassing when a company
that it can transplant a template where no one
feels totally
means more than their role. Walter gets these great
"prompts"—spirited "girlfriend"; grounded family; rugged

hero who even the "wolves" salivate over in admiration —
3006
that end up meaning that though he loses his job, he can
evolve into equal in presence to the "wolf on wall street"
boss who has everyone else in his company cowed in fear,
and whom the age, even the movie agrees, is mostly theirs
now.
This isn't necessarily more fun to watch than "Wolf". It
doesn't admit to the masochism that it baits most in the
audience with: feeling small lends to your surely being
virtuous. And it's a lie: it's doubtful the few true Walter
Mintys out there are living as enjoyably, as compellingly,
as these assholes are. Sparks of inspiration — meet jet
engine!

Someone at the NewYorker has just suggested these
"wolves" are (“the Great Gatsby's”) Buchanan's pointof
view, but this isn't true. Gatsby, was new wealth, when the
old was feeling less sure of itself — and the wolves are
feeling it .

They're really Gatsby — those the age wants to inflate —
stripped of course of all that otherwise commends, for our
age being the punishment for a previous one's egoistic
proclamation that human beings are good, and deserve —
all of them ; even the weak and gullible — to know
happiness and pleasure.
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very>
Emporium / Patrick McEvoyHalston
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Labels: apocalypse now, david denby, Richard Brody, scorcese, the great gatsby, wolf on wall
street
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Noblesse oblige
very>
Everybody who writes about movies dreads making these
lists, yet all of us want to readeach other’s lists. Partly
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we’re looking for affirmation, partly we’re looking for

ideas, and partly we’re looking for guidance on how to
approach this strange exercise in subjectivity and
perspective. I kept my movie-watching in 2013 to an almost
human scale at roughly 175 films, about half the number I
typically watched in the days of Salon’s “Beyond the
Multiplex” column. (I know plenty of people in and around
the film business who watch 450 to 500, or even more.)
Even so, you wind up faced with ridiculous conundrums:
How do I decide whether a contentious French drama
about a love affair between two young women is better or
worse than an absorbing and informative documentary set
in Tahrir Square? Can’t we say they’re both terrific, and
leave it at that?
Sure we could, but that would be cheating. I decided sit
down one day in mid-December and make the list quickly,
without much deliberation. I don’t fiddle with it for weeks
and I don’t try to make guesses about historical
importance or whatever; that won’t make me happier, and
the odds that I’ll look at it six months or a year from now
and think I screwed it up are pretty high in any case.
Suffice it to say that what everybody says about 2013 is
true: It’s been an explosive year for movies in general and
especially for American cinema. We may be in the “post-
theatrical” age but movies continue to play surprisingly
widely on the big screen, even as more and more people
watch them at home, on mobile devices or via brain
implants. (OK, that technology’s not quite ready, but just
you wait.)
The 10 movies on this list all moved me, challenged me,
thrilled me and delighted me; I recommend them all
3010
without hesitation. [. . .] 1. “Stories We Tell” 2. “12 Years

a Slave” 3. “Inside Llewyn Davis” 4. “Ain’t Them Bodies
Saints” 5. “Blue Is the Warmest Color” 6. “The Great
Beauty” 7. “The Square” 8. “The Invisible
Woman” 9. “Her” 10. “The Wolf of Wall Street” (The10
best movies of 2013, Andrew O'hehir, Salon.com)
-----
Douglas Moran
I'm trying to decide if the fact that I've not only not
seen any of these films but have no interest in seeing any of
them means: A) I'm a typical shallow, middle-class
American with middle-brow tastes; B) I don't get out often
enough; C) Andrew's taste is too highfalutin' for the likes of
me; D) None of the above.
One thing for sure: I'm never going to watch the hugely-
praised "12 Years a Slave", which while I'm sure is an
excellent film, I know will depress the living crap out of
me. Life is depressing enough; I don't need to pay money
to see a film and be artificially depressed. I know this
makes me a plebe, but jeez. (It reminds me very much of
when the Glenn Close/John Malkovich "Dangerous
Liaisons" was released--I saw it based on the reviews, was
depressed as crap by it, and have never, ever wanted to see
it again.)
—
Andrew O'Hehir
@Douglas Moran All of the above, Doug. I mean, the
ordinary moviegoer wants something different than a critic
3011
wants, and there's kind of no way around that. I'm not going
to pretend to be a populist, Gene Shalit style, if it doesn't
fit. I heard Vincent Canby talk about this years ago: When
you see 200+ movies a year, you become a specialist, and
you're looking for something you've never seen before.
Whereas ordinary moviegoers, by and large, want to see
essentially what they've seen before, done well or with a
new twist, and with a familiar outcome. The audience for
"12 Years a Slave" is inherently much smaller than the
audience for "Gravity" or "The Hobbit," and even the
audience for "Wolf of Wall Street" (with stars and glamour
but a somewhat "unsatisfying" conclusion) is somewhat
smaller.
—
Douglas Moran
@Andrew O'Hehir @Douglas Moran In all honesty, I
have no idea how you can watch that many movies in a
single year. I have to imagine that it changes your
perception, and have often thought that "uniqueness"
becomes far more of a sought-after quality for a critic than
"entertainment". So something that the great mass of
people will find entertaining, a huge percentage of critics
will either roll their eyes at or actively detest--"Sleepless in
Seattle" or "Love, Actually" being a couple of perfect
examples of that. Isn't there some quote about the familiar
becoming detestable, or something like that? When you
see 40 romantic comedies in one year (most bad), you've
got to get burned out on them. Or so I've thought.
3012
Of course, when one goes to so few films in a particular

year, one is pre-disposed to want to like them. And then if
you don't, it's even more disappointing. Such was my
reaction to "Elysium", which was one of the few films I
made an effort to see this year, and which was basically,
"Meh". Which pissed me off mightily; "I spend all this
time, effort, and money, and all I get is 'Meh'? I'm going to
blog about this until my fingers fall off!" Etc.
And ironically, when one skips a film because of reviews
and then sees it on DVD or whatever and it turns out to be
okay, you may end up liking it better. Such was the case
for me with "Oblivion", which got (at best) "Meh" reviews,
but which wasn't too bad. So long as I didn't spent the
effort and time of going to a theater to see it.
With critics, the best one can do is find a critic who either
provides enough information, entertainment value, or
shares your opinions closely enough so as to be useful to
you. So although we seen it demonstrated many times that
your tastes are wildly different from mine, you write
informative and entertaining reviews that provide enough
data that allow me to make an informed decision. (I felt the
same with Charles Taylor, FWIW.) And given my
knowledge of your tastes, I know that I wouldn't enjoy "12
Years a Slave", no matter how goddamn awesome it is in
some absolute, Platonic Ideal of a Film way. It would just
depress me, anger me, make me cry or outraged or
whatever, and my blood pressure doesn't need that. So I
skipped it.
But I won't stop reading your reviews. Even when you call
3013
me a typical shallow, middle-class American with middle-

brow tastes. So there! :)
—
Emporium
@Douglas Moran @Andrew O'Hehir This was like
something out of a Jane Austen novel.
The lord discusses aesthetic preferences with one of the
respected men in his nearby town—a pastor, an affluent
farmer, a doctor. The lord will be the master in this
conversation, but he takes care to give room for the town
leader to imagine himself less afflicted than the lord is, that
his comparative ignorance and suspicion of change is a sign
of his being contented in settled, rich, bourgeois propriety.
So the town leader for a moment gets to pretend he's master
in this conversation, by tending to the lord's affliction in a
way that highlights his own contentment. Chest out,
pleased in feeling a proprietor — who, being a small master
of the universe, is of course mostly just going to indulge in
daily contentment rather than jostling foreign novelty— he
then quickly lends the rest of his thought to acknowledging
the real superiority of the lord and the stultifying aspect of
his perpetual fixedness.
The lord has the refined intelligence and awareness; the
lord rightly has the authority to instruct. And he, even if he
harrumphs his way through the reviews, nevertheless still
listens. This doesn't make him a joke; he's still a battler. But
deep down he acknowledges his betters. In his middling
3014
home set up so middlingly, on the table — even if mostly

unread — is apt to be the Times.
The town leader doesn't want the authority of the lord. He
feels comfortable in some place middling — the lords keep
the psychic terror "Krakens" at bay. But he likes that the
lord's preference for him owing to his being the ideal John
Bull-type the royalty can rely on, means he ranges his own
grounds with that much more righteous pomposity.
Here it means being an agent in the comment sections, who
may not be an O'hehir or a Taylor, but owing to their
concern to single him out in a friendly, acknowledging
fashion, he's a warden to everyone else.
For this empowerment, this flattering divine touch, of
course he's still reading his reviews, however much he's
thereafter openly begrudged. Mr Collins to Lady Catherine
de Bourgh, nothing ever will sink the truth benighted in this
grand moment of grace!
—
Douglas Moran
@Emporium @Douglas Moran @Andrew O'Hehir So if
I parse this correctly (which is hard, honestly, given the
length of your analogy), I only read O'Hehir's reviews
because he occasionally answers me with courtesy and
good humor in the comments section? Not because, as I
said, I find them informative enough to help me decide
which movies to see, but because he has shown me
Noblesse Oblige? Is that what you're saying?
3015
—
Emporium
@Douglas Moran @Emporium @Andrew
O'Hehir @Douglas Moran @Emporium @Andrew
O'Hehir In true gentry style, his courteous, good-humored
reply had a lot of teaching in it — which some might find
plainly arrogant: critics pursue and are entertained by
novelty, something new and smart; ordinary people, by a
repeat of the same 'ol sack of shit. Under cover of the
ostensible key difference — number of movies watched —
is being pushed a class difference, a difference in quality of
person.
To which you replied you're still not going to see "12
years," even if God had placed all the wisdom of the
universe in it, if there's any risk of it spoiling your dinner.
But you're obliged to have had him visit, and ensure him
you'll keep reading his reviews to make sure you make an
informed decision as to which film out there won't depress,
anger, outrage, or unsettle your blood pressure in any way.
With such self-mockery here, I gathered you conceded that
the films he likes are probably those anyone who has a
larger stake in the world probably ought to watch. The
bumpkin was visited by a lord, and afterwards felt
contented and even thrilled.
So, yeah, I'm thinking noblesse oblige.
—
3016
Douglas Moran
@Emporium @Douglas Moran @Andrew O'Hehir Ah, I
see; thanks for clarifying. I've got it now: You're a
pompous, pretentious bore who believes that, by reading
a couple of posts by people you don't know in any way
whatsoever and of whose past interactions you have zero
knowledge, you nonetheless feel informed and wise enough
to pass judgement thereon. Got it.
That will save me considerable time in the future should I
happen upon another of your comments; I'll simply skip
over it and save myself the trouble of trying to untwist your
tortured syntax. Thanks; appreciate it.
And by the way, Pro Tip: If you're going to use such over-
boiled phrasing and grammar, you might want to re-read
your comments before pressing the "Post" button. For
example, I "assured" Andrew; I didn't "ensure" him. Also,
a single return after a paragraph suffices. I'm sure on re-
reading other edits will occur to you, given your vast and
superior knowledge of the written form.
—
Andrew O'Hehir
@Douglas Moran I have to admit, this whole thing was
hugely entertaining. And one of my main reactions (to
myself) was: Dude, no freakin' way is some guy in the
comments going to out-marxist-analysis me!
—
3017
Douglas Moran
@Andrew O'Hehir @Douglas Moran [laughter]
----------
Emporium
@Andrew O'Hehir @Douglas Moran
When you see 200+ movies a year, you become a specialist,
and you're looking for something you've never seen before.
Whereas ordinary moviegoers, by and large, want to see
essentially what they've seen before, done well or with a
new twist, and with a familiar outcome.
This description of ordinary moviegoers would seem to
have nothing to do with how many movies they watch.
Anyone who wants to see what they've seen before with a
familiar outcome, isn't going to seem to naturally evolve
into someone who prefers the new and different if they
upped their viewing habits. Rather than finally yearn to barf
it up, then change it up, they'll eat their predictable bland
plate of steak and potatoes with the same insistent pleasure
Homer Simpson would his one-billionth donut.
That is, it's more honest to say that even if the critic can
only for some reason make it to ten rather than the two
hundred films they prefer or at least usually have to watch,
they just naturally are people who take most pleasure, not
in the repetition of thrills, but in the piquant, the fresh, the
new. They're beyond repetition-compulsion; are more
evolved than middlebrow — and it's not owing to practice.
3018
There certainly are critics that are that. True leaders; better
than the average dope, I mean. Still, there's a good number
I reckon unconsciously pick choices they can imagine
leaving the mob in a fit of frustration. Became the critic, to
indulge the delight in stymying. Critic film geeks.
Emporium/Patrick McEvoy-Halston
12 Years a Slave (Review Part One)

very>
3019

12 Years a Slave (Review Part One)
I've only seen one film this year that kinda gets at how
someone could become a person as sadistic as Fassbender's
slaveowner is in this film. Insidious 2 got how a little,
vulnerable boy, completely owned by an absolutely
terrifying mother, was going to have no chance building an
independent self apart from her. His life was on the line,
and you can imagine how a six or eight or however old a
boy he was, would have a brain formed largely on ensuring
he does nothing outside of what she wants. The point of life
... is to not be devoured. And the great homo sapiens brain
of his would be using all its evolutionary excellence to
contrive means to ensure he manages this--even if this
means making him into someone who would be to any sane
outsider, deviant, insane ... strangely ill-purposed to what
life would confront him with. The rest of the world does
not realize that this one brain alone negotiated avoiding
oblivion! What of if it if it's ill-purposed to manage
anything else in life, which after all might be about self-
development and adventure, such strange, completely
uncountenanceable things, that are firmly known to be, for
that matter, completely disavowed for him by mother, when
life has clearly showed itself in its definitive first all-
important years of being experienced as only about
avoiding being killed? It was vital but young Ender in an
adult mission against a planet of bugs, and in a fever of
3020
genius, it won! it won! it won! The full compass of the

universe was revealed, and in one hell of a pitched, ongoing
battle, a definitive victory was for all time achieved! What
the brain does, though, isn't quite what is shown in this
film. It doesn't figure out primarily how best to obey her--
here by dressing up as a girl and disavowing himself as a
boy so to not remind his mother of her former husband--but
rather to be part of her, to be her. As her, he'd never need
worry about being devoured by her or, just as importantly,
losing her approval and feeling abandoned. In real life, the
young boy would have dressed up as a girl on his own
initiative--a replica, specifically of his mother, that is; not
just any odd female--rather than terrorized into it. And his
later development into a "Psycho" adult who dresses
evidently as his mother would have synced up. In real life,
too, he'd proceed further and be hunting down innocent
people, taking huge delight in sawing them up--what fun!
cackle! cackle! cackle!--because he'd be his mother, whom
his brain would only have let know as fully right to be so
devoted to terrorizing his innocent, vulnerable child-self,
for fear letting him be even in the smallest sense aware of
her true perversion would have lead to his being spotted
out. If despite knowing how she doesn't want you to see her
limitations, her thorough deviance (and trust me, she
doesn't), you actually were allowed by your brain to be
cognizant of her game, you'd also know she'd deem the
"you" you've revealed to yourself as permanently unworthy
of and removed from any further love--an impossible
actuality to accept. You've got, that is, to be consciously
only allowed to know her as a saint; someone you'd defend
against insults to the death ... that much more so if all she
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does between stuffing herself with amusements is blender

babies into milkshakes. Each time he found a young victim,
he'd be more fully fused into his mother, and the vulnerable
child self that is intolerable to be reminded of, that much
more outside. Constant fusion into a sadistic alter, constant
victimizing of people representing his "guilty" child-self,
would be his life ... just as it is for the perenially sadistic
Fassbender.
Fassbender's slaveowner had a mother who did to him what

he does to his slaves? Yes, this is absolutely right. Every
slaveholder had one such mother, which is why, exactly,
slavery became institutionalized. The slaver shown in the
film who makes the slave stand for hours in a painful
position while he laxy-dazies ... yep, this is something that
slaveholder was afflicted with in his own childhood (I
knew something of this myself, with my mom lying on her
bed, reading fantasy books, eating cookies into a belly
contented that it could hold down four or five bagfuls, and
luxuriating, while I stood uncomfortably attending to her
like a eunech at attention before a Sultan queen).
Fassbender making even his prize slave, the one
unbelievably gifted at speed-gathering cotton, exist in so
much filth she wretches at her own smell ... yep, this is
what Fassbender himself endured by his mother during his
own childhood. Collectively, all the slaveholders making
their slaves into stinking, shit-stained, confined wretches,
recalls for me what the Germans did to Jews, Gypsies, and
"unsocials," when they re-inflicted their own horrible
childhood experiences onto them in the 30s and 40s. To
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wit: upon a German's "birth, 'the wretched new-born little

thing was wound up in ells of bandages, from the feet right,
and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be
embalmed as a mummy … babies are loathsome, foetid
things, offensive to the last degree with their excreta
…' Babies simply could not move for their first year of life.
A visitor from England described the German baby as 'a
piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy
in yards of bandages … it is never bathed … Its head is
never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten
months old.' Their feces and urine was so regularly left on
their bodies that they were covered with lice and other
vermin attracted to their excreta, and since the swaddling
bandages were very tight and covered their arms as well as
their bodies, they could not prevent the vermin from
drinking their blood. Their parents considered them so
disgusting they called them 'filthy lice-covered babies,' and
often put them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the
wall or on a tree while the mothers did other tasks"
(DeMause, "Childhood Origins of World War 2 and the
Holocaust").
The whipping and lashes too, Fassbender and the rest of his
slaveholder ilk would have suffered? Once again--yup.
Very much--yup. Germans did this to Jews as well, as it had
been done to them by their parents: "It was brutal beating,
beginning in infancy, that visitors to Germany most
commented upon at the beginning of the twentieth century,
with the mother far more often the main beater than the
father. Luther’s statement that 'I would rather have a dead
3023
son than a disobedient one' is misleading, since it implies

disobedience only was the occasion for beatings, whereas
mere crying or even just needing something usually
resulted in being punished. ' Dr. Schreber said the earlier
one begins beatings the better … One must look at the
moods of the little ones which are announced by screaming
without reason and crying [inflicting] bodily
admonishments consistently repeated until the child calms
down or falls asleep … one is master of the child forever.
From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture,
is sufficient to rule the child.' Havernick found 89 percent
of parents admitted beating little children at the beginning
of the twentieth century, over half with canes, whips, or
sticks. The motto of German parents for centuries was
'Children can never get enough beatings.' They were not
just spankings; they were beatings with instruments or
whippings like Hitler’s daily whippings with a dog whip,
which often put him into a coma. (As Fuehrer, Hitler used
to carry a dog whip with him as he gave orders to be
carried out.) It is not surprising that German childhood
suicides were three to five times higher than other Western
European nations at the end of the nineteenth century, fears
of beatings by parents being the reason cited by children for
their suicides. No one spoke up for the children;
newspapers wrote: 'boy who commits suicide because of a
box on the ears has earned his fate.' The beatings continued
at school, where 'we were beaten until our skin
smoked.' Children could be heard screaming on the streets
each morning as they were being dragged to school by their
mothers. The schoolmaster who boasted he had given
'911,527 strokes with the stick and 124,000 lashes with the
3024
whip' to students was not that unusual for the

time. Comparisons of German and French childhoods in the
late nineteenth century found 'no bright moment, no
sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home [with] mother love
and care' in the German ones, with 'sexual molestation and
beatings at home and at school consistently worse in the
German accounts.' Ende’s massive study of German
autobiographies of the time found 'infant mortality, corporal
punishment, and cruelties against children' were so brutal
he had to apologize 'for not dealing with the 'brighter side'
of German childhood because it turns out that there is no
'bright side.' Other studies found most Germans
remembered 'no tender word, no caresses, only fear' with
childhood 'so joyless, so immeasurably sad that you could
not fathom it.' When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that 'the
German people today lies broken and defenseless, exposed
to the kicks of all the world' both he and his reading
audience read this not as political metaphor but as the real
kicks of their parents and teachers and real memories of
lying broken and defenseless. The tortures of childhood
were far more traumatic and constant than the later studies
of 'authoritarianism' ever imagined. There was a good
reason that Germans and Austrians spoke so often about
their Kinderfeindlichkeit (rage toward children), and it is
this rage that is embedded in the early violent amygdalan
alters which is inflicted upon others in World War II and the
Holocaust. The child-hitting hand was even the symbol of
Nazi obedience, since the Nazi salute endlessly displayed
the open palm of their beating parents as they fused with
them, flush with opioids. 'Ghosts from the nursery'
embedded by extremely insecurely attached children were
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displayed everywhere in Nazi Germany. To imagine tens of

millions of people 'just obeying Hitler' as though there were
no inner compulsion to inflict their nightmarish earlier
childhood tortures on others is simply absurd (DeMause,
"Childhood Origins").
12 Years a Slave does worse than Carrie did to nudge us
closer to understanding how someone could become a
thorough sadist, but, like that film, it does at least show
some truth: here, that slavers are less respectful and loving
people--not, that is, just people under some spell of a
collusion of adult preaching inflicted on them when they
were young; victims of ideology, that is. Fassbender and his
wife are colossal assholes, full of hate, full of desiring other
people--their slaves--to be subjugated for the wretched
crimes they committed. Benedict Cumberland, the nicest of
all possible slavers, knows at very near, at very, very, very
near a conscious level, that the clearly educated slave he's
purchased had to have once been free, to be someone he
himself would recognize as free if he met him while
touring the north, but won't let him go. The capacity of this
man to love, which is some, pales in comparison to the
attorney who arrives to free Northup, or more notably, Brad
Pitt, who movingly risks his own life to do so. But still, the
link to parenting isn't there, and we might just as well
assume that the institution itself poisoned them, stunted
them, than ever consider that each one of them might have
had a mother as terrifying as Fassbender's wife. If the film
had done that, shown that mother force her children to
know filth and whippings and abandonment for being
deemed willfully disobedient brats that needed to be
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broken--even if as expected they were still groomed into

betters--what a wonderful and useful connection would
have been made: that is how a child could grow into an
adult who would find such righteousness in getting
disobedient underlings into line, not at all blanching when
whip stroke after whip stroke actually spooned chunks of
flesh out of people, and more likely being aroused by it (as
the Germans were, as they masturbated during their own
floggings of Jews). The approval from mom that every
small child needs, could only ever be found in whole-
heartedly joining her cause.
But I'm going at this film as if we might be interested in
using it as an opportunity to test, refine, revise, or--rather
better--completely re-understand how an institution like
slavery could come into existence--letting the idiotic
economic rationale dissolve for good. But this would mark
progress, growth, and so this isn't something we're apt to be
doing. Rather, we're using this film as a reward to show that
we've refit our society that so innocuously we can watch a
film about a strictly two-tiered society--master, and slave--
something ostensibly 150 years and a civil war behind us,
and be surprised by how much we involved ourselves in the
position of the slave. We increasingly see our own society
as two-tiered, with avenues of plausible climbing closed
off--the one percent vs. the ninety-nine. And this isn't
because reality has forced us off our preferred conception
of living in something multi-tiered, involving the essential
middle class. Instead, we knew a long while ago that we
wanted something stratified, with the upper-echelon a class
apart, and set things in motion so that even when massive
3027
bank-loan leveraging was keeping us housed and up with

every electronic trick, our outer reality would soon rather
better reflect the "Kantian" schema we were game to force
onto it. We're in a period of penance, where because
previous collective growth was making us feel terrifyingly
abandoned, as it recalled how in our youth our own
emerging self-attendance eventually drew anger from our
immature mothers for it meaning a permanent turn away
from having up to that point mostly focused our existence
around her, we feel compelled to shut it down so to know
her back with us. We kill the growth we've accrued; we kill
the potential to grow; and familiarize ourselves with
"stuckness"; and life more and more becomes us as
children not yet old enough to leave the hearth--the fragile
ninety-nine percent--in the perpetual company of entitled
parents--the obstinately set, one. She's there, our mom's
there; and even if she's aloof and removed, she's not mad,
not angry: even if we're not all acting like good children,
we do the essential part and communicate that owned
children "is" who we are, and that we won't be doing any
shifting of structure for a good long while (like the last
Depression, about twelve years?). Her enemies--emissaries
of real growth--will, unless they're mostly going to be
incorporated into making our "parents" lives easier or more
luxuriant, become our own, as we either chase any one with
any notable new ideas out of public view or somehow make
it possible that even if they were a glorious new dawn
visited upon us ... we're just not seeing it, sorry. So we have
a culture where James Wolcott appropriately writes:
"Although we live in a culture of uncircumcised snark, it
actually seems a more deferential time to me, the pieties
3028
and approved brand names--Cindy Sherman, Lena

Dunham, Quentin Tarantino, Junot Diaz, Mark Morris,
Judd Apatow, John Currin (feel free to throw other names
into the pot)--more securely clamped down over our ears."
Where "today's social media making even the meanest
rattlesnakes mend their ways in the hope of being liked,
friended, and followed in numbers sufficient enough not to
be mortifying." If you're "in," you stay in. If you're out, you
should know the part you're assigned--and it's to be as if
marked by something intangible and intransigent that
you're always a step down. You can be like Northrup and
play your fiddle like a genius, or instruct on how to
engineer a way through a stuck problem that'd only fail to
impress the most trenchantly set against you, but not if it's
to prove the point that as much as anyone, you don't really
belong where you're stationed. "Parents," the one percent,
are playing a role as well, something collectively assigned
to them, only they just don't know it. I think it is this
unconscious knowing that they've masochistically,
unselfishly, surrendered themselves to playing a part--
which remains, even if hard to see, still very much a
demeaning surrender of human potential--that is buoying
some of the pleasure they're taking in living these days ...
opiates flowing from felt parental approval. I admit I'm
mostly thinking of those like the ones Walcott mentions
here, those of the liberal literate elite, who are evidently
not perturbed that they all share the same habits and
assumptions to the degree that the dullest gentry-clot did in
centuries past. They're not about moving us ahead, but
about station--manners have become the point itself,
something which really is just a lubricant when gentry's on
3029
one of its roles and Byronesque genius gets to come out of

them as much as from any ambitious Shakespeare
merchant' son. You listen to their discourse, and you know
they're no trolls. The Gandalf who rows up the pleasant-
offered cheerful "good morning!" with contestation and
complication ... in today's climate, he's but another of the
trolls who's descended down from the mountains. He'd
quickly learn to stifle it, and next time by master Baggins'
he'd be, "yes, yes, it is a good morning! Indeed so! Sorry to
disturb you, and thanks again for your kind remembrances
about my fireworks .. though remember if you can to like
my "Good Old Grandpa Gandalf"
fireworks Facebook page; every bit helps, you know!" and
he'd shuffle off as quick as a fox, as tamed as the pathetic
car-buffing Biff, to chance disturbing the morning no
further. Society would be one further up on propriety, and
shorn one possible mega disturbance; and even if they were
made aware that in subscribing him into the role of a door-
to-door salesman it cost them one potentially world-saving
wizard, it'd still be felt as completely worth it.
Paul Krugman recently recounted the damages that have

been afflicted by our current austerity-maintained
Depression: "These dry numbers [he, writes,] translate into
millions of human tragedies--homes lost, careers destroyed,
young people who can't get their lives started. And many
people have pleaded all along for policies that put job
creation front and center. Their pleas have, however, been
drowned out by the voices of conventional prudence. We
can't spend more money on jobs, say these voices, because
3030
that would mean more debt. We can't even hire unemployed

workers and put idle savings to work building roads,
tunnels, schools. Never mind the short run, we have to
think about the future! The bitter irony, then, is that it turns
out that by failing to address unemployment, we have, in
fact, been sacrificing the future" (NYT, Nov. 7 2013). We're
inflicting a lot of damages to ourselves, a lot of anxiety.
This is important, because when you take into
consideration how even when jobs were leaving us and our
incomes were wilting away, banks were still enabling us all
the stuff we wanted for a further twenty years, it undoes all
the accruing we had been doing pretty much without pause
since World War 2. Further, it's adding "revenue" of despair
into a pot that will eventually fill so that we sense that
enough joy has now finally been sacrificed to our mothers--
she's mollified, and satiated--that we kinda now feel safe to
begin to tip toe away from her and embark outside on real,
undetermined adventure, while she goes on a several-
decade-long snooze. But it's a mistake to say these figures
delineate only misery. When we know we've succeeded in
making deep sacrifices happen, Mother is with us, not
going to leave us, and we know a kind of contentment--one
that even liberates, and enables some fun ... if we go about
things properly. The recent Thor movie tries a wee bit to
explain why the Norse aristocracy--an empowered King
and Queen--is just, but it barely bothers. We feel watching
this movie that those creating it and those watching it will
just accept the aristocracy as normal, not because we're
dealing with old gods but because it's how we're attending
to our own society as well (note the recent
hopeless Salon effort reminding people not to focus so
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much on the "Queen" battle of Hillary vs. Elizabeth Warren

as it's the "little people" congressional battles that'll matter
most), and would have as the new normal, rather than
anything queerly demos. And there's no wishing in the
movie from the "little people" for any mollification. The
intern Ian who is throughout the movie referred to as
"intern" rather than by name, objects, but mostly shows that
... whatever, it's out of his power. For his shrugging, for his
acceptance and mostly non-complaint, for his willingness
to let himself be used and mildly abused and for showing
that if he spent the rest of his life as he just might in a
role perennially servile to an actual scientist with multiple
degrees, that, well, that's just what life's allotted him, the
movie grants him a boon: at the finish he gets to do
something heroic and strong, and thereafter receives
admiration and a kiss from the senior intern--even if it
means once more being the passive. Ian's the Northrop in
12 Years, who for doing remarkable things ... who for
showing that even doing something really accomplished
need not press on being a class challenge, he gets rewarded.
Just like in the Great Depression, we're going to see a lot of
people in servile roles in movies, and take note that when
you hear them complain, about "what a lady has got to do
to get a buck or a bit of respect in this here depression," or
whatever, what you'll be hearing is less tearing down the
walls and more their being resigned to them. It needn't be
done so loud that you're cognizant that the cages somehow
seem surer after "your" complaint; just loud enough that it
registers with your masters.
As a side note, if you're incapable of actually drilling
3032
yourself to want to live in a dream-inhibiting age, if you're

one of those genuinely good liberals, birthed of truly loving
parents, who believed that Occupy's facilitation of society's
understanding of itself as of master and servants was
something other than our conceding that we've roomed our
house as we would like it, and instead as a sure prelude to
insurrection and thereafter an equal society, these could be
real tough times for you in particular. I'm thinking
specifically now of Robert Frost's sister, a liberal, whom his
brother had committed into an insane asylum during WW2.
Morris Dickstein writes that "with a history of violent
outbursts, Frost's sister had grown increasingly hysterical
about the war, yet Frost [...] paints her as the paradigm of a
liberal gone berserk, a bleeding heart who really bled. 'I
really think she thought in her heart that nothing would do
justice to the war but going insane over it.' He, on the other
hand, was fatalistic and self-protective, the kind of
conservative for whom there's very little anyone can do to
alter the basic conditions of life, which include going crazy
and dying. For his sister, he says, 'one half the world
seemed unendurably bad and the other half unendurably
indifferent. She included me in the unendurably indifferent.
A mistake. I belong to the unendurably bad.' 'It was
designed to be a sad world,' he later wrote to Untermeyer"
("Dancing in the Dark").
EndFragment

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Labels: 12 Years a Slave, james wolcott, lloyd demause, morris dickstein, paul krugman, thor the
dark world
3033
The Circle, part two
The Circle
It's difficult to figure out why everyone is so ready to laugh
at the humiliated Carrie in Carrie. We're told at the
beginning that it's the popular gang's fault, where everyone
else laughs along so to not be caught out and be deemed
part of her very dubious camp. And this is substantiated at
other times, when one or two kids show that, when no one's
really attending, they're quite prepared to interact with her
as if she might not have the plague. But then again, when
the prom's on, and they laugh at her while she's covered
with blood, it's impromptu, immediate, reflex: there's no
calculation of what is expected of them, they simply
automatically in chorus respond in awful jeering. So, what?
Kids can be mean? Except they're not really quite kids
anymore. So, people can be? Except not everyone is.
There's not an ounce of it in the gym teacher. Nor in a few
others who met her at the prom and reacted to her openly.
The film has an inkling to show that the inclination to
empathize has something to do with what kind of parents
we have. The popular girl, who almost immediately realizes
how horrible it is to torture this dismayed girl, is shown to
have as a mother someone who goes out her way to try and
make Carrie's own oddball mother feel appreciated. And
the dastardly evil girl is shown to possess a big business
father who is entirely indifferent to people he judges as not
really mattering. But then again, no one has a mother as
grievous as the one Carrie possesses, and there's no hint in
3034
the film that Carrie has any inclination to torture the

exposed and vulnerable. Her own "bullying" at the end, is
really just self-exertion, as she found herself either
terrifyingly confined or horribly hounded.
The reason kids bully does not owe, fundamentally, to
someone's foreignness. They actually recognize their
similarity to the bullied profoundly, but often not
consciously. The loner, the exposed, the insecure, is
themselves, not when they were first in school, or any such,
but when they were younger than that, when they were
infants, and they badly needed attendance, and over and
over and over again, didn't get it. This is the very opposite
of nothing to a child, and more closer to the apocalypse
bearing down. It changes your brain, for instance. Installs
the superego, to make sure you never do whatever caused
you to be in that situation again. Since the only thing you
could conclude is that it was your vulnerability and
neediness which was to blame, your brain makes sure that
when you see the vulnerable the capacity to empathize gets
shut down, and takes any course to make sure you see this
person as not the once-you you can never let yourself
remember, but as someone foreign. If you just saw this
person as different from you it wouldn't be enough, though,
for if that was all that you were when you were left alone
and unattended, then it would make your parents seem
culpable, as it's paltry excuse just to abandon someone. You
judge it instead as criminal, as guilty. And in taking the
"guilty" down, you show the rightness in your parents once
having abandoned you, thereby keeping them those who
wouldn't be offended by your inner-most thoughts, thereby
3035
still maintaining them as potential sources of provision and

love. So now you understand why Carrie, humiliated in
ways that would recall one being a soiled, shit-stained child
(twice covered in running dirty pools of excretions) would
red-alarm people to suddenly wish her to be laughed at and
hounded into a crunched-down, crumpled form. Of course,
this means that a whole lot of us were possessed of hardly
perfect parents, cause if we weren't, the vulnerable would
only draw our sympathy, and we'd all be closer to the
welfare state of Sweden, where even when it's in its worst
moods there's no chance they'd leave a portion of their
populace to the wolves in the same fashion still-awful-
parent-afflicted U.S.A does. How bad portions of the U.S.A
are, is revealed by how even after everyone has agreed
we're in a Depression, it's nothing at all for many states to
summon the legitimacy to think the proper next order of
things is to cut food stamps.
The reason why I'm bringing up why kids would want to
torture a helpless, panicky Carrie in this discussion of the
Circle, is because I'm a little concerned that when I hear
people say Dave Eggers' book has changed the way they
see our public-share networks, what has really happened is
that they have recognized the helpless Carrie of this book
and taken Eggers' pro-offered route to count themselves
mostly of the "outside." Near the end of the book, Mae
Holland is in hysteria over the world-wide publicized fact
that some people in her company do not like her. It drives
her crazy, as she becomes someone who in dismay
cherishes the completion of "the circle" as those who've
lost their efforts to remain human spend their days with
3036
meth cheeks and maddened eyes chuckling in anticipation

of the apocalypse. She's the child who when first left alone
screams and tantrums, but after sustained, prolonged
ignoring, quietens down like one of Harry Hallow's isolated
monkeys, as what was right in them to keep them for so
long trying has left them for good. Mae in this novel isn't
the exception; everyone who believes in the circle who
doesn't instantly get the approbation they need, panics in
heightened alarm. Not responding instantly to an e-mail
sets one off into hysterical crazy land. Another by the
possibility that his constant pre-ejaculating might make him
less than a perfect ten out of ten lover. Eggers may want us
to believe that those furthering the circle, killing every bit
of privacy left in the world, and making everyone else at
least pretend smile while in their company, are fascists,
sharks devouring everything else contained in the tank with
them. But I really think it is this show of them that sticks--
the alarmed, besotted, powerless infant, that is.
So in her we recognize, or rather we find, our early
childhood powerless selves, but rather than identify with
her, with our once-selves, Eggers nudges us to use her
instead as a place to keep those nasty nagging things safely
posited. She can carry all our early-life vulnerability, and
we can laugh at her for it, mock her, as we feel compelled
to do, without an inkling of guilt. For though she
fundamentally is our childhoods, we can certainly just think
of her as Eggers would have us, as produced in adulthood,
owing to letting herself get lost in company think. We can
safely mock her Carrie-like horrible exposure, because she
let herself get so upset over learning that 3% of the
3037
company didn't like her, rather than let herself leisure in

knowing how the whole rest of the human pie could not
have been more pleased. How greedy can any one get!
How needy! And if she's alone, it's clearly her fault:
repeatedly outsiders, former friends/lovers, have tried to
talk sense to her, tried to reveal for her the cult-think she
was adopting, and she nudged them out of the picture, or
forced them to the point where any further bothering would
put them at desperate risk. And we can be those in the book
who have little delight in the prospect of the completion of
the circle, the supposedly powerless and at risk--but in real
life actually those who believe the worst damage of our
times are going to hit those for whom
facebook/twitter/constant share are the only things going
for them; and despite their own participation, this clearly
isn't them. Something we help cement by declaring, after
reading the book, that our own facebook/twitter lives is
going to be allowed to droop a notch. Unlike "you" the lost,
who we'll likely see next chasing down with bats any poor
sod who failed to "like" your latest insipid post, a bit more
of our private lives will once again be kept under wraps.
We're seeing great rewards in turning cold--our withholding
will surely set you all deliciously off! and so more of our
unwanted selves can be drooped into you. Thanks in part to
you, dear Dave.
Eggers might be regressing to old form. I first remember
him for his magazine Might. It was a very clever thing, but
nasty as well--Bender from the Breakfast Club taking
people down a notch: if he's not happy, why should you be
allowed to be? It's been called one of the origins of snark
3038
into our contemporary culture, but I remember it most for

its interest in leaving the audience feeling played. Eggers
and the subject he was writing on was in on the trick--
someone or another young and famous ostensibly dying,
for instance--but we'd come to realize that our desire to be
in the know was being allowed to come to the forefront of
our consciousness, our desperate need to feel as smart,
knowing, and cool as these whip-smart under-30s, and
about that time forced by the reveal to sit sunk for a
crushing while in the dank regrettable stinking dark pool of
it. Abused and sodden. Exposed as needy as hell. With
Eggers likely snickering ...Why should we be allowed to be
happy?
If we apply a bit of the humanism from another hipster-
produced effort--the Royal Tenenbaums--to our reading of
the book, we'd realize that her being upset at being
reminded that some few refuse her acknowledgment, isn't
necessarily a silly thing. In the Tenenbaums, each child for
awhile was getting every accolade from every source, but
when their father ended up hardly caring, that was all that
mattered, and they stopped even being able to try. Many of
us, like them, are in striving to complete our own circle of
approval, just trying to undue our mother and fathers not
being sufficiently interested ... not being genuinely
interested, in the person beyond the eager projections they
self-servingly placed onto us--demon, angel, hero, genius,
ungrateful filthy scum, or whatnot. If it's one out of
hundred, or three, the sole "exception" always harkens back
to them.
3039
It's such an obvious thing, when we're inclined to

understand.
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Labels: carrie, dave eggers, royal tenenbaums, the circle
Ender's Game
Ender's Game
One of things that is supposed to be notable about Ender, is
that he encourages other kids to think for themselves and
chip in. He is even reminded of this just before his biggest
battle against the bug aliens. So what does he in fact do?
He leaves all his other commanders' forces to be sacrificed,
and therefore left with nothing to individually command.
How nice it would have been to see the focus pulled off
him, as he ostensibly wishes, and actually witness some of
the other commanders make decisions. But we don't get
that, and instead the sense that all we need is one great
leader, and everyone else might as well being prompt,
order-applying drones. A good pilot or good gunner might
get some special accolades--nice flying/gunning, ace!
especially you, cutie!--but not for any property of
leadership. Maybe one of the reasons he has so many
sympathy for the Queen alien, is that he's effectively
looking in the mirror. The two boss commanders, vastly
superior to everyone else, in discussion, in camaraderie,
after battle: "I alone know how you feel."
He's upset over his genocide, but how about making his
3040
own species shrug its shoulders and leaving Earth's purpose

mostly all to him? We could try, but he'd do it ten times
better anyway, so what's the point. I'll let an actual drone do
my part, and be in the bar remembering the days when
human volition had a demonstrable point. You all can go
about still worshipping him if you like.
In actual truth, though, he--or his representatives in
history--is not really special at all, atypical. But rather
instead brilliantly representative of the current appetites of
the people. Hitler was in in Germany, only because he
wanted it as bad as Germans did. He directed the German
"finger," this way or that. But the choice wasn't his whether
or not to pull out the gun. If he was distinctive, they'd
actually look past him, picking even an imbecile over him,
to imagine as superhuman--which is what they had done for
him, after all--if he's as thirsty for punishment, murder, and
massive wasteful human sacrifice as self-punishment for
the terrible sin of having enjoyed life too much, as they
were. The best leaders, the ones remembered as singular, as
genius, always end up being the bloodiest ones ... the point
is, they delivered the gross blood bath we wanted, and for
as much we're willing to dress them up, however
preposterously, as if they were fundamentally neat-freak
creatures of tactics and calibration.
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The Circle (Dave Eggers)

3041

very>
The Circle
Dave Eggers clearly thinks most of us have become
incredibly needy and paranoid—guessing that anyone who
is private, is doing so to deliberately withhold approval
3042
from us, and must be chased down and punished. There is a

scene in this book where the main protagonist is going to
pieces upon learning that 3% of her workplace doesn’t like
her. All she can do is imagine who they might be, and
wonder how they might be courted to her. Our collective
regression to the emotional state of an abandoned child, is
according to Eggers what could empower our wanting
some giant company—a Google gone total world
domination, for instance—to have everyone in some way
under wraps. Little lollypop Google icameras everywhere,
ensuring no one does anything that might be felt by our
Earth hoard as a snubbing. Terrorism isn’t the issue. Nor
really crime or racist behavior. It’s that someone if they
could would “unfriend” you, if only if it could be done
anonymously.
Gravity
very>
3043
Gravity
I almost don’t want a movie to provide a simulacrum of
what it might be like to be out in space right now.
Engineers, and other employees whose brains are 90%
scientific data, still after fifty years of space inhabitation,
holding court over who gets to tell us what it’s like to see
your home planet from the outside--how we might prefer to
be in the situation where only Apollo and his lute was able
to express the same. We think New Mexico, and we don’t
only think of cowboy yokels bearing daily witness to desert
beauty, but artists, poets, hippies, doing so. Space, however,
is kept rigidly by those who see nothing amiss in their
space station--the ostensible center for a community in
space--being as cold and human-indifferent as any structure
nearly forgetting it was built not just to withstand, but to
house. When Sandra Bullock’s character peeps into her
shuttle, the objects that float out aren’t items of décor, of
domicile, but a Space Jam character--the difference in
inner-life between any of them and your typical cubicle
3044
geek, is slight. I could handle it if this was critique--they

made the main protagonist a likely NPR listener, after all--
but it’s apparent the filmmaker kind of liked that the
heritage of space still isn’t something we could imagine
anyone knitting an afghan cover for. Throw a nervous Betty
in midst of it, and it'll be a perpetual struggle for her to
keep herself together--one doohickey into a slot, is about
what she could manage--and that with relief. Which would
contain her.
Part of me followed, immersed myself in Bullock’s
character, with gratitude all the way appreciating her being
at the forefront of heart-palpitating situations we can relate
to. Part of me just balked at the whole thing, fixed on some
corner of the screen, and kept my own composure whatever
was happening. It's an hour and a half of struggle--
something perhaps only soldiers and Formula One drivers
and James Cameron, never cease to want to re-experience.
The rest of us remain wary that if we too often brace
ourselves against assaults, we'll get to the point where we
never quite relax all the way out again. At the end she
tasted the relief of being in a medium--the sea--where she
had more control, those toned muscles, useless in space,
getting to visibly, kinetically show they were worth all the
hard work. I felt like telling her she should insist this be the
worst inhibition she should ever let herself know--if space
for us must still be first fish crawled onto land, we should
let it go until the worst sublimation it can inflict still leaves
us knowing the evolved flex of our substantial
monkeydom.
EndFragment
3045

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(Still Pending) Response to commenter

Reuben Thomas, on Richard Brody's review
of 12 Years a Slave
very>
3046

Reuben Thomas:
To me Brody does not get it. "Django unchained" is the
film you want to see after seeing "12 years a slave". The
last one simply came after. And I'm pretty sure of the
historical existence of characters like the one depicted by
Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino's movie...
But it mystifies me more that Brody does not seem to be
able to infer through his own imagination any of the
realities actually suggested by both films. If we accept that
it's actually impossible for even all of the slavery related
films as a whole to narrate every single moment of real-life
historical abuse, then we should offer our own minds to
fill-in the blanks as homage to the effort and as proof of our
own capacity for compassion. It's like Brody were saying
that the current world is in such a state that without the
explicit nature of these images we can no longer gather
enough empathy against slavery.
I agree that empathy is lacking, but only because both films
fail when they show the horrors of slavery as the result of
the actions of madmen. The horrors of slavery were the
result of the acts of psychologically sound businessmen and
plantation entrepreneurs. People like you and me. People
who truly believed in the inferiority of the black race and
the need for slaves to sustain an economy and a way of life.
Come on, even a war was fought around these "facts". I
3047
wish a film would come and actually show that
@reubenthomas Slavery was the result of madmen--or

rather, people who were brutalized by their parents when
they were young. When collectively childrearing is brutal
enough, it leads to institutions where a populace re-afflicts
the horrors inflicted upon them upon some simulacrum of
their innocent, vulnerable childhood selves--what Germans
in the 30s were getting themselves prepared to do. If you're
the type to enjoy good parent Richard Brody's writings,
you're way beyond being someone who could be
indoctrinated into seeing any institutionalized human
torture as okay. Doesn't matter if your head was drained of
all prior teachings; unless somehow they excavated all the
love you received out of you--you're beyond them.
I also have major doubts about slavery as about good
economy, but little that most people want to flee
considering how the particular nature of their childhoods is
still afflicting them. The typical historian's method of
evasion, is to see humans as essentially the same--as
rational, homo economicus. Trust me, the societies that
were abandoning the institution of slavery, did so
fundamentally because through increased love from
generation to generation, they'd become people who no
longer felt the perverse need.
The Africans that were stolen out of Africa, what were their
societies like? Did they possess institutions as abhorrent as
slavery? If so, that was something they were going to have
to work out of themselves, through the same means--
3048
increased empathy from mother to daughter, gradually over

generations--as well.
Link: Richard Brody's review of 12 Years a Slave (New

Yorker)
EndFragment

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Carrie
Carrie
There's a moment in Carrie when Carrie becomes remote
from us, not owing to the carnage she wrecks, but to her
being possessed of a self-assuredness there's no way we'd
be able to match. Her mother, attempting to prevent her
from seeking a life for herself which might allow some
pleasure, bangs her own head repeatedly against a wall,
with sufficient force it might lead to breaking herself open.
Carrie watches it, but insists on her own life anyway, letting
her mom break herself into brain pulp, if such is her wont.
This was what she was going to need to do to individuate,
push on despite being guaranteed that if her mom could no
longer physically desist her by scaring her to holy hell with
knives or carting her off into isolation closets, she'd
probably slit her own wrists before her, to show her the
wreckage her "selfish" pursuits were inflicting physically,
emotionally, psychically on her. She's basically Rose in
3049
Titanic, who ultimately told her own mother to shove the

hell off, even though this was going to bottom her mother--
high in lineage, but nada in riches--out, but somehow with
a much, much, much more daunting mother, and without
someone--apologies to the good gym teacher--near Angel-
sent to temper her the strength to do it. Intent on going to
the prom, she telekinesises her mother into a closet, fuses
any possible exit, and embraces a new world. The world is
set-up to turn on her, as it turns out, and when she turns on
it, it's less out of shock and rattled umbrage and more as if
out of now familiar, superb, quite controlled and even-
pleasurable rebuttal (great! I get to use these powers again--
and in an even larger venue!). The confidence in which she
directs and motions her carnage, the presumption, without
hesitation configuring how aptly to direct the environment
to butcher the particular wretched kid she's caught sight on,
is more or less the same we saw in her disabling her maniac
mom when she'd become immune to her. We take stock of
her at the end, and with her poise, apt calculation, and
tremendous power, with her not seeming to have done in
anyone who didn't deserve it--it's mostly the real nasties,
like the corrosive black-haired twinish girls, who are
squashed down into trampled-down floor rugs like the
deflated evil witches in Wizard of Oz, who are done in, but
everyone in the crowd was laughing at her covered in pig's
blood while video played of her terrible shower
humiliation... so what loss, really, any of them?--I basically
ignored the finish and imagined her carted off by Professor
Xavier. She'd beat down her mom and home, beat down her
school and small-minded, hipster-absent town (hipsters
would have admired her aesthetic and askew beauty), and
3050
now was really just ready for bigger game. Not, that is, to
be herself quit by death, and folded into a lesson for smaller
people.
I'll admit, though, that I actually did identify with her some.
When I was about to leave my mother and embrace the
wider world, I would find her lying as if dead, in midst of
some house pathway I would have to cross. Since she knew
I knew she was performing, and that this would be amongst
a number of innumerouses I would have to ignore just to go
about my own day, she knew I would have to step over
her--as if she, a bum on the street, and I, the callous--and
that by doing so, no matter my awareness of what she was
doing, there was still a gamble-worthy chance I would still
feel doomed by some rightful, me-overlording judge as
having done the unpardonable: "Your mother was lying on
the ground, possibly sprawled in death, and you
just walked over her ... you did this, to your mother!!! I
don't care what kind of hinderances she presented you with,
you crossed the line, and are the saddest, most selfish, most
demonic cad ever born to earth! Your fate is to be cursed
with guilt after every fun thing you do, never-ending--and
this only to start!"
There's another way I know I could have identified with
her, harnessed her power of self-righteousness, but chose
not to. When Carrie explains why her mother is wrong to
hem her in, she doesn't just do this by explaining the
innocuousness of such normal life events like the prom, the
rightness every human being has to participate in and try
and enjoy them, but effectively by chastising her mother as
3051
being self-centered and selfish. Referring, that is, to her

own powers of telekinesis, she explains that this power is
actually fully normal to their shared mother-daughter
lineage, only that it skips every other generation. She
makes her mother's preference that her daughter understand
it only as Satan's "gift," a betrayal of the whole story of
their heritage, a wilful ignorance of bloodline and history,
that selfishly makes her own self more normal--or rather,
better, less sin-ridden--than her daughter. She makes her
seem a selfish rebellion against her own telekinesis-
empowered mother! The way we can do the same with our
own parents, is by finding a way to make our generation
seem more akin to our parents' parents, with their own
selves the historical aberration. This is okay-easy for gen
xers to do, but easy-peasy for millennials, for, like them,
baby boomers' parents were defined by their living the
great span of their youth in hope and dream-inhibiting
Depression times. The baby boomer parent points a finger
at their millennial kid, calling them spoiled and selfish, and
the crafty millennial, perhaps looking at their own lifestyle
of "Kinfolk"--read overtly ancestral, paradingly
masochistic, grandfatherly and sparse--ways, sees the
absurdity of someone built out of decades of prosperous
post-war years chastising someone who like the 1930s
sufferers, doesn't even feel guaranteed any kind of job. To
them, a house and a car, isn't bottom-level middle class--
what everyone who doesn't live on the street could
possess--but a sign that you've gotten lucky and hit upon a
career path vixen, unaccountable Future gloriously spared
by shining some favor on. To be called spoiled,
increasingly invites a collective glare back ... a judgment,
3052
against the abominable absurdity of the revealed exploiter

still insisting morality has anything at all to do with them.
Depression Nazi Youth, against their own Weimer-spoiled,
dessert-fattened, bourgeois parents, that is.
If we adopt this strategy in categorizing away our own
parents, it would amount to the same sin the same afflicted
upon this movie. Carrie makes the link between Carrie and
her grandmother in order to isolate her mother, and this
comes at the cost of appreciating that this grandmother--
surely having come at her own daughter as menacingly as
Carrie's mother did with Carrie--is equally as dismissal-
worthy. Further, it comes at the cost of understanding why
exactly her mom was as crazy as she was (do we really buy,
considering what the film shows of maternal power, that it
owed to religion?), why she was confined for life to
appreciate pleasures as the worst possible thing in the
world, the great villain in the world, that everyone
attempting to be selfless and holy will crusade against. Very
likely, it comes at the cost of appreciating that her mother,
in actually desisting against the voice in her telling her to
kill her new-born child, and choosing instead to keep and
hold and temporarily tend to her, may have been doing
something heroic, in relation to her lineage's history. Some
part of her daughter, she was able to believe, deserved to be
loved--something she herself may have had even less
experience of.
I'll end this review by mentioning how much I appreciated
the popular high school couple in this movie. It was
moving for me to see the girl, especially, trying to figure
3053
out how to make amends to Carrie, not just to expunge

guilt, but because she wanted her mended and happy. It was
a miracle to see her boyfriend manage his prom date with
Carrie, without either making her feel she was being set-up
or not truly of interest to him. He wanted to convey how he
felt, that she was interesting, and that he was pleased to be
her date, could very readily have a good time with her, and
did very well with this. He moved her to allow herself a
little bit more time with him, an hour more at the after-
party, perhaps--the baby-steps forward toward larger
happiness she was still going to need. When the bucket
crashes down and kills him, I almost wanted to stop the
movie there. He and his girlfriend have a lot going for them
to make them feel they could manage whatever hit they
might take through so publicly befriending the most
despised person in school, but they weren't guaranteed to
float though. It was lovely courage, and terrific love, and
they deserved much better.

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Don Jon
Don Jon
It's a considerable task put to Julianne Moore's Esther for
her to present as the preferable alternative to porn as porn
and our porn-watcher are presented here, and I don't think
she manages it. Jon--the watcher--has his life perfectly
3054
compartmentalized. There's his time at the dinner table, his

time at the gym, his time at church and the confessional, his
time at the bar with his friends, his time in bed with this
week's select girl, and his time afterwards in porn--summed
up nicely each time with a single crumpled up tissue sent
into a black waste bin--and in none of these activities does
he feel a disadvantage. I mean by this that though he's a
millennial and not an owner of a home, nor of a job that
puts him outside of being defined as a loser or as
underclass servile--he's a bartender--he's not mastered in
his family home, his job place, amongst his friends, nor
anywhere else, exempting sex, whose for-him arduous
quality requires a besting amendment. His life seems
perfect, an already commendable, substantial realization for
anyone fraught with being a mastered young man ill-placed
to make any kind of stake against the world, until rather
than settle for his usual 8-or-9-in-hotness babe he goes after
a 10, and he starts loosing leverage over his life. Scarlett
Johansson's Barbara culls Jon to her powerfully, and each
step towards her she uses to adulterate him in a way more
amenable to her. Julianne Moore is too old to be within the
echelon of women Jon and his friends would even rate, and
is more like someone sage--an Obi Wan ... or a croon,
even--needling him insights to loosen and unroot him from
an allegiance to a sun-radiant sashaying shrine of a woman
he can do little but obey and forbear. She also gets him to
rethink his attachment to porn, by showing him that a great,
nurturant, reciprocal relationship with a woman--with her,
in this case--can give him the high he thought only
obtainable through it.
3055
In effect, what she's doing is akin to unrooting someone to

their obsession with, say, texting, to spend more time
directly involving himself with people. Once you know
how great a real-life conversation can be, you'll lose your
interest in the shallows of more generic and detached
conversations ... ostensibly. But clearly to millenials there
is worse than something detached and not entirely
satisfying, and that is, that whatever is too pronounced and
of too much affect can subjugate your shallow defences and
eventually overwhelm and subjugate you. That phone call
that you think communicates more than the text, that is
obviously a better, a richer, form of communication, is to
millenials an affect-loaden, commanding mother's harague
that can't be dialed down into something just font and text,
on a device never stripped of its potency as an authoritative
cultural object to diffuse everything communicated into it
into a community that has been messaged the same thing
before. So her learning him to be a responsive partner and
to enjoy reciprocation and conversation development, may
be a genuinely helpful learning, until his ability to imagine
himself a kind of device which powers down people's
ability to dictate terms to him, lapses, and he becomes a kid
who has lost his varnished advantage--his youthful alpha
perfect form and sexual potency--to a crackening, wise
older woman, who has hard-earned won the argument over
who should be allowed to break in every part of innocent,
ignorant him. She's a superior Barbara, that is, in that
there's no one out there to lesson him on how he might be
better off without her. Which may be why the film inflicts
her with a periodic tendency to shut down, broken over
rememberance of her lost family, so to become sort of a
3056
null object he can actually act over from time to time.

If this film was true life, Jon would forgo her the first
moment possible--making his switching off at some
moment where she had curled into herself once again in
pain. He'd bookend her experience with her with it lending
him the authority to talk back to Barbara and acknowledge
the rightness of his feeling neglected by her (guys are going
to like this moment in the film), and perhaps with his
gaming how he schedules and goes about his life a bit--a bit
of social mixing it up with basketball might be better than
just the familiar routine of weights--but otherwise return to
what he had, with maybe also a bit more sass at the church,
and so not just with his dad. He'd forgo the commanding
10s this time, spot out the less-fielty-owed 8s and 9s, and
every week, catch one. He'd take them to bed, which
though it punished him with missionary sex which hardly
flatters the form of his mate, reducing them to compressed,
blockened slabs of somnambulist flesh, though it means
felatio which terminates just when its getting good, or
which from the start--when he's eating her out--is pretty
rank and foul, is still something which might lend life into
his follow-up routine of amended sex through porn. He's a
hunter who can claim more from his follow-up routine of
administrating, handling, and plying apart his prize stalked
prey, than can the big game hunter readying things with a
blooded carcase for a later feast.
In short, a device clearly used to make guys who watch
porn not feel like they're losers--he's a guy who's got an
active sex life, and with total scores--probably has most of
3057
them thinking that though they like the involvement of the

Obi Wan Kenobi female friend, they'd just-fine take what
Jon has from the start. And you can understand why
apparently some porn companies cooperated with the film.
Here presented is a fully honest account of why guys go to
porn, and apparently it's as innocent-dewed as Playboy
magazine in the 1950s. Guys go to it for better tits, better
ass, and a feeling of empowerment and satisfaction they
don't always so much feel in sex, which can turn servile.
Not ideal, maybe, but understandable, and hardly character
defining--a bit hen-afflicted man still turning his head at the
gorgeous young blonde strayed into his path ...
quintessential manhood. But go to a porn site, and see if
this is what you see. Do you perhaps instead see something
a little bit more disturbing than just chasing down the
perfect ass? Or even, something more salutary than just
cold sex, stripped of any genuine sensuality that might have
been more evident in porn during the free-love 1970s?
Maybe what you get is a lot that is damning men, making
them beyond recoverable--a heightened longing for
revenge, not compensation. Rape fantasies. And maybe also
a bit that is genuinely buttressing them, giving them some
company that is actually teaching them a thing or two about
mutuality, but delimited by being entirely under their
control.
Prisoners
The movie begins with Hugh Jackman's character, Keller
Dover, attending his son's successful kill of a deer. Just into
the film, we're not quite sure what to prioritize, how much
3058
yet to ascribe any particular that strays into our sight, so we

give the fact that the movie shows hunting to be about
springing on an animal whose attention is preoccupied
elsewhere, full due. Hunting means killing, and possibly in
the process, terribly wounding an animal whose flank is to
you. When Keller salutes his son for the effort, we're
certainly willing to submerge this fact so it doesn't too
much incriminate a father whose love for his son is real, but
it's certainly not completely out of mind when Keller's best
friend's oldest daughter asks his son if he is comfortable
stalking deer. The son replies not with his experience but
with what his father would say in retort: hunting is a way to
keep nature in balance ... and besides, how soon are you
about to turn away from innocent-cow-produced burgers?
So, when we eventually find out that the person intent on
hunting down children describes her efforts about as coldly,
if for an inverse purpose--for her it's about disrupting God's
plans, not tending them: nothing tees people off into
madness than the disappearance of children--are we in
mind to ascribe equivalence, even slightly? No, the movie
isn't that sophisticated. They're not both addled on over
onto the same suspect line, which might include everyone
sufficiently besotted they're non-blanched at making insipid
imprints on beautiful flesh, including the numerous-
tattooed, somewhat sullen and snide detective, Loki (Jake
Gyllenhaal), but rather one doggedly good against one
entirely evil. But likely unconscious to us, we've still in
some way aligned them together: you've got to be able to
turn hard on other's suffering if you mean to pursue larger
goals. He ends up torturing a young man for days and days
to get information he just knows he possesses, and it's the
3059
most abominable path in that it leads him to a point where

no one--not even you, the movie-goer--has any sure faith in
him anymore. He's all alone in a void where going on looks
to be about either obliterating all awareness that he might
actually have made an awry choice which resulted in his
doing something damnable, useful only in satisfying a
desire to feel efficacious and rage against a world with no
choice but to suffer his bruising imprint; or maybe just, still
holding onto his awareness that his victim had given him
sure signs--the kinds of signs an experienced hunter
recognizes instinctively in the gives of prey--that to get to
the kids their location has to be broken out of him. What
could have doomed him, what was dooming him, instead
hefted him off into herodom ... he was right, and gets to the
true child abductor--the aunt--first. Jail for his actions
becomes, what, scratching him with a few negligible
abrasions as he slowly stretches up into a human giant? Yes
indeed; only that.
Taking her down fails, looking to be owing to his not being
so good going after another hunter--he'd become excellent
at some point, but remains at this point nonetheless a
newbie at this. He prides himself in once again getting into
her house, seemingly through another successful
deception--he'd done a number on the detective previously,
and seemingly also before the aunt, so surely he's already
got good game with this skill, right?--not realizing this
means getting him off the street and turning his vulnerable
flank to actually pistol-armed her. And for a human being,
who, like a deer, can be taken down by even one shot, this
means the end of his efforts. But it still seems like an
3060
instance of first through the wall always gets hurt: with the
follow-up pursuit by the detective, the aunt relents almost
immediately, as if the game has got now to be up entire,
hoping only for one last successful slay of a child, one last
nasty rippling through of the human community to
unsteady God, before becoming rendered a shot-through
crumpled form requiring burial or cremation.
The movie gives a great deal of give on who it's okay to
be--for instance, the priest we first encounter as a drunken
mess, had once taken upon himself to do in someone who
had slain numerous children and would have slain more if
he hadn't stepped in, even if this still made him someone
who stores a bound corpse in his basement. But it's not so
pleasant to true teddy-bear types. The father of the other
abducted child, Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard), is a
professional, wears fine sweaters, endeavours to play the
trumpet, makes his basement into a friendly entertainment
space, and he, unlike Keller, can't bear to keep what Keller
is up to to himself. So while Keller, to keep the possibility
of retrieving his child's location alive, lets himself be
thought of as someone who deals with a crisis selfishly by
escaping to a retreat and into alcohol, Franklin coughs it up
pretty much immediately to his wife Nancy (Viola Davis).
Keller finds this out by Nancy's banging on his door to
accost him, with her husband behind her, sundered and
shamed for betraying his friend's trust and relenting to his
wife to handle things subsequently. The film figuratively
castrates him once again, when his wife actually ends up
agreeing with Keller, telling her husband to adopt Keller's
ability to think on their children rather than take the "easy"
3061
way out, and absolve the long-tortured, mentally-disabled

man any subsequent abuse.
It's not so easy on tortured, abducted kids, either. It's
probably not so unpleasant to those like the Birch's girl,
who succeeds in an escape not too far long into her capture,
but those kept long enough in terrible conditions that
they're going to show signs of crippling owing to it, sure
aren't treated that well. Think Paul Dano's character Alex
Jones, a victim of child-abduction, who we are repeatedly
told hasn't any sadistic intentions towards children himself
and is possessed of a ten-year-old's mental state and
intelligence, and who is beat to near the point of death and
then boxed in and subjected alternatively to blasts of
intense heat and intense cold. Think David Dastmalchian's
character Bob Taylor, who we learn too was an abducted
child subjected to terrific abuse, and who too now though a
bag of quirks remains nevertheless essentially harmless,
and is beaten to a pulp by the detective before he does a
quick steal of a gun and blows his own head off. The film
does agonies of horror to these two, and then when it gets
to the child-afflicter herself, it lets her off with but one easy
bullet ... is it too much to say it was done out of respect?
Abused children are urinals you can piss in yet again, just
let it gush and gush all over them, while the abductor is a
just-come-upon statue you're surely baiting the gods by
taking down in any drawn out way.
P.S. People have accused Chris Nolan's Dark Knight series
as being misanthropic, and you'd have to wonder then what
adjective they'd need to invent to adequately damn this
3062
film. Dastmalchian was a tormented, insane man in that

film too we remember, and Batman scolded the DA intent
on tormenting information out of him that he was raging on
someone mentally sick--a schizophrenic--and that he wasn't
going to get anywhere with this. Batman also said the thing
that took him out of his despair of finding himself
parentless, alone, and in a hell of self-accusation that was
sure to render him insane, was a surprise moment
of kindness--Inspector Gordon's putting his coat around
him and talking to him in nurturance and sympathy. Dark
Knight's philosophy applied to this film would have had the
torture go nowhere, and for the breakthrough to have come
from Nancy's effort to break with the program and show
some trust in Alex, who'd known so little of it in life. I like
this film, but you can bet I would have preferred to have
seen this. It's the truth--kindness is the way to go, if we're
really interested in making a better world rather than
accosting ourselves for once having put purposeful posts up
in that direction. And boy oh boy does the world need this
reminder.
The Family
The Family
When the mob family descends on their new locale, a
quaint village in northern France, their identity is of
American. The mobster's wife, Michelle Pfeiffer's character
Maggie, enters into a local grocery and asks for peanut
butter, descending upon her a crowd of locals dismaying
American obesity. Certainly too, when the teen boy and girl
in the family join the local school, they're the improvising,
3063
brass-balled Americans, whomever sets out to take

advantage of them regrets their imposition near
immediately. Later, however, it would seem that what they
are mostly is Italian--Maggie is fierce in pitting her olive
oil diet against the French obsession with cream, as if
bulwarked by centuries of Italian lives and culture. They
churn out burgers and Cokes for the locals, only to satisfy
expectations--Americanism has become a red cape they
float before onrushing french bulls they're cannily flanking
and spotting out. I'm not quite sure how much fun it is to
watch a pleb mob family reduce the French into imbeciles,
but I suppose if you understand that what they're doing is
impressing themselves upon new cushions so they are
succumbed of some of their store presence to take on more
of "you," I suppose you can at least get at the sanity of what
they're wanting to do.
But what becomes interesting is how in their individual
pursuits they find themselves extraneous to one another.
The father goes from being a retired patrician mobster to
become an excited cell terrorist, activated in his fervour to
take down a corporation. The mother goes from sallying
forth destruction to the arrogant French in piquant moments
to finding her own insides blasted out, with a priest taking
what she had revealed to him as ingredients to mix back a
mirror as to how long a road of evil she's traveled. The
daughter goes from teaching awkward, totally overmatched
teenagers a lesson they'll never forget to taking on a
polished young instructor, who'll show her that spunk and
sass can be quickly subsumed if any inflection at all is
given the life someone poised and learned is due to lead.
3064
The boy manipulates a whole school to his advantage, but

becoming Zuckerberg to the school spanks him as to how
top dog substitutes paltry happiness if it's not something he
can adequately return home and show family. They've gone
so far out in their own individual sports that gangsters
arriving to kill them really serve as a welcome call back
home. The French, who had temporarily been given some
advantage, are once again relinquished all, as the gangsters
dump however many they need into corpse status to show
the power of this call; tailing along with it, a whole family
back tightly together again.
The episode packages up, and the family is off to fuss up
some other European station for awhile. We take stock, and
see them as a blotch of virus who are eating up small moth
holes into a fine swatch of something precious we weren't
really allowed to see, for it making their presence there
beyond endurable. Exempting the boy--he is the lone one of
the family who can strategize, delay, his revenge--they've
each got major problems restraining themselves, which
their CIA overlookers greatly assist them with. Fine. But if
they needed a soothing, antique village with a lot of prop
people to serve as a calming backdrop for this containment
"therapy," it's too bad it couldn't be done entirely in
simulation.
Insidious 2
I leave it to Insidious 2 to faithfully expound upon the most
significant fact about evil--those doing it aren't themselves,
but rather are possessed by alters driving them to take
sadistic pleasure in murdering innocents. It's quite
3065
something, after seeing the damage the adult Parker Crane

has done to women he's culled from local denizens--rotted
bodies aligned in church rows--to finally be introduced to
him as a young boy, and for him to be attributed about the
same amount of empathy as the good boy in the film, Josh
Lambert. They spy him in long braids and a girl's dress,
combing his doll's hair. When he turns around, he actually
warns them to get out of the room--he actually tries to help
them! Later we see his mother descend upon him and make
him feel as if his entire known universe will be squashed
out if he doesn't obey her in all respects, and cast himself in
the role of female full-time so to be fully owned by her and
bear no resemblance to a husband she wants cast out of
memory altogether. Later he would own his mother's look--
eyes of convinced sadism, a wide smile supped on other
people's powerlessness and pain--and it's clear he's in no
way his own self anymore: his mother alter has simply
taken him over.
There is nothing scarier for human beings than the look of
our mothers when they themselves are possessed. I've seen
it--at an age where I was old enough to have the resources
not to feel the normally life-saving need to bury my
awareness of it. She wandered into my room while I was
still awake, with the complete scary visage of someone
under possession, driven to seek out innocents to harm. But
while it was true that I was in her home at the time owing
to vulnerability, I wasn't so vulnerable not to take some
delight in this kind of "photo capture" of the source of the
fear that had dissuaded me away from whatever full kind of
self-realization I might have been capable of--"you, kid, are
3066
owned by me; I will flush into you my emotions, and they

will have their full play with you." Here was the source of
the absolutely terrifying "eye ball" nightmare I used to have
all the time as the kid, where my dreams would be going
casually along their route, and then all of a sudden a
boulder-sized eyeball would appear and advance upon me.
Here is the source of that maybe still subliminally felt
sense, that if I'm out enjoying life, adorning myself with
possessions and accomplishments beyond what my mother
would have thought me allotted--something uncomfortable
to her--that all of a sudden out of the blue I might casually
open up a door and see a terror of teeth about to have it out
with me.
Actually, this might be an exaggeration ... it is possible that
now I'm completely demon free. What I do with my
independence might take my mother--in all respects--
further and further away from me (which, trust me, is pretty
damn scary as well; and is surely the source of my
conjuring her up in my daydreams and my writing), but it
may be I can't see any Joker face, twisted to take delight in
pain, and not instantly see the helpless "Parker Crane" that
was going to have no choice but to let this demon into
him/herself, and own them whole in response to triggers of
self-fulfillment and helplessness.
The Butler
The Butler
The current generation of liberals have clearly reached

3067
expiry date when they find themselves—without knowing

it, of course—actually favoring Uncle Toms, thereby
becoming exactly those whom they in their better days
would have been at lead in toppling. The current black
situation is that the huge bulk of them are in the
dispossessed 99%, with the vast majority, in the worst
ghettos of this unlucky group. And liberals look at this
group, and see a hopeless situation. They see people who
have simply transmogrified, who, having their claim on
bourgeois respectability taken from them, have over the
last 30 years of taking sustenance from the sort of foul
stuff you count as familiar when you're trying to
makeshift an accommodating life for yourself in hell—
with cock-fight UFC becoming your sport,
sadomasochistic Fifty Shades your fiction, heavy whiskey
drinking your milk, and hard-core porn and online-
betting not even a poke that something has gone wrong—
and now stand before them as a people anthropologically
different, fixed forever in their degraded status, like brief
fresh flesh to stagnant rotten meat. At the same time
liberals have stopped believing past-times shared by all
are really America's greatest cultural offering, and
accoutered themselves in whatever way to make them
feel that as if by DNA, every sprout of their lived lives
must have behind it years of private-school teaching. The
idea that you should want the 99% to be given a loud
voice, and dominate American culture, is about as absurd
as saying you want to bring down the walls staunching
back a zombie hoard. You might assist them a little, agree
to minimum wage increases and health care benefits, but
you'll turn armaments against whomever would say it is
insufficient to let them rest with administrations that still
keep them compartmentalized and accountable.
3068
It's not so much right to say that they remember your

origins, either, who you were before. Rather, it's a bit as if
for an agreed upon extended period of years, they stayed
eyes-fixed to their New York Times, and looked up so
they could see everything again with fresh eyes; and so so
much of the democratic world that was built upon the
belief that people are equal, and once had ample evidence
for this belief, can look now, with this spread of loonies
partaking so much of the population, simply absurd to
them. They go to a liberal web site, and look down from
the article to the comment section, and cannot believe
that people had once thought it worth so much effort to
place such a close bridge between writer and audience.
They look at the grand numbers of people who can but
don't vote, and actually hope they rest content in their
apathy: if they all went out to the ballot box, they'd force
the unpleasant acknowledgement that one person-one
vote, is a fantastical, silly, dangerous proposition, when
so many are only one-fifth as human as they themselves
are. And they realize that their task is to argue for the
reality of the number of unhumans loud enough, that the
moral imperative becomes to take down the morays that
have made it seem as if larger inclusion is a humane and
necessary thing. So courageously they in unison pit their
courageous resources, and the crowd of unknowns that
hippies once thought you should know, for believing you
could be spiritually pure regardless of how anonymous
your situation or what-not anonymous no-place you're
from, become trolls, unknowns, but dank killers, who
from under bridges or out of dark corridors can be relied
upon to stank up any good thing the civilized might be
forging. And so eventually, pounding this lesson home—
3069
trolls! trolls! trolls!, progress begins to be made, and sites

that were once open-access begin to require commenters
to provide their full name with their posts, a seemingly
small request, but really a final nail, considering that
coinciding with this request is a society that has made
newscast-main-story the fact that individuals caught
saying the wrong thing can get 35 years, or a visit from
the unimpressed, who've located your address, and who'll
show how you can be turfed out of your job or kicked to
shit with bats, in a startled, shocked, blink of an eye. And
as to the public vote, you can't let it come to your actually
denying people it: there's no way this wouldn't cause
dissonance that would destroy even you. So what you do
is make them feel so apart from a world that would give a
shit about them, that in frustration they come to believe
their only hope is through violence. And then you make
violence, a decision to desist from the public
conversation and just stage revolt, something that is
goodness gone foul—something wildly excessive
and spoiled, for it being completely unnecessary—and
something you can destroy like something tolerated gone
arrogant, like a weed proclaiming itself a latinized plant,
in a truly terrific garden that shudders the thought. For
which all, you'll need directors, traitors to the underclass
that take your view and makes it incontestable. You'll
need Uncle Toms ... and so enter the butcher, or sorry,
Lee Daniels's foul weapon, The Butler, so all that would
disquiet the over-class can begin to rest the fuck in peace.
The Butler takes you through black history in America,
from cotton-fields to today, and everything Daniels, a
black man, shows you concerning black Americans is
either exemplary or understandable ... exempting the
3070
Black Panther movement. At a time in history when black

Americans were buoyed by the huge love and
peacefulness of Martin Luther King, and who would
eventually find others his equal to relate to and support—
first Nelson Mandela, then (ostensibly) Obama—here,
according to the film, is where even a very good and
righteous population can go foul if it shorns patience for
hate. The Black Panthers, we learn, though ostensibly
about community service, were really just interested in
taking out two of you for every one of them. Their way, is
blood on the streets, payback, with anything good that
could possibly come from this, really beside the point
(the only point they're concerned with, is your head, on
the end of a pike). And it is okay, regardless of your color,
to hate them.
How do we know this? Because the person who
exemplifies membership to the Panther movement that is
true to it, rather than based on what it purportedly stands
for, is the sole black villain in this film. She is the butler's
eldest son's girlfriend, Carol Hammie, who looks down
on her boyfriend's family, at just that point in the film
when the butler's wife has ceased drinking and cheating
on him for her realizing she just can't any longer do this
to such a good man. The wife, Oprah Winfrey's Gloria
Gaines, identifies Carol as low-life trash; and the
occasion of correct naming, sparks momentum in the
film to show up how foul she really is, demarcating how
even her five-year-long love for her boyfriend was false.
She's model gorgeous—the most beautiful woman in the
film, by far—and the Black Panthers are fierce in their
black attire, but they're lost souls tempting blacks to
where chaos—no true love; all hate—reigns.
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So you take a film like this where done by a black person,

the one thing that a liberal crowd allowed itself to
question regarding black empowerment is given huge
leverage. When a dispossessed people begin to dress in
spooky garb—in this film, Carol's aggressive afro doesn't
really jive with her boyfriend's black leather—he still
looks an affable Theo Huxtable—and is effectively in
affronting Joker garb—and beget violence, then,
effectively, the KKK has got company: one ranges more
over Southern rural, and the other NorthEast urban, but
it's all just more goons on the landscape. Once you've
chosen this path, your life circumstances no longer
applies, for no amount of previous suffered hate prevents
you of your God-given ability to choose the path of love.
And so as liberals free their homes of the presence of the
dispossessed, by raising rents, and thereby effectively
shipping them off to the outskirt ghettos; and in a sense
free them from their presence on the way to work, with
tax policies that attend to "your" drive but pay less and
less attention to their public transport; and keep them
seeming contained, at least, as they explore their
preferred websites, by construing comment sections so
they seem fetid marshes you screen out as you fix on your
own haute-bourgeois/aristocratic compartments, at first
the dispossessed do nothing as you enjoy how "scum"
miraculously seems less present in your everyday life, but
later manifest, in a terrible way—with a burnt-down
luxury apartment building that had taken the place of
something low-rent, scrawled with anarchist hate; with
minimum-wage food chains looted across the country—
after strikes had gone nowhere—with stolen burgers from
them shoved up the arses of uptown gourmets; with
private roads laced with fowl killed in oil spills, that leave
3072
morning drivers retching—these dispossessed are going

to be received with nothing but a merciless hard
crackdown—regardless of huge a high percentage of
them are black, mentally-ill, and starving. If they had
waited, their sufferings would eventually have been
noticed—did you not see how the butler eventually had
the support of a president to get his raise-hike?—but
impertinently, impatiently, greedily, and
unnecessarily, they chose the path of hate, and have
become vermin.
Crackdown is to be lead by the likes of Daniels as well.
The Butler shows he's got all the right attributes. You
don't want them too smart and sophisticated, and he's
not. You don't want him thinking an aristocrat, an officer,
is anything he can aspire to, but rather contented to
himself as a gruff staff-sergeant, and he is. And you want
him beguiled to "betters," as if they are gods, harsh as
hell on any of the underclass who'd try and rival them,
and he—to near a point that should make him look a bit
ridiculously stupid to his betters—is. If you're showing
cotton-field masters, it's okay to show them as brutal
sadists, but if you can't show scenes of them and their
black servants/slaves that doesn't spark something
outside folk portrayal—all evil, and all innocence—
narrative needs are determining what you are seeing in
life. If you're showing students being prepped to suffer
abuse by forcing other students to play the role of
accosters, at a historical time when psychology was
becoming famous for its prisoner/guard experiments,
where students couldn't help but play their delegated
roles for real, and for the Maslow experiments, where
people told to shock a victim could find themselves
3073
apparently shocking them from pain into

unconsciousness, and you do it just straight, then you're
not post but pre-Kubrick, and are actually dialing back
what we know of people and the world. If you show
someone in close proximity to presidents, yet nothing
shown looks different from what an ignorant person from
afar would project as how these scenes would play, you're
pretty much taking the accomplishment of Aaron
Sorkin's The West Wing back, and substituting
something more dutiful to authority; more respectful of
mystique and distance. And if you show every worn
president but not the one who currently resides, you
make it seem as if they were all leading up to the one so
pure and beyond he's most accurately represented as a
light that's effused itself over the social landscape,
concentrated heavy beyond the door you're about to
enter, and about to take you some place as rapturous as
heaven. And if you show Jackie O as a natural aristocrat,
a true princess, and her rival beauty—but of the
dispossessed—as a snake villain, you're the Uncle Tom
who's undertaken the tradition of G.W. Griffith. So
fabulously unaware are you, that the lesson you think you
know by heart, is one you impertinently cast aside to put
a stake though the snake: "guess who's coming to
dinner," isn't supposed to favor the traditional-minded
family who's shocked by the strange black thing planted
down at the dinner table before them, but shown up by
him or her.
And when we've lost that lesson, we no longer believe in
democracy, but shown that though it might have taken
three centuries to prove it, the whigs were wrong: gates
need to be put in place to keep these tempering hordes
3074
from bucking up into a revolution.

Posted by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston at 11:10 AM No
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Labels: lee daniels, the butler
Kick-Ass 2
Kick-Ass 2
When Roger Ebert reviewed the original Kick-Ass, he
wasn't primarily taken aback by any one single incident—
Hit Girl's being shot, with the audience having to take a
moment to remind themselves about her bullet-proof
vest, for instance—but by the fact that people behind the
movie were so comfortable exploring a whole terrain of
something which had pretty much taken him off stride
upon first occurrence. He couldn't believe that a movie
primarily involving kids could be so comfortable with
people dying, being butchered, all over the place, coldly,
bloodily, humiliatingly, with this not counting it as
beyond fun and games. "This isn't comic violence," he
writes, "These men, and many others in the film, really
are stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently
experiences no emotions about this. Many children
would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think,
after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?"
Ebert worried about what would happen to the 6-year-
olds who wanted to see the film, and, despite his
proclaiming himself not so worried about them,
3075
evidently also about the sheer fact of the older ones

who'd already been ruined to become of the
internet. Specifically he writes, "The movie's rated R,
which means in this case that it's doubly attractive to
anyone under 17. I'm not too worried about 16-year-olds
here. I'm thinking of 6-year-olds. There are characters
here with walls covered in carefully mounted firearms,
ranging from handguns through automatic weapons to
bazookas. At the end, when the villain deliciously
anticipates blowing a bullet hole in the child's head, he is
prevented only because her friend, in the nick of time,
shoots him with bazooka shell at 10-foot range and blows
him through a skyscraper window and across several city
blocks of sky in a projectile of blood, flame and smoke. As
I often read on the Internet: Hahahahaha.”
Ebert pretty much assumes that if you liked Kick-Ass,
you've got to be pretty much lost to the human. Zombies
might have great sport figuring out what to do with the
various body parts that remained after they've gorged
themselves full, perhaps bowling human heads through
assembled foot-and-ankle "pins," or making rib-cages
and thigh bones into cunning hefty decorative wear, but
anyone still human isn't going to be in mind to demarcate
their creativity here, but just drain it of distinction so that
the sheer fact of its blunt awfulness, not its
variegatedness, holds your attention. If in real life a mob
is ripping apart its victim, do you describe particulars
involved so the act looks to possess a distinguishable
aesthetic, a uniqueness—worth? Would irony save it
from now possessing validity? Or do you eclipse it, deny
it, and just hold it as not worth describing? Ebert does, or
shows, both—we already have the description, and he
3076
ends his piece with, "then the movie moved into dark,
dark territory, and I grew sad." But since his description
is compelling enough to have you think that Ebert was
aware that his foremost problem is not with the film but
with a world that gets sufficient kicks from energies he
finds repellent that it gives latitude to art that partake of
them, he mostly sounds as if with this essay he knows
he's successfully enunciated his own demise. The
foremost thing he did by setting out as a critic to analyze
the film, was welcome himself innocently but
conclusively to how little this changed world is going to
factor him in. It's not true that this was the last essay of
Ebert's I ever read, but it's the last one of significance he
ever did: it's tough to admire the work of someone who's
crawled into his own dark corner, out of realizing that as
considerable as he is, he hasn't the momentum to take on
a world when it isn't dialing down its emerging
preferences.
I liked Kick-Ass, just like I also liked (or rather, loved)
Refn's Drive—a movie Richard Brody accused as being
inhuman, of being in love with the idea of "the poker face
as the key to success"—and as well Game of Thrones, a
show Maris Kreizman argues with genuine case is for
"Star Wars fans who thought Princess Leia should have
been raped." For both bad and good reasons. The bad, or
at least, the regrettable reason, is because I'm not so
different from those 1930s artists who were daunted by
their predecessors—those 1920s greats who hung out at
the Parisian cafes, like Fitzgerald, Joyce, Hemingway,
and the rest of those populating Midnight to Paris—but
grew wings when a Depression climate frowned on those
who arrogantly showed how ripe human life can be. You
3077
watch Kick-Ass or Drive, and you know that completely

non-misanthropic critics like Ebert and Brody—both the
highest class of loving people—are going to find
reprehensible anyone who'd take much pleasure from
them (Brody would give you the okay, only if you liked
Brooks' gangster, and not, that is, for Ryan Gosling, the
film's style, and the 95 percent of the rest of the film).
Being someone who is bit daunted by how personality
rich these two men are, who is fascinated at what kind of
early experience enabled them to bring so much presence
to the world (it's more than their being surely first-
borns), and whose inclination is to quieten myself to take
in more and more from them and maybe locate the
maybe-still-tapable source, I like films which break this
spell, which give you a sense that somehow the world has
incrementally changed, accrued, layered, so that things
that wouldn't have had much chance to distract the
attention of men like these, can find themselves irritating
them for their requiting them to swat at them or tear
through them before lunging awesomely at what they're
actually in mind to take on. It's easy to imagine them
eventually willy-nilly pinned or hopelessly entangled as
these accumulations bear down—like the great uber-man
in Prometheus stunningly blocked and enveloped by the-
even-greater, great python-muscled tentacle horror that
barged in his path—if they don't find some place of
refuge, and you can kind of factor them out and see the
world—however Depression grey and stilled—as your
own grounds now to range over.
Also bad, is the fact that I like the fact that films which I
know to be, maybe not precisely misanthropic, but
endorsing orientations towards the world which are
3078
reroutes away from approaches which'd have one face

one's personal scourges and actually, like, grow, appeal to
me for the fact that they favor reroutes I know I also need
to have championed to appear ideal. They convince me
that I don't stand out too much as a self-realized, self-
satisfied douche, a bitchy demon presiding over our age
would feel the need to sweep down upon and teach a
swift scolding lesson to. She could read deep into my
thoughts, recognize that I know everything that is going
on in an age which inverts what is good—self-realization
—for the bad—self-sacrifice/diminution—know that I
ultimately want Her gone for inhibiting something as
precious as a human life, and at such an awesome scale,
but still pat me on the head as no threat—even give me a
lift, if I needed one, and smile genuinely to me—because
She knows I'm still broken sufficiently that I'll need her
"fix" like all the rest of them. This means that when
someone like Brody chastises a film like Skyfall for
something that may well be regrettable, and that I should
want to be the kind person who like him had instantly
noticed, I'm actually glad that at the moment it hadn't
occurred to me.
Specifically, when he writes,
The colossal chase scene through Istanbul at the beginning of
Skyfall recalls the escape through Shanghai, early in

Indiana
Jones and the

Temple of Doom , with pushcarts overturned,
merchandise scattered, terrified bystanders diving for safety.
Spielberg offensively turned ordinary people going about their
business into just so much confetti for his spectacle—exactly
the sort of cavalier colonialera bravado that might have
3079
repelled a filmmaker who started his career in the late sixties.
Plus ç a change:

Skyfall , too, scatters Istanbul’s residents and
their goods like bowling pins. From the start, Sam Mendes, the
director of the latest installment of 007, proves faithful to
tradition, yet not always the best of that tradition.
I realized him to be like the sober peasants in Monty

Python's Holy Grail, who made clear King Arthur's
requisiting them not just for directions but for
confirmation of his own grandiose status, or like the
whole feel of the Lancelot bit in the film, where Lancelot's
a crazed loon with a sword, hacking away at an innocent
assembly of peacefully gathered people, for a point he'd
actually end up staunching himself in retreat from. But
the point is that I evidently enough relate to the fantasy
of being someone inflated that when you see the like in a
film, you're too much enjoying and partaking in his
paving through swaths of less-mattering people to be
instantly critical or self-reflective of what he'd just done
to the actually probably quite fulsome people around
him.
Same thing applies, especially, with Brody's superb
criticism of Drive, where he argued that "Refn doesn’t
seem interested in pain but in its infliction—specifically,
how blank-faced, soft-spoken people manage to commit
mayhem and, at the moment of violent outburst, stay
fixed on their plan and maintain a fearsome calm in the
face of disgusting gore." Yes, absolutely true: Refn clearly
enjoys that Ryan Gosling's ostensibly accommodating,
becalming, boyish manner, can be exploded so
conclusively that anyone who might privilege their own
interests through it find themselves unable to handle
3080
whom he has revealed to them as a good part of his core,

and he's got them now in a position where they'll never
be quite sure about him; always a bit fretful and fearful,
prepared to disengage and let "you" be free, so you can
decompress and relax in your own space, the moment
you show any hint of being tweaked from normal. He
enjoys creating protagonists who experience other
people's startled pulling back, like as if it's at this
point where you can begin to form a friendship with
them, if it would still take, and they remain interested,
because you now know them well enough from what they
have revealed to you—you've had that advantage—before
you revealed the dragon-self they've actually also to
tangle with (something akin to Black Widow's technique
in the Avengers). And I know what that is about. One of
my favorite characters from fiction was once Severian,
from Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer, and this was
him to a T. Just as soon as you think you've got him
pegged, and are moving on with your further plans, he
shows what he's been hiding, and does the like of
surprising you by punching your nose-bone into your
brain. And though I'm aware enough of it's immaturity,
or rather, its origins as a defense mechanism against
abuse, like the "ignoring of emotions of others and the
crawling inside boxes and clinging to hard surfaces and
mechanical devices in place of relating to caretakers"
(deMause, "Why males are more violent") that autists do,
I can't quite stand outside a film like Drive and find it
hard to slip Gosling's character on. Rather, it is a bit
more the character Brody actually likes in this film,
Albert Brooks' gangster, whom I am prone to engage with
rather secondarily.
3081
Brody makes the gangster out to be a horror, "[some]one

whose professional identity emerges, tantalizingly, only
by degrees," but he isn't, like Gosling, the guy who
disengages and puts the cold-face on, but rather the
saddened older guy who realizes there's really no other
option for him, and so does what he has to, still himself
the whole while. Indeed, when he forks and knives a guy
repeatedly to death, in a scene of massive violence and
emotional heat, it's as if it's more his way of displacing
his anger at his partner, who caused the problem but who
just can't any longer suffer himself the gore, like a
husband requited to killing the pest in the tub or who was
eating away at the yew bush, that he had no real truck
with—that is, more a manner of communicating, to
someone else, like a hard-slammed door, than it is your
spelling a hard lesson to whom you're directly accosting.
Gosling, on the other hand, when he kicks and crashes in
the skull of the assassin fallen before him, has entered
some other kind of state, separated from emotions, with
even his nearby beloved completely momentarily out of
the picture; and it is only afterwards that he can regroup
himself to something human like earnest communication
—even though you've surely fallen back by then, probably
concussed into pitiful trembles and nervous quivering,
and on your way to actually running away.
How the hell could I orient more towards Gosling than
Brooks in this film, you ask? Because Gosling in this
picture is more drawn from wounding than Brooks is,
and I relate, and whatever love I've gathered since then
hasn't quite become sufficient that I tilt more the other
way. This means that I expect a good portion of my life
has still been too much about a re-route than about a
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healthy full-on engagement with a logical path, and this

means any god on the lookout for anyone treading
disallowed hallowed grounds and heaping and
integrating life riches found there-on into his life
drawers, might temporarily fix on me—or even quite a bit
—but ultimately desist, contented in my non-threat, like
the momentarily confused military drone in Oblivion.
This isn't exactly the right comparison, but I won't be due
to be a Bradley Manning; which is the way I need to have
it.
And now to the good. To the good reason that is, for
liking or loving films that enormously astute and
psychologically healthy critics like Ebert and Brody are
bound to find offensive and largely unenjoyable. There
are some periods of human existence, where, as I
mentioned concerning the 1930s, all the great artists
sound about opposite the great artists who thrived just
before, when humanity was involved in some kind of true
renaissance period. These types—the actual lessers—do
in this instance have the advantage—the times are behind
them, for them, and it means for them they see, they
experience, a landscape of fresh things they might
explore, rather than blockages, howling spirits
instructing them on how despite their whatever genius,
they're not wanted, they don't matter, and they're no
good—now try to do your best work with this holy hell of
shit on your tail! So artists like Walker Evans, who
thought humanity so spoiled it needed to be taught the
Depression lesson, thrived, and artists like Fitzgerald,
whose blood was Jazz-Age, began to wilt. If you look at
30s films from the perspective Ebert and Brody show
towards Kick-Ass and Drive (or that Maris Kreizman
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shows towards Game of Thrones), as you show up every

director for their potential amorality, their dispirit, their
exploitation, their dehumanization, you'll be showing up
a lot of what turned out to be the best films of the era.
42nd Street made people into "cogs in a wheel"
(Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark), it took away their
worth as individuals, favoring only what they counted for
as part of a collective—it kind of was a Nazi film: and
Busby Berkeley was great 30s innovation, for example.
And critics who could only point out the bad and not
recognize that increasingly it is from sour motives that
real art is increasingly to be found, have surely come to
their terminus: If it's not humans but oily kaiju masters
who are making the better 'bots, no matter how much
you hate them, you've got to be at least be able to
recognize this. Brody thought Drive a poor movie, with
only one thing going for it; Ebert showed no sense of how
exciting and out-of-the-blue Kick-Ass was; and years
later you go about and talk to bank-tellers, retail workers,
average joes—movie goers—you watch how they light up
when you talk about these movies: they were favorites of
the year, for many. So, concerning Ebert (I know, I know
—rest in peace) and Brody, and their likewise actually
wonderful ilk ... do we keep them? One begins to think—
no, lest we come across something awful they spelled out
about friggin' Game of Thrones, a world-wide beloved
phenomenon, for Heaven's sakes, and feel compelled to
seek them out and torture them out of their eyes and ears
to demonstrate our point that clearly for them, their
owning them no longer much matters.
I don't remember a single particular moment of Kick-Ass
I especially enjoyed; it was more how surprised I was,
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how excited I was, to see a film-maker just truck on

through a landscape of horror like it was all just so what?
Yeah, a pre-teen is carving up bodies and having a heap
of fun—if this sounds like something you've got to work
yourself up for an entire movie to be ready for, you're
dark ages, because this director instructed us to the fact
that a whole bunch of talent is about to take it as nothing
really special. So, if in good times, when artists do this,
make inroads into taboo turf, this means they're
exploring hush-hush topics like racism or adult sexual
relations, then in the bad—times of purgatory—it's going
to mean going the distance with things likely to wound
more evolved predecessors. So if you're looking for
people making inroads, then these days when artists put
butterfly-knives into the hands of children and explore
what they do with them, or not pull away when the
barbarian horde does its pillaging and raping, but instead
lets the cameras role on and even go for grim close-ups,
here perhaps most especially is where you're going to find
it. The reasons they're being explored are surely sordid,
but you couldn't work with this material before—for
reasons that were never truly convincing—so you should
be able to find some way, through watching their
explorations of it, how it might someday be made to work
in a humanist sense.
Kick-Ass 2 doesn't provide that same sense of a taboo
territory confidently being repossessed for public use,
though from what it does in the beginning, I was actually
a bit surprised at this. The movie begins with the villain
accidently-on-purpose killing his mother, and donning
her clothing for his next super-villain persona. Any time a
villain does this, adopts a mother-persona, it usually
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means that this character is going to be given greater

latitudes than you'd normally expect. This will be true for
a 1960's film like Psycho, but especially true for any film
emerging out of a Depression period. Depressions are all
about a population punishing itself for having taken too
many cookies from the cookie-jar previously, and it's
pretty much lived as if there isn't anything you do that
your righteous mother with her tightly gripped rolling-
pin isn't felt to be watching over. The last thing you're in
the mind to do, that is, is say anything derisive about her,
no matter what the hell she might be up to, and you're
not about to take advantage of her likeness in film to
overtly show what you really think of her abuses. Instead,
you'll see the likeness, and immediately take advantage of
this opportunity to manifest a repentant attitude, and not
say a word no matter how many how many
transgressions she pulls, no matter how many cookies
disallowed to you, she swallows down herself. Brody
could watch a film like Skyfall and point out M's rather
arrogant "clinging to her position," which actually made
things worse, but the rest of humanity, be sure, stayed
mum. Yes, the rest of humanity was also secretly joyous
when she gets disposed of at the finish, and that, thank
god, an affect-dialed-down male lead is left in charge of
operations, while Brody was free of any such malice, but
Brody was casually telling the emperor off to her face,
with his not even being aware he'd done anything
especially inopportune: which you just don’t do.
The boy arch-villain, Motherfucker, isn't actually the one
given any latitude; he aims at one point to rape someone,
Night Bitch, who'd been set up as if already abused—with
her perpetual nervous trepidation—and as akin to the girl
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in a horror movie who's doomed to be slain for her being

sexually active, and thus part of the cohort that are
usually not in geek films spared humiliations but rather
made to feel susceptible to being bitch-slapped
consummated into fully ravaged victims. But his penis
fails him, and she ends up being denied her ill-fate by the
someone present who probably could have been shown
raping her, with a strap-on, and with the camera not
feeling the need to fret and pull-away, as if it's got sure
protection for its plainly powerful-indulging, evil-
purposed scrutiny. Specifically, Mother Russia, the
gargantuan villain recruited into Motherfucker's service,
who's not like a brute in a Bond film in service to the
mastermind—clearly a number two—but rather more like
Kraken to Poseidon, a vastly dwarfing entity, who's show
is now its own once released into the film. It felt strange
that the movie handed the mother's mana all to her, after
it had just set up Motherfucker as the mother-visaged
psycho due surely for a number of personally inflicted
massacres—though I got the point behind this afterwards
—but regardless, Mother Russia is the bad bully mother
in this film, whom geeks fear so much you should explore
their decision to converge in basement-caves at the onset
of real world-beckoning adolescence, as owing to it. She's
Iron Man inflated to 400 percent power, she's the
adrenaline hit that Hit Girl takes later, to enable drama
to potentially take place that without her it wouldn't
dare.
The key scene in the film, the only one maybe worth re-
watching on Youtube, is when the gang of villain elites
marches into the suburbs, each one an arrogant sure
shell of ego for essentially standing behind the power of
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their way highest paid, Mother Russia. She's going to get

to do anything she wants, is what you feel, and it may be
the movie's encouraging you to feel this way, to be
reminded that moods can take over people where
trespasses can be effected, and the world thereafter just
can't placidly reset, is what it deserves credit for, and not
really with what it shows done within this protective
cloud of latitude. She launches a lawn-mower into the
face of a police-officer, and gives you the same sense that
the first Kick-Ass at times did with Hit Girl and Big
Daddy, that this just happened: in real life, someone like
her, a real human being, could have come out of the blue,
and done this. They're ridiculously costumed, and they ’re
striding into the suburbs as if conquerors of Rome, but
it's not, it's not, simply funny. You can’t quite comic book
them, which makes the scene feel kind of awesome.
Mother Russia is ostensibly in the film to be an
appropriate foe for Hit Girl, but she's really in it for this.
This said, the fact that Mother Russia dwarfs everyone
else who is also part of the elite club of villains, helps
make another of the film's points. What Kick-Ass
suggested … has been already terminated: we're not in
the mood to inflate geeks so they might pass as true
super-heroes, but for splitting them off into the sliver few
—the 1%—who are undeniably awesome, and the rest,
who even with costumes on and trained, look like they're
just waiting for someone truly skilled to take them down
for their silly pretense, á la what you felt was partly at
work when Night Bitch gets paid that grim visit at the
hospital, and what was behind even mafia-trained
Colonel Stars and Stripes surprisingly quick exit from the
film. To me, it's amazing the movie would want to go this
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way, but it did—and with confidence. It gets right that

what we wanted was for Hit Girl to receive what looked
like her due in the original Kick-Ass, to not properly
belong in any movie too much owned wholly by geeks.
When she rides off alone at the finish, she's the 18-year-
old with the physical capacity now, to fit right into the
Avengers without blinking, with a big-league foe played
by a big-league actor, taunting her, rather than
essentially unadulterated nobodies and Hollywood
castaways. And if she surprised us in Avengers 2 by
serving as Black Widow's replacement, we'd calculate the
actresses' already-stardom, as well as what she's surely
due; consider her character's superlative killing out of
Kick-Ass; and actually probably let her do the
unthinkable and be the only one you're ever likely to see
in a Depression period, rise from the slums and get to
keep their stay.
Be warned, however, that though it looks like she's off to
the big time, it's not quite true to say she's leaving
everyone else behind. All the other heroes drop their
super-hero garb and personas, but they don't sulk back
into the individually bullied. Rather, they take the other
empowered end of the super-hero stick that the last
Depression period—the one that gave birth to
superheroes in the first place—enabled. Specifically, like
the last Depression gave us Captain America and
Superman, it also ended up giving us the people as folk,
or in Germany, as volk. That is, the people ended up
being the depersonalized "cogs in a wheel" that Dickstein
rightly laments, but these same cogs ended up feeling
that as an anonymous legion they were empowered
together as something all-pure, all-powerful, and all-
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virtuous—look into the New Deal era, or, sorry, the Nazi
vision of "people's community," to get some sense of this.
Every one of the heroes are shown indistinguishably back
in their street clothes, amongst the mass, but one feels
that when "filth" passes by them, they're going to be at
liberties to disassemble them that you just couldn't
imagine. Here's where an awful lot of latitude is going to
fall over the next number of years, and I think we feel this
at the end of the film—how Dr. Gravity, surrendered of
his "Superman" and contented in his "Clark Kent, "
almost eclipses Hit Girl's racing off to her own individual
future in Manhattan, when he smiles to participate in a
righteous lynching. If his skills were a bit better, he'd fit
in with Coulson's crew of black-garbed, non-glam agents,
which as we know, no one's passing over for its
possessing serious, serious legs.
Posted by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston at 4:05 PM No
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Labels: 42nd st., Dancing in the Dark, Game of Thrones, Gene Wolfe,
Kick-Ass, Kick-Ass 2, Monty Python, morris dickstein, Oblivion,
Prometheus, Richard Brody, roger ebert, Shadow of the Torturer,
Skyfall, the Avengers
Blue Jasmine
Blue Jasmine
One thing I was not really fair to, to my experience of
Elysium, is how impressed I was by how it accurately
conveyed, that if you're not amongst those essentially
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expected to live as if there is no constraint upon them—

all smiles, celebrations, new restaurants, and "isn't life
the greatest!"—are outside the fortuned 1%, if you ever
dared offering up any sass, any reflection about how you
truly feel, you'll follow it with a thousand embarrassing
surrenders to whatever authorities might expect of you,
hoping that way to abet an executioner's suddenly raised
strike from tilting to ultimately fall down on you, and cast
you out from a life that still has the bearing of relevance,
however spit upon and dim a one. There's a worse fate
than being a factory worker at a job-place that truly
believes not a one of them is particularly valuable in what
he does, each one to be replaced by another, if need be, as
can any newly purchased tool be schlepped in to replace a
lost one. If you somehow still seem part of a story, can
count yourself part of something, inclusion and purpose
can keep you sane. If you're outside of one, with the
world around you moving with purpose, there's no
socially acceptable narrative for you to count as your own
in which to unconsciously share and funnel your
perplexing life afflictions into, and they just keep popping
up, your insufficiently addressed life afflictions, all the
time, at scary conscious level, and are alone to you. And if
your being in sync to no one means the like of you
suddenly rehearsing something you said, or something
someone else said, out loud, you're going to tether out
pretty close to crazy-town for most people, which in
today's world will bring not empathy but shock "therapy,"
to kill that strange buzzing aberration dead that appeared
rather startlingly out there on the street to affront us.
The tragedy of Jasmine, is that she has acuity, some
potential to articulate precisely how things are, which
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with the help of her summoned kindness can take other

people out of life patterns that are "solutions" which
enable them to live, but which themselves cry out to be
solved as well. Almost as soon as she lands on her sister's
doorstep, she knows her sister's life, her friends, her
community, fully rightly. She's stumbled into a morass,
but one that if she hangs on tight and bears it to the best
of her ability, will bear her enough so she can evolve the
extenuations required to finally once again get some full
bracing against the world. She might try applying herself
to her surroundings, but since up close they're befudging
nullity, which brings to the person who is able to
summon considerable momentum to understanding
them the feeling of having summoned a great wave that'll
break its barrier with so little resistance it now requires
its own taxing down, the solution is better to drink when
she has to, Xanex herself when she has to, and just gain
the proclivity necessary to downscale the nerve-stressing
constant attenuations of a help center-type job, so she
can build up the protein-juice resources inside herself
from which promising extenuations might eventually
sprout.
She has terrible luck. The one thing that could still get
her once she has recuperated sufficiently from her past’s
great heave of traumas and developed the ability to work
as a receptionist--and so survive regardless if her sister
stopped hosting her--was if something arrived that
looked to instantly take her away from this life—make it
all seem like some extra-long but still now forever gone
nightmare, into which she was insanely transported but
now from which she has neatly danced her way out. And
with her meeting Peter Saarsgard's Dwight, she goes all-
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in with this perfect way out. When she accidently meets

her sister's former husband on the street, we see what
this way out would have cost her. Caught out, she can in
instant defense show how alive she can be to other
people's motivations, and seem instantly adult. But since
this means having to reckon with things she did—
horrible things, like losing a deserving hard-working
man’s very realistic opportunity for a more enfranchised
life; like in a moment of venom alerting authorities about
something she was always at some level aware of but
hadn’t blown the whistle on until it seemed perfect spite,
which killed her husband, spiraled her son into thinking
a forgotten cave is better than spending one moment
further outside, and undid her whole life—she can't help
but take the bait to be as if still ordained by a rigid law of
the universe to recover to be the Blue-Jasmine, perfect-
princess again.
At the end she's on the street, dead eyes, and babbling.
Somewhere on the horizon a crew will soon appear to
diagnose her as needing to have her head shocked from
one planet to the next, leaving her in a permanent daze,
puddling drool down the front of her cream blouse and
Chanel jacket. But it's appropriate she just gives up. The
universe clearly has it in for her. She was right that her
sister would find for herself a better mate once she
judged herself worth a bit better, but her first magical try
with this ended so traumatizingly she ensconced herself
even harder with what—thank god!—was still available to
her. This meant Jasmine's presence would be thereafter a
reminder of a conscious decision on her part to force
herself to believe this was whom she was naturally right
for. This meant Jasmine—who reflects back at her now,
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clearly justified mockery—would have to be out of her

life hard. Jasmine couldn't pick herself up from this, and
go back to the certainly plausible and now already partly
traveled path of becoming a decorator, because
sometimes you're just handed too many blows, and
you've got to just sit down, give up, and let yourself be
broken down by the universe to be reconstituted into
something which actually has purpose. (The only salve
temporarily available to you is that you might
humorously blow at the ants taking bits of you away, like
Ron Perlman's puffing at the legion of flames already up
the wood-ladder and eating at him in Name of the Rose,
so a clearly humorless God has the humiliation of having
to chow down on some farce before he takes you.) We felt
for her when she—so long a time a natural denizen of the
most sophisticated rich—was brought down to being a
sales clerk serving her former friends, which is like
becoming a maid-servant after having once been a
duchess—is usually a kind of humiliation you're made to
suffer just before being executed, like being raped. Truly,
it’s amazing she managed. We certainly knew what she
meant when, after being accosted and groped by her
dentist boss, someone she had expended every frenzied
effort to communicate was not someone she wanted to
get intimate with, she just couldn't bear to take to court.
We knew how she felt when she requested more silence
and solitude in her sister's home, with her really, truly,
having expended every effort to make this a last-ditch
recourse—her ability to neuter down her own proclivity
to just arrogantly own whatever space around her, had
been commendable: her sister needed to speak up then,
and the guys needed to go to the bar instead—any
recourse away from that would have been universal
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indignity.
The universe moves on, and eventually society recovers
its poise and actually cares about people again. This
becomes a time for true therapy, where if you babble to
yourself so you are aware of the specific instances which
afflict you, this is actually an asset therapists would use
to make sure they zero in on you more precisely— it’s like
being able to describe your dreams with precision. This
becomes a time that the story to be told when someone
like Jasmine falls into your life, is how she, despite her
flaws, improved you for the better, before she hefted
herself off to a world she after all was more natural to:
more Mary Poppins—or better, Cold Comfort Farm. The
problem with purges of the kind we’re experiencing now,
is that it’s going to leave us with fewer Jasmines when
we’re actually in mind to appreciate them. Seriously, a
good number of our babblers are actually going to be
amongst our best, but just tragically untethered from
madnesses we use with proficiency to assure ourselves
sane--like what happened to Fitzgerald in the '30s, when
a world thought things like fascism sane.

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Elysium
Elysium
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When Matt Damon's Max encounters the kids who

surround him hoping for money, there's a tiny bit of
tension in the moment, like what we've got is a wildlife
encounter between a mature bear and a curious pack of
wolves, which should end with maybe one nip or a loud
roar, or maybe some mutual entertainment, but could
potentially go horribly wrong. But as soon as Max drops
them a bit of money, we understand that in this movie, if
you're of the dispossessed kids, are elderly, or a woman,
you'll understandably do what you can for a bit to eat, but
you're all earnest and good, even if choked down some
for being so always scared. Guys can get rangier, but are
not more interesting for it: unless of course that they'd
get a kick out of an exoskeleton being drilled and bolted
into you is going to make you look even uglier and cause
you a great deal of pain, is for you a show that they're
"complicated." So there really is nothing about the people
left behind on this overcrowded, desert planet, that is
interesting, and there's not much to our hero: who serves
up samples of guesstimated-minimal-necessary shows of
the abeyance and cowering and obliging that he has to
do, lest he lose the one thing that gives him some
satisfying edge over everyone else on the planet—his
having a job—and just seems to add more and more puss-
filled wounds to his large, fatigued mass, as he goes about
the movie. He has sufficient pulling strength to ensure
the narrative moves and so we don't feel permanently
caught in this awful place, and that's really about it.
He says he wants to live, and that's why he wants to get to
Elysium—to have his radiated, disintegrating organs, all
in a magical moment, repaired. And of course this means
he'll end up sacrificing his life and not living, even if he
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can't say, like Robert Kazinksy's also-ultimately-self-

sacrificing Chuck Hansen plausibly does in Pacific Rim,
that he rather enjoys living his life. But the character who
really shows the kind of exhilarating heft that comes from
not passively letting a world turn ill-fortune toward you,
is of course evil-agent Kruger, who takes upon his taking
over the space-station command with the same
persuasive suavity as his swaggering a three-shooting
missile-launcher into launching position, to down three
ships that would have been traumatized a space station
as if befelled by an insect invasion, if he didn't stop them
short before arrival.
It's not really Jodie Foster's Delacourt, that is. There's
something about these overt mother-types in current
movies, that whatever their momentary grandiosity,
makes them feel from the start horribly doomed. Like M
in Skyfall and Crystal in Only God Forgives, who also
looked to possess the acumen to persist and thrive in
their positions, they're hit with some kind of wounding
accusation that's set them up for some kind of justified,
necessary, coup-de-grace by the end of the film. They’ve
leveraged themselves in an un-allowed way so
profoundly, that even if most men still part around them
or out of fear pretend to keep faith with them—only
offering up at-best glancing blows so that only other
empowered women might hit them by mid-point with
something more solid—an executioner has been let loose
in the world that's going to get them, even if not
themselves left in the end to be an ongoing hero. They
can dwarf whole male hierarchies for awhile, but
something about their being all alone while a whole
world waits to get behind a single moment of seeming
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narrative necessity, makes it feel like they can for sure be

taken out.
Once she’s out in this film, Kruger soon goes too. And so
we have a bunch of androids bringing medicine down to
huge hoards of dispossessed people, who of course oblige
their weakest to get their remedies first. Somewhere
some village boy shows appreciation, but kind of
preferred when the space ships aired but got blown up in
space—that was cool, mom! And the other villagers
gather around and stone him, and not a spark of
interesting doubt ever showed itself in this universe for a
millennium of years. The men are dumb while the
women are smart--but since this just means they go
nurse rather than ambition doctor, male anxieties remain
soothed.

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Only God Forgives

Only God Forgives
If you've suffered from being used incestuously by your
mother as you became a young man, Ryan Gosling's
character Julian shows what you might do in
recompense. One, get away from your mother, like a long
way away—Thailand's good. Two, find yourself in
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structures that seem as if a bunker and are labyrinthine,

and where the wall patterns are like compact shelves of
ancestors, or warding glyphs, scary to those who aren't
used to them, and maybe even partially in your favor, so
you couldn't possibly be unwillingly dragged away, and
where any intimacies you might entertain within have the
protection of carapace around yolk—they will have their
time. Three, have boys around you about the same age
you were when you were abused, and instead give them
encouraging pats of support—from this, some good to
others, as well as some assuagement of your own hurts.
Four, re-explore relationships with women, but where if
you're the one submitting, it's done very gently; and
where for the most part you're just getting used to the
idea that women, that sex, can be something under your
control. Five, exist at a time when if your canny,
resourceful, you-dwarfing and daunting, war-ready
mother arrives back into your presence, masters you in
your own den, your still-existing pliancy to her means
you're the paltriest obstruction to a crusader supped on
resources of a vast conservative landscape that has once
again begun to stir: bent inwards to her, you hardly
require scything, and can pretty much be just walked
through as a righteous kill is staked.
You'll have to have something that would yoke her back
to you, though. Her out of the picture altogether, means
no chance for rapprochement, for adjusting or in some
limited fashion mastering her, so you might know for a
moment the self-assurance that would come from
knowing you had it in you to finally insist on borders, as
well as brokering for yourself a new kind of space you
might use with other people. And possibly out of
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structures put in place to keep her more under your

terms, sneak in for yourself a bit of the whole scale
intimacy that boys hunt for from their mothers like
dwarves through staunches of ore to gold. And Julian has
this something with his older brother, Billy, the mother's
favorite for being the eldest, the strongest, and for
possessing a penis so large it draws awe, who for being
the favorite when this means the inverse of what it
normally does, seems incapable of immunizing himself to
her ingrained influence to try something like genuine
intimacy on, and is seemingly susceptible every night to
having his need to dispense his sense of being a child-
victim scale over into his becoming a perpetrator of
butchery—inevitably involving someone young and
hopeful, like his once-self was, attacked so thoroughly to
form her own gross pond of parts and blood.
His succumbing to his drive to kill someone young and
vulnerable, draws his mother, Crystal, back to Thailand,
and when she arrives she stakes her claim on long-
assumed territory, and garners her penthouse roof suite
away from whatever hotel-precedent that would dissuade
her temporarily from it. The flowers in the background
are pink, and so too the limited, nervous, would-be-
scene-abating receptionist's garb, but the place never
really knew the color until she came in and showed them
what it can do worn, when affixed to even a very tired,
great lady. We have a sense that in each place she’s in
subsequently, she feels so presumptive, so masterly, she
might boast that she’s no longer sure she dressed to
match the décor (which, you note, she always does) or
whether it had taken antecedent notice of what she was
in the mood for and made adjustments. Still, even with
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her feeling that her claim on this section of Thailand is

broad and meaningfully unchallenged, Julian gets some
of what he would hope to acquire from her. He’s had
enough time with his girlfriend, the proud prostitute Mia,
to feel he can square it against whatever mockery his
mother might present against it, and gain the foothold of
a mother having to realize her claim on her son is itself
going to have to be adjusted—even, potentially, subjected
to the harrowing sidelining of becoming secondary. This
is all he could possibly get from her, though, as when Mia
challenges him on why he lets himself be ridiculed by his
mother, his response to her is simply fervor: staking any
more than some presupposition against his mother
requites him back into simply being her hardest
defender.
But even as Crystal fits back into her Thailand operation,
exhaling smoke as casually and confidently in her
spacious hotel room as a dragon nestled in its adopted
den, or admiring young men’s muscles like chops served
before her, she has made a miss-step: as warned, the
Thai climate is no longer one where cops can be killed,
and the best move from her would have been to have
spent less time repossessing and luxuriating, and more
time reconciling and preparing. What has changed is
ancestors and ancestral traditions, represent not so much
something that is being dissipated as a country sways
urban, but being recovered, having strength lent to it, as
people once again are finding something most true about
themselves as a race, in customs ostensibly unchanged
for generations. The movie paints this as sanity, a slow
return to decency—the ways of villages and country life
are beginning to speak again. But it admires that what it
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at least as much is, is about a capacity for righteous

revenge that whatever milieu it is slowly preparing itself
to replace, would be stopped short by. You for sure like
the cop in this film, Chang, the representative and
embodiment of this renewed spirit, when he asks his
daughter’s baby-sitter about what she prepared his
daughter for dinner—he respects the sweet sitter, and he
means his payment to feel well-earned, a tribute to her
(it’s the movie that would have us contrast this payment
with the exchange of money made at the beginning of the
film, which was for drugs). But your admiration for his
penchant to respect the often-overlooked but valuable is
more than curbed, when proper payment for not seeing
becomes the loss of your eyeballs, and for stubbornness,
the loss of your life. For sure around him if we were
comporting a colorful scarf, sunglasses, and carrying
’tude, we’d lose all such in a hurry: there are two that do
this in this film, and neither ends up doing very well.
Otherwise he’d grab whatever conventional tool in his
near vicinity, and use it to instruct us on some respect—
no doubt involving some permanent maiming. And as for
his second in command, there’s lust in his eyes, craving:
we feel it, and it’s repellent.
Chang slays Crystal for her egregious presumptions on an
intrinsically modest people, and here is as sure in what
he does as many Russians are becoming in their attitudes
towards homosexuals, or British are becoming in their
hard-line intolerance of porn, or Americans are becoming
in their universal cheering-on of athletes having their
careers cut off brutally for being exposed as cheaters. If
he’s a god, I insist he’s a god to fear, not one to welcome
into our lives as someone doing necessary cleansing,
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however sometimes hard to watch, as his executions are

often performed before us, demanding our assent. But at
least for Julian, his killing stroke to her neck stills her so
he can do something indecent but which makes sense—
putting his hand inside her womb, as the child in him
nestles along maternal warmth, freed from
complications, like incest, or envelopment. This is what
he needed from his mother—close proximity, warmth,
safety—and his cunning, intuitive, brash act here might
even helped service a huge wound of his own. And it is
true to what I think Chang actually represents that these
hands which were ineffectual as weapons but effectual in
obtaining compensation for a parent’s abandonment,
may in the end have been severed from him. What really
gets Chang’s goat, is what is at issue with any parent who
would spank a child senseless: a child presumes.

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The Conjuring
The Conjuring
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it,

but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the
affordments of that time are going to make them have to
work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who
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would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that

house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from
2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a
notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian
estate, that a single-income truck driver with some
savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit
that the father—Roger Perron—would get his family out
of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs,
we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one
dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares
to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to.
The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy
traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—
really, a kingdom—multimillionaires might blanche at
trying to acquire, while at a time when even those a scale
up from truck-drivers probably can't even afford a runt
house and are surely just renting, like runt peasants of
old.
Normally, I think it's likely that if everyday sort of people
are presented to us in film, we're more likely to identify
with them, and wish ourselves more akin to whatever
more possessed—cooler—characters are also about. Not
so true with this film, though, as Ed and Lorraine Warren
—the paranormal experts—are about as chastised and
wary as we tend to be. They are the type who when they
describe their wedding night sex, sound like those who if
they added a few extra raisons in with their porridge
would feel like they've made a guilty trespass, with
pleasure beyond that, something they're now
permanently apart from. They are the type who can make
their basement into a hold for a Dante's Inferno worth of
evil-possessed artifacts, each one a trauma of a whole
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family (at least) being slaughtered, and have it not feel

like they have too much to be concerned about. There's a
kind of immunity to further harm, it would seem, if you
go about like as if you've already ingested your life's
portioned quantity of it before you've even seen much
grey hair reflected back at you in the mirror. If life has
poisoned you near mortally when you're still at the point
where you should still resonate optimism and promise,
all the demonic uglies will part around you in thorough
disinterest and seek preferable prey—something that will
empower you as if a pillar they've got to nonetheless still
recognize and be inconvenienced by in their having to go
around, and a lesson which also felt right in if-you-
ingest-yourself-with-malaria-it's-likely-you're-going-to-
be-okay World War Z. The Devil is interested in those
who affront by being ripe with life—not, that is, with you.
The Perron family is that, however. With their large
brood, pet dog, ambitious home, and pretentions to being
entirely self-sufficient and nuclear, they're the post-war
American dream. And so they're exactly the sort the Devil
would chase down even if they didn't set up shop in one
of his Earthly abodes. This is effectively what happens in
the film, by the way—someone's being chased down. Only
in this film it's after what one person in particular has
achieved for herself: the mother, Carolyn. She has
achieved a glorious family, with her favorite life moment
being a time with them at the beach, with it already clear
to her that with them she had everything she'd ever
wanted. This moment is used to lend strength to her
when it looked like she was going to go all witch, but it is
also the one that ensured her a regressed, beauty-
shunted, generation-older woman would afflict her by
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trying to undo it as well. The great beast in this film is

simply a mother's mother. We don't traffic in psychology
which once had the momentum and the guts to face it,
but when pretty much every mother has a child, she has
simultaneously something all her own as well as a cruel
visit by someone—her mother—telling her to dispatch it,
slit its throat or beat it senseless, and come back fully to
her. It's near every woman's experience, as she desists
against her mother's need to continue lifelong supplying
her her own unmet needs for attention and love, and
instead presumptively chases down her own; and it's
something science and-so-not-just-folklore has
fortunately pinned down as an actual existing thing we all
have to reckon with—specifically, the postpartum.
Few women talk about it, but it's something nearly all
women near at conscious level come to know. And which
their guys will no doubt remain oblivious to, as women
decide sharing would show themselves devils to faces
that will never, ever, understand, and remove them from
life anchors needed to compact the great acquisition of
their own family down. So couples go about their child-
blessed, married lives, never shorn of near-justified
mockery, represented by what lies beneath. She's out
there, though. Your spurned mother is out there. And
from unaddressed quarters in places you have the good
sense to be wary of, she's hoping still to hatch her
requisition for your love and the full loss of everything
you preferred to have lent your love to.
P.S. One of the comforts in the film is in its instructing us
on how much better it is to desist in anything hubris, and
instead join convention. We've got two paranormal
researchers ... who bow completely to Catholic tradition.
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It's like they're not so much aberrant as they are

representative, of what a church has taken seriously for
centuries before the modern fuck-you. They're all fidelity,
that is. And in this film, along with being—tenement-like
—amongst a crowd of other people, an extended family
rather than selfishly nuclear, doesn't this feel like the safe
place to be? That is, when the Catholic church agrees
with the researchers—seems of the same base perspective
and wave-length—don't we feel sorry for those who were
never baptized and have now got to depend on leniency
to not be left to being tortured and soul-fucked by a
scary-as-shit assassin, in complete sadistic control?
I'm not a Catholic, and in fact on my own time read the
presumptuous, self-satisfying John Updike, who would
seem to support every self-pleasure, every I-love-you-
honey-but-your-concerns-and-needs-are-not-exactly-
being-factored-here orgasm, that would make a Catholic
fret and recoil from upon witnessing, but this film will
move me to cross myself a bit more in public, I suspect. I
think I'm going to need to have some of the demon-
possessed—even if only the dumber ones—presume me
one of their own. I'm just one brick amongst a heraldic
company of others. Don’t tell me all alone I might be
sandstone serendipitous sculpture!
The Wolverine
The Wolverine
It may be that what Wolverine would need to recover
from dealing with foes on the scale of a Magneto or a
Dark Phoenix, is find himself amidst an environment
where no one he comes across looks like he or she ’d
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present much of a problem to that great big bear we

encounter at the beginning. It’s a pisser that that venom
woman can spit into him a spider that cancels his
healing, because otherwise the movie looked like one for
Wolverine to remind himself he could reasonably just
vacation himself through an onslaught of angry swords,
guns, and knives. Truly, other than this one deadly ability
from the venom woman, mutants here seem so
downscaled—any ordinary guy, good with a sword, would
seem just as much a problem. So if all he needed to get
past Jean, was to get some soothing attention from a
humbled, lovely girl, who you know is incapable of even
making a loud gesture let alone bursting into a fiery,
taunting, red-headed demon-woman, then this trip to
Japan was just what he needed. Only, this environment
was one that could infest him with a parasitic tick—the
spider—he couldn’t possibly have worried about
incurring while living cave-man in Alaskan woods (btw,
when he removed it, were you too thinking of the slicing
open of a salmon and the removal of guts? … Maybe I did
so out of fidelity to that great bear.). And because of it,
while Japan might requit him back to women—near
literally through baby steps—it still reminds him of how
badly human beings can suck.
Think on what he had invited upon himself here. He had
once saved the life of a man—Yashida—from nuclear
explosion. After this, he had the presence of mind to
realize that this man’s honor might still be vulnerable—
his fellow officers had hari-karied themselves, in ritual
recognition of their end—and manages to refute his
offering up of his family heirloom sword in a sublimely
honor-salvaging, appropriate way: he makes it seem that
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his keeping it is just his taking care of it for awhile until

he comes back—after his eventual death—to reclaim it, a
plausible enough scenario. What a sublime offering he
gives this young officer, and Yashida makes use of the
rest of his life to become a great industrial leader and the
father of a great clan. What he does to Wolverine in
recompense is beyond the pale. He lures Wolverine to his
home in Japan, tugging once more on how brilliantly
being from a honorable culture can be used to
inconvenience anyone with a sense of decency. Then
when Wolverine gets there, he tugs once more: not so
much by security reacting to him like he might be a threat
—though this was a way of soiling someone you are
supposed to venerate—but by ensuring he gets a
monstrously-thorough scrub-down before meeting him,
which can play as just Japanese custom but also as
someone using excusable means to show you through
your constant honoring of expectation, that your proper
role is as a supplicant: with your suffering yet one more
inconvenience, how sure are you that your most
profound instinct is actually not to submit? His piece de
resistance is of course to instruct Wolverine that his curse
is to be a warrior without a lord … and so ostensibly that
what he was waiting for was not just to be sundered of his
perpetual youth and healing abilities but to be essentially
bidden to do so by a lord he had surely been lost without.
We wouldn’t much admire Wolverine if he didn't finally
put up road-blocks to this manipulative idiot exactly then
and there. The whole thing plays a bit like someone
taunting someone out of envy whom he knows he’s going
to have to play underhanded in order to actually get to
“submit.” We can imagine ourselves personally tripping
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up our well-earned defenses against people in his

situation, and are in fact fully bonded to Wolverine when
he knows he’s going to have to rip apart a good chunk of
Japan to achieve some self-esteem-salvaging, fuck-you-
for-that push-back—but now without this being at all an
easy thing to achieve ... Fuck! how did we get ourselves in
this situation? It must have been stupid, stupid, stupid
me! (fists slammed repeatedly against our heads.)
The revenge motive does work in this film, and we cheer
his getting his healing powers back like we would a
recovery of our own after a masterful, humiliating play
on our own openness and gullibility. And we’re angry
that the film connives yet some other thing that can best
his healing power—the poison-cauldroned arrows.
Really, we just wanted him to flip all those arrowed to
him, to him, so he could mince them like fan blades; and
for the rest in the film, melt through any foe presented to
him as quickly and easily as through butter.
Those who made the film seem stunningly unaware of it,
but the idea that anyone should buy into pressing
arguments that it is time for them to die, is given pretty
powerful refutation by the setting of the film. In a
flashback, we saw a good part of a Japanese city
destroyed at a time when aggressive nations were taking
their defeat as a sign that their cultural history was over—
that it was time for them to die (indeed, during WW2
Germany's last days tens of thousands committed suicide
—the largest mass suicide in history). Yet the movie is
mostly set at a time when the city has long past taking
even this in stride. Sometimes the harridon that is
preying on you finally desists, not for your finally
confronting it, ripping its influence away from your
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heart, but for its having finally had its fill, and falling off,
satiated. If this is what happened with him and Jean,
maybe he should desist being the warrior—as as
admirable a course as this seemed for him—and head
back to better know his young new Japanese girlfriend.
He might go through a long lovely spell with her, and be
totally demon free.
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Pacific Rim
Pacific Rim
The movie Amadeus argued that when a protective,
tolerant environment is nurtured, genius that otherwise
might have been cowed from developing, can gain the
confidence it needs to come to life. Pacific Rim argues the
same. If Earth is up against an alien force that'll crush it
unless it reaches the pinnacle of the one thing that has
been instrumental in blocking it—the drift between two
well-matched individuals—then relationships, deep
bonds, are going to need to be given the allowance
needed to develop and ripen.
If it wants to die, that is, it would replace the one
program that got humanity excited in its ability to match
the adapting alien invaders—the Jaeger program—with
one that feels anti-innovative rather than innovative, one
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that substitutes a you're-lucky-to-have-this-job

environment for one where all humanity felt part of a
team. You'd build a wall, that is, where people dying
while working on it is both bad and good news (someone
died—but left an opening!). And which when busted
through by an alien in one hour, simultaneously both
dispirits and gives a lift: One looks at the alien's physical
resemblance to the Sydney Opera House it incurs
immediately after breaking through, and you think not
just of its mockery of it but of how great if would be if
conjured now was something on our side which more
aptly responded to it.
It is met by just that Jaeger. And what begins a sequence
where the rulers-in-charge start scrambling, revealing
themselves as self-concerned elites and no longer being
listened to, is for sure some sense that its young pilot—
Chuck Hansen—makes such quick work of it, and
conveys authoritatively that all we needed were better
pilots: alone he makes whatever people-abating
arrogance the wall-idea still possessed, wilt even further.
While the film errs, in my judgment, in not quite giving
this thoroughly arrogant Chuck Hansen his due, it
remains true that it is in good part his rightful arrogance
here which shoulders out of the way any further
contesting that the remaining Jaeger program is really all
that humanity has got left. They were quit by the same
kind of arrogance they were trying to abrogate to
themselves, a deadly "Et tu, Brute." But as perfect as it
was to have this vital young bull-dog beset upon these
decrepid autocrats, who maybe all along have coveted the
idea of being left alone in luxurious bunkers while the
rest of humanity got crushed, it is precisely this—
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bullying, intimidation—which is antithetical to the Hong

Kong Jaeger abode he is due to inhabit.
He's the best pilot, but there's a sense immediately upon
encountering the environment that presumes in Hong
Kong that his less pleasant aspects more make him rather
than Raleigh, the exposed artifact the place near wishes it
could rebury. What Admiral Stacker Pentecost is
presiding over, is a base where you respect whatever
leads to accomplishments; and especially as he patrols
down the line of the four remaining Jaegers, slowing
people down to individually consider the crafts
themselves and the crews commandeering them, he
makes clear that this can come from phenomenon that
might require a bit of work to see as exceptional. The
sense you have is that even if the Chinese crew had
relationships with the basketballs they always carried
around that seemed grossly fetishistic, that even if the
Russians never relaxed out of their stern intensity— like,
ever—the respect you'd have for them would envelope
everything they presented to you in the most appreciative
manner. Pentecost doesn't direct Raleigh to attend
carefully to the genius of his scientists—in fact when
Raleigh to some extent dismisses them by saying " this is
your research division," his response isn't to defend them
but to acknowledge that "things have changed." But
implicitly he does, by how his being around them doesn't
do anything to force them to quail any of their very loud
peculiarities (it's funny how even their individual
attempts to show themselves likewise finding the other
scientist's mannerisms and arguments bonkers, very
much work counter to purpose). It's not that he's vested
in seeing them as mad scientists, himself the calm
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commander acknowledging the mad idiosyncrasies at

work in the labs, but that he knows that these are men
who have had to have had enormous fight in them to
have remained, despite the abuse they've certainly had to
shoulder, so still confident in themselves and fresh to life
(they love having people share in their cool adventures—
it seems to trump every other consideration). And from
these types, even from just a couple of them, he knows
you can get giant results.
Their greatest result comes mostly from Pentecost's not
cowing one of them from doing something "rock star" on
his own, which he saw no possibilities in. He's
permissive, and an adroit protector of anyone who has
demonstrated his or her worth—even if this meant
disobeying orders—but still of limited vision—the father
who can't quite see what his kids are capable of until in
fidelity to their own growing confidence and sense of
what they actually need, they disobey and show him. And
he's not quite in fidelity to something the film is quite
explicit in trying to communicate: his singular
leadership, his understanding of himself as a fixed point,
his tendency to encourage one person while discouraging
the other, doesn't lend to the kind of powerful dynamism
you'll find with a pairing, and in fact partakes of the
bluntness of a wall. It's as if unlike Raleigh, who one
never really understands why he could go solo
(something to do with him having such an enlarged
feminine as well as a masculine half?) or what was really
so distinguishing about his ability to do so (do most
Jaegers lose a pilot in a fight?—it wouldn’t seem so), the
reason he could commander a Jaeger solo was surely
because he was never really built to be on the same
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standing as other human beings in the first place. The

only way he could ride with another, it would seem, is if
the other knows he’s mastered—which doesn't really
equate to the cooperative and equal, two-hemisphere
brain analogy, and more like ego making quick work of
id. But he's still effectively protection for individuals to
eventually reach the sort of deep bonding you sense they
would be happiest and most fruitful effecting. Something
akin to very well-matched marriages between remarkable
individuals, in fact, and a giant evolution from the
pairings we'd heretofore seen, which would work more
because of what they already share with one another
passively from DNA or shared childhoods rather than
what they might eventually learn as adults to contribute
to each other.
The scientists—the mathematician, Gottlieb, and the
biologist, Dr. Newton Geizsler—know each other's
tendencies so well, not just because of their close
proximity and because they're otherwise likely friendless,
but because each of them has with integrity taken the
subject matter they are most interested in to similar
climactic heights. When they come together in a mind-
bond, you know it’ll be a good one that’ll produce very
important results because they’re not just inherently
simple people who can come together as readily but by-
itself as uselessly as two simple molecules or lego bricks,
but very complex but diverse, spirited matter that once
finally paired might take on a load beyond what other
minds could handle and beget a miraculous
breakthrough. You might say that if all the other sorts of
pairings were type one to three, theirs was type four—
which would of course make what happens between
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Raleigh and Mako Mori humanity’s type five:

our endgame Exterminator.
Previous to Mako’s pairing with Raleigh, memories are
shown as if they are all laid together in a neat sequence:
all settled, and a bit bland for it—a newsreel you ’ve seen a
million times that you spin through to get on with fresh
material. This is even true with what incurs between the
scientists. But it isn’t true with Mako, who interjects into
Raleigh a memory sequence where a specific memory
resists any such pressing-down, arrogantly piercing any
tendency to make a settled story of it with its assertive cry
for further attendance. It isn’t at first supposed to be true
with any pilot—as Raleigh says, first bonds are rough. It ’s
a sign of inexperience that a pilot “chases the rabbit”—
that is, unruly undealt with memories that draw you to
them. But still the film suggests that usually the way
towards control is not so much to deal with these
memories, tend to them, but rather to as quickly as
possible learn to subjugate them—as if the best bonds the
program had known had come from people who could be
dissuaded from thinking much about what had
constituted them. Though he seems to appreciate that
something better could be forged, Pentecost fears taking
it on, believing there simply isn’t time for it. He is moved
ultimately to give her a chance mostly in fidelity to a
promise he once made to her, but he should have
recognized that he had someone on hand who could
finally make it less of an issue. That is, though it turns
out that Pentecost sought Raleigh out because he could
commandeer a Jaeger solo, the film makes clear that he
should have been staking him out for the magic he could
forge with another person.
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When Raleigh first meets her, we get a quick but clear

offering of what will make them develop into such a great
team. They’re not afraid to test and challenge: she
assesses him immediately as not what she had imagined,
and he responds just as quick … in Japanese, as a nod to
how the fault, the aberrance, might actually be in her. But
there’s humor—agreeability—in the situation, the earned
touché, and Raleigh rests with that to make sure the
encounter becomes mostly a friendly, even charming,
well met. She doesn’t fall back from her assessment that
he isn’t really right to pilot the Jaeger, but when, after he
requests it, she admirably forthrightly tells him so, he
makes sure it doesn’t lead to grievance but for grounds
for subsequent consideration on her part. Importantly,
when he says she might be right—he means it, and is
visibly affected, even hurt, by it, before he regroups,
which shows his respect for her ability to assess him and
the importance that he let it in. But at the same time he
has strong faith in himself, in all the conclusions come
from constant testing he’s been through, and begins the
very important process for her to think that if you’re too
much perfect pattern it’s a perfection that comes from
being denied your rightful due acquaintance with life.
If he touches her here, it’s going to cause quite the stir.
And with her becoming obsessed with him, with her
challenging of him taking on some of the tone of someone
who’s lashing out at everybody else is really just an
expression of her increased dissatisfaction with herself,
and of Pentecost of someone who is quickly sliding away
from well-earned love into precarious disrespect, he has
unwound her from her over-attachment to what had been
virtuous in her long spell of respectful abeyance.
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Pentecost decides to make her Raleigh’s partner, but his

consideration was concurrent with her beginning to
insist this must be her role as convincingly as a great
daemon new through the rift. It turns out she isn ’t ready
to be quickly processed into a Jaeger pilot, but also that
what Pentecost could only see as a disaster—her early
trauma truncating the influence of her bond partner and
dominating her while in control of a deadly giant—is
viewed by someone she has the capacity to form the
deepest bond with, if he can be made to part of even this.
Having scared everyone to death, everyone in the base
parts from her, but isolation from them but guides the
creation of a quiet cocoon where she and Raleigh can
reconnect after each one has witnessed and experienced
what has mostly constituted their current identities. This
disaster developed into a miracle you’ll hardly ever see in
crisis times—a profound improvement in understanding
and earned trust. And one senses in exultation after a
hard-won victory, that here between Raleigh and Mako
you’ve got a development, a creation of a mature bond,
you’d stake against any engineer’s “fifty diesel muscles
per muscle strand” to show that humanity’s fate
ultimately lies in its capacity to take on the hardest
assignment, even in pressing times. Humanity wasn't
ready to take it to the aliens, until all prudence had been
shed.

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Sunday, July 14, 2013
This is the End, and Summer

Self-Surrender
This is the End, and Summer Self-Surrender
I saw This is the End again, and the thing I noticed more
this time is how scary the film ends up becoming. The
lady beside me twitched as if herself hit, when a car
crashes through a guy on the street, flipping him rapidly
upwards and away to pavement as but a smashed-up
carapace due to be crunched into even more ignominious
road splatter. The film picks up again into something
really disturbing, when a devil with a massive spearing
penis subjugates Jonah Hill into a rape victim. And
afterwards it gets worse, when Seth Rogan and Jay
Baruchel find themselves without it realistically seems,
any means to innocently show the kind of self-sacrifice
and not-self love that would get them by surprise into
heaven: Craig Robinson had seemingly claimed all
possible avenue to demonstrate yourself sincerely
repentant after knowing that this is the avenue to
abscond yourself indulgently into heaven, with his
amazing "take your panties off!" charge on the Lord of
the Rings Balrog thing. This means that while they see
many others taken safely away to a further lifetime of
new experiences and shedding of all that lied past, they'll
be left alone, with unloved destitutes without any fate,
denied even the pleasure of knowing someone intended
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this barren fate for them: they were just passed

completely by as a narcissistic self-loving judge sought
out his same amongst the innumerable chastising
ponderous before him.
What happens to Rogen and Jay at this point of the film
is pathetic, though not with this saying anything undue
about either of them. It's a hard thing to be a self-
possessed, self-respecting individual, someone who
doesn't just give in when someone powerful draws down
on them; and it comes close to impossible when someone
forces you back into the experiential state of an infant
about to be abandoned for good by his parent. Rogen and
Jay will clearly do anything now to still have a chance at
being picked--there are no limits, and you can tell. And
this has nothing really to do with their belief that God can
be trusted, but owing to the intolerable fear of being left
to rot, while so many others are drawn off to God and a
halo of eternal happiness. I know they ostensibly are
those who finally learned to be true friends to one
another, but, really, who they are at the end of the film is
the guy who poked his head into Franco's house earlier,
willing to titty-fuck or be titty-fucked, if only they'd let
him in. If they were self-possessed, they would have
remained in many ways who they were earlier. Both of
them, we note, are at heart natural skeptics, questioners,
doubters, who serve as constant reality-checks for friends
who might be becoming lost to themselves. Even with the
Devil clearly possessing Hill, Rogen is still calling out his
friends on their arrogant presumption of the Trinity; and
his inability not to show when he thinks someone is
sounding crazy even when it compromises a moment
when it would feel good to be completely agreeable to a
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bro, comes clearly through when Franco delineates his

absurd plotting for the finish of a proposed Pineapple
Express 2.
Rogen is reluctant to agree with Jay that Franco's party is
full of assholes and that his house "is a bit much," but it
certainly isn't clear that this is just his deluding himself
while the "hipster" outsider Jay has here kept his cool. At
the finish, Jay admits he was afraid to join Rogen in LA,
and it is possible that what this party is is just an LA that
would have brought a wrath upon itself for too closely
arrogating the assurance and confident self-regard that a
jealous Athenian god would have assumed for herself. Or
himself ... one wonders if the reason we are shown so
much of the various demons' gigantic phalluses owes as
some kind of quitting response to Franco's own sculpture
one. In retrospect we realize that not one of the
partygoers was chosen into heaven--it's the only way they
wouldn't have credited Jay's accounting of what had just
happened to them. And for a moment Franco, nestled in
his cozy "throne" chair, with his whole company of
grateful, happy, beautiful friends by his side, for good
reason draws Rogen to doubt what he might have seen or
even turn his back knowingly on Jay: two presentations
of considerable power have just been handed him, and
considering the former involved people dying horribly
and a night sky filled with pockets of beaming
"spaceship" lights, it's to the massive credit of what this
LA has going for it that when it is feeling at its most self-
assured, there is genuine reason for a momentary re-
think of who best to ally oneself with. God, from
whatever pantheon s/he belongs, is, quite incredibly,
going to have to amp things up a bit to close the deal.
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This, s/he certainly does, and the Seth and Jay we

encounter at the end might wish for themselves each day
a plate of their favorite cookies and a date with their
favorite band, but one thing they won't do is be
meaningfully distinguishable from any of the other
heaven drones impossibly happy to yet be alive, ready to
do as bidden, and willing to see Master in any which way
s/he pleases. As Tony Stark remarks in the Avengers,
"historically, not awesome." And so in good faith to what
Rogen normally offers, I offer my own amendment to the
film where rather than Franco at first being drawn to
heaven but losing this prize for being a poor winner, Seth
loses it for considering that as grateful as he now is, that
God as much as Jay should probably still have tried
harder to get to like the people at the party ... Michael
Cera's butthole indeed was as adorable as we all
imagined, and the rest just seemed to be having a good
time.
I originally thought to write this second take on the film
as a preamble to a discussion on the Internment, another
film from the summer where we're supposed to just be
happy for two guys making it into some utopian space,
considering the hellish wraths they'd be exposed to if
they didn't make it in. The hells are about the same,
actually. Owen Wilson's life as a mattress salesman,
where if he isn't perennially sharp and obedient he'll be
outside in a clown suit in forty degree weather, would
have drawn him for sure into alcoholism and very likely
at some point, suicide. He for sure, never, would go out
on a date, as befouled for being a loser as the plague-
ridden were in hence-times. But I think you can pretty
much transplant my thoughts on This is the End onto this
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film. For my purposes what it still serves is to show how

humiliating it is that the god in This is the End is never
really questioned, for just like the Google one all he really
does to convince others' eager acquiescence and
surrender of self-pride, is show himself the only safe-
house available while the world underneath pretty much
everyone, crumbles away. Then he counts on you
dressing him so He's The Great Human Benefactor; and
you do.
It's certainly a trend this summer to have Utopia offered
to people, but it isn't always allowed to stay in a light
favorable to its own preferred self-regard. Oblivion, for
example, ends up showing its own up. Yet even though it
surely wasn't its purpose, Oblivion still suggested how
much we'll hide in the safe abode, regardless of how
much integrity we'd assume for ourselves if we braved
living on the more tenuous outside. I know, for example,
that Tom Cruise's initial digs were certainly something I
am longing for. So too his sense the perimeters of what
each day might expect, and the portioned human
bounty--his adult friendship and love affair with his
wife--that awaited him at the end of each day. How sure
am I that I would be able to addle on over to the outside,
if each day there meant being bludgeoned by something
sizeable you might have to account into your awareness
of things? As an attempt at recompense, I might dream of
being absolved into known grids.
Given our current clinging inclinations and fear that risk
might mean abandonment, Wall-E's efforts to nudge us
outside of pattern and safety seems lovely therapy that
we should be glad to have incurred into our constitution.
Jerry McGuire's bold sinking us into someone's failure
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and outside status for most if its film, however, has

become something way too undistilled for our rattled
tempers to handle ... I wouldn't look for it any longer on
subsequent top one-hundred AFI lists--unless of course
that and Forrest Gump turn out to be two of God's
favorites.
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This is the End

This is the End
Emma Watson makes an appearance in This is the End,
and it's to scold Jay Baruchel on his better-than-
thouness, and subsequently later to axe off the top of a
giant scrotum statue that camps mock-proudly in James
Franco's fortress dwelling, as she goes raving femme-
fatal on these jumpy boys. She isn't meant to come off
badly; in fact the film wants to make it seem like
it's deferring to her. But basically she's one who can't be
included within the boys' play; and it can, and sorta is, a
way of revenging yourself on someone. Like Kate
Middleton, she's become too high stature to be other than
someone you part your way around, like a school of small
fish around a shark, when she's predated herself upon
your premises. This film's reminder of this status was
probably invisible to her; in fact I think she thought she
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was including herself in with those expected to bear some

of the ribbing, and therefore also part of the fun. But if
she wanted the film to force people to make more of an
effort to treat her as someone worthy of engaging in some
truly respectful, that is, not beyond genuine critiquing
and in a less stand-offish way, to have cooperated it
wouldn't have used the film's "rapey vibe" joke as a plant
to really just set her off and jet her out of the film.
Rather, rather than the safe humor enabled by keeping it
to Tatum Channing alone, it would have challenged us to
think on why we were so disquieted by how they were
willing to show themselves depicted when she ended up
following Tatum out on a leash as one of cannibal-leader
McBride's zipped-up gimp bitches. Think on it. We
wouldn't have fretted because we would have found
ourselves thinking – "this could end your film career”; we
would have done so because since there is absolutely no
way we're ever going to not want to see Watson as film
royalty since she's one of those serving as a god-type
starlett fully immune to disposal that keeps us feeling
small, temporary, and therefore unpretentious,
somehow we're going to have to live with an image so
much more impossible to chase out of our heads than
Middleton's caught-unaware boob shots. How many in
the film audience would have thought that if she let
herself be shown in this position she's dumbly submitted
herself to a further collective pile on? That is, to what
happened to actresses caught out in the films before,
notably with Elisabeth Berkeley, and as was at issue and
palpably for a moment at hand in Seth Macfarlane's
assaulting query at the Oscars to all of still-acting
Hollywood's accomplished actresses who'd ever for
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continued relevance bared a boob? And yet regardless

we're still keeping you in place, even in a position where
hereto cognitive dissonance and upset would meant our
immediately needing to chase anyone like you out, is
what we could not at some level be aware of. For some of
us it'd be a spark to reflect bravely on – why. And from
this, some subsequent work toward counting her just as
much worth dignity but on the same human level as
ourselves.
The film is ostensibly about the end of life, but to me it's
about how to best spend time while in an ostensible sort
of purgatory. Kind of like Casablanca is ostensibly about
that, when in reality they're both about how to spend
time in a place that you'd want no way out of. New life
comes to James Franco's castle home and ongoing party,
just like all newcomers find their way to Sam's suave
long-standing cafe, from a world that has become
increasingly hostile: Germany has crashed through
Paris's gates in Casablanca, but here still, with people
taking swipes at Rogen’s film career while greeting Jay at
the airport, and with the "mean shopkeeper lady" scaring
him from even attempting to buy a chocolate bar while
sojourning to a grocery store, things on the outside are
making doing anything while exposed to it other than
full-immersion buffering it, an increasingly unlikely thing
as well. Hosting is left to someone who knows to let
everyone come in and find their place and do their
business, while never leaving people without someone
who still will conduct affairs. There's some underhanded
dealings on the outskirts of the place, and, we can
assume, some rowdier characters, but the center is the
confident host and his robust rotund piano-playing
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entertainer, keeping things humming, pleasingly tipsy

and teased.
When hell descends, it's rather as if the boys had
retreated back to Seth Rogan's place, home for xboxing
fun and a lower scale sort of ribaldry – boys wrestling
and "I drank my pee" jokes – in a noticeably confined
space. No longer is it so much a place to spend much time
in, and the outside world of flames and awful happenings
seems to not have much of a fortress wall to give backtalk
and bulwark to: the sense you have when one of them
steps out, is of someone leaving their pitched tent into a
ranging tempest forest fire ... it does feel brave as shit
when Craig Robinson ascents to entering it. And so there
is a sense that the rest of the film is about dogging
towards a mechanism by which a space sort of akin to the
lost safe James Franco party-world can be unlocked,
while meanwhile entertaining us with the full possible
supply of fun and jokes that can be squeezed out by a
bunch of quick-witted guys caught in some place quickly
being besieged by their own excretions. At the end, when
they all ultimately leave it, it feels like they were forced to
... the “outhouse” had packed brown and was pushing
them out.
The relief from leaving it, almost makes once again
meeting Danny McBride a thrill, even as we're
understanding him as a pack-leader cannibal. And so too
even James Franco's being eaten, as after-all this links us
back to the party where he actually suggested this
happening to him in a sequel to Pineapple Express. Mind
you, we were already primed to like McBride. In a movie
world ultimately built of people taking pleasure in refuge,
he actually exults into a status of someone who isn ’t
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going to let anything from the outside cage him. When he

greets his former friends, it feels appropriate that he
seems almost to have forgotten them – "You guys are still
alive?" He can do the shocking thing of cutting ties when
appropriate and moving on, which is a miracle in a world
designed to make people want to cling to the familiar. No
wonder his peers were shocked that he’d leave them so
totally, and no wonder even after trying to shoot them
they let him go untouched. However much we get a spell
of a great purgatory in this film there's of course no
Divine or Fiend, but this was unanticipated and
unfamiliar enough to for a moment seem an outerworldly
visitation.

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The Bling Ring
The Bling Ring

"Bling Ring" ends focusing mostly on Emma Watson's
character, Nicki. When the enjoyable world she had
participated in ends, she gets sucked back into her
mother's embrace, her cult, that heretofore she had found
successful means to quarantine as something only to be
endured while at home. Her own escapades have ended
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with her mother having her back entire, and even if she
talks back to her, gets angry at her for repeatedly
insisting on inserting herself into her interview with the
Vanity Fair reporter, we see she's due to become as much
the harmless clown as her mother is. Harmless, because
however much she might climb in this world -- her family
is by no means poor or without resources -- they are
made to seem so much trapped in a disassociated
mindset, poor things petting their preciouses, they're
more like pilgrims caught enspelled that the more sane
world pilgrims may have to temporarily reckon in but
mostly will shake their heads at and step by, as they
interact with adult matter that still undergirds world
affairs. There's also Marc, who we also focus on, and are
made to understand as someone who was grabbed into a
situation there's no way he could resist, and will now
have to spend having his temporary bling-ring enrapture
cleansed by four very brutal years in prison, hopefully
keeping himself together so that when he's free he's
thoroughly sobered but not spiritually snuffed out.
The film turns a cold shoulder, that is, to the actual
ringleader of the Bling Ring, Rebecca. When Marc gives a
look to her in the court room, knowing she'll be remote
from him but hoping she might just not be, it's like she's
been revealed as an alien slitherer deposited amongst
teenage life, blithely unconcerned if what she made of her
surroundings interjected a poison into the community
that stalled the social fabric. She's just a few steps away
from being someone a TMZ or even a Vanity Fair
reporter might turtle before if s/he had to make light of:
Do you yet remain someone who's propriety keeps from
considering things I could engage that could upend your
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positioning in a conversation and make you my

plaything? The film lets her seem someone so cold she
would draw people to her to fulfill her own ends, all the
while intending to leave them as scapegoats while she
scoots off to a foreign locale. Someone almost
unfathomably awful, who is incapable of remorse and
immune to any impulse to oblige us by compromising
herself so we can imagine her as either chastened or
harmless, and thereby laugh at or maybe sympathize with
but otherwise quickly regroup from and head on with our
regular life. Someone who demonstrates that some
children deserve to be tried as adults: no one is left
feeling sorry for her four years in prison. And indeed her
four-year term might not be enough: we may need eight
to fortify ourselves to her next invasion.
It can indeed be difficult to reveal who she is in this film
to show she does deserve to be taken in almost near
opposite. I am drawn to think of her as a conquistador
who's come upon the Aztecs, or any European who found
themselves on an island of dodo birds, in the way she
shows this whole rich land of Hollywood homes is ripe
for the taking. Like only one hundred conquistadors were
required to claim a whole civilization, like dodos were
almost like walking already-cooked turkeys to their
European discoverers, Rebecca shows that five kids are
sufficient to make it seem as if all Hollywood has been
used as somebody else's boarding house. But the fact that
Hollywood has become a place where cars and homes are
so unprotected that their plundering comes across as
innocence for the first time plucked, should ground the
more mature amongst us to realize Rebecca in a more fair
light. The sense you have is that somehow all of
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American's sense of vulnerability and fear and violence –

that we know is everywhere – has been quarantined away
from these affluent quarters into the world of Middle
America. Mid-America has been left a stronghold
suffering from torments from within and from without,
which explains why when at the finish we see signs of
people who actually populate it (in the courthouse
guards, mostly), there's not an ounce of rosy life in any
grim one of them. (And pity Marc, who when he is shown
in the bus with fellow prisoners, comes across as a last
sad twilight of still-cheery rosé before a remorseless term
of sole stone-grey.) It’s been going on for enough time,
we suddenly realize, that Hollywood could learn to assert
as a reasonably confident norm something which had
been unthinkable: there is no need to lock your doors, for
we know we have no reason to fear intrusion. And so this
shocking innocence comes across as the grossest
vulgarity; another status symbol to show that being rich
means being in a literally different universe from the
poor.
Rebecca is portrayed as mostly someone who has evolved
to the point that attitudes built around older realities
have slipped away from her first, and so in this
deliberately wrought out world of unchastened innocence
she indeed understands it as a world of accessibility. She
isn’t, that is, afloat in some realm of unreality, but
understanding it straight. (Showing Marc this, by the
way, is one of the ways she’s generous to him – a true
best friend, with the first of course being that she
immediately apprehended insecure him as someone fun
to know.) She’s the first into this land of open resources,
and knows to make full use of it, so her story isn ’t about
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how she robbed celebrities’ homes but how she co-

habited them, fit their world onto hers, and long enough
so that it could be integrated near as blasé hers. I think
we sense that we have a lesson to learn from her; and
maybe for some of the time in their readily and
intelligently discerning particular items amongst all the
wealth of stuff (they're familiar with all the items, or at
least the clothing and jewelry, and with plausible justice
believe they know how to better ensemble it than their
"owners" do), we take advantage of their being so
engaged to maybe imagine ourselves along with them,
plucking an item we see that they may not yet have
claimed, and delighting in it. I’m not saying that we ever
find ourselves as confident as Rebecca, but when Marc
slips off being so apprehensive and learns to chill, I think
we’re wondering if we somehow have been taught a
lesson we needed to learn as well; and this is
disorienting.
And when Rebecca sees nothing amiss in taking Paris
Hilton’s dog, I don’t think we so much awaken from an
evil spell that might have been partially cast upon us and
see her as the foul snake she surely all the while has been,
but take advantage of a trespass we can trap as surely
irredeemably foul, to cooperate with an evil we may
temporarily been loosened from. That is, I think what
makes this rich landscape so plausibly innocent of the
trauma affecting the rest of the nation is a collective
agreement on our part to defer to the rich and powerful,
to enable them with privileges appropriate to emperors
from four centuries ago. When we walk amongst their
paradise, we find sign to be angry at them but realize we
can’t be drawn – even in these conditions – to see them
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downed; a realization which would force us to realize how

much of our awful world is really of our own sad, sick,
surely masochistic, wanting. So us, actually the ones still
caught in a kind of spell, decide at this point in the film to
view the kids as having temporarily been caught in one.
They just went on a wild ride which disjoined them from
reality that they would have to sober up from. I think
with enfranchising ourselves at their expense, we’re in
the mood to make allowances, and I think especially with
Nicky and Marc, we make them – however much Nicky is
a made a subject of ongoing laughter as she and her
family become a bundle of idiocy.
We know that we were actually taken inside Paris
Hilton’s own home in this movie, and that what we saw
up close were her clothes closets and designated party
rooms. I hope that some of us feel sick that thereby
there’s a paul cast over all this film where the rich can
draw as close as they want to us, let us feel their
presence, if this is what they’re in the mood for, but it
ever goes the other way it has to be managed so that the
rightful norm that ascent is only by permission of the
powerful, is confidently reasserted.
.
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Man of Steel
Man of Steel
Kal-El doesn't have the very best of upbringings -- though

it is still very, very good. His Kansas parents genuinely
wish him the very best, but struggle sometimes -- owing
to their own limitations -- to provide what Kal-El needs,
what any kid would need, to in fact become an adult who
through belief in self might just change the world (not
impossible: in certain favorable times -- times of
permission, not times of crisis or war -- near lone-
individuals in fact do). His father is worried that if his
son shows his super abilities too early, he'll be
overwhelmed by how the world would react to him, and
the alarmed world wouldn't have an adult him, to calm
them down some and help them stay sane. And this is
sensible, but clearly installs in Kal-El a sense that any
time he summons his natural instincts, summoned along
with it is a frustrating grapple-hold of restraint that'll
frustrate and infuriate him. His mother will do what she
can to calm her son down, but never quite soothingly
confidently, but rather as if, if she isn't particularly
skillful, a genius at calming down her own aroused fears
and self-doubt, her son will be lost to inner-torments and
feel all alone in the world. The son grows up in a world
where everything is so heightened. Apparently with the
littlest thing, any understandable natural kid instinct
given life, his whole known universe could go up in
smoke, however much he still does have a mother and
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father always ready to step in and stomp down some of

the impact. The result of his confounding upbringing is
that when Kal-El's father refuses to let his son save him
from the tornado, one feels not just sympathy but anger
towards him: don't you know that you've confounded
making your son feel perennially tight with some
conviction that his agreeing to cede himself so totally to
you has meant losing you as a father?
No wonder he ends up wandering about spare, terse
landscapes awhile afterwards, working one little-thanks,
scarce-contact job after another: he needs to be in a long
zone where his need to temporarily refute his upbringing
-- all affections -- is given echo by his surroundings. And
fortunately, he eventually finds company with his original
Krypton father, who is a bath of cushioning natural ease
of self-comportment, and who is given time to enclose his
much-loved son safely within it. From him, and from
allowing himself a good span just to practice and get used
to all his abilities that he has for so long kept under-wrap
-- bounding up and arcing against Earth's atmosphere's
kiss with deep space, and the like -- his son could stop
being someone who looked naturally bound to Christ-like
sacrifice himself just to cleanse himself of his Earth-
parents' expectations of him as epic, to being a true super
man, who not just through physical abilities has it in him
to have a formidable impact on the human race.
It should be noted, that this is what he does do: when he
allows himself to be captured, agrees to have hand-cuffs
placed upon him -- and without any dis-comportment --
people aren't taken aback by any physical ability but by
his ability to let himself be humbled, appear humiliated,
if it serves a larger purpose. Yes, some of us have still
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been raised with enough support and love to evolve this

much maturity, is what he communicates. There is still
hope for Earth.
Many critics find the destruction of good portions of New
York really bothersome in this film, offensive, I'll explain
why for me this was not at all the case. There is a way of
experiencing this film, including the alien world stuff, as
really just documenting a normal human life, some good
person born outside of privilege, who's potential to
realize himself will ultimately have to grapple with the
fact that our contemporary world isn't one that is
interested in seeing class divides being crossed. I promise
you that I actually experienced the Krypton bit, the pre-
birth, as something uterine: all the oval shapes, placental
tentacle entities, pools of great significance.... So to me
Superman could have just been an everyman, whose
developmental story, from embryo knowing only a
uterine world to a child birthed into a vast blue-skyed
"Kansas" cosmos, is the fantastic story everyone
experiences, and which we sometimes attend to --
document -- to show how magnificent and remarkable
each and everyone of us is. The everyman version of this
story would have the parents perennially amazed by their
child, perhaps because he was a late-birth, when all hope
of it seemed lost. And their belief that their child will
change the world, every really loving parents' difficulty in
accepting that such a beautiful, glorious miracle could
ever not just continue to incrementally grow to affect our
collective destiny. And so when Kal-El's fate ties him in
with New York, a feeling I had the first moment he made
contact with a Pulitzer-prize winner -- Lois -- I couldn't
help but think of what New York society would do to him
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if he was an everyman hoping to become upwardly

mobile in the big city.
Without super powers, it'd recognize him only as
someone without an ivy-league background, without
establishment connections, and without all the
mannerisms that are causing many of the well-to-do to
not really be able to recognize the rest of their human kin
as human in the same way they are. With them, New
York would actually kind of do the same. "You're out of
Kansas; your father is a mechanic … this is what we
cannot shake as mattering most; so how now do we
account for the fact that your super abilities and true
alien status make us feel silly for still intrinsically
experiencing you this way?" The answer is to make you
into a Lebron James (credit Andrew O'Hehir for this
reference), a super athlete we talk all the time about at
the water coolers, but who is never found outside a
circumscribed categorization as some kind of super-
machine. He could in reality become someone who kind
of is like Christ in being morally ahead of a people he was
born into, but because recognizing this would mean
crediting that they have something to learn from the
Kansas-born and raised other than some
accomplishment of great physique, it'd be consistently
waylaid, in preference for the always-available great-
physical-feat bit. He’d eventually be taken as a moral
example, but only when elite society had decided it was
ready to make the American proletariat in general as
much as well, which would happen when it could be done
in such a way that it showed them to be great suffering
workhorses, not those who really ought to be directing
the world.
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And so what would an everyman do to still have his say in

New York? It wouldn’t matter – he’d have no chance. But
what would a super-powered everyman do?: he’d shock
the elite, the establishment, clear some way amongst
them, and start setting up something of his own from
where they had scattered away. The big blast of New York
in this film, the buildings going wither and tether, is a
manifestation of what this Superman would do
(figuratively, not literally) when he had to reckon with
the big city (yes, there is a way in which I see the villains
as mostly an extension of a universe that empowers Kal-
El). He wouldn’t be a Clark Kent, because such a figure
would be only allowed to work mail room, and would
never be introduced to anyone important (Clark Kent ’s
appearance in this film as someone who’d work close
with prize journalists/editors/publishers, is really just a
momentary substitution of a previous cinematic
Superman – Christopher Reeve – as a cute and expected
way of dolling up a legacy picture (The film had really
ended at this point).).
It’s harsh, but this is the only way available to him. If it
had been a different era, the 1920s say, rather than the
very 1930s-like now, when a regular man from the
Midwest – a Gatsby – could shake the core of a big city
like New York and find it actually grateful for his great
awakening stir, there could have been near simultaneous
integration included with his meteor-level impact. But
since our times are the opposite, with our Sears and
iHops not reminding us of what they long to do (at least)
in the film -- of post-war American mid-America; of true
heartland virtues held by those who hold the blandest,
the least discriminate of tastes -- but of American dregs,
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even something fundamentally good is going to be taken

as bombast missileanic.
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Labels: man of steel, superman
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Mud
Mud
There's a movie that Mud appears to be, but isn't, that
one would probably wish it had in fact been. That is, one
that looks upon the heroes of our youth and sees in them
projections of the strength we at the time needed them to
have, for understanding them as versions of ourselves but
in the adult world. Ellis is a fourteen-year-old boy with
an abnormal amount of bravery, self-control and heart,
but a lot of what is distinctive about him looks like it
might be at risk as the life that nourished it--his life with
his two parents, living up river amongst loner
individualists--is collapsing, and he'll be absconded by
his mother into a townie life. The townie kids hang out in
packs, are ruled by peer expectations, and don't seem
worth a whole bunch. They make great components of
your own feats, if all you do is periodically range amongst
them and thwart or humiliate them, but if they were your
everyday milieu your automatic need for company and
experimentation amongst people your own age, might
mean your own inviting upon yourself a poison which
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would cripple what was notable about you. If you sensed

that something of the kind was due to hit you, you might
in Ellis's position start imagining suddenly being visited
upon by mythic characters of great strength, that seemed
to have bridged the divide between childhood and
adulthood but wholly retained their fierce nature, heart
and will. And when they talk about life, as Mud does, as if
it is fundamentally ruled by mythos, you'd have the
reassuring sense that your own appreciation of the world
is brewed from the same mix the whole universe is
universally of. You might lose confidence during the day,
and feel powerless and without sympatico friends, but in
the evening glancing at the constellations of the Archer or
the Centaur, you'll feel that wink of appreciation that will
gather some of your strength back to you.
Arguably, the mythic characters I'm referring to in this
film--Mud himself, his "dad"--the retired military sniper,
and Juniper--are shown to in fact be, if not nothing,
certainly lesser of the sort. But not too much, in my
judgment, for they still seem of greater motivation and
purpose than anyone in the film--exempting Ellis's
mother, whose drive to finally live her own life, and even
her wishing for her family to gather for dinner, chimes in
the movie as sort of a death-knell an incantation of
powerful eternal adolescent spirit has to be very quickly
created against. And the danger in their being
represented this way is that it conveys that what you need
to do in life is set your sense of yourself early, abscond
from the social world your peers will get into during
adolescence and early-adulthood, and arc back into some
kind of interaction with the world in adulthood--as if you
alone had diverted from "the college" path in the game
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"Life," to rejoin them later in contest of family and other

stakes, should you desire. I'm sure in some cases this
might keep you "truer," more truly functional and happy
than everyone else--ala Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But it
probably means that the universe of conversation and
social refinements and personal awareness and
understanding that one can be become acquainted with
amongst life with groups of people, that can make one
actually surpass becoming an adolescent's hero and
become a fully realized social adult, will be denied you.
For this kind of growth you've got to be able to relax and
hang--be the kid who sees some good from milling about
with a peer group; be the kid who would near more want
to relax and jam with Neckbone's uncle Galen (to be fair
to the film, Galen is not portrayed here entirely without
his attractions), than putting the universe right by
conjoining Mud to his eternal equal.
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Labels: Matthew McConaughey, mud
Wednesday, May 22, 2013

One of the criticisms of Abrams -- perhaps the foremost
criticism of him -- is that he likes to let other directors do
the hard work of staking out new territory, and then he
comes in into fully delineated terrain, and makes some
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adjustments -- "Sally would work better with Jonathon,

and the couch should go there--". With his last film
everybody had him as of the dutiful flock of Spielberg,
and with this film, at least at the beginning -- the same.
It's Raiders of the Lost Ark, with tribesman chasing
down our interloper heroes, spears thrown, an artifact
used to momentarily buy time by tricking the tribesmen
into forgetting their current purpose and supplicating
themselves, and an escape into an airship (no snake, but
discord of a kind: Spock and Kirk feuding). But okay, in
truth this sort of chase is how he began his last Star Trek
film, so maybe this is just how he gets a number of his
films revved up. The possibility, though, that Abrams is a
bit too comfortable being in a great director's shadow,
being a "mini-me," clasped in clothing and
appenedendums to someone/something solace-offering
and protecting, comes more to the fore --very irritatingly
to the fore -- when we realize that Kirk and his crew
aren't actually adults out on their own adventures, but
more like misbehaving kids back home with disappointed
parents, who can't believe what they made of the freedom
granted them to explore the woods. This is the way it was
in Abrams’ Mission Impossible 3, if you remember. And I
bring up this film because, for me, this is not a crew who
will ever credibly go on some five-year journey all on
their own, but more like a team of top-notch agents, who
will go out on raiding missions but always at the end back
to home base, reconnecting with an older and more
entrenched culture, that coddles them, relieves them of
some of the responsibility of their own actions. Mind you,
Abrams has this way of making it seem that if it's too
much just your own braced against the world, where
you're the head, accountable to no one, or when you're
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engaged in affairs that are a bit too much gravitas -- as in

this film, when a great-power world war is threatened
-- then there's no room for play. Everything has to be
rigidly taught (taught, as in tight), and often angry as
hell, so that you've got so much seriousness going on it'll
ostensibly allay any moment that sneaks in that reveals
how you're as nervous as hell and feeling totally not up to
it! Older characters seem to manage this okay, and in
truth get to be relaxed about it -- witness the cowboy
reaction,"Ah hell," the admiral offers Kirk when he learns
he's been talking to Khan. Ostensibly it's more their turf,
like as if Cold War and WW2 was more their turf rather
than our current more insouciant foreign policy. Abrams
does better when things are allowed to be not so serious,
when the seriousness has been tempered down, and
affect and warmth and can slowly infiltrate and build into
something. When Kirk decides not to seek out and kill
Khan, but rather capture him and have him go through
due-process, you feel it in the theater like a relief of
tension; and it is no surprise that on their mission to
capture him we get some development in the Uhura-
Spock relationship which had been crushed by all the
emergent seriousness, with tendrils for a later more
whole-hog exploration of it --"What is that even like?"
What is that even like?, or what would that be like?, is in
fact a question that in effect gets floated up a number of
times in the film -- what is like to be fired by your best
friend (Scotty, by Kirk)?; what is it like to feel someone
else's death (Spock, through Pike)?; what is like to see
McCoy flirt?; to see Scotty souced? And it is a question
that gets its best reaction and exploration from us when
we've been given a climate suited for empathic
identification rather than route response. Down-play the
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stakes a bit, and we get that -- I swear the film would

have been just as good if the whole thing took place in a
bar, exempting of course Khan, who could be checked
into every once in awhile for bedazzlement at what one
superhuman can do to whole line-ups of opponents.
No doubt, it is partly owing to Abrams' deeply democratic
nature that he has more than a few of the crew serve as
captain (Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and -- in effect -- Uhura, when
she leads the encounter between the crew and the
Klingons), but just as true is surely because he seems to
intrinsically identify a position of ultimate command as
confining, as something you almost want to loft for
someone else to do (sucker!): Don't necessarily think of
Sulu as privileged here, for instance; he's more stationed
while everyone else cavorts into space.
Back to my thought that what this crew is is a team of
elite special agents, never completely detached from
home base. At some point in the film I began to think of it
as akin to the last James Bond movie -- Skyfall. Two
great genius agents (Kirk and Khan; Bond and Raoul)
betrayed by an older, very near retirement-aged Mother
or Father who ultimately had bequeathed them. I have to
admit I actually did not enjoy this Trek all that much,
and felt that when things threatened to be taken out of
the youngins' hands and given to seniors who didn't seem
so equivocating and abashed at going out on their own,
even though this meant huge regression to Clash-of-
Civilizations war, it looked to be more captivating than
the plentiful smaller shows that Abrams put on. So in
compensense I did force myself to think upon how much
more evolved this special-agent film was to Skyfall. We
were supposed to root for the militaristic turn in Skyfall,
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with headquarters being drawn back to a WW2 bunker

rather than kept open but vulnerable in the city, with M
quoting Tennyson, about old men, old values, returning
undaunted in a world of threat. We were supposed to
hate counsels and trial-justice. We were discouraged to
empathize: never for a moment were we supposed to like
Raoul, or consider that he had just cause (even though he
was sacrificed for heaven's sake!) -- rather perhaps heap
more on his misery, by insulting his bold fashion (I liked
his shirt, myself). It's very bad when you essentially have
a twin of yourself but cannot think of anything nice to say
about him, because this means you're as far away as you
can be from empathizing for your unwanted qualities
being grafted onto him for dismissal. Into Darkness
sidesteps this darkness -- we are to like law courts, hate
or at least regret old dinosaurs returning, like a relaxed
atmosphere that kindles an appreciation of nuance, and
of course throughout thoroughly enjoy and like Khan --
and tries to fold all kinds of calamities – including twice
the devastation of good parts of a downtown -- into it that
can still be managed in a non-inflated, non-emergency
measures, unalarmist way. There is an evolved person in
Abrams, however much it is still true he's a boy-adult
head-of-family caught as a fulcrum in a Serious Man /
Everybody Loves Raymond world. Making something of
the domestic, because he likes the living/family room,
but also because there’s no way he can allow himself out.

Some time in the past there were tinkerers who were
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great and powerful -- so great that in this mundane world

of ours it still would require a moment's recalibration to
not consider them actually half magic, if someone
persisted in your face that they were in fact so. Edison, if
you want the best example, though you might also go
with Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was Scorsese's
movie Hugo was worshipping. Stage magician Oz hopes
to be like that, and spurns women left and right to keep
himself fixed to this goal. He'd have been okay if this
didn't also mean his deceiving women into his bed, but
for this, judgment appears to have cast upon him and the
rest of his life is going to be about lifelong serving the
bequests of women, fixed to a spot rather than a free
wanderer, readily reached by three very empowered,
three very great and powerful, witch-women. But the
actor playing Oz is James Franco, and so maybe the
people behind this film had in mind some revenge upon
women too. For Franco is sensitive and responsive
enough to suggest to most sensitive souls that he's hardly
a man so involved with machines or aspiring to sky-high
goals he's dulled to humans, but there's something about
how though he says and does and expresses about as
you'd expect and desire, he's still applied a thin layer
everywhere that registers as if it's all a lie--like you're in
truth interacting with some puppet of himself, that's
close to him but not really him, he's operating via remote
control, a la Tony Stark's suit in Iron Man 3 -- his
passive-aggressive revenge, let's not kid ourselves, on
Pepper, for her owning his day world while he couches in
his basement cave. Franco probably isn't so savvy, so
great a magician he's made himself entirely inaccessible
to you; he can be figured out. But the thing is, what
would cause him to smirk like he's got something on you
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you can't balk, is that you don't really want to figure him
out: he's the only plausible man in town, and Oz had
become akin to the Castle Anthrax, managed by women
who are becoming insufferable to one another and in
need of a man, that beacons out promise of man-rule
glory to get some hapless guy in to serve as some post to
steady them, as well as for stud. Anyway, Oz might
become convinced that he's really great and powerful,
after apparently making up for every past sin against a
woman he's ever effected -- which is so much his
foremost concern the last gesture he makes to the latest
evil witch haunting the land is an apology -- but the
audience knows this guy is owned by a need for
reparations. How easy it is to keep a guy like that from
growing up -- just making every step ahead seem a
spurning of everything and everyone who preceded it,
and he's back to being yours. The end of the film shows
two great ones battling-- the white good witch vs. the
more mentally balanced evil witch -- and when the good
witch defeats the evil one, it most certainly doesn't end
with her apologizing but with her sure of the rightness in
making this once actually most beautiful and regal witch
(here played very stately by the stunning Rachel Weisz),
the only nightmare horror/grotesque to be found in the
land -- something of irrevocable consequence just
happened here. This is grown-up matter for the only
grown-ups in Oz. Ben Kenobi vs. Darth Vader at the
finish of Star Wars – but at a time when boys who know
best toys and tech, a la George Lucas, aren’t going to be
allowed to be so ball-danglingly front and center, so these
roles go to the girls while the guys do the patching up.
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Labels: oz the great and powerful
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
One thing I never confused the movie for the book for,
was its portrayal of Gatsby. In the book I could believe
that the huge estate he had prepared was but to lure him
Daisy, while in the movie it is surely his
aggrandizement--I honestly thought most of the time of
Orson Wells's Kane while watching puffed up Leo. He
strolls his party not so much invisible, as he is in the
book, but hidden master of it all. And he shows off how
that special person and that special person and that
special person are all there, rendered as they are into part
of his ample house collections, with them trapped to not
want to be anything else, owing to his hosting the biggest
draw in town--Beethoven in his second act, and this just
one feature. Every night he houses his parties, and every
night the whole town is corralled into it -- he's master of
the house and master of all. And so at the end of the
evening when he strolls outside and looks across the
water at the beaming green light across the bay, it's
absinthe to well the evening down amidst cool air -- the
logical follow up to the evening's clamor, a cleanse, not
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what what has been sitting with him throughout and that
he has longed to return to.
Daisy comes across as someone he has to possess for a
complete validation of himself as great and complete. By
his side, the past when he was just a young officer on the
climb, unsure if he should dare merge with someone of
assured standing, becomes smoothed into him. As much
talk as there is in the film that once again knowing Daisy
means Gatsby's all-important green light's dwindling out,
the only way there's any sense of it the film is that it
might mean Gatsby and Tobey McGuirre's Nick Carraway
being distanced from one another, as it is their
encounters that are a bit of magic. Magic, as in first-date,
guard's up but set for maybe great change, is not Gatsby
courting Daisy with tea, but Nick for the first time
refusing his own otherwise agreeable and placating
stance and leaderly simply refusing to let Gatsby leave his
home and thereby lose his great chance with her he's put
so much effort into procuring, while also humiliating and
really hurting Daisy. Nick here instinctively puts aside his
friendly bemusement at Gatsby's unpredictable
dramatics, for doing what has to be done so these two
people he's fond of don't lose from this hereto magical
and charming day, full as it still remains of possible
beautiful portent. There is magic also in all three of them
hanging together during the day in Gatsby's mansion,
with Gatsby tossing his shirts at them, partaking of the
clownish fun of sport throws at town fairs, but take away
Nick and leave it to the other two to display something
meaningful, and it's the gesturing carapaces, animated
but without souls, embraced together on the grounds
outside of one of Gatsby's parties.
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I'm being a bit hard on Gatsby, but there is a sense that

just maybe there really is very little to the guy--that those
who'd judge him--notably Daisy's husband Tom
Buchanan--are possessed of something solid that refuses
them any slip into admiring or being bedazzled by him.
At the beginning of the film, Tom is made to seem a non-
threat, for being by one and all regarded as someone with
rearguard prejudices in a world of Jazz Age authority.
But still you don't forget him as a judge too, possibly
because his relation--that is, Nick--is just meeting Gatsby
too, and he's in a sense quickly onto him as well. Nick
realizes that Gatsby needs tempering--"if only he could
have been content with his sweet date with Daisy over
tea," he alases. He's like old money prejudices, with a
lighter side, a real fondness for youth and their eager
tries and newish ways, who'd court peers he still belongs
to to try and see them the same way; and his having so
much standing in the film, gives solidity to Buchanan.
When Buchanan reality-tests Gatsby in a way which fully
renders him down--the only real murder in the film--and
gains back his Daisy, Nick had already been rendered to
the point that the best he could do for the person he still
wishes the best of luck to but who realizes he has no hope
of further influencing, is communicate true love and
support for him through his otherwise lying nods to
Gatsby's determination to gain sake himself Daisy--the
only thing he wants at this point from Nick is a show of
deferent affirmation, so it has to be the conduit for
something truer and larger he'd prefer to communicate:
great realization and maturity and love, from Nick. Nick
knows it's likely "the wolves" for Gatsby; Buchanan only
supplies them. Hard judgment to the softer man's
realization--"Amadeus's" Count Orsini-Rosenberg to
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Baron Van Swieten, upon Mozart's decline and death.

Nick of course is shown writing a book that we know will
puff up the Gatsby legend that is being debilitated as his
estate is being looted. But I think this is just pause for us
to think on the words that are being literally inscribed for
us on screen. There was a great show of a kind for us in
this film, but it may pass as just a film amongst others --
not even possibly being one of our Depression's notable
showy numbers, that we should get to high acclaim if this
one wears like the last one ("Forty Second Street," Busby
Berkeley, all show, no depth, anything to beat back the
pressing accretions of the Depression, and all that), while
we know Fitzgerald's words are lasting three-gens plus,
and are looking immortal. The book is our true green
light, something truer to be engaged in, whatever our
current society's overall bent and mood, if that's actually
territory we're fond to explore just now, however much it
might not be, with all the bon-bons in this film looking
like they might just have been offered a little early, when
we still haven't fixed ourselves to believing you can be
like Gatsby and have fun and possibly be successfully
ascribed, at least, as paper-thin, if you've accepted your
lot is to live in times with no chance to beat back
judgmental oppressors if they're really, really
determined, to fix on you. The sin-watching Tom
Buchanans are going to have no handle on you, for your
mad gambits and wild dancing are acknowledgments, not
questionings, of how ascribed you are to live in mostly
dream-defeating times. The Toms would take note of
that, and would have no problem allotting you your
driving "Daisy" home.
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Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3
If you ever give someone a twenty-foot stuffed animal for
a present, you might want to consider that you're doing
so more out of a desire to affront the receiver than please
him/her, and that also possibly you're communicating
that you're the one -- the denied child -- in gigantic need
of love yourself. It could pass as just making up for long
neglect, as it is does in this film, but when you're
following up by fooling your lover (here with Pepper
engaging with simulacrum Tony while the real one pulls
his strings in his den) and then maybe not-so-accidently
fixing it so that your den toys substitute as nightmare
horrors to scare the Dickens out of her, the truth is that
you may be the one who is frustrated and in anger, and
that you are unconsciously being driven to communicate
it as loudly and aggressively as possible. Tony Stark is in
need of attendance -- being ready to lose his life in favor
of saving the world and finding himself in some other
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dimension against the onslaught of aliens while with the

Avengers, has him the mercy of reoccuring anxiety
attacks -- he's got PTSD, as bad as any out of
Afghanistan. This might seem difficult to identify with,
but it's not really, as you've got a Depression on your
hands which is making sure you suffer the incredible
aggrievement of actually feeling more and more without
support while our awareness of the particular historical
situation we're in increases. You need a manger to lie in,
not your cold removed den, and this is what Tony gets, as
he finds himself removed from the world in some small
town down south, where he gets to be slotted in with
some small boy's modest home and essentially just talk
bubble gum and comic books and harken to early-life
Christmas scenes -- so the Savior taking small liberties, in
the fortuned house to host him. Here's where it begins to
become clear to the astute that what you're still hurt from
is not what you're macho-maintaining saying it is, but
maybe out of the things that are floating up while on lay-
away -- topics/concerns like boys without fathers, bullies,
and the discourse you're floating always at your new bud
children which said a slightly different way is the sort to
flatten a child hard. Tony abandons the expected needs of
his new boy-friend about half a dozen times; he clearly is
taking pleasure doing so. This is supposed to be just
cover for the fact that he's the kind of guy who couldn't
care more -- but of course if this was you and what you're
actually enjoying, using as a remedy, is that here
repeatedly you've got a subject who has to be neglected
and abandoned "you" while you skirt off satiated and
unaffected, this is the excuse you'd use too. If you get too
much into this remedy you might neglect to cover what is
supposedly afflicting you -- as happens in this movie
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when you take that wormhole that opened out of space

that afflicted our universe with multitudes of replica
aliens that is ostensibly the source of Tony's trauma, and
have it be inspiration for your own horrible revenge upon
foes as your penthouse's den hole opens and out comes
an armada of iron men to kill some other's dream. When
you're parted from your manger and back in adult digs
and engaging with your lover, you might make her
constituted momentarily as if out of nightmare things
herself -- like what happens to Pepper in this movie,
where she finishes as ripped older woman, dragon-
blooded, and android (she's sporting parts of Iron Man's
armor). Basically a gargoyle, but for a moment not
removed from you, but akin, and family -- you're of
wormholes and annihilating/abandoning/table-turning
revenging things yourself. Apportioned some
"equipment" from pre-birth nightmares -- actually the
greatest sort.
Further: The dangerous Orient is made to seem a
harmless old man who smells up bathrooms, a
disappointment worse than the revealed wizard in the
Depression's "Oz." Is this because he's not ripped like
everyone else or because it's not "time" (who are we
kidding if we haven't half set it up already as our next
greatest enemy?) for China? Or are we expected to
implicitly appreciate that while left behind, that stinking
shitcloud of odor is accumulating, and will be source of
inspiration for the next worm-hole hell to chastise the
character-armor we're using against our times into
malfunction -- maybe the false villain really could only be
the true one once we've been made to associate him with
decrepity, bathrooms and shit -- spouted hell, not
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singular and contained (-- the hero's-only denizens?)?

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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Pain and Gain (2013)

Pain and Gain (2013)
No film which can at all remind you from where Ronald Regan-era
began to about the termination of the first incarnation of Tiger Woods
-- all muscle, arrogance, and domination -- is going to really seem a
Depression-era film, where stupid willfulness is going to be
showcased simply as a sort of madness the hopeless adopt to believe
they've got a chance in the world. In this film you've got Michael Bay
as director, a bunch of body-builders as the main protagonists, and as
well a very A-team-reminiscent van as home-base, so you basically get
what you'd expect out of an 80's/90's film -- if you can amass a
signfiicant amount of stupid wilfulness, you'll be treated as a meteor
that's got to be allowed to destroy it's loaded-up fuel content of
others' carefully procured affairs. If you show enough of yourself
while daring to equivocate with them, it's "dispatch" for you -- as
appropriately happens to the Miami porn-king, who tends to the
gang's leader -- Mark Wahlberg -- the fact that a lot of what he says
makes no sense at all. Neither did anything about Reagan or Tiger or
Mr. T or Thatcher really make sense, but when society's obliging them
big-time, your reality-checks will go unappreciated, thank you very
much! Quite frankly, this film was delightful nostalgia -- the lady a
few seats behind me laughed numerous huge-heartly laughs, and I
chuckled along with her. The 80s, after all, as stupid as they were,
were paradise to our current time when the only ones who can
prosper are those who aren't will and muscle but just cany -- doing
nothing but what the times allow, without even a fiber of muscle
daring the alacrity of showcasing itself.
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Posted by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston at 11:58 AM 2

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Saturday, April 27, 2013
Place Beyond the Pines

Place Beyond the Pines
One might be tempted to say that after seeing this
film what you’ll want to be is a good parent – being
there for you child, so he doesn’t go astray – but
this isn’t really foremost what this film
communicates. Instead, it is really more about
automatizing, exerting yourself against the pull of
others, and experiencing how your self-assertion
forces others to adjust to your insistent sense of
purpose.
We encounter Ryan Gosling’s Luke as he is about
to take part in a circus act, where he spins about in
a circle cage, intertwining his motorbike with two
others in angry-bee-but-still-beautiful kaleidoscope
patterns. The camera doesn’t enter the cage with
him; we stop short outside – but however fantastic
an ability he has as a performer we get that this is a
skill one can acquire eventually, if bike-riding is
your natural bent. In short, there’s no adventure in
it for him, however much it does require a moment
of “steadying” before going on. There is no real
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adventure to any part of his life – until he learns he

has a child, and the fuzzy outlines of a new and
exciting acquisition and self-narrative – being a
parent and exploring life with a child; being the
parent he ought to have had – tease into view. He
becomes the willful child who won’t oblige what
others expect of him – he quits his job, despite
contract obligations, his boss telling him he can’t
quit – and is beginning to intrude himself into the
life of the mother of his child regardless of how
obviously strongly paired she is with her new lover,
who’s not charisma, but a dependable provider and
a dependable partner in this landscape of frightful
people-indifference, poverty and uncertainty. His
end-goal really is impossible regardless, it turns
out, but he can’t quite know it at the time, as it still
is just maybe something accomplishable if he
begins the adventure of acquiring an even more
risky skill – bank-robbing – which could also
involve his own death if he failed even just once,
but which opens up otherwise unavailable
wealth--“magic” to acquire what is otherwise
beyond him. The rush he gets from actually
carrying out successful heists lends him the brass
authority to put together a crib he purchased for
his child in his rival’s home, however certain this
moment of macho-assertion would lead him out of
his family’s life. But before he’s firmly out of her
life, he does winnow a family together for a short
while, earns himself a proprietorial sense of family
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– which a photo, which, appropriately, lasts and

lasts, captures.
We are supposed to believe that when police officer
Avery (Bradley Cooper) shoots and kills Luke, he
ended the life of someone else’s father. But this
truth is undermined because we know Luke was
pretty much played out anyhow – there was no
future for him; he was someone who lived a lot in
his short time, owing to his balls. So really the
effect of all Avery’s muddling over the moment
plays out more as him pausing on exactly how self-
determining he is at this point in his life. He
became a police officer, it is made to seem, owing
in part as a passive-resistant way of telling his
father to fuck the hell off and let him lead his own
life. His assessment of his police work, of his fellow
officers, seems in good part determined by who
they must be to make himself seem part of a
different – more pure, simple and less
compromised – world than the one his father
belongs to. This illusion can’t hold up; and very
soon it becomes apparent that this new world he’s
lent himself to is just as ready to make use of him
for its compromised purposes. There is a moment
of self-actualization, of conviction, when he spins
his car around and balks his police officer
“buddies” to engage with his father once again. In
teeth of other’s willful expectations, he does what
he wants to do, and the film makes it seem as if
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everything else is presumable after that: he’ll be

someone who upsets others expectations (Just as
Luke was on the right path when before his boss he
essentially spits in his face and quits, here Avery is
on the right path when he forces the attorney
general to accept his terms, regardless of how
much this pisses him off), but who successfully
accomplishes his goals and has others adjust to
him. He decision to rat out a corrupt police force is
shown to mean depriving sons the company of
fathers they need, as they are jailed, longterm, and
therefore out of their sons’ lives for the their whole
teenage lives, but there’s more a sense here of the
thrill of how one person’s decision, of how possibly
“your” decisions, can create a wake around you and
force others to change their life courses, even
drastically, regardless of their curses and
vituperate anger, their insistence that you are the
one who is going to have to bend, not them.
Luke’s son actually does seem to have a good
father. He’s shown to be a regular family presence,
and there for his son in times of stress. But the
film, rather than show the importance of this,
shows it as meaning little but a challenge. How do
you tell two reasonably good parents that they
aren’t going to get to affect how you choose your
life? That his mother lied to him about Luke comes
across as an excuse for the boy to use to commit an
act of matricide – the letter to “mom” which
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informs her he knows she lied. And I guess his

father actually not being a Darth Vader – he at one
point encourages his son to see him as his true
father by saying, “Luke, I am your father!” – but
rather more like the dependable, non-descript
uncle in Star Wars who gets burned to death
without anyone much caring, is hardly shown to
require any refuting at all – there’s no authority
there to balk, just a perpetually standing place-
holder. The son steals, does drugs, and nearly kills
two people, but all this is shown as the sort of wild
acting out that might be required for him to shake
off other’s expectations and ready assessments of
him, so at the finish he could plausibly be a fully
self-automatizing individual, heading off fully free
into his own future.
Email This
Labels: place beyond the pines
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Oblivion (2013)
Oblivion
How many films exist where there are two worlds a
protagonist will exist in—the first, ostensibly
superior, almost always cleaner, but really corrupt,
and the second, more raw – if not also dingier –
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but really the last remaining refuge of humane

community? Lots and lots, of course, and Oblivion
is another, and belongs with probably the whole
host of those which don’t really convince that the
hero doesn’t actually forego the more appealing
world. The two worlds in this film are the first one,
where he’s essentially living in a Tony Stark pad,
with his very pretty Pepper, who, we note – just as
we note with Pepper – comes close-enough to
being his age-equivalent. Good for the Tom Cruise
in this world, for conquering his fear of intimacy of
older women for the pleasure in mature company!
He has a hankering for old ways of the past, which
makes him not so much sentimental as cherishing,
but which could look to become obsessive: witness
his whole lake-cabin thing. And she has, or refuses
to acknowledge, not a wit of it, which can make her
seem a bit clinical, anesthetic, but also maturely
distancing – they are going to have to leave all this
behind – as well as a useful counter to her
husband. They work together as a team, and they
have the daily pleasure in knowing that what they
are doing assists the other enormously. But they
also have distance, so that every day when he
arrives back they have the pleasure in taking in one
another, maybe not so much anew, but with what
each of them accrued in their time spent apart. We
have here, or what we see and feel of them here, is
an adult couple.
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The second world is essentially a tenement world.

Lots of dingy people, closing huddled together. It’s
a world of a “wife,” his actual legally married wife,
that is, but which has throughout really the feel of a
siren lover who has enraptured him – they talk
about how they would grow old and argue with one
another, but all we ever see speaks of new romance
not of how couples relate past this, try to romance
past this (his “false” wife in the first world, did a
good job previously showing how this gets done).
He gets to be a savior of this world, which makes
him a bit epic, mythic – what an adolescent dreams
of being before learning what it is to function
proprietarily in a world of adults. He gets to kill off
Mother for belonging to this world, but in the
previous one She didn’t require killing because She
had already been managed into the delimited role
of a boss – someone who is ultimately just as much
just doing her job, as accountable and non god-like,
as “you” are. Yes, I’m stretching a bit here, but
there is a sense that She, the god, really is just
mission control.
The first world wife judges Cruise tainted, and
won’t let him into their domicile after seeing him
devolve with his floozy. He is. He’s entered the
adolescent imagination this SciFi film, of all places,
had built a world against – in its first world. She’s a
Ripley without the credit.
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Original Article: A plagiarist's lame excuse:

Addiction made me do it

THURSDAY, DEC 1, 2011 09:32 AM PST
His problem is that he wants you to believe he intented the
alphabet; when it gets to the point that other people ’ s works
become like the alphabet —
something everyone knows wasn
’ t our
own creation; only something we ’ re using to hopefully create
something worthy — people doing the same will be equally worthy
as salute as original authors.

Permalink
Original Article: A plagiarist's lame excuse:

Addiction made me do it

Re: “ Yet the rush to label his selfish behavior a disease tends to
undercut the sincerity of the atonement. ”
Anyone who ’ s settled in well with a disease, should understand
others efforts to get in with one as well: therein, lies not just sure
excuse, but sure excuse to delight in any and every selfish
endeavor imaginable. Really Mary, one day after delineating for us
how you ’ re not waiting until tomorrow! and instead are enjoying
your every pleasure today!, you ’ re finding some poor sure
damnationattracting/drawing sod who ’ s put together his own
pastiche of pleasures, to grind to ground. If you ’ re still finding
yourself anxious about living life uninhibited by denial, don ’ t
project and disown your own “ sinful
”
self into some other
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defenceless patsy, to show how much you normally despise
uninhibited selfindulgence —
that
’ s just cruel; instead, get
sympathetic treatment, from someone who loves and admires you
— someone who knows in other things, s/he has a great deal to
learn from you.
When we ’ re not all in the mood to seek out and destroy sinful
people, we might admit that there was something capable and
compelling about someone successfully making a pastiche of other
people ’ s works, into a proved winsome whole. He made other
authors ’
contributions into, letters of the alphabet, from which he
assembled a larger paragraph, chapter, and on. I ’ d love to see
movies be made available for artful others to reassemble into
unique creations —
I truly hope we go there.

Permalink
Original Article: The argument against thrift

Haven ’ t you known quite a few people who are evidently doing
well, but if you ask them, will tell you how so much of what they
earn goes towards paying off afflictions. (To mind instantly, is how
every college professor we seem to hear from at Salon, for
example, is in some hurry to tell you about their 60 hour work
weeks, and how they could earn double if they worked in
business.) My guess is, is that you personally could be gifted in the
future with some huge lottery ticket, and soon enough we ’ d still
end up hearing from you about — possibly even your dental work,
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certainly the claiming charities, relatives, and a vast pantryfull of
other afflictions. You ’ d never admit that the bulk of your life was
about selfadventure and living it up. (In our weird culture, getting
cancer is only guiltfree way to gift yourself with a bucket list of
goodies.)
Growth, untainted good things, make so many of us feel anxious,
exposed, punishmentworthy. When we starting feeling especially
anxious, we actually want to be involved in something of the like
of a depression, so there ’ s no way anyone could point us out and
suggest we ’ re not actually mostly cruelly, unfairly burdened.
If dental work and the like wasn ’ t so easily apprehended by you as
an affliction, thundered into it to instantly prove how deprived you
are, you might have added that with these things, too, there is
adventure —
possibilities for selfknowingness, expansion,
consolidation. What dentist do we choose this time to visit? What
sort of dental work, service, attendance, might actually be out there
for us? There are so many ways to care for the body, so many
interesting, different people, to encounter, sort through, and
experience as we come to the way that works now best for us, why
not the same with such ostensible simplydrearies as car repairs?
Maybe, if we have a mind to look, that world has become
interesting too?

Permalink

WEDNESDAY, NOV 30, 2011 08:46 PM PST
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Continuing to update ourselves, invest in products that represent
selves we are evolving into, is a very healthy thing — and if most
people really wanted such, rather than a severe cold spell that
cancels out “ bad
”
consumeristic habits we probably need
“ rescuing
”
from, we wouldn
’ t elect in people allagreed that what
we need is austerity. There is some similarity between what this
author believes and what Paul Krugman believes; he, Paul
Krugman, remember, wants the government, at least, to spend,
spend, spend, and let austerity fully suck it. It ’ s probably one of the
reasons some people think he ’ s a babyboomer douche.

Permalink

All adults — not just parents — have a powerful psychological
urge to put their desires on hold, and that urge makes us receptive
to the notion that we’d better be saving more and spending less,
just like all the mainstream economists and reputable journalists
keep telling us to. We know what will happen to our bank
accounts, our waistlines and our marriage vows if we stop listening
to their insistent voice of reason.
Even so, we’ve reached the point where we have to confront our
fears about consumer culture, because the renunciation of desire,
the deferral of gratification, saving for a rainy day — call it what
you want — has become dangerous to our health.
This powerful psychological urge was not much in evidence these
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last fifty years; however, you ’ re right that many, many people (but
not all) are ruled by it. Its origins lie in our relationship with our
parents, who, owing to the fact that much our purpose was to
somehow satisfy and attend to their own unmet needs, felt drawn
to and did threaten us with abandonment and the like when we first
sought out a world of acquisitions, all our own. This scare is for
the child so profound that it alone is responsible for the
development of the superego, or if you will, the parental alter, most
everyone of possess, and which usefully wards away from too
much “ spoiling
”
ourselves in life, for fear of reexperiencing that
worst of all possible human experiences (to the child, parental
abandonment means annihilation, oblivion: that which cannot,
above all other things, be reexperienced).
After (Depression and WW2 sacrificepermitted) 30 years of
unambiguous growth (1950s to end of ’ 70s), and twenty years of
manic growth, the parental alters in most of us are speaking hugely
loudly, warning us that Oblivion is coming unless we terminate all
growth, right friggin ’ now. The Depression, we guess, ought to do
it; and it will do it, endangering our health of course —
part of
what it is supposed to do, to show our commitment now to
selflessness, to the very point of noendinsight suffering —
but
alleviating us of the felt sense that a greater Oblivion is past
zeroing in on us and begun to head our way.
You ’ re right about economics. Enjoyed your piece. Hope there are
plenty more people like you out there. If not, and if you ’ ll excuse
me, rather than a bounty of gifts, I ’ ll make THAT my selfish,
selfish Christmas wish!
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Permalink
Original Article: This is our new normal

Also fun! Thank you.

Permalink

Fun! Thank you.

Permalink
Original Article: Why is Hollywood still terrified of

abortion?

What I appreciate so much about postwar feminists is that they
made personal realization such an important thing. This isn ’ t a cut
— the realized, the happy woman, is living the life LIFE, in my
judgment, is about —
beautifully stretching out for others the
realm of the possible; plus, when they raise a child, for having not
denied themselves, for claiming some of the love that had cruelly
been absent, they ’ ll genuinely do better for their very important
kids as well.
Abortion is a tricky thing. Rightwingers who now are so against it,
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for it bespeaking female realization and their life outside the
containing home, could be all of a sudden for it, if it ends up
meaning saving the world from “ useless eaters.
”
Watch for it; they
(rightwingers) are identified most for their hatred of life; their
particular stance, is adaptable, actually entirely reversible.

Permalink

The capitalist system failed, then, and will go down to defeat
amidst goodstyle socialist reform. Despite 30 years of failing
schools, parents more and more away from home, every personal
problem treated impersonally with drugs, cold consumer culture,
everywhere, a generation was nevertheless formed so full of
goodness and energy, only the unattuned would mistake them as,
really, essentially denied; zombielike.

Permalink

abortion?

It ’ s true, women who keep their babies are being made to seem
pure, THEMSELVES keepable; those who abort them, creatures,
harlots, diseased —
aliens. And it
’ s clearly not just winning over
the rightwingers.
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Drained. As if as much at the end of a long, weary journey, as
beginning a new one. Unlike the ’ 60s, vitality didn ’ t give birth to
them.

Permalink
Original Article: Who's making a killing off student

loans?

They ’ ve been lied to by everyone they trust, and when they rage
and despair, they ’ re gleefully hated upon as spoiled and pampered
— as ONLY NOW about to know what real pain is.
Sometimes a whole generation is set up for sacrifice, so to abate
the anxiety previous ones had about their own life gains. The first
world war, for instance, was once such horrible moment. Stick it
out, kids. You don ’ t have that many friends, but if you find way
not to readily sacrifice yourselves in order to feel good for fully
submitting to elders ’
needs of you, we
’ re not as bloodthirsty as we
were back then. Recognize our sick needs; only pretend to give in
to them; and know you very much CAN outlast us. They ’ ll be fun
toys along the way, too —
the
’ 30s had jazz, swing, and Citizen
(friggin ’ ) Kane!

Permalink
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Capitalism hasn ’ t looked good for 30 years, and it ’ s certainly no
ideal. But as a socialist, I ’ ll maintain that the communism that we
are likely to see emerging over the next ten to fifteen years, will
be, unfortunately, Sovietstyle once again. That is, for true serfs,
those without distinction or personality, witness the kind of dead
populace we ’ ll soon start applauding for their noble selflessness.
We ’ re already seeing it; todays liberal youth, enjoying becoming
part of the nameless, leaderless, washed out OWS ’ lot.
Understandable, but sad.

Permalink

abortion?

Gotcha; and I agree.

Permalink

The ’ 50s to ’ 70s followed a long depression and a world war —
people felt permitted a huge period of growth after that “ heroic
”
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sacrifice, and that ’ s why they got it. The ONLY reason we ’ re all
about to go through another stupid period of, not just oligarchy, but
of hatred towards anything that doesn ’ t smack of personality
abatement and selfsacrifice, is because we feel such is necessary
to forgo some kind of even worse punishment, which would surely
visit us if we kept on arrogantly growing, defining ourselves —
special snowflake style — and otherwise
“ misbehaving.
”
So my guess is that it ’ ll be like the last Depression; we ’ ll have to
wait out about 7 or 8 years of complete stiflement, then there will
be a moment where we begin to pull ourselves out, followed by
another immediate squashing; then we ’ ll probably collectively
“ arrange
”
another world war to happen in which to sacrifice a good
number of our youth — representatives of our guilty ambitious,
striving selfves —
in, and, penance fully paid, we
’ ll get another
stretch of 30 years of unambiguously great growth again.
Hopefully most of us prove to have staying power, and when
wonderful, presumptuous, youthful progressives are once again
permitted to reign, they ’ ll find a way to mostly abate this
horrifying cycle.

Permalink

abortion?

Re: “ She clearly seems like a pretty sick puppy, and has always
had a streak of selfloathing a mile wide. ” As such means she
’ s not
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likely to REALLY claim much for herself in life, I think many
young people will find her admirable, in this sacrificeyourself
andyou ’ rethegoodgirl times.

Permalink

abortion?

WEDNESDAY, NOV 30, 2011 11:23 AM PST
Abortion is associated with independence, freedom — with
presumption — and so it is no surprise that we are being greeted
with women prepared to use their babies to show how prepared
they are to sacrifice ambition and distinction, and become the likes
of a responsible but bland and thereafter inconsequent breeder,
during an era where this sort of selfsacrifice means escaping
damnation as grotesquely selfish, spoiled, and undefeated. It ’ s not
the flapper 20s, wonderfully giving Victorian teatottlers the bird;
’
it s the depressed ’ 30s, where Mother once again rules the family,
and has us all under wraps.

Permalink
Original Article: Is childhood obesity abusive?

Beans, Laurel WAS right to encourage you understand that your
diet —
which is rather similar to my own
—
is a very bland thing
to inflict on everyone else. I grew up on sugarless cereal and skim
3173
milk —
beans, whole grains, and greens I could
—
still with
considerable regret —
do mostly wholesale when necessity called.
Others are at some level very, very right to go for their cheeses and
fatloaded sundaes, second and third helpings, and tell momma ’ s
boy Jamie Oliver to bugger off.
It ’ s the problem with the nofat people I in many ways respect.
They ’ re the type to lament that the Dutch, who when isolated
during WW2 had to forgo their fatty diet of cheeses etc. and
indulged more in greens instead, mostly left their greens and beans
diet behind them after the war. That is, when the Dutch went back
to being opulent and lifeenjoying, rather than starved and isolated,
they were such that lead nofatdieters, overall, actually lamented
their ostensible regression.

Permalink

loans?

The question is rather, what chance have these kids got, when their
own PARENTS morbidly actually want a system which gives them
no chance. Deep in our most regressed past, we were of cultures
that practiced infanticide. It ’ s not, unfortunately, fully yet out of
our systems.

Permalink
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loans?

There are times when people intuit the ethos is switching from
sortof demos to completely patrician / plebian. We ’ re
entering into one such time —
1 % constitutionally different
patricians, 99 % personalityless noble sufferers (the public
aggressively wants it this way —
now is the time for them to
show how virtuous they are for largely suffering away a
decade or two of their lives). I hope some in this debate
pointed out that probably the number one reason to get into
(the likes of) Brown, owes now more to your wanting to look
like you could score the leisurely gentleman ’ s B, than your
ability to match the work ethic and competency of any asian.
Original Article: Why no one's talking about Newt's

weight

I don ’ t think so. He manifestly represents the institution; as such,
as someone more important ’ s puppet, it gives him latitude: he
could be as big as a truck, and somehow the institution ’ s “ pin
stripes ”
would work to thin him. Christie
’ s on his own, and so
we ’ re more likely to take into account all that he ’ s presuming to
bring up to the table.

Permalink
Original Article: Why no one's talking about Newt's

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weight

Newt COULD be as fat as Christie, and you ’ re right, it still
wouldn ’ t be as commented on. Newt is more part of an institution,
so it seems not so much about him, but rather the large edifice he ’ s
foldest himself amongst. Christie ’ s on his own, so we look only at
him, and his bustingout gut.

Permalink
Original Article: Who needs a bucket list?

You hear the word “ pegged,
”
and think dildos (wink, wink) and
porn common usage. You think of those with problems with their
babyboomer parents, and think — the irresponsible of your
generation! When you see poetic language in use, you brag about
your plainness, and suggest the other is likely autistic. When you
encounter someone evidently different than yourself, you think,
“ first off
– , ” and then supply
“ helpful
”
correction.
How sure are you that you aren ’ t a geek / pervert, a parentpleasing
“ good boy,
”
or a bore?

Permalink
Original Article: Why my small bookstore matters

TUESDAY, NOV 29, 2011 12:34 PM PST
Credibility doesn ’ t lie in directing more and more people to little
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bookstores, because THAT is the direction they ’ re actually headed,
and Indy bookstores are —
as this astute poster suggests
—
now
going to enclaves of boutiqueness, tight, smart “ intelligences
”
that
give their frequenters some sense they ’ re surely empowered
against the unscrutable, insane, everywhere masses.

Permalink
Original Article: Wall Street, take our children!

TUESDAY, NOV 29, 2011 11:39 AM PST
Wall Street wouldn ’ t have been permitted to eat our children,
unless the larger public actually wanted it to. Children aptly
represent our own striving selves, our own desire to live lives that
are uninhibited in what might be accomplished. Unfortunately, few
have been raised to escape at some very deep, profound level
thinking this desire ultimately horribly selfish, and so when we
NONETHELESS acquire good things for ourselves in life, we
JUST HAVE TO MAKE SURE society offers up apt replacements
to suffer the fate we ourselves believe WE deserve for our own
guiltarousing life gains. Our literate, liberal culture (even) is
finding everyway now to (please God!) GUILTFREE publically
visualize the hurting, the humbling, the humiliation of children.
IT ’ S ALL ostensibly being done to show how much they actually
DO care, to show evil others up — but that
’ s not really why it ’ s
being done: not a liberal now who talks of eating, hurting,
maiming children isn ’ t pleased we ’ ve got a culture very
successfully doing just that, and will, how so delightfully!,
continue on and on doing the same. After all, they ’ re the ones
3177
who ’ ve benefited the most —
it just can
’ t be made not obvious,
despite the evils of Wall Street, and their own support for humane,
green, utopic urban development and bornagain little community
bookstores —
and everywhere about them the angry Depression
’
voice of disapproval sounds.

Permalink

In this age, if you get pegged, you ’ re dead. Best to leave some
suppleness, for maneuverability sakes.

Permalink
Original Article: Will 2012 be a replay of 1968?

The OWSers are not just the young, either, but it is important to
note that that is now how the movement has been essentialized —
as a burdenloaded, bitterly angry and desperate, youth movement.
I argue that not only will it thereby right now not gather huge
sympathy, but actually draw antipathy for visually manifesting all
the distress, fear, and aloneness, that others feel in themselves but
need expressed in other people, so it can be punished, but as an
outsider, and thereby fully denied. Hurting young people is the best
way to show how apologetic you are now for your own spoiled life
acquisitions. In hurting them, you ’ re letting the part of you that
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urged you on to growth know you just how much you despise it, to
the great pleasure of our idhating superegos, “ who,
”
in this
depression, have seized hold of the reigns as surely as “ allstick
”
Quaritch did at the end of “ Avatar.
”

Permalink

If you weren ’ t on the fiveyear “ list,
” it
’ s likely you ’
be doing
much of the same, though. Culture has crested — the baby
boomers have willed it so. It ’ s time to revisit, indulge in known
pleasures, knowing that the only thing new, but still comfortably
away away, in the horizon, is the doom of discord, crazed
agitations and enthusiasms, and war trumpets. It feels like end of
times — the new on the scene don
’ t seem so much of the sort to
want to communicate — and the freedom granted in this will draw,
is drawing, many to indulge in familiar joys, and suppress the
agitating arrival of the also genuinely worthy but UNFAMILIAR,
not “ your own,
”
who
’ d dare enter to disquiet this lovely collective
swansong mood.

Permalink
Original Article: Will 2012 be a replay of 1968?

Obama ’ s best hope is if people see Occupy Wall Streeters as a
3179
bunch of students loaded down with student loans — ’ cause people
hate them. The ’ 50s/ ’ 60s/ ’ 70s were going to be about youth, about
youthfulness, because the Depression and WW2 were about the
denial and sacrifice of all that. Now that we ’ ve hate our long
period of, first, unamibuously good growth, and, second, equally
long period of manic growth, we ’ re into Depression mode once
again, which is about the hatred of all things young and promising.
It does these very vulnerable youth a great misservice to have them
thinking it might be the ’ 60s come again; it isn ’ —
t for the most
part, OWSers are helping ESSENTIALIZE themselves as spoiled
and yet still disgruntled, for the rest of the public to BEGIN their
picking on. If they end up looking mostly outed, cold, and without
hope, the public will keep voting in those properly giving them
their due, grafting upon them all the miseries and insecurities the
rest of the public wants denied in themselves.

Permalink
Original Article: Support your indie bookstore!

Patrick MacabreHalston here, Aunt Messy, and I ’ m not whining,
I ’m helping. Independent bookstores are coming back again, and it
will owe to the purchasing decisions of the liberal elite. They ’ ll
think their support of them means they ’ re for the small guy, that
they, wierdly, ARE the small guy, but it really owes to them
having an opportunity to this time claim small bookstores as all
their own, as a kind of boutique, that actually mostly distinguishes
them from the mongrolized plurality of the 99 %. What better way
3180
for the enfranchised to support the 99 % than in a way which
continues their loathing and fretting them?
Original Article: Support your indie bookstore!

MONDAY, NOV 28, 2011 08:52 AM PST
Independent bookstores are coming back, but not as beloved
neighborhood staples, folky stuff. They ’ ll be brutal class
demarcators, thriving boutiques, where those of refined, patrician
taste go to assure themselves they have little to do with the
mongrel 99 % (and to keep taste alive!), and which the alienated
99 % wish to keep alive, too, to keep some remote glamor amidst
their wasted debased world. Small havens of otherwise disallowed
personality, just like the ’ 30s.

Permalink
Original Article: How should we design the cities of

our dreams?

SUNDAY, NOV 27, 2011 10:25 AM PST
Re: “ And there
’ s reason to be optimistic that they will, because the
generation that will retrofit our old cities with new ideas is the
same one that ’ s currently developing an instinctual aversion to
economic unfairness. ”
It won ’ t be a generation that ’ s going to do it —
it
’ ll be foremost
from the children of the endowed right now — each one of them
very much green, poorconcerned, but also so very different in
manners from the 99% that their classconcerned parents don ’ t find
3181
themselves not entirely enthused about them. They are princes and
princesses who ’ ve been denied the core stuff to break through
instinctual aversions to be all for the people; what we can expect
from them is everything so that the wellentrenched will never not
really know themselves as aristocracyloving aristocrats. In every
greenguilded urban landscape, they ’ ll see the patrician easyness of
their power, and it ’ ll actually be mostly that that pleases than what
they tell everybody, including themselves, it communicates —
their ostensible democratic core.
This article is about how the 1% will never recognize themselves.
It is time, once again, for patricians.

Permalink
Original Article: How gossip took over the news

Why is it when one reads this article that one senses Oxford ’ s
walls firming up and getting stronger? It feels almost as if what we
need most, now, is for institutions to do their duty, the press to
sober up and leave them alone, and for the public to let themselves
be lead.

Permalink
Original Article: Is Don DeLillo really prescient?

If this author really meant to bring up DeLillo ’ s truly prescient
3182
point (about the two towers), one wonders why he didn ’ t in fact
mention it. What this author does do, however, is argue that Delillo
has a morbid and paranoid point of view, that he should be seen as
retrofiting his vision to whatever grand tragedy or moment of
social dysfunction comes along, and whose tendency is to use his
characters as simple conduits for his own wrongheaded
mouthings. It is hard to see how even the greatest genius could
from this bleeck make the climb up to deserving to be a major
writer; it certainly seems the stuff for what an ostensibly more sane
generation would recognize as a con, a hack.
To me, though, if I want to find myself more dispirited, I ’ d turn to
more of John Williams ’
works way before I
’ d Delillo ’ s.

Permalink
Original Article: The dilemma of taking care of

elderly parents

The author has explained how in America, children and parents
love one another —
the generation of baby boomers who gave
their parents the bird when they left the nest, clearly never existed;
the plentitude of popular movies and books that showed us such,
clearly were all lies —
so you clearly don
’ t exist. But if you DID
exist, she has also explained how the situation would be fully
upsidedowny, so guaranteed YOU would get to be the person who
beats the hell out of your parent; though, I must admit, what I think
baby boomers are concerned about is that this upsidedowny
3183
situation is more illusory than real, more their own parents
temporarily making themselves seem so harmless so the truer
situation that all the old feelings of when “ you
”
were fully under
their thumb don ’ t flood so strongly into view you somehow
DON ’ T acquiese and find a way to home them with you.
Twenty years ago, the situation would have been different, because
it was still a youth culture. Now, with crammed living quarters
rather than nuclear suburb castles the expected norm, with self
sacrifice/sublimation rather than selfsatisfaction/realization the
commanding ethos, with the Depression feeling as penance for
baby boomer ’ greed
—
it
’ s going to put grandma and grandpa back
in the limelight. Give up the master bedroom now, folks — the old
kings and queens have returned.

Permalink

elderly parents

SATURDAY, NOV 26, 2011 05:35 PM PST
If extended families once again proves the trick, we ’ ll have to
come up with something else before long: ’ cause at some point the
diaperchangers are going to find some gigantic war that they just
HAVE TO partake in, to give them some period of guaranteed
relief from domestic crap.

Permalink
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elderly parents

SATURDAY, NOV 26, 2011 01:50 PM PST
How can you be sure that “ no one wants to ignore parental needs,
”
when you ’ re also so sure they ’ re all precariously perched “ I love
my parents, but –” ers? It just seems more reasonable to me to leave
plenty of room for seeing some of those leaning heavily on the
“ but,
” as actually at some level more hoping to rid themselves of
their parents than further attend to them. Does matricide and
patricide exist only at the same level as whiter unicorns and
fairies? One would have “ matricidical
”
fantasies, not so much
matricidal ones; or maybe better, “ dark, unicornal, magimatridical
”
fantasies, just so no one gets confused.

Permalink
Original Article: Neil Gaiman's audiobook record

label

Gaiman is the most nonaggrieving guy on the planet. At a time
when we are prepared to communicate hard that that is the only
“ voice
”
we
’ ll tolerate, it ’ s no wonder he ’ s been annointed. What
we need from the British now is another John Cleese: that guy
could teach Americans some about what it is to be taken into
account.

Permalink
3185
Original Article: Should liberals be more thankful for

Obama?

What Chris Matthews didn ’ t catch, but Joan seemed to a bit, is a
certain edge in Chait —
he
’ s not so much making a point, as
beginning a pointed indictment. Chris bearhugged him with love
and admiration, and though it obscured most everything else from
view, I still did see the circumspect little guy, not quite plussed,
with his pointy knife still sticking out.

Permalink
Original Article: The geeky triumph of Pepper Spray

Cop


It has helped cement the idea that overt disobedience is a youthful
stance, at a time when the nation is in mind to project its own
selfishness, desire for more, into this most appropriate of
“ containers,
”
to deny and punish, is in mind to see a lineup of
youth being victimized and find it a “ phallanx,
”
an image actually
a bit compelling for its homoeroticism — frontline soldiers, the
youngest and the bravest, giving themselves up for expedient
slaughter, the whatever wishes of their desirous elders.

Cop
3186

That ’ s funny.

Permalink

Cop

There was a time when nazi concentration camp guards weren ’ t so
fugitive. Maybe we ’ re more entering there than the part you ’ re
skipping ahead to?
This officer is going to be publicly condemned, but maybe because
he ’ s a couple steps too far from where people are prepared to go
right now. So instead many ways to keep him in view, ostensibly
of course for our villification, but maybe actually more for
purposes of consideration.

Permalink

Cop

The South had hillbillies and rednecks with guns, the North had
shopkeepers and respectability. Who ultimately proved malleable
and carpeted upon? Historically, what is most notable about
warrior cultures is that they tend to be of the kind that pretty much
throw themselves upon their opponents ’ bayonets. They aim so
3187
hard to be sadistic, but submit at the end so enthusiastically to
masochistic submission — their God likes nothing better than a
large field of their own boys lying dead, in dutiful, noble sacrifice.
Ours laments the insanity, and moves on.

Permalink

Cop

He ’ s a meme in part because, I suspect, many people are impressed
with his imperturbality, in face of struggling “ children.
”
Near
every Republican would want to be like him, and many, many
liberals too —
like a good portion of those who applauded Obama
so loudly for remaining serene and adult while Republican / Tea
Partiers went about like spoiled children, or even those who
applauded that “ Go the @#!# to Sleep
”
book, where, faced with
screaming children, adults imagine laughing in response at them, at
giving them the bird.
This isn ’ t the ’ 60s, where youth, after a withering Great
Depression and the mass sacrifice of a world war, were going to be
allowed to define and rule the world for a longish while. This is
end of cycle, where more and more people are going to get a kick
out of adults acting like stern, disapproving “ grandfathers,
”
who
are unsparingly brutal toward actingup children.

Permalink
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Original Article: The face of police cruelty

Or it might nudge them into complicit selfsacrifice. We have done
everything possible to make youth feel they are not to be valued in
this society, and I suspect many have internalized the attitude.
Putting yourself in the way of police who WILL hurt you would
surely provide even greater satisfaction than selfcutters get by
their means of punishing their own wretched youthfulness.
When a whole nation of youth launches themselves into war, it has
a great deal to do with the joyful feeling they get from knowing
they ’ re commiting the sacrifice their nation eagerly desires of them
— finally, now, they
’ re incontrovertably virtuous good boys and
girls.

Permalink
Original Article: The coming out story I never

thought I'd write

I ’ m delineating the way ahead. The new left I ’ m describing, the
one that will increasingly identify with the working class, is a
vastly regressed left. It will turn on groups the previous lot had
spent so much time loving and supporting.

Permalink

3189
thought I'd write

I wonder how much the urge to come out right now owes to a
sense that we ’ re at the climax of a cultural age, one that is in the
process of changing wholesale. The previous liberal period was
about enfranchising the kinds of groups middle America tended to
discriminate against; the current one is one that will mostly
identify with the middle, with the American “ volk.
”
For the
previous lot (of liberals), with no growth ahead, no more truth to
be discovered, it ’ s about daily finding a way to triumph your fully
realized self —
Newt=bad, Salon=good, kind of stuff. In the
meantime the new left composes itself, and then eventually
launches a wholesale attack on the “ boutique liberals
”
(Chris
Hedges ’
term) who (very much ostensibly!) represent the kind of
mecentered selfdecadence that brought down to such a sad low, a

once hardy, once manly , robust workingclass nation.

Permalink

thought I'd write

Well, I disagree —
but I
’ d be with you if you were to argue that
few who share my opinion mean homosexuals any good. They
pretend to help, but they mean to eviscerate.
I find it difficult to believe you ’ re actually FOR educated
psychobabble. And some sympathy, please — the same kinds of
3190
people who hate on gay men tend to hate on the Jewish science,
psychoanalysis, as well. To them, it ’ s all signs of a society gone
fully decadent and retrograde.

Permalink

thought I'd write

He was built to please —
as such he was the perfect candidate for
homosexuality.

Permalink

thought I'd write

Boys turn gay to safeguard them from feeling fully absorbed
within their mothers ’ needs. Because they were cued early on that
they near existed to please their insufficiently loved mothers,
they ’ re highly sensitive, and it is partly this which draws them to
Salon. It is ALSO that people like Walsh and MEW remind them
in part of their mothers, and this is still naturalenough and
drawing company. It is ALSO that Salon registers as a site that is
sensitive to not too much offend, make anxious, their readers — if
it stirs things up, we all sense it ’ ll hurry along to fully calm down
the stirred waters and nestle simply agreement for a good
3191
subsequent bit: such an environment is comfortable for gay men,
who learned from the start of their lives that the one thing above all
others that you do not do, is make mom in any way anxious.

thought I'd write

You ’ re right, the allAmerican kid enjoys sports but doesn ’ t have a
lesbian for a mother. If he simply had too much mother — as
you ’ re insinuating —
then his conclusive turning toward men is
largely a turning his back on her: it doesn ’ t cement their bond, but
the opposite, making them safely askew, securely delineated, from
oneanother. The original, the primary fag hag will only get so
much out of him in the future: I wonder how much it is this
wonderful safety that is celebrated with coming out?

Permalink
Original Article: On the eve of destruction

MONDAY, NOV 14, 2011 03:41 PM PST
They lost public support owing to a collective desire to image them
spoiled brats. “ You
”
let them air out your own distress, and then
disown them, indulging in another long term of suffering before a
movement arises that is uncomplicated by the expectations — we,
REALLY, deserve better than this — of the very best (not saying,
of course, that these are its only constituents, but that they are
surely amongst them — it
’ s so rancid now that no matter your
3192
[commendable] appreciation of ongoing discourse and society ’ s
ability to right itself you should find yourself assessing it all as a
choice away from possible salvation).

Permalink
Original Article: On the eve of destruction

MONDAY, NOV 14, 2011 03:15 PM PST
A lot of liberals have done some inner calculations and decided
they ’ re not going to lose much if they stay mostly status quo and
let the next twenty years be a total horror for most other people —
they ’ ll feel guilty; but this affliction will actually satisfy in
showing they ’ re not completely living it. They ’ re not evil, but just
not healthy enough to find little satisfaction when a spectre of
doom has decided it ’ ll pass them by. If Joan makes the rest of her
life about preventing the next twenty from being about huge
widespread misery and eventual grand sacrifice through world war
(the usual way it goes when our collective concern is suddenly to
purge out all badness), it ’ ll owe to support from grand friends like
Chris Matthews. If people like Joan and Chris balk completely out
of their familiar “ discourse,
”
to me, at least, imagining many
people like them doing the same, imagining all of them as akin in
inner resources as they, the future will suddently seem — open.
Note: they ’ ll lose all their friends, though — there
’ s only a couple
people I can think of at Salon that will stand completely with Joan,
and believe it or not, neither is Glenn. If subliminally sensing all
this, if you were her, wouldn ’ t you find yourself doing recheck
after recheck?
3193

Permalink
Original Article: If Tolkien were black

Updike has been accused of something of the same (by Bloom, for
instance), i.e., possessed of great gifts, but lacking something most
meaningful. Personally, I think it ’ s that both he and Anthony focus
mostly on the domestic, see the worthy play and adventure there,
that scares away people taken aback by too much hearth. I really
do find Anthony ’ s creativity of a near wholly different kind from
so many fantasy authors, who ’ s invention always ends up reeking
to me of compensense. This is less true for almost all writers in the
genre during the 70s, of course, when you didn ’ t have to have all
that much inner fire to have the age propel you on to quite new
things (LeGuin ’ s in there, for sure). His style is pronounced,
mostly without hedge. Uncircumcized. He really is the closes
writer I can think to Updike, much more than the Delillos, Oates,
and all them.

Permalink
Original Article: If Tolkien were black

It ’ s tough to tell right now how genuine people are being when
they cite Ursula LeGuin as their primary influence. She ’ s the pre
eminant fantasy writer to cite if you don ’ t want to collect around
you any (or at least, the least amount possible) consideration as a
3194
geek. None of the others lit people mention quite gift the same.
Personally, I wish more would cite and actually be influenced by
Piers Anthony. He ’ s fantasy ’ s John Updike, its boldest, least
cowed, ACTUALLY least geeky, adventurer. If you see all that but
still think him a dork, something about the whole genre must sadly
play to that part of us that actually never really wants to go outside
our door.

Permalink
Original Article: Was Shakespeare really

Shakespeare?

THURSDAY, OCT 27, 2011 03:42 PM PDT
Right now, you ’ re either part of the 99%, or part of the ruling
class. The Depression lost sight of the middle classes (they
certainly existed, but they didn ’ t fit the times ’ “
dynamic
”
so were
ignored in popular imagination), and so too we. This is why the
consideration of Shakespeare as an aristocrat is having its day.

Permalink
Original Article: Democrats can't occupy Wall Street

TUESDAY, OCT 11, 2011 09:11 AM PDT
One of the greatest things about gross inequality, is that you don ’ t
need to listen to those who well may be able tell you how to live a
little better, with their more than likely coming from a class
absurdly elevated beyond your own. You can remain stuck in a
3195
class that is suffering, but that has also decided, unlike the ’ 60s and
’70s, that it might be femme manners of them if they learned to
love cooking french. Many mainstream democrats are going to try
very hard to become populists (the new Salon, anyone?). If they
can ’ t get in, it ’ s ’ cause of our own walling them out.

Permalink
Original Article: Democrats can't occupy Wall Street

By this, “ by demonizing the elements of modern American
workingclass life, from SUVs and lowprice exurban box stores to
the kinds of cuisine that upscale foodies frown upon, ” are you sure
don ’ t just mean talking accurately about them? SUVs are
deplorable. The box stores, just as bad. What they eat — a strong
sign that humans can let themselves live with their more important
part of their brains inactive. Liberal elites are going to get it
because they are a reminder that we can ask for more out of life
than this; expect it, even. They ’ ll be replaced by populists the
masses will want to listen to, who ’ ll tell them Jamie Oliverstyle
how they have to stop driving SUVs and stuffing their faces with
fatty foods, but not to go for something more refined, but
something more deprived.

Permalink
Original Article: Unions, Democrats and Occupy

Wall Street
3196

WEDNESDAY, OCT 5, 2011 09:13 PM PDT
It was inevitable, and thus they didn ’ t so much make it as failed to
prevent it. Every generation that begins by leading a society
beyond whereever it had previously permitted itself, that is allowed
to lead it, because a society has decided for a time that innovation,
overall improvement, is permitted, has been earned, ends up at
some point pulling back: not only does the rest of society begin to
feel untethered over all this hubristic innovation (a society that
rises all boats –
my word!), but many of the left that lead the good
things begin to as well. The pivotal overall psychic change

occurred at the end of the 1970s, when the masses moved things so
that growth would largely be something denied them. In sum, the
spoiled babyboomers that came to focus on consumerism and
themselves, were very likely the best generation humanity has ever
seen. We get to be the lot that sees whatisintruth fleshedout
personalities, and rather than accomplishment see selfindulgence,
blameworthy selfattendance and other neglect.

Permalink
Original Article: Unions, Democrats and Occupy

Wall Street

WEDNESDAY, OCT 5, 2011 09:42 AM PDT
The New Deal didn ’ t arise out of a fear of unrest. Social
improvements came out of the masses feeling they were owed
something, for very clearly having already suffered so much.
Social justice isn ’ t just handed to us, not because it HAS to come
from a fight (with many sad losses sustained), but because we
3197
don ’ t think we deserve it if it comes too readily. (Twice a century
it seems people become more comfortable with allowance and
permission; otherwise we ’ re very suspicious of the mass of us
living beyond what we thought possible.) That ’ s the ONLY reason.
Also, the spoiled dangerous kids of the ’ 60s – . America largely
won
came to understand the Americans who saw them as deserving
punishment, as older, regressive, primitive ArchieBunker types,
who not only hated the kids, but blacks and homosexuals and
immigrants and uppity women as well, and effectively represented
everything the ’ 60s generation had to oppose to finally give some
sanity to America. The haters had their moment to freely express
their absolute hate, but it might as well been a lure, for it served to
move the youth into positions of considerable influence and power,
and doomed them into constantly being on the defense.
The ’ 60s youth were emblematic of what was right with the
country — it was going to be a time for youth, for romanticism.
Unfortunately, our current lot is for many of us a sign of what is
right about it now too: we ’ ve entered a time where you have to be
delusional to see the young as at all overindulged or spoiled. If
they start getting the things they ask for, it ’ ll owe to us gauging
they ’ re so sufficiently broken what they want won ’ t be so out of
line of the reduced way of experiencing the world we expect out of
them. Having your debts paid off and having some sort of job,
needn ’ t mean you ’ re on your way to becoming fully human. You
could just be a New Deal/Soviet working ant, no different from the
rest of the thriving but pointless collective.

Permalink
3198
Original Article: Why American novelists don't

deserve the Nobel Prize

With how much their damn presumption and spoiledness clearly
bothers us, I think it fair for us all to take a pause and consider that
even if they really were/are great, we might not be the ones to ever
accord them this.
Perhaps to be great, you have to focus one heck of a lot on oneself
— that is, perhaps you have to become one whom a later, more
shrunken generation, who has schooled themselves into believing
their own egoistic desires make them bad, and is determined to see
any they see rising in others gets retracted and punished as well,
will see as simply too selfattendant and spoiled?
What we want, apparently, what clearly makes us sick, is for artists
to partake in the collective, to be somewhat bland and non
descript, and to do without blinking what we would have them.

Permalink


MONDAY, OCT 3, 2011 06:53 PM PDT
They may not know as much about suffering — or it may be that
they actually know quite a bit but aren ’ t as DETERMINED by it
— but they surely know more about allowance and play, and not
3199
playing out their lives as others would have of them. Guess we
differ on where we think invention and creativity come from,
perhaps owing to our different take on how much fun people
should allow themselves.

Permalink


If I could give a nobel to one American horror writer, it would be
to Stephen King. If to one fantasy writer, to Piers Anthony; and
one SciFi — Wolfe. All, I think, could be called indulgent, but
they are the ones who ’ ll change mankind for the better, while
letting everyone know it ’ s more than okay to complement your full
belly with some afterdinner ice cream, some sherry or rum. I don ’ t
think we ’ ll see their equals for a couple generations, but we ’ ll get
lots of onmessage revels in grit, by authors who are teaching
themselves they ’ ve never known anything other.

Permalink


Rated!

Permalink
3200


The 1930s turned hard against selfcenteredness and spoiledness
too. Fortunately, after they were allowed their unfortunately
longish turn at haranguing everyone into good behavior and
championing postoffice art, the nation eventually returned to good
sense, and spoiled brats had their indulgent turn again (Yay
Updike ’ s “ Couples
” !). I
’ m encountering good numbers trying to
turn us all against Updike — the best of American writers; most
fun. Please allow yourself to counter Wallace ’ s “ evisceration
”
of
Updike ’ s “ Toward the End of Time
”
with Margaret Atwood
’ s take
on the book. She ’ s the grownup; Wallace has proved just a self
lacerator we ’ ve made now mostly into a whip.

Permalink
Original Article: The creative class is a lie

SATURDAY, OCT 1, 2011 12:35 PM PDT
The last big depression also suppressed the individual power of the
actor —
we got the factory system, and replacable, nervous talent.
25 years after this began was about the time the factory system fell
apart, so I ’ m guessing you ’ re probably here speaking accurately
only about our immediate future. In my judgment, the problem
now with the digital revolution, which was NOT true when it
began, is that it is no longer supported by a collective will to make
3201
it generally empowering. If we ’ re in the mood to see the previously
“ spoiled
”
thoroughly demoralized, left only with flowers and
bonbons we ’ d find their use as instruments of humiliation. Such is
our mood now.

Permalink
Original Article: The creative class is a lie

SATURDAY, OCT 1, 2011 11:45 AM PDT
The whole point of a depression is to suppress creativity and
individuality —
a depression is the penance for previous good
times. Pointing out its effectiveness in doing so may not even be a
lament —
what good things we allow ourselves now need to be
better camouflaged as compromised pleasures/opportunities. The
rich get to strut their stuff, unblanched —
we enjoy pointing to
them to show how good and suffering we ourselves now are. This
goes on for about ten years, then we get a big war where a whole
bunch of promising youth sacrifice the rest of their lives to the
nation, and then we all slowly begin to feel that that ’ s about
enough for compromised offerings: blood price — paid in full.
We then start detaching ourselves from our extended families,
claim our own pieces of earth, and have one of those true youth
lead periods of creativity, selffulfillment and fun, that only are
permitted to come about twice each century. Hang in there guys.
And maybe some of you even buck the trend: it would make me
near believe in miracles.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
"Brave" IS brave, but leaves the significant tear unattended
3202
Andrew O’Hehir at Salon has suggested that Brave, however feminist,

doesn’t really undermine patriarchy – the daughter weaves a spell of
command and rhetoric to sway them to her side, but ultimately it’s to
the men to determine when sharp changes to tradition can be
undertaken. But the whole (or almost the whole – see below) of what
Brave does is show only women as capable of the maturity, the
majesty to see what the realm needs to survive; the men, are twits,
practically always ready to hack at one-another over the smallest
slight. The men, that is, though they can supply buffoonish charms,
are mostly a drink-fest and a random melee waiting to happen: does
the movie really supply any doubt as to who maneuvered these realm-
saving “patriarchal” traditions into place in the first place? Andrew’s
former peer at Salon, Stephanie Zacharek, has argued that Brave is
closer to Ratatouille and The Incredibles than to Wall-E and Up; and
with its preference to show ordinary folk as afflictions on those
mentally at least one rung up, there’s no doubt about it – it is.
You could tell by the released preview of the film that it is the
dynamic between mother and daughter which was going to make this
movie good (and maybe great), and this certainly proved true, with
the surprise being that the film actually ends up becoming more the
mother’s than the daughter’s. (Asked now to conjure up an
emblematic image, it wouldn’t be the redhead’s magnificent locks, but
the queen’s surprise as she tries to cover her bare self from view, or
her eyes as she started turning whole bear.) We remember not the
young lass shooting arrows, but her delight at seeing her mother gain
competency catching fish – it’s not so much the mother
countenancing the changes in her teenage daughter, that is, but the
daughter countenancing her mother’s accommodations to new status
and frightening powers. I liked this, but it goes against the natural
order, against plain fairness, frankly. It’s nice that the mother knows
new adventures and stretchings out of the possibilities of self, but if
the daughter doesn’t have her time now, during her teenage years,
when the whole pull of her lifeforce is directing her that way, her best
3203
bet for it will be after she’s married and with kids, when her
adventuring might be mixed with anger at her previous long denial
and not do them any good.
You always hope films directed at young kids will still introduce them
to something adult. What is adult is to appreciate that the reason
teenagers can actually end up shortchanging their efforts to
individuate, is owing to fear of the anger this arouses in their mothers
(to the mothers, their individuation feels vindictive), not to their
mothers ultimately prevailing to induce some appreciation of the
complicated ways of the world into their still limited and fully self-
absorbed minds. The youth agrees to marry – whomever, to cruelly
circumscribe herself the beautiful adventure of finding a soulmate,
after “maturely” coming to appreciate her desire for as much as
selfish. A whole environment is Truman-show produced to show her
brave act of telling her mom to piss the hell off, as something so
intrinsically abase it would lead to the like of her mom being
permanently disabled, and a whole realm at the cusp of war.
Fortunately, the mother has been apparently introduced to enough
fun that she ends up speaking up (or effectively motioning, if you
prefer) for the wisdom of allowance, for her daughter’s needs for the
same, and – with permission granted – thereby her daughter sways a
bit off the masochistic and is saved the fate of being life-long humped
by one of the idiot clansmen claiming her.
Still, there is a sense that the adult does make its appearance here,
perhaps to be mulled over and chewed on without us being so much
consciously aware we’re up to as much. When the mother starts
losing her own persona and going whole bear, the daughter is face to
face with someone who just a moment ago was her familiar mother
but has suddenly become someone fully absent from her, and also
very, very frightening and savage. I would argue that, outside of a few
very lucky ones, there’s isn’t any girl out there who hasn’t known
wicked fear at experiencing from their own mothers, this sort of
upsetting transformation. The look the bear directs at the daughter in
the film, a quick but very impressionable one, as of someone suddenly
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alien who means her terrific harm, is of the obliterating kind that
foremost keeps young women from fully being comfortable with their
intuitions to explore the adult, with their developing mental checks,
inner-scolds, that keep them from letting life be too much about
ostensible mother-betrayal and self-realization. We only get this look
twice in this film, and perhaps you are agreeing – thank god for it!
Putting something this true into the film can’t quite be called brave,
as it’s too “subliminal,” too deniable, to seem more than what a good-
intentioned but also very careful place-holder might put forth. Same
thing can be said with the film’s other brave element – its actually
countenancing that what a family needs is a strong wife, able kids,
and a strong father. As mentioned, the real father in this film is an
idiot, and overtly this film belongs with a depressing, long slew of
films we’re likely to see forthcoming, where it’s near beyond
countenancing that female members don’t just simply take over. All
the men in this film are like cartoon characters put in odd pathetic
abundant company to a sex possessed of something vibrant and real –
exempting one notable exception. The adult male monster bear –
possessed somewhere inside by the spirit of a ranging, founding-
father clansman – has no truck for idiots or fools, either, nor is he
about to be toyed about by wee fey boys who idolize sweets, and he is
a fantastic creature which inspires equally fantastic engagement on
part of mother and daughter to be brought down. His is a powerful
“voice” – the mother “bear” is something in defense of her “cub,” but
he never in the battle, owing to someone else’s ferocity, loses his own
magnificence – and the three of them together undeniably in their
engagement inspire something along the lines of great, create a
landmark encounter from which a worthy mythology might be
constructed (the father’s engagement with the bear, from which he
wrung out a lifetime of tale-telling, was in comparison but Ekler vs.
Sugar Ray). The young girl’s talk of bravery subsequently, in fact,
only gains some credence owing it.
The most significant rift in this film is between mother-daughter and
an astray father, who has no “in” to meaningful involvement with his
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family, and pretends to have true volition only with the rush that
comes from fleeing his impotence with them and wading into battles
with other intrinsically cowardly men. The great bear shows such a
presence the other two need to be at their best to shape its fate, and as
it’s not so hard to imagine something understood mostly as majestic
being something that should be slotted at or near the head on your
own side, the great bear serves for a moment as akin to a beloved
strong, fierce, formidable father surprising the involved conspiracies
women were shaping by appearing forthright into their dynamic after
a long spell of traveling was finally over. And to everyone’s relief.
I would argue that mostly owing to the male bear, and not to the
movie-short shown just before Brave, which in retrospect seems a
calculated effort to perhaps alleviate some young men’s feeling
shortchanged by the film, boys might find themselves feeling
provisioned by this theater experience. But I still strongly suspect
that a lot of young men will walk away from Brave feeling as if
mocked by it, as if having suffered yet another rebuff. The film
informs us that progress in society involves further exploring the
relationship between mothers and daughters, putting men on the
backburner for a change. What a film like this, as well as a societal
current which favors its view, denies is that real progress would come
when boys, not girls, become more subject of their mothers’ attention
and love. In real life, mothers and daughters already have extensive
involvements with one-another, with the result being, and though I’ve
talked in this review mostly of the harm, still mostly a fleshing out of
the personality on the part of the daughter, the development of more
soul and intrinsic warmth. Boys still mostly lose sight of their
mothers, and as the psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause argues in his
great essay, “Why Men are More Violent,” though “mothers may
dominate their little girls and expect them to share their troubles,
[. . .] domination has been found to be far less damaging to the child’s
psyche than abandonment and routine distancing.” Without involved
contact with their mothers, in comparison to girls, boys become
personality-thin, evidently deprived and sadly dull. That is, the film
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actually shows a truth in showcasing teenage boys as unappealing to

the eye, without any needing to look to their fathers to know there ’s
no use trying to excuse them for just going through an awkward stage,
and in still showing more-or-less infant boys – still within the realm
of maternal attention – as far more captivating and spirited. May a
brave film appear that actually overtly argues that something should
be done about this deplorable true-life actuality (and please not by
Adam Sandler, who I've long appreciated but no longer trust).
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"More cuts, please!": Current films and our self-torture
More Cuts, Please: Current Films and Our Self-Torture

Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston 2012
If you’re like me and you’re beginning to notice a lot of evil being

passed off as innocuous, just a joke, or even as good, and you’re
wondering why this has become so widespread, why people are doing
the opposite of the holy crusader and enterprising ways to target, to
demean the precariously placed, let me tell you what this is all about.
Most people are not comfortable when too much of the good life has
been made available to them. All the great things they’re hugging to
themselves has them feeling they’re worthy of disownment, of
catastrophic punishment, as this was the crippling experience they
were made to feel when they first as children started attending more
to their own needs than the unmet ones of their mothers. The
superego, set up as a child to protect him from reviving this
intolerable experience, by dissuading him from having too much fun
in life, takes over and comes up with a scheme that’ll save the self
from oblivion. Individually, we agree to take actually good things as
only of a form we can lament as gross and sinful – self-love, gluttony,
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and so on – and collectively we make sure society is restructured so

that, rather being dominated by an aspiring middle class, it becomes
of the smallish quotient of the protected prospering accompanied by
the spread of losers. The moment when we began to become more
focused on our own individual lives and our mothers turned away
from us, abandoned us – intentionally – for our unconsciously
presumed to be deliberate abandonment of them, is replicated and
stretched out for a tedious sum of years. And this time “the child”
does not find way to inevitably grow anyway, but simply to suffer
wounds, sores – degradations – it intuited it deserved for this most
quintessential and worst of crimes, while “the mother” is put in plain
view in her absolute worst light, self-absorbed, disconnected, cruel,
thereby allowing the child to demonstrate absolute obeisance to her
will by seeing all but allowing himself to register nothing. Woe to all
those, that is, who’d call Her a tyrant! Thereby – believe it or not – a
worse fate is felt to have been averted.
Most people alive unconsciously want our society to be for awhile of

disconnected winners and afflicted losers. This sounds ridiculous to
you, I know, but how do you account for the fact that Romney has
been mostly identified at this point as an elite, lifelong ensconced in
pampered surrounds, as an uncaring asshole who bullied other kids
and is thoughtless to those – our pets – defined by their being under
our care, as someone who unabashedly is a friend to corporations and
who is very, very awkwardly trying to fit what is evidently wholesale
their agenda into packaging that sounds at least a bit bottom-up, and
yet very plausibly has a legitimate shot at the presidency? And how do
you account for the fact that since dealing with the cleanup of 9-11
the very last thing we’ve had to worry about is mass public denial of
the afflictions to public service men and women, debilitated through
their experience in whatever service they’ve undertaken – the
physical injuries they’ve suffered, the psychological ones driving them
to suicide, the financial ones telling them they’ve got destitution
awaiting them in their home life as well – with I think the near
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conscious collective realization that no one for a good while is going

to do much about it, even with all the facts laid bare, week after week,
by our news media?
Politics and economics produce the carnage. What the media does is
ensure we all know it’s being done, transforming all the incoming
variant data of external suffering into quotients of sacrifice we can
please ourselves by counting and stacking up. Fairly assessed to be at
the helm of this madness is what is most commonly assumed to be a
tag-along – popular arts, which, rather than offering escapes, keeps
us at some level keen that none of this carnage owes to happenstance
but rather entirely to our dictates. Films, that is, are directed – if it’s
on the screen, it’s ’cause somebody wanted it there. And more and
more we’re assuming they’re done, not by auteurs lead by their own
idiosyncrasies, but by those skilled at taking percipient guesses as to
what we’re going to want next.
What we wanted not that long ago were still films that told us we
really don’t deserve to be kept stunted, and that what we really need
are more sparks of encouragement and love in our lives to start us on
the path to realizing ourselves – Wall-E is perhaps the strongest last
evidence of this. The grossly askew in this film are the robots put in
power when society had become all corporate, determined to slacken
human beings into their most passive forms to expedite vulgar profit-
making – specifically Auto, who can only recognize real life as
something aberrant and destructive. To the perceptive, the ostensibly
ordinary in this movie, like Wall-E and the corpulent, childish
captain, are more evolved than the superficially superior specimens –
to Eve, who is shown as massively repressed, as essentially deprived,
despite her lavished-upon Apple-white gloss, her Maximilian
physique and power. Part of the point of Eve in the movie is in fact to
show up an awesome arsenal as mostly just good protection to absorb
the shocks and blows that might incur should you chance to actually
begin a souled life. The difference between her and the tiny line-
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making robot, whom Wall-E drives into fits over the most trivial of
trespasses as fair register of its inanity, is ultimately trivial.
But around the time Wall-E was released came also very popular
Ratatouille and Dark Knight, and subsequently it has become evident
that whereas Wall-E was at the crest of something good, these films
were at the core of something foul which has become the bulk of our
view. Ratatouille is the dark to Wall-E’s light. Wall-E holds to the
generous view that what is greatest in humans is to be possessed by
each one of them, regardless of cultivation or IQ; Ratatouille to the
opinion that the masses are dispossessed of anything worthy, and
only worth a nod if they at some level recognize their bumpkinness
and put themselves at your disposal. That is, while Wall-E gives you
irrepressible Wall-E, as well as the indefatigable captain, Ratatouille
gives you limp-noodle Linguini as your representative of the average.
While Wall-E portrays manipulation and control of the masses as
evil, Ratatouille shows it as necessary – not just to ensure the
cultivated and smart collect within the society they truly belong to,
but because without being ordered and directed about nothing
notable will ever be realized. (Ditto everything said here with Brad
Bird’s subsequent film, Mission Impossible 3, which conspicuously
delineates regular cops as “not rocket scientists,” as idiots, that is, and
allows abusive handling of Ethan’s limp-noodle ally Bogdan for his
being dispossessed of any ability to help himself.)
The issue in Dark Knight is why the exceptional should care about
those so execrable they’d annihilate a true hero who stood amongst
them if it would quit them of a momentary uprise in uncertainty and
fear; and the only reason the Joker doesn’t quite entirely win this
debate, isn’t really owing to the fact that the business man doesn’t
end up turning the key and blowing up the other ship, as he remains
as we assessed him first, not in anyway credible as a man; but because
if Batman stops being interested in the people, Batman in all
likelihood stops being interesting to the Joker, who’d already gotten
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bored with what the rest of humanity makes available to him. The
lieutenant deserves exemption, and so too Maggie Glynwethall as the
love interest, but for the most part humanity is drab and scurried, and
is actually at its most fetching when harassed into lipstick and white
paint before sacrifice. And when bound into some kind of tight
collection, your thoughts can become quickly inclined to ponder over
just much really is lost is someone connived to cart them off –
“elsewhere.”
Dark Knight is no doubt to me the most important movie of our

time. Products of genius are only really possible when your own
visions can be taken aloft by the prevailing inclinations of an era – it
wants what you have to offer, and your unconscious intuition of this
gives full confidence to your initiatives. And when it starts
demanding sacrifice, demeaning attitudes towards human beings it
prefers portrayed as diseased, a masterpiece like Dark Knight arrives
to daunt those who’d hope to mount something built of love and
hope. To me there is something intense about this film, specifically,
that probably helped shoulder out some of the hopeful in our
obviously downward-plummeting era; and mostly afterwards what
I’ve experienced in movies not made by auteurs who’d built their
reputations on films made decades ago, is not so much great
bombasts of, well, evil, but steady deposits made in film after film of
quick but telling swipes taken at the dignity of average, struggling
people.
We get films more akin to Iron Man, released around the same time
as Dark Knight, which might even be noted for their positive
estimations of people, but which rather seem to have in supplicant
modesty queued up so the new Big Man on the scene can see who
they’re truly in sympathy with. Tony Stark is moved to change his
business wholesale after he really gets what his weapons are all about,
how much damage they do to regular people, how much they inflate
petty tyrants. He removes his tie, and sits amongst the people eating
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a cheeseburger – and corporate-heads panic! But man-of-the-people

Tony Stark prompts the civilians he now champions to in fact behave
in a manner which historically has served as pretext to launch armies
to wipe them out. When he as Iron Man arrives to save the men from
being shot before their distraught sons, daughters and wives, he
leaves the boss terrorist to the fate of the peasants, whom one is
presumed to assume will converge on him and deliver a fate crueler
than anything he could possibly deliver. One is presumed to assume
that they’d immediately mob him and rip him up into a debris cloud
of sinew and viscera before he could even quite squeal out a
“NOOOOOOOO!!!,” leaving us with a still haughty Tony Stark,
deliverer of clean blows, as well as the apropos, and the ravaged
peasants, dispensers in their revenge of a mess of blood and gore. It’s
just a quick scene, and the rest of the movie prattles about as far as I
can remember under the assumption of the dignity of the people, but
what a denigrating truth it drove in: the common people can be
counted upon to degenerate into savages; you might loosen your
tie amongst them, but how much closer would you really want to get
– yuck!
This spring, week after week I saw the cuts, gauges, wounds, films are
plainly eager to make to regular people. Friends with Kids has been
praised for its generous treatment of the long considered but
ultimately discarded love interests. But how kind is it to decide
against the gorgeous, talented brunette – Megan Fox’s character – for
showing her possessed of an aversion to kids as if they were spiders,
or dirty rodents, delineating her as someone who, though she has
cleaned herself up nicely, remains solidly fucked-up at the core? And
how nice is it to show the considered love-interest who is comfortable
with kids, and is also nice, sweet and reliable to boot, as possessed of
a shortchanged, mundane appreciation of play? When she squeals in
alarm at the kid in the restaurant, she is the trauma-informed kid,
born of a trailer park, who rose to become what someone born in that
position and is beautiful and determined is plausibly able to do – get
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to New York and become a star performer. When his dull intellect
blanches at seeing any sense to her morbid games, he is the
unimaginative lower-order intelligence who certainly didn’t come
through Berkeley, and who has succeeded, but who may not thrive for
long as society displaces everyone who cannot make instant play with
whatever demands are put before them, like her ad-man perfect
partner can. The trauma-infused lower orders, and the stunted
middling ones, are considered for equal status – but damningly
rejected. An especially hard hit given that they are ostensibly
represented by their best.
If you can only trudge through life, leaving the dreaming and their
carrying out to the higher orders, you shouldn’t and you’re not going
to feel safe enough to feel the world has gifted you a safe-zone
wherein to figure out what you want in life, to feel convinced that for
you the world can still about testing, trying, learning, developing,
ably riding and otherwise enjoying. You’ll go on like a soldier in the
trenches, knowing at any minute you or your best mate may be shot
down, and you’ll be upset for a half hour before – out of necessity –
putting your mind as to how their demise might enfranchise you.
Friends with Kids knows that the friends belong to the protected
circle, that they enjoy knowing that they are the ones who can
frighten the servile with instant doom. Done much like as in Iron
Man, where it looks to be about something else, this film showcases
the vulnerability of the working class, of everyday folk, by making it
seem mostly about a means for Adam’s Scott’s character to show
much he cares about his lifelong best friend. Perhaps the whole life of
an insufficiently fawning servant – the nanny – is up in the air, to
make one nice milestone moment happen for a privileged couple. It’s
Atonement, but without the mother surprising all by appearing out of
nowhere and raging head on at the car, making ample demonstration
at the injustice done to one of the working orders – to her dear,
beloved son – just to demonstrate the resiliency of an idiotic, rigid
social order.
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In What to Expect When You’re Expecting a whole class of people get

it too, and just as sneakily as with Iron Man and Friends with Kids.
While the rich in the film can seem dopey, they’ve got heart, and can
indeed learn a new trick or two as well; the poor, or at least the
precariously placed, are the opposite of redeemed. A wad of money is
denied most of the movie by a son with a sense of pride, but finally
accepted to show he’d abandoned selfishness in favor of learned
selfless concern for his wife. Very nice, except the means by which
this wad of money was put to generous use counted on the fact that
nurses – presumably way past the luxury of professional and personal
pride, having known too long cuts to their pay, instability of hours,
and an overall environment resonate with abuse – are most likely
now open to your bribes. It’s a chilling moment. The son of the rich
dad is made to seem loving – that he bumped his wife up ahead of
others doesn’t count against him, as he is only doing what anybody
would do to save the life of their loved ones – and the professional
who is supposed to be in right frame of mind to countenance one
person’s upset against that experienced by all the patients, comes out
looking possessed of the moral center of a street hood.
If the nurse who accepted the bribe got caught, he might end up a
hood – this at least is the working assumption in 21 Jump Street. In
this movie, which showcases the Abu Ghraib-akin humiliations you
can feel free to subject gang members to (the two main-character
police men mock hump one of them from behind while he lay pinned
on the ground), the head of a new drug ring centered at a high school
is a teacher, who was driven to it, we are told, owing to the paltry
wages paid him. His situation isn’t even hinted at as something
worth concern, though. Instead, he is the medium whereby the film
feels comfortable trying out humiliations you may not ever have seen
before as a source of humor – specifically, his penis gets shot off, and
we see him fumbling about on the ground trying to find it. Teachers,
we are told, are, like the nurses of What to Expect, part of a now
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suspect occupation. They are like lower class occupations of old

where people involved in them were presumed to be always just this
close to going illicit. It is true that the high school teacher involved is
a boorish male, and it is worth considering that he is subject of
remorseless abuse mostly because of his belonging to this category of
disrepute, but another contemporary film, Me and My Boy, does have
you wondering if, no, while not apt to be portrayed as drug dealers,
we’ve still presumed female teachers might have been forced to go so
off-kilter that boys’ dreams of teacher sex is something some of them
might be voraciously making happen.
One might assume those of one working class occupation – the police
– come out of 21 Jump Street okay – but this actually needs to be
considered. The one character with smarts is shown to be someone
who, if he’d actually been treated with some respect in high school,
would have been off to Berkeley rather than exploring the trades.
This would have meant, like Tony Stark in Iron Man, not just being in
possession of a posh pad, but never needing to dirty himself, not ever
needing to find some kind of compensation within the realm of the
macho which seals the deal as to what kind of social rung he belongs
to. He humiliates his opponent, but as the film shows, his world is
easily one where he and his partner could end up being, and
essentially at random, shot to pieces. Just after their preparing
themselves for just such a fate, the original (that is, the TV show) 21
Jump Street cops surprise us with their appearance and prevent this
from happening; but any pleasure incurring from their visit is quickly
replaced by shock at how quickly they become dispatched by a hail of
bullets – star status, we are conclusively being told, is eclipsed by
their being in the role of discardable cops. No magic exists now to
keep members of the working class safe.
Construction workers are the ones who get it in Dark Shadows;

they’re one of two groups we see the awakened vampire presume to
prey upon in the film. The other group is composed of young
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sensitive hippies, who are done away with, it is made to seem, simply
for being out of sorts and vulnerable to society for existing outside
their heyday. To be vulnerable means someone is going to get to prey
on you very brutally, and to have it portrayed as the most inessential
of side matters, an after-thought, and maybe – if it can, as with this
film, look to be mostly about rounding out our understanding of
someone relevant – of no import at all. Unlike Monty Python’s Holy
Grail, no trail of police officers is due to track him down for his
butchery. If lords were slain it would be a different matter, but no
one is going to speak up for the working class dregs or other similarly
disenfranchised – again with this film, it’s do to them as you wish,
while you mostly attend to curious plucks on the threads extending
out of your privilege.
Unlike Wall-E, debilitations aren’t adorned on men but for their

triumphant shedding of them. The momentum of these films isn’t
towards their standing on their own two feet, but towards being
loaded down by encumbrances, and pretty much accepting that their
fate is be drawn down inexorably as sacrifices into a predatory maw,
ála the most iconic moment of Toy Story 3. The critic Stephanie
Zacharek said of The Avengers that “it’s time for Whedon to retire the
idea of the hole in sky that suddenly breaks open, unleashing horrors
upon an unsuspecting world.” But, I’m sorry, the portal isn’t going
away, because dealing with a felt need to feed it is in fact the primary
concern of our age. It is the maw of our mothers, which wants
representatives of our self-ambitioning, self-nourishing selves
sacrificed to it so it can know satiation and justice – the time for self
and societal-growth is over; it’s now about who’s to pay the price for
accumulating for decades, and how much each guilty one. If you
already had some sense as to what this age was about, you could
pretty much have predicted that Snow White and the Huntsman
would have a scene where the expectant queen would have before her
a multiple of strewn-about youths, drained into carcasses for her
replenishment. So, too, that the experience of watching Prometheus
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could fairly be described – as one commenter at the movie-review site

Movieline did – as being riddled with a million wounds; and that the
pursuit of origins, rewarding, renewing discovery – enlightenment –
would be easily outmatched by some wretched-awful beast’s insistent
demand that it’s going to be about biology, about your body as host
and its about presumptive spawning. You could also have predicted
that the girl would come out okay – so long as she was shown
thoroughly decimated beforehand. And especially if it could be made
to seem a choice between wholly-taken-down-a-notch her and some
still proud figure, which is of course what we get, with her being lead
to believe for a moment that her just-deceased husband had managed
to impregnate her, only to find out that this miracle had occurred
owing only to his already being in part a DNA-manipulating beast-
thing (making her someone who essentially was fucked by a fiend,
and near-forced to give birth to its kid), and with his being of a
species of humanity which has presumed to temper themselves into
gods.
The humiliations we’re seeing applied in all these movies towards the
kinds of people we know are most precariously placed, isn’t about
Hollywood not giving a damn, but about our being able to show we’ll
actually pay for films which show people like us treated abominably.
We’re cutting ourselves to pieces, and the abasement happening to us
in society, through loss of jobs, through service in war, through
competition in schools and being owned by student loans, through
pleasure-critical, self-lacerating diet and fitness regimes, takes on the
environment, stances on youth and youth culture, on your sheer right
to have any confidence in your ability to supply yourself just the
basics, is our best hope to show ourselves so afflicted we can’t
possibly be taken as greedy types that deserve to be sucked into the
maw. We’ll feel ourselves drawn into it, but our own sure scar-
procuring, fervent self-brutalization will keep us from ultimately
deeming it’ll much be moved at the finish to actually seek
nourishment from us – any pride still there that might yet be sucked
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from us, isn’t worth anyone’s trouble, no matter how voracious.
We’ll come out of this at some point, and it’ll actually come with our
sense of pride being replenished. But this story, friends – also
essentially dark – will come at another time. As a preview, it'll be
about re-polluting categories of people fifty years of collective effort
has been put into humanizing.
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Review: "That's My Boy"
Adam Sandler deserves credit for being angry that a culture he grew
up knowing pleasures from, has essentially been demarcated
subsequently as something you can only bring up with shame. The
really quite wonderful Grosse Pointe Blank is, however, an indication
of this unfair pattern – the 80s were Reagan and aids, a time to get
trapped in. Well, in truth, so it was – it was a period where society
seemed mostly interested in abandoning its dependents and building
remove so to not hear their complaint (bang on, Risky Business and
Breakfast Club). The kinds of things we were offered to take pleasure
from showed what growing up in that decade did to our preferences –
I’m sorry, but though Vanilla Ice, Mustang 5.0s, gloomy uterine strip
clubs did please for seeming to grant us access to black culture,
powerhouse prowess, the illicit, something is off with you in
retrospect if you can’t see that the main reason to now stand up for
them is because they once meant something to kids. The kids who
grew up with them may rightfully still feel better provisioned than
today’s, and I think they are, but this is only because things have just
become more scrutinized, tightened up.
But I did still enjoy Vanilla Ice, I did still know awe at the power of
the 5.0s, I was excited by the sense of realm-transgression offered in
the strip club; and I thought when we turned away from those we
began to feel guilty about taking enjoyment from, kicked them while
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they were down so that we could feel for awhile like we were in
charge, it was an indication of the extent of the damage we’d
incurred. We abandoned our stars hard, near encouraging them to
suicide themselves so to not trail us through our lives. Sandler
bravely stands up for them, and is trying to use his Hollywood power
to encourage a safe-zone whereby we can do something about this
period so many of us grew up in other than flee it, and feel cool for
doing so. With the considerable help of his work, the pieces come
back into view, and you’re not going to be allowed to say, simply,
“God, did we really grow up with that?,” a response that has for
subsequent decades shortchanged us the ability to really reflect and
engage with the past that determined much of our adult selves. It’s
become time for Sandler’s long, aggressively appreciative engagement
with it. You need not only to hear of Vanilla Ice again, know that he
survived his suicide-attempts and is occupied fruitfully making
homes, but spend part of an evening with him, even if just to allow
you the slow goodbye someone who was once (he was, assholes, don’t
deny it) a meaningful part of yours deserves.
But it’s never time to believe that this period did not ultimately
shortchange us. It did. It became cool to pick on anybody who could
remind us of our father-shortchanged (80s were the time for divorce,
and I don't remember seeing my dad all that much -- did you?),
mother-overwhelmed selves – gays in particular. I do appreciate that
this film was made out of truly righteous anger at what is always
denied when we talk about teachers sexually preying on their students
– specifically, that this was a dream near every male student had,
which shouldn’t have become something which can’t be mentioned
lest you be made to seem to have given excuse for rampant human
victimization everywhere. But it’s not so cool to suggest that maybe
there was something right about young men’s fear of gay culture as
well. Think about it, the right of young men not to be ashamed of
their fantasies is stuck up for by someone with the formidableness –
Sandler – to show he knows something about the charms of mature
love – Saran Sarandon and Adam Sandler together mostly ends up
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communicating the beauty of an erroneous but still well-watched

pair. It is stuck up for by someone with the formidableness to argue
that what kids need badly is more attendance; and to convey the
pleasure to both parties that come from this with convincing honesty
– there’s not, as there more than sometimes is with Wes Anderson,
any coveting of the lost-look, the apartness, being abandoned is often
pictured as giving you. Alone, his kid isn't centered enough to
sufficiently stand up for himself -- and that's about right.
But it is also stuck up for by someone who shows you another
coupling society sees as a crime, and aggressively supports its
judgment – bother-sister incest. The two involved somehow, but still
appropriately, become the good-looking people, the kind that scared
the insecure 80s boys of the sort who burrowed into Dungeons and
Dragons dens, forestalling meaningful self-development, went to strip
clubs because it brought women down to essentials you could handle,
were the first to join in on dissing “the fags,” Mili Vanilli. They
become the kind of people who readily picked on us, but whom we
might imagine actually picking on, if they could somehow be tipped
over into a category of priss for their liking, say, jazz dance (they wore
pink Ralph Lauren, so to ignorant us, plausible enough), if they could
be made to seem -- gay.
This is a shameful aspect to this movie. There were a couple parts in
it that drove a few people in the audience to pick up and leave; but
even at their worst the fact that so much of Sandler’s main point
deserves respect, and because he has cast some of the more empathic,
more good, SNL members of times past in this movie (Ana Gasteyer
in particular), I worked my way through them – but are you really
okay with the stripper blowjob scene?, can you honestly say the girl
giving the blowjob didn’t exist in this movie to play the part of the
insecure youth who is outmatched and overwhelmed by someone
older -- specifically here by the stripper matriarch -- and then used by
men at will, so that while one insecure youth is redeemed in this film,
another is sacrificed? did the 80-year-old’s sexual advance, ostensbily
about some other thing redeemed, not still remind you of the shower
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scene of the Shining? But if Sandler endorses what are in fact true
offenses, unable to recognize them simply as bad because they
happened to also be discredited at a time when society was cruelly
concerned to make young men feel suspect about themselves, their
inherent inclinations, what they did to shore up some sense of
themselves as strong, as in charge, rather than perennially preyed
upon, I’m sorry, but I’m turning on him hard. It won’t be about
abandonment, but about communicating to him that he is now just as
much picking on people himself.
One last thing, did Sandler know by choosing to make his character
the one who drove the 5.0, leaving ostensibly redeemed Vanilla Ice to
the passenger seat, in the context of macho he thereby shamed him.
One wonders if part of his purpose in redeeming people everyone else
seems bent on denying, is that thereby they become his doll
collection, all his own to play with.
----------
Thoughts on "Prometheus"
1) "Prometheus" succeeds in showing us that whatever the ultimate

secrets of the universe might be, they're going to have to be really
something to not instinctively seem less rousing than when a spirited
human being is roused into action out of fidelity to a felt truth that
she is part of something worthwhile and good in this world. The
android draws wonder from two things in the movie -- the aliens'
cosmological map, evidence of their distilled, focused interest in us;
and the anthropologist's surprising resiliance. I did find the light
show appealing, but when we realize the star men are considerably
less possessed of life than the android is -- that they're really just
battle robots, further evolution of the android looks to involve his
drawing wonder that the young woman hasn't shorn herself of
needing to find something outside of herself for authority and
inspiration. "It speaks for you that you want to see greatness in
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everyone around you, for it betrays that you know greatness inside
yourself, and that it is worth pursuing, but it wasn't so much in your
boyfriend, and it hasn't proved so much in ancestors, however
celestially hued ... Look, girl -- people like you are the evidence that
someone out there should cast about and look for something better,
which means the opposite that you should be occupying yourself
doing the same thing. Your not conceiving of yourself as akin to the
origins of life, as someone who through her spirit can stir other
people to greater things, is inhibiting you from just making rather
than studying and searching. The cultural products these aliens have
made is barren and gross; let's see what you might come up with,
instead. Adventure, is better than answers, for it means not finding
out but interacting, changing, challenging -- I go with you now to the
home planet 'cause I see this has become your main point."
Maybe the film needed to be set in Venice. As is, all those not blind
can see is her spirit.
2) Mind you, the great vaginal-placental beast in this movie is really
quite something. I was happy that someone with our DNA could offer
a bit of resistance to it. It says something that Ridley Scott still keeps
us focused on the female anthropologist; anyone less developed
would have been thinking only of the climax moment involving
satisfying the vivid, hungry maw, and no personality would have been
fleshed out for us in the film. She's the counterforce, the outside, that
keeps us from being tentacled and sucked in to the squid horror like
everyone else.
3) I thought the android and the lady anthropologist made a great
pair; I am glad they went off on adventures together.
----------
"Friends with Kids" is about the "with kids" part
Maria Aspan has written an article praising “Friends with Kids,” and I
would feel inclined to do the same if I felt the film began to open up
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for new explorations what had felt foreclosed in pattern. But I tend to
find that in many films that tip the hat to your preferences, you ’ll
relax enough in them to want to praise them for the new they’ve
shown you, the possibilities, considerations, they ’ve lived out for you.
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” if, like the central
characters, you’re comfortably mainstream, uninterested in having
the intellectual edge on anyone and more just participating in the --
to you -- exciting trends/new truths manifesting now, does have the
material to have you thanking it for what it did right too, for it
fleshing out in a compelling fashion a whole variety of ways expecting
a child affects you and your partner. But if the mainstream is
loathsome to you, the film becomes simply garbage; no true
explorations, just extensions into drudgery. Myself, I can certainly
put myself in the frame of mind to consider New York’ smart-set
elitism garbage, and dismiss the film as readily as most critics did
“What to Expect.”
I’ll do so now. Noam Chomsky has argued that most of what should
be discussed regarding politics and the economy, isn’t actually
engaged by the media. He would have us see them, the members of
the media, as obsessing over a permitted sliver as if it were all the
world. I felt a bit like Chomsky regarding the media while thinking
upon Aspan’s review. She found the film refreshing, as opening up
new ground. I agreed that, sure, it might do that, but limited to the
latitude permissible to a class that is otherwise comfortable when
most of the innovative is off the table. I find this an era of foreclosed
opportunities, an era so staving off it drives people into thoughts of
ongoing demonstrations in hopes it might initiate a grand happening
that would pull us into a grand narrative that would stop us from
feeling immobilized. The only people I can imagine as finding this
era, on the contrary, flourishing, as provisioning, as perfect avenue to
explore terra incognita or at least the previously criminally
overlooked, are people deemed no threat to the presiding directive –
no growth! – of this era. They have to be people who get a kick out an
era – regardless of how bad – for it’s enabling them. They have to be
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people who get a kick out of the fact that if they threaten to fire you
for ill-service, color will drain from your face as you know that, once
again amongst the unemployed, conditions might have worsened so
this time you could be out for good. Kindness is their option, and one
they’ll use; but they tolerate and even like that if they withdraw it, it
could well mean oblivion for you: they are agents of a ruling
nastiness and keep their weapons of you-destroy ready at their hip.
They have to be people who like that despite whatever ostensible
growth they’re incurring, none of them are especially distinctive. The
point is to cow through betraying the daunting inevitability of the
ruling class. Stick within the medium of expectations – something
you’re so wonderfully entirely built to do – and you’ll communicate
you’re impossible to dislodge, of being principally a member, not an
individual ostensibly to be taken at his/her measure. You take one of
them, study him or her, and you see his or her cohort, even if he or
she distinguishes him/herself for his/her struggling while being
studied in isolation. They have to be people who are comfortable with
the fact that if you do anything truly notable and different, doom
awaits you for going grand when minute variations are what’s called
for; for imposing on your own what we’ve all agreed is to be so
abandoned to the imperatives of the era that it seem beyond the
human and under prerogative of God.
This must seem mad as hell, for the innovation the film explores is of
two friends successfully raising a kid together, not exactly something
not extraneous, right? Well, actually, what they foremost are, are a
variant of the marriage possibilities readily allowed in a movie moved
by the most mundane of Hollywood world-views, namely, already-
discussed, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” with this movie,
rather than former party animals who thought it cool to cheese-out
their wedding in Los Vegas, we get the New Yorker preference for the
cosmopolitan kept alive while a couple have their kid. What’s
important is that, like all their other sophisticated friends, they’re
finally down the path of having one.
Couldn’t they have just kept single, that is, not have a kid? Not if they
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plausibly wanted to seem as if they weren’t on some other path from

their friends -- a very treacherous one. That is, it was once New York
to be double-income-no kids, ’til maybe about ten years ago. And
previously all that New York independence and sophistication was
differentiating you from the hordes of common North Americans, but
you were all in your own way expanding. But now that easy credit
isn’t keeping them feeling of the same status as those post-wars blue-
collars whose jobs were garnering more for them than many white-
collar ones, now that the idea of having kids feels wrong to their
financial situations, now that they’re beginning to feel out the
possibility that they’re of the 99 % dispossessed rather than of the
plump middle class, and that their historical role is not to determine
what is essentially great about America but to show in their wreckage
just how bad-behaving America must for a long time have been, the
smart-set having kids has become a very different thing.
A grand culling has clearly been called for, and if you’re not feeling
cowed, evolution has clearly distinguished you as its favored, even if
ultimately only for your effectively humiliating its scorned. And
you’re expected to literally breed the future, even if your role makes
your prized offspring into sordid dumpings onto the poor. If you
choose instead to not have kids, you’re wrong to the times for defying
expectations others are finding themselves ruled by. Everyone, even
the most rich, are best understood for their having surrendered – the
prospering to arrogance, though an essentially false facsimile of it.
Everyone is doing their thing, letting themselves be drawn into
prevailing currents, and there you are standing apart, clearly with His
will so manifest, believing yourself more special than God. The price
you’ll pay is to be judged asocial, out of bounds but in precarious
plain view everywhere you go, even in New York.
----------
Review: What to Expect When You're Expecting

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Alison Willmore, in her review of “What to Expect When You’re

Expecting,” aired her humble request to Hollywood that when it
makes a film which features a young, precariously situated couple,
with no obvious love-bond yet who have conceived a child, that it at
least –- then -- bring up the possibility of abortion. Certainly seems
reasonable, except since by expecting the film leads us to think of the
late-term child rather than onset protoplasm, I thought the request
actually out of place here. Yet I appreciate the attack in any case, for
the film, if not as bad as critics have taken it as, is vile, very much
advocating Willmore’s other concern with the film, that you haven’t
known human fulfillment until you’ve had a kid.
You could be an Adonis, and be a rival -- for a moment. But as the
film shows with the comparison of Chris Rock’s character, Vic, leader
of the men with babies for being amply besot with them, against
Davis, a single man of exceptional endowment -- muscles, good looks,
the sexy job, and even if now just with but one, surely at his beck and
call armfuls of ripe gorgeous babes spread out in conveniently-
remote-from-one-another exotic locals -- it’s not to your advantage to
be the Greek hero when the times are all Christ submission and
community of grace. You’re allowed it -- rivalry -- for a moment,
’cause isn’t there even with Christ some admirable, some singular,
standing up to God?; but if you don’t let up it’ll leave you seeming
impressive solid granite the rest of us will nevertheless walk around,
pleasantly more attendant to generous broad blue skies and relaxed
human activity, the multiple other attractions available to us in the
park. You’re the best we could imagine, before we became endowed
with children and got with humanity’s overall central pattern; now
you’re the gorgeous gladiator we admire, but which never shames us
for registering more and more as being delimited to the arena of
boyhood while we partake in the communal flow opened up by adult
life. And that you finally did end up with kid, saved you. Getting in
with the times has saved you the stress of having to keep your
musculature proving it might never lapse to the point of
acknowledging defeat – which, even if somehow successful, is
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counter-intuitive enough to draw our consideration, but never having

us thinking that something central had now just been disproved:
eternity is across generations, not in the distinction arisen in one: it's
better to be average, but with a kid.
And this is probably best case. The next is that you’re in service to
someone who is fecund, as the fat sales assistant is, bearing the worst
of her master’s – store owner Wendy’s -- lapses, aping out the worst
of her ridiculousness to pacify her effect, sitting on her hands when
her personal possessions get smashed in error … but at least she isn’t
abandoned.
But if you’re with kid, you’re part of the group which seems bent on
mending any difficulties they have, surmounting any limitations that
have been conceived -- the obtuse will become attendant when it
matters. You’ll cross paths many times, and though you may never
know one another, the possibility is ever possible – and if you do it’ll
be to fortify one another, attaching into one greater complex
macromolecule, interlocking and expanding, exhilaratingly, by divine
right. This ex potencia, which still exists for the young couple for not
talking abortion, for at least being oriented the same as the other far
better economically situated couples, would have been denied them if
they’d considered abortion. Their (even if playfully) at-war ocean-
side food carts would never port into the safe and secure denizens of
the affluent, in loyal vassalage, but also recognizably within the same
family, as the full-sized margarita stand by the pool of the super rich
race driver baits their income-makers with. They’d be the egregious
wedding photo the adopting parents try to hide, but without any
excuse. People can be goofy as they enthusiastically become part of
the married fold – it’s odd commemoration, this Los Vegas-style, but
the attitude is essentially right, and they’re in it all the same. What
they don’t do is have an abortion, inflict willingly the worst possible
out-0f-your-hands calamity. God’s ways might be unknowable, but
it’s easy to spot the mechanisms of the Beast; they tear vicious gaping
cuts through the fabric of reality we’ve all collaborated to knit, leaving
all of us feeling shaken and sundered. Asocial kid killers, with knives
3227
-- slash, slash. It's obvious what we're at some point going to have to
do with them.
----------
Take the kids to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"
Alison Willmore, in her review of "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,"

argues that the film "is a precision instrument aimed directly at the
heart of its intended underserved older audience," and one wonders if
even if its intention was to serve only them, if the reality is that it
could and should serve a swath more. The film, like the Harry Potter
series, features both young and old, with key storylines for both, only
with "Hotel" the focus is on the latter rather than the former. But one
could never say of "Harry Potter" that it's principally for the young,
that it serves its intended audience well -- and only them -- without
expecting reproach for this being obvious nonsense, that "Harry" is,
rather, clearly universal, with appeal to anyone who hasn't lost all
touch with life. In fact, if you were to say that the films / books were
only for the 7 to 12 set (or, as they move along, the adolescent), and
that adults enjoying them probably are still in contact with their
youth but only in a pathetic, sad way, as A.S. Byatt did ... well, take
care, for here very swiftly follows the torrent to bash gravities of
humiliation against your small dribble of bile. But as swift as so many
are to defend books and films thought by some only for children, do
we doubt how few would throw any disconcert Willmore's way for
presiding "Hotel" as "for the aged only"?
What, though, is a 12 year old to make of adults, not in their last years
acting like infants, but maturely trying to square their desire for
renewal, for new life, new adventures, with their understanding that
they are besot with already established life courses, by ruts of routine
responses and resurfacing old tricks, worsening in their ability to
catch some good game? It sure doesn't look much like a ride to entice
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fresh crowds into Disneyland. Yet in this age where we've gotten used
to books and films being targeted to the emotional and intellectual
capabilities of differing children's age groups, to their set-determined
particular interests, there's still the reminder of lasting books written
just a generation or two ago by the likes of Roald Dahl, Richard
Adams, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine l'Engle, E.B. White, and Salinger,
that don't sit so well with the idea that there isn't somehow something
adult, already fathomed in the childish mind. Personally, I've never
thought enough thought has gone into how it is an older writer is able
to write for children at all; instead thinking the proofs on how anyone
cannot but offer, regardless of whom they're intending to write for,
mostly unabashed contact with their 30 -, 40-, 50, 60-ish or on writer
selves. And if children go for it, it has to be that they're very fond
of the adult in these writers, even as they still very much do
appreciate the various considerations allotted them, the faeries, farm
animals, and guardian wizards that assure them this is a world they
can handle.
Even with "Harry Potter" we're already a bit keen to this possibility.
As the series progressed there are encounters simply between adults
that could challenge you to wonder, if all collected and left by
themselves, how bogus it'd be to label them anything short of
literature. I'm thinking in particular of Snape and Dumbledore, of
Snape and Voldemort; with the challenge, subsequent Snape's reveal,
being to determine if the Snape we've long known without fully
knowing his past is fair measure of the key early experiences we are
told have determined him. Yes -- we have to conclude to be satisfied
with the reveal, in a blink sifting through forty or so years of another's
developing -- this product, out of an already complex early
person, could be begot from this; it plausibly fits. And if we're not
similarly now boomer-aged, knowing ourselves how great spans of
time's drift accord with great early pushes in a set direction, how on
earth might we determine this? And yet I think it's possible that we
may. Or if not, at least that we might sense that we've already
experienced enough of life, of how things go, to make us one day feel
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capable of doing so. "I don't quite just now understand you -- but I
did catch sight of you; you're not alien, and feel I'll one day see you
straight," we, the 7 t0 12-year-old kid, even, might well feel the urge
to communicate.
Of course, to say that small parts in children's books and films
perhaps thought mostly for the adults are actually as much still for
children, isn't to say that if "Up" was entirely about the life story of a
loving married couple, or if "Fellowship of the Ring" somehow mostly
about past-prime Bilbo settling into his own exotic hinterlands, kids
couldn't get enough of it. As alluded to, no doubt not to feel
overwhelmed or wretchedly bored it's got to feel about them, not their
grandparents. But as true as this surely is, I'm tempted to argue the
case anyway, perhaps through reminding people of just how literate
people were a generation or two ago, of how many educators hoped to
stuff as much classical literature into you, hoping you'll even oblige
their skipping ahead past more-relatable "Romeo and Juliet" if
"Hamlet" or "Lear" was judged the master work. And of how this
meant early encounters with works we'd introduce college kids to,
presuming the opposite of child-obtuse pedagogy and rather Mozart-
in-the-womb zeroing in on what kids actually need for life.
Presuming something more, actually: that what kids actually most
want is not to be catered to but rather to be introduced to humanity's
show, the best that human heritage has begotten -- the good stuff.
And they realize it not necessarily immediately, without, that is, some
pushing, for garnering something from the great requires adjusting,
at least temporary unsettlement and even repelling dis-ease; but
rather sometime afterwards, after life has gone by some and the new
and one-time perturbing has manifested more clearly as a facilitating
component of you.
There, I moved quickly from being tempted to make the case in favor
of the difficult, the non-pleasing, to actually more-or-less making it;
and I realize I did so because, despite believing that what kids can't
help but love about the literature they read is their contact with adult
minds, and that kids are more perspicacious than we often judge,
3230
capable of encounters with the adult before "this is for kids aged --"
categories look to communicate, it's never the less true that if you
take your kids to "Hotel" they may well hate you for it. Unlike how
the critic Stephanie Zacharek assessed another movie sure to be
thought, as she puts it, "just a little nice movie for grannies and no
one else" -- "Letters to Juliet" -- I cannot, that is, sincerely argue that
kids will like it foremost for the youth they will find in these aging
people. In "Letters," Zacharek found the 73-year-old Vanessa
Redgrave "living assurance that the young people we once were
can stay alive is us, no matter how much we grow and change,"
proclaiming, when Claire finally meets her long-ago love, that "it
takes zero imagination to see the face of the young Guenevere in this
older one." But though with Tom Wilkinson's plot-line in "Hotel" one
can find the near equivalent of this particular moment, I declare
"Hotel" worth a visit primarily because it makes you realize just how
much better than you there is out there; it's appeal lies in its not
being reassuring. It teaches you that all that youthful energy you
possess is not something you should so much be concerned not to
lose, but be concerned to use, to acquire the depth fully available to
you only in growing older.
To be more fair to Zacharek's review, I'll note that though she singled
out the moment of youthful presence in Claire as what in particular
would reverberate with youth, it's clear she thinks they'll actually take
to all they'll see of her. She actually follows proclaiming the film not
just for grandmas by drawing attention to Redgrave's
adult substance, of how she "puts all she's got into something other
actors might cast off," how "[s]he's present every moment," as much
as her youthful vitality. And she takes care to establish the moment
immediately before Claire meets her long-ago love as a complex one,
as something which to fully understand requires testing your acuity,
some extension of yourself into behavior you may not quite be able to
delineate for it possibly not yet being wholy part of your own
resources. This moment's all about adult considerations, about being
aware that however much the 15 year old he fell in love with is gone (a
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cowing realization that has her shelter herself, not so much out of
self-pity but "as if [. . .] trying to hide from herself"), "she's not."
And -- now to be more fair to her as well -- Willmore's assessment of
"Hotel" isn't just that it's pigeoned for old hearts not young ones, that
it's simply "about growing old in a terribly British fashion," but about
not-to-be-missed moments as well, presumably, with her herself
being delighted by them, available to both young and old. She
highlights some of the ones I'd be inclined to; but rather than list
them in the exact fashion she does -- "Billy Nighy joking with Judi
Dench about his inability to fix a telephone, Maggie Smith forcing
down local food in order to be polite, Tom Wilkinson joining in a
game of pickup cricket and Penelope Wilton looking terrified during a
tuk-tuk ride" -- I'd have been tempted to italicize the great actors'
names as well: for what we agree is so special is getting to see great
living people interact smartly with one another, not our chance to see
characters from a book so capably enfleshed. Or do what Stephanie
did with Vanessa Redgrave in "Letters," and involve myself more fully
with why Penelope Wilton making clear with Nighy that it's over
between them, or her thanking Wilkinson for sparing her further
humiliation -- both moments of self-account that reminded you how
much one must have to be able to convey so much self-possession
after catastrophic revelations have deflated you to wondering if you're
a fraud -- is so special.
You get enough of great people here I'd be tempted to compare it to
the Louvre, a storehouse one's never to early to start familiarizing
oneself with; but to flatter it now surely a bit too unjustly, here you
get the artist him/herself, as well as his/her oeuvre: a doubling down
of greatness. "Midnight in Paris" reminded Armond White of how far
these actors were from the greats they portrayed; please don't
underestimate who I wouldn't put these actors toe-to-toe with.
So I think the kids should go to this "Hotel" for the elderly. Don't be
spooked by the specter of death; we're told it's of course going to lurk
everywhere but it proves delineated and contained within a single
source: Tom, the only one not to be sparked to new purpose for his
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chasing down of an old one. If kids never-the-less resist, I'll accord

one legitimate reason why it might still be possible that if they flee
your grasp and escape for, say, one more viewing of The Avengers,
they might be wise to. For this is a time when youth may be less
about vitality than about constantly taking it -- the world does right
now seem to have it out for them, with some now declaring it none
other than a period of child / youth sacrifice, to beget a Generation
Occupy. They may, that is, simply have known just too much of it to
garner treasures from a film where youth are shown denied yet once
again. They could be at the point of psychic toppling, with the trigger
-- who knows exactly what? And the key youth in the film, the young
owner of the hotel, is here mostly denied. Cover is of course
provided, for no older person wants to think themselves intentionally
presiding forever over the young; but there is a sense that the film is
intentionally pitting aggressive youthfulness against elder
wisdom/knowledge of people/canyness and patience, with the latter
lot clearly triumphant. The young owner ostensibly comes out with
his dreams realized, his hotel afloat, and the resplendent wife he's
fought for at his side; but the feel is mostly that he's gone from sole
owner of a hotel to its bell hop, enthusiastically presenting himself to
the ring of a bell. This is good therapy for Maggie Smith's character,
who's been head servant but never inexctricable to the family she
served, but unfair to him.
Still, the last time a generation turned whole-hog on a preceding
generation it judged self-indulgent, the result was some vitality --
they felt they got their own era -- but, in my judgment, also a criminal
curtailing of depth. It was the '30s, with artists who thrived then
sometimes being the ones unable to thrive in '20s Paris, for all the
great but also incredibly daunting personalities they mixed with
there; but were able to once self-sacrifice and common purpose, not
self-indulgence and individual enrichment, became king. Personally,
I'd prefer not to think youth have had it so bad they'll take the barren
ramshackle over the opulent for it at least being theirs, but the film
does argue a case for this as well. So, yes, at the finish, I'll admit there
3233
is still some valid last minute weighing to do ... but please do decide
to take your kids to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel."
----------
Making "The Avengers" -- Men Only
Recently, Andrew O'Hehir had this to say concerning The Avengers

and its (ostensibly) all-male demographic:
I don't think I'm breaking any news if I tell you that "The Avengers,"
Joss Whedon's ensemble action-adventure that unites an entire posse
of Marvel Comics superhoes, will be far and away this weekend's No. !
film at the box office. [. . .] Or that a large majority of those ticket
buyers will be teenage boys and young men. Like most summer
"tentpole" productions -- those designed to support franchises, and
ensure the financial future of major studioes -- "The Avengers" is
aimed squarely at guys under 35, long the demographic, psychological
and economic bulwark of the movie industry.
All this is standard operating procedure in 21st-century Hollywood,
where the industry is dominated by post-boomer males reared on the
comic books, TV shows and blockbuster movies of the ’60s, ’70s and
’80s, and the audience is understood in almost Pavlovian terms as a
slavering horde of permanent adolescents. Audience familiarity and
“pre-awareness” are greatly prized, so nearly all these guy-oriented
movies derive from superhero comics or video games or other
decades-old pop franchises. (It is, of course, possible to go too far into
the pop-culture past. Let’s observe a moment of silence, once again,
for“John Carter.”) We can certainly argue about which of these
movies create an interesting twist on existing formula and which are
cynical crap, but I don’t think we can argue that it makes much
difference to the bottom line. “The Avengers” will make a kazillion
dollars, and so did “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” The differences
between the two are mostly a matter of fine-grained detail; they’ve
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both got cartoonish male bonding, a lot of stuff blowing up, and hot-
chick eye candy.
If you’re female and you’re interested in any or all of the above
pictures, by the way, I apologize for making it sound as if you don ’t
exist. But in marketing terms, you don’t.
[. . .]
All of this reflects deeply ingrained social and cultural ideas about
gender, which are present in people of both sexes. Maybe men ’s
preference for violent action yarns and women’s preference for sappy
love stories — and our tendency to understand one as more “serious”
than the other — are hard-wired in some biological way, although that
falls a long way short of scientific truth. But despite the torrent of
male-centric franchise flicks we’ll see this summer, and next summer,
and for all the summers into the foreseeable future, the tide in the
Hollywood gender wars has begun to shift, slightly but perceptibly.
I personally wonder if what we will see this year, next year, and
further beyond are periodic interruptions by liberals of their basic
enjoying of life to float out mouthy j'accuses at still-male-centric
society, allowing some smaller bite, to come off themselves. And I
wonder if it was time for one such interruption to come from Andrew,
and this is what actually explains why it is only in the comment
section of this article that we learn why Joss Whedon's
Avengers apparently wasn't permeated by Whedon's ostensibly
natural female orientation, rather than for the film being in the end,
mostly all Marvel.
What I am drawing upon here is not right-wing concerns, but rather
that of some leftish occupiers -- Chris Hedges, specifically, as well as
some of truthdig. In "Death of the Liberal Class," Hedges challenged
readers to imagine liberals as mostly being uninterested in what
happens to most Americans, in actually finding them disgusting, and
as having since the late '70s spent their time essentially walling
themselves from them. He contends they've actually become
courtiers, a class distinct from "fellow Americans," and use
"boutique" issues of race and gender to justify their privileges and
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relevancy while keeping the rest of America feeling suspect, probably

owed their inferior place. And so thereby life goes along comfortably,
even if significant changes to American life -- the kind of stuff Hedges
contends liberals once defined themselves by -- are intentionally
forestalled, and democratic America comes to be increasingly
pyramidic -- in accord with liberal preference. If you're on my end,
you might just indicate how much you agree with Andrew, but unless
this becomes your one and only comment ever on a comment section,
a brief passing by conveying no sense that you live on the web but
rather are for the most part out and about on other things, though
your heart will be deemed in the right place, the whole otherwise
anthropology of you will keep you a jumble more than a bit comically
less kept-together than he.
We are told that this essentially is Marvel's picture, not Joss
Whedon's. Personally, I wonder how someone supposedly so infused
with female respect could ever not effuse his affectional ethos all over
a film of his make. If this film does indeed feel all-male, I'd
encourage people to look back on his earlier works for signs of
significant female discomfort that would lead him -- when such could
be excused -- to ultimately seek to sublimate himself into projects
where women end up shoved to the side while male concerns
predominate. A lot of men who champion women are trying to be
good boys, showing their mothers their allegiance to them through
their annhilating misbehaving boy-men -- their own bad boy selves.
These types always find some way to guilt-free revenge themselves
for this ongoing maternal domination, though. For Whedon, it might
have been this opportunity to do damage through the excuse of
following Marvel heritage. Perhaps if this psychology holds true with
Andrew, look for signs of it in the kinds of art movies he can
preference which others blanche at -- ones that contain significant
examples of female humiliation and torture, for example; for with art
films, you could always convince yourself it was the other things that
tintilated, or that the manner of the portrayal conveyed unmistakable
criticism, or some such.
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----------

Stephanie Zacharek, and the news of Avatar 2, 3 and 4
Stephanie Zacharek's review of the film, we note, was very harsh. It's
always great to have her take, but it'd be nice if she'd accord some of
her assertions, particularly this one -- "But if you're out to change the
face of filmmaking, you have to work much harder at a lot of the thigs
Cameron just shrugs off" -- and perhaps also this one -- "In Avatar,
the technology is everything" -- and also this one -- "'Avatar isn't
about actors or characters or even about story; it's about special
effects, which is fine as far as it goes" -- with what actually ended up
happening. Cameron didn't leapfrog off this project; the world, the
people in it, mattered to him -- and do we doubt that audiences
haven't either? And this, his sticking to the Avatar universe, isn't
because he's old, or because Avatar is ideal ground for his special
effects fetish, or because the aquatic's hold on its lifeforms doubles
nicely its recent long hold on him; but rather because despite his early
errancy -- i.e., Titanic's "Goodbye, mother!" - he means to spend the
rest of his life in the lap of his mother deity, Eywa; it really does come
down to that.
Stephanie was astray from the life in this film as she was from the life
in Avengers. This line from her review of Avatar, "It's a remote-
control movie experience, a high-tech 'wish you were here' scribbled
on a very expensive postcard," just like this one from her review of the
Avengers, "all a filmmaker really needs to do is put them all into a big
stock pot filled with elaborate set pieces and some knowing dialogue
and he's golden," shows she's been sending up movies that it turned
out audiences have bought into -- and brother, have they!
Or, audiences these days are such that they fall head over heels for
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movies that really are all about special effects and already-cultivated
prejudices, with tedious characters, no meaningful story
development, and removed directors (Armond White thinks so). It'd
be nice to see her take a momentary break from movie reviews and
write an account of what it's like to draw back from an appraisal of a
film to situate oneself amongst what-turn-out-to-be zombies, who
clearly accepted as hearty feasts what you had established as cold film
corpses.
----------
Iron Man vs. Captain America
Note: this is a reply to Maria Aspan's discussion of the four key

things that worked about the Avengers (at movieline.com).
Re: The Avengers doesn't try to give equal time to each of the
heroes; it might as well be called Iron Man 2.5. Thor is there to
swing his hammer and drop off the villain from his movie, Hawkeye
gets brainwashed before we even know him, and Captain America
fades into Tony Stark's straight man. And you know what? Those
are good things. The movie's already over two hours. And by
choosing a few Avengers to focus on, Whedon made me more
invested in what happened to Stark and Black Widow and the Hulk
during the course of the movie.
Stephanie Zacharek, you'll note, saw it different. She argued that Iron
Man's pronouncement, his "self-important wisecracks, begin to wear
a rut in the movie" -- that he wore on us, leaving the hero who all
along didn't try to hard -- Captain America -- as the stand-out
Avenger. She said it was the hero who remained most human that
you remember; and it is true that the ground fight involving the least
powerful Avengers -- Hawk Eye, Captain America, Black Widow -- left
together enough human precariousness and human uplift to make
them seem for a moment the human core and the rest as external
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battle armaments. I wrote awhile ago, in a comment that may, alas,

have gotten lost in the woods, that we might see in this film a
transitioning away from the super-hero types we've gotten used to
wanting to associate with -- the wise-cracking Wolverine or Iron Man
types -- towards actually wanting the patriotic, the square, the
straight-man types redeemed for our appreciation, even our
identification. I thought the old preference would have to be allayed,
played to, to make the transition possible while keeping our self-
respect. I think we're all still more here with Iron Man than we are
with Captain America, as you argue, but that comment in the film
about America actually being in the mood for old school, and the
scene where Captain America garners the respect of the police force,
began to clear a path, I think, for Captain America to more take over
in the next film -- with his perhaps even being accorded a knock-out
win in an argument with Stark, with average intelligence but solid
virtue stearing wit and snark clear to the side. How this will happen
while engaging an inter-galactic villain, I don't know, but I still expect
to see it.
A final note on this: there was a sense when Iron Man brandied wits
and, well, brandy with Loki, of these two actually being co-
sympathetic, fundamentally akin -- with both being conniving, smart-
as-sin, full-of-themselves court wits, who'll ultimately need to oblige
themselves to more straight-laced kings. You're right -- Iron Man's
sacrifice didn't register (note: I'm referring here to another of
Aspan's comments; specifically that she "believed in Coulson's death
much more than the movie ever made [her] believe that Iron Man
would actually have to sacrifice himself to save Manhattan); and, we
noted, it was the best that he had. Penny is going to need to absolve
him, and perhaps with this, absorb him -- already she wasn't seeming
so second-fiddle; instead as if already reeling in the stray dog wanting
his being reigned in.
----------
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The Avengers -- Review
Note: this review builds on Stephanie Zachareks' review of the movie

at movieline.com
Not to say Loki doesn't have presence, but the story proved to be
about the team settling together in a very satisfying fashion, with
everything else but interjections to this realization.
Personally, the agent getting tongue-tied before an American legend,
perhaps because it was presaged by his being highlighted, playfully,
certainly not sincerely, but still a bit oddly as a romantic rival to
Stark, kind of felt like he was being set up for something -- the
overreaching kid, due a sad fate for being likened to things he'll never
be -- a manly hero; a playboy -- and for never being able to
subsequently quite pull himself tightly together again thereafter. But
you let that momentary consideration dissolve because its purpose of
helping limit the sense of Captain America as anachronistic, now
irrelevant -- a joke -- that nobody too much wants while we're all
becoming entranced to bond with Eastwood, old American virtues,
locales and industry, is effectively lessened here. Anyhow, the
moment felt too functional and too much like it was spotting one guy
out to be affecting. To me, the moments that worked best were when
the heroes have had their fair estimation of one another and have
begun to settle in. Thor standing alone quietly with Hulk for the first
time as mates -- which, other than Hulk's Indiana Jones-like
trouncing of the gloating, over-estimating opponent, might be the
film's most satisfying moment -- worked for this reason first, and
then secondly for the terrific follow-up humor it spawned.
I'm not sure Black Widow's best moment was the one you mentioned.
I was more struck with her encounter with Loki, another plausible
instance where something human -- there's just no denying it! --
could catch short even the likes of "magic and gods"; and so much
more satisfying than when an F-18 or a nuke are used to do the same.
It was a terrific surprise; Loki blanched and guffawed, as we did.
And we were pleased that Whedon didn't let a talent she'd after all
3240
shown she had simply surrender itself because before someone

ostensibly way out of her countenancing; and I thought good for you
Whedon for giving something pronounced to the more simply human
characters -- with Captain America of course getting undaunted
leadership, as well as emblemmanship of the times -- to help settle
them in experientially amongst their powerhouse teammates as
legitimate peers. Hawkeye didn't get a standout trait; but they did
make his arrows something sorta akin to Iron Man's arsenal. And
with him more or less the one exception, and with him being played
by a movie star actor, and with us wanting one or two of the Avengers
to be allowed to sulk a bit in the shadows -- good enough.
----------
Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Hunger Games (novel) -- Review
The basic message of the book is that in a competitive system, the

cream always rises to the top. More than this: than an unsparing
competitive system emboldens life stories so vivid and interesting,
there's nothing their equal in possessing. Withdraw societal life
supports, and though many may die, you'll finally have the chance to
really know what it is to live! Very pro-capitalist. The other lesson is:
if someone in authority gives a girl the highest grade and it makes a
rival male very angry, it's because he's jealous; not, rather, because
the girl was eager to please and a suck-up and so of course was the
one who got the A +.
Reply to this post from Tryfan:
Seriously -- have you read the books? Because that's certainly not
what they're about. I may not be as optimistic as Sutherland, but to
call the "Hunger Games" series "pro-capitalistic", and about "cream
rising to the top" is just plain wrong.
3241
My reply to Tryfan:
Overtly, totalitarianism is criticized in Hunger games; but if you mean
to show how brutal a society is primarily by having it pit young people
to fight to the death in battle royales, you don't (1) show these battles
as serving nicely to out people's true worth; which (2) suggest you
could go through it all and still come out looking the prince or
princess; where (3) people, where kids, who die often overtly deserve
to, have had it coming for a long time, in fact, or find their status
enhanced owing to it; and (4) that you'll come out of them several
steps further along the way of knowing who you really are and what
you want most in life.
The contest begins with Katniss appraised highest by authorities, and
though this must feel good (the novel never has her admit to being
flattered by it -- but boy do we well how important it's been in the
past to the author, and how many readers, using Katniss of course as
their avatar, rejoiced and savored it), the unforgiving contest
demonstrates how much better it feels to prove you're really worth it.
(It also does zero to suggest we actually want authorities outed --
their worth is proved in their rightful assessment of Katniss's, and in
their readiness to oblige their honest assessment, despite it being
culled from affrontery.) The contest could have been efficiently
criticized by showing how it degrades its participants, but Katniss,
though involved in a contest which in order to win must have her
killing kid after kid after kid, isn't involved in even a single one which
sullies her. She kills the brutal boy who dispatched holy Rue; she
with innocence ends the life of the evasive Fox; and with mercy, even,
closes things out on the worst sort of bully in the world. She ends
things for one or two others -- but they're of the favored, mean and
unsparing sort too
... and this is another problem: if you want to criticize a society by
showing it as one which enables contests which kill kids, you don't
depict the contests as producing teams of people so mean they
obviously deserve their deaths, and of others so innocent you just
have to root for them. What is just and unjust looses its fix on the
3242
contest itself and focuses on who, exactly, are the ones to die, and
who, exactly, ends up spared. Further, you don't have the most
innocent -- Rue -- dispatched, but in a way which makes it seem as if
this was the only way for her to become as she was clearly meant to:
that is, of mythic and lasting importance, cemented in the
imagination as heavenly grace once briefly visited upon Earth before
departure owed to what is most crude and coarse in man. Lastly, you
don't make the contest one which loosens people to develop as human
beings: Peeta, through the contest, gets to know a relationship with
the person he's always coveted; and Katniss too begins along a path of
becoming a sexual human being, of in fact initiating all the various
sorting outs that'll lead her to become an adult. Without the contest,
they would have remained stunted the whole of their lives. They
never would have known the beauty of loving cooperation, even,
spared participation in this sort of brutal but ultimately saged, just
competition. Capitalism, of the Spenserian sort, even, has found its
new love-child with this book. Maybe everthing gets righted in the
second and third without requiring a lobotomy before undertaking
them, but I'm not holding my breath.
Reply to this post from Bread & Circus:
Of course, a lot of the brutality is set up to allow Gale to argue that
anything goes in the war against the capital. Unlike most stories
about a hero fighting against a totalitarian regime, Katniss never
takes charge, and never takes over the movement except as a
symbol. I thought the critique of capitalism was in the relationship
between the Capital and the Districts; resources flow into the
Capital and prices are kept artifically low by starving the workers
in the districts. When the districts protest, they are brutally
repressed. This is a bit like when a company (like Shell, for
example) supports a government (like Nigeria) while producing oil
for expot. The government benefits from the profits and represses
the people who say that it isn't a good deal for the country's citizens.
Meanwhile, the company is able to keep cots low becuase it isn't
asked to conform to the environmental or labour standards.
3243
Nigerians get paid crap for working for the company, have to deal
with oil spills and government repression, and we (citizens in
developed countries) get cheaper oil. [. . .] The unequal and violent
relationshi between Panem's capital and districts helps us reflect on
how violence and repression can create unequal relationships in our
"free" market global economy.
My reply to Bread & Circus:
You can and should find major critiques of capitalism and
totalitarianism in these novels -- just not any a leading capitalist or
tyrant totalitarian would be spooked by. If having dignity is
unambiguously associated with being dispossessed, and at major risk
of being lost if one starts to middle or better, totalitarians will know
you have a comfort level with being amongst counted losers you'll
never find courage to really shake off: denied everything, you can't be
shuck of being noble; start accruing, with dreams and hoped-for
aspirations suddenly quite realizable, and you're no longer spared
being assessed a self-focussed, spiteful aspirer.
*****
Jen Yamato:
It can certainly be argued that Collins' book series and the Gary
Ross-directed feature adaptation has the potential to influence a
generation of youngsters who'll come for the sci-fi escapism and
leave the theater appreciating its personal messages of personal
accountability and standing up for what's right in the face of
impossible odds. More subtle are the franchise's critiques of
capitalism, celebrity, and media exploitation; if The Hunger Games
succeeds in teaching kids to think critically about reality television
alone that will be some sort of cultural coup.
My response to Jen Yamato:
Re: More subtle are the franchise's critiques of capitalism, celebrity,
and media exploitation.
Super subtle, or they don't in fact exist? Katniss is the opening
ceremony's sensation; she is the darling of the selection process,
gathering the highest score and the most focused attention of the
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scorers; she is the prime focus of the contest's otherwise most worthy
participant -- Cato -- and of its most self-sacrificial and virtuous --
Peeta; the cameras that are everywhere can't help but fixate on
winsome, deadly her: this is what kids will take from the movie,
because its evidently of prime importance to the author -- there's
nothing better than being the star! But though it's what you covet,
you can never admit this to yourself -- to do so would make you
selfish, crass, a for-sure climber, not the superior princess of the ball
who only gets lofted owing to superior qualities one can do nothing to
disown oneself of. The author is experiencing her dream self through
Katniss, which involves being the star at everyone else's expense; but
to eliminate the guilt, her subconscious makes sure to pretend as
primary, as the implied take, that Katniss really isn't into all the
attention and accolades she garners ... and nor should you be.
Katniss is an exercise in developing a false consciousness. You get to
pretend to be the saint while actually nurturing the kind of stuff that
would have you knife in the back anyone who would steal even one
photon of your greedily-clung-to limelight.
Reply to this post from Bread & Circus:
Except that the kids in the districts don't really have a choice in
being a star. Someone is going to be. Also the poorest kids have to
increase their odds of being chosen if they want to feed their
families. Then after it's all over, the tribute who won is in the
control of the president forever because of threats to their families. I
don't know if the movie will focus on this, but all the star treatment
and circus surrouding the tributes is really just to retty up and cover
up the control and force used to maintain the status quo in Panem.
What I like most about the Hunger Games is you can argue and
think about it for ages.
My reply:
If I sensed that the author wanted most for people to simply live
authentically, regardless of whether or not they're appreciated for
what they think, feel or do, I would have praised her for it. What I
sensed, was a novel that registered that its readers want to believe
3245
themselves authentic -- but in truth really most wanted to be attended

to and feel the rush of being superior to every dispossessed one of
miniscule the rest of you. As such my criticism. The author so felt the
guilt of imagining herself annointed and above thee, she gave
everyone aplenty "truths" they as a chorus could unite behind to
abash demons popping up proclaiming -- nay!
----------
Hunger Games (film) -- Review
Katniss's district is shown as so drained of vitality, she, Gale, and

Peeta come across as Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli did when they first
entered the no-more-cheer-than-a-graveyard domain of the subjected
Horse Lords. The result is that the Reaping looks like just as good an
opportunity to actually save oneself as Gale's proposal to flee into the
forest does: the Opponent is becoming as weak and drained as all the
adults have become. This is true for all the kids actually reaped --
excepting the ones killed off in the first few minutes, dull as
dishwater, excepting the frizzy-haired boy, who might in some
alternate universe had a one-in-a-million chance to jump-start into a
Sideshow Bob. Gale is a stag; Katniss, your alert, quick deer; and
Peeta the one a sophisticate would assess as so multi-capable his
great flaw is that, owing to his mother's apparently catastrophic
denial of him, though he can with facility heft hundred-pound bags he
isn't anywhere near knowing the extent of his reach. Rue is supposed
to remind Katniss of Prim -- but this is crazy talk: she is further proof
that the Reaping took Katniss away from country debilitation toward
being amongst "Princeton's" shining elite -- these type have got it so
going on they even know what it is to loosen themselves to impish
play.
The favored district is composed of non-blanched meanies; but upon
watching the film I realized the experience of their involvement with
3246
Rue, Thresh, Peeta and Katniss is kinda like the popular high school
set figuring out exactly how best to deal with spark-possessing new
varietals that one day might compose a competing rival one: even
while conniving how to dispose of them, pick them off, one by one,
they're experimenting with and enabling the mental/physical/spatial
relocations that could let them acceptably fit them in as their own.
This is a bit of a stretch, I know, but it is still the close high school
equivalent.
It's the crowds that stand apart. It may be that in their united fealty
to Katniss, District 12 figures in the imagination as pure, while the
Capital is set as a grotesque -- but I am pausing on this one. If so,
however, the film does enable a certain class of people for ruthless,
empathy-denied elimination -- the Capital's crowds of splendor-
entranced, disconcerned entitled elitists; and for this then should the
film principally be explored for its say on fascism.
*****
Jake's comment at Movieline.com:
[. . .] Consequently, I found the arrogant "bad boy" teen leading the
group of evil teens to be far more interesting a character with his
simple moment in the finale when he suggested that all the killing he
did was not worth it. That moment of regret showed more depth
than katniss, Peeta, Rue (sp?) and all the other characters combined.
My reply:
Cato's final moment wasn't for me so much the character regretting
as the film archly regrouping to argue the contest as simply an evil
thing, rather than as a glorious opportunity for come-uppance on the
arrogant popular kids (with denouement looking to involve wizened
commentary on the sure fall of the arrogant). I believe, though, that
Cato spent his last moments sniffling something Peetaish -- that
special Miss Katniss was of course the one in the end who was going
to prove victorious. I preferred the book where he was kept such an
arrogant, powerful brute, Katniss wasn't sure he couldn't even have
made his way through all the dogs (which were, by the way, way too
inflated in the film -- Conan, let alone Cato, would find himself evenly
3247
matched if pit against one). I will cooperate and acknowledge there is

a way in which Cato's sniffling seems in character -- or, rather, at least
in archetype: he might be Hubris recognizing that Selflessness is
what in the end is armor-clad by God. Cato's group did seem as if
versions of the fallen out of Paradise Lost or Pilgrim's Progress -- or
perhaps better, out of Greek myths -- with each ordained an
appropriate fall for claiming glories belonging solely to the gods:
Glamored-up becomes hideous; tall-as-a-tree is shot through at the
trunk; furious dexterity is humbled by unabashed strength; Hercules-
proud and strong, crushed by a pride of much stronger lion-dogs. It's
enough there, I think, to make Katniss and Artemis comparisons at all
worth our bringing up.
----------
Mirror Mirror -- Review
Almost from the start you feel the director's efforts to please the
audience's key and only regal lady -- the blossoming young woman,
traditionally picked on by patriarchy, and whose current allegiance
guarantees you status as a modern man that gets to lubricate with
subservience but without any contestation, the way ahead -- and so
the Queen's proclamation that it is her story being told is really
understood as falsehood, pretty much moment one. The film pleases
those who are pleased when people fuss effort over them -- and much
effort is fussed here. It is to update Grimm, but with every particular
summoned, dissipated for its patriarchy, chill, bigotry, and anti-
democratic sentiment. But with enough kept of at least the protector
man so the tentative, growing girl gets the expected satisfaction of
feeling notably special, as well as the sure companionship of someone
to serve as the adroit male draught horse who's to accompany her
along and familiarize her with, life's unsteadying rush of dramatic
new impulses. And also too, to have us forget about all that servile
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mechanism-pulling, curtain-raising / closing, young Queen-pacifying

sweat and stress -- to lose sight of the chamberlain -- and simply
enjoy the movie.
If there is dissent in the movie, some measure of the not fully
accounted for that could maybe one day locate ruin upon all that's
been claimed, it's not the late arrival of the ostensible penultimate
grim moment -- the Queen's sly bequeathing of the ruinous poisoned
apple; that thunder had already been claimed by the Queen's surprise
popping up into Dwarvish denizens to introduce the Beast to Snow
White, a silly, appropriately ill-defined entity doomed as much as
everyone else to register the princess's bequest. Rather, it's the
Queen's isolated mirror-retreat, which way trumps the dwarfs' made-
to-be-domesticated forest composure to serve as an impenetrable
man-cave in the film, and which at the end no one but the old Queen
is aware of.
To be more clear: This film showed "Brave" in the previews, where
the great opponent to spirited young-intelligent-girl-assent is not
boys, nor Father, but very clearly pissed-off Mother; and it seems
pretty clear to me that if one is to look most clearly for dissent from
men in this era of female appeasement, it's going to be located in the
safer armor of older lady garb. In this film, her remaining retreat is, if
slight, and hardly even still clearly aligned to her, still the only
remaining antidote to the princess's chilling final conquestorial
gesture and proprietary dance and song at her absolutely-everyone-
now dominion of the realm.
----------
American Reunion -- Review
Perhaps it's the foremost goal now for most people, not to be a
runaway success, but to situate yourself so you get a comfy-enough
seat in which to watch how it all unravels. It's been 13 years, and it
3249
seem the point of the reunion is to strip away whatever attenuations

becoming visibly adult after high school brings upon you -- something
for self-esteem purposes you need to feel you'd donned -- to mostly
lounge back, lifelong, into a niche, a "knit," you've always known as
pleasing and comfortable. Well, for these characters -- good for them.
It'd be nice to see people settle into their permanent habitat after
they're fully formed rather than while shadows of greater essences --
of true world-exploring adventurers, of truly individuated, mature
couples; but I think even with where they remain they'll have fun,
know some good living.
I think they'd be wise, though, not to be made subjects for any further
films. Stifler, the only one of them who remains an agent of true
living -- that is, not just a joiner in common-place activities like
horking down hotdogs with genial-enough friends, but generating,
initiating upon them new adventures, experiences and landscapes --
seems pretty much near used up by film's end, exhausted from having
to play through all the requisite and predictable (note: in a time
where collectively to help bide time we make ourselves feel evolved
and accomplished perhaps primarily by ridiculing white male alphas,
it plays out as requisite, not a surprise, that his high school sports-
mates are all gay) humiliations that have to be suffered upon him.
The film seems to realize as much, as an effort -- a sustained one -- is

made to resuscitate him in the last few moments before the finish. All
of a sudden after so much victimizing he's generously funnelled every
plausible available target to feast and food for himself through
thorough banging or deflating -- without of course -- or at least done
in a fashion that gives ready avenue for denial -- chisseling away one
iota at categories of people we are fully vested in remaining
righteously affiliated with -- some renewal and vitality. But it still
plays out with him seeming more like their potentially straying,
thoroughly wrought-over, hyper-respondant traumatized dog than a
co-equal who can confirm with what he generates that yet still with
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ample provisions, mapped-out destinations, and of course, pre-

selected accomodations, they'll know in life some subsequent true
adventure.
----------
Dark Shadows -- Review
You might like this film, if your thing is to be in near proximity to

someone who can be tight to the world as a sealed box. With the help
of hypnotism, past connections, or, for us, an entising opening, we all
come to him; and though we press upon him sufficiently to make him
lean, we feel -- withstood. I'm tempted to say he's a (Karen)
Carpenterish restrained school girl, budding, but with books tight to
the chest to keep from betraying herself with jiggle. But I probably
say this mostly because the finish has the just-passed-pubescence,
adolescent girl growing all hairy and unruly, raging all out at the full-
figured presuming witch who dared trespass into her room. It flashed
upon us like a primal scene amidst otherwise decanted space, maybe
searing into our memory. Afterwards, the boy finally summons up
his ghost -- leaving it to a woman (the ghost's his mother) to unleash
the arsenal required to daunt the witch -- and the ocean opens us up
to a subsequent villain, but to no avail: we'd sealed up already,
content with the first-offered surprise reveal.

Saving Liberals from Chris Hedges
Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges (2010)

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-----
Saving Liberals from Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges, in Death of the Liberal Class, ostensibly isn’t wishing

the liberal class to die – he’s simply demarcating it as deceased, or so
he argues – but he certainly doesn’t have much good to say about it
either, and as a DeMausian psychohistorian, I’m probably normally
not much in mind to defend it myself. He describes it, the liberal
class – a composite of left-leaning artists, journalists, and academics:
lefty intellectuals – as if it entrance to it now requires abdicating
anything that meaningfully defined liberals as liberal in the first
place. You have to agree to no longer serve, to betray, the people,
their best interests, and effectively end up sycophants to the
mandarin corporate ruling class. And to see my sort of psychohistory
at all accepted within academia right now, I would likely have to see it
especially emphasize the destructive aspects of patriarchy, how it
afflicts women; I would have to see it value all periods of history,
applauding any acute psychohistorical study, whether it concern
Ancient Greeks or modern times; and I would have to see it adopt the
academic tone and focus tightly on subject matter, thanking friends
and loving support “for making our work possible” but otherwise
keeping our personal life, and the personal—out. And this would
mean full disrespect of the remarkable truth that patriarchy, though
indeed now retrograde, was once significant psychogenic evolution—
people moving up the scale. It would mean implicitly slighting the
fact that evolution of the old kind, gradual betterment of people
through time, is real, that the further you go into the past the more
primitive the people you are dealing with are, making deeper descent
into history an increasingly more harrowing descent that at some
point must stop you into bluntly asking yourself why you were so
eager to climb down in the first place? It would mean betraying our
awareness that our families didn’t just give us the support we needed
3252
but likely determined exactly what we’re up to in this reified realm of

scholarship, and that the measured, neutral, reason-clearly-in-
charge-here voice usually shows signs of its being an older
psychoclass innovation. It would mean betraying what I ought to
love, degrading myself, ostensibly too, from heights to lows, knight to
accomplice, elf to forlorn orc. Nevertheless, if I am true to what I’ve
either learned or confirmed from exploring DeMausian
psychohistory, I’m not about to judge Hedges my peer; and am in fact
trying to use the book to help keep faith in the same liberal
establishment which treats the sort of psychological ideas so precious
to us so very warily.
THE LIBERALS’ STORY: HEDGES’S TAKE

Hedges holds that those who believe in human perfectibility are
ruinous to the maintenance of the best that human beings can
actually hope to achieve. His sort of liberals – the classic ones – born
in the 17th century and who experienced their heyday in the late 19th
and early 20th, were perfectly clear-headed, however, in that they had
a skeptical attitude towards human beings, believed that though
conditions on earth could be improved it’s never going to be made a
utopia—for people are constituted so that they cannot be made all
good. They guarded against parts running rampant over wholes, in
particular, private interests and self-serving passions over –
respectively – the structuring of society and overall bent of mind. The
mind was best constituted with reason checking passions; and
society, with multifarious interests and independent viewpoints
having to contend, indeed, often highly combatively, with one
another. The high-times of American society – still mostly
decentralized, with regions and interests fruitfully engaged yet still
clearly separate – had this, but was sundered of it rapidly once
independence of mind, independence in general, was made to seem
injurious, traitorous, to hope of victory in the First World War, and
with liberals coming to see a fractious society as inconsistent with
their new view of human beings as perfectible and society as
3253
potentially harmonious. The state concentrated, opinion

concentrated and “narrowed,” at the same time as liberals came to see
concentrated power as necessary to disseminate their message of
human perfectibility and the subconscious-targeted manipulations
required to unleash it in the mass (62-63, 101-103). The end result,
according to Hedges, was of course not perfection en masse, but
rather mass degradation—people lost much of their Puritan inner
guardedness, of guilt, and let themselves be ruled by their passions
(101-103). And from the 1980s on, liberals full-scale abandoned the
public they had, with two notable exceptions, spent their time
annihilating much of the dignity of, to competitively compete with
one another for corporate support—only corporations, now having
the public they always wanted, and apparently feeling less the need to
keep liberals afloat “as a prop to keep the fiction of the democratic
state alive” (25), soon started abandoning the-now-useless them to
their death knell. What follows for all of us is surely the chaos of
hypermasculine response to widespread powerlessness, unless
somehow some brave someone sounds a clarion call that draws fallen
liberals back amongst the people.
THE LIBERALS’ STORY: THE DEMAUSIAN TAKE

The DeMausian take on liberals in the 20th century can be reached
simply by inversing everything Hedges says. The altered liberals, the
ones that came to genuinely hope for the elimination of all strife and
who thought they saw its realization in the near future, weren’t fallen
but rather progressed from their classic predecessors. The classic
liberals were notable, for being an advancement beyond their
medieval/renaissance predecessors, and for representing a belief in
what human beings were capable of (and deserved) that lead to
considerable social reforms, but only, really, in the now very qualified
way that patriarchy was an advancement over matriarchy: It should
look good to you—but only until you become familiar with what all
succeeded it. The changed liberals Hedges deplores were no-doubt
members of a superior psychoclass, who stopped seeing strife and
3254
division as necessarily a good thing[1] for having experienced the

truly better things issuing from out of their less divided, less
“intrapsychically” stricken minds (DeMause, Foundations of
Psychohistory, Creative Roots, 1982, 238).[2] That they saw within
human grasp, utopia, speaks strongly to their credit: because it was
only with this psychogenic advance in ambition that the inequalities
and cruelties the classic liberals understood as not just ineradicable
but, in full honesty, as actually desirable – for it well communicating
the fact of human imperfectability and the limit of their potentially
hubristic highest accomplishments – could in fact begin to be
eradicated. It would mean the reduction in size of a handy class of
people to project all one’s anxiety-arousing desires into; but they were
better prepared to handle this great but daunting leap forward as
well.
WHO REALLY BETRAYED WHOM?

The “growth” Hedges believes liberals sadly ended up leading the
public into, and that he deems as only wholly regrettable mass lapsing
to base drives, wasn’t on the contrary simply a beautiful thing. The
socializing-psychoclass dominated 20th century, with its erotic
materialism, its “my soul would be quiet if only everyone could buy
endless material goods” (DeMause, 237), certainly didn’t have it all
figured out. But still what they sought out in life was far from vile,
and overall represented true growth in human ambition. Indeed, it
could at times simply be about joy in living, playful experimentation
and expansion of self, not simply the quieting of the disquieted soul,
one of the two periods Hedges applauds liberal participants within
partook of in a variety of ways. In fact, it was really generous true
display of fidelity to the larger public’s best interests displayed by
postwar liberals during the 60s and 70s that lead the public to, in
effect, shortchange, to betray, its further fruition in the 80s. Hedges
regrets that, unlike their 30s ostensible counterparts, 60s liberals
were of two parts when they would have been best served if composed
of but one. They were, wonderfully!, truly with the people and for
3255
conflict, for fighting vested interests in way of common cause and

social improvement; but they were also, so sadly!, so ultimately
doomingly!, for urging everyone to realize the American Dream – the
spread of hedonism (even Martin Luther King, who, Hedges believes,
compares poorly with his counterpart, Malcolm X [184-185]) – as
well. But the truth is that it was because they were so full of
hedonistic impulse, or rather, of genuine, untainted love of
themselves and the possibilities of life, that we know their social
reforms were moved out of good—the former lead to the firm
expectation of the other. If reform was moved by a more staid, more
degraded impulse it might have lead to the results of reform efforts in
the 30s, which may in fact, if what reformers then mostly worked to
do was confirm a public’s substitution of bland, mundane aspirations
for previous exciting Jazz Age ones, have been about cementing the
neutering of dreams than their partial realization, defining them and
shutting them down until new life could begin after the war. It would
have made the 60s liberals their opposites, and only now kin to those
who thrived in the 30s, their ostensible counterparts, when group
phase had regressed gaspingly to Depressed from thrillingly
Innovative.
HEDGES’ GROWTH PANIC

DeMausians appreciate that if 80s on liberals actually came to
despise ordinary people, this was, though still unfortunate,
understandable, for ordinary people were responsible for the creation
of an environment which would objectively make them seem less and
less appealing. For three decades, they, the ordinary people, those of
lesser psychoclasses, were mostly in-sync with the less ordinary, the
members of higher ones. They permitted and engaged with the
reforms, the expansions of experience, of pleasure, the more loved
and evolved amongst them lead them onto, were allowed to lead them
onto, owing to pretty much everyone feeling that some great
mountain-world of happiness had been earned to partake in by the
giant sacrifices endured through the Second World War and the two
3256
decades of dreariness previous to it. Three decades—until the more

regressed psychoclasses experienced in a way that could not
temporarily be abated through war or recession but only through the
more total sort of renouncement involved in what we understand as
historical group phase change, their maternal alters chastising them
for pleasing themselves too much, threatening upon them
abandonment which spoke to them as death.[3] Truly good things
began to look mostly sinful, and bland things, more appropriate, if
not exactly desirable, for the former speaking louder of guilty self-
pleasure and the latter of its forsaking. And they “decided” to help
more fully demarcate themselves from those with self-respect by
bonding themselves to the likes of sludge-pile Limbaugh while
innovation-prone liberals sought out refinement on the coasts, with
Prada, with Armani.[4] And what happened to the 80s psychoclasses
that finally succumbed should be understood as incurring upon Chris
Hedges right now.
Hedges is now fully with the people. He announces this fact,
entrenchs it so that it is sunk into his every thereafter-moment in the
text, by beginning his book with a vivid personal account of one
suffering owing his being criminally forsaken: people like him –
specifically, one Ernest Logan Bell – are not only always on his mind
but much closer than any time previous, his near proximity. He
makes clear he wasn’t always “here,” though, that before as an
employee of the New York Times he existed within a highly seductive
culture, daily-exposed to voices that baldly tempted sin but also
heights fully and thrillingly aloof from pedestrian morality. Exposed
to the same, he lets Doug McGill, an employee of the Times for ten
years, recount its essence: “[I]f you keep writing good stories you will
keep getting access to the CEO plus perks like lunches and home
telephone numbers for future stories” (133); “I was beginning to get
too used to having mayors and governors and CEOs call me up, as if I
were a friend, and pay for my dinners and give me their press releases
and have me describe them in glowing terms” (134). But he, Hedges,
found way to stick to his principles, something that ultimately lead to
3257
his being loudly booed at universities and coldly dismissed from the
Times—badges he wears and prouds around in his book that serve,
like warriors’ wounds, to announce his commitment away from
himself, apart from his previous life which he had come to
essentialize as soul-claiming and self-indulgent for so baldly
proclaiming that it might be okay to claim something all for yourself,
without even any tinge of morality to buttress or qualify it. Given that
all such are described as having to go through the same humiliations
– and be clear, the humiliation rites he describes are not really to be
understood as descriptions of what happens to those who balk
establishment expectations but as markers required to delineate one
as martyr-hero[5] – it leads to him being counted in his own mind
within the same class of those, the real greats, who, for speaking
inconvenient truths, incur sharp miniaturization in status and
subsequent near-empty-cupboard levels of financial compensations.
It could us draw us to think of him along the lines of Chomsky, who
comes up frequently in the text to serve as the lone hero who braved
balking establishment consent we should all try to emulate, or of
Michael Moore, who got booed and jeered at the Oscars for speaking
off message, or of Ralph Nader, who drew upon himself a whole
chatter-classes’ animosity for presuming the same could be
institutionalized and perhaps one day even the norm; but perhaps
because it is difficult to talk of these renowned figures and simply
conjure up feelings of disavowal, to delineate the fate of those who
speak truth to power he temporarily delimits our attention to the sad
fate of mostly-unknown-to-us Finkelstein, who for “refus[ing] to back
down” and “demolishing myths surrounding Israel” (151) incurred a
life sentence of marginalization and a frozen income level of $15, 000
to $18, 000 a year.[6]
Whatever actually develops with him, the-now-ever-increasingly-
renown Hedges, he made his choices assuming they meant his
following the martyr’s path: this is the truth he will cling to, and you
are not to question it! If you indeed questioned how much his
principled stand was mostly egoism, hoping to prompt him to
3258
question if his description of martyrs, with it involving “defiance and

execution [that] condemns [the] [. . .] executioners” (206), likely had
an aspect of relish to it that told the truer tale,[7] he’d probably ask
you when the last time was you’d volunteered in a soup kitchen? And
after debasing you by suggesting how reluctant you are to do the least
bit to close with the suffering – and note, it wouldn’t have mattered if
you could recall a recent time you had, for he would understand it as
merely show, an anxiety-ward, a “boutique” gesture – he’d follow
through with more thunderous humiliation by asking you when the
last time was you risked loss of life or career termination for a cause
you believed in?[8] Then he’d quickly slide past you for knowing for
not simply assenting to him, guaranteed, you’re part of the amalgam
of outraged left who seek to bring down people like him simply for the
crime of showing up their own emptiness,[9] and are a complete
waste of his further time. You’re one of those he’s encountered time
and time again who’ve left him with remembrances that have piled up
in his mind so readily and appropriately as simply more heaps onto
an already comically massive pile of degrade, it might draw him to
laugh. That is, one who “engage[s] in useless moral posturing that
requires no sacrifice or commitment” (156),” is “childish” (194), has
been “rendered impotent” (19), who has “nothing to offer but empty
rhetoric” (9), possesses an “irrational lust for power and money that
is leading to collective suicide” (194), is “passive” and only encourages
“rot” (200), who “wallow[s] in the arcane world of departmental
intrigue and academic gibberish” (126), is beholden to those “not
endowed with decency or human compassion” (204), is “seduced by
careerism” (142), is damningly “complicit in the rise of [. . .]
oligarchy” (142), who “hide[s] [his] cowardice behind [his] cynicism”
(205), who would applaud the aghast act of “shoving a health care bill
down our throats” (27), who is “smarmy,” “fatuous,” oily,”
“buffoonish, “ignorant,” a “parasite” and a “courtier” (190), and so on.
[10]
WHAT THE TRUTH HAS TO FACE

3259
I realize I could make either Chomsky or Nader (or even maybe my

foremost hero, Paul Krugman) look bad through a selective massing
of their quotes, but with them I would be sure to suggest, probably
through an equally large counter, that they are still warm men who
mean most everyone well—for they would be delighted if through
their efforts more people became happier; I feel it in them, these
hubristic leaders permitted to rise and draw us closer to the ideal
during our last growth phase, through all the disgust and other-
evisceration, however aplenty. But though they’re his heroes, I judge
this simply not so with depression-hefted Hedges, who’ll I’ll let be
understood by these actually-not-so-selective quotations without
attenuation for being someone who to me will only be satisfied when
most people count amongst the humbled, not the happy. I feel I
might possibly get through to Chomsky or Nader in a way I never
could with him; for with these two counter-evidence, proof of errors
of observation or presumption, that could lead to more self-
awareness, wouldn’t be abused into mere opportunity to cement a
rigid course—something they were evidently primed to cripple and
then assimilate within a pre-existing schema. If Hedges, clearly
under the rule of his maternal alter, obsessed as he is in seeing the
neglectful and self-centered punished, let in information that
unmistakably communicated to his subconscious fidelity to truth, at
all times, truly above anything else, his alter would immediately
understand the implications of it and remind him why he installed it
in as his protector, his super-ego, in the first place.
Even if his disposition, his emotional well being, his psychoclass, was
equivalent to Chomsky’s and Nader’s, you’d still have to be really
skilled to draw him to doubt, for each of these men believe they ’ve
already fully delineated what is unreal in this world and possess as
heightened a sense of raw pure truth as is possible to achieve. To us
psychohistorians it may seem ritualistic, a bit too apropos, pre-
determined, childishly simple and binary, that once you’ve come to be
able to acutely diagnose the mistruths of those who hold power you
end up inevitably finding such great virtue in those most afflicted by
3260
them, but nevertheless ordinary people cannot be understood by

these men as other than noble-hearted John Bulls. Perhaps one of
the reasons for this incredible inability to consider them differently,
more skeptically, is that they probably believe they have been so
abundantly induced to think of them as ignoble by scorning liberal
brethren, that surely long ago they engaged with its possibility in full
—it’s simply to be presumed, and its simply on to long overdue
redemption. But with Hedges, at least, the primary explanation
actually lies in his so coming to see suffering people as doing, simply
with their suffering, something noble, as being noble, that their
overall degradation as human beings can’t be seen. Hedges and the
multiple of leaders that will emerge during this depression will draw
us so very close to the people’s suffering for the same reason “heroes”
allowed to emerge in the Great Depression, such as John Steinbeck,
did: to confirm that people are doing as directed and making much of
the rest of their lives about withering for previously having made it
for so long about self-enrichment.[11] They’ll weave romance around
brutal suffering, cast a chilly spell that fully obfuscates but suffices to
calm: “All we expect ‘is’ the absolute basics, and for this we submit—
Won’t Mother now you just let us be?”
THE DEMAUSIAN FIX

I understand that my analysis looks, with its identification of Hedges
as someone who has come to hate anything that smacks of true
growth, to be aggressing to view the group he despises, contemporary
liberals, as golden. I don’t think they are, and so my start of the costs
larger acceptance amongst them would currently require for
DeMausians. But I think more than just that their helping bulwark a
society of “mak[ing] more money, meet[ing] new quotas,
consum[ing] more products, and advanc[ing] careers” (200) is
preferable to the payback and full-stop Hedges wants to get behind
and the cleansed society he wants to help put in place, more than just
that the “specialist[’]s master[y] [of] narrow, arcane subjects and
disciplines” (115) sounds like far better bedding for the next growth
3261
phase to arise in than Hedge’s “righteous thunder” and “implo[sions]”

(140) does, more than just their ostensibly typical belief that “if our
repressions can be removed – by confessing them to a Freudian
psychologist – then we can adjust ourselves to any situation”
(Malcolm Crowley, quoted in Hedges, 101) sounds better for the
future of psychohistory than Hedge’s disdain for self-esteem
movements, for psychoanalysis proper, and the “preoccupation with
the self” (111) does. I think that as many of the highest psychoclass
liberals watch their peers rapidly start sounding like Hedges (the
online liberal magazine Salon, frequently accused of being too
lifestyle focused and pointless, has, for example, recently relaunched
itself as aggressively populist, encouraging readers to support its
abandonment of fluff for the righteous fight by becoming “core”
members), regressing into conflict-obsessed warriors akin to him,
they will from being disturbed, rattled and alienated by their alien
thunder become more cognizant of who truly are their natural peers,
and psychohistorians will find themselves gifted through the
mechanism of psychoclass migration and realignment with some very
talented people to further their own studies—right now. Liberals
haven’t exactly been golden, but fidelity to them may help gift us with
another golden age of psychohistorical studies, way before it was in
fact due.
[1] No doubt, also, a strong centralized state was less offensive to

them owing to their experiencing more abatement of early placental
smothering from their less needy, better assuaging, more-your-own-
needs-concerned themselves-better-loved psychoclass mothers.
[2] This is not to say that unification during the period Hedges speaks
of it largely arising – the First World War – wasn’t actually mostly for
3262
a short time simply a truly regrettable regression into growth panic-

spurred group think, but that its ongoing continuation should be seen
as owing to psychoclass innovation.
[3] For the degree to which “death” is infused with feelings of

annihilation incurred from maternal rejection, see of course Joseph
Rheingolds’ The Mother, Anxiety, and Death (Little Brown, 1967).
[4] The 80s-on mass concentration of liberals to the coastal cities

should be understood as a wisely informed psychoclass migration;
unfortunately one that didn’t let itself be quite segregated enough.
[5] Or rather, hard-to-acquire prizes, that sparkle forth as if giant

gushing gem-stones, which could draw upon him a charge of vanity
that might stick if he doesn’t stop showing them to people, and put
them down for awhile.
[6] As opposed to those professors we remember Hedges delineating

for us at the beginning of the text, the ones apt to earn $180, 000, not
$18 000, “so long as they refrain[ed] from overt political critiques”
(10).
[7] Specifically, that executioners should properly be understood here

really as patsies upon which one’s own martyrdom is exultantly
executed.
[8] For, yes, to Hedges, what happened when he spoke unpopular

truths on campuses make him, in essence, the soldier who took
bullets for the crowd (he refers to himself as someone “inflicted [with]
career wounds” [127])—showing each other their wounds, neither in
his mind would trump the other: I dare you to read this book and
judge any different.
[9] About the liberal establishment’s reaction to Chomsky, Hedges

3263
writes, “He has consistently exposed their moral and intellectual

posturing as a fraud. And this is why he is hated” (35-36).
[10] Presuming higher discourse than the like he’d encounter on Fox
News, after having previously been asked by Kevin O’Leary if he was a
“left-wing nutbar” on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company)
interview show, the “Lange & O’Leary Exchange” (Oct. 6, 2011), a
disgusted Hedges snorted, “it’ll be the last time,” after at the end
being thanked for appearing. One wonders how less offensive
Hedges’ own scornful 3-word encapsulation of the liberal class would
be – and if something likely, like “fetid, cowardly, sycophants,” if this
would be something he’d hesitate to say on a respected stage?
[11] Though Hedges sees Steinbeck as noteworthy for raising a

nation’s moral reach by balking mean stereotypes through his
capacity to empathize, show skepticism, and his startling willingness
to verify what was really going on amongst the destitute – showing in
detail what was happening to them in material terms (138) – I agree
with Morris Dickstein’s assessment of him in Dancing in the Dark
(Norton, 2009) as instead someone who helped homogenize people
into homo economicus, who played to preferences at the price of the
real, who couldn’t empathize with those he closed in with enough to
not mistake them for possessing inner resources sufficient to power
heroic endurance simply impossible for people so stricken to be able
to possess (140), and who cursed a Depression generation by helping
cement it with an “apotheosis of the real, the material, with [a] [. . .]
grave suspicion of the imagination” (107).

3264
Wanting War, Jeffrey Record

-----
Jeffrey Record, in “Wanting War,” would have you know that the Iraq
war was/is a war of hubris, that Iraq presented no pressing threat but
an enticing prize, neo-cons and George W. Bush made use of a
nation’s powerful need to simply trust to empower their intent to go
after. I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, and possibly long, long
ago accepted it in full, thinking what we most needed to know about
the war has been repeatedly revealed; and perhaps for this reason,
principally, we should go into why Record’s account does us all little
good.
BUSH’S LURCH
Record wants to leave no doubt that Bush’s decision to go to war with

Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the new realities of the world
revealed by the attack, and as such, left us all of course in a much
worse fix (with such like Iran’s influence on Iraq now even being
greater). Afghanistan was the more likely suspect, not Iraq; regional
history was ignored rather than carefully studied; old gripes and
plans, not newly awakened sensitivities, the primary movers. It was
an abashingly stupid and ruinous thing to have done, and it depended
entire on the “confluence of George W. Bush, neoconservative
influence, and 9/11” (p. 92). The neo-cons had always wanted
America’s foreign policy to be about showing all of America’s scummy
enemies that it meant business, and thought to communicate this
most clearly by every once in a while focusing intently on one of them
and eviscerating them, as an object lesson to the others (pp. 92-5).
They took advantage of a President who had no clear-cut foreign
policy and could be lured by their offering of a plan which would offer
profound personal satisfaction – in that it would lay waste to a
personal enemy, Saddam, who’d greatly afflicted his father and, with
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America’s withdrawal in the previous Iraq War, hadn’t quite yet

sufficiently been paid back for all his harm; and in it matching his
preference for Manichaen, simplistic, solutions to pressing problems,
to become a blessed chosen agent of God.
Record argues this war had one very noteworthy success – it did
create a “nominally democratic political system in Baghdad” (p. 149)
– but overall has proved a giant mistake, and implicitly that
addressing the requirement we never see its like again in the future
requires a greater alertness to two different styles of leadership
leaders lean to. Leaders can either let reality inform their actions, or
let their inner preferences loose upon the world. The first is
responsible, but can lead to doubt which can admittedly be
“cripp[ling]” (p. 141); the second can spur you into effective action
(Record tends to make achievements of this course significant at first
[as expected, the Iraq army was squashed in a hurry], but ultimately
effectively lurches that leave you scrambling in quagmire), but isn ’t
“enough to craft an effective national security strategy ” (p. 141), and is
mostly not about tactics but inexcusable relapsing to childish
preferences. His Shakespearean account of sly advisors and weak
leaders prey to them, and neo-Victorian account of good sons who
own up to their responsibilities and bad ones who never stop hoping
to elide them,[1] is noticeable enough that psychohistorians aren’t
just about to let his account inform them only of Bush and the neo-
cons: no doubt you’ll all start noting Record’s own simplistic,
defensive tendencies, how he can – probably successfully – make an
argument telling people we all have to look at leader’s wants and
motives, without appearing to give psychologists any room to now
take over. His title bespeaks of id, but there’s no room for
psychobiography given here: one’s background can certainly
influence you – as Bush’s particular religious upbringing plays upon
him – but, ultimately, the choice is yours as to whether you take the
easy or the hard way. It’s “King’s Speech,” stripped of its
Freudianism. And recognizable as such, I think that the primary
concern we would finish the book with is how we might work against
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this wall which can freely permit talk of delusion and unreality and
binary thinking (though of course this actual term is never used), but
staunchly still keep psychology (and empathy) out while leaving
moralizing and righteous anger clearly in.
THE LURCH RECORD MAY WELL LEAVE US IN
But if we’re left stumbling over this problem, and wishing if only
people could read it and see it as but a facilitator to the gates of
something about Bush we’ve written, we’ve let ourselves be more
worsened than marginally informed by the book; for we’d at the end
be thinking mostly leaders, when psychohistorians should never find
themselves thinking mostly of them. Psychohistorians should be
wary when anyone puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of our
“leaders,” who we know are but people we study to aptly guess at the
psychic needs of those who wished them in, and this indeed is the
only place Record puts it – Americans-at-large are to him, sensible, if
not pronouncedly disgusted by excess and lack of good sense (other
nations [or at least the ones America has tended to have wary
relations with] come across as level-headed as well, with them being
not-at-all sacrificial and in fact realistic and savy in matters of war
[pp. 174-75]: Bush and his neo-cons are in this account, astoundingly
alone.). To Record, “Most Americans do not believe that it is their
country’s mission to convert the rest of the world into like
democracies, and they have limited tolerance for costly crusades
overseas that have little or no foundation in promoting concrete
security interests” (p. 149). But aren’t we also the lot that’s spent the
last thirty years or so participating in manic consumerism, losing
ourselves into an excess of work and after-work purchase in an
economy that may not at all have meaningfully improved despite the
activity? Haven’t we all been lead by want, unconsciously knowing
that we were thereby coating everything in our culture with a shine
we could subsequently easily point to as evidence of the sinning self
we would disown and stand cleanly apart from?
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If Record had been eager to do something other than nicely

complement his account of grossly negligent leaders (and my, does he
ever offer it up: “U.S. performance in Iraq has been a monument to
the combination of arrogance, ignorance, poor planning, worse
execution, and a willful refusal to acknowledge, much less correct,
mistake after mistake after mistake” [p. 149]) with a rudely ill-served,
staunchly and commendably conservative and fair polis, he might
have done some of the work that would have us psychohistorians
learning from his wisdom rather than maybe actually being tripped
up by his key folly. If he had, for instance, wondered if the fact that
we were all so quick to wake up to this nightmare deception – with his
book being maybe the thousandth to have come after Bush’s first
term delineating Bush’s hubris – may suggest that maybe we all-along
kinda knew the President was smacking back at a world in way that
was grossly indifferent to precision and to good form, would be easy
to thereafter spot-out as in fact actually rotten, and therefore why we
all would want something like that.
I wonder it myself, and I think actually that we were at some level
aware that our president was responding to 9/11 by drawing the world
to recoil and maybe awe at our readiness to just whip out our
collective cock and humiliate and fuck, in public, indifferently, before
abashed and stunned you and you and you, whomever stumbled
mostly readily into view in our reptilians minds after being let loose
and agitated to seek out some tit-for-tat revenge. I wonder if we went
after Iraq knowing it drew us back into a time when imperialism
hadn’t gotten the cleaner coat we knew it needed, because it would
make the humiliation we would “apply” less sparing and complicated
– more indulgent and satisfying – and because it would be so easy to
thereafter pin on the hubristic desires of leaders who made use of our
understandable need to trust to draw us back into neanderthalic
politics unrelated to our current world, to our current selves. I think
we made use, are still making use, of the neo-cons and President
Bush, maybe not so much ultimately even to deposit and disown our
own “hubris” but to no longer recognize it in future; and so when
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authorities like Record sum up Bush and the neo-cons (or, more
precisely, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine) as evidencing a “nostalgic
yearning for the days when wars were wars (and men were men),” as
having very “little relevance in a world in which instrastate wars and
intranational terrorism replaced interstate warfare as they primary
threats to U.S. security” (p. 175), we can substitute into this well-
pounded imprint of archaic, regressive, boarish manners – and
therefore of manners, presentation, in general – in the definition of
what all is actually occurring as a consequence of our foreign policies,
a substantially more sober and current style, to help begin our
process of making the sacrifice and humiliation we enjoy so that it’s
largely invisible to us as anything but appropriate conduct.
Individual Nazis may have needed twin selves, one that humiliates
and destroys, and the other that goes home for dinner and talks
domestic, to execute as much; but maybe we think we’ve found a way
to (perhaps only temporarily) manage it with but one.
Record is by no means against war. He just wants it kept
“competent,” “realist,” “clearly defined,” evidently last resort, with
public and congressional support but presumably lead by
“extraordinary statesmen like Roosevelt” (pp. 151-52). One wonders,
though, with his intent to see Americans in his preferred fashion,
probably losing himself to temporary needs of narrative empowered
by the fact that he can rely on it not being anywhere near his alone, if
he’d recognize it when he saw it. I kinda doubt that what Obama is
actually doing, what Americans are enabling him to do, abroad, is
competent and adult, but he surely knows he’s got to present it that
way.
Psychohistorians know that leaders are ones to be particularly
sensitive to, never criminally obtuse to, our most deeply felt desires.
If Bush wanted war for gross reasons, we wanted it for the same as
well. Bush intuited our desire to indulge one last time in blatant
drunken excess, and delivered; Obama, our desire to continue on with
the same but feel ourselves clean, by delivering ourselves for awhile to
an aesthetics of sensibleness, consideredness, restraint and sanity,
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sourced from our leaders. Record sees Bush and the neo-cons as
nostalgic and archaic; I see them as but part of the same gross one-
two punch.
[1] To Record, Bush Sr. took a weightier account of the world which
drew him ultimately to respect restraint (pp. 155-56), and he and Jr.
end up seeming as much good path-bad path brothers in the same
fraternal order as father and son.
----------
Thursday, August 25, 2011

I'm a vegetarian, but I'm not so foolish to think Michael Pollan
trumps Julia Child
Following my recent column about vegetarianism, I received a

wave of hate mail from meat eaters. This came as no surprise
-- as food has finally become a political issue in America (as it
should), some carnivores have become increasingly aggressive
toward anyone or any fact that even vaguely prompts them to
critically consider their culinary habit. Although the
stereotype imagines vegetarians sententiously screaming at
any meat eater they see at the lunch counter or dinner table,
I've found quite the opposite to be true. In my personal life, I
go out of my way to avoid talking about my vegetarianism
while I'm eating with friends, family or work colleagues, but
nonetheless regularly find myself being interrogated by
carnivores when they happen to notice that I'm not wolfing
down a plate of meat.
Having been a vegetarian for more than a decade now, and

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having been raised in a family of proud meat eaters, I'm going

to use this space to publish a brief primer for both vegetarians
and those who are considering vegetarianism -- a primer on
what kind of blowback you should expect to face when you are
forced to publicly explain your personal dietary decision, and
what succinct, fact-based responses are most appropriate
when confronting the tired cliches that will be thrown at you
from enraged carnivores. [. . .] (David Sirota, “A
vegetarian’s guide to talking to carnivores,” Salon, 24
August 2011)
The carnivore-in-the-vegetarian's guide to discussing

sensibly with its new solely vegetarian self.
David, I'm glad to hear you read the comments. I feel it's always
appropriate, but not always a class-circumspect thing to do (or at
least to admit to).
I grew up meat-eating in the 70s and 80s. Loved so much of those

times, and the food -- the whole pleasure of life learned
"encountering" it -- is something I treasure. It may be that someone
vegetarian at birth is not missing out on something if they never came
to know what tastes, what treasurable stories of experience, meat
afforded us, but I think that those of us who went vegan at some point
but certainly remembered how much they once enjoyed meat, should
always communicate some considerable fidelity to this fact.
You shouldn't be killing animals for food -- to be able to consciously

kill an animal is something that if we don't powerfully and fully flinch
from, automatically shows us possessed of sadism, some disturbing
capacity to switch to a otherwise disconnected self when engaged in
acts of violence. But it may really be that the world of experience is
wonderful, resplendent, "Julia Child" lessened in not knowing the
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tastes afforded by meat. (No one in our century-past communicated a

love for food that surpassed what she afforded [compared to her joie-
de-vivre, our Pollans in fact seem depleted, and as if out of their
venerance for unadulterated, rough-skinned vegetables]. The 60s and
70s had abandoned restraint and went whole-hog for pleasure, and
this generation of highly evolved people weren't yet one that had
abandoned meat. The unfortunate thing about current vegans is that
they came on mostly after the 60s and 70s golden ages had passed,
and so haven't yet had their time when they didn't also communicate
shrewism, scolding, restriction. That'll come, but only after the
current depression fully unfolds, another possible world war, and
then, finally, accompanying the collective agreement that a golden
age is once again fully warranted.)
It's hard for us born loving meat to know for sure, but if true, we
shouldn't be afraid to admit this even as we lessen the pleasure we
take from fat, expand that we take from vegetables and legumes, and
refuse to inconscionably kill what should simply have been respected.
Link: A vegetarian’s guide to talking to carnivores (Salon)
----------
Reading lists, and all they entail
While there's no way to know whether Hillary Clinton would

have hung tougher than President Obama with those
recalcitrant Republicans, here's a safe bet -- her summer
reading list would have included a few more women authors
than his.
Obama opened his Martha's Vineyard vacation by purchasing

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Daniel Woodrell's "The Bayou Trilogy" and Ward Just's

"Rodin's Debutante." He'd already packed novels by David
Grossman and Abraham Verghese, along with Isabel
Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," a nonfiction
account of black migration from the American South. (Some
reports also had Obama carrying Aldous Huxley's "Brave New
World" and Emma Donoghue's novel "Room.")
That would make Obama's reading 70 percent male -- which

is actually a better male-female ratio than the past.
[. . .]
Now the fact that the president of the United States

apparently doesn't read women writers is not the greatest
crisis facing the arts, much less the nation -- but it's upsetting
nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of
prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their
manifestations may seem relatively benign.
It is a well-known fact among those of us to whom this

matters that while women read books written by men, men do
not tend to reciprocate. The reasons for this imbalance are the
subject of much speculation and little conclusion, but, simple
as this may sound, it looks an awful lot to me like we think
they are more interesting than they think we may turn out to
be. And I very much doubt that's a message Mr. Obama
means to endorse -- especially as a father of daughters who
might enjoy and even be inspired by seeing their father cart
around a book emblazoned with a woman's name writ large.
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In recent months, women writers have tried to call attention

to this discrepancy and received some hefty pushback. In
February, a group called VIDA released a study detailing jaw-
dropping differences between how often men and women are
reviewed in such publications as the New York Times and the
Atlantic. Both publications reviewed dramatically more fiction
by men than women. (Robin Black, “President Obama:
Why don’t you read more women?” Salon, 24 August
2011)
Don't push the fe-man too far!

When you deliberately elect in a man who is now essentially
constituted to abay women's whatnot anxieties, you have to allow him
his escape to his man-cave, else he go insane and lose all use. What is
Obama but someone elected to obey our mothers' demands that we
now show self-sacrifice, to evidence our awareness that we should
have spent more time diligently attending to them?
Robin, What Makes You Even Slightly Different..

...than the chuckleheads who have been ripping the
president's reading list from the Right?
You are a parasite; your article is parasitic. (Chupacabra)
-----
troll bait
This article virtually screams for Zorkna's contumely, and alas
will richly deserve it when it comes. (absolut carnage)
-----
Strange Article
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It must be silly season if this article gets such a high billing on

the Salon home page. Seriously Robin I hope this is not
keeping you up at night!
I suspect most people, regardless of sex, do as I do when
selecting reading material - chose based on subject of interest
regardless of whether the author is male or female.
(hemp4evr)
-----
Why Are Women So Resentful?
What horrible person would make a gender issue out of the
President's reading list on an annual vacation? How sick are
so many women in this society? (mobutu)
-----
Holy crap!
I bet he doesn't have any Sarah McLachlan on his iPod either!
The cad! (greengoblin)
-----
Because
Women aren't good writers. Hey, write a stupid article, get a
stupid response. (g50)
-----
This is a ridiculous article
I'm sorry. This just sounds like one more dumb reason to
bash Barack Obama. I think the President should be able to
read anything he damned well pleases on vacation. This is a
waste of brain cells and energy. (gaylefleming)
-----
A Reason NOT to Be President
At least if you're NOT president, you don't have people
complaining that your reading list doesn't have gender
balance among the authors.
Geeeeeez! (cross1242)
-----
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[50 more consecutive responses of essentially the

same]
another perspective
What is noteworthy about these comments, aside from their
viciousness, is their complete failure to understand the point
of the article they are commenting on. A serious issue is
raised, and it is not what President Obama reads or doesn't
read. It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that
women writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that
confronted by all writers. Since President Obama's reading
list was made public, it afforded a perfectly reasonable way to
raise the larger issue. It's too bad that commenters have
seized on this harmless illustrative device as if it were the
central point of the article; had they bothered to read in order
to understand, we might have had an interesting discussion
instead of an outpouring of venom. (mysteryperson)
@mysteryperson
RE: It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that women
writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that confronted by
all writers.
This privilege is evidence of a culture that has mostly surrendered the

rest of the ground to women, so long as "they" have some elevated
mountain top to swap secrets, share signs, and indulge in all men for
awhile. Some women want even this sundered, but when this is
accomplished -- the termination of such a obviously-needed
masculinist ritual -- the results aren't pretty (see Donald Tuzin's
"Cassowary's Revenge" for an example of what happened after a
millenium-held long masculinist cult dissolved).
3276
Most men are still born to insufficiently-respected, insufficiently-

loved mothers. Such mothers don't magically, despite their lack of
sustenance, become enabled providers, but inevitably look to their
boy children as "gay hags" do gay men -- to satisfy, serve, and then
dispose them until their next craving. Later in life these unfortunate
men are either going to need an incredible dose of spot-on therapy or
masculinist sexist escapes, or else, and even if very literate, they ’ll
start doing base things like suiciding themselves or indulging on
impulsions to physically abuse women.
Women, grow up and afford yourselves a more mature understanding

of what lies behind these masculinist escapes. Also, admit you voted
for Obama for what actually leads to him needing these periodic
escapes -- because you sensed in him someone constituted, fully
broken, to respond to your distress and needs.
Really, people?
The vast, vast majority of these comments just go to show
how important it is that SOMEONE make the point(s) Robin
Black made in her piece. Otherwise, the myriad sexists on the
internet and off might never come crawling out of the
woodwork spitting their venom.
I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue
of gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume
them, does deserve to be examined. The sickening anti-
woman stench coming off of this comment thread is evidence
enough of that. Once Obama's summer reading list has been
publicized (and it has been!), critics have the right to ask
questions about it. And the lack of women writers on Obama's
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summer reading and other reading lists - conscious or not -

just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
The New York Times reviews far more men than women
(http://www.slate.com/id/2265910/pagenum/2) and, (again)
whether it's conscious sexism or not, it's reflective of a bias
that (AGAIN) is also reflected in this disgusting comment
thread.
Or it could just be that women write worse than men.

(For the clueless among you, also known as most of you, I was
being sarcastic in that last bit. You're welcome.)
(seriouslah)
seriouslah
Re: I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue of
gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume them, does
deserve to be examined. The sickening anti-woman stench coming
off of this comment thread is evidence enough of that. Once Obama's
summer reading list has been publicized (and it has been!), critics
have the right to ask questions about it. And the lack of women
writers on Obama's summer reading and other reading lists -
conscious or not - just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
I considered it, seriouslah. It's right there, and kinda obvious -- or

were you too much prepared to enjoy your indulgent haughty snark to
internet plebs to consider it? Still, what did you make of my argument
that masculinism owes to a need for compensense, for boys who grew
up with insufficiently loved and respected women who could not then
but help using their dependent boys to feed them some of what they'd
been denied?
3278
How to disagree
It is with some discomfort that I disagree with Robin Black’s
piece. I am a friend of Robin’s and have been an admirer of
her writing since before she was published. The problem with
her premise, I believe, is that she is conflating two things that
on the surface appear to be related but which are not. The
coverage and positioning of female writers (sorry, I just can’t
go with the popular usage of “women writers”) in the media
and what President Obama chooses to read in his free time
are vastly different. One is a business/editorial decision and
the other a matter of personal taste. Could both have
influence? Sure. However I think it’s reasonable to assume
that someone in the editorial meeting at Time magazine
thought Jonathan Franzen was a pompous gasbag but still
sided with putting him on the cover. Hopefully the President
chooses to read books that he is truly interested in and not
because he’s trying to make some sort of impression.
Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable
the language used and way in which some here have disagreed
with her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments
would shirk from the chance to voice their opinions publicly
on matters of art, politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so
in the basest, most vulgar ways on the internet because of its
faceless, impersonal nature. Yes, we live in a country where
freedom of speech is a right; however, shame on us if we don’t
use it in a manner that is commensurate with its importance.
(bdudlick)
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@dudlick
Re: Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable the
language used and way in which some here have disagreed with
her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments would shirk
from the chance to voice their opinions publicly on matters of art,
politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so in the basest, most
vulgar ways on the internet because of its faceless, impersonal
nature. Yes, we live in a country where freedom of speech is a right;
however, shame on us if we don’t use it in a manner that is
commensurate with its importance.
Dudlick, I'm not sure if you're a dude, but you sure sound like a
gentleman concerned to defend his lady from unruly ruffians. Just so
you know, feminists have long ago dissected such ostensibly women-
serving behavior as vile and inherently patriarchal, because it
reinforces the idea that women, however becoming and noble, are
more delicate than men, which would leave contentious stuff like
politics and business mostly to those better constituted for the fray.
Yes, you begin by saying she surely is capable of defending herself,
but with her absent from the discussion and you immersed within it,
this seems about anxiety-calming, about manners, and being
fundamentally disingenuous, and this too does your case no good.
Also, if you are a guy, a marxist perspective would have your

gentleman's refutations of the boarish to be mostly about aristocratic
privileging at working class expense. To other eyes, that is, it's about
selfishly making claim to the chick and dicking her, dudlicks. Thought
you should know.
Link: President Obama: Why don’t you read more women?
----------
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Good times, and turkey dinners
But before any of these inquiries are but a twinkle in Isaac's

eye, I know I'm going to face an interrogation about
vegetarianism. At some point soon, he'll ask why our family
doesn't eat this stuff called "meat" that's everywhere.
I have my substantive answers already lined up, so I'm not

worried about what I'll tell him. (We don't eat meat because
it's unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible, expensive and
inhumane.) With this question, I'm more concerned about the
prompting. Why is he almost certainly going to ask at such an
early age?
I think I know the answer -- and it's not the ad campaigns that
make meat seem like a rational choice ("Beef: It's What's for
Dinner"), a healthy alternative food ("Pork: The Other White
Meat") or a compassionate cuisine decision (Chik-fil-A's
billboards, which show a cow begging you to spare his life by
choosing chicken). No, Isaac's going to have questions
because of the grocery -- more specifically, because of the
vegetarian aisle that subliminally glorifies meat-eating.
I realize that sounds like an oxymoron, but the next time you
go shopping, imagine what a kid gleans from veggie burgers,
veggie bacon, veggie sausage patties, veggie hot dogs, Tofurky
and all the other similar fare that defines a modern plant-
based diet. While none of it contains meat, it's all marketed as
emulating meat. In advertising terms, that's the "unique
selling proposition" -- to give you the epicurean benefits of
meat without any of meat's downsides.
Obviously, this isn't some conspiracy whereby powerful meat

3281
companies are deliberately trying to bring vegetarians into the

megachurch of flesh eaters. If anything, it's the opposite: It's
the vegetarian industry selling itself to meat eaters by
suggesting that its products aren't actually all that different
from meat. The problem is how that message, like so many
others in American culture, reinforces the wrongheaded
notion that our diet should be fundamentally based on meat.
For those who have chosen to be vegetarians, this message is

merely annoying. But for those like Isaac who are being raised
as vegetarians, the message is downright subversive. It
teaches them that as tasty as vegetarian food may be, it can
never compete with the "real thing."
That message will undoubtedly inform Isaac's early curiosity

-- and maybe his questions won't be such a bad thing. Maybe
they'll motivate me to spend more time in the supermarket's
raw produce section, and maybe my ensuing discussion with
Isaac will help him better understand why our family has
made this culinary choice.
However, that doesn't mean the subtle propaganda won't

ultimately win out, thus adding another carnivore to a
destructively meat-centric society. (David Sirota, “Why do
vegetarian products glorify meat,” Salon, 19 August
2011)
Turkey dinners
If you grew up loving your turkey dinners, if some of your favorite
childhood memories are of the times around the succulent-meat-a-
plenty table or excursions to eat fatty steak, burgers, or prime ribs,
then you remain fidelitous to the good things in your past when you
choose Tofurky and veggie bacon after really connecting with and
3282
deeply caring about the truth that it is a terrible thing to kill animals
for sustenance. For you, it isn't transition but fidelity to the blessed
things of your past that were very much part of the furnishings for the
love that made you care. Though it might be even more mature, to
move on entirely might well in fact for you be about birthing a new
kind of inorganic rupture and violence.
----------
When progressives fail just to mind their own business
There is a shadowy group of malcontents in America today,

plotting a grand takeover of our political institutions in order
to completely remake the country according to their wishes.
Despite the fact the members of this group are a small
minority of the population, and an unpopular one at that, they
seek to infiltrate the courts and the government at every level,
in order to replace our long-standing system of law with their
own extremist, undemocratic religious code. These true
believers are especially dangerous because they think they're
doing God's work, and you ignore them, or play down the
threat they pose to America, at your own risk. This tiny band
of fanatics is largely distrusted and despised by regular
Americans, but a terrified media coddles them and pretends
they're harmless. I am speaking, of course, of the Tea Parties,
a group now officially less popular among Americans than
Muslims.
Professors David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam have a

column in today's New York Times explaining that the Tea
Party movement is made up largely of ultra-religious ultra-
conservative Republican partisans (shocker?), and now that
America has caught on to this fact, the Tea Party people are
much less popular than other groups who largely seek to mind
3283
their own business:
Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is

climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News
survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an
unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable
opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now,
14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to
20 percent, while their opponents have more than
doubled, to 40 percent.
Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well

among the public these days. But in data we have
recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any
of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than
both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less
popular than much maligned groups like “atheists”
and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that
approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.
So it turns out that going around in funny hats screaming at

people for a few years is not a great way to endear yourself to
the American public, unless you're Joe Pantoliano.
Better luck with next election cycle's rebranding campaign

that fools everyone in the political press for a year or so, ultra-
conservative Republicans! (Alex Parene, “Tea Party
people less popular than many other hated minority
groups,” Salon, 17 August 2011)
... until Progressives become the minority group of concern
Yes, and we can expect Salon to gleefully join with Obama in

destroying them. Afterwards, now lost in the feeling of healthy vigor
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and purity acquired in disposing of presumptive malcontents, they'll

begin their war on progressives (real ones), who also unfairly would
hoist their minority agenda on the rest of America. Though it was
what they did in the '60s and '70s, and, we remind, to everyone's
benefit, time now to see similar efforts/presumptions on their part as
simply "Tea Party" beyond countenancing.
Few of us will escape the drive to make someone else embody our
own -- to us -- increasingly suspect selfishness. Tea Partiers first, and
then in a far more brutal way -- for their representing it vastly more
convincingly -- their inverse: the best, least regressive people alive,
true progressives.
Obama is about so depleting America that most everyone will be

hardened and made spirtually pure from knowing long sustained true
suffering. This is his (albeit, mostly unknowing) agenda, and it is
drawing, and will continue to draw, most of us to it. I expect a second
term, and a president progressives will fear to assail, for fear of what
their liberal friends might say and do in return.
Link: Tea Party people less popular than many other hated minority
groups (Salon)
----------
THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2011

I'm a vegetarian, but I'm not so foolish to think Michael Pollan
trumps Julia Child
Following my recent column about vegetarianism, I received a

wave of hate mail from meat eaters. This came as no surprise
-- as food has finally become a political issue in America (as it
should), some carnivores have become increasingly aggressive
toward anyone or any fact that even vaguely prompts them to
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critically consider their culinary habit. Although the

stereotype imagines vegetarians sententiously screaming at
any meat eater they see at the lunch counter or dinner table,
I've found quite the opposite to be true. In my personal life, I
go out of my way to avoid talking about my vegetarianism
while I'm eating with friends, family or work colleagues, but
nonetheless regularly find myself being interrogated by
carnivores when they happen to notice that I'm not wolfing
down a plate of meat.
Having been a vegetarian for more than a decade now, and
having been raised in a family of proud meat eaters, I'm going
to use this space to publish a brief primer for both vegetarians
and those who are considering vegetarianism -- a primer on
what kind of blowback you should expect to face when you are
forced to publicly explain your personal dietary decision, and
what succinct, fact-based responses are most appropriate
when confronting the tired cliches that will be thrown at you
from enraged carnivores. [. . .] (David Sirota, “A
vegetarian’s guide to talking to carnivores,” Salon, 24
August 2011)
The carnivore-in-the-vegetarian's guide to discussing

sensibly with its new solely vegetarian self.
David, I'm glad to hear you read the comments. I feel it's always
appropriate, but not always a class-circumspect thing to do (or at
least to admit to).
I grew up meat-eating in the 70s and 80s. Loved so much of those

times, and the food -- the whole pleasure of life learned
"encountering" it -- is something I treasure. It may be that someone
vegetarian at birth is not missing out on something if they never came
to know what tastes, what treasurable stories of experience, meat
afforded us, but I think that those of us who went vegan at some point
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but certainly remembered how much they once enjoyed meat, should
always communicate some fidelity to this fact.
You shouldn't be killing animals for food -- to be able to consciously

kill an animal is something that if we don't powerfully and fully flinch
from, automatically shows us possessed of sadism, some disturbing
capacity to switch to a otherwise disconnected self when engaged in
acts of violence. But it may really be that the world of experience is
wonderful, resplendent "Julia Child" lessened in not knowing the
tastes afforded by meat. (No one in our century-past communicated a
love for food that surpassed what she afforded [compared to her joie-
de-vivre, our Pollans in fact seem depleted, and as if out of their
venerance for unadulterated, rough-skinned vegetables]. The 60s and
70s had abandoned restraint and went whole-hog for pleasure, and
this generation of highly evolved people weren't yet one that had
abandoned meat. The unfortunate thing about current vegans is that
they came on mostly after the 60s and 70s golden ages had passed,
and so haven't yet had their time when they didn't also communicate
shrewism, scolding, and restriction. That'll come, but only after the
current depression fully unfolds, another possible world war, and
then, finally, accompanying the collective agreement that a golden
age is once again fully warranted.)
It's hard for us born loving meat to know for sure, but if true, we
shouldn't be afraid to admit this even as we lessen the pleasure we
take from fat, expand that we take from vegetables and legumes, and
refuse to inconscionably kill what should simply have been respected.
Link: A vegetarian’s guide to talking to carnivores (Salon)
----------

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Reading lists, and all they entail
While there's no way to know whether Hillary Clinton would

have hung tougher than President Obama with those
recalcitrant Republicans, here's a safe bet -- her summer
reading list would have included a few more women authors
than his.
Obama opened his Martha's Vineyard vacation by purchasing

Daniel Woodrell's "The Bayou Trilogy" and Ward Just's
"Rodin's Debutante." He'd already packed novels by David
Grossman and Abraham Verghese, along with Isabel
Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," a nonfiction
account of black migration from the American South. (Some
reports also had Obama carrying Aldous Huxley's "Brave New
World" and Emma Donoghue's novel "Room.")
That would make Obama's reading 70 percent male -- which

is actually a better male-female ratio than the past.
[. . .]
Now the fact that the president of the United States

apparently doesn't read women writers is not the greatest
crisis facing the arts, much less the nation -- but it's upsetting
nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of
prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their
manifestations may seem relatively benign.
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It is a well-known fact among those of us to whom this

matters that while women read books written by men, men do
not tend to reciprocate. The reasons for this imbalance are the
subject of much speculation and little conclusion, but, simple
as this may sound, it looks an awful lot to me like we think
they are more interesting than they think we may turn out to
be. And I very much doubt that's a message Mr. Obama
means to endorse -- especially as a father of daughters who
might enjoy and even be inspired by seeing their father cart
around a book emblazoned with a woman's name writ large.
In recent months, women writers have tried to call attention

to this discrepancy and received some hefty pushback. In
February, a group called VIDA released a study detailing jaw-
dropping differences between how often men and women are
reviewed in such publications as the New York Times and the
Atlantic. Both publications reviewed dramatically more fiction
by men than women. (Robin Black, “President Obama:
Why don’t you read more women?” Salon, 24 August
2011)
Don't push the fe-man too far!

When you deliberately elect in a man who is now essentially
constituted to abey women's whatnot anxieties, you have to allow him
his escape to his man-cave, else he go insane and lose all use. What is
Obama but someone elected to obey our mothers' demands that we
now show self-sacrifice, to evidence our awareness and hence our
possible redemption that we should have spent more time diligently
attending to them?
3289
Robin, What Makes You Even Slightly Different..

...than the chuckleheads who have been ripping the
president's reading list from the Right?
You are a parasite; your article is parasitic. (Chupacabra)
-----
troll bait
This article virtually screams for Zorkna's contumely, and alas
will richly deserve it when it comes. (absolut carnage)
-----
Strange Article
It must be silly season if this article gets such a high billing on
the Salon home page. Seriously Robin I hope this is not
keeping you up at night!
I suspect most people, regardless of sex, do as I do when
selecting reading material - chose based on subject of interest
regardless of whether the author is male or female.
(hemp4evr)
-----
Why Are Women So Resentful?
What horrible person would make a gender issue out of the
President's reading list on an annual vacation? How sick are
so many women in this society? (mobutu)
-----
Holy crap!
I bet he doesn't have any Sarah McLachlan on his iPod either!
The cad! (greengoblin)
-----
Because
Women aren't good writers. Hey, write a stupid article, get a
stupid response. (g50)
-----
This is a ridiculous article
I'm sorry. This just sounds like one more dumb reason to
3290
bash Barack Obama. I think the President should be able to

read anything he damned well pleases on vacation. This is a
waste of brain cells and energy. (gaylefleming)
-----
A Reason NOT to Be President
At least if you're NOT president, you don't have people
complaining that your reading list doesn't have gender
balance among the authors.
Geeeeeez! (cross1242)
-----
[50 more consecutive responses of essentially the

same]
another perspective
What is noteworthy about these comments, aside from their
viciousness, is their complete failure to understand the point
of the article they are commenting on. A serious issue is
raised, and it is not what President Obama reads or doesn't
read. It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that
women writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that
confronted by all writers. Since President Obama's reading
list was made public, it afforded a perfectly reasonable way to
raise the larger issue. It's too bad that commenters have
seized on this harmless illustrative device as if it were the
central point of the article; had they bothered to read in order
to understand, we might have had an interesting discussion
instead of an outpouring of venom. (mysteryperson)
@mysteryperson
RE: It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that women
3291
writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that confronted by

all writers.
This privilege is evidence of a culture that has mostly surrendered the

rest of the ground to women, so long as "they" have some elevated
mountain top to swap secrets, share signs, and indulge in all men for
awhile. Some women want even this sundered, but when this is
accomplished -- the termination of such a obviously needed
masculinist ritual -- the results aren't pretty (see Donald Tuzin's
"Cassowary's Revenge" for an example of what happened after a
millenium-held long masculinist cult dissolved).
Most men are still born to insufficiently respected, insufficiently loved

mothers. Such mothers don't magically, despite their lack of
sustenance, become enabled providers, but inevitably look to their
boy children as "gay hags" do gay men -- to satisfy, serve, and then
dispose them until their next craving. Later in life these unfortunate
men are either going to need an incredible dose of spot-on therapy or
masculinist, sexist escapes, or else, and even if very literate, they ’ll
start doing base things like suiciding themselves or indulging on
impulsions to physically abuse women.
Women, grow up and afford yourselves a more mature understanding

of what lies behind these masculinist escapes. Also, admit you voted
for Obama for what actually leads to him needing these periodic
escapes -- because you sensed in him someone constituted, fully
broken, to respond to your distress and needs.
Really, people?
The vast, vast majority of these comments just go to show
how important it is that SOMEONE make the point(s) Robin
Black made in her piece. Otherwise, the myriad sexists on the
3292
internet and off might never come crawling out of the

woodwork spitting their venom.
I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue
of gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume
them, does deserve to be examined. The sickening anti-
woman stench coming off of this comment thread is evidence
enough of that. Once Obama's summer reading list has been
publicized (and it has been!), critics have the right to ask
questions about it. And the lack of women writers on Obama's
summer reading and other reading lists - conscious or not -
just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
The New York Times reviews far more men than women
(http://www.slate.com/id/2265910/pagenum/2) and, (again)
whether it's conscious sexism or not, it's reflective of a bias
that (AGAIN) is also reflected in this disgusting comment
thread.
Or it could just be that women write worse than men.

(For the clueless among you, also known as most of you, I was
being sarcastic in that last bit. You're welcome.)
(seriouslah)
seriouslah
Re: I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue of
gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume them, does
deserve to be examined. The sickening anti-woman stench coming
off of this comment thread is evidence enough of that. Once Obama's
summer reading list has been publicized (and it has been!), critics
have the right to ask questions about it. And the lack of women
3293
writers on Obama's summer reading and other reading lists -

conscious or not - just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
I considered it, seriouslah. It's right there, and kinda obvious -- or

were you too much prepared to enjoy your indulgent haughty snark to
internet plebs to consider it? Still, what did you make of my argument
that masculinism owes to a need for compensense, for boys who grew
up with insufficiently loved and respected women who could not then
but help using their dependent boys to feed them some of what they'd
been denied?
How to disagree
It is with some discomfort that I disagree with Robin Black’s
piece. I am a friend of Robin’s and have been an admirer of
her writing since before she was published. The problem with
her premise, I believe, is that she is conflating two things that
on the surface appear to be related but which are not. The
coverage and positioning of female writers (sorry, I just can’t
go with the popular usage of “women writers”) in the media
and what President Obama chooses to read in his free time
are vastly different. One is a business/editorial decision and
the other a matter of personal taste. Could both have
influence? Sure. However I think it’s reasonable to assume
that someone in the editorial meeting at Time magazine
thought Jonathan Franzen was a pompous gasbag but still
sided with putting him on the cover. Hopefully the President
chooses to read books that he is truly interested in and not
because he’s trying to make some sort of impression.
Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable
the language used and way in which some here have disagreed
3294
with her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments

would shirk from the chance to voice their opinions publicly
on matters of art, politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so
in the basest, most vulgar ways on the internet because of its
faceless, impersonal nature. Yes, we live in a country where
freedom of speech is a right; however, shame on us if we don’t
use it in a manner that is commensurate with its importance.
(bdudlick)
@dudlick
Re: Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable the
language used and way in which some here have disagreed with
her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments would shirk
from the chance to voice their opinions publicly on matters of art,
politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so in the basest, most
vulgar ways on the internet because of its faceless, impersonal
nature. Yes, we live in a country where freedom of speech is a right;
however, shame on us if we don’t use it in a manner that is
commensurate with its importance.
Dudlick, I'm not sure if you're a dude, but you sure sound like a
gentleman concerned to defend his lady from unruly ruffians. Just so
you know, feminists have long ago dissected such ostensibly women-
serving behavior as vile and inherently patriarchal, because it
reinforces the idea that women, however becoming and noble, are
more delicate than men, which would leave contentious stuff like
politics and business mostly to those better constituted for the fray.
Yes, you begin by saying she surely is capable of defending herself,
but with her absent from the discussion and you immersed within it,
this seems about anxiety-calming, about manners, and being
fundamentally disingenuous, and this too does your case no good.
3295
Also, if you are a guy, a marxist perspective would have your

gentleman's refutations of the boarish to be mostly about aristocratic
privileging at working class expense. To other eyes, that is, it's about
selfishly making claim to the chick and dicking her, dudlicks. Thought
you should know.
Link: President Obama: Why don’t you read more women?

----------

Good times, and turkey dinners
But before any of these inquiries are but a twinkle in Isaac's

eye, I know I'm going to face an interrogation about
vegetarianism. At some point soon, he'll ask why our family
doesn't eat this stuff called "meat" that's everywhere.
I have my substantive answers already lined up, so I'm not
worried about what I'll tell him. (We don't eat meat because
it's unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible, expensive and
inhumane.) With this question, I'm more concerned about the
prompting. Why is he almost certainly going to ask at such an
early age?
I think I know the answer -- and it's not the ad campaigns that
make meat seem like a rational choice ("Beef: It's What's for
Dinner"), a healthy alternative food ("Pork: The Other White
Meat") or a compassionate cuisine decision (Chik-fil-A's
billboards, which show a cow begging you to spare his life by
choosing chicken). No, Isaac's going to have questions
because of the grocery -- more specifically, because of the
vegetarian aisle that subliminally glorifies meat-eating.
I realize that sounds like an oxymoron, but the next time you
go shopping, imagine what a kid gleans from veggie burgers,
veggie bacon, veggie sausage patties, veggie hot dogs, Tofurky
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and all the other similar fare that defines a modern plant-
based diet. While none of it contains meat, it's all marketed as
emulating meat. In advertising terms, that's the "unique
selling proposition" -- to give you the epicurean benefits of
meat without any of meat's downsides.
Obviously, this isn't some conspiracy whereby powerful meat
companies are deliberately trying to bring vegetarians into the
megachurch of flesh eaters. If anything, it's the opposite: It's
the vegetarian industry selling itself to meat eaters by
suggesting that its products aren't actually all that different
from meat. The problem is how that message, like so many
others in American culture, reinforces the wrongheaded
notion that our diet should be fundamentally based on meat.
For those who have chosen to be vegetarians, this message is
merely annoying. But for those like Isaac who are being raised
as vegetarians, the message is downright subversive. It
teaches them that as tasty as vegetarian food may be, it can
never compete with the "real thing."
That message will undoubtedly inform Isaac's early curiosity
-- and maybe his questions won't be such a bad thing. Maybe
they'll motivate me to spend more time in the supermarket's
raw produce section, and maybe my ensuing discussion with
Isaac will help him better understand why our family has
made this culinary choice.
However, that doesn't mean the subtle propaganda won't
ultimately win out, thus adding another carnivore to a
destructively meat-centric society. (David Sirota, “Why do
vegetarian products glorify meat,” Salon, 19 August
2011)
Turkey dinners
If you grew up loving your turkey dinners, if some of your favorite
childhood memories are of the times around the succulent-meat-a-
3297
plenty table or excursions to eat fatty steak, burgers, or prime ribs,

then you remain fidelitous to the good things in your past when you
choose Tofurky and veggie bacon after really connecting with and
deeply caring about the truth that it is a terrible thing to kill animals
for sustenance. For you, it isn't transition, but fidelity to the blessed
things of your past that were very much part of the furnishings for the
love that made you care. Though it might be even more mature, to
move on entirely might well in fact for you be about birthing a new
kind of inorganic rupture and violence.
Link: Why do vegetarians glorify meat? (Salon)

---------

When progressives fail just to mind their own business
There is a shadowy group of malcontents in America today,

plotting a grand takeover of our political institutions in order
to completely remake the country according to their wishes.
Despite the fact the members of this group are a small
minority of the population, and an unpopular one at that, they
seek to infiltrate the courts and the government at every level,
in order to replace our long-standing system of law with their
own extremist, undemocratic religious code. These true
believers are especially dangerous because they think they're
doing God's work, and you ignore them, or play down the
threat they pose to America, at your own risk. This tiny band
of fanatics is largely distrusted and despised by regular
Americans, but a terrified media coddles them and pretends
they're harmless. I am speaking, of course, of the Tea Parties,
a group now officially less popular among Americans than
Muslims.
Professors David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam have a
3298
column in today's New York Times explaining that the Tea

Party movement is made up largely of ultra-religious ultra-
conservative Republican partisans (shocker?), and now that
America has caught on to this fact, the Tea Party people are
much less popular than other groups who largely seek to mind
their own business:
Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is
climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News
survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an
unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable
opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now,
14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to
20 percent, while their opponents have more than
doubled, to 40 percent.
Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well
among the public these days. But in data we have
recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any
of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than
both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less
popular than much maligned groups like “atheists”
and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that
approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.
So it turns out that going around in funny hats screaming at
people for a few years is not a great way to endear yourself to
the American public, unless you're Joe Pantoliano.
Better luck with next election cycle's rebranding campaign
that fools everyone in the political press for a year or so, ultra-
conservative Republicans! (Alex Parene, “Tea Party
people less popular than many other hated minority
groups,” Salon, 17 August 2011)
... until Progressives become the minority group of concern
Yes, and we can expect Salon to gleefully join with Obama in

3299
destroying them. Afterwards, now lost in the feeling of healthy vigor

and purity acquired in disposing of presumptive malcontents, they'll
begin their war on progressives (real ones), who also unfairly would
hoist their minority agenda on the rest of America. Though it was
what they did in the '60s and '70s, and, we remind, to everyone's
benefit, time now to see similar efforts/presumptions on their part as
simply "Tea Party" beyond countenancing.
Few of us will escape the drive to make someone else embody our
own -- to us -- increasingly suspect selfishness. Tea Partiers first, and
then in a far more brutal way -- for their representing it vastly more
convincingly -- their inverse: the best, least regressive people alive,
true progressives.
Obama is about so depleting America that most everyone will be

hardened and made spirtually pure from knowing long sustained true
suffering. This is his (albeit, mostly unknowing) agenda, and it is
drawing, and will continue to draw, most of us to it. I expect a second
term, and a president progressives will fear to assail, for fear of what
their liberal friends might say and do in return.
Link: Tea Party people less popular than many other hated minority
groups (Salon)
---------

Not exactly seeing it in its best light
Since you all abandoned the other thread
"Starkey racism row: It is the political elite's

3300
ceaseless denigration of white working-class culture

that has 'turned kids black' "
(Link:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100
101050/starkey-racism-row-it-is-the-political-elites-
ceaseless-denigration-of-white-working-class-culture-that-
has-turned-kids-black/)
What changed is not so much that blacks, followed by whites,

immersed themselves in the lingo or outlook of their
ancestors, but rather that white working-class culture has in
recent years been denigrated to an extraordinary degree.
From the way the white working classes speak (un-PC, foul) to
what they eat (”junk food”, which makes them “obese”) to
what they wear (the girls dress like “slags”, the boys like
“scum”), virtually every facet of white working-class life has
been subjected to the ridicule of the political and cultural
elite, finding itself mocked on TV shows and tut-tutted over or
legislated against in parliament and the press. Meanwhile
working-class institutions are either in a state of disarray
(trade unions being the best example) or have been invaded
by the intolerant nannies and nudgers of the prole-loathing
elite: consider the public house, once a relatively free zone,
now colonised by morality cops on the lookout for smoking,
excessive boozing and anything with a whiff of rowdiness.
Football games, post-work pints, EastEnd attitude, northern
grit – hardly any aspect of white working-class culture has
escaped being problematised by the snobs, therapists and
health obsessives who govern modern Britain.
At the same time, immigrant cultures are more likely to be

3301
celebrated, as “vibrant” by the educational establishment and

as “cool” by the trustafarian chattering classes who like
nothing better than listening to Niggaz with Attitude on their
outsized headphones. The movers and shakers of modern
British society demonise white working-class culture while
simultaneously slumming it with what they consider to be the
“noble savages” of the immigrant community. In such a
climate, is it really any wonder that white working-class kids
are “turning black”? Their so-called “blackness” was not in
any way the cause of the riots, but it does point to a problem
that at least contributed to that urban upheaval: the fact that
huge swathes of lower-class youth feel cut off not only from
society but also from their traditional cultures, turning them
into confused, at-sea, potentially nihilistic individuals.
Comment from Australia:

Australiaisdying
Today 06:07 AM
We see the same here in Australia. White kids listening to
gangster rapp, acting like black thugs, they've completely lost
their own identity. Also the media is constantly telling white
people over here how evil we all are leading to a depressing
sense of identity as well. We are only about 5-10 years behind
the UK and I fear for our survival as we are being swamped
with Black American culture (especially) and the constant
witch hunts by the media against whites whilst trying
(unsuccessfully) trying to cover up the growing horrific crimes
commited against white Australians by African and other
immigrants. There is huge racial tensions between the
Africans and Aboriginals who call them 'invaders' (are you
going to call Aboriginies racists Fabian delusions?) and even
our Middle Eastern immigrants have problems with them. I
never hated any other ethnic group before but am growing
3302
tired and weary of this no so-obvious planned destruction of

Western countries and the now inevitable genocide of the
European race.
See, folks, this is happening all over the Western-European

world. And people see it. Even the other "trolls" on Salon who
hate me say the same thing: "Oh, it's hate whitey day again on
Salon."
So, what can we do? (—Grand Duchess Anastasiya
Nikolayevna’s paregoric bottle, in comment section
of associated press’s “London police charge 1,000th
person in riots probe,” 17 August 2011)
@Duchess
The liberalism you despise is about to come to a complete close. The
reform in manners you hope for will come to; it'll keep people feeling
contained and controlled as a snug-fitting Nazi uniform.
Liberalism has been just awful for quite some time, but the truth that
is so important to understand but near impossible to be
countenanced, is that everything since the late '70s was due to
become a frustratingly warped form of its earlier incarnations.
Liberalism will once again unambiguously shine golden, but this will
require the commencement of a new golden age, where regressives
give progressives some stretch and more or less for a time let them
lead the way, and where progressives themselves are free from self-
shakles they'll end up applying when they too have decided society
has had it too good. This will come only after what we're about to see
here: the emergence of the – everyone-agreed -- noble working
classer, the emergence of the spritual greatness of original stock folk,
and a war against polluted others that everyone will feel good about
but that will obnoxiously, terrifyingly outdo in carnage the
3303
scapegoating and casually applied debasement you goad liberals for.
Link: London police charge 1,000th person in riots probe (Salon)
--------

Fattening up the idle rich
If the rest of us are sweating through a wretched climate-

change-seared August, it's a good bet the super-rich and
powerful are calm, air-conditioned and happily summering in
the world's most posh retreats.
Of course, to paraphrase the late great Molly Ivins, most
Americans do not employ the word "summer" as a verb,
because such usage implies an annual season of luxury that
the typical prole can only dream of during his few days off at
the local state park (if he's lucky to have a vacation and lucky
enough to live near a state park that hasn't been shuttered by
budget cuts). But summering is what the wealthy do -- and
when they do it so ostentatiously in such a pulverizing
recession, it all but screams "Let Them Eat Cake."
So, too, does the rhetoric of a presidential race beginning in
earnest. As the 2012 candidates now romp through primary-
state hamlets, they are already road-testing a carefully
sculpted type of "Let Them Eat Cake" rhetoric that somehow
makes them sound simultaneously like populist Huey Longs
and loyal mouthpieces for their biggest corporate campaign
contributors.
With that as a preview, let's look at this month in "Let Them
Eat Cake." (David Sirota, “‘Let them eat cake!’:
Summer edition,” Salon, 17 August 2011)
3304
We're not exactly shoving this exulted pap down their

throats, but ...
Let's admit it to ourselves. Many of us wanted these kinds of stories
to circulate, for they make us, by way of contrast, in our poorness,
insecurity, and perpetual striving, more honest, noble, and good. The
rich, though they know it not, are mostly our delegates, playing the
part of the unconscionable bad "guy" so we can begin to feel ourselves
more worthy after having selfishly partaken of so many riches we
really hadn't the resources to afford.
Further, they are playing the part of the self-absorbed, their-children-
ignoring parent, who must ultimately not be dethroned lest the child
impinge on her/himself the psychologically untenable realization that
their parents, not ultimately somehow themselves ("I must have been
disobedient," the child concludes, after his father demonically beats
him with a belt; "I must have been noisy," the child concludes, after
his mother left his father.), were responsible for their ill-treatment.
It's psychologically untenable, because this realization puts you
beyond ever proving yourself now finally worthy of receiving their
love.
The rich have their part to play in this completely unnecessary
depression, and though we're going to hear just as much or more
about the noble American suffering their way on through, they mostly
won't be touched. Our narrative, our immature emotional needs,
demand it.
Link: “Let them eat cake!”: the summer edition (Salon)
--------

3305
Dan Savage joins team Obama
Lauerman: There's still a lot to be concerned about. But do

you get giddy with the progress you're seeing?
Dan Savage: [Laughs.] Yeah, I actually am! You know, we're
winning.
Anyone who wants evidence that we haven't won yet just
needs to look at the Republican field. You know, we live in a
two-party system, and for one party, the only thing they can
seem to agree on is hating gay people. They hate us like they
hate evolution. Unfortunately, they just can't wish us away,
any more than they could wish evolution away. It's not a done
deal and it's not sewn up. But they're now fighting a rear-
guard action, while we're advancing on all fronts.
The heartening thing, even if we are cursed with a President
Santorum, which is not going to happen, or President Perry or
Bachmann, is what we've seen over the past 20 years, under
Democrats, there's been some progress. There's been great
progress since the Democrats got the wake-up call in
November of last year, on gay issues, legislatively. But there's
not a lot of regress under Republicans. They seem to shrug
and live with it, with gay progress, once it's achieved.
[. . .]
So how do I feel about the Obama administration? I'm really

very pleased with what's been delivered. I am not an idiot,
and I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type. I don't doubt
we wouldn't have seen these things, that these things would
not have been delivered, if we didn't make it clear there would
be a price to pay if they weren't. Obama "isn't there yet" on
same-sex marriage -- if you believe him. And, frankly, I don't.
3306
I don't think somebody who was for same-sex marriage in '96

is against it in 2011. And I agree with Tracy Baim, the editor
of Windy City Times, who did the interviews with Obama
back in the '90s when he was running for state Senate in
Illinois, that we're not going to listen to what he says
anymore, because it's too aggravating. We're going to watch
what he does. And he's doing the right stuff. (interview
with Dan Savage, Kerry Lauerman, “The evolution of
Dan Savage, Salon, 16 August 2011)
Losing the language for complaint

I hope true progressives out there are taking note as to what is
currently happening. When (ostensibly, but certainly within the
current reigning paradigm) absolutely righteous men like Dan Savage
more and more bond with end-of-growth, depression/mass
cruelty/regression-ensuring Obama, and begin to turn their venom as
much against the unpersuaded, taken-aback left as the Santorums,
they'll be left stumped for a lexicon for successful protest for their
greatest composed efforts gleamingly undeniably evily back at them.
You'll be left wanting to argue against everything you've suely ever
hoped for, and for it will be vulnerable in a hundred different ways.
You'll be tempted just to disengage with thought altogether, else just
resigning yourself to concluding you're the biggest suckers who've
ever lived, who surely deserved what they got. Some of those left now
without any sustainable defense, will wish you could have been a bit
smarter.
@nortonshitty
A slight mistake Mr Shitty? Read it here:
Dan Savage--Oct. 2002-"Say Yes to War on Iraq"
"No to War! No to Oppression!"

3307
The above anti-war message was delivered to me via a sad-

looking pink poster. I pulled the poster off a light pole and
hung it in my office over my desk. I look at the poster every
day when I sit down to work, and every day I wonder how and
when the American left lost its moral compass.
You see, lefties, there are times when saying "no" to war
means saying "yes" to oppression. Don't believe me? Go ask a
Czech or a European Jew about the British and French saying
"no" to war with Germany in 1938. War may be bad for
children and other living things, but there are times when
peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is
one of those times. Saying no to war in Iraq means saying yes
to the continued oppression of the Iraqi people. It amazes me
when I hear lefties argue that we should assassinate Saddam
in order to avoid war. If Saddam is assassinated, he will be
replaced by another Baathist dictator--and what then for the
people of Iraq? More "peace"--i.e., more oppression, more
executions, more gassings, more terror, more fear.
While the American left is content to see an Iraqi dictator

terrorizing the Iraqi people, the Bushies in D.C. are not. "We
do not intend to put American lives at risk to replace one
dictator with another," Dick Cheney recently told reporters.
For those of you who were too busy making papier-mâché
puppets of George W. Bush last week to read the papers, you
may have missed this page-one statement in last Friday's New
York Times: "The White House is developing a detailed plan,
modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an
American-led military government in Iraq if the United States
topples Saddam Hussein."
These developments--a Republican administration

3308
recognizing that support for dictators in Third World

countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to post-
WWII-style nation-building in Iraq--are terrific news for
people who care about human rights, freedom, and
democracy. They also represent an enormous moral victory
for the American left, which has long argued that our support
for "friendly" dictators around the world was immoral.
(Saddam used to be one of those "friendly" dictators.) After
9/11, the left argued that our support for brutal dictatorships
in the Middle East helped create anti-American hatred.
Apparently the Bush administration now agrees--so why isn't
the American left claiming this victory?
Because claiming this victory means backing this war, and the
American left refuses to back this or any war--which makes
the left completely irrelevant in any conversation about the
advisability or necessity of a particular war. (Pacifism is faith,
not politics.) What's worse, the left argues that our past
support for regimes like Saddam's prevents us from doing
anything about Saddam now. We supported (and in some
cases installed) tyrants, who in turn created despair, which in
turn created terrorists, who came over here and blew shit up...
so now what do we do? According to the left, we do nothing.
It's all our fault, so we're just going to have to sit back and
wait for New York City or D.C. or a big port city (like, say,
Seattle or Portland) to disappear.
It seems to me that if supporting tyrants creates terrorists,

withdrawing our support from those very same tyrants might
help to "uncreate" terrorists. Removing the tyrants from
power seems an even better way to uncreate terrorists.
But wait! Taking out Saddam means dropping bombs, and
3309
dropping bombs only creates more terrorists!

That's the lefty argument du jour, and a lot of squish-brains
are falling for it, but it's not an argument that the historical
record supports. The United States dropped a hell of a lot of
bombs on Serbia, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Germany,
Japan, and Italy. If dropping bombs creates terrorists, where
are all the German terrorists? Or the Italian terrorists? Or the
Vietnamese terrorists?
But wait! Iraq isn't in cahoots with al Qaeda, so why attack
Iraq in the war on terrorism?
Because we're not just at war with al Qaeda, stupid. We're at
war with a large and growing Islamo-fascist movement that
draws its troops and funds from all over the Islamic world.
Islamo-fascism is a regional problem, not just an al Qaeda
problem or an Afghanistan problem. To stop Islamo-fascism,
we're going to have to roll back all of the tyrannous and
dictatorial regimes in the Middle East while simultaneously
waging war against a militant, deadly religious ideology. To be
completely honest, I would actually prefer that the United
States go to war against the ridiculous royal family in Saudi
Arabia. The Saudis have been using American money to
export their intolerant and deadly strain of Islam all over the
world (the kind of Islam that inspires people to blow up
discos in Bali), and getting rid of the Saudi royal family and
their fascist clerics makes more sense than getting rid of
Saddam. But the Saudis are our "allies," so perhaps we can
pressure them to reform, as Josh Feit suggests.
In the meantime, invading and rebuilding Iraq will not only

free the Iraqi people, it will also make the Saudis aware of the
consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own
people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on
Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the
3310
Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free

your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and
democratize... or we're going to come over there, remove you
from power, free your people, and reform your societies for
ourselves.
Post-9/11, post-Bali, what other choice do we have?
(Ccommentator)
Ccommentator
I think you'll find a lot of gay men are unconsciously drawn to support
efforts -- like Bush's wars or Obama's collective sacrifice -- that ends
up looking at the finish to have been mostly about purposely
destroying the lives of multiple innocents. Being gay is a defense
mechanism against the overwhelming mother, one of a number
possible. Children of such insufficiently loved mothers understand
that they are bad if they do not devote themselves entirely to them --
an "education" that later in life makes them susceptible to "gay hags,"
women who blithely readily presume upon them and dehumanize
them as property. Since life cannot but be about some growth and
"selfish" acquisition, as means to safeguard themselves from
annihilative punishmen, unconscious self-protective alters within
them will drive them to find some guilt-free way to punish other
innocent children for their own neediness. At the finish, after using
mostly-impossible-to-argue-against saints like Dan Savage to destroy
progressives who would kill this advancing child-life
destroying/grossly inhibiting depression if they could, Obama can
probably expect people like Dan to masochistically submit to sacrifice
expectations themselves.
@Patrick McEtc-Etc
"Being gay is a defense mechanism against the overwhelming
mother -- one of a number possible."
3311
And it is a well-established fact of geography that if one sails

too far out in the ocean, one will fall off the edge of the Earth.
It is also a proven medical fact that rhinoceros horns and tiger
penises are wonderful cures for impotence. (robwriter)
robwriter
Psychoanalysis pretty much died in the '70s, and it's a well-
established fact that whatever happened afterwards was so much
better for mankind.
Link: The evolution of Dan Savage (Salon)

--------
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2011

When you're mostly still interested in acquiring the wound, it's way
too early for medicine
Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip,

but so is Europe. New data out Tuesday show even Europe's
strongest core economies -- Germany, France, and the
Netherlands -- slowing to a crawl.
We're on the cusp of a global recession.
Policy makers be warned: Austerity is the wrong medicine.
[. . .]
But chalk up a big part of Europe's slowdown to the politics

and economics of austerity. Europe -- including Britain --
have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They've been
cutting public spending just when they should be spending
more to counteract slowing private spending.
3312
The United States has been moving in the same bizarre

direction. Cutbacks by state and local governments have all
but negated the federal government's original stimulus, and
no one in Washington is talking seriously about a second. The
pitiful showdown over increasing the debt limit has produced
the opposite: a Rube-Goldberg-like process for capping
spending rather than increasing it, and a public that's being
sold the Republican lie that less government spending means
more jobs.
Yes, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are deeply in

debt. But policy makers on both sides seem to have forgotten
that economic growth is the most important tonic. (Robert
Reich, “Austerity is bringing on a global recession,”
Salon, 17 August 2011)
We always get what we want, and sometimes it's stark

curtailment after one too many dip-ins into the cookie jar,
that has us all feeling a bit edgy
Doom is what we want, as:
Economic depressions are motivated internal sacrifices which

often kill more people than wars do. Cartoons prior to and
during depressions often show sinful, greedy people being
sacrificed on altars, and the depressed nation becomes
paralyzed politically, unable to take action to reverse the
economic downturn. Just as depressed individuals experience
little conscious anger--feeling they "deserve to be punished"--
so too nations in depressions are characterized by
"introverted" foreign policy moods, start fewer military
expeditions and are less concerned with foreign affairs. The
feeling during depressions is "I should be killed" for my
wishes rather than "I want to kill others." Depressions are
3313
economic anorexias, where people starve themselves to avoid

being eaten up by the Dragon Mother, the maternal vulture of
infancy. The nation begins to look for a Phallic Leader with
whom they can merge and regain their failed potency and who
can protect them against their growing delusional fears of a
persecutory mommy.
*****
At the end of the 1920s, for instance, as economic and social

progress seemed to have gotten "out of control," world
bankers-chief sacrificial priests of modern nations-pursued
deflationary economic policies, trade barriers were erected
and many other "mistakes" were made that were motivated to
produce the Great Depression that sacrificed so much of the
wealth of the world. As Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon
said in 1929 as the Federal Reserve pushed the world into the
Great Depression, "It will purge the rottenness out of the
system." Business cycles, as William K. Joseph has shown, are
driven by the manic and depressive cycles of group-fantasy, as
manic defenses against growth panic are followed by
depressive collapses into emotional despair and inaction.
Indeed, most death rates car crashes, homicides, cancer,
pneumonia, heart and liver diseases rise during prosperous,
manic times and are lower during depressions and recessions.
Only suicide internal sacrifice rises during economic declines,
reacting to the prevailing group-fantasy need for internal
sacrifice.
Depressions and recessions are thus not due to "the Invisible

Hand" of economics but are motivated sacrifices that often
kill more people than wars do, halting dangerous prosperity
3314
and social progress that seem to be getting "out of control.

[. . .] Like Aztec human sacrifices, recessions and depressions
are accompanied by national sermons, "cautionary tales,"
about how sacrifices are necessary to purge the world of
human sinfulness." (Lloyd DeMause, Emotional Life of
Nations)
Depressions aren't just the rich, even if ultimately to their own

detriment, hogging it all selfishly to themselves. Greed, self-interest,
gone amuck. We've got to look at other motivations behind this
evidently willed madness, most notably, I would hope, collective
masochism. Referring to preferred social science
assessments/assumptions of human behavior, further DeMause to
help prod deeper inquiry into why nations do the mad things that
they do:
Social behavior, using these models, cannot therefore be (a)

irrational (because all men use only reason to achieve their
goals), (b) empathic (because empathy for others would not
be totally self-interested), (c) self-destructive (because no one
can rationally ever want to hurt themselves), nor (d) sadistic
(because people don't waste their resources just to harm
others). At most, people might be shortsighted or uninformed
in their social behavior, but not unreasonable, benevolent,
suicidal or vicious-i.e., not human.
The exclusion of the most powerful human feelings other than

greed from social and political theory plus the elimination of
irrationality and self-destructiveness from models of society
explains why the social sciences have such a dismal record in
providing any historical theories worth studying.
Link: Austerity is bringing on a global recession (Salon)

----------
3315

The more abused, the least ensouled, unfortunately
"This isn't about me." That's what eager, well-intentioned

and lily-white aspiring writer Skeeter tells the nervous
African-American maid Minny in "The Help." It's her pitch
to try to get Minny to open up about her experiences as a
domestic, and her feelings on the roiling racism of Jackson,
Miss., in the early 1960s. But it's also one of the most telling
moments of what's shaping up to be one of the most
controversial and surprisingly divisive movies of the year.
Because novelist Kathryn Stockett wrote a book that wasn't
just about her. And that has a made a lot of people very
uncomfortable.
[. . .]
On Monday afternoon in Times Square, the audience for
"The Help" was surprisingly packed and unmistakably
diverse. For a few hours, a variety of young people and older
matinee goers, men and women, black and white, sat down
together and watched a movie about what happens when
black and white people sit down together. Then, as Viola
Davis walked down a Jackson street, the lights came up. And
for every member of the audience, an opportunity for
conversation began. (“Why the ‘Help’s’ critics are all
wrong,” Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, 16 August
2011)
Nothing new to see here

The debate about The Help in which MEW is engaging is the
same debate that has dogged books written by whites about
blacks for years, going back at least to Mark Twain's
masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--in which the
3316
protagonist learns to recognize the humanity of his friend

Jim, but, incidentally, not of all black people ("I always
knowed he was white inside," Huck says toward the end of
the novel.) In my view Stockett's book is only partially about
the black experience; it is also about a Southern woman's
dawning understanding of that experience. Of course
Skeeter's understanding is incomplete, as was the
understanding of just about every Southern man and
woman of that time. Yes, there were Southerners who were
genuinely evil--the murderers of Emmett Till, Bull Connor,
etc. But most people in the South were simply people who
had been raised with racism as part of the fabric of their
everyday existence, and to whom it had never really
occurred--or only fleetingly--to question that racism. Most
of these people were even capable, like Skeeter and Huck, of
loving individual black people while not questioning the
overall racism of societal structures. (Huck doesn't exactly
become a revolutionary with the intent of knocking down the
edifice of Jim Crow, just as Skeeter does nothing more than
write her little book and Atticus Finch does nothing more
than try a single court case that doesn't change anything.)
But the experience of whites--flawd people that they were--is
part of the story too. Stockett's book is about a young
woman who is just beginning to understand the rotting
foundation upon which the society she has grown up in is
built. And stockett was no more wrong than Twain to try to
give her black characters a voice. They are real characters,
just as Jim is--he is in fact the only consistently responsible,
compassionate, grown-up person in Twain's novel. I am sick
and tired of the moral superiority of those who claim that no
white Southerner can speak intelligently about race. Let's
not forget that whites in Chicago and Boston rioted about
integration, too, and before that allowed institutional
racism, in the South and elsewhere, to go unchallenged.
3317
Racism is, unfortunately, a legacy of our whole nation, not

just one region of it, even if it was worse in that region than
anywhere else. Those who don't like Stockett's book, or
Twain's either for that matter, are entitled to their opinions,
but it doesn't make those of us who did enjoy both works
clueless racists. I understand that it is important to absorb
the perspectives of black writers who did, in fact, live the
experience, but that does not mean all other voices must be
silent. (recovering lawyer)
@Recovering lawyer
RE: Yes, there were Southerners who were genuinely evil--the
murderers of Emmett Till, Bull Connor, etc. But most people in the
South were simply people who had been raised with racism as part
of the fabric of their everyday existence, and to whom it had never
really occurred--or only fleetingly--to question that racism.
Terrorism of a people isn't seen or felt to be abnormal owing to the
fact that one was raised to see it as a fact of life, but because the
people doing the terrorizing (or who see it as a matter of course) are
perpetrators suffering from mass dissocation. In regards to the
Germans in Nazi Germany and Americans in regards to the Iraq war,
Lloyd DeMause explains this phenomenon this way:
Examples of mass dissociation of perpetrators are legion.

Lifton documents how Nazi doctors "double" themselves and
create an "Auschwitz self" to divest themselves of
responsibility toward those they experimented on. The Nazi
commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, when asked if the
Jews he killed had deserved their fate, replied that "there
was something unrealistic about such a question, because
[we] had been living in an entirely different world," that is,
the world of social alters. Jews weren't particularly
personally hated. Their blood just had to flow in order to
3318
purify the blood of Germany. And America, in the 1990s, had

to conduct a genocide of over a million Iraqi children
through our embargo in a trance-in fact, no one noticed we
were killing them! They weren't human because they weren't
real. We were just punishing evil Iraqis. The Nazis used to
say they were just cleansing Europe of Jewish pollution.
How could one ask if Jewish children deserved to be killed?
"It never even occurred to us," Höss said. We were just "good
Germans" and "good Americans" when we killed millions of
children. The most important psychodynamic of history is
people's ability to switch deep into their social alter, identify
with the perpetrator and periodically persecute helpless
people who represent ones' own childhood self. It is the social
alter's duty to remove bad, sinful children. As one German
policeman ended his description of his execution of Jewish
children:
...while leaving the execution site, the other comrades

laughed at me, because pieces of the child's brains had
spattered onto my sidearm and had stuck there. I first asked,
why are you laughing, whereupon Koch, pointing to the
brains on my sidearm, said: That's from mine, he has
stopped twitching. He said this in an obviously boastful
tone...
The psychohistorian asks: "Did he wonder incredulously

what could possibly justify his blowing a vulnerable little
girl's brains out? Do Americans wonder why they must
gratuitously kill a million innocent, helpless Iraqi children?"
The answer is that it is precisely because children are
innocent and helpless that they must be obliterated, to
punish them for our own imagined sinfulness. (Emotional
Life of Nations)
3319
Southerners weren't evil -- which is a unhelpful, nonsense concept --

but people who'd in their childhoods collectively suffered from a
simulacrum of the abuse they ended up suffering on black people.
Blacks had to suffer, because to these poorly nurtured whites they
were full of the badness they themselves felt possessed of and needed
some neat way of hefting principally into someone else. In readily
accepting as normal a culture that evidently would seem hateful to
anyone more (loved and therefore more) sane, even if born in the
South and never exposed to outside ideas/possibilities, they
demonstrated in their everyday simple acceptance of slavery their
intolerance for their own neediness, and therefore their claim to some
goodness/purity.
As every psychologist will tell you, the more abuse, the

more ensouled
I said this on Matt's thread, but just as a reminder to those ostensibly
more bold thinkers out there, being the subject of constant abuse
guarantees the evolution of your personhood, of your capacity to
emphathize and be spared some of pronounced sadistic or
masochistic impulses, will be stalled. That is, in truth, the more you
reveal about how awful the treatment of black people was, the harder
case you make for us to really believe you'd ever truthfully yourself
ever be able to show things simply from the black perspective. If you
couldn't show them as principally heroic in the masquerading-as-
uninflated, simply-honest-accouting mode, and had to show them as
grown-ups know they had to have become after knowing a life of
torture, submission, and fear, my guess is you'd actually lead the
effort to again making whites and their evilness the principle concern,
in hopes that our narrative needs would mostly apply to the tortured
blacks the noble status reality would guaranteed steal from you.
The black community drew together and supplied the support and
love that whites would wholesale deny? I would recommend not
3320
taking a closer look at that one either, and in fact leaving this actually
oppression-supporting argument for soul-nurturance fully alone.
(The great thing about this depression is that you know it'll be
narrated by a future generation as an occasion to forego idleness and
selfishness and develop community -- something, that is, like
ginormous pointless sacrificial wars, to make a people "great.") They
brought it with them from Africa and found some means to keep it
alive? Again, I wouldn't touch it: not just my poor demon-possessed,
jealousy-moved and other-fearing peasant Celtic and German
ancestors weren't doing all that well even just a short while back. How
we all love the folk, though, with their community focus, common
touch, and faith in things unseen.
Link: Why the “Help’s” critics are all wrong (Salon)
----------
TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2011
Michelle Obama's sacrifice
When the Washington Examiner's Byron York asked Michele

Bachmann if she was submissive to her husband at the Fox
News GOP debate Thursday night, the crowd gasped and
booed. That's because wifely submission -- also known as
complementarian theology -- is central to the faith of many
evangelicals. York's question wasn't about religion per se,
but was an attempt to probe whether, if Bachmann became
president, America would be getting Marcus' decisions and
not hers.
[. . .]
Submission theology is built around the notion that God has

a "design" for men and for women; that they are unique
3321
from each other and have their designated, God-given roles.

The husband is the spiritual head of the household, the wife
his obedient "helpmeet," the vessel for their children, devoted
mother, and warrior for the faith. By committing themselves
to those gender roles, evangelicals believe they are obeying
God's commands. They see the wife's obligation to obey her
husband's authority as actually owed to God, not her
husband.
But the obligation falls on the woman to be obedient, even

when the husband doesn't love her as evangelicals believe
God commands.
[. . .]
Regardless of the Bachmanns' relationship, candidate

Bachmann's policy initiatives, as they relate to issues like
gay marriage, abortion and funding for Planned
Parenthood, stem directly from her "biblical" view of gender
roles. "God's design" for gender roles is not limited to the
issue Bachmann usually applies it to (opposition to gay
marriage). God’s design, in her view, is for (Christian) men
and women to get married to serve God, and for the woman
to be a mother and a fierce defender of the "biblical
worldview." Bachmann's worldview, which she sees as
under siege by secularists, feminists, imaginary socialists
and other boogeymen, must be defended for future
generations. "An arrogant corrupt Washington elite,"
Bachmann insisted earlier this year, has "declared war on
marriage, on families, on fertility, and on faith." (Sarah
Posner, “What Michelle Bachmann’s submission
theology really means,” Salon, 15 August 2011)
Michelle Obama's sacrifice

3322
America seems to need reassurance right now that women

professionals won't dominate their husbands. Submission "theology"
was at play, after all, with our election of Obama, with how we were
going to imagine Barack relating to Michelle, as opposed to how we'd
imagine Hillary relating to Bill, as Salon.com noted at the time:
Damn it all, Michelle Obama has quit her $215,000 dream job and
demoted herself to queen. Though the party line is that she's only
"scaled back" to a 20 percent workload, I doubt her former co-
workers will bother alerting her to many staff meetings. She's
traded in her solid gold résumé, high-octane talent and role as vice
president of community and external affairs at the University of
Chicago Hospitals to be a professional wife and hostess.
Now, the energy and drive that had her up jogging before dawn and
a gratifying day of work and family will mainly be spent smiling for
the cameras. Just as we watch curvy, healthy-looking singers and
actresses like Lindsay Lohan become anorexic too-blonde hoochies
before our very eyes, so we're now in danger of having to watch the
political version of that process: Any day now, Michelle Obama's
handlers will have her glued into one of those Sunday-go-to-meeting
Baptist grandma crown hats while smiling vapidly for hours at a
time. When, of course, she's not staring moonstruck, à la Nancy
Reagan, at her moon doggie god-husband who's not one bit smarter
than she is. (Debra Dickerson, "Michelle Obama's sacrifice," Salon,
21 May 2007)
Liberals don't get much of a kick from Bachmann, but however much
they're willing to press her on her submission, with their collective
failure to admit they kind of liked Michelle hemming in her career a
bit, I'm not sure they're exempt from liking the idea a considerable
some as well.
Link: What Michelle Bachmann’s submission theology really means

(Salon)
---------
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2011

Why losing fat is ACTUALLY so hard to do
I was channel surfing mindlessly, avoiding some household

chore, when I landed on a cable talk show discussing child
abuse. The guests were talking about horrible things:
parents who starve children, beat them or sexually abuse
them. Parents who let their children get fat. This last one,
one woman leveled, was the same as any other form of
abuse and deserved the same unequivocal response: Remove
the kids from the parents.
I had happened upon yet another media debate in response

to the controversial JAMA article that came out a few weeks
ago. This study looked at whether intervention was ever
warranted when parents allow their children to become
dangerously obese. The study itself was balanced in its
approach, but the talking-head response was anything but.
This particular pundit -- shoulder-shrugging with a clear
look of disgust on her face -- talked about taking fat kids
away from their parents as if it were nothing more than
trading in a car. I had to turn the TV off, my stomach in
knots.
I wondered what this woman would say if she met my own

parents. Would she blame them for the way I turned out?
For that matter: Should I?
Let me back up a bit. I'm fat and have been since I was a
toddler. Not "trapped in my trailer" fat, or "have to use an
extra-wide electric wheelchair at the grocery store" fat, but
medically, technically, morbidly obese. I confess that
whenever I hear that term -- morbidly obese -- I giggle,
3324
because I picture chubby Goths with back nail polish and

dog collars. That is not to say I do not take it seriously,
because I do. It is the first thing I think about when I wake
up in the morning, the last thing on my mind when I go to
bed at night. And I will never be a member of the "fat
acceptance movement," because I don't accept it. I have been
fighting my weight for over 35 years.
But I don't believe I deserve to be hated, and hate is what I

feel every single day as a fat woman. I feel it in the stares
from strangers' children, and when someone screams "fat
ass" as I walk my dogs. I feel it when I get a flawless
performance review, but my boss asks if I have considered
weight loss surgery -- as if that has something to do with my
professional skills. I feel it in the constant stream of media
images about what women should look like, in the tired fat
jokes from comedians (come on, stop phoning it in -- get
creative!), and in the constant articles about the doom that is
The Obesity Epidemic. Fat people are taxing the healthcare
system, they make other people uncomfortable on planes
and trains, they use more fossil fuels because it takes more
gas to haul their big butts around thus causing global
warming, and they suck up the world's food resources while
others starve.
And yet, I understand: These arguments aren't without

merit, and it is after all human nature that some people
express their points with meanness and derision. I don't take
it personally.
But even at my most open-minded, I could not bear the

debate that erupted in response to the JAMA article (and the
derisive online comments). While the study, by Dr. David
Ludwig and Lindsey Murtagh, did suggest that obese
3325
children -- in some extreme circumstances -- should be taken

away from their parents, coverage of the article focused on
the most sensational elements of the argument. It resulted in
a cascade of hate on cable news and morning shows that
was packaged as concern for children, like that disgusted-
looking pundit who made me sick to my stomach.
Did my parents make me fat? Probably. They fed my

siblings and me meals of bologna on white bread, hot dogs
and potato chips. They let us have four of those Oreo-knock-
off cookies-that-don't-quite-taste-right in a sitting, rather
than one or two. They used fast food as a reward and eating
in general as a form of entertainment. If I was upset, I might
be offered a tasty snack as a pick-me-up. Even if nothing got
done all day, not the dishes, not the vacuuming, not mowing
the lawn, by god dinner would get done and there wouldn't
be any leftovers to pack up and put away. I suppose to some
people it is a portrait of failed parenting.
But my parents are also a success story. They were teen

parents. They had me -- the eldest -- at age 16. It was not a
mistake but a planned pregnancy. My mother grew up in a
household where she faced daily abuse at the hands of people
she trusted. There were challenging finances and in a family
with eight children, food could sometimes be scarce. My
father grew up in a slightly more stable financial situation,
but where violence was the primary outlet for anger, or
disappointment, as well as for discipline of children. When
these two wounded, but hopeful souls met they made a
forever pact in heart-shaped doodles on their class
notebooks. They crafted an escape plan: Create their own
family where they would make different rules. That is just
what they did.
And they did it all on their own. My dad worked two jobs
3326
while finishing high school. My mom went back to night

school after I was born. Dad worked double night shifts and
Mom cut coupons and raised the kids while balancing work
at McDonald's. They never got welfare. They never received
food stamps. They modeled hard work and commitment and
most of all, love. They are still married -- still go out on date
nights and still laugh and look longingly in each other's eyes
-- almost 40 years later.
Doctors did warn them about the children's weight, and

these problems were not ignored. My mom worried. She
ached for me when I came home crying after schoolmates
teased me all day long. She was my biggest cheerleader
when, in the fifth grade, I became the youngest member of
the local Weight Watchers group to reach the 50-pound
weight loss mark. She saved money we didn't have to buy
weight-loss shakes and exercise equipment. She went
without sleep sewing cute clothes that actually fit well,
unlike the pricey crap in the husky department. Dad did his
best when he wasn't working.
But once the fat is on, it is hard to get it off. When you get it
off, it comes back with a vengeance. My parents could never
quite bridge the gap between what was recommended and
what we could afford, between what they went without and
what they would never allow us to miss. And who's to say
what part their parenting played in all this, really -- which
part was simple genetics and which part of was the learned
behavior of emotional eating; which part overindulgence
and which part the negative side effects of yo-yo dieting;
which part was uncooperative children and which part plain
lack of knowledge and time. To think of that pundit giving
such a disgusted look to my parents, crushes me. They tried
so hard. They, in fact, did way more than so many. From
3327
troubled beginnings, they created a family where the cycle of

violence was broken, where their children had access to
more education and opportunity than they had. Did they
make mistakes with food? Yes. But there was nobody better
to raise my siblings and me than the two people who
sacrificed so much to make sure we grew up happier and
healthier than they had.
That's the real point here: We are healthier for their efforts.
No matter our size. (Stacey Hall, “Should I blame my
parents because I’m fat,” Salon, 14 August 2011)
Makes you wonder who would foremost keep bullying

society alive and well
The writer is clearly pleased to be possessed of something that
guarantees she won't be going through life without a good dose of
affliction. She can accomplish stellar things -- absolutely perfect
performance reviews! – and even then! she won't just be collecting
satisfying accolades. What she is incapable of communicating is that
without people unfairly dumping on her she'd feel much more
uncomfortable than she does now, for not being able to convince
herself she isn’t actually having it spectacularly good. She'd think
herself spoiled; self-enriching, other-neglecting, and fully
punishment-worthy.
Most people, sadly, are in some way like this, and all people who
share multiple siblings are, for we get this way from learning at an
early age that we exist primarily to meet some of the unmet needs of
our parents (mothers who have multiple children have them
primarily because infants and very young children are absolutely
focussed on the mother, make the mother feel primary, important
and loved, while older children inevitably begin to focus on their own
needs, on concerns/interests outside the home, necesitating the
plopping out of yet another sure thing!), and our insufficiently loved
3328
parents always interpret our later desire for independence and self-
exploration as us rejecting them. A betrayal they instinctively
countenance by such for-the-child catastrophic things as complete
disinterest and rejection. Ever-after do such children remain loyal to
their parents, protect them from knowing that much of their future
life was predicated on never feeling they'd done something, acquired
anything, insuffiently adorned or trumped by some sobering
disability/curse/deflation that it made them feel worthy of a revisit of
this super ego-installing punishment.
This writer is fat, and, thanks to a fat-hating society and efforts from
people like her to keep it seeming pretty much inevitably always so --
despite every valiant effort! -- she's thereby found way to make
whatever true life gains she acquires something she feels a bit more
okay about savoring. (Even better, it's left her in her preferred
position of stalwartly defending her ostensibly primarily self-
sacrificing parents: oh how the pieces delightfully fall into place!) You
may not be, but perhaps you'll be lucky to count yourself amongst the
people truly stricken through this depression, which will glory you
with sure means of demonstrating how incontrovertably
unbegrudable have been your own claims upon, and acquisitions
through, life.
No, and you shouldn't blame yourself, either.

I am completely sick and tired of self-righteous jerks who
are completely ignorant of the reams and reams of medical
research demonstrating that, for people who have a real
obesity issue, 1) diet and exercise don't work, 2) repeated
efforts to diet make the problem worse, 3) several different
genetic/metabolic mechanisms seem to be involved, etc., etc.
Do NOT blame your parents and do NOT blame yourself. My
parents sent me to nutrition counseling, weighed my food,
fed me extremely healthy meals, enrolled me in Weight
3329
Watchers when I was 12. When I was a teenager, my mother

took me to a "diet doctor" who prescribed mysterious diet
pills. She was desperate and I was desperate. I have ben on
every diet plan ever known, and I have been successful at
losing weight--so disciplined and so successful that I have
lost a total of more than 700 pounds over the course of my
lifetime. And I am now, once again, morbidly obese.
Those who would consider fat people lazy and undisciplined

should also consider that some of us managed to graduate
from college with honors, from major law schools and
medical schools with honors, and hold down extremely
demanding jobs--these are not the hallmarks of lazy or
undisciplined personalities. We are smart enough to
understand that extra weight probably is not healthy
(though the risks are probably lower than the unhealthy
effects of extreme dieting). We are smart enough to realize
that we are penalized in a million ways, social and financial
and medical, for our weight. And yet we are fat.
Thousands of us go through extreme surgical procedures

that effectively remove our stomachs and require us to eat
extremely limited (and, yes, unhealthy) diets for the rest of
our lives in order to lose weight. Those of us who go to such
an extreme do not do it because we are too "lazy" to exercise.
Really, if this were a matter of walking an hour a day, or
just maintaining an 1800 kcal. diet when we notice ourselves
gaining a couple of pounds, or keeping the kids away from
candy, nobody would be overweight, much less a hundred or
more pounds overweight, and nobody would be removing
his stomach to prevent himself from eating.
Personally, I think the people who are ready to throw stones

at fat people (or deny them health insurance or the love of
3330
their parents!) should submit themselves to a thorough

examination of their own health habits, including the
possibility of unlucky genetic traits or environmental
circumstances that may predispose them to heart disease,
cancer, alcoholism, diabetes, chronic pulmonary obstructive
disease, and a zillion other "preventable" diseases or
conditions. I don't see why I should pay higher premiums to
cover some moron whose drinking gets him into a car
accident or whose loud mouth gets him into a fist fight. And
those old people walking around with expensive portable
oxygen tanks really should have known better than to live in
smoggy cities or smoke cigarettes--why don't we lob some
damning insults in their direction? Ditto the slender, but
heart-attack prone legions of bankers and lawyers jamming
high-end steakhouses across America--can we all agree that
they should have been removed from their parents before
they were allowed to grow up as assholes (let alone allowed
to develop high blood pressure and coronary artery
disease)? (M.A. Mayo)
M.A. Mayo
Re: "Really, if this were a matter of walking an hour a day, or just
maintaining an 1800 kcal. diet when we notice ourselves gaining a
couple of pounds, or keeping the kids away from candy, nobody
would be overweight, much less a hundred or more pounds
overweight, and nobody would be removing his stomach to prevent
himself from eating."
Have you heard the rumor that a good number of Americans eat 1800
kcal meals pretty much every single time they sit down to dine? If this
isn't simply a rumor, how would narrowing your diet to a third of its
current, and largely denied everything you look for to achieve hunger-
riddance and temporary satisfaction, be so obviously easy to achieve?
I think perhaps if you replaced all these Americans and put in their
place, Europeans, it might be accomplished. But otherwise it would
3331
seem almost impossible, and what you'd be left with is a nation of fat
people immodestly spreading the word of experts who insist it has
nothing to do with diet and exercise -- so stop the abuse! -- as they sit
more comfortably fully sedentary, imagining a walk around the block
a bit much, let alone an hour of purposeful striding, indulging
themselves the extra helping they crave with a bit more, at ease, "ca
ne fait rien."
Predictable responses to touching article

The author's love for her parents is palpable and lovely.
Don't blame them - plenty of kids get the same food and are
skinny. I suggest instead reading Gary Taubes' books - Good
Calories, Bad Calories, and Why We Get Fat and What to Do
About it - and forget about feeling sad. Ms. Hall's parents
were great. (jcc126)
jcc126
RE: The author's love for her parents is palpable and lovely. Don't
blame them - plenty of kids get the same food and are skinny. I
suggest instead reading Gary Taubes' books - Good Calories, Bad
Calories, and Why We Get Fat and What to Do About it - and forget
about feeling sad. Ms. Hall's parents were great.
What is palpable is the author's need to so essentialize her parents as
hard-working, self-sacrificing, and self-denying that attacks upon
them can readily be dismissed for their absurd cruel-heartedness
alone. What is palpable to some of us is the author's absolute need to
understand her parents as not at fault, which mostly communicates to
us how complicated her love for them actually is, in that it may in fact
mostly be at the service of intimidation-born requirement.
Gary Taubes tells people to pretty much consume no sugar. The
biggest meat pattie in the world, if you like, but absolutely for sure no
bun to bed it in, fries to accompany it along, or sugary drink to wash it
all smoothly on down. My guess is that if you turned on every obese
3332
person onto this diet the only weight they'd lose is in strangling
people like you for blanching them temporarily of their king-feastly,
abundant starchy fun.
Calories, non-smoking, etc.

I'm near the author's age, and virtually all the kids in
elementary school & junior high were skinny yet had a lunch
just like she describes -- so I don't buy for a minute that her
weight was from what she ate for lunch.
I learned the hard way in my 20s that caloric restriction +

exercise aren't always helpful. I exercised at the gym for 2
hours 3 nights per week and ate nothing more all day than a
plain sandwich (a few pieces of lunchmeat, mustard, wheat
bread), only drank water...yet I only became fatter.
Fortunately, the anti-depressant I was prescribed
(Wellbutrin) speeds the metabolism up or something, so I
finally reverted to being a proper weight (5'2 ½" ~112 lbs.)
even though my increasingly painful neck deformity meant I
couldn't work out at the gym anymore.
Comparing society's attempts to get people to lose weight

with anti-smoking campaigns is absurd. The reason society
restricted citizens' right to smoke anywhere they pleased is
because -- unlike being obese -- it physically harmed others.
(Even if you don't believe in the effects of secondhand smoke,
the chemicals still trigger allergic reactions like headaches
or full-potentially deadly asthma attacks. As the old saying
goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my face...)
(XyzzyAvatar)
XyzzyAvatar
Re: I'm near the author's age, and virtually all the kids in
3333
elementary school & junior high were skinny yet had a lunch just
like she describes -- so I don't buy for a minute that her weight was
from what she ate for lunch.
So Europeans are skinny owing to their superior genes? Or do we get
some kind of wonderful compensense in exchange for our absurdly
cruel collectively-held genetic defect, which has so many of us gaining
weight, not just on regular, but even on starvation diets of water,
whole grain, and non-sugary spread?
RE: Fortunately, the anti-depressant I was prescribed (Wellbutrin)
speeds the metabolism up or something, so I finally reverted to
being a proper weight (5'2½" ~112 lbs.) even though my
increasingly painful neck deformity meant I couldn't work out at the
gym anymore.
One of the problems about people you know are on anti-depressants,
or "inclined" to go on them, is that they have a tough time seeming
entirely trustworthy in the tales they tell: truth seems never likely to
have it over giving just the right sort of lift. Your increasingly painful
neck deformity that you tell us about is mostly in service to your
explanation, or is it something of a primary point in itself? That is,
did you want us to finish reading and consider how damnably cruel
and mis-understanding others must have been in assessing your
likely reason for quiting the gym? Another thing, beyond weight, that
unfairly draws scorn upon the innocent, to be used to draw satisfying
consolation from oneself and (complicit) others?
RE: Comparing society's attempts to get people to lose weight with
anti-smoking campaigns is absurd. The reason society restricted
citizens' right to smoke anywhere they pleased is because -- unlike
being obese -- it physically harmed others.
I'm not sure about physical abuse, but be sure some of us suspect that
a nation of fat people will intellectually harm us, in aggressively
inhibiting/squashing debate when it doesn't tell things as they would
have it.
For weight loss, forget "eat less, move more"

3334
Just stop consuming easily consumable, easily digestible

carbohydrates. It shouldn't be difficult, decades ago most
people managed to do it without having to think about it.
The problem is fighting the efforts of all the industries whose
very existence is dependent on such consumption. It wasn't
always this way. Junk food is heavily laden with the worse
kinds of carbohydrates. When did obesity become a major
health issue? There are physical mechanisms in the body
that go haywire when carbohydrates are processed. No
amount of exercise can stop those processes. Exercise
promotes the consumption of still more carbohydrates. The
body has no off switch for consumption of food while
carbohydrates are being consumed. These ideas seem wrong
or counter-intuitive because of the misinformation spread in
recent decades. (Charley Horse)
@Charley Horse
RE: Just stop consuming easily consumable, easily digestible
carbohydrates. It shouldn't be difficult, decades ago most people
managed to do it without having to think about it.
Just like decades ago (lets say the 60s and 70s) pretty much every
Republican was more liberally in support of social programs than
most democrats are now. That is, "decades ago" is sadly a realm no
one living now is easily going to be able to resurrect or revisit; no
matter how hard think someone thinks about it, "they're" not likely to
come to know it.
If we as a people collectively "Jamie Oliver" lose weight now, it'll be
for terrible, non-praiseworthy reasons: namely, to essentialize
ourselves as pure and fit and isolate poisons neatly in some other
culture/group; and two, to emphasize the difference between
ourselves and the readily indulgent elite, something that serves our
masochistic need to feel noble, selfless, and less inviting of the harsh
judgment sweeping over a land that clearly previously had suffered
way too much scarcely limited and unquestionably unearned gaudy
3335
spoils and unrepetant fun.
Link: Should I blame my parents because I’m fat (Salon)
----------
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2011

Parading as the very opposite
American historical films are forever refighting old wars,

congratulating themselves for being on the right side, and
encouraging viewers to pat themselves on the back for being
on the right side, too. They view the war from the general's
tent up on a distant hill and imagine that they're right in the
thick of it. That's how Paul Haggis' "Crash" swept the Oscars
in 2006 -- by serving up a contemporary story of Los
Angelenos who said and did brazenly racist things in public
constantly, as if it were 1967 and everyone was wearing love
beads, Afros and hard hats. The characters seemed crude
and primitive, lacking in self-awareness, unenlightened; this
made them easy to label, judge and dismiss. A variation on
this strategy has enabled another race drama, "The Help," to
become an instant hit, a likely Oscar contender, and yet
another reminder that when mainstream cinema depicts
discrimination, it tends to ask the same two questions: "How
did this affect white people?" and "Aren't you glad you're not
bigoted like the creeps in this movie?"
[. . .]
This isn't the story of beleaguered domestics standing up for
themselves during a time of American apartheid. It's the
story of a perky proto-feminist writer (Emma Stone's
"Skeeter" Phelan) cajoling black women into standing up for
themselves by telling her their stories and letting her publish
them in book form. It's about what a good-hearted and
3336
tenacious person Skeeter is, and how lucky the maids are to
have met her.
[. . .]
There was no real-life book similar to Skeeter's magnum
opus; it's a fictional flourish that feels like a college-educated
white liberal's wish-fulfillment fantasy of how she would
have conducted herself had she been time-warped back to
the civil rights era. I wouldn't have just stood by and let it
happen. I would have done something! Something brave!
[. . .]
And so, yet again, for what seems like the zillionth time, a
heart-tugging Hollywood film transforms a harrowing and
magnificent period of African-American life into a story of
once-blinkered white people becoming enlightened. The
black characters' struggles are sensitively rendered,
magnificently acted, and sometimes heartbreaking
sideshows. Although Viola Davis' subtle performance
anchors the movie, and will likely earn this perpetually
underrated actress an Oscar nomination, giving Aibileen the
movie's voice-over won't fool anybody. This is Skeeter's
movie. She's the one who sets the plot in motion. Without her
youthful idealism, these downtrodden black women would
have continued to suffer in silence.
This sort of thing just keeps happening and happening and
happening,
[. . .]
I've heard somewhat sheepish arguments to the effect that
the white folks' stories take center stage in these films
because they're more clearly dramatic. Why? Well, you see,
it's because drama -- commercial mainstream drama,
anyway -- is about people learning, changing and growing,
and the non-white characters' stories are less dramatic
because they already know discrimination is bad, which
means their "arcs" are inherently less interesting. No, I
3337
promise you, some moviemakers really do think this way.

The only proper response to this kind of thinking is to smack
one's forehead -- or better yet, the filmmaker's -- with a tack
hammer. At least it's offered timidly and rarely, and as a
commercial rather than an artistic defense.
Even more problematic is the overriding sense -- conveyed
not just in "The Help," but in so many historical movies --
that the era being depicted is tucked safely away in the past,
a closed chapter, and the collective insanity that gripped
society has dissipated thanks to the efforts of good-hearted
people like you, the viewer.
It is inconceivable that any viewer of any race, age or
gender could look at the bigoted, greedy, petty, pinch-faced
shrews who torment poor Aibileen and her colleagues and
think, "That person reminds me of myself," or "I know
somebody like that." They're not fully rounded, likable
people who happen to have a few revolting qualities, and
who therefore complicate our reactions. They're paper
targets that the film can pepper with rhetorical buckshot.
[. . .]
It might not be a bad idea for filmmakers to lay off the big,
tried-and-true historical topics for a while -- civil rights,
slavery, the Holocaust, America's righteous participation in
World War II, the moral tragedy of Vietnam -- and deal with
more recent eras. I'm not suggesting anything radical. I
mean "something that happened 20 years ago as opposed to
50." Movies about actual recent history -- 9/11, Iraq, the
financial meltdown, the dog-whistle racism of 21st-century
America -- tend to bomb.
Better yet, filmmakers could deal with controversial subjects
by way of metaphor or parable. This sounds like a dodge,
but it could be liberating. And it couldn't possibly yield a
more tepid movie than "The Help." As engrossing as it is, it's
still a white liberal fantasy in historical drag -- "Crash" with
3338
smiles and hugs. (Matt Zoller-Seitz, “Why Hollywood

keeps whitewashing the past,” Salon, 12 August
2011)
So let's tell it straight? But what if this gets the story all
wrong too?
Re: And so, yet again, for what seems like the zillionth time, a heart-
tugging Hollywood film transforms a harrowing and magnificent
period of African-American life into a story of once-blinkered white
people becoming enlightened.
The period was actually, indisputably, a harrowing and magnificent

(epic?) period of African-American life? Good thing, because if
Hollywood ever takes up your call and gets real, it wouldn't have
presented itself with the dreadful problem of not showing much
anything of interest, let alone of magnificence!, for their (i.e.,
Southern blacks) just being relentlessly unconscionably hated upon
and abused. There's this simple, idiotic myth/assumption that when
whites attack another culture, project their own unwanted demons
onto some Other for purposes of punishing and destroying it, that this
Other was more spiritually pure, psychologically sane, less mad,
hateful, and more community-oriented and naturally benefactory
than their oppressors. The only thing I know for sure when a group is
being oppressed is that it shows the illness of the persecutor and that
it must be stopped; it doesn't tell me damn all about the oppressed.
They could have been better, even vastly so, as was the case with the
Jews in Nazi Germany, who were possessed of genuinely more
affective and tolerant child-rearing inclinations than their punitive,
indulgence and progress-fearing German "brethren," but nothing
discounts that they may have been even worse.
Would this be a subject matter/consideration you'd be okay with

Hollywood tackling in regards to the South, Matt? A film that shows
whites for what they were, and how the blacks may have been also
3339
(that they were all a mess, with it being best to have lived in the North
where you'd find at least some who were civilized)? Or are you at last,
even after all your preference for nuance and distaste for the
impossibilities of the purely good or simply evil, still stuck with a silly
default defense of primitivism and the folk, very much ready to
destroy anyone who'd poke holes at your own maddingly intractable
mythology, allowed to persist on and on, not in the least bit for its
claim on truth but because its espousers know that no one but a
purely evil person who must be hunted down and destroyed for the
good of all would take them to task on it? Is the road you've taken
really so very, very uphill or hard?
------
The wall
For Matt the wall that blocks all further forward progress, all further
larger public engagement with the real and trespasses into exciting
unexplored possibilities of who we might become, is white people's
need to enslaven all narratives to their need to feel important. It's
gotten as far as they (i.e., white people) can allow. Bit by bit,
previously simply demonized Others have long not just been exempt
from demonization, but even granted memorable roles for supporting
actor/actress nomination. But they cannot be made primary to white
protoganists, for we've collectively learned we need these protagonists
kept essentially as they are – enfranchised, the primary heroes -- to
keep ourselves feeling sexy and vital.
The problem for me is that Matt's own heroism is the one that seems
most unfairly protected from deconstruction. What Matt will never
permit you to consider without being made to feel grossly
punishment-worthy for it, is that disenfranchised people may not be
empowered to show any of the traits we ought rightly to consider
ennobling or heroic. He wouldn't have you consider that if you
focussed purely on the blacks that all you would mostly see is the less
3340
pretty things that happen to people after suffering ongoing abuse:

that you wouldn't just discover how awful torture is, but that suffering
from whole-scale torture makes a people, though absolutely worthy of
essential respect, still truly hard to like, leaving them, not so much
with assertive, pronounced, striking and nobly defiant souls, but near
bereft of all such entirely.
He certainly wouldn't have you consider that black culture might not
have been so pretty to begin with, even before the in-fact truly
demon-haunted, unloved and unevolved whites set themselves upon
them. If you consider any of this, Matt'll show no nuance in IDing you
as evil, for to him your primary use is to ensure that he himself is
never in the end mistaken for being evil himself. Nothing of the mass-
bucking/disregarding, controversial things he says can suggest a core
lack of empathy or sympathy, because of how clearly he distinguishes
himself from you indisputable monsters. Making clear your
inarguable evilness/villainy keeps him within the pale, bravely
looking like he might even risk being horribly misunderstood to keep
himself -- and hopefully thereby some of us -- at the forefront of
reality exploration/confrontation. That is, Matt’s own kind of
narrative needs, for their actually also too very much being privileged
over bare truth, however much parading as the very opposite, are to
me what is at risk of keeping us all from stretching out into
unfamiliar, more discomforting territory.
Link: Why Hollywood keeps white-washing the past (Salon)
----------
3341

Reply to Barbara Ehrenreich
My reply to Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay on Salon:
Helping the stupid Depression story be told

Re: To my own amazement, "Nickel and Dimed" quickly
ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards.
Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. But for
the most part, the book has been far better received than I
could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending
well into the more comfortable classes.
Associating oneself in anyway with you gives one working class-
sympathies cred, as well as appreciative-of-one-of-America's-
foremost-essaysists cred (I mean, who dislikes you?). In addition,
your extended sojourn amongst the untouchables didn't leave you
exempted from where you'd been previously -- back once again to
being one of America's NYRB foremost. In addition, your book was
warzone adventure, from someone who lived, breathed, and even ate
it, all its ghastliness. You really counted flinching from the
frighteningly permanently destitute such that it'd leave you ignored
this time around? You're not just one of those who, no matter their
success, for some reason always finds some reason to define
themselves as not immoderately empowered/influential? I'm hearing
even the President -- eternally hopeful, but always hamstrung --
defines himself this way, and I'm guessing it’s what people do when
they want to communicate they're not at all responsible for the
widespread muck they mostly actually want, or at least get some kind
of weird kick from.
Look at how Laurel here debases herself to you: she's pretty much do
as much to none other -- even her expecting God might be in for
worse than just a few minor correctives. You're none other than one
of our collectively-agreed-upon few gods, you fool. Average Middle
3342
American, indeed!
Re: A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading
it, she'd always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw
as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a
healthy diet wasn't always an option. And if I had a
quarter for every person who's told me he or she now
tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own
foundation.
Too bad Laurel didn't chime in on this one, for she'd have said the
perfectly fair and in fact just plain necessary in reminding you and
this earnestly self-deluding fool that the poor don't eat healthy owing
to lack of options, but because they like fatty foods to the point that in
some moods they'd choose a follow-up burger over peace-
neverending, but with only an apple as chaser.
Re: Even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely
read among low-wage workers. In the last few years,
hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories:
the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just
been turned off, the woman who had just been given a
diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the
newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.
At what point did you pass up concluding that this aggressive flow
suggested people kind of enjoyed this opportunity to showcase their
suffering, and wonder if your efforts for a better America for the
working class would be shortchanged owing to most of them being
broadly aware that a better America would make it incrementally
harder to show how nobly unspoiled and self-denying they'd become?
Their wounds are real and ruinous; how every accuser's accusation is
sundered by this stark, undeniable corporeal fact.
Re: In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs
pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many
of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff
competition for those that remained. It would have been
impossible to repeat my "Nickel and Dimed" "experiment,"
3343
had I had been so inclined, because I would probably

never have found a job.
Now it's even easier to credit to yourself that those who believe you're
lazy, not only don't know what they're talking about but are probably
to be counted amongst those who'll burn in hell for prospering at a
time when it surely means living it at the-public-at-large's expense.
You'll live the rest of your life relatively prosperous and always
lauded. They’ll, however, live it that much greater, truer heroes --
even if it means a 30-year shortchanged life, and most of this with
some sort of missing limb or malfunctioning organ, plus a further list
of afflictions not even an evil Santa could bear to count without at
some point pleaing for mercy.
Re: But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum
principle, to stop kicking people when they're down.
Good news! This is what they can expect to receive in plenty. During
the last Depression at some point everyone was for the noble,
suffering poor, which is fortuitous because it's the one sort of not-
entirely-inversed plentitude they can handle. They need yet more
years of jaw-dropping sacrifice and self-wasting before they'll believe
they've shown inner persecutors they're clearly not what they're
accused of being: indulgent, greedy, self-centred -- selfish! Then,
they'll be all for the next Roosevelt, who'll permit some growth -- but
not that much! -- before ensuring the inacting of some giant war
that'll waste away many of them as well as their kids for good, and
prove beyond doubt that liberals may have a point in thinking we now
might deserve better and in doing what they can to finally actually
enact it. We're in for such good times, people -- we always get what
we want. The rich are but toys we wind up again and again to undue
the good things we've become highly anxious over possessing.
----------

The South
3344
As a book and a movie and a social phenomenon, "The Help"

functions as a kind of Rorschach test that measures how you
feel about the history of racial inequality in America.
[. . .]
Stockett herself was not born until 1969, and drew on her
own experiences being raised by African-American women
who worked for her parents in the '70s and '80s. Her book is
set in the dramatic context of the early '60s, when the civil
rights movement was just beginning to capture national
attention, but as she has said in interviews, relations
between affluent white Mississippians and their black hired
help really hadn't altered much between that time and her
own childhood. And for all the cultural shifts America has
experienced since then, the fundamental economic disparity
between whites and people of color has hardly improved, if
indeed it hasn't gotten worse. A recent study by the Pew
Research Center suggested that the current recession -- and
can we stop pretending it ever ended? -- has slashed the
median net worth of black households by 53 percent (and
Hispanic households by 66 percent), while white wealth fell
by just 16 percent. The raw numbers are even more
astonishing: The median household net worth for white
Americans is $113,149, and for blacks it's $5,677. That's not a
misprint or a misunderstanding; the median white
household is 20 times richer than the median black
household. (Andrew O’Hehir, ‘“The Help: A tale of not-so-
ancient American history,” Salon, 9 August 2011)
Hate the South.

Southern white people suck.
3345
"Maid sues Queens exec over bad pay, abuse"

Link: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2002-08-
27/news/18210475_1_josephs-court-papers-domestic-
worker
An immigrant domestic worker charges she was "treated
like a slave" by a Merrill Lynch executive, who kept her
prisoner in his Queens home where she suffered constant
verbal abuse and was fed table scraps.
Filipino-born Elma Manliguez says she was paid the
equivalent of 6 cents an hour over the two years she worked
for Martin Joseph and his wife, Somanti.
In a lawsuit filed against the couple, Manliguez also
complained she was forced to take meals on the kitchen
floor, was often told she was "stupid" and was denied basic
necessities like sanitary napkins.
"I can't forget how I suffered," Manliguez, 41, told the Daily
News yesterday.
----------------------------------
"[Walnut Creek] Woman indicted for allegedly
exploiting nanny]"
Link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
f=/c/a/2008/11/19/BAIV147LUS.DTL&feed=rss.news
A Walnut Creek real-estate agent will appear in federal
court today on charges that she lured a Peruvian nanny to
the East Bay with promises of a better life but instead kept
her as an indentured servant for nearly two years.
Mabelle de la Rosa Dann, 45, also known as Mabelle Crabbe,
was indicted by a federal grand jury in June. She has
pleaded not guilty to a charge of harboring an illegal alien
for the purpose of private financial gain.
Dann and others brought Zoraida Pena-Canal, 30, of Peru
into the United States on a three-month visitor's visa in July
2006, authorities said. Pena-Canal had worked for Dann's
sister and Dann as a housekeeper and nanny in Peru several
3346
years earlier, investigators said.

----------------------------------
"Ooops! She Did It Again: Susan Tabas Tepper is
Serial Nanny Beater?"
Link: http://www.phillyfuture.org/node/5328
Dahhhlings, how are we? I have been silent for too
long...been contemplating new summer fashions (Lily is
definately out, but strappy sandals and espadrilles? Sooo
In!)
So there I am minding my own business running errands
and what comes over the radio? Main Line Social
LIGHTweight, Susan Tabas Tepper, has oops done it again!
"Alleged serial Nanny abuse" - look out our own Naomi is
back in action...
Susan is beating the help...again? In a sick way I can't help
but mention that it was almost a year to the day since the
last incident...then she was wielding carrots (organic,
natch!)...today she might need a mani/pedi as she is accused
of doing it the old fashioned way - hands, fists, nails,
whatever.
----------------------------------
"Annette John-Hall | The quiet anger felt by 'the
help'
By Annette John-Hall
Inquirer Columnist"
Link:
http://www.saveardmorecoalition.org/node/1612/nannyga
te-update-nannies-speak-out-tabas-tepper
The news that Main Line socialite Susan Tabas Tepper had
allegedly gone all Naomi Campbell on a nanny again didn't
sit too well with the sisterhood of nannies gathered at
Rittenhouse Square yesterday.
That's where most of Center City's babysitters congregate.
You know, down on 18th and Walnut, by the fountain.
3347
Especially on perfect mornings, nannies on the Square are

as predictable as perennials in the springtime.
Yesterday, they were out in force - black, white, Asian,
Latino, almost all foreigners - a virtual bouquet of
caregivers, their caravan of strollers parked, their eagle eyes
focused on their preschool charges, almost all of them white.
You better believe they had an opinion about Tepper, the 44-
year-old Villanova villainess who stands accused of
assaulting her most recent nanny, Urszula Kordzior, only
months after landing in community service for smacking
down another valued employee. The nanny's 9-year-old
daughter allegedly got pushed when she tried to help her
mom.
It appears the hits just keep on coming.
The Rittenhouse nannies agreed to talk only if I didn't use
their names. After all, they like the families they work for.
Oh, and they want to keep their jobs.
"If she did that to me? I would fight back, yes I would," says
a Jamaican nanny....The problem with privileged folk, she
continued as the children clung closely to her, is that they
often view "the help" as nothing more than another child, to
be seen and not heard.
Course, while they're at the wine sip, "the help" has the all-
consuming responsibility of raising their kids.
It seems that Tepper, the daughter of the late Main Line
financier Daniel Tabas, treats animals with more dignity
than her employees. She's been known to tame a tiger, but
can turn on humans - especially those she considers beneath
her - with the ferocity of a wild beast.
...."They think we're inferior, that we're not educated," says
the Jamaican babysitter, a teacher for 11 years in her
homeland before coming to Philadelphia last year. "A lot of
nannies around here are educated people. But you would
only know that if you spoke to the nannies."
3348
I followed her suggestion and spoke to other nannies. Some

were college-educated, others weren't. Many are doing child
care as a temporary job until they can find something better.
And while all of the women said they had yet to experience
the Mommy Dearest wrath of a Tepper, they complained
that certain families had a tendency to take them for
granted.
"They think they can do with you whatever they want," says
a ponytailed native of Spain.
----------------------------------
So, we have Queens, New York; Walnut creek, California;
and Philadelphia, PA. All in the North, all wealthy, all in the
past ten years. Damn those Southerners! Won't they ever
learn!? (Grand Duchess Anastasiya Nikolayevna’s
paregoric bottle)
_____
OK, you insufferable troll

Quit hijacking the thread, seriously. I said nothing about the
South in this review, except that it's where the movie is set. If
you had actually read the review, you'd have noticed that
most of what you're posting actually supports the point that
prodigious inequality persists in America, and may even be
worse now overall than it was in the Jim Crow South.
Sane readers: We really will have a way to get rid of these

people. I keep saying that, but it's getting closer. (Andrew
O’Hehir)
Trolls for the working man

Laurel defends put-upon Southerners, those in regions which didn't
thrive when domestic manufacturing lost its impetus, but hates gay
marriage and spoiled teachers for, according to her, ruining the
3349
foundations of society and making it near impossible to build a better

one. Duchess entrenchedly defends put-upon working classers, but
hates most Jews for, according to him, enslaving and depriving
everyone else into a society with no further forward momentum.
The problem for those who haven't yet put together their troll-kill
program is that time is rapidly running out when it is easy and safe to
target their trolls as TROLLS. For during depressions eventually
EVERYONE, including coastal urban elites, becomes for the
struggling working classes, people of the South, places like
Pittsburgh; the very worst villain becomes the person who'd spit upon
them, something most urbanites ACTUALLY WERE even a couple
years into the depression -- "goober on, Tea Bagger / mad internet
commenter!" -- before instantly transmogrifying themselves; AND
THE WORST VILLAINS become those "leeches" without the moral
fibre still existing in those real Americans bearing through a wasted
republic -- usually the likes of Jews, gays, too-long-tolerated spoiled
public servants, and other vulnerables.
Looking at where Joan W. is heading now (firmly into an Obama
camp that will destroy her as soon as she's no longer useful, for her
in-truth being far too good to be anything at all actually like them), it
is indeed possible that by the time you guys get this thing going, the
trolls you end up dispatching might actually include some of those
calling for this current lot to get the heave-ho. (Soon, for feeling so
impossibly isolated and excluded, no one is going to scream more
lunacy than the few true progressives out there.) Laurel, you'll note, is
beginning to seem comfortably settled -- maybe she senses it's near
her time. Indeed, the difference between her and Ehrenreich,
defender-of-the-noble-but-ever-put-upon working classer, didn't
seem so legion to me.
Link: “The Help”: A tale of not-so-ancient American history (Salon)
----------
3350

Yes, America will once again quietly queue up in bread lines
Today, the answer seems both more modest and more

challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop
doing the things that make people poor and keep them that
way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop
treating working people as potential criminals and let them
have the right to organize for better wages and working
conditions.
Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the

government for help or find themselves destitute in the
streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today,
we can't afford the kinds of public programs that would
genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue
otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum
principle, to stop kicking people when they're down.
(Barbara Ehrenreich, “How America turned
poverty into a crime,” Salon, 9 August 2011)
The Coming Explosion...

When the number and desperation of people at the bottom of
the economic ladder reach critical mass, there will be a
revolution in this country that will put all others to shame.
We are armed to the teeth, and there aren't anywhere near
enough police and national guard to quell mass riots, nor is
there any assurance that our demonized and demoralized
public authorities would be willing to shoot down people by
the hundreds or thousands. They might just join in and turn
those guns on their exploiters.
3351
Think it can't happen here? Think that Americans in the 21st

century will quietly queue up in bread lines as they did in the
1930s?
The thin veneer of civilization is wearing very very thin.

Time for those in power to get serious about improving the
lot of everyday people, or ignore same at their dire peril.
(michaelira)
michaelira
Re: Think it can't happen here? Think that Americans in the 21st
century will quietly queue up in bread lines as they did in the 1930s?
Yes, this is what some of us think, as:
Economic depressions are motivated internal sacrifices which
often kill more people than wars do. Cartoons prior to and
during depressions often show sinful, greedy people being
sacrificed on altars, and the depressed nation becomes
paralyzed politically, unable to take action to reverse the
economic downturn. Just as depressed individuals experience
little conscious anger--feeling they "deserve to be punished"--
so too nations in depressions are characterized by
"introverted" foreign policy moods, start fewer military
expeditions and are less concerned with foreign affairs. The
feeling during depressions is "I should be killed" for my
wishes rather than "I want to kill others." Depressions are
economic anorexias, where people starve themselves to avoid
being eaten up by the Dragon Mother, the maternal vulture of
infancy. The nation begins to look for a Phallic Leader with
whom they can merge and regain their failed potency and who
can protect them against their growing delusional fears of a
persecutory mommy. (Lloyd DeMause, Emotional Life
of Nations)
3352
Why do you think it'll be different this time around? I'm genuinely
curious.
respectfully,
patrick
Link: How America turned poverty into a crime (Salon)
----------
SUNDAY, AUGUST 14, 2011

On class size and lazy teachers
Few things about a school seem to matter more to parents

than class size.
[. . .]
But you may be surprised to learn that the effects of class

size on learning are not 100 percent clear. Conventional
wisdom tell us that smaller class size is crucial for learning
-- that kids of all ages learn more in smaller groups. And
indeed, in the early years of schooling, there is some
research to back this up.
But there is a substantial body of research to suggest that

kids in small classes don’t necessarily learn more. In the
range of things that schools can do to improve outcomes for
your child, reducing class size may rank a distant fourth
behind solid teacher training, a clear and well-sequenced
curriculum, and a staff that is well supported and regularly
evaluated. For decades, class size was largely a function of a
3353
community’s population. A lot of kids born in a particular

year? The local school found a way to cram them into
classrooms. In the 1970s, though, as the discussion of the
achievement gap sharpened and schools began to be seen as
an instrument of racial oppression, "overcrowding" became
a catch-all concept for the inequities between poor and
middle-class kids in public education. Writers like liberal
activist Jonathan Kozol decried the antiquated, crumbling,
and overcrowded classrooms where poor children had their
dreams denied. "The overcrowded classroom" was
associated with poor performance, high truancy, and high
rates of juvenile crime.
In the last twenty years, legislators have tried to institute
state-wide standards in an effort to keep teacher-student
ratios low, especially in poor and underperforming schools.
[. . .]
In general, the powerful teachers unions do endorse small

class size. Although it is popular to bash the unions, you can
look at their enthusiasm for small class size in a couple of
different ways. It may be an honest reflection of the
experience of the people who are on the front lines in
education. A great number of classroom teachers point out
that they can barely learn the names of thirty students by
the end of the first month of school, much less pitch
instruction to different learning styles so the students can
learn best. Teachers also describe a sense of connectedness
that can grow in a small class, creating a learning
environment that is intimate, flexible, and, when it works,
highly productive. A more cynical take is that the union
support for small classrooms is part of an effort to protect
3354
the working conditions of its members. Smaller class size

makes it easier for teachers to teach. It takes much less time
to grade fifteen essays than thirty.
The most cynical take is that smaller class size also increases
the number of teachers who are hired and strengthens the
union that supports them. Randi Weingarten, head of the
American Federation of Teachers, acknowledges that raising
class size is a branch on a tree of hard decisions that cash-
strapped states are facing. But, she says, "if somebody says
they want to raise class size, they’re doing it because they
want to cut the budget, not because it’s actually going to help
children." Teachers’ union representatives point out that the
same fiscal conservatives and corporate-type reformers who
encourage high student-to-teacher ratios in classrooms are
often the ones who send their own children to private schools
where -- you guessed it -- the kids receive instruction in
small groups, often twelve to fifteen in a class.
Does class size matter? For some interesting reasons, it’s

hard for researchers to come up with a definitive answer.
[. . .]
To be sure, all the nay-saying and bellyaching about the way

the Tennessee test was conducted didn’t slow the enthusiasm
of class-size-reduction proponents. In fact, the Tennessee
project changed education policy in the entire state of
California. In 1996, state education officials on the West
Coast got legislators to appropriate $1 billion a year to cap
elementary school class sizes at a strict twenty kids to one
teacher. A pricy undertaking, it led to an unprecedented
3355
hiring binge, with the state bringing 28,886 new teachers on

board. Six years later, the Rand Corporation published a
study examining the results of the California effort-- and it
was discouraging. The good news was that, overall,
California’s educational performance had gone up. The bad
news was this: despite hiring all those new teachers, the kids
in the small classes were performing about the same as kids
in the larger classes. And those positive downstream effects
-- better grades in high school and higher graduation rates
-- never materialized, either.
So, what happened? No one is sure. But there are two strong
hypotheses: either the Tennessee results were specific to that
state and that experiment, or -- and this is one that most
educational experts favor -- teacher quality matters more
than class size. (Peg Tyre, “Does class size really matter,”
Salon, 5 August 2011)
Class size matters slightly, but not as much as other

factors
For example a small class of 15 would not do as well as a
larger class of 24, assuming that the class of 15 kids ONLY
ATTENDED 5 hours a day, and 180 days a year, and the
class of 24 attended EIGHT hours a day, TWELVE MONTHS
of the year....just like kids in Europe, Japan, China -- every
place that beats our socks off.
But we can't have that, can we? Because of the immense

3356
power of the teacher's union, and the fact they want to

protect their short days and VERY short school year, which
means they are GUARANTEED a paid 2.5 month summer
vacation each and every year, to sit in the yard and sip iced
tea, and play with their kids, and go on nice vacations, while
the imbeciles who PAY THEIR OUTRAGEOUS SALARIES
AND LUX WAGES slog into their regular 8 hour a day jobs,
all bleepin' year long.
@Follow the Money

I am sorry, but NO, you are NOT a professional. Teachers
are not professionals. They do not work full time. They
attend teacher's college, which is the easiest and most
undemanding program anywhere (they reject NO ONE, you
don't even have to speak proper English to get accepted) and
they "prepare you" for a job where you work part time, can't
ever be fired, and retire 15 years before anyone else at
almost full pay and benefits.
That's a rip off. It is not "professionalism". Sad you do not

even know the difference.
@Engineer Bill
Teachers have a right to decent working conditions; I agree.
But they have FAR FAR MORE THAN THAT -- they have
Socialist benefits that would stagger the most affluent
European. Even EUROPE, nobody gets THREE MONTHS
OF PAID VACATION. Nobody works only 4 hours and 45
minutes a day!
Teachers also mostly DO NOT have "advanced degrees".

They have an education degree, which is an ordinary BA,
3357
about what you'd get if you majored in Tibetan Basket

Weaving or English Lit or "Communications".
And they earn far more than "people who have advanced
degrees", according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- more
than engineers, more than nurses, more than architects,
more than physicists, more than Optometrists. WHY?
because those folks work all day, 12 months of the year.
Teachers only work a 5-6 hour day, max, and they get all
summer off, 2 weeks at Christmas, 1 week at Easter and they
can retire FIFTEEN YEARS EARLY at 90% of highest salary
(which is often six figures).
On a "per hour worked" basis, teachers are some of the

highest paid people in the work force, frequently earning
$50-75 and much more, PER HOUR ACTUALLY WORKED.
Don't bother, BTW, with the crap about "but they must
grade papers at night!" You don't grade papers in gym class,
in typing class, in health class, in KINDERGARTEN. And I'm
a working professional, and I take work home frequently,
and nobody has a pity party for ME. Every professional I
know has to take work home -- reports, professional
journals, employee evaluations. Nothing unique there. But
teachers are whingers and fakers, goldbrickers and clock
watchers.
The truth is finally OUT and being heard by the public, and
changes are afoot. Thank god for the courage of people like
Gov. Chris Christie in speaking "truth to power' when he lets
the public know about the greed and corruption in the
teacher's union, and how it has dragged our national
3358
educational levels down to that of Latvia (and that's an

insult to Latvia).
***
BTW: I went to school in the sixties -- height of the baby
boom. My classes had 40-44 kids in each -- I have the class
pictures to PROVE THIS. And we had ONE teacher per class
-- no aides, no assistants, nothing -- and we got a good,
decent education. A far better education than 7/8ths of kids
today get! We didn't have inflated grades, we did not have
social promotion.
What is missing in education today is NOT "small classes"

which is just teacher union code for "hire more union
teachers at high salaries and bankrupt cities and suburbs".
What is missing is this: get rid of all illegal immigrant

children and make it a law they cannot steal an education
from the taxpayer.
What is missing is this: utilize unused school buildings (or

build new facilities) for REFORM SCHOOL. Really
disruptive, violent bad behaving kids need to be in REFORM
school, in uniforms, no cell phones and listening to Lawrence
Welk muzak all day until they realize they need to mend
their ways. Violent, misbehaving kids DESTROY education
for the good kids, and drive teachers insane, and suck up all
the time and resources. Put them where they can be
controlled and disciplined.
What is missing is this: truant officers, and a lot of them.

Most schools have missing kids -- staying home to watch TV,
fake illnesses, lazy parents, drugs, video games or just
3359
hanging with friends. It makes our communities a mess with

crime and drugs; it leads to unplanned pregnancies. Get
every kid in school.
What is missing is this: pass uniform state laws to FORBID

dropping out before age 18 OR graduation from an
accredited high school OR a GED. No more dropouts! Don't
behave? REFORM SCHOOL. Add to this, no driver's license
without a high school diploma. See graduation and literacy
rates SOAR.
I could go on all day. American education is an epic failure

and white hot crisis. It won't change until we take back
power from the evil and corrupt teacher's union, and
institute NORMALIZATION of teacher wages, benefits and
retirement (i.e, what other people get and no more than
that). (_bigguns/laurel)
To Echo One of the First Commenters

If you increase the class sizes of the "best" teachers, you will
lose the "best" teachers. The fact is, the best teachers are
often those with multiple degrees and certifications, and
years of experience spent learning how to manage
classrooms and build relationships with students. There are
exceptions: I have met a number of teachers who are quite
simply gifted--an instinctual ability to relate to young
people. However, those teachers are the exceptions. Most of
us become successful through hard work, training,
mentoring, and practice, practice, practice.
When you start implementing practices that punish your

best employees (increasing their work considerably without
providing either monetary compensation or professional
3360
recognition), you will lose your best employees. And after

years of this sort of nonsense, the people who teaching in
public schools will be either pure saints, or people who
couldn't get hired in any other field.
But that's the plan, isn't it? Deprofessionalize education, and

staff the schools of the underclass (i.e., anyone who isn't
wealthy and/or influential) with human "information
delivery devices." When the kids fail, Rhee, Right-Wing
politicians, and their Corporate Sponsors (as well as, I
suspect, this Peg Tyre charlatan) will use it as an excuse to
abolish public education entirely.
This entire movement is a con. Like the extortionists who

took our economy hostage, these people claim to want to
destroy public education in order to "save" it. In fact, they
just want to destroy public education. (Lisa Rathert)
@Mornings Minion: yadda yadda yadda

Lady, you work at one of the white, affluent privileged
private schools in Northeastern Ohio, and they are the kids
of millionaires, doctors, sports stars and so forth.
Your experiences are MEANINGLESS to people whose kids

are in public school, and can only dream about sending their
kids to a lux private academy.
I've met kids from your precious schools, and they are all
spoiled, entitled brats.
Do us a BIG FAVOR and tell us what ONE YEAR'S TUITION
is at your "Whitey Rich-Kid's Academy".
3361
Then we will know why you can have classes with 15 or 18

kids.
The rest of us live in reality, and we can't afford any more
taxes to give teachers summer vacations, or 15 more years in
retirement luxury on our dime.
Teachers have failed us again and again and again. They

said our kids would thrive is we had "open classrooms" -- we
did, and it was a failure. They said "whole language" and
"new math" and we did those things (expensively) and our
kids were worse off than ever.
They said "raise our salaries! double them! and your kids
will learn!" so we raised their salaries to double and more,
and our kids failed worse than ever.
They said smaller classes, they said teacher's aides, they said
more computers -- we tried everything.
Today, adjusted for inflation, we pay TWICE what we did in
1970 per child, and teachers make more than double in
adjusted dollars (and far more benefits) but our kids are
worse off than ever.
It's always "the parent's fault" or "societies fault", never the

teacher's fault-- the lazy, goldbricking clock watching
teachers waiting for their giant cash retirement payout at
age 52!!!!
Here is how you solve this problem (Lord Karth is close, but
not quite): fire every single member of the teacher's union.
Then go to the local unemployment office. Ask who has a 4-
year degree in any subject. Hire those people for $25 a hour
3362
(WORKED HOURS only), and a decent but not lux health

plan.
Watch our kids thrive and succeed. Because ANYONE chosen
at RANDOM would be better than the lazy, useless,
goldbricking members of the nation's most corrupt union.
Remember these words: CLAW IT BACK.
That is our only choice -- that or continued failure, because

anything the teacher's union proposes is guaranteed failure
for our kids. (_bigguns/laurel1962)
Misery
Most liberal Americans are regressing; it's why they're mostly still for
Obama (the key lie is not the one Greenwald, with his insistance that
Obama actually got the deal he himself wanted, exposes, but the one
he ignores: that MOST LIBERALS THEMSELVES at some level
MOSTLY KNEW this about him, and mostly explains why they chose
him over the "less cooperating" Hillary) and why someone like
Laurel/_bigguns talk of "lazy, spoiled" whatevers now appeals to their
sensibilities, when before, when they Gollum-in-his-better-mood had
kowed back the demons threatening to overwhelm their minds, they
would have associated such talk with the Archie Bunkers they were
hurriedly leaving behind in the dust.
The talk now is of how the Tea Partiers are responsible for bringing
down the whole nation. In my judgment, they're something of a
convenience for many liberals who have become more and more
comfortable with crackdowns, and are at some level pleased to have
them to help hide from themselves for awhile the real fact of who
they've become. Without the Tea Partiers, they themselves would
have had to figure out a way to argue for the sort of cuts we've just
seen, and though they would have found a way it never would have
gone down easy with them: guilt over doing the unconscionable
would have chomped good portions of them up.
3363
BTW, EVERYTHING worked better in the '60s and '70s; the reason
for this owes to the fact that after periods of war and mass sacrifice,
people feel entitled, permitted to make life once again about growth.
EVERYTHING went downhill in the 80s, and this owes NOTHING to
what went on previously -- the truly beneficent 60s social agenda that
Laurel complains about, or whatnot -- excepting the key fact that
what went on was mostly unambiguously spread-out improvement
and dream realization, and this is only permitted a short while before
we once again collectively decide we are the sort of immature, sinful,
ungrateful cretins to be rightly filled up with a heftier portion of
constriction and misery. Republicans go for this sort of thing whole
hog, of course, but more liberals than we have yet permitted ourselves
to appreciate do also.
Laurel/_bigguns has voted for moderate democrats the whole of the
way, and though currently still here a troll she is for the most part
representative. This will become more evident here. Even with her
talk about gay marriage and teachers, that is, though right now she's
considerably ahead of the curve, you can already feel preparations are
dutifully being made so that much of the rest of Salon at some point
keeps pace with her. It's one big nightmare. I wonder what will
happen to the Krugmans, who seem completely absent the afflictions
of the punitive superego?
Link: Does class size really matter? (Salon)
---------
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011

Old coot at the age of six
I don't know about you, but the chirpy tales that dominate
the public discussion about aging -- you know, the ones that
3364
tell us that age is just a state of mind, that "60 is the new 40"
and "80 the new 60" -- irritate me. What's next: 100 as the
new middle age?
Sure, aging is different than it was a generation or two ago

and there are more possibilities now than ever before, if only
because we live so much longer. it just seems to me that,
whether at 60 or 80, the good news is only half the story.
For it's also true that old age -- even now when old age often
isn't what it used to be -- is a time of loss, decline and stigma.
Yes, I said stigma. A harsh word, I know, but one that speaks
to a truth that's affirmed by social researchers who have
consistently found that racial and ethnic stereotypes are
likely to give way over time and with contact, but not those
about age. And where there are stereotypes, there are
prejudice and discrimination -- feelings and behavior that
are deeply rooted in our social world and, consequently,
make themselves felt in our inner psychological world as
well.
I felt the sting of that discrimination recently when a large

and reputable company offered me an auto insurance policy
that cost significantly less than I'd been paying. After I
signed up, the woman at the other end of the phone
suggested that I consider their umbrella policy as well,
which was not only cheaper than the one I had, but would, in
addition, create what she called "a package" that would
decrease my auto insurance premium by another hundred
dollars. How could I pass up that kind of deal?
Well ... not so fast. After a moment or two on her computer,

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she turned her attention back to me with an apology: "I'm

sorry, but I can't offer the umbrella policy because our
records show that you had an accident in the last five years."
Puzzled, I explained that it was just a fender bender in a
parking lot and reminded her that she had just sold me an
insurance policy. Why that and not the umbrella policy?
She went silent, clearly flustered, and finally said, "It's

different." Not satisfied, I persisted, until she became
impatient and burst out, "It's company policy: If you're over
80 and had an accident in the last five years, we can't offer
you an umbrella policy." Surprised, I was rendered mute for
a moment. After what seemed like a long time, she spoke into
the silence, "I'm really sorry. It's just policy."
Frustrated, we ended the conversation.
After I fussed and fumed for a while, I called back and asked
to speak with someone in authority. A soothing male voice
came on the line. I told him my story, and finished with, "Do
I have to remind you that there's a law against age
discrimination?"
[. . .]
Yet too few political figures, policy experts or media stories

are asking the important questions: What are the real
possibilities for our aging population now? How will we live
them; what will we do with them? Who will we become?
How will we see ourselves; how will we be seen? What will
sustain us -- emotionally, economically, physically,
3366
spiritually? These, not just whether the old will break the
Social Security bank or bankrupt Medicare, are the central
questions about aging in our time. (Lillian B. Rubin, “The
hard truths about getting old,” Salon, 3 August
2011)
age
Thanks for the truthful article, though I'm glad several have
pointed out that the life-span of U. S. citizens has not
increased significantly in years.
The self-satisfied cretins who have commented, indulging in
the very stereotypes you write about, show just how
dominant age bigotry is. If the old wanted to be mean, they
would point out that all these commentors will die someday.
Of old age, if they're lucky. If they continue to push the
stereotypes, they will know exactly the dismay the aged feel
now, and one hopes they suffer for it. If they really believe
they will be exempt, well . . .
You notice I call it age bigotry, not age discrimination.

Discrimination is too polite a word.
I spent fifty years writing learning about writing. I'm

smarter and more alert than all but a tiny fraction of thirty-
year-olds. And that's being generous. I'm a better teacher
than ever. I just published a fifth novel and a ninth book. I do
calculus for fun. I know more about my art than the ones
who do get hired will EVER know. But I can't get hired.
Betty Davis is reputed to have said, "Old age isn't for sissies."
Amen. It takes a strong character to accept and understand
3367
that your body is getting weaker and you will die and
though you might improve your situation with exercise and
diet and activity, as I do, there is absolutely nothing you can
do about the process as a whole.
Yeats wrote of "this caricature, decrepit age,/ tied to me as

to a dog's tail."
I wrote this:
The old keep saying, You too will come
to this.
The young keep answering with a kiss.
One tries to remain accepting and even-tempered. Probably
the most insulting treatment you receive as you get old is to
be ignored, to be treated as if you no longer matter.
There's a lot of help here, kiddos. You could save yourselves

a lot of grief by paying attention. But you can't do yourself
any good at all by ignoring the facts.
What will it take before every human can understand the
simple fact that time of life is NOT a firm and fixed class of
people, but a phase, a temporary passage, and EVERYONE
must go through it? Be proud of your youth, but you did not
create it. And make no mistake, you WILL get old.
Ahh, but why should the young care? They know they will be
young forever. (hontonoshijin)
hontonshijon, old coot at the age of six

RE: "I spent fifty years writing learning about writing. I'm
3368
smarter and more alert than all but a tiny fraction of

thirty-year-olds. And that's being generous. I'm a better
teacher than ever. I just published a fifth novel and a ninth
book. I do calculus for fun. I know more about my art than
the ones who do get hired will EVER know. But I can't get
hired”
I'm wondering if you can't get hired because you know more than
anyone on the planet, and thus whoever's hiring you is put in the
humiliating position of pretending, however clearly preposterously, to
be your boss. I'm not sure how old you are, but I seem to remember
someone also aged and important and ever-wise arguing that
novelists continue writing great things until they're about 50, and
then slide hard; and I clearly remember Updike later in life saying
that though he hopes accumulated wisdom makes his later books near
equal sources of treasure to his earlier life-filled ones, he admits that
everyone seems to want to default back to "Rabbit Run."
RE: Betty Davis is reputed to have said, "Old age isn't for
sissies." Amen. It takes a strong character to accept and
understand that your body is getting weaker and you will
die and though you might improve your situation with
exercise and diet and activity, as I do, there is absolutely
nothing you can do about the process as a whole.
People who think it shows strong character to do such and such
usually have been showing such character-establishing and other-
deflating tendencies since they first started to define themselves. It
might have been when you first broke your arm but mostly managed
to stifle the cry, but my guess for you it was when you realized, unlike
your enfranchised, dreamy, reality-denying peers, that life wasn't
going to give you nothin' unless you worked your ass off for every
square inch(!); a realization you probably had sometime around the
age of 5 or 6, if it didn't dawn on you while within the womb, with it
prompting your first newspaper route or whatnot.
In truth, to narrate your life so that you count amongst the virtued
and noble for your ostensibly adult ability to reckon with inevitably
3369
flawed existence, is a wicked easy posture to adopt; it's in truth our

near human default, as few people are raised to believe that making
life significantly less flawed and far more, if not "unicorns, raucus fun
and pixie dust," then at least drastically more leisurely, pain-free and
fun, doesn't make you but an idle dreamer, a dumb child who won't
grow up. With more and more liberals now actually sounding more
conservative than conservatives from the 60s and 70s, we can expect
the few true progressives that remain to be summed up and dismissed
as children who won't leave behind their foolish ideals and do the
adult business of dealing with the hard truths of reality.
RE: One tries to remain accepting and even-tempered.
Probably the most insulting treatment you receive as you
get old is to be ignored, to be treated as if you no longer
matter.
You're attention is flagging, sir; best not get behind the wheel. Half
the people here are reminding you that baby-boomers have not been
ignored at any point in their life cycle. With them in their 60s, you
can already feel how the only thing anyone is going to know is how
life begins at 60, then 70, then 80, then after awakening from cryo.
Since we're in a Depression, the poor will eventually be rediscovered;
this will be the only way the youth will sneak in.
Re: Ahh, but why should the young care? They know they
will be young forever.
I personally think they far more know the aged will never listen than
that they'll remain forever young, something they haven't even really
known. Most of the young are looking at two or three jobs and 60
hour workweeks, and if you listen to them their recompense for this
true life-denying awfulness is that it has them feeling more adult,
clearly -- and without all the wastings and wiping-aways that later life
"provides" -- buying into the idea that denial and suffering somehow
GIVES you something, when all it truly does, despite the saintliness it
floats you, is deny. When a whole generation believes denial, wounds,
and withering gives you character -- which this lot increasingly does
-- the aged have enacted a sparse, neutered future as a big part of
3370
their legacy. Personally, I'm ignoring the aged who despite every
attention, pretend themselves right to be aggrieved they're being so
ignored and humiliated, and stick to or at least remember the
boomers who showed the noble life is yours when you pheonix-like
rise way above where anyone else has gone before, not when you
accept the inevitability of blockages, hinderances, sags, and stop-
signs.
PMH
Interesting how much you know about me, Patrick McEvoy
Halston. Why you must be psychic, little boy.
I've read your other letters, and have a pretty good idea both
of the level of your intelligence and empathy, and what to do
with this particular letter. (hontonoshijin)
hontonshijon
If it's to wipe your dripping bottom, wonton, I wouldn't depend on
one measily letter ...
Link: The hard truth about getting old (Salon)
---------

What if Hillary had ...
As liberals rail against the debt limit deal and Barack

Obama’s choices leading up to what they see as an epic
capitulation, it seems fair to wonder if a different president
3371
-- someone with, say, a reputation for toughness and savvy

and with a history of combating Republican obstructionists
-- could have produced a better outcome. Someone like, oh, I
don't know ... Hillary Clinton?
That, after all, was the premise of Clinton's Democratic

primary campaign in 2008 -- that Obama might be able to
inspire the masses, but that only she had the experience and
know-how to get results. And now here's Obama seemingly
validating it -- and hardly for the first time in his
presidency. Can we now safely say that Democrats made the
wrong choice three years ago?
The short answer is: No. Believe it or not, the best evidence is
that if Clinton were now the president -- or, for that matter,
if any other mainstream Democrat were -- the differences
would be very small. (Jonathan Bernstein, “Would
President Hillary be a stronger leader than
President Obama?,” Salon, 3 August 2011)
It's in her wish

If Obama could somehow have made America continue on in a spirit
of Krugman-style never-ending growth, it would make him
uncomfortable -- his style is to walk about a handsome, kept-in and
composed aristocrat, granting assurances and placations amongst
townspeople subdued into a hunch of abayance, a non-arousing,
defeated cloister of mottled greys and unassured, uninspiring greens.
Hillary would mostly dig it. Something in this is why Obama was
chosen over Hillary: they -- the people -- too had become unnerved by
what might be drawn if things shine too spritely sweet and gay, and
fled Hillary's buoyancy and often-cheerful resonance for more spent
"country."
Both WOULD have followed pretty much the same course. But that
wouldn't be the thing. Everything about Hillary would sit uneasily
3372
with, would be gainly testing, mocking, its spirit, while Obama is in

entirety all smooth cooperation. (Remember Hillary's -- referring to
whole body airport scanners -- "I'd avoid them if I could," which read
as "don't go quietly into this good night!," and her meaning it.) About
all this kowtowing to the debt: there is something in her that would
keep us reminded that she could be prompted to REALLY avoid it if
she could, while, as Greenwald reminds and reminds, Obama would
spit venum at any voice that could forestall America becoming
growth-stalled and frozen for at least ten years. He -- Obama -- knows
Hillary is one such voice. But the plan I think was to keep her sort of
relevant, and thereby placated and subdued, until voices like hers
resonate only with an easily demolishable minority, until people like
her and Krugman are but absurd and entitled, fully dismissal-worthy
douches.
Link: Would President Hillary be a stronger leader than President

Obama? (Salon)
---------

Populists and trolls
With the details of the pending debt deal now emerging (and
for a very good explanation of the key terms, see this post by
former Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein), a
consensus is solidifying that (1) this is a virtually full-scale
victory for the GOP and defeat for the President (who all
along insisted on a "balanced" approach that included tax
increases), but (2) the President, as usual, was too weak in
standing up to right-wing intransigence -- or simply had no
options given their willingness to allow default -- and was
thus forced into this deal against his will. This depiction of
Obama as occupying a largely powerless, toothless office
3373
incapable of standing up to Congress -- or, at best, that the

bad outcome happened because he's just a weak negotiator
who "blundered" -- is the one that is invariably trotted out to
explain away most of the bad things he does.
It appears to be true that the President wanted tax revenues
to be part of this deal. But it is absolutely false that he did
not want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced --
either by his own strategic "blunders" or the "weakness" of
his office -- into accepting them. The evidence is
overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he
got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well
beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which
he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this
bill (as Robert Reich described the bill: "No tax increases on
rich yet almost certain cuts in Med[icare] and Social
Security . . . . Ds can no longer campaign on R's desire to
Medicare and Soc Security, now that O has agreed it").
Last night, John Cole -- along with several others --
promoted this weak-helpless-President narrative by asking
what Obama could possibly have done to secure a better
outcome. Early this morning, I answered him by email, but
as I see that this is the claim being pervasively used to
explain Obama's acceptance of this deal -- he was forced into
it by the Tea Party hostage-takers -- I'm reprinting that
email I wrote here. For those who believe this narrative,
please confront the evidence there; how anyone can claim in
the face of all that evidence that the President was "forced"
into making these cuts -- as opposed to having eagerly
sought them -- is mystifying indeed. And, as I set forth there,
there were ample steps he could have taken had he actually
wanted leverage against the GOP; the very idea that
negotiating steps so obvious to every progressive pundit
somehow eluded the President and his vast army of advisers
is absurd on its face.
3374
[. . .]
In other words, he's willing -- eager -- to impose the "pain"

Cohn describes on those who can least afford to bear it so
that he can run for re-election as a compromise-brokering,
trans-partisan deficit cutter willing to "take considerable
heat from his own party." (Glenn Greenwald, “The myth of
Obama’s ‘blunders’ and ‘weakness,’ Salon, 1 August 2011)
rjcrane on what Obama wanted

It's impossible to know what Obama really wanted as part
of raising the debt ceiling.
Well, yes and no. It only appears to be impossible to figure
out if you assume that he had one single thing in mind all
along.
If you make that assumption, then it would certainly be
impossible to know what Obama really wanted.
But the assumption is false. In reality it is very easy to know
what Obama really wanted — so long as we accept that his
desires as a politician are entirely oriented around process,
not outcome.
What Obama wants — the entirety of what motivates him,
across the board, in terms of every aspect of his
administration's agenda — is to achieve a vague kind of
glowy status as someone who takes on sacred cows and
entertains opposing viewpoints and sits at the center of it all
brokering the compromises that get things done and that are
the hallmark of serious people who get things done.
Beyond that Obama has no actual fixed position on
anything. His only guideline is: when you get 10 putative
experts in a room, what is the middle ground?
Of course, even the question of who is a legitimate expert is
subject to debate and compromise: Obama also has no fixed
position on that question, nor even a fixed set of standards to
3375
apply.
Why should he? Great statesmen, as far as he's concerned,
are defined as being the ones who make great compromises.
So he's always looking out for another great compromise to
make.
So it turns out to not be that mysterious, does it? Like the
plot of Lost, the most important thing to grasp is that there
is no plan, there is no well-established arc, it's all ad hoc,
based on contingencies, and the belief that "it will all become
clear in the end" is pure wishful thinking on the part of
people who are bound to be disappointed.
This is one of the areas where I disagree somewhat with
Glenn Greenwald — I don't think that Obama came into the
White House, or into the 2011 budget negotiations, with the
explicit intent of cutting lots of spending. He came into the
process with the explicit intent of listening to his "experts,"
and listening to the opposition, and coming up with a
compromise.
If his experts had told him that he needed to raise spending
and raise taxes, and it had been the Angry Progressive
Caucus instead of the Tea Party burning down the doors to
Congress, he would be signing spending bills right and left
right now, urging everyone to stay calm and follow his lead.
As the often right, always interesting Cornel West said
recently, Obama's problem is that he sees the highest virtue
as being a thermometer, when what the country needs is a
thermostat.
Anyway the reasons don't really matter in the end. This guy
has made himself into another Hoover. Let's show him the
door. (Amity)
**********
GG
Could you elaborate on this thinking? Once you decide to
consciously refrain from doing things that would help hi get
3376
elected and thus possibly cause him to lose/the GOP to win --

"he will not get any of my money or campaign support" --
why doesn't that rationale extend to voting?
It's a very good question, Glenn, thanks for asking.
The truth is, I'm speaking rather emotionally this morning.
I'm thinking about all the hard-earned money I sent him last
time (that I can afford even less this time around, thanks in
no small part to his leadership) and the campaign work I
did, and I just don't feel like I can raise the spirit to go out
and affirmatively, actively support him in 2012 after all this.
But I know I will vote for him. All my Naderite/third-partier
friends assured me in 2000 that there was no difference
between Gore and Bush, and withholding support from
Gore, even if it resulted in his defeat, would "teach the Dems
a lesson" and force them to re-affirm their core principles.
How did that turn out? They were wrong on both counts.
The DNC went further right and nobody will ever convince
me Gore would have been the same or worse than Bush,
that's just ludicrous.
There it is, Glenn. I'm sorry it is not more logically satisfying
than that. I may very well end up holding my nose and
giving him support once I see the nightmare alternative. I
just never imagined Obama could possibly be this horrible.
The Right was right, he DID turn out to be a Manchurian
Candidate, just the other way around.
What choice do we have? What can I do? I ask sincerely, not
rhetorically. (Jestaplero)
**********
Jestaplero
What choice do we have? What can I do? I ask sincerely, not
rhetorically.
Don't have an answer yet, except to say that since we don't
even know who is running yet -- and the election isn't for
another 16 months, during which much can happen - I think
3377
it's wildly premature to decide. (GlennGreenwald)

**********
@GlennGreenwald
Don't have an answer yet, except to say that since we don't
even know who is running yet -- and the election isn't for
another 16 months, during which much can happen - I think
it's wildly premature to decide.
Really? What makes you think it's "wildly premature"? Tell
us what you think is a real, honest voting strategy for 2012.
(ondelette)
**********
@Jestaplero
Is it? I will not countenance a Republican in the oval office
with my vote. Not until there are prosecutions first.
I watched every day of the Iran-Contra hearings (did the
equivalent of live-blogging on them for my community of
like minded concerned citizens at the time) went through the
Tower Commission report and all the other available data at
the time, and then watched the 2000s unfold with virtually
all of the key players reinstated to power and worse of the
same starting virtually from where they left off. I do believe
in their continuity, and do believe there will be a price for
putting the Republican party back in the Executive Office
that is worse than the price of protesting what's wrong with
the Democrats.
Unless there are choices for alternatives to the Republicans,
that doesn't really leave a choice of votes. Glenn has
criticized people for their "wildly premature" decisions, and
for what he sees as handing over the keys. But he has
articulated nothing that amounts to a viable strategy for
doing otherwise, given the above. Unless he really doesn't
believe the above. I would like to know who killed Amiram
Nir before I trust that it's okay to put any Republican back in
office for a third re-run of the "off the shelf clandestine
3378
organization out of the reach of congressional oversight."

(ondelette)
**********
ondelette on wild prematurity
Really? What makes you think it's "wildly premature"? Tell
us what you think is a real, honest voting strategy for 2012.
I agree with ondelette. Sixteen months is not wildly

premature.
It's not even premature at all. It's kind of late, given that
major-party primary season starts in 4 months.
There are three options for unseating Obama —
1) Defeat in the primary
Ingredients:
1 competitive Democratic candidate, finely parsed
2500 assorted delegates, washed and let dry for 1/2 year
2) Third party upset
Ingredients:
2 competitive 3rd party candidates, combined and whisked
50 million 3rd party voters, proportionally divided among
50 states
1/4 billion dollars (or more — depending on what else is
being served)
or 3) Republican White House
Ingredients:
1 tolerable Republican candidate, warmed over(*)
20 million crossover Democrats, blue-state are best
So we're standing here staring into the fridge with only a
short time before dinner. What have we got to work with?
* When prepared in Massachusetts some years ago, a
version of this recipe using Mitt Romney proved surprisingly
delicious. (Amity)
**********
3379
Okay, Amity
So if the third party route is taken, you need to do a two part
assault. You need the party machine and candidate. I
suggest Elizabeth Warren for the candidate. A lot of people
are pushing Bernie Sanders, and he's good, but Elizabeth
Warren is a genuine pedigree stamped outsider right now at
a time when pollsters are saying that voters are so mad with
everything in Washington that they genuinely don't believe
that whoever they vote for will change anything and
whoever they vote for therefore has to at least begin the
process of changing that during the campaign. She has the
credential that she was actually kicked out of Washington.
For machinery, you need to pick people who aren't tainted,
which will be a trick, but she can probably do that. She has
been working on ending corruption against consumers for
20 years, she knows how to smell it, and she just put
together one large organization.
The biggest thing that's different with a third party
progressive run against the establishment, if it's going to be
an anti-corruption run, is that it needs to run against the
media. For real. To do that, it needs to create at least its own
quasi-media to run with. So it will have to tap resources that
most campaigns don't tap, suggest getting people from the
cinema industry that are progressive on board early, like
Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Don Cheadle, if they'll do it,
and teaming up with anyone in Silicon Valley from social
media who will give a firm commitment to anti-corruption
(be ready to fire if they won't stick to it), and the blogging
community, and the Digital Cinema community, and NAB.
Craft the new media necessary to force the broadcasters or
go around them and go get the funding that those crafting
the plan says it needs. In other words, don't assume you will
get coverage, create the coverage.
3380
If all that can happen, then there can probably be a viable

third party candidate. What's holding it back will be that
last: the media. They are the gatekeepers, and the PTB, those
who benefit by the corruption, are going to try to keep them
in charge of the gates.
I will gladly switch votes to a third party candidate if one
can win. If no one challenges the seat of power over
elections, which aside from Diebold is the press, not the
parties, then there won't be one.
And no, I'm not volunteering.
**********
ondelette on options
So if the third party route is taken, you need to do a two part
assault. You need the party machine and candidate. I
suggest Elizabeth Warren...
Okay so we have Elizabeth Warren.

Pros: articulate, photogenic, principled, has a message
Cons: dry, wonky, not a bimbo, works for Obama
Not a bad start — so, one nomination.
Yes, she would need a first-rate message machine. Also she
would need a first-rate fundraiser — I assume she's not
herself a billionaire.
As a press strategy, one that has worked in the past for 3rd
party candidacies is to aggressively publish concrete
platform positions on "hot button" issues that are current in
"the conversation."
That requires being able to produce position memos quickly,
and it requires having the gonads to put your position out
there in detail and at least seem sincere.
The press seems to like that because it gives them a ready-
made quote which usually contrasts nicely with standard
political mush-mouthedness.
And if that doesn't work you have Youtube, which is a gift
3381
not available to outsider candidacies in years past.

In terms of fundraising, how many people would need to
donate $1 each to cover a decent budget for the February
2012 primaries? You need to make a strong showing in a
head to head contest with the big two, so this isn't something
that you can shoestring. (Amity)
Populists and trolls

I don't think Obama has much to concerned about with those who
want progressive reform but who still want it furthered through the
current political system, because I think most of these are
considerably moved by a psychological need for decorum --
something Obama will always offer, and seems almost to represent --
and which "other alternatives" will never be able to confidently show
themselves characterized by or even in possession of. I think, that is,
that there are those highly critical of the president, who show him up
as false and even pine hard for third party alternatives, yet will
inevitably find themselves mostly in some kind of conversation with
him rather than, primarily I think at some point just to avoid,
immersing themselves with some other kind of company, within some
other sort of discourse, because Washington manners and decorum
keeps them feeling secure and at a safe distance from let-loose
emotional storms they have a tough time not projecting as raging
everywhere else in America.
I am not saying that a leftist populist movement would in fact mostly

be populated by crazies -- my guess is, rather, that it will be
constituted possibly mostly by the most psychically/emotionally
healthy, which does NOT, by the way, include the forementioned likes
of George Clooney and Ben Affleck, and rather more the likes of Rob
Reimer and Matt Damon -- but that there are many progressives of
the kind with some considerable trepidation towards third parties,
even at this point of obvious complete betrayal/plain reveal, who are
3382
not healthy, self-integrated enough to imagine joining them as

anything than surrendering to emotional states they have spent much
of their lives trying to keep kept in and as much to the manageable
side as possible. They'll see the best of progressives, in a sense, as let-
loose subterranean farts and haragues, as "trolls," even despite
themselves, despite their intact and nagging larger awareness of this
falsity, and will in some loose sense find themselves sticking with
Obama even if in means, as it surely would, convincing themselves
they're surely doing the very opposite in their forever showing him up
as a villain or phony. Washington has nothing to fear from these folk,
and will likely benefit from them, because as some true friends split
off, readily join and see as welcoming what they fret, what they find
ill-formed, disgusting, and no-doubt contagious, they'll at some level
be aware of how powerful their need for establishment and
“apartness” is, how shamefully debasing/damning/minisculing this
need is, and will end up wacking the good for their being responsible
for this uncomfortable self-reveal and for in such a blanched, stark
way showing their clearly being far better than them -- a "height" no
one else was allowed to surpass, because their sense of being the most
civilized, Olympus-like cleanly afloat and apart from the messy world
gave them an essential confidence to at-their-own-pace take on some
of the demons within themselves they've kept at bay but still possess
enough of an impulse to ambition a way to productively engage so to
live in a yet more at-ease, satisfying, and comfortable sort of way.
I think this will be phase one, where a leftist populist movement does
arise, comes to realize just how few are truly with it/them (like "the
douche" Paul Krugman, they'll represent [at least] abundance, galling
insistence on indulgence, when everyone agrees its all about some
kind of hemming-in/osterity now), and then retreats into forms that
eventually, but for a huge bulk of time anonymously, crystalize into
new and greater kinds of civilization. When the second phases arrives,
the sort of progessives I have been talking about will want no part of
them either; but here, for very good reason, as they will be the ones
3383
Chris Hedges in my judgement conjures with his disgust of "boutique

liberals," ones who are denied all the good things decorum-concerned
progressive Salonistas embody: an acceptance of "your" feminine self,
being pained when the manners and sensitivities necessary for
productive, enjoyable discourse have become illegitimate for their
somehow being simply weapons of the already franchised, for their
revealing your posturing, feminine, primarily self-concerned douche
"stank." This new movement will in fact be composed of trolls, bullies
-- Masculine, hard, intolerant, joy-fearing "old left" bullies/machines
who'll insist you evidence your battle scars, your poverty-responsible
work stink, your hurried impatience with rational discourse/reasoned
assembly -- for yet more talking(!!!) -- rather than your concern to
politely engage and lather properly for the debate to count yourself a
member of their tribe.
On the plus side, if you're older and relatively affluent, even if you
find yourself trapped/pinned in spot, trapped into repetition for
having no welcoming other place to go, no one really wants to have
much of a go with you: don’t fret too much; however longterm, you'll
be assured a comfortable-enough "cell." They know you still have
fight, and the concern will be to concentrate on those who've near
been bred to be filled with yet more suffering.
Link: The myth of Obama’s “blunders” and “weaknesses” (Salon)
----------

Gay marriage and enlightenment
Psychologist Christopher Ryan is out to defeat an archetypal

figure in the mythology of monogamy. No, not prince
charming; he's after the widespread belief in a prehistoric
3384
hunter who would slay an antelope on the plains and

heroically haul it back to his nuclear family.
You might wonder what this has to do with monogamy.

Well, Ryan argues that in actuality the meat would have
been shared with the entire tribe, because pre-agricultural
societies shared everything -- including sex. This is a key
point he and co-author/wife Cacilda Jethá make in "Sex at
Dawn," which was released last year in hardcover and this
month in paperback. Our hunting and gathering ancestors
were nonmonogamous, they argue -- the implication being
that, biologically speaking, sexual exclusivity is unnatural.
The book challenges much of the previously accepted

wisdom about the sex lives of our ancestors, although the
authors admit they haven't exactly proved their case.
Regardless, they have gained praise and admiration from
sexual radicals like sex columnist Dan Savage. (Tracy
Clark-Flory, “Is monogomy like vegetarianism?,
Salon, 30 July 2011)
What's with these articles, anyway?

I wasn't aware that there was either a massive polygamous
movement or a massive backlash against a polygamous
movement, one or the other of which would be necessary to
explain Salon's recent fascination with the subject. It's like
seeing a week of arguments about debating the benefits of
locomotion by somersault, or making homemade cheese, or
something else unusual -- one article is mildly interesting,
two might be justified in the interests of balance, but unless
someone really missed a chance to clinch their argument,
three or more articles suggests an editor with a fixation,
3385
rather than a strong interest among the public. (The Vicar)
@Vicar: what's with these articles? LOL!

Well, it's this, Vicar. Salon (and other lefty publications) are
on a major, BIG push to destroy traditional marriage. Gay
marriage is the biggest, but not the only, weapon in their
arsenal.
They intend to first legalize gay marriages, which effectively

redefines marriage COMPLETELY into a "super duper best
friends with benefits" relationship. As most gays do not
practice sexual fidelity (not all, of course, but most), that
pretty much takes a big chunk of the CONCEPT of sexual
fidelity being at least a GOAL of marriage and drop kicks it.
Then promptly after redefining marriage, they legalize

polygamy (see: Canada, The Netherlands) and then incest
marriage (see: Germany, Switzerland). I'm sure there is
some barking about legalizing bestiality marriage
somewhere too. And NAMBLA must be gloating and rubbing
their hands together with glee. Consent laws? they just keep
LOVING PEOPLE apart, like Mary Kay Le Tourneau and
her 8th grade boyfriend.
The reason for the timing of this series is A. the recent

blackmailing and coercion of New York State legislators to
"legalize" gay marriage against the will of the voters in that
state and B. the big interview with sex columnist Dan
Savage in the New York Times, which promoted his idea of
being "monogamish" -- committed to one partner, raising
children with that partner but in no way sexually faithful to
that partner.
3386
It's the ultimate in New Age urban-hipster memes -- change

marriage, because a small group of lefty liberals don't like
marriage the way it is. Boo hoo hoo.
And yes, Tracy has a fixation. She has two overwhelming

emotional issues, right now. One is her poor mother is very
ill; a terrible thing for which I have great sympathy (but one
which brings up all kinds of memories of your childhood,
your upbringing, your parents when young, your parents
marriage).
The other is she is growing up -- about 26 or 27 I think -- and

wants to get married (having your mom be so ill is a
powerful driving emotion to have your own child), and there
is no suitable guy around. Or there IS a suitable guy, but he's
an S.F. urban hipster, and he likes Tracy well enough, but
not enough to promise her sexual fidelity. Should she accept
him on his own terms? Maybe if there is some meme or
paradigm, some book or trend! one that tells you that
monogamish marriages work, or that polyamory is right, or
that monogamy is silly and stupid anyways, and bonobos
aren't monogamous -- right? then you can justify what you
want to do anyways.
SO that's why we've had this (pretty useless) series.

(_bigguns)
@Laurel...
Well, it's this, Vicar. Salon (and other lefty publications) are
on a major, BIG push to destroy traditional marriage. Gay
marriage is the biggest, but not the only, weapon in their
arsenal.
3387
It has nothing to do with "destroying traditional marriage",

whatever that means. Pushing for gay marriage has more to
do with fairness. It's unfair that gay people don't have the
same right to be married just as straight people do. And
WHO CARES that the some laws may need to be changed,
the marriage law has already been changed dozens of times
in the last 100 years. This is just another one of the changes.
Get used to it. Less and less people are having any problem
with gay marriage these days.
But as long as you can keep your fantasy that this has
anything to do with "destroying" something (how very
constructive of you), then you can feel noble and good about
your intentions, as if you're the "protector" of something
sacred, and that "they" are your sworn "enemies" and "they"
need to be "defeated", as if this has anything to do with
triumph and defeat, or winning and losing.
Then promptly after redefining marriage, they legalize

polygamy (see: Canada, The Netherlands) and then incest
marriage (see: Germany, Switzerland). I'm sure there is
some barking about legalizing bestiality marriage
somewhere too.
Except that animals can't give consent. Face palm. Just

because you don't agree with it, doesn't mean that it's
wrong. If you do, then you should at least state
LEGITIMATE reasons why. (Astronomy)
@Astronomy
3388
Of course it does. Redefining marriage is a big step towards

destroying it. (Undoubtedly legal polygamy, incest marriage
and bestiality will finish up the job.)
Pushing for gay marriage has everything to do with the

"lefty liberal paradigm" plus a HUGE grab for power, in the
face of increasing right wing power (Tea Party, etc.).
Instead of fighting for single payer health care, or a public
option, or protesting to end the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the left has chosen instead to throw its entire
weight, its control of media outlets and its money (much of
it, interestingly, from WALL STREET -- guess the Kochs are
just fine when they back your paradigm!) into legalizing gay
marriage.
Marriage laws vary wildly from culture to culture, but they

are ALWAYS about male & female. Actually, for all the
mystique gays assume about marriage, the big "secret", the
whole underlying structure is "male & female". That's it. The
whole enchilada. Without that, it's nothing but "super duper
friendship with benefits" Or even without benefits. I mean,
who cares if two gay people don't have sex? They can't
procreate anyways.
I think it is a huge mistake on your part (and that of Salon in

general) to ASSUME that people "don't have a problem with
gay marriage". I'd say they have a HUGE problem with it
and the way it continues to be forced on states WITHOUT A
VOTE OF THE PEOPLE by left social engineering courts
and/or legislatures rife with corruption, blackmail and Wall
Street money.
3389
If you TRULY BELIEVE ONE WORD YOU HAVE WRITTEN

HERE, then you'd be happy -- overjoyed -- to allow
Americans to vote on this, in their own states, and PROVE
that they "don't care if gay people get married".
I also never called anyone "my sworn enemy" and that's

pure nonsense. I speak out against corruption of the
legislatures of this country, against bribery and blackmail,
against Wall Street money corrupting the legislative process
and against "outing" people against their will. I speak out
for the voters who are betrayed by the legislators they
elected to carry out THEIR WILL, which is what an elected
official is sworn to do -- not to re-engineer society in the
image of lefty ideology.
And as far as consent: since you are such a brainiac about

the history of marriage, you'd know that before the mid-19th
century, CONSENT wasn't even commonplace. Many if not
most marriages were ARRANGED, sometimes between
CHILDREN. (But they were still legally valid, because they
consisted of ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN.) Even today,
arranged marriages are NORM between the Orthodox Jews,
in Amish society, in Muslim and Indian/Hindu nations.
So the idea that consent is an absolute is pure nonsense. And

frankly, I have met nutty pet lovers who would LOVE to
marry their dog or cat. (Do ya think anyone might have
married Leona Helmsley's dog, the one that inherited $12
million????)
3390
It's not a matter of what "I agree with". It's a matter of what
Americans want in America, which means "not what lefty
judges and ideologues and bribed corrupt legislatures" want
to do to us and our social customs, without a vote.
So here is my legitimate reason: I believe that marriage is a

relationship between ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN, and
that any other relationship, no matter how sincere or loving,
is SOMETHING ELSE. And I don't want to be downgraded
in my marriage to a "Partner A or B". And I -- and many
millions of other people in 45 states -- will fight this battle for
as long as it takes, to get a Constitutional Amendment
defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
And yes, sad it has to come to that, but it is only way to
render all these bogus "marriages" illegal, and permanently,
so we don't have to fight this nonsense for another decade.
(_bigguns)
@Astronomy
What do you exactly suppose that is supposed to be "destroyed"?
You can still get married and remain married, and nothing will be
changed on your part. You will still be married just as you were
before.
Laurel is arguing that they can't get married anymore, because
"marriage," all marriages, has/have been redefined by permitting
gays to marry, as what they do is more along the lines of best friends
with benefits. According to her, one of the points of marrying is to
submit yourself to the power of a longstanding tradition/higher ideal
that will help you remain fidelitous, true to your one partner; this, to
her, no longer exists, and we can expect marriage now to be less
effective in keeping married couples loyal to one another.
It's not an assumption. According to a recent Gallup poll, for the
3391
first time more than 50% of the Americans favor gay marriage. Kids
these days grow up looking up to people like Lady Gaga, who is
bisexual. More and more people are having less problem with
homosexuality ITSELF, much less gay marriage. The times they are
a-changing. I would give it another decade or so until
homosexuality is completely accepted by society.
People saying they're for gay marriage may be them saying they're for
easy-reach enlightenment, one more stay from focussing on un-dealt-
with personal issues. That is, they may be for gay marriage in the way
they are for a greener America and a black, well-spoken President:
mostly because it demonstrates more that they've all got it on than
that they're pretty close to falling apart. Once the Tea Partiers are
dealt with, confirmed by all as public waste, and more regressive
postures can be undertaken by the holy majority without making
them seem akin to them -- that is, base, neanderthalic, defined by the
overwhelming inner psychoses that have determined their mongoloid
outward forms, and rather in an old school but encouraged way,
which I think Laurel actually mostly represents -- I think all this
current celebration will probably work against homosexuals. It will
likely help cement them as those who danced as the bulwark of
civilized society -- the moral values (ostensibly) our grandparents
bound themselves to and thereby made sure to keep intact -- breaks
apart. We'll see.
I am for gay marriage, btw, and a true friend of those who hope
marriage gets redefined in allowing gays to marry. Only this bit about
the likes of Laurel being cast permanently in shadow can be sustained
in my judgment only for a short while. Obama will ultimately prove
no real friend to the gay community.
Link: Is monogamy like vegetarianism? (Salon)
----------

3392
You don't need workaholics to redeem the loafer
I used to beat myself up for not working out enough, or

having one beer (or five) too many. Simpler times, those
were. Job stress? Not really. Ten extra pounds? Whatevs.
Not accomplishing things -- that's what's killing me lately.
Forget gorging on a cheeseburger and fries followed by a
slice of cheesecake. These days my greatest indulgence is
doing nothing.
Things I currently need to do but can't quite make myself

do include: adjusting the contributions to my 401K,
networking, finding a new health insurance plan, getting
new tires on my car, catching up on unread New Yorkers,
writing overdue thank you notes, washing my bed skirt,
flipping the mattress.
It's not that I don't enjoy idle time. I love it. But I can't
escape the feeling that I should be improving my life right
now, getting organized, simplifying my routines, creating
platforms for future income, educating myself, getting
smarter, getting better.
[. . .]
The sad irony is that I don't even have a full-time job. Oh

sure, I work for a living, but as a freelance public
relations consultant for Internet companies, I sometimes
log as few as 10 hours a week. I should have plenty of time
to get tasks done. But I lose so many hours to
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lollygagging. A longer-than-anticipated hike on a sunny

afternoon. A morning drinking coffee and reading blogs.
An hour outside reading a magazine.
My habits stand in stark contrast to those of my father. At

65, he can't bear to be still for more than five minutes.
This has become especially clear lately, as he recovers
from knee replacement surgery. For the first two weeks,
he barely left his bed. After that, he could only move with
the help of heavy painkillers. I've never seen a man more
miserable in my life.
You'd think a major surgery like that -- where they

actually shaved off the bottom of his femur and the top of
his tibia and drilled holes in them to insert titanium
screws -- would focus a person on what matters: getting
better. But his to-do list is as long as ever. It fills the front
and back of three index cards, getting longer every day.
My father has been a runner and an athlete all his life.
He's raised nine children, six of them boys, and worked up
to three jobs at a time for the last 40 years. But it seems
there is one thing he cannot do: relax so that he can heal.
My youngest sister, Caity, discovered this recently when
she took a leave from work to provide emergency care.
After two weeks, my father had made no progress in his
recovery, and on the surface, it didn't make sense. He only
had to do five sets of 15-minute exercise intervals per day.
What was going on?
From the minute she arrived, my dad bombarded Caity

with directives. Run the sweeper. Restack those
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magazines. Wash the sheets. Wipe down the granite

countertop with the special granite countertop cleaner
and dammit don't use regular Windex. Dust in the dining
room. Sort the mail. If Caity wasn't up by 8 a.m., she'd
hear him banging his walker around at the bottom of the
stairs. There was work to do, dishes to wash, breakfast to
make, trash to be taken out. Having Caity around to do
these chores -- my mother couldn't be bothered, but I'll get
to that in a minute -- was what ultimately put his mind at
ease enough to concentrate on his therapy. Before he
could settle down and do nothing -- he needed to know
that something was getting done.
The story was a revelation to me. I grew up thinking I

was lazy. I berated myself for not having accomplished
more, for not being in better shape, not being as
financially disciplined as I could be. My dad was the
model against which I judged myself. He created a
formidable family, climbed to the upper rungs of the
corporate ladder. I'd admired and resented him for his
ruthless efficiency and ambition. But it struck me that his
success might not be due to discipline so much as a kind of
helpless workaholism. In other words: He's not trying to
be like this; he just is. If my father isn't constantly
productive, he starts to go a little nuts.
Is that the kind of personality required to be "successful"?

I used to be one of them, sort of. By the time I was 31, I
was a vice president of public relations at one of the
world's largest banks. I could scarcely believe it myself.
Eleven years of climbing the ranks, being on call at all
hours of the day. Fifty-plus-hour work weeks. Countless
exercises in crisis management, anything to keep a client
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happy.
But in the summer of 2009, almost 11 years to the day
after I started working, I crashed.
[. . .]
But I took a break. And I discovered that left to my own

devices, I could pass the time doing nothing more taxing
than reading, going for long walks or hikes, thrift store
shopping, sleeping and embarking on pet projects like
painting my living room or trying my hand at writing a
screenplay. I had some compulsion to get things done, but
nothing like my dad's. In fact, what I began to realize was
that I was far more like my mom than I'd ever realized.
My mom is a loafer. Now that she's settled into

retirement, I feel like I'm finally seeing her true essence.
She reads at least five books a week. She plays games like
Scrabble and slot machines on her iPad. She stays up late
watching '80s movies on cable and TV shows like "The
Closer" and "Justified" and then sleeps till 10. She
occasionally goes to lunch with a friend or attends a
meeting of her book club, but otherwise she's happy
staying home and waiting for one of my siblings to come
visit with the grandkids. Any chores she's responsible for
get tackled at the absolute last minute, when they can't go
another second undone. This is not a person who would be
frustrated while recovering from surgery. She'd be excited
at, say, the chance to reread all the Sue Grafton alphabet
mysteries back to back. I'm not saying she's lazy -- having
raised nine children, she was far from it -- just that now
3396
that she can, she prefers to chill out.
I sometimes wonder how her people survived evolution. I

don't wonder this about my father. He comes from tough,
wiry and determined folk. They are survivors. Hunters
and gatherers. But my mother's lot is sedentary. She and
her siblings enjoy sitting around my grandmother's living
room in Kentucky, eating potato chips and telling stories,
happy to be near each other and jawing away a few
hours. These are round people. People who know their
baked goods.
[. . .]
I don't know that I'll ever stop feeling bad for not being a
Type A personality. Or worrying that I'm not
accomplishing enough. After all, I do want to own a home
some day, and to retire when I'm old, and not to stress
about how I'll afford kids. But maybe for now, I should
enjoy my idle time. Sit around talking to my aunts and
uncles about the absurdity of it all. It may not get me
anywhere. But maybe for right now, at this second -- here
is where I'm meant to be. (Sara Campbell, “Tales of a
reluctant loafer,” Salon, 30 July 2011)
Well, there are several issues here

For starters, Sara Campbell is apparently home on
MEDICAL leave (her doctor enabled her to do this,
possibly unethically) for "stress" or something similar. So
she's using her long-term DISABILITY insurance -- which
3397
most folks (me) don't even have -- for a LONG, long

vacation from reality. Very few people can do this, stress
or not.
If she had small children to support, or a spouse in school

(all realistic possibilities at 32), she couldn't "take off" like
this, or work 10 hours a week. She'd be STUCK, like most
adults humans are STUCK -- having to support herself
and her family.
So this is a privilege and a vacation, and I guess she feels

"she deserves it" after 11 years, even though most of us
don't get this even after THIRTY years in the workforce.
As Babylonian correctly says "blah blah blah". Or boo hoo
hoo.
If Sarah wasn't drawing down some serious disability

pay plus her part-time hours, she'd be in sh*t city, because
Los Angeles is one of the nation's most expensive cities. If
you don't work, sweetheart, how does the rent get paid?
How do you keep the lights on? What do you for
GROCERIES? (Forage? where in LA? on the freeway?)
This is a child's fantasy of how you want to live -- no

responsibilities, no spouse, no elderly parents to care for
(her sister Caity has that duty), no children, no house
(with a yard to cut, and repairs to make).
And she strangely conflates this with her mom's

RETIREMENT -- which her mom EARNED by working
for nearly FIFTY years. Yes, you earn the right to sit
around reading mysteries and sleeping late when you
spend decades raising NINE kids and all that entails (it's 4
3398
times the national average number of offspring, so a

really heroic effort). Just thinking about all the laundry
your mom had to wash, Sarah, and all the meals she
cooked (tens of thousands) over 30+ years you kids were
small makes me tired.
But you, sweetie, have done ZIP to earn her retirement.

Not to mention, retirement is a pretty sure sign you are
finished with living, and lining up to go to the Big
Retirement Home in the Sky. I shudder to think what kind
of gormless young'un you are that you WANT that kind of
passive lifestyle, all sleeping and reading books, with most
of your life in the PAST. That's no way for a young
woman to be looking at life.
I'd almost say "maybe at heart, you are a bum". After all,
some people ARE -- we all know one or two. They just
have zero ambition and don't care if they have to sleep in
their car, because the very idea of "doing thing" is
repellent to them. So long as they don't mooch off relatives
or Uncle Sam, that's their right.
But it does not compute, because you have had serious
jobs in the past, great professional success and your
"loafing" has gone on a few months whereas your hyper-
careerism seemed to last at least since high school and
into your first several (very high ranking) jobs.
So I imagine your therapist ALSO TOLD YOU that you are

depressed. However, she did no favor for you by giving
you a fake permission slip to go on disability. People tend
to get better faster from depression when they have
3399
meaningful work (and meaningful relationships) -- you

won't have either if you spend all day watching soap
operas and sleeping till noon.
Also, in our modern era, people date and socialize around

work (assuming you are old enough to be out of school),
and having no real day job means you aren't meeting a lot
of folks and when you DO meet someone, you get to say "I
slack all day, and work a few hours here and there",
which isn't going to impress a really decent guy that you'd
make a very reliable life partner. (Will you get bored
raising kids with him, then decide to run off and "find"
yourself"?)
So, in short, you might want to get your act together. Go

back to work. Find something you really like to do, which
apparently IS NOT PUBLIC RELATIONS.
I recommend you look into getting a teaching certificate.

Public school teaching is a very secure job (you can't be
fired for ANY reason) and the days are only 6 hours long,
and you get all summer off, plus two weeks at Xmas and
another week at Easter. Sweet! It sounds like it would suit
you very well.
I also recommend you look into moving somewhere

OTHER THAN LOS ANGELES. The very high cost of
living in LA means you are pressured, very hard, to make
a lot of money simply to pay rent. Taxes are very high,
too. And the culture of So Cal is such that people feel
pressured to have fancy cars and clothing. All this will
tend to make you unhappy with a real middle class job or
3400
moderate wages. Unfortunately, in THE REAL WORLD

the trade off is between very high wages (your job at the
top of the heap, at the world's biggest whatever) and free
time. The jobs that offer reasonable hours rarely pay in
the high six figures.
Scale your ambitions to your nature, and move out of the

fast lane. And take your Prozac. And go back to work.
You'll be fine, in a few months. (_bigguns)
Not ease and play

Where does creativity come from? Foremost from those who work,
work, work, or those who dally around a little bit -- maybe more than
a little bit? If the latter, it's not hard then to find a possible source of
evolutionary fitness that accompanies those who come to find
something unfit in those who never seem to be comfortable slowing
down sufficiently to truly take in the smell of the roses.
Also, with people like _bigguns/laurel, can you imagine them EVER
believing life should be about ongoing comfort and play? Even if
benevolent aliens arrived on the planet and gave us every indulgence,
without limit, guaranteeing it without recompense and for eternity,
_bigguns and her like would still see day-to-day relaxation and ease
as something that had to be EARNED, not as something which leads
to greater things, not as something surely you're shown up as crazy
for, with impetus removed, not just immediately sitting back and
enjoying; and would find some excuse to explain why everyone still
needs to delimit themselves, their day, and most of their lives with
driven effort, duty, purpose, and labor. Without such, and against all
evidence, people like her will insist the world will fall apart, and in
this context mostly show the real concern all along was that without it
they themselves would.
3401
Mothers have kids because kids focus themselves entirely upon them
-- they make the MOTHER feel loved and central, something
someone who has nine children clearly hadn't known enough of
elsewhere previously. This is primary; the rest, all their mountains of
efforts selflessly, witheringly taking care of children without break for
spans of years and years make them feel as if they've made life
sufficiently about suffering that they shouldn't be punished for the
indulgences they've permitted themselves before they've parked
themselves in the feedlot that disposes one out of the world. This
backbreaking work is PRIMARILY selfish too, that is. Please don't
nobody back down too readily to the ever-looming, chastising,
overworked Mother.
That we haven't been loved enough to believe that life SHOULD be

about ease and comfort and creativity, continues to be our key
problem as a species. Maybe evolution's too hard at work to notice its
essential stalling.
Link: Tales of a reluctant loafer (Salon)
----------

Afloat from reality
After I had been sober again, from alcohol, for a year, I

found a new way to unplug. For a month and a half, I only
visited the planet Earth for brief moments; the rest of the
time was spent in a haze I'd achieved from a combination of
prescription and over-the-counter medicine.
3402
The final time I indulged in my magical concoction, I almost

checked out for good. I awoke in the psychiatric emergency
room. My friend and my sister were with me, their faces
gentle but serious. The toxicology report showed a lethal
combo of chemicals. I hardly knew what was in the innocent
pills I had been taking; I just knew it was making me numb,
good. My doctor asked later, during our post-emergency
visit, why I wanted to kill myself. I insisted I didn't. I'm all
nerves, I told her, I just wanted a little break. That little
break almost killed you, she said.
That's when I realized it wasn't the booze or the pills that I

needed to quit. I had to quit checking out; I had to quit
giving myself over to recklessness. Ultimately, I prefer to
live. But life is complicated. Life means waking up every
morning with the tight hand of anxiety opening and closing
on my esophagus. For a while, I took Prozac to cope with
that problem, and although it didn't give me the abandon
that I was seeking, it left me chemically content and
disconnected. My fretful thoughts floated in a balloon above
me as I went around and marveled at the fact that I was so
strong I never cried, or got too mad, or orgasmed, for that
matter.
Life after quitting abandon wasn't easy. I decided to quit

everything chemical, including Prozac, to stop numbing
myself. I'm not condemning Prozac. It works for some
people, and the drug helped keep the angst in check, but I
think I need to be a little raw to stay alive. In a twisted way,
I now live with the constant urge to lose myself and abandon
everything, and that feeling makes me keep the recklessness
under control. It makes me put on a bike helmet when I leave
my house in the morning, put the headphones away, ride on
the correct side of the street, pay attention to signs and cars
3403
around me. Pay attention, period. (Jowita Bydlowska,

“How I stopped numbing out,” 29 July 2011)
"... put the headphones away..."

Great idea! At age 43, the CD player in my car broke; I
never got it fixed, and now, three years later, I'll listen to a
Youtube song when the urge strikes, but I no longer
surround my life with racket.
No MP3 player, no radio. No TV. My soundtrack is the music

that life provides. I would seriously recommend this to all
who have frazzled nerves; it helps one to gather one's
thoughts and to put all in perspective. (kaonashi)
@kaonashi on music
"At age 43, the CD player in my car broke; I never got it
fixed, and now, three years later, I'll listen to a Youtube song
when the urge strikes, but I no longer surround my life with
racket."
All this paragraph shows is that you're old, not that you're
enlightened about music. If you think of all music as "racket"
then it sounds like you never had taste in music to begin
with. Music represents multiple modes of thought: Some
music is repetitive or mind-numbing, but other types of
music can focus thought or even enhance it. There are times
when I've been in a glum mood and the only remedy turned
out to be music -- not caffeine, not exercise, not yoga, not
drugs. Music was the whip that cracked me out of my stupor
and got me on my feet, being productive and remembering
why I wanted to move forward. Incidentally, what is "a
YouTube song"? If you're listening to music on YouTube then
your options are severely limited. Ever listen to a whole
symphony on YouTube? A great jazz live performance in its
3404
entirety? No? Yeah, well, again, this explains why you

dismiss all music as "racket" and apparently never had any
taste to begin with.
"No MP3 player, no radio. No TV. My soundtrack is the

music that life provides."
Why on earth would you lump music in with television?

What television presents is a text. Music is not text unless it
is lyrics-based. The best music is not lyrics-based or even
programmatic -- or it does have lyrics but they can be
ignored, or they work at a subconscious level as well as a
direct level. Bottom line: If you're lumping TV and music
together, you fundamentally misunderstand music. As for
your statement about "life" being your "soundtrack," that's
nice as a cloying sentiment, but horribly trite otherwise. Yes,
the sounds of life itself are pleasurable and can function as
music; that doesn't mean they obliterate the joys of music
itself. Birds chirping, the hum of the road on a trip, the
chatter and giggles of happy children, the sounds of a busy
restaurant, the crickets in a pastoral landscape....yes, these
are all terrific. But so is Sibelius. It's not an either/or
proposition.
"I would seriously recommend this to all who have frazzled

nerves; it helps one to gather one's thoughts and to put all in
perspective."
Maybe you should make a list of all the crappy, white-trash

music you listened to and then we'll avoid it. Since you didn't
have any taste anyway, your recommendation is only
meaningful to the extent that we can all agree that having
bad taste does not enhance living. (rattigan glumphobo)
3405
@rattigan glumphobo
The sad thing is that I think we're enabling a culture in which sane,
critical people like yourself just don't get it. The only way in which
you should be able to feel you can get away with such bland thoughts
-- hers, not your own -- is if critical analysis, somehow for just being
critical analysis, has confidently in the broad context become alien
and unwelcome. We're being floated a lot of the kind of comments of
the sort you're rightly critiquing here, and yet it's like your sharpest
strike mostly works to better show up the kind of environment we
now find ourselves within: these voices proceed, unchanged, and in
greater aggression, as if they hadn't encountered any obstacle at all. I
think we're being made to understand that for some basic but
essential surrender some people are going to be able to say anything
they want, the more absurdly childish and afloat from reality the
better, and more than get away with it: the extent of this prize better
demonstrates the fact that a new kind of judge has arrived on scene,
with considerably different expectations than we've been used to.
I think you're the person I once recommended write some stuff for
Open Salon. I did so because I thought OS was on the ascent (as it has
proved to be), would float more and more of its "finest" to the front
page of Salon, and because you, owing to your interesting, challenging
thoughts and fine writing, would find yourself there, for your and our
benefit. I see now that until you more come to cooperate in seeing the
banal as brave and even miraculous -- which is actually possible for
some critical people: witness some of the teetertottering we
sometimes now see from Matt Seitz -- Salon isn't going to want much
from you. Grounded critique isn't going to elevate you one bit.
I gather you heard from Andrew that Salon is about to go troll

hunting. I'm not sure myself if with this effort it's just going to be the
likes of the Duchess who can expect to have their beastial flanks
spanked.
3406
My mistake
I realize now you were referencing one of the poster's comments, not
the article. Sorry for the sloppyness -- I had read the article earlier, as
well as all the comments, and had readily blended kaonashi into
Jowita.
Link: How I stopped numbing out (Salon)
---------

Wondering about the pride parade
Yet despite the often crushing realities of the world, people

still want to believe. Isn't that why, amazingly, people are
still watching "The Bachelor"? Isn't that why we New
Yorkers were so jubilant this week, when gay and lesbian
couples were able for the first time to exchange vows? Isn't
that why campaigns selling "true love" get made? Because as
much as everybody loves a happy ending, there's something
almost unfairly seductive about the notion of a happy
beginning -- and the expensive fantasy that a whole lovely
lifetime could be lurking within one tiny blue box. (Mary
Elizabeth Williams, “She’s the one”: the “She’s the
one” director would like to sell you a ring,” Salon,
29 July 2011)
@_bigguns
There are no good arguments against gay marriage. They
are all bullshit.
You can't argue that you're right because "marriage is
between a man and a woman". There is no "marriage".
3407
There's no Magic Space Library on Jupiter where a Super

Dictionary is kept in which words are universally defined
throughout space and time. "Marriage" used to involve (and
still does, in some parts of the world) a woman being handed
over like property to a man who can treat her like garbage if
he wants. Women in "traditional marriages" couldn't work,
vote, inherit property, get divorced or even testify in court
against him.
Look to the Middle East to see what marriage "is". It

involves women being murdered to restore honor to her
husband because she was raped.
If your definition of marriage is a religious one, then blow it

out your ass. Our Founding Fathers probably made church
and state separate at least partially because they knew how
stupid, unsubstantiated and dangerous it was... they came
from a country with an official state religion. Today's Tea
Baggers would happily have an official religion today, as
long as it was theirs, but we liberals have a more
Enlightened view of the matter.
If you really think that the consciousness of the universe is in

any way concerned about whether two people on Earth
declaring their love for one another have different-looking
peepees, then you're an idiot and you shouldn't vote. (Oh,
noes! Gay people getting married! Now Jesus is all weepy!)
You can tell how evil and dishonest anti-gay-marriage

spokespeople are, because they so regularly use dishonest
arguments. They know that they're fighting for the right of
the majority to oppress the minority, so what do they do?
They talk about "activist judges" who want to "redefine
marriage" by "legislating from the bench". Nothing is more
3408
disgusting than listening to right-wing pundit after right-

wing pundit spew the EXACT SAME TALKING POINTS --
not because they're legitimate or even logical, but because
they were crafted to be rhetorically effective. EVIL!
It's none of your business what genitalia two fiancees have.
There's no defense of your assertion that you have the right
to look inside my underpants on my wedding day. And if you
can't see what my junk looks like, you can't tell what sex I
am... so how do you even know it's a gay marriage?
(Clavis)
@Clavis
You know, people who are opposed to safe, legal abortion
use your same argument, i.e. "there is no argument FOR
legalized abortion; it is always wrong".
Of course in your eyes, gay marriage is always right. But
you are in a small minority of extremists.
There actually IS that "Magic Space Library" and it's called

HISTORY, and throughout history, every culture and
society, every era and regime and religion and nation, has
recognized that MARRIAGE is between male and female. In
the west, this has been ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN for
thousands of years (before Christ, or Christianity, ever
existed).
That people do bad things (rape women, then murder them

in honor killings) does not equate to "marriage all bad".
Most marriages are happy, functional and produce
biological children and marriage is the very basis of human
society.
By your logic, NO gay marriage will ever be bad, and no

gay married people will ever fight, abuse each other, lie or
3409
cheat. That is pure nonsense; read up on the Jenkins-Miller

split (a lesbian couple in a civil union, and the nastiest
divorce/custody I've read about in years).
Not only do Tea Baggers NOT have a official religion, but I

AM NOT A TEA BAGGER. It is not just Tea Baggers who
oppose gay marriage or how would Prop 8 have passed with
a clear margin of victory? Tea Partiers are maybe 30% of
the REPUBLICAN party. (I am a Democrat.)
So, let me ask you: is the consciousness of the universe
concerned about whether a brother and sister marry? How
about if you wanted to marry your own grandmother? How
about if you wanted to marry an underage child? How
about if you wanted to marry YOUR DOG?
I mean, you just said that THE UNIVERSE does not care if
"your pee-pees are the same or different". So surely the
universe does not care if you marry a dog, or a dolphin, or
your own father.
The fact is, there are RULES about who you can marry and
how and why, because without RULES, you'd have CHAOS.
The fact is, those talking points ARE TRUE. Lefty social
engineering judges and courts DO want to redefine society
for themselves, or their friends, or their kids, or whoever is
pressuring them, or get votes or big Wall Street money. It's
important enough that Wall Street BRIBED -- openly
BRIBED -- the New York legislature and NOBODY even
cares. It's important enough that they blackmailed and
coerced legislators to vote against their constituents.
That's evil.
3410
Also: I can tell a man from a woman without "looking in

their underpants". For starters, there is common sense. Then
there is DNA. Then there is your various ID forms (birth
certificate, driver's license) that ANYONE needs to get a
marriage license.
Surely if genitalia does not matter, then species does not
matter. Kinship does not matter. Age does not matter. The
fact is, Clavis, what you promote is chaos and anarchy.
bigguns (Laurie Laurel)

There were an estimated 500,000 people who marched in or
attended New York's gay pride parade the weekend gay
marriage was passed here, so I don't think anyone is too
concerned about the 10,000 homophobes you managed to
round up.
You're eventually going to need to get your fat head around
the fact that, whatever nonsense you may think about
national polls, you are most definitely a minority view in
New York...and shrinking all the time. Which is what was
properly reflected in ALL of the news coverage I watched on
this. Largely jubilant and celebratory with occasional
mention made of the MINORITY view against gay marriage.
There was plenty of news coverage of the homophobes

BEFORE the vote, by the way, pretty much equal time with
pro-marriage equality protesters (including endless
nonsense from the Catholic Church). And then what
happened?? Oh yeah, you and they LOST, BIGTIME!!! So
now the news coverage has moved on to the celebration, to
the people whose lives have been improved by this. So
moving on might not be a bad idea for you too.
I love the statement in your post that the duty of legislative

leaders is to protect the jobs of their colleagues. That says
3411
volumes about how you think society should be run. He

should have shut down the vote on a technicality, I suppose,
rather than allow his members to vote their conscience as he
did. You've complained about social engineering in prior
posts. What kind of engineering would you have called
"manufacturing" a defeat like that when all of the votes were
clearly there for a victory??
I think your time would be better spent protecting that

backwater of Ohio where you live from the ever increasing
likelihood that gay marriage is coming there soon, than
trying to carry your brand of hate across state lines to New
York, where you've already lost. But suit yourself.
(@rm2gro)
@rm2gro
I think a march with 10,000 people, on short notice, is
significant. The piece I quoted showed where the protest
march was ignored, while pro-gay marriage activities and
celebrations were given huge media attention; that's the
POINT.
New York CITY is an outlier, because of its vast size, media
industry/domination AND its huge gay sub-culture. The rest
of New York State is completely different, and would likely
have voted against gay marriage had they been given the
right of referendum.
The right of referendum FOR THE PEOPLE is important,

and New Yorkers have long lacked this right: here is an
example of why denying people the right to referendum is
dangerous and wrong.
Where you are naive is in not realizing that the media is

MANIPULATING (or trying to manipulate) public opinion
3412
by focusing on gay marriage in New York, making it look

glamorous, making the celebrations look fun or important
and IGNORING THE OPPOSITION. Then, when New York
Staters manage to overturn gay marriage, and invalidate all
the bogus gay marriages (in a couple of years; it will be slow
because of the lack of right to referendum), they will be
screaming "haters!".
Also: the vote squeaked through -- EVEN WITH

BLACKMAIL AND COERCION -- by a couple of votes. That's
not a landslide, and we did not lose "big time". (Actually I
did not lose at all, since I don't live in New York State.)
When Prop 8 WON by a similar margin, did you say "they

won BIG TIME" or did you scream "it was only by a few ten
thousand votes, so it hardly even counts!"? You twist the
truth to your own agenda.
Nobody's life is "improved" by gay marriage; the lives of

tens of millions of ordinary straight married people is
RUINED when their marriages are DEVALUED and
REDEFINED as "super-duper best friends with benefits".
Rm2gro, I suggest you google and read the recent, very in-
depth article that the NYTimes (very liberal and pro-gay
marriage) did on the New York legislature and the vote.
They made it clear that legislators DID NOT vote their

conscience -- they voted AGAINST their conscience, and
AGAINST THEIR constituents to get the Big Wall Street
money for their next campaigns (remember when you guys
HATED Wall Street? And the Koch brothers? so now they are
good????? hypocrites!). Or they were blackmailed and
coerced like Carl Krueger, with false and humiliating
3413
accusations and daily protestors outside their HOMES

calling them names.
What you want is to fight corruption in the government

EXCEPT WHEN IT GOES YOUR WAY. You are the most
dangerous and hypocritical kind of ideologue.
Again, I have not "lost" anything. IF I lived in New York

State, however, I'd be working double time to make sure that
my hypocritical, lying, cheating, double-dealing legislator
would never be elected again -- or recall him/her if I could.
Then I'd work to ensure that ALL New Yorkers had a right to
referendum votes, to throw out evil social engineering
legislation written by special interest groups for their own
benefit. Then I'd get rid of Anthony Cuomo. But of course, I
don't live in New York State.
What will you say when the REAL referendums OF THE
PEOPLE in places like New Hampshire and Minnesota and
Iowa DON'T GO YOUR WAY? I'll bet my last nickel, you'll be
screaming that "they must be forced to accept gay
marriage!" You don't really like democracy, rm2gro.
(_bigguns)
@laurel/_bigguns -- the surplanting of gay marriage

I think a march with 10,000 people, on short notice, is significant.
I agree, it is significant.
Where you are naive is in not realizing that the media is

MANIPULATING (or trying to manipulate) public opinion by
focusing on gay marriage in New York, making it look glamorous,
making the celebrations look fun or important and IGNORING THE
3414
OPPOSITION.
Making gay marriage seem glamorous and fun is hardly

unambiguously doing it a favor: witness the reception of Sex and the
City 3, with a consensus of critics saying "thanks for the party girls,
but haven't you noticed -- it's going to be a bit harder these days to
imagine ourselves enjoying your fun." Every ebulliant, victory-is-
near-in-our-grasp gay pride parade, every voice that is jubilant at the
inevitable country-wide spread of gay marriage, is unaware that right
now it is being essentialized, setup, in a way that will serve it rather
poorly in the future. Once the Tea Partiers go down and the
conservative mindset can be adopted without risk of IDing its adopter
as a neanderthal -- and rather as a sane middle-of-the-roader, as you
present yourself -- all this dancing and jubilance will be reimagined,
transformed by the public near instantly as beyond preposterous and
more a disgrace. You're so affronted by all this, but you're actually
getting the setup you'll need to get the society you want.
Nobody's life is "improved" by gay marriage; the lives of tens of

millions of ordinary straight married people is RUINED when their
marriages are DEVALUED and REDEFINED as "super-duper best
friends with benefits".
Gay marriage is to you not just an affront, another middle finger
raised at the millions of ordinary Americans, but something worse
than cancerous as it instantly transforms, or rather, malforms every
single marriage, which is actually something even worse than it
appears, as:
[biological] marriage is the very basis of human society.
I continue to wonder how anyone who does not believe that

homosexuals are in some way inferior to heterosexuals, could argue
that when what they do in their relationships is surplanted onto what
heterosexuals do the result is the worst possible thing to happen to a
3415
civilization: its dissolution in chaos, for having its bedrock, its

essential structural support, crippled.
I have tried to make the case with you before that the surplanting of
gay relationships onto heterosexuals ones (or at least marriage) is
actually to the benefit of heterosexual marriage, in some sense, gives
it a name, an association, it might live up to! This has nothing to do
with what gay relationships are actually about (you've heard my
hugely controversial take on that), but about true value of the
progressive mindset that is broadcasting their supposed essence.
Namely, that relationships do not reach a new height in binding
themselves to a weight of tradition and rules, but are sundered by it,
denied by it. Only the infantile so need society, expectations and rules
to encourage them to do what is right, and you should never find
value in a tradition that tells you that you are foremost
untrustworthy, impulse-driven children in need of restraint and
supervision. Adults manage it more autonomously, more
independently, more beautifully, more truly.
Link: She’s the one (Salon)
---------

Cowboys, Aliens, Chicken Salads, and Trolls
You know what's wrong with this damn country? Chicken

Caesar salad. (Stand aside, Rush Limbaugh. I'm talkin'
here.) I could just as well bring up flavored coffee. I mean,
what was so doggone wrong with the flavor of coffee that
people felt like it would be better off tasting like hazelnut
candy and imitation vanilla extract? But it's the ubiquitous,
and nearly always awful, chicken Caesar that really fries
my butt. Caesar salad wasn't something you ate all the time,
3416
and not everybody liked it. It was garlicky and spicy and
salty, and in the old days often had anchovies ground up in
the dressing and served whole on top of the lettuce. (Oh, I
know they still make it that way, for $17.95, in some ever so
precious restaurant you frequent. Spare me.)
Then somebody had the brilliant idea that more people

might like Caesar salad if it was less scary -- if it was less
like itself, in effect -- so they took out the fishies and turned
the dressing into a flavorless, oily, Parmesan-cheesey glop
you could buy at the grocery store. Fewer people hated that,
I imagine, but it was an inherently boring salad no one
would ever make or buy on purpose. Romaine, with a salty,
grainy, viscous fluid somewhat like dirty motor oil drizzled
across it. Then came the stroke of genius, in the form of
chopped-up strips of grilled chicken breast, the most
innocuous and non-carnivorous form of meat. The result is a
hybrid mishmash of incompatible elements, which seems as
if it ought to be appealing and which nobody actively
dislikes, but which is, in fact, unsatisfying on every level.
And that's how we get, dear reader, to "Cowboys & Aliens,"
which is not merely the chicken Caesar of movies but the
chicken Caesar with raspberry vinaigrette, bleu cheese and
some of those godawful walnuts crumbled on top. [. . .]
(Andrew O’Hehir, "Cowboys & Aliens": Daniel Craig
does Eastwood in a steampunk mashup,” Salon, 27
July 2011)
----------
What's wrong with a classic Caesar with grilled

chicken added?
Dude, I am completely with you regarding classic Caesar
3417
salads. They must have anchovies to be TRUE Caesar salads.

Not anchovy-flavored dressing, but actual fishies. So far, so
good.
But what if you're at a restaurant and you're ordering a

Caesar, but you're also really hungry? And what if they offer
grilled chicken with the salad "for a few dollars more" (see
how I worked in a Western reference there?)?
Seriously, then you'd have a classic, true Caesar but with

some lean, perfectly-grilled, lightly seasoned chicken on the
side for protein. And then you've got a meal. A Caesar alone
is a decent lunch, but not much of a dinner. Add chicken and
boom -- it's a dinner.
So what's your problem? And where are the chickens in

"Cowboys & Aliens"?
Also, please tell me the name of the restaurants that serve
Caesar salads with sliced almonds, raspberry vinaigrette
dressing, and bleu cheese crumblies. I think you're making
that shit up, or they aren't actually selling those salads
under the name Caesar Salad. (rattigan glumphobo)
-----
But what was wrong with the film?

Forgive me, Mr. O'Hehir -- and I like your writing so much
that I put a paraphrased quote* from one of your reviews on
my Facebook profile, I thought it was so beautiful and true --
but in this review, you spent so much time making with the
ha-ha that you didn't spend nearly enough time detailing
what you thought was wrong with the film -- why it didn't
work; why it was "mediocre"; etc. Just sayin', I wanted to
know what you didn't like about the film, and after reading
3418
what you wrote, I still do.

.
.
.
The quote:
*"We all live and die amid confusion and injustice; life seems
too short no matter how long it lasts; and the days we have
are miraculous, and then they are gone." - Andrew O'Hehir
(Clavis)
-----
Not a good review, by the way

The Salon front-page headline proclaims this "The summer's
lamest hack-job." Then, when you click the story, it says
"Daniel Craig does Eastwood in a steampunk mashup." Why
is the headline different in two places, and why does one
headline proclaim the movie utter garbage while the other is
non-judgmental? That's very odd and hints at editorial
indecision or second-guessing.
The subhead does say the movie is cliche-ridden and

irritating, but the article gives the reader very little work
with in terms of analysis. Instead we get an extended
metaphor about salad. Comparing a movie to food is itself a
cliche, but I haven't seen Caesar salads used before (credit to
O'Hehir for knowing his way around a Caesar salad).
Nonetheless, extended metaphors have to be backed up:
HOW is the movie like a salad done wrong? And WHY did
you miss the opportunity to compare the alien monsters to
giant anchovies? I mean, you had it all lined up and
then....nothing.
Reading this review, dividing it into paragraphs, you get a

3419
really long metaphor, a description of the movie's Western

setting and characters, a 2nd description of the movie's
Science-Fiction hybrid plot, some background information
about the graphic novel (even though the movie is barely like
it), and an off-the-cuff concluding paragraph that mentions
Somalia, John Boehner and how it's okay for summer
moviegoing fare to lack social/political relevance.
What I am saying is: There's no REVIEW in this REVIEW!
Why did the movie bother you? What about the alien twists
was lame? Which parts were hackneyed? The headline says
it's a lame hackjob, but the article says Jon Favreau's
directing is "reasonably accomplished," or something.
Andrew, how about getting it together and reviewing more

of the content of the films your write about? Try reading 10
old reviews by Roger Ebert and another 10 reviews by
Pauline Kael before you start writing your next review.
Those two writers actually write about life, and the reasons
people care about going to the movies, and investing
themselves in the stories and characters, or escaping, or
reflecting, or whatever reason people go to movies. They're
into moviegoing, and it shows. They don't reduce movies to a
laundry list of elements to be summarized, and they usually
don't compare movies to Waldorf salads or whatever.
(rattigan glumphobo)
-----
Heh
While I have no intention of seeing this film, I found your
review to be cliche piled upon cliche of hackish, uppity movie
criticism, which--as you might guess where I'm heading--
just ends up being irritating. Very irritating, before the end
3420
of the first paragraph even. You might want to rethink your

approach. (ban-ghaidheal)
-----
Where's the review in this review?

I was hoping for a review of the movie. Instead, I got
a...well, I'm not sure what I got. It definitely wasn't a review.
Seemed more like an exercise in being contrarian and
obtuse. Are you sure you actually watched the movie, and
didn't cheat by watching the trailers and then going out for
salad? (Jon Henshaw)
-----
I finally figgered out the trick to salads

you have to make them YOURSELF.
Personally, I like less lettuce, more other veggies and meat, a
greater variety of toppings, and more dressing.
Moreso, since I almost exclusively eat organic food, which

almost always tastes better, it makes the salad taste better.
With the dressing, I often mix one or more HIGH QUALITY

organic commercial dressings together, then throw in more
vinegar, since I love vinegar, olive oil, since we do not get
enough Omega 3s in our diets, and a bunch of herbs and
spices, since I like things hotter and spicier.
As a topping, I sometimes crunch up some Thai spice Kettle

brand potato chips (my personal trick, since these are my
favorite chips of all time).
Can't fail. This is the BEST salad you will EVER have. I
actually started to like salad after I began to make them
3421
myself. (Liberty2Day)
-----
I couldn't care less about this stupid movie

but a real Caesar salad (if one assumes that Cardini actually
invented it) has no anchovies in it.
romaine lettuce
olive oil
crushed garlic
a good wine vinegar
freshly squeezed tart citrus juice
Worcestershire sauce
coddled egg yolks
freshly ground black pepper
freshly grated Parmesan cheese
freshly prepared croutons
a dash of salt (EdipisReks)
-----
Blah blah it's only a movie, dude, blah

Relax and lighten up, dude, it's only a movie, dude.
Just thought I'd throw that out there, since it's the standard
response to reviews like this and SOMEBODY HAS TO SAY
IT.
It's THE LAW. (Matt Zoller Seitz)
Matt Seitz
re: Blah blah it's only a movie, dude, blah
Relax and lighten up, dude, it's only a movie, dude.
Just thought I'd throw that out there, since it's the standard
3422
response to reviews like this and SOMEBODY HAS TO SAY IT.

It's THE LAW.
Reminds me of David Edelstein's charming post on Stephanie's

"Inception" review:
Kill the beast! Spill her blood! Smash her face!

You must be punished for your dumbness and illitarecy. Christopher
Nolan RULEZ you drool! Whoo---ahhhhhhhhhhhh.
All good. Surely takes some balls. Except some of us are wondering if
even a couple years from now, when most of America is pretty well
showing how maybe the last thing they need is to be made more sport
of, if you guys are going to keep this good stuff up. Hope so; but my
bet is you'll actually be TARGETING people still talking like you're
talking now. May this feedback make it less likely you'll end up so.
-----
@Alix Dobkowski
You know, Alix, my complaint about the headlines not
matching is a perfectly valid comment. It's so valid, in fact,
that I notice Salon's editors have now completely excised the
"hackiest, lamest" headline from the article -- both on the
home page and on the article. So what's your problem with
me pointing out that the headline doesn't make sense? When
Salon's writers and editors do work that is not only sloppy,
but completely inaccurate and inconsistent to a fault, are we,
the lowly, pathetic readers of Salon, supposed to just suck it
up and roll over and say, "Yes sir, I'd like some more?" As
far as I am concerned, I pay Salon's fucking bills by reading
their articles every day -- I am regularly exposed to the
advertisements that pay Salon's electric bills, as well as
3423
paying for the postage stamps so Salon's editors can mail

their freelance writers a special certificate that says,
"Congratulation! For your efforts, you have been awarded a
Gold Star (not included, only metaphorical)! Maybe some
day, you too can earn monetary compensation for your
writing efforts! Until then, thank you for your
complimentary submission, and keep 'em coming! Who
knows? One day we might even hire you to work on our
esteemed staff, at least long enough so that you can enjoy a
delightful unpaid U-Haul trip across the country, and then
another delightful U-Haul trip when we lay off your sorry
ass."
And yeah, I complained about the metaphor, but only

because it made me hungry. After reading Andrew's column,
I totally wanted to toss a salad, especially one that smelled
of fish. It could be named Caesar, or hell, Cecilia. Who by the
way is breaking my heart and shaking my confidence daily.
No, I do not read the comments of oda7103sf or Liberty2day

for one simple reason: I prefer to choose when and where I
enjoy slapstick comedy merged with tragedy. Whether that
choice is a Jerry Lewis movie or something featuring Adam
Sandler getting kicked in the balls by Sarah Silverman, it
makes no difference. I want to be able to savor it.
Liberty2day and oda are far too random, and especially
with oda, I think he works that whole "chronic masturbator"
persona a little too much to be funny.
Regarding Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, I am not saying

O'Hehir should emulate them. I am saying he should read
some good reviewers from the olden days to get in the mood.
O'Hehir is a good writer, but even good writers go off-track
or lose their mojo once in a while. O'Hehir is capable of
3424
cranking out about a dozen well-written and intelligent

Cannes articles in a few days, so I know he's capable of
kickass movie criticism. But what he's done here shows he's
not in the mood or something. Frankly, after O'Hehir
finished writing that whole long paragraph about Caesar
salads, he should have done one of two things: (1) Kept
going, writing a whole big article on Salads for Salon's food
section, which recently lost Francis Lam; or (2) Deleted the
entire paragraph, starting over with an extended metaphor
about Matzoh Ball Soup, or Dietemaceous Earth, or possibly
something to do with Squid Jism.
Some of the best reviews I've ever read weren't by Kael or

Ebert or Sarris or Glieberman or Zacharek or Seitz or
O'Hehir or Rainer or Rafferty or Lane or Sragow or
Kauffmann or Denby or Siskel or Canby or what's-her-face
at NY Times or what's-her-face at EW or what's-their-faces
at Variety or Hollywood Reporter or Libby Gelman Waxner
or even Joe Bob Briggs or that guy with the mustache or that
other guy with the scrub-brush mustache and Ch-ch-ch-chia!
'fro.
No, the best reviews I've ever read were by nameless

reviewers at the LA Weekly, or the Phoenix New Times, or
the Willamette Weekly, or RE/Search books, or in regional
daily newspapers whose writers haven't become jaded yet
and aren't just rung-climbing to an editorial position, or in
small 'zines, or blogs written by people who really, really
love movies to the point where they're really, really paying
attention to things and they have an almost Zen sense of the
details and textures and story references and thematics and
visual motifs and characters. And they also are completely
tuned in, with laser precision, to the things that are wrong
with the stories, the way the assumptions are subtly
3425
insulting to the audience's intelligence, or the way the movie

rewards viewers who are opening their awareness to the
film. Yes, these writers use snark and wisecracks, but they
use them for a reason, which is to illuminate something
important about their evaluation of the film, and not just to
fill space with acceptable copy so they can hit "save" and call
it a day. I'm not saying O'Hehir doesn't do the former, or
that he does the latter -- actually I think he does a little of
both the good and the bad, and I'd love to see the ratio
improve much. (I have few illusions that I'm helping matters
much by being the buzzing mosquito of annoyingness
around here, but then again, I'm fucking partially paying
Salon's bills, so I can do whatever the hell I want.)
Regarding the movie: I don't intend to see "Cowboys &

Aliens" either, not after some of the other reviews I've read.
Last I checked it had 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, which means
the tomato is half-rotten. I usually throw half-rotten
tomatoes away, unless I'm making a salad for somebody I
can't stand. Not a Caesar salad, though. They don't have
tomatoes. (rattigan glumphobo)
Link: "Cowboys & Aliens": Daniel Craig does Eastwood in a

steampunk mashup (Salon)
---------

Addressing the shitbox
RESPONSE BY LK WALKER
3426
I usually don't reply to letters as this is an open forum for

readers where you can vent. But I have to correct one thing.
I never used the word 'loser' in any part of my article, and I
never would use that word to describe anyone. That is a
word chosen by the editors to incite readership. And look! It
worked.
As my ex-fiance's grandpa used to say: There's a lid for
every pot!
Thanks for reading... (LKWalker, comment in
discussion thread of LK Walker’s “How I learned I
don’t have to settle,” Salon, 26 July 2011)
@LK Walker, the pretender

re: I usually don't reply to letters as this is an open forum for
readers where you can vent.
[. . .]
Thanks for reading...
So you insult your readers by essentializing them as venters, not
thinkers, or your-thought elaborators (with you offering some
thoughts that could be expanded upon to make for a discussion), and
then you thank them for reading.
May I suggest next time you enter the discussion you provide
consistent feedback, and say something along the lines of, "I usually
don't reply to letters as this is an open forum for readers where you
can vent, however ... That clarified, by all means continue on with
your expletives and rants -- hey, it's your shitbox. Thank you for yet
remaining being able to mostly read."
Link: How I learned I don’t have to settle (Salon)

---------

3427
Norway shooter and the Oklahoma City bomber
The world was stunned Friday by a double tragedy in

Norway: An explosion in the nation's capital, Oslo, left seven
dead, while a shooting spree on the nearby island of Utoya
reportedly claimed the lives of 86, mainly teenagers from a
Labor Party youth camp. Though many at first suspected the
involvement of international terrorism, both acts of violence
have now since been pegged to a 32-year-old Norwegian
man named Anders Behring Breivik. Breivik has confessed
to orchestrating both attacks, and says he acted alone.
(Though he made further statements in a court hearing
today -- where he pleaded not guilty -- that have stoked fears
about two more possible terror cells in the country.) Breivik
has called his actions "atrocious," but also "necessary."
The facts we've learned about Breivik in the days since the
massacre paint a portrait of a disturbed and isolated man.
Unearthed documents have shown that Breivik -- the son of
a retired Norwegian diplomat -- was fiercely xenophobic,
railing against Muslims, women, and cultural and political
"leftists." Indeed, ABC News notes that, after his arrest, he
told Norway's acting national police chief that he "wanted to
attack Norwegian society in order to change it" and that "he
wanted to transform the Western world." He also called for
a "conservative revolution [... and] armed resistance against
the cultural Marxists/multiculturalist regimes of Western
Europe."
Per the Wall Street Journal:
In bombing those government buildings and hunting

down those campers, Breivik was not taking out
people randomly. He considered the Labor Party,
Norway's dominant party since World War II,
responsible for policies that are leading to the
3428
Islamization of Europe—and thus guilty of treason.
The Oslo bombing was intended to be an execution of the

party's current leaders. The massacre at the camp—where
young would-be politicians gathered to hear speeches by
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and former Prime Minister
Gro Harlem Brundtland—was meant to destroy its next
generation of leaders.
[. . .]
The most shocking testament to Breivik's twisted worldview,

however, is a 1,500 page document that he titled "2083: A
European Declaration of Independence," and that reveals
Breivik's infatuation with American cultural conflicts. (At
one point, he lambasted American liberals' "War on
Christmas.") Its sections allegedly included the following:
"What your government, the academia and the media are
hiding from you," "Documenting EU's deliberate strategy to
Islamize Europe" and "How the feminists' 'War Against the
Boys' paved the way for Islam." The man cited a number of
American, Canadian and English writers in his manifesto --
including Robert Spencer, who runs the website Jihad Watch
Web, on 64 occasions, the New York Times points out.
[. . .]
The Daily Beast's Michelle Goldberg, meanwhile, notes the

strain of misogyny running through Breivik's work:
Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety

and right-wing nationalism been made quite so
clear. Indeed, Breivik's hatred of women rivals his
hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it. Some
3429
reports have suggested that during his rampage on

Utoya, he targeted the most beautiful girl first. This
was about sex even more than religion.
Goldberg also points to statements Breivik has made

complaining about the influence of his diplomat stepmother,
whom he faults with instituting a "super-liberal, matriarchal
upbringing, [that] contributed to feminise me to a certain
degree." Likewise, he wrote, "The female manipulation of
males has been institutionalised during the last decades and
is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in women."
(Peter, Finochiarro, “What we know abou the Norway
shooter,” Salon, 25 July 2011)
----------
From Lloyd DeMause's "Psychogenic Theory of History":
Consider a typical example of a traumatized child growing

up and joining others in fashioning a historical group-
fantasy. Timothy McVeigh, one of the Oklahoma City
bombers, experienced continuous maternal abandonment as
a child, according to neighbors and relatives, as his restless
mother, who regularly cheated on her husband, kept leaving
the family for weeks at a time. Timothy asked friends, "Is it
something I did?" when trying to understand why his
mother wasn't there. When he was ten, he became interested
in guns and became a survivalist, collecting rifles in case
Communists took over the country. When he was sixteen and
his mother left him for good, he began to refer to her as "a
bitch" and as "that no-good whore." Neighbors reported he
was often like two people, "angry and screaming one
minute, then switching to quite normal" for no apparent
reason. In the army, when he failed the Green Beret test --
3430
another rejection -- he quit in disgust and began hanging out

with Right-wing militarists. After going to Waco to watch
how the government had abandoned the children during the
siege, he went to Oklahoma City to act out a scene in a
Rightist novel where a group packed a truck with a
homemade bomb and set it off at F.B.I. headquarters. But
four months before he acted out this rage against authority
(his mother), McVeigh visited the day care center in the
building, pretending he had children he wanted to enroll.
Thus he picked out a site where children who had been left
by their mothers would be blown up too, thus punishing
abandoned children representatives of himself restaging his
own abandonment and the carrying out the punishment he
thought he deserved for his rage at his mother.
[. . .]
The raging part of Timothy McVeigh, elaborated by militia

group-fantasies, often made him seem, said others, like two
people. The process was similar to that observed in the
creation of alters, or alternate personalities, in people who
have Multiple Personality Disorders, a diagnosis recently
renamed Dissociated Identity Disorders. Dissociation is
defined as "a loss of the usual interrlationships between
various groups of mental processes with resultant almost
independent function of the one group that has been
separated from the rest," and is involved in such
pathological syndromes as hypnosis, depersonalization,
fugue, sleepwalking, possession and visionary experiences. A
Dissociated Identity Disorder has three criteria: (a) the
personalities seem to be distinct and lasting, (b) the
dominant personality at any particular time determines the
individual's behavior, and (c) each personality is complex
and organized with its own unique behavior patterns. There
3431
are four possible core dissociative symptoms: amnesia,

depersonalization, derealization and identity confusion.
Severe, repeated child abuse and neglect almost always lie
behind the full D.I.D. disorder. Kluft says, "Most multiples,
as children, have been physically brutalized, psychologically
assaulted, sexually violated, and affectively overwhelmed."
As Ross puts it, a multiple personality disorder is a little girl
imagining that the abuse is happening to someone else. The
imaging is so intense and subjectively compelling, and is
reinforced so many times by the ongoing trauma, that the
created identities seem to take on a life of their own, though
they are all parts of one person.
[. . .]
The social alter is the inheritor of earlier dissociated

persecutory feelings and has as one of its roles the setting up
of group punishments that are "object lessons" to us all.
McVeigh's staging of the Oklahoma City explosion was
carefully arranged to have "abandoned" children like
himself punished along with the more conscious aim of
punishing bad authorities. The formula for restaging early
traumas is: (1) Fuse with your persecutory alter ("Terrifying
Mommy"), (2) find a savior alter ("Grandiose Self") whom
you follow to (3) kill the victim alter ("Bad Child"). Empathy
for victim scapegoats is lost because they are so full of our
negative projections and are seen as bad children-growing,
striving, wanting too much. The larger the success and new
freedoms a society must face -- the more its progress
overreaches its childrearing evolution -- the larger the
historical punishment it must stage. When an American
Senator, voting for more nuclear weapons, said that even if
a nuclear Holocaust was unleashed it wouldn't be too bad
because we would "win" it ("If we have to start over with
3432
another Adam and Eve, I want them to be Americans"), the

weird trance logic can only be understood if nuclear war is
seen as an "object lesson," enabling us to "start afresh with a
clean slate."
Link: What we know about the Norway shooter (Salon)
--------

When a new addiction beckons
When I finally stopped going to bars
A year after I quit drinking, I avoid my old haunts. But now

that I'm not a lush anymore -- what, exactly, do I do?
I quit drinking more than a year ago. It was time. None of
my closest friends said, "Wow, I didn't know you had a
problem," because that was untrue. What they mostly said
was, "Good for you." And, "Let me know how I can be
helpful." But what I struggled with -- and still struggle with,
more than 365 days after I drained my last glass of
sauvignon blanc at a friend's wedding reception -- was
telling people who weren't my closest friends. Who might
have been close, but not that close.
[. . .]
But since moving back to Texas from New York last month --
and embarking on the string of reunion dinners and meet-
ups this entails -- I feel I owe my former drinking buddies
fair warning. I know what it was like to anticipate a
debauched evening at the bar only to hear, "I'm pregnant!"
Or, "I've decided to cut back." And what was going to be a
3433
last-call rager got tragically downshifted to two guilty

glasses and bed by 11 p.m. Yay, good for you, I'd say, sipping
a glass of wine that suddenly felt like it was the size of a
thimble.
[. . .]
When Tim and I did meet for lunch, at a place I remembered

for its hearty salads, we talked about this for a bit. I was
expressing disappointment that I hadn't seen the guys from
the magazine he runs, the guys I usually catch up with over a
pint or four.
"We could go bowling," Tim says. "Or play kickball."
Ugh: sports. I didn't want to sound too negative. But how do

you explain to someone you only know through bar chatter
that you are embarrassed by the world? That you can't do
anything that involves running, sweating or standing
outside? This is why drinking was so convenient. It was a
smoke screen for the fact that I sucked at everything else.
[. . .]
What I really like to do, though -- what I like more than

anything else, more than anything in the world, whether I'm
at the bar or languishing in my apartment -- is to talk to
people. I like to have honest conversations with other
humans that surprise me, and challenge me, and make me
think about my life in new ways. It's what I always wanted
from the bar in the first place. And it strikes me, driving
home that day, that it's exactly what I just had . (Sarah
Hepola, “When I finally stopped going to bars,”
3434
----------
fuck that
Thats a lot of nerve about choosing a "healthy
lifestyle"........try boring. Not to say getting drunk off your
ass every night is a good choice but the fact is that sobriety
as it is preached by the American Prude Movement, both
right and left, is pretty fucking boring. So what do you
do?????Play board games and drink decaf coffee. Bad choice,
unless you were headed to the grave on the fast track. And
even then, Fast track to the grave may be a lot more fun than
singing the blues about boredom. (quiet man)
-----
"Lush"
So people who drink are "lushes". Whatever.
(kugelschreiber)
-----
Allow me to be bold, as an anonymous voice in an electronic
wilderness. There is a book; a short, simple, cheap book, that
neither preaches, nor feels like self-help in any way. But if it
helps you even a tenth as much as it helped me, it will be
worth you picking it up.
It's called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.
I think what you seek will not be found in husband, kids,
drink, job, or any of those things, for those are identities, and
in the finality of it all, fictitious.
The identity is the problem, and this moment is the solution.
My best wishes and best of luck to you. (John McCall)
-----
Think of things you like to do and do them
Take a class at the local college. Go on an alumni travel tour.
Hang out at museums. Learn to ride a horse. Find a really
nice cafe and make some new cafe friends. My late mother
used to go out for breakfast at the same place every day.
3435
She'd only have a Danish or some toast and coffee, but over
time she got to know the regulars and so it was always a get-
together. (expatjourno2)
-----
Ms H, I Know Just How You Feel...
Way back in my 300+ lb days, before I learned I was a Type
2 diabetic, I treated food the way you treated your drinking.
But in my case, I had to stop using food as I had: I ate from
boredom, recreation, fear, anger, fill in the blank.
Once I regulated my eating habits, I learned how to eat
again: B/C I WAS HUNGRY. I was amazed at how much
time and $$ I was wasting on my earlier habits. That's when
I got a life--and I still regulate my blood sugar w/diet and
exercise alone, 15 yrs later and 140 lbs ago.
What you did is what I did: you reclaimed your life and time.
And as you age, you come to appreciate how precious time
really is, and learn not to waste it.
Good for you! (elsma03)
-----
A year sober
Congratulations!
You've already kept sober for a year and made a major
lifestyle move, back to TX.
I'm assuming you've GOT to have a car now, and there are a
lot of scenic and historical things to see...and since it's now
safe for you to drive... (Greeneyedkzin)
-----
Identity
You probably know this but I'm going to say it out loud. It's
not that there isn't anything fun to do outside of going to
bars -- it's that the people you want to spend time with only
know how to have fun at bars. It's a quandary. There are
tons of interesting people doing interesting things at all
3436
times of the day and night without alcohol -- but you have to
shift your sense of your self to find them.
Good luck. I enjoy your writing and I hope that you find
something that works for you. (And have you thought about
corresponding with Roger Ebert?) (amspeck)
-----
Realize this.
Those old drinking "friends" aren't really friends if they only
like you because you drink with them. I put the cork back in
the bottle twenty-five years ago. There are people I used to
see and drink with weekly who I haven't seen nor spoken
with for twenty-five years. They only wanted to be around a
"Good-time Charlie" and I only wanted my sobriety and life
back. I have new and better friends now, people who enjoy
my company because of who I am, not who I become when
drunk. Good luck. Once you get past the, "nobody loves me"
stage of your new-found life, you'll will get on with the
business of actually living. I wish you peace. (Robert
David Clark)
-----
The Discoveries Are Inward

It is indeed hard to replace the social aspects of the bars with
the humdrum everyday activities of sobriety. But the sad
truth is that sobriety only got worse until I went inside and
opened up the spiritual longing that I had tried to fill with
alcohol, sex, drugs or a host of other diversions. I am
grateful now that I have been driven from the rather narrow
diversion of the bars and into the broad and exciting scope of
a spiritual reality (I, frankly, once thought of as bullshit).
Anyone can stop drinking. I did it every day. Sobriety is so
much more than the cessation of drinking: it is the opening
up of a new life of adventure I never imagined to exist.
3437
(trungpapa)
-----
You shouldn't make fun of these "hobbies"

You lost your hobby, drinking - you should find another one.
There are in fact people who passionately care about art,
book clubs, dance, music, politics, actually important things
that make your life deeper and richer. Find which one of
these you love and throw yourself into it! (TomRitchford)
-----
On a side note, I second an earlier poster's suggestion that

you learn to ride a horse. It's a great way to get outside and
play without alcohol, sports talk, or boredom. Admittedly,
though, you'd meet more men (if that's one of your goals)
with contra dancing. (EditGrrl)
-----
Put away your prejudices and the insecurities that you hid
with drinking and choose exercise. Go bowling! Go to a
softball game. There may be drinking there as well but you
might find it easier to avoid. If you can't, go to a yoga class
or a spin class. No drinking there and no one will judge you
if you aren't great at first. You'll find a social circle among
people whose values are healthy in both senses of the word.
(BuffCrone)
No longer the lush
How about just dwelling on the fact that you appear to have left
something damning behind you, and just in time? I mean it; every
day you could just look at the rest of America that is still, despite all
the news and bad press, keeping on with their depressing bad habits,
3438
their indulgent, self-destructive ways, and know that they -- not you --
are going down. You'll find many other former sketchy ones who now
too count themselves amongst the pure -- like that former Salon
editor who lost 200 pounds and kept it off for a year, who wrote in to
let us know that and also of how he has learned to subsist on less than
1200 calories a day, leaving us to think his new reformed self is such
that he needed to learn he still required more than the random
nutrients you inhale as you walk through the streets of New York to
survive; or the new food writer, Felissa, who has left luxuries behind
her and made life "an exercise of reduction" and humility; or the
young ’un Drew Grant, who newly preaches how "you still owe them
[i.e., your parents] your life and your respect," showing how you're
never too young to scold like an elder and to abort much that could
have interesting in your life for a surer sense of earned protection.
I truly think this is going to get you by. You'll more than survive, and
even thrive, and every day you'll be encouraged to think yourself
elected and deserving. Whatever great adventure you make of your
life now that you've finally begun living, whether it's joining exciting
groups, seeing America's notable sites, or just settling into a less
complicated but more human, satisfying life, it will be this pleasure
that foremost makes you feel you've made a turn for the better.
Link: When I finally stopped going to bars (Salon)
--------
MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2011

As gay marriage comes to America
Seven years later, after she'd adopted my biological kids, my

wife and I, along with other Canadian couples, sued
Canada's federal government for same-sex marriage rights.
After a three-year fight, we were victorious and, in 2003,
3439
just after our 10th anniversary, we wed, the coolest group of

daughters and dragmaids at our sides.
In 17-plus years, I had never imagined, not even for a sliver

of a second, that my wife and I would part through any
means besides death -- that's how happy and bonded I
believed we were. If anyone had asked me my favorite thing,
my answer would have been to spend time with my wife.
Doing anything.
Only days before she started making noises about leaving

me, my wife and I were renewing our vows during a horse-
drawn carriage ride under the Eiffel Tower, and while the
horse hooves clopped their way along the cobblestone side
streets of Paris, I was swooning. I was delighted at how
fresh our love still was. We were not symbiotic or enmeshed,
but independent, free and happy. Our relationship glowed
with health. When we had issues, we had meetings and
solved them, and nothing went along unresolved.
Then came the shock -- and the unraveling. [. . .] (Jane

Eaton Hamilton, “What kept me together after the
divorce,” Salon, 19 July 2011)
----------
Ms. Hamilton, you're demonstrated something very

important
When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no
different from heterosexuals. This is why it is a crime that
homosexuals are not allowed to marry, and thankfully, that
situation is changing. In my own state of Maryland, where
legalizing same sex marriage narrowly failed this year, our
Governor has just announced that he is making passage a
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personal legislative priority (unlike the previous attempt). I

have no doubt we'll win this time. New York was a game
changer.
Best of luck to you. (Beans&Greens)
@Beans&Greens, and world-at-large

Re: When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no
different from heterosexuals.
I'm beginning to suspect that there are liberals out there who support
such things as gay marriage now on the condition that it, one, keeps
them feeling liberal, enlightened -- costumed in just the right way to
keep them feeling "of the moment," enabled by momentum,
protected; and two, because at some point they're betting
"indisputable" evidence will come to light -- of the kind
laurel/_bigguns keeps pointing out that suggests homosexuals ARE
rather different in affairs of the heart: more promiscious; involved in
relationships so distinctly different in kind that they are not
transferable from homo to hetero, or hetero to homo -- that will
permit them a full retraction. "You're actually like that!!! ... Well now,
I was your friend, taking on every bloody elephant in the room in your
support, on the condition you were as you presented yourself to me. I
took you at faith, and you've been lying to me all the time!" With (the
eventual coming of) tea partiers effectively neutered, with most
everyone beginning to sound puritan and rigid, many democrats, in
my judgment, are no longer going to be so much friends of
homosexuals.
It may be even here, with the inevitable spread of gay marriage that
will so show laurel how out of touch and impotent she is -- "rage
away, lunatic; you're still fated to be just washed away in the torrent!"
-- what we're actually seeing is a setup that will empower, justify a
later heavy and nasty turnabout. The narrative setup may be here to
make it look like the "fallen," homosexuals, almost took control of the
very reigns (!) -- i.e., marriage -- that sourced the most profound
3441
virtues of the country!!! It may be something which will at the end not
so much leave her soaked and humiliated, barely able to stand let
alone shriek, but comfortably throned, expecting the cascade of
inevitable tribute to start, with you just nearby on a spit. You're her
greatest nemesis, and she'll ultimately dine on you, enjoying every
chew of your multi-morseled torso-kabob, and in full concentration
("Beans&Greens but no beans and greens for mEEs tonight!"), but
room first for a few more satisfactions of repentant Salon staff
shuffling up to thank her for her early and brave more good faith
stances, of the kind they humbly submit you couldn't deny they were
at least attempting, but hadn't anywhere near the earthquake of soul
to show it first so boldly and undisguised as she was able.
I would recommend people begin to more see and consider the
implications of the numerous liberals about who are beginning to
sound more and more conservative -- notably in regards to sex and
relationships, but elsewhere too (note the commenter who explained
how Andrew Leonard's ostensibly liberal stance towards government
debt would have seemed conservative 40 years ago). What is going on
here is not so much a change in heart -- though it is about turning on
their own liberalness, "fretting" it now more and more as suspect
permissiveness, unfettered indulgence, excess -- but a concern for
purity, something which always works against groups like
homosexuals for their readily being made to seem those who prosper
when civilization has lost its way, an embodyment of its decadence.
If this happens, the best out there -- good people like you -- will still
be supporting gay marriage, but I'm wondering if even for you this
voice of love and support comes out strangely and humiliatingly
muted, for your realizing you needed to believe homosexual love was
the same as heterosexual love to provide so much unsecond-guessed
support, to people who deserved your full support regardless. You
might perhaps avoid knowing this, but because the source of this info
will now becoming as much from ostensibly liberal sources as
conservative ones, you'll have a tough time doing so.
3442

The only requirement for a marriage is MALE AND

FEMALE -- in western civilization, we understand that to be
ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN, which is very logical, as it
takes ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN to make a baby.
Anything else might be lovely or wondeful, loving or even
very long lasting -- but it is not a marriage.
Marriage is a relationship between one man and one

woman.
I hope to see that become the law of the land, by
Constitutional Amendment, in a few years.
I think the awful corruption and payoffs in New York will

only ensure that pro-traditional marriage supporters get
really galvanized in the next election cycle -- they realize
now how easily their rights to traditional marriage can be
taken away, by corrupt politicians bribed by big Wall Street
money. (_bigguns)
-----
If ANYONE here can understand Patrick McEvoy-
Halston's rant...
...I'd love to know what the heck he is saying. Honestly, dude,
I cannot make ONE LICK OF SENSE out of anything you
write -- not one -- and I can't even figure out what side you
are on. (_bigguns)
Laurel, and the takeover of Salon

Laurel, you're not aware of your central lie: that you, at heart, and
despite truly not wishing so, do not think gays are equal to
3443
heterosexuals. If you really thought so, THERE'S NO WAY you'd be as

opposed to gay marriage as much as you are, making it seem as if the
one thing that keeps civilization ago has just been stopped in its
tracks. More than this, I think you think they deserve punishment for
daring to enfranchise themselves in the same way heterosexuals are
enfranchised, for SPOILING, permanently -- simply for trivial, of-
the-moment pleasures they'll quickly come to learn they really have
no use for -- their most treasured institution.
I've heard your call/request, and I'll interpret my post for you: I am
NOT so much someone who suspects that at the end of the day you'll
find yourself helplessly neutered from having any influence here at
Salon letters or "abroad," but rather someone who thinks that even
now you're increasingly "tolerated" here out of felt intuition that
where, that who you are now is kinda where many Salonistas are
going to find themselves in some not-so-long while.
You're registering more and more as simply a voice of punishment;

absolute intolerance for the (ostensibly) idle, spoiled, and delinquent
in whatever guise. Though they're hating it (i.e., your angry wrath)
when you're directing it against gay marriage, I think some sense
yours is the voice of the future, and are more likely to start abiding it
than risk becoming another of its targets. More than this, and because
there are in truth way fewer of these truly ideal Salonistas out there as
you make seem, they're increasingly listening to the part of
themselves that has judged this is a time for curtailment and
responsibility and sacrifice, not yet more stretched-out claims for
indulging yet more me!me! satisfactions -- what surely got us in these
dire straits, in the first place.
Some imagine you howling, echoing, endlessly but alone, as if shut

out for good from the rest of your kind, but I'm beginning to see you
more as one who might well be speaking to the gathered's "hearts,"
drawing them to you. My strong hunch is that it will be good, loving
3444
(if however annoyingly smug) people like Greens&Beans -- the voices

of true encouragement -- who will find themselves not so much
listened to, at some point.
Link: What kept me together after the divorce (Salon)
---------
THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2011

When society favors the geek
Some say that all narratives ultimately tell only two stories.
One: Someone goes on a journey. Two: A stranger comes to
town. The summer before my eighth-grade year, when I was
12, I experienced the intersection of both. In other words, I
learned how to escape.
This was 1979. My mother had been home from the hospital
for a few months, and my sister, brother and I were just
coming to understand her. Our "new" Mom.
The new version of my mother was a changeling. At 38 years
old, she had suffered, and barely survived, a ruptured brain
aneurysm. The head injury caused her to be mostly
paralyzed on her left side. Her brain became scrambled. She
limped around the house, couldn't tell time and didn't know
the day of the week. Often, she'd make inappropriate
remarks, swearing at the slightest provocation or making
some lewd joke in front of friends. At times, she scared me.
"Ethan!" she'd yell from her lair. "Help me get up!" She
might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the
floor, or in the bathtub.
Years before my mother's "accident," as we called it, my dad
had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but
he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family
friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my
3445
siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a
miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We
eventually discovered this would never come to pass.
It didn't take long to figure out I couldn't tame my mother,
not this beast. I knew I couldn't save her, either. I fought
with her for a while, usually battling over her inability --
what I mistakenly read as her refusal -- to regain her old life,
be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision.
After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck
with a mother I was afraid to love.
We began calling her the Momster.
-------
[. . .]
Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came
home from the hospital, a stranger came to town -- a new
kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared
to me.
[. . .]
I hung out a lot at JP's house that summer. After a few weeks
of watching "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," listening to
Electric Light Orchestra's "Discovery," and programming
primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack
computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.
-------
[. . .]
That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon
took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a
vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid
-- a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the
basketball team -- take action, be the hero, go on quests, and
kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys
in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted,
non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt
invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was
3446
the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the
idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was
missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one
Band-Aid. But shooting my "Star Wars" remakes and clay
monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute
movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless,
instantaneous and endless. Epic.
I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it
found me, coincided with my mother's return from the
hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the
Momster -- more courage than I could muster at the time. I
couldn't face down the creature that plagued my own house.
But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly
symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the
prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family's
four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident
and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts
and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into
my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had
transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather
strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother
again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.
But in the summer of '79, I was but a newbie. I needed to
gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons &
Dragons. I didn't know that game was about to save my life.
Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes
on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two
strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you
count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and
again. I would play many new roles. I would go on
incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat
many monsters.
When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session,
after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for
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Webster's. "Cleric |ˈklerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a

priest or religious leader in any religion." The next day, back
at JP's for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D
game world, clerics weren't just priests. They were
characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or
perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as "cure
light wounds" and "protection from evil." They could dispel
the undead.
Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my
head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer,
or in some realm far away in the future. (Ethan Gilsdorf,
“My Summer of Dungeons and Dragons,” 18 July 2011)
-----------
Zero plus zero equals the infinite, apparently
How does hanging out with other geeks end up making you less
somehow of a geek (giving you true courage, of the kind that applies
to the "real"world, etc.)? How does zero plus zero generate anything?
I'm wondering if the truer story is that somewhere along the line
society decided geeks were preferable to healthy self-esteemers, for
their preparedness to take shit, bow to bullying power, and in service
to it, humiliate others with more true backbone: that is, for having no
real self-respect. In preverse times, their disadvantage, their
malformation, actually rendered them more fit, and they ended up
with subsequent life stories that allowed them to believe their
adolescent escapes had been subsequently revealed as healthy, even
leaderly, pasttimes. Rather than socially retarded, time has
apparently shown them they have as much a claim to being vanguard!
And, oh, the part about his mom becoming “the momster,” principally
owing to her illness, is foremost a lie: he'd have been hiding away
3448
from a tyrannical mom, battling her bulking likeness in the form of

dragons, demons, and whatnot, regardless. That despite everything
he has accomplished and come to realize, he still cows to her and has
therefore in some profound sense barely moved an inch, is evident in
his emphasizing the illness so you don't think momster was due to
make her years-long appearance in any case. "It wasn't YOU, mom; it
was just the illness: I'm still your good, loyal, appreciative boy – brave
knight to your cause, tending cleric to your maladies."
The cruelest fate for fabulous endeavors which would make YOU part
of the tale, is that its history is largely about compensating for a
bullysome world, or rendering it more appropriate for trauma-
satured minds, rather than about boldly encroaching upon an
insufficiently magicked one – even when it shines golden, as it did
during the ’70s when D & D was born.
Link: My summer of Dungeons and Dragons (Salon)
--------
MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011

Young predators, and the greens & beans crowd
It was always something: glossy garnet plums, candy red

romas trucked from Mexico in the dead of winter. I wanted
to eat a local, seasonal diet, I really did. I liked the idea of
buying all my produce at the farmers' market, or joining a
CSA, or growing most of our food. But somehow I never got
around to joining the CSA, and the weekend crowds at our
local farmers' market kept me at bay. We did garden, but
Seattle's seasons were not conducive to a high yield: Some
years our tomatoes never ripened beyond dark green. In the
end, I bought most of our produce at the local grocery store,
where I tried to do my best.
3449
Our local supermarket was an overpriced yuppie mart with

a good selection of local, organic, seasonal produce. I had the
opportunity to use my buying dollars to support small local
farms, but it was rough to shell out $4 for a bunch of kale. I'd
read Michael Pollan's argument: "We [Americans] spend a
smaller percentage of our income on food than any other
industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of
our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more
dollars on it in a week." As much as I admire Pollan, there is
something cavalier in his dismissal of the problem of price.
Does Pollan really remember what it was like to struggle
financially?
[. . .]
My husband and I were both laid off in October of 2008, and

while we've worked on and off since then, we've keenly felt
the economic crunch. For the past three years, our lives have
been an exercise in reduction. First we stopped eating out,
then we stopped buying specialty items, then we found
ourselves unable to afford items that had once seemed basic:
peanut butter, bacon, grapes in February. We moved to the
country in order to cut our expenses, but our move coincided
with the end of my husband's unemployment benefits, and
our budget dwindled more quickly than our expenses.
[. . .]
Unfortunately, I'm a little late. Many of the mushrooms are

fuzzy with white mold or crawling with black flies, and a few
3450
have been chomped by slugs. I'm knocking a slug off the log
with a stick when I'm startled by a giant mottled
salamander, which seems more annoyed that alarmed by
my presence. It stares at me with obsidian eyes, unmoving.
In all my years in these woods, I've never seen this species
before. And the salamander isn't the only one laying claim to
this territory: A few feet down on the same log, cougar scat
sits like a warning. I think twice about continuing on, but I
can't quite tear myself away from the bounty of mushrooms.
Despite my bad timing, I find clusters of fresh new
mushrooms here and there. The pell-mell arrangement of
logs requires me to duck and stretch in order to get at the
most promising patches. I am crawling across a particularly
precarious log when I hear a heavy thump in the woods
above me. I freeze. A cat wouldn't make any noise if it was
stalking you, I comfort myself. It's probably just an elk ... or
a bear. My heart is hammering. I hop down, dip under the
salamander log, and scramble down the hill to my bike. I set
my bag of mushrooms in the basket and hightail it for home.
(Felissa Rogers, “When eating local is the cheapest
option,” Salon, 16 July 2011)
----------
Overpriced???
In the last couple years I have put a commercial kitchen in a
barn. My business has a 3 acre orgranic farm where the
kitchen get its ingredients to make locally grown, locally
processed products like roasted tomato sauce; marinated
mushrooms; pestos; jams; dehydrated herbs (and kale and
apples); pickles galore... the list could go on an on. It is
delicious and fun -- but as you might also guess, expensive! It
just kills me to read (constantly) that foods priced right
3451
(even underpriced!) are considered "elitist" or whatever.

Does it ever occur to anyone how expensive it is to grow and
process locally? We pay local (fair!) wages. We pay payroll
taxes out the wazoo. Workers Comp. About 4 other kinds of
insurance. Plus, I think our kitchen is the only building in
town up to code. Then property taxes and on and on.
I'd like to ask these people who think our products are elitist,
"How much do you think quality, traceable food is worth?" If
the answer is, say, more than your latest tech gadget, then
what's the problem? No, you can't have it all and you have to
make choices. Back in the 1900s when people paid the true
cost of their food there weren't fancy ipads to tempt them
toward frivolous spending while still needing to eat. If you're
so outraged by price then you should be doing something
about farm subsidies -- which go 99.99% to commodity
producers of corn, wheat, cotton, soy. NOT fruit and veggie
farmers!! If that box of twinkies was actually priced to
reflect the true cost to make it, then a $4 bunch a kale would
seem a lot more reasonable.
Producing food (organically, esp) takes a lot of work, a lot of
energy (human or otherwise) and a lot of money. So if you
care about the food your family eats then stop complaining
about the price, and start feeling lucky there are farms out
there willing to undertake the substantial financial risk to
make it available.
I will be lucky if my business ever breaks EVEN let alone
makes any money for me. I fully expect never to recoup the
kitchen construction costs. (And yes, this irrelevantly means
that I have off-farm income somewhere. So I do this work at
great cost to my family.)
Good food costs a lot to produce -- it's just that our country
has been conditioned to think otherwise. Get used to it.
(nycmom)
3452
-----
@nycmom
I fear for your heart. You took a simple comment about a
grocery store's prices and took it in all sorts of directions. I
shop monthly at Puget Consumers Coop in Seattle which is
likely the store she is referring to. I paid $2.59 there the
other day for a can of black eyed peas. Ihe discount grocery
outlet sells them for 79 cents. Sure 79 cents doesn't buy
organic. But that is still a helluva price disparity.
I recently retired early on social security alone. Needless to
say I'm not living fat on the hog. I'm a vegetarian anyway.
But not eating out and watching prices closely on everything
allows me to be done with a job that was killing my soul and
not doing anything positive for my body. And my weight is
going down and I am much more cheerful and aware.
nycmom-I recommend that you do some soul searching. To
spill so much bile over her comment about grocery prices
does not indicate a happy life being lived.
(Ccommentator)
-----
Ccommentator
Thank you, but you do not need to worry about my heart or
soul. They are just fine because I AM taking action about the
issue most important to me.
Yes, my post was frustrated, and probably misdirected at
this particular article. But it happens to be about the 1000th
time I've read that good food is "elitist" or overpriced. I
speak from a producer's perspective about the cost of
production. It is not for the faint of heart, or faint of wallet
for that matter.
I'm not sure where that $2.79 can of beans you bought came
from, but I can tell you with some certainty that the $.79 can
came from somewhere like China where the workers who
produced it do not enjoy the same Social Security benefits
3453
that you are.

By the way, I'm a vegetarian too and have been since I was a
child. I have a farm and a personal garden. I am on the
board of a very active nonprofit that works specifically on
food justice issues. Previously, I worked very hard for a
grassroots nonprofit to organize sustainable ag groups to
achieve sane federal farm policies. (THAT was and remains
depressing). So please do not say that I am "spilling bile". I
know whereof I speak.
I think the truth is that I offended your wallet. But you made
your choices: you chose an ill-fitting career and then chose to
quit and live on social security. Good for you, I try not to
judge.
I am working hard every day to create a local food economy
and GOOD JOBS(5!). I am very proud of that. A by the way,
just for a fun tidbit of info, the employer contribution to
Social Security is 2x the employee contribution. So I am
doing my part. Are you???
Admittedly I may be over-passionate about my work. Here I
am in my few free minutes (I have little kids too!) putting in
my $.03 on a silly article and responding to you! I need
balance, yes, but not soul-searching. And frankly, I think you
could use some meaningful work. Oh, and if you're worried
about the price of beans, why don't you just by some very
inexpensive dried ones, and plan ahead.
Good Food for All,
NYCMOM / Entrepreneur / Local Food and Farming Activist
/ Very personally-satisfied-person-who-is-not-satisfied-
with-our-country's-food-system (nycmom)
-----
@Susan Wood: Felisa is making CHOICES and some
of them are impractical
Or even self-destructive.
She and her husband lost their jobs in late 2008; they had
3454
two YEARS to reduce their yuppie standard of living and put

something away for the "hard times" in case they didn't find
new jobs (which they did not). They choose to move to a
VERY remote rural area (her parent's vacation cabin)
KNOWING that her husband's UI had just been cut off (after
99 weeks, ahem -- 4 times the former average).
What kind of person says they can't afford PEANUT
BUTTER -- a big jar of the generic stuff is $2.50, less on sale
-- but in other articles tells us she buys KEY LIMES
(imported from Key West, no doubt) and COCONUT OIL (at
something like $15 a jar -- and if it's the highest quality
organic, $30 a jar).
Felisa is this kind of scary broke and near hunger NOT
SIMPLY because of the economy but because of HER
CHOICES. She did not have to move to a remote cabin where
THERE ARE NO DECENT JOBS WHATSOEVER (even if
things improved). She did not have to forgo applying for
food stamps. She did not have to spend whatever windfalls
she gets from relatives or the odd Salon gig on key limes and
coconut oil.
And it doesn't have to be like this, but she STILL SAYS she
won't apply for the food stamps SHE IS ENTITLED TO,
because "she just doesn't feel right about doing that" -- she'd
rather be hungry, or forage for food, than have a pantry of
healthy, fresh, natural basic foods that would last her
through a long hard spell.
I've read a LOT about "foraging" but nothing about why she
chooses not to get the food stamps she is entitled to NOR
anything about canning or preserving or "putting food by".
Susan, you stated that this is a political problem and would
never happen in FRANCE, because France has a superior
social safety net. I can't answer for that -- I don't know what
kind of unemployment programs France has -- but I DO
KNOW that we HAVE a safety net, and it's called FOOD
3455
STAMPS and Felisa won't use them. SO I assume even if she

lived in France -- even if we adopt more comprehensive
safety net programs (universal health coverage) SHE
WON'T USE THOSE PROGRAMS.
She wants to live like this. That's what I have concluded. She
likes foraging. She likes feeling sorry for herself. She must
get some "mileage" (sympathy? Checks from the 'rents?
stories published on Salon.com?) from making herself
poorerer and more desperate than is remotely necessary.
(_bigguns)
Oh, and this:

I shop at local farmer's markets and await the first really
local produce with great anticipation each year. In
Northeastern Ohio, we have a lot of farms but a very short
growing season (compared to places like California or
Florida). We do get some amazingly great local produce --
organic and conventional alike -- from local farms (some
Amish).
I have personally found that GREAT, fabulous "family farm"
produce is CHEAPER than anything they drag up (unripe)
from Chile or elsewhere. I am confused why it would be
different where you guys are; I suspect you are being ripped
off (maybe by "Whole Paycheck").
The only slight exception is our local strawberries -- fabulous
-- but the growing season is a pathetic 3-4 weeks (less if the
weather is bad). A pint of superb local strawberries was
$4.49 this year (up from $3.99 last year) -- the tough mealy
imported ones were $2.99. I gladly pay the extra for this
rare and short-lived treat.
But in general, the local stuff is CHEAP. Not as insanely
cheap as in the past, but affordable EVEN by people on food
stamps, or the working poor.
The local squash, onions, peppers, tomatoes, corn -- it just
3456
goes on and on. The summer is a wonderful time here where

we CAN eat locally, every day, for very little.
So I buy LOCAL KALE grown on local farms and it doesn't
cost anything like nycmom's $4 a bunch (yikes! that is
seriously a lot for kale). It used to be around 79 cents; now
it's running $1.19. Again, this is family farm stuff, sometimes
Amish grown -- within 50 miles of my home.
In addition, we have several superb local farmer's markets;
two are within 3 miles of my house. The other is a giant
ethnic food market (delightfully free of yuppie pretensions
and high priced stuff) downtown. There are also a few
"farmer stalls" here and there, like at the local garden center
-- some sell "backyard" produce that is the rival of any
boutique farmers (its where I first got to taste locally grown
"San Marzano"-type tomatoes FRESH, not canned).
And on top of THAT, the local SNAP (food stamp) program
HANDS OUT gift certificates of $5 to $15 of FREE PRODUCE
for anyone with SNAP card (or on SSDI). At one stand, they
have reclaimed several old empty lots around the market
and turned them into "urban farms" growing raspberries,
blueberries, tomatoes, peppers and corn.
The rain made our corn crop late, but we are currently
enjoying awfully good California corn instead. (We'll get our
local corn, just late. When it comes in, it is 10-20 CENTS an
ear. Lordy, people, how much cheaper than THAT could it
get????)
I admire people who farm and produce stuff, but frankly
some of them (loony, self-important, entitled lefty organic
ones) are impractical and just can't figure out how to
make/grow a GOOD or GREAT product and do it at an
affordable price -- and being angry and entitled doesn't
translate into "we are bad people if we won't buy the $4
kale".
Maybe we are just middle class or working poor and trying
3457
to feed our families at a reasonable cost. That we can't afford

your "baby boutique heirloom veggies" or "$40 truffle oil"
does not translate into "we don't appreciate good, fresh,
healthy local foods". And no, I won't even buy DOG FOOD
that has been made in China; their standards are so abysmal
I can't trust any foodstuffs from there. (I caution people to
avoid Chinese garlic, when we have splendid, vastly superior
American garlic, at all price ranges. CHECK THE LABELS.)
(_bigguns)
-----
Bigguns
Good for you! You're buying direct from the farm. Better
prices for sure. Again with the judgment for zero reason. We
do not make truffle oil. We do not grow heirloom baby
vegetables. We do, however, make an amazing Roasted
Tomato Sauce that we sell at farmer's markets for $10.
Zucchini relish. Bread and Butter Pickles. Marinated
Mushrooms. Holiday pies made with 100% local fruit (that
we freeze for the winter). We farm and we buy from other
local farms. You make a lot of arrogant assumptions.
We farm and process in New York. Not Ohio. Does that make
me "angry and entitled"? Yes, I'm dyed in the wool lefty. But
I have to admit that starting a business has given me a
different perspective on the cost of doing business. How nice
that you can quote the prices of the produce you buy. Bet you
have no idea of the costs to produce.
Here in the northeast, we have a VERY short growing
season. So preserving that produce for the off-season is
important.
I NEVER said anyone is "bad" for not buying $4 kale. I never
said we sell it for that price. What I said is that I understand
the actual costs involved in growing, and getting
produce/products to market. Retailers take their own cut,
remember. We operate a low-income CSA. We take food
3458
stamps. We have a farm store. We sell to restaurants. We do

farmers markets. We know a lot about growing
(organically) at as low a cost as possible. It's still not that
low to hire local labor, and pay them fairly and legally, no
matter what you all prefer to think.
So you can make all the assumptions you like about
something you know nothing about. I would love to hear
from other growers and producers, but hey, I don't think
there are too many of them on Salon. I am not angry, I love
my work. I am often frustrated at the expense and red tape
involved. Don't call me entitled. I work around the clock and
invest money in the food system when I could be vacationing
and wearing Prada.
I am not the one being judgmental. I am offering a
perspective that is not offered often. I can promise you your
local (fruit and vegetable) farmers in every state agree with
me. It is unfortunate that food, and especially processed
products are so expensive. God knows, I wish they weren't.
But the reality is that they are. Should I offer a product
below the cost of production? There are not many other
businesses doing what we are doing, and those that are feel
the same way: that consumers must learn to pay more for
local, sustainably-produced food. That's all.
The fact that the economy is in shambles is not our fault. The
unemployment rate and income disparity is not our fault.
That fact alone ought to convince someone like me not to do
what I'm doing, but I do it anyway because it makes me
happy to offer a product that doesn't exist elsewhere. So
yeah, I guess I'm loony.
I am truly sorry and sad if that offends. (nycmom)
-----
3459
@nycmom
Rest assured that plenty of people appreciate what you've
written here. Farming is hard work, and your commitment
to organic farming says much good about you. I would buy
your stuff in a heartbeat.
One more thing, since you seem to be new here. There are
two Salon letter writers with similar names. The first is
Bigguns, a longtime Salonista who I and others like and
respect, and then there is _Bigguns (note the dash before the
B), a troll. For the sake of the former, whom you might meet
if you stick around here long enough, please don't confuse
her with the latter. (Beans&Greens)
-----
Thank You!
Thank you Beans&Greens and XyzzyAvatar. Thank you so
much. And many many apologies to the real Bigguns.
Yes, I am new to commenting and do not know the rules. I
read Salon occasionally but it takes something really big or
something about local food to really feeling active.
I am doing the best I can, as I'm sure we all are with what
we're given. I do not intend to seem angry, but I feel
attacked. And I feel attacked not for what work I am doing,
but because a few people have made some very large
assumptions. I suppose that impulse is the same one that has
caused me to jump into the issue with full abandon.
I appreciate those of you who've expressed understanding. It
means a lot. I was briefly tempted to give my company's
website so everyone can see the good things we are doing --
not for more sales because we do not ship -- but I have too
many people who are invested in the work (employees) to
invite hatefulness on my account.
And I just have say. If there is one issue that liberals and
conservatives ought to agree on, it's local food. It's good for
3460
economies, the environment, public health, employment. It

preserves land, prevents sprawl, gives families good clean
fun in the spring and fall (berry picking, pumpkins).
One person's "grocery prices" are another person's
"revenue". It is not so simple and not so small a thing. Low
price is not the only important thing in the world. I think we
all know we vote most strongly with our dollars, no matter
how many we have.
Again, I am passionate not angry (although my husband
might say zealot). Whatever. I still feel pretty good about it
all. (nycmom)
-----
@nycmom: I'm not the "enemy"

Oh - -and there is no "real bigguns". It's just a username.
Anyone can use it (or a variation on it). Even you.
The big mouth "beanbreath" (Beans&Greens) used to be
Durian Joe, but he doesn't acknowledge that. He gets to
change his username, but in every thread, he has to be SURE
to let people know "I am not the real bigguns" (though there
is no real bigguns...never was, never will be).
I can prove that. HELLO??? hello? bigguns? BIGGUNNNNS?
(See? she isn't here.)
******
I was commenting that you are angry about customers (or
potential customers) who criticize your high prices. (I am
sure your roasted tomato sauce is delicious, but that is FIVE
TIMES the cost of an ordinary jar of bottled tomato sauce;
what makes yours worth 500% more?)
You mentioned kale, which is why I commented on its price
(I love kale!).
In the final analysis, you seem to be saying "good food has to
cost a great deal more than low quality food, and if you
want HOMEGROWN STUFF, it by necessity will be very
3461
costly". I dispute that.

As I stated, I buy a LOT of local farmer products. My region
(Great Lakes) is not a lot different than yours -- long cold
winters, short growing seasons. So the costs should not be
too different.
The farmer products I buy are either WAY cheaper than the
standard fare from Chile or Mexico OR they are just slightly
higher for a dramatically better product. NOTHING LIKE
FIVE TIMES AS MUCH. I mean like 50 cents extra for
amazing local strawberries vs. awful mealy unripe ones
from Chile. I happily pay this tiny difference.
But if the good local strawberries were (like your roasted
tomato sauce) FIVE TIMES what the Chilean ones were --
like FIFTEEN DOLLARS A PINT -- I couldn't afford to eat
them. (Beanbreath could. But not me. I don't earn $240,000
a year.)
I do not know all the details of how these family farms (some
Amish) grow this amazing, gorgeous produce -- honestly, it's
like something out of Dutch still life masterpiece! -- and sell it
for peanuts, but they do. Every year. Its' one of the great,
incredible blessing of living in an ABUNDANT, food-
sufficient culture. The good part, we often do not talk about.
(We'd rather snark on the failures.)
They also are not POOR doing this. Farmers in this area are
pretty affluent. (Time Magazine did a recent piece on "Go
into farming and get rich!") The Amish are very, very self-
sufficient. They reside in large numbers just an hour south of
me, and it is a great treat to drive past their beautiful, tidy
farms and acres of corn, wheat and soybeans and other
crops, or the barns of beautiful animals.
So maybe we could take a minute, and stop whinging and
celebrate the great, wonderful abundance of American
farming. It is truly a great thing. (_bigguns)
-----
3462
@Beans&Greens
I like you very much, sir. You are indeed an inspiration. But you are
also such a tool for calling _bigguns a troll. She moves quick, has
things to say, and can do magic ... and you make her seem as dullard
as your diet, as unappealing as your hobbitan smugness. To some of
us you're BOTH the best and the worst of the baby-boomers. To be
nice, I'll just say you're both inspiringly full of life (truly, you are), and
soon -- to be not so nice -- hopefully, full of the holes some of us will
put in you, to help finally rid you out of our way.
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston: I can never make much

sense out of your letters
But this one is short and sweet. And thanks for saying that I
am not a troll (which is true).
A troll is something specific, like that loser vasumurti, who
cuts and pasts HUGE LONG multi-part screeds on veganism,
in threads that are totally unrelated.
My posts are always on topic. I also have to deal with a LOT
of Salon anger at anyone who dares to defy the "lefty liberal
politically correct meme".
Also you get huge creds in my book, Patrick, for the term
'hobbitan smugness". Wish I'd thought of it myself! You
NAILED that ridiculous, preening hypocrite!
Unfortunately, you also seem to be suggesting you are going
to shoot both of us. That's troubling. You might wish to ring
the nurse, and ask her to up your meds. (Let her read the last
line of this post, too.) (_bigguns)
-----
3463
Has anyone else noticed a disturbing trend?

I follow Felisa Rogers' columns. I also follow the comments --
all of them.
Has anyone else observed that Patrick McEvoy-Halston
(spelling is probably off) has been sounding like that state
senator who pointed a gun at a reporter?
In the comments on one of Felisa's columns (possibly the one
where she got the bicycle and saw cougar scat), he was
comparing her to a predator herself. Someone joked that it
was a werewolf. He seemed, however, to be saying that she
was preparing herself for the day when she and people like
her -- or, more to the point, like PM_H -- rose up and
attacked Baby Boomers.
He's just talked about "putting holes" in people in this
lettercolumn.
What do people have to do around here to violate the terms
of service and/or creep people out? There are a few people --
both on staff and in letters -- whose comments on sexuality
make me want to bleach my brain. There are some master
sarcastics and our resident bullies, trolls, and MRAs.
I don't think even joking remarks about "putting holes" in
people are funny, cool, or remotely safe.
Mister, if you're joking, you're not funny. If you've got
firearms, you're talking about them in an abusive and
unprofessional manner. And this is just a rabid case of
"epater le bourgeois," knock it off. (Greeneyedkzin)
@Greeneyedzkin
The essential part of the post you are referring to is not really the part
of wishing them (baby boomers like laurel and G&B) full of holes,
believe it or not, it was actually the part about them being so full of
substance, holes become more notable for their working more as
marked inversion. I'm actually not truthfully interested in even
3464
disposing them -- not even just to let some other generation have
their chance: the idea of making anyone shut up, live life with a
shrunken, diminished status is obsene to me: the idea really is just to
enfranchise everybody, and I'm glad I don't think that this is only
accomplished violently, by finding some way to disenfranchise,
discredit or monument and/or "etherealize" (as by, for instance,
making them Elders, Emeretuses -- people already half-way shuffled
off to a higher plane and half-way otherwise sedimentation) the
already strongest voices on the scene. I think baby boomers have yet
more to say, and I would have them say it: but only if it means
fighting through an enfranchised, accustomed way of looking at the
world that actually mostly does them credit -- you are mostly great,
world builders! of the great-Eden-within-a-rock-from-Wrath-of-Khan
type -- but that still prevents them from doing the good they could to
generations after them that are suffering and are determined to suffer
far more yet.
People like Felissa are my more natural true opponents. What she is
up to is I think predatorial -- she is making the worldview of baby
boomers, she is making baby boomers, seem discard-worthy, right
even before them, knowing that because of how she presents herself,
because of their own desire to fit her within their preferences, and
because of their flacid ability to recognize alien viewpoints for so ably
and for such a long time dominating the world scene that
epistemological alienness, true difference, can hardly now even be
seen, her efforts aren't likely to be spotted. Felissa isn't though just a
younger version of most of you -- dashed with the slight, not-much-
aggrieving difference that informs you you made sure her generation
developed their own voice. Her small asides aren't so much potential
draw-aways from the main point as they are actually distinctive tells.
She isn't quite so much taken to Pollan, the whole farmer's-market
scene, vegetarians because they're, though her "friends," and however
much truly admirable, just for one reason or another beyond her
lesser or restricted capacities, but because "they're" all part of a
3465
stupid, indulgent, actually counter-human scene, of the dumb

touristy kind she rejects while out of country. Baby boomers, she
believes, created a world that is removed from struggle and which has
come at the cost of making them ridiculous. They have domesticated
everything around them, removed from view all true disquiet, all true
agitants, making it seem as if the whole point of the universe was to
float up a gargantuan spread of grazers who have gobbled up every
outside affront and are without any otherwise natural inner spur.
Felissa considers this "claiming" a vulgar affront to generations that

struggled their way through their lives, against worlds quite ready to
claim them without hesitation or grief, and who proved with every
true effort -- even if after successive generations there wasn't sign that
these efforts were all that much building on one another -- that
human beings are about some kind of purpose far grander than that.
Trust me, that salamander that didn't daunt to Felissa, that,
diminutive as it is, still would have disproved its claim to its spot, has
to her more worth than a whole cattle farm of Pollan-worshipping
farm-market shoppers.
Her voice is the conservative one, the one that appears at the end of
all good times that believes that buldging flacid excess is about to get
its comeuppance, that it will be finally be showed that difference does
indeed exist out there, is and was always ultimately stronger, and that
it wants to -- quite rightly -- dine on you. Voices of this kind appear at
the beginning of liberal times, but have little weight because their
carriers are too readily made to seem the ones lacking in invigorating
spirit. When they appear at the end of liberal times their weight is
considerable because the mood shifts so that when people compare
foragers and isolationists to domesticators, exchangers, shoppers,
markets and crowds, "domestication" less seems where civilization
finally got its start than where mankind must have first lost its
fighting spirit and soul.
Though she here and there makes herself seem akin to the Michael
3466
Pollan crowd, I wish it were more obvious that when people tell
Felissa to start greenhouse-farming and going on food stamps that
this is just so laughably something she is building herself to naturally
consider more unwelcome than spotted cougar scat. What she is up to
now is hurriedly doing the struggling, the daily encounters with
survival that surely made her and our ancestors hard but reverant and
spritually great, so that she can feel through accumulation, in
constitution more akin to them. She's effortlessly becoming the story
of how she puts food onto her plate, while you bait her with
remissions that just ensure her course.
Even if the world ensures that there continue to be means for Felissa
to get better foodstuffs, and to get it easier, there is a sense she would
actually take ultimate withering over such easing: it would firmly
include her within a harsh but awesome universe that would
recognize, understand, welcome and incorporate her, in a way it
would surely not if she had allowed herself to become what she is
accused by the ignorant of being: a hipster foodie, whose life is
fundamenally about fun and play rather than … really just surviving.
But Felissa and a generation that is mostly like her, because they want
civilization to be shamefully shown up as unequal to the ground it
built itself upon, will ensure politicians happen to get in power that
can't but further wreck it, wiping out social programs that, ostensibly
-- but to her, fully debatably -- help the weak. Eventually social
programs will find their way back in, but only when they point to the
considerable fibre built into a nation of hardy survivors, not to their
absence or fast dissolution, and this is going to take an awful lot of
suffering and fear-encountering/battling days to ensure.
If I could wave an all-powerful magic wand I would have Felissa and

her generation know that the kind of conversation and company you
get amidst those farmer crowds, the pompous hipster foodie scenes,
should actually mostly draw you to them. Only because "you've" come
to draw pleasure from suffering and scarcity, from daily proving
3467
victorious over demons that really could full-on devour you, only
because you've surely been relentlessly abused and have become quite
mad does the life you're living now seem such a compelling draw to
you. For of course having no such wand, I gesture to a near equal-
though source of future-altering power: Blessed Baby Boomers,
please start really looking at people like Felissa and recognize the
difference between you and them. They're more brutal and savage --
considerably so -- and you've got to step in, somehow give them more
life, and make it harder for them to demarcate the line they're already
far-along in establishing between themselves and those like Michael
Pollan who've sadly forgotten what it is to struggle, and are forever
damned for it.
Link: When eating local is the cheapest option (Salon)
---------

Success story?
For 40 years, I was fat. No sartorial trickery could hide it.

No amount of career or personal success made me forget it. I
want to say I learned to be comfortable in my skin, but it's
not true. I hated being seen with my shirt off -- which meant
no gyms, no swimming pools or beaches. I hated the
multiple-angle mirrors of dressing rooms. I even felt self-
conscious ordering food at restaurants. Then, two years ago,
I moved to New York City -- and within 11 months, I wasn't
fat anymore.
[. . .]
Back in the Midwest, where I lived my entire adult life, the

most common question was, "How did you do it?" Some
3468
people asked with a wink and nod -- you know those vain
coastal people and their shortcuts. No, I didn't have surgery,
didn't take supplements, didn't hire a trainer or even buy a
miracle-cure book.
I walked more, and I ate less.
Part of my diet plan was simple necessity. Back home, I
drove a car everywhere I went. I cherry-picked parking
spots to get as close to the door as possible, shaving my walk
to the minimum. But my normal daily walk in New York City
was about three miles, just getting to school, walking to
work either in Greenwich Village or Midtown and meeting
my friends and wife for dinner.
At the same time, I cut back my eating. (“I always thought I’d
be fat,” Michael Humphrey, Salon, 27 June 2011)
----------
Success story?
Did the psychological troubles that moved your over-eating disappear
with the weight loss too? Or have they just been differently
channeled, and into a form that very pleasantly draws little attention
to their existing?
@Patrick M-H
What psychological problems? Where is that in the article?
Please point it out for us.
The author moved from an area where not only did he have
to drive everywhere to get around, he was surrounded by
overweight people who consistently made bad food choices.
In New York, you have no choice. You walk. Just about
everywhere. It's like Toronto or Chicago that way. San
Francisco? Same deal. You might as well walk. (Wasn't it
3469
Mark Twain who quipped that the women in San Francisco

have the best legs in the world?) They're set up as pedestrian
cities.
If you're staying in a reasonable (by that I mean a couple of
miles) distance from home to get things done, you have no
choice but to walk. If you are dumb enough to drive, and IF
you're lucky enough to get a parking spot, you're going to
end up walking about the same distance anyway. There's no
point.
When we moved to Texas from Toronto, I gained 20 pounds.
I never changed my eating habits, I just couldn't walk
everywhere like I used to. There were no sidewalks, ground
level ozone levels were downright dangerous because of all
the trucks and even if I ignored all that, we lived at LEAST a
30 minute drive to go to the grocery store.
When we left that suburbopurgatory and moved to Chicago,
that weight was gone in about 6 months. It was all about
activity level. (Aunt Messy)
@AuntMessy
The author believes it is all about activity level, and makes it seem as
if this is obviously the case, in his losing pounds so readily when he
actually had to walk, but his primary previous difficulty wasn't the
lack of a firm prompt to exercise but that he gorged himself too much,
that he had, as they say, an "unhealthy relationship to food" -- that it
likely served as compensense for his previous profound lack of
attention during childhood. He went to exercise and good foods --
though maybe in body-hating and certainly body-taming portions:
starvation-level -- because he finds opiate nourishment in belonging
to this new of-the-moment elect club of puritans, who have in their
attainment passed beyond the point of having to look back at any
previous inhibiting sin. If this obese-to-thin movement wasn't now
the rage, beckoning through the privilege of full loss of disavowed self
3470
to join its membership, Michael Humphrey no doubt would, even in

walk-to-work New York, be tagging along that extra-package that ice
cream bars and whiskey surely gift one with.
I hope Salon doesn't become wholly constituted by people in a hurry
to lose all touch with reality. Michael Humphrey isn't fat, but he likely
remains the same man: and that's surely his still ongoing problem.
Link: I thought I’d always be fat (Salon)

---------

When a new addiction beckons
When I finally stopped going to bars
A year after I quit drinking, I avoid my old haunts. But now

that I'm not a lush anymore -- what, exactly, do I do?
I quit drinking more than a year ago. It was time. None of
my closest friends said, "Wow, I didn't know you had a
problem," because that was untrue. What they mostly said
was, "Good for you." And, "Let me know how I can be
helpful." But what I struggled with -- and still struggle with,
more than 365 days after I drained my last glass of
sauvignon blanc at a friend's wedding reception -- was
telling people who weren't my closest friends. Who might
have been close, but not that close.
[. . .]
But since moving back to Texas from New York last month --
and embarking on the string of reunion dinners and meet-
ups this entails -- I feel I owe my former drinking buddies
fair warning. I know what it was like to anticipate a
debauched evening at the bar only to hear, "I'm pregnant!"
3471
Or, "I've decided to cut back." And what was going to be a

last-call rager got tragically downshifted to two guilty
glasses and bed by 11 p.m. Yay, good for you, I'd say, sipping
a glass of wine that suddenly felt like it was the size of a
thimble.
[. . .]
When Tim and I did meet for lunch, at a place I remembered

for its hearty salads, we talked about this for a bit. I was
expressing disappointment that I hadn't seen the guys from
the magazine he runs, the guys I usually catch up with over a
pint or four.
"We could go bowling," Tim says. "Or play kickball."
Ugh: sports. I didn't want to sound too negative. But how do

you explain to someone you only know through bar chatter
that you are embarrassed by the world? That you can't do
anything that involves running, sweating or standing
outside? This is why drinking was so convenient. It was a
smoke screen for the fact that I sucked at everything else.
[. . .]
What I really like to do, though -- what I like more than

anything else, more than anything in the world, whether I'm
at the bar or languishing in my apartment -- is to talk to
people. I like to have honest conversations with other
humans that surprise me, and challenge me, and make me
think about my life in new ways. It's what I always wanted
from the bar in the first place. And it strikes me, driving
home that day, that it's exactly what I just had . (Sarah
Hepola, “When I finally stopped going to bars,”
3472
----------
fuck that
Thats a lot of nerve about choosing a "healthy
lifestyle"........try boring. Not to say getting drunk off your
ass every night is a good choice but the fact is that sobriety
as it is preached by the American Prude Movement, both
right and left, is pretty fucking boring. So what do you
do?????Play board games and drink decaf coffee. Bad choice,
unless you were headed to the grave on the fast track. And
even then, Fast track to the grave may be a lot more fun than
singing the blues about boredom. (quiet man)
-----
"Lush"
So people who drink are "lushes". Whatever.
(kugelschreiber)
-----
Allow me to be bold, as an anonymous voice in an electronic
wilderness. There is a book; a short, simple, cheap book, that
neither preaches, nor feels like self-help in any way. But if it
helps you even a tenth as much as it helped me, it will be
worth you picking it up.
It's called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.
I think what you seek will not be found in husband, kids,
drink, job, or any of those things, for those are identities, and
in the finality of it all, fictitious.
The identity is the problem, and this moment is the solution.
My best wishes and best of luck to you. (John McCall)
-----
Think of things you like to do and do them
Take a class at the local college. Go on an alumni travel tour.
Hang out at museums. Learn to ride a horse. Find a really
nice cafe and make some new cafe friends. My late mother
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used to go out for breakfast at the same place every day.

She'd only have a Danish or some toast and coffee, but over
time she got to know the regulars and so it was always a get-
together. (expatjourno2)
-----
Ms H, I Know Just How You Feel...
Way back in my 300+ lb days, before I learned I was a Type
2 diabetic, I treated food the way you treated your drinking.
But in my case, I had to stop using food as I had: I ate from
boredom, recreation, fear, anger, fill in the blank.
Once I regulated my eating habits, I learned how to eat
again: B/C I WAS HUNGRY. I was amazed at how much
time and $$ I was wasting on my earlier habits. That's when
I got a life--and I still regulate my blood sugar w/diet and
exercise alone, 15 yrs later and 140 lbs ago.
What you did is what I did: you reclaimed your life and time.
And as you age, you come to appreciate how precious time
really is, and learn not to waste it.
Good for you! (elsma03)
-----
A year sober
Congratulations!
You've already kept sober for a year and made a major
lifestyle move, back to TX.
I'm assuming you've GOT to have a car now, and there are a
lot of scenic and historical things to see...and since it's now
safe for you to drive... (Greeneyedkzin)
-----
Identity
You probably know this but I'm going to say it out loud. It's
not that there isn't anything fun to do outside of going to
bars -- it's that the people you want to spend time with only
know how to have fun at bars. It's a quandary. There are
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tons of interesting people doing interesting things at all

times of the day and night without alcohol -- but you have to
shift your sense of your self to find them.
Good luck. I enjoy your writing and I hope that you find
something that works for you. (And have you thought about
corresponding with Roger Ebert?) (amspeck)
-----
Realize this.
Those old drinking "friends" aren't really friends if they only
like you because you drink with them. I put the cork back in
the bottle twenty-five years ago. There are people I used to
see and drink with weekly who I haven't seen nor spoken
with for twenty-five years. They only wanted to be around a
"Good-time Charlie" and I only wanted my sobriety and life
back. I have new and better friends now, people who enjoy
my company because of who I am, not who I become when
drunk. Good luck. Once you get past the, "nobody loves me"
stage of your new-found life, you'll will get on with the
business of actually living. I wish you peace. (Robert
David Clark)
-----
The Discoveries Are Inward

It is indeed hard to replace the social aspects of the bars with
the humdrum everyday activities of sobriety. But the sad
truth is that sobriety only got worse until I went inside and
opened up the spiritual longing that I had tried to fill with
alcohol, sex, drugs or a host of other diversions. I am
grateful now that I have been driven from the rather narrow
diversion of the bars and into the broad and exciting scope of
a spiritual reality (I, frankly, once thought of as bullshit).
Anyone can stop drinking. I did it every day. Sobriety is so
much more than the cessation of drinking: it is the opening
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up of a new life of adventure I never imagined to exist.

(trungpapa)
-----
You shouldn't make fun of these "hobbies"

You lost your hobby, drinking - you should find another one.
There are in fact people who passionately care about art,
book clubs, dance, music, politics, actually important things
that make your life deeper and richer. Find which one of
these you love and throw yourself into it! (TomRitchford)
-----
On a side note, I second an earlier poster's suggestion that

you learn to ride a horse. It's a great way to get outside and
play without alcohol, sports talk, or boredom. Admittedly,
though, you'd meet more men (if that's one of your goals)
with contra dancing. (EditGrrl)
-----
Put away your prejudices and the insecurities that you hid
with drinking and choose exercise. Go bowling! Go to a
softball game. There may be drinking there as well but you
might find it easier to avoid. If you can't, go to a yoga class
or a spin class. No drinking there and no one will judge you
if you aren't great at first. You'll find a social circle among
people whose values are healthy in both senses of the word.
(BuffCrone)
No longer the lush
How about just dwelling on the fact that you appear to have left
something damning behind you, and just in time? I mean it; every
day you could just look at the rest of America that is still, despite all
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the news and bad press, keeping on with their depressing bad habits,
their indulgent, self-destructive ways, and know that they -- not you --
are going down. You'll find many other former sketchy ones who now
too count themselves amongst the pure -- like that former Salon
editor who lost 200 pounds and kept it off for a year, who wrote in to
let us know that and also of how he has learned to subsist on less than
1200 calories a day, leaving us to think his new reformed self is such
that he needed to learn he still required more than the random
nutrients you inhale as you walk through the streets of New York to
survive; or the new food writer, Felissa, who has left luxuries behind
her and made life "an exercise of reduction" and humility; or the
young ’un Drew Grant, who newly preaches how "you still owe them
[i.e., your parents] your life and your respect," showing how you're
never too young to scold like an elder and to abort much that could
have interesting in your life for a surer sense of earned protection.
I truly think this is going to get you by. You'll more than survive, and
even thrive, and every day you'll be encouraged to think yourself
elected and deserving. Whatever great adventure you make of your
life now that you've finally begun living, whether it's joining exciting
groups, seeing America's notable sites, or just settling into a less
complicated but more human, satisfying life, it will be this pleasure
that foremost makes you feel you've made a turn for the better.
Link: When I finally stopped going to bars (Salon)
---------
MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2011

As gay marriage comes to America
Seven years later, after she'd adopted my biological kids, my

wife and I, along with other Canadian couples, sued
Canada's federal government for same-sex marriage rights.
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After a three-year fight, we were victorious and, in 2003,

just after our 10th anniversary, we wed, the coolest group of
daughters and dragmaids at our sides.
In 17-plus years, I had never imagined, not even for a sliver

of a second, that my wife and I would part through any
means besides death -- that's how happy and bonded I
believed we were. If anyone had asked me my favorite thing,
my answer would have been to spend time with my wife.
Doing anything.
Only days before she started making noises about leaving

me, my wife and I were renewing our vows during a horse-
drawn carriage ride under the Eiffel Tower, and while the
horse hooves clopped their way along the cobblestone side
streets of Paris, I was swooning. I was delighted at how
fresh our love still was. We were not symbiotic or enmeshed,
but independent, free and happy. Our relationship glowed
with health. When we had issues, we had meetings and
solved them, and nothing went along unresolved.
Then came the shock -- and the unraveling. [. . .] (Jane

Eaton Hamilton, “What kept me together after the
divorce,” Salon, 19 July 2011)
----------
Ms. Hamilton, you're demonstrated something very

important
When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no
different from heterosexuals. This is why it is a crime that
homosexuals are not allowed to marry, and thankfully, that
situation is changing. In my own state of Maryland, where
legalizing same sex marriage narrowly failed this year, our
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Governor has just announced that he is making passage a

personal legislative priority (unlike the previous attempt). I
have no doubt we'll win this time. New York was a game
changer.
Best of luck to you. (Beans&Greens)
@Beans&Greens, and world-at-large

Re: When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no
different from heterosexuals.
I'm beginning to suspect that there are liberals out there who support
such things as gay marriage now on the condition that it, one, keeps
them feeling liberal, enlightened -- costumed in just the right way to
keep them feeling "of the moment," enabled by momentum,
protected; and two, because at some point they're betting
"indisputable" evidence will come to light -- of the kind
laurel/_bigguns keeps pointing out that suggests homosexuals ARE
rather different in affairs of the heart: more promiscious; involved in
relationships so distinctly different in kind that they are not
transferable from homo to hetero, or hetero to homo -- that will
permit them a full retraction. "You're actually like that!!! ... Well now,
I was your friend, taking on every bloody elephant in the room in your
support, on the condition you were as you presented yourself to me. I
took you at faith, and you've been lying to me all the time!" With (the
eventual coming of) tea partiers effectively neutered, with most
everyone beginning to sound puritan and rigid, many democrats, in
my judgment, are no longer going to be so much friends of
homosexuals.
It may be even here, with the inevitable spread of gay marriage that
will so show laurel how out of touch and impotent she is -- "rage
away, lunatic; you're still fated to be just washed away in the torrent!"
-- what we're actually seeing is a setup that will empower, justify a
later heavy and nasty turnabout. The narrative setup may be here to
make it look like the "fallen," homosexuals, almost took control of the
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very reigns (!) -- i.e., marriage -- that sourced the most profound
virtues of the country!!! It may be something which will at the end not
so much leave her soaked and humiliated, barely able to stand let
alone shriek, but comfortably throned, expecting the cascade of
inevitable tribute to start, with you just nearby on a spit. You're her
greatest nemesis, and she'll ultimately dine on you, enjoying every
chew of your multi-morseled torso-kabob, and in full concentration
("Beans&Greens but no beans and greens for mEEs tonight!"), but
room first for a few more satisfactions of repentant Salon staff
shuffling up to thank her for her early and brave more good faith
stances, of the kind they humbly submit you couldn't deny they were
at least attempting, but hadn't anywhere near the earthquake of soul
to show it first so boldly and undisguised as she was able.
I would recommend people begin to more see and consider the
implications of the numerous liberals about who are beginning to
sound more and more conservative -- notably in regards to sex and
relationships, but elsewhere too (note the commenter who explained
how Andrew Leonard's ostensibly liberal stance towards government
debt would have seemed conservative 40 years ago). What is going on
here is not so much a change in heart -- though it is about turning on
their own liberalness, "fretting" it now more and more as suspect
permissiveness, unfettered indulgence, excess -- but a concern for
purity, something which always works against groups like
homosexuals for their readily being made to seem those who prosper
when civilization has lost its way, an embodyment of its decadence.
If this happens, the best out there -- good people like you -- will still
be supporting gay marriage, but I'm wondering if even for you this
voice of love and support comes out strangely and humiliatingly
muted, for your realizing you needed to believe homosexual love was
the same as heterosexual love to provide so much unsecond-guessed
support, to people who deserved your full support regardless. You
might perhaps avoid knowing this, but because the source of this info
will now becoming as much from ostensibly liberal sources as
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conservative ones, you'll have a tough time doing so.
-----
The only requirement for a marriage is MALE AND

FEMALE -- in western civilization, we understand that to be
ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN, which is very logical, as it
takes ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN to make a baby.
Anything else might be lovely or wondeful, loving or even
very long lasting -- but it is not a marriage.
Marriage is a relationship between one man and one

woman.
I hope to see that become the law of the land, by
Constitutional Amendment, in a few years.
I think the awful corruption and payoffs in New York will

only ensure that pro-traditional marriage supporters get
really galvanized in the next election cycle -- they realize
now how easily their rights to traditional marriage can be
taken away, by corrupt politicians bribed by big Wall Street
money. (_bigguns)
-----
If ANYONE here can understand Patrick McEvoy-
Halston's rant...
...I'd love to know what the heck he is saying. Honestly, dude,
I cannot make ONE LICK OF SENSE out of anything you
write -- not one -- and I can't even figure out what side you
are on. (_bigguns)
Laurel, and the takeover of Salon

Laurel, you're not aware of your central lie: that you, at heart, and
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despite truly not wishing so, do not think gays are equal to
heterosexuals. If you really thought so, THERE'S NO WAY you'd be as
opposed to gay marriage as much as you are, making it seem as if the
one thing that keeps civilization ago has just been stopped in its
tracks. More than this, I think you think they deserve punishment for
daring to enfranchise themselves in the same way heterosexuals are
enfranchised, for SPOILING, permanently -- simply for trivial, of-
the-moment pleasures they'll quickly come to learn they really have
no use for -- their most treasured institution.
I've heard your call/request, and I'll interpret my post for you: I am
NOT so much someone who suspects that at the end of the day you'll
find yourself helplessly neutered from having any influence here at
Salon letters or "abroad," but rather someone who thinks that even
now you're increasingly "tolerated" here out of felt intuition that
where, that who you are now is kinda where many Salonistas are
going to find themselves in some not-so-long while.
You're registering more and more as simply a voice of punishment;

absolute intolerance for the (ostensibly) idle, spoiled, and delinquent
in whatever guise. Though they're hating it (i.e., your angry wrath)
when you're directing it against gay marriage, I think some sense
yours is the voice of the future, and are more likely to start abiding it
than risk becoming another of its targets. More than this, and because
there are in truth way fewer of these truly ideal Salonistas out there as
you make seem, they're increasingly listening to the part of
themselves that has judged this is a time for curtailment and
responsibility and sacrifice, not yet more stretched-out claims for
indulging yet more me!me! satisfactions -- what surely got us in these
dire straits, in the first place.
Some imagine you howling, echoing, endlessly but alone, as if shut

out for good from the rest of your kind, but I'm beginning to see you
more as one who might well be speaking to the gathered's "hearts,"
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drawing them to you. My strong hunch is that it will be good, loving

(if however annoyingly smug) people like Greens&Beans -- the voices
of true encouragement -- who will find themselves not so much
listened to, at some point.
Link: What kept me together after the divorce (Salon)

---------

When society favors the geek
Some say that all narratives ultimately tell only two stories.
One: Someone goes on a journey. Two: A stranger comes to
town. The summer before my eighth-grade year, when I was
12, I experienced the intersection of both. In other words, I
learned how to escape.
This was 1979. My mother had been home from the hospital
for a few months, and my sister, brother and I were just
coming to understand her. Our "new" Mom.
The new version of my mother was a changeling. At 38 years
old, she had suffered, and barely survived, a ruptured brain
aneurysm. The head injury caused her to be mostly
paralyzed on her left side. Her brain became scrambled. She
limped around the house, couldn't tell time and didn't know
the day of the week. Often, she'd make inappropriate
remarks, swearing at the slightest provocation or making
some lewd joke in front of friends. At times, she scared me.
"Ethan!" she'd yell from her lair. "Help me get up!" She
might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the
floor, or in the bathtub.
Years before my mother's "accident," as we called it, my dad
had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but
he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family
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friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my

siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a
miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We
eventually discovered this would never come to pass.
It didn't take long to figure out I couldn't tame my mother,
not this beast. I knew I couldn't save her, either. I fought
with her for a while, usually battling over her inability --
what I mistakenly read as her refusal -- to regain her old life,
be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision.
After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck
with a mother I was afraid to love.
We began calling her the Momster.
-------
[. . .]
Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came
home from the hospital, a stranger came to town -- a new
kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared
to me.
[. . .]
I hung out a lot at JP's house that summer. After a few weeks
of watching "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," listening to
Electric Light Orchestra's "Discovery," and programming
primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack
computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.
-------
[. . .]
That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon
took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a
vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid
-- a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the
basketball team -- take action, be the hero, go on quests, and
kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys
in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted,
non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt
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invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was

the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the
idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was
missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one
Band-Aid. But shooting my "Star Wars" remakes and clay
monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute
movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless,
instantaneous and endless. Epic.
I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it
found me, coincided with my mother's return from the
hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the
Momster -- more courage than I could muster at the time. I
couldn't face down the creature that plagued my own house.
But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly
symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the
prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family's
four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident
and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts
and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into
my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had
transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather
strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother
again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.
But in the summer of '79, I was but a newbie. I needed to
gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons &
Dragons. I didn't know that game was about to save my life.
Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes
on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two
strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you
count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and
again. I would play many new roles. I would go on
incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat
many monsters.
When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session,
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after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for

Webster's. "Cleric |ˈklerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a
priest or religious leader in any religion." The next day, back
at JP's for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D
game world, clerics weren't just priests. They were
characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or
perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as "cure
light wounds" and "protection from evil." They could dispel
the undead.
Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my
head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer,
or in some realm far away in the future. (Ethan Gilsdorf,
“My Summer of Dungeons and Dragons,” 18 July 2011)
-----------
Zero plus zero equals the infinite, apparently
How does hanging out with other geeks end up making you less
somehow of a geek (giving you true courage, of the kind that applies
to the "real"world, etc.)? How does zero plus zero generate anything?
I'm wondering if the truer story is that somewhere along the line
society decided geeks were preferable to healthy self-esteemers, for
their preparedness to take shit, bow to bullying power, and in service
to it, humiliate others with more true backbone: that is, for having no
real self-respect. In preverse times, their disadvantage, their
malformation, actually rendered them more fit, and they ended up
with subsequent life stories that allowed them to believe their
adolescent escapes had been subsequently revealed as healthy, even
leaderly, pasttimes. Rather than socially retarded, time has
apparently shown them they have as much a claim to being vanguard!
And, oh, the part about his mom becoming “the momster,” principally
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owing to her illness, is foremost a lie: he'd have been hiding away
from a tyrannical mom, battling her bulking likeness in the form of
dragons, demons, and whatnot, regardless. That despite everything
he has accomplished and come to realize, he still cows to her and has
therefore in some profound sense barely moved an inch, is evident in
his emphasizing the illness so you don't think momster was due to
make her years-long appearance in any case. "It wasn't YOU, mom; it
was just the illness: I'm still your good, loyal, appreciative boy – brave
knight to your cause, tending cleric to your maladies."
The cruelest fate for fabulous endeavors which would make YOU part
of the tale, is that its history is largely about compensating for a
bullysome world, or rendering it more appropriate for trauma-
satured minds, rather than about boldly encroaching upon an
insufficiently magicked one – even when it shines golden, as it did
during the ’70s when D & D was born.
Link: My summer of Dungeons and Dragons (Salon
)


Young predators, and the greens & beans crowd
It was always something: glossy garnet plums, candy red

romas trucked from Mexico in the dead of winter. I wanted
to eat a local, seasonal diet, I really did. I liked the idea of
buying all my produce at the farmers' market, or joining a
CSA, or growing most of our food. But somehow I never got
around to joining the CSA, and the weekend crowds at our
local farmers' market kept me at bay. We did garden, but
Seattle's seasons were not conducive to a high yield: Some
years our tomatoes never ripened beyond dark green. In the
end, I bought most of our produce at the local grocery store,
where I tried to do my best.
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Our local supermarket was an overpriced yuppie mart with

a good selection of local, organic, seasonal produce. I had the
opportunity to use my buying dollars to support small local
farms, but it was rough to shell out $4 for a bunch of kale. I'd
read Michael Pollan's argument: "We [Americans] spend a
smaller percentage of our income on food than any other
industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of
our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more
dollars on it in a week." As much as I admire Pollan, there is
something cavalier in his dismissal of the problem of price.
Does Pollan really remember what it was like to struggle
financially?
[. . .]
My husband and I were both laid off in October of 2008, and

while we've worked on and off since then, we've keenly felt
the economic crunch. For the past three years, our lives have
been an exercise in reduction. First we stopped eating out,
then we stopped buying specialty items, then we found
ourselves unable to afford items that had once seemed basic:
peanut butter, bacon, grapes in February. We moved to the
country in order to cut our expenses, but our move coincided
with the end of my husband's unemployment benefits, and
our budget dwindled more quickly than our expenses.
[. . .]
Unfortunately, I'm a little late. Many of the mushrooms are

fuzzy with white mold or crawling with black flies, and a few
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have been chomped by slugs. I'm knocking a slug off the log
with a stick when I'm startled by a giant mottled
salamander, which seems more annoyed that alarmed by
my presence. It stares at me with obsidian eyes, unmoving.
In all my years in these woods, I've never seen this species
before. And the salamander isn't the only one laying claim to
this territory: A few feet down on the same log, cougar scat
sits like a warning. I think twice about continuing on, but I
can't quite tear myself away from the bounty of mushrooms.
Despite my bad timing, I find clusters of fresh new
mushrooms here and there. The pell-mell arrangement of
logs requires me to duck and stretch in order to get at the
most promising patches. I am crawling across a particularly
precarious log when I hear a heavy thump in the woods
above me. I freeze. A cat wouldn't make any noise if it was
stalking you, I comfort myself. It's probably just an elk ... or
a bear. My heart is hammering. I hop down, dip under the
salamander log, and scramble down the hill to my bike. I set
my bag of mushrooms in the basket and hightail it for home.
(Felissa Rogers, “When eating local is the cheapest
option,” Salon, 16 July 2011)
----------
Overpriced???
In the last couple years I have put a commercial kitchen in a
barn. My business has a 3 acre orgranic farm where the
kitchen get its ingredients to make locally grown, locally
processed products like roasted tomato sauce; marinated
mushrooms; pestos; jams; dehydrated herbs (and kale and
apples); pickles galore... the list could go on an on. It is
delicious and fun -- but as you might also guess, expensive! It
just kills me to read (constantly) that foods priced right
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(even underpriced!) are considered "elitist" or whatever.

Does it ever occur to anyone how expensive it is to grow and
process locally? We pay local (fair!) wages. We pay payroll
taxes out the wazoo. Workers Comp. About 4 other kinds of
insurance. Plus, I think our kitchen is the only building in
town up to code. Then property taxes and on and on.
I'd like to ask these people who think our products are elitist,
"How much do you think quality, traceable food is worth?" If
the answer is, say, more than your latest tech gadget, then
what's the problem? No, you can't have it all and you have to
make choices. Back in the 1900s when people paid the true
cost of their food there weren't fancy ipads to tempt them
toward frivolous spending while still needing to eat. If you're
so outraged by price then you should be doing something
about farm subsidies -- which go 99.99% to commodity
producers of corn, wheat, cotton, soy. NOT fruit and veggie
farmers!! If that box of twinkies was actually priced to
reflect the true cost to make it, then a $4 bunch a kale would
seem a lot more reasonable.
Producing food (organically, esp) takes a lot of work, a lot of
energy (human or otherwise) and a lot of money. So if you
care about the food your family eats then stop complaining
about the price, and start feeling lucky there are farms out
there willing to undertake the substantial financial risk to
make it available.
I will be lucky if my business ever breaks EVEN let alone
makes any money for me. I fully expect never to recoup the
kitchen construction costs. (And yes, this irrelevantly means
that I have off-farm income somewhere. So I do this work at
great cost to my family.)
Good food costs a lot to produce -- it's just that our country
has been conditioned to think otherwise. Get used to it.
(nycmom)
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-----
@nycmom
I fear for your heart. You took a simple comment about a
grocery store's prices and took it in all sorts of directions. I
shop monthly at Puget Consumers Coop in Seattle which is
likely the store she is referring to. I paid $2.59 there the
other day for a can of black eyed peas. Ihe discount grocery
outlet sells them for 79 cents. Sure 79 cents doesn't buy
organic. But that is still a helluva price disparity.
I recently retired early on social security alone. Needless to
say I'm not living fat on the hog. I'm a vegetarian anyway.
But not eating out and watching prices closely on everything
allows me to be done with a job that was killing my soul and
not doing anything positive for my body. And my weight is
going down and I am much more cheerful and aware.
nycmom-I recommend that you do some soul searching. To
spill so much bile over her comment about grocery prices
does not indicate a happy life being lived.
(Ccommentator)
-----
Ccommentator
Thank you, but you do not need to worry about my heart or
soul. They are just fine because I AM taking action about the
issue most important to me.
Yes, my post was frustrated, and probably misdirected at
this particular article. But it happens to be about the 1000th
time I've read that good food is "elitist" or overpriced. I
speak from a producer's perspective about the cost of
production. It is not for the faint of heart, or faint of wallet
for that matter.
I'm not sure where that $2.79 can of beans you bought came
from, but I can tell you with some certainty that the $.79 can
came from somewhere like China where the workers who
produced it do not enjoy the same Social Security benefits
3491
that you are.

By the way, I'm a vegetarian too and have been since I was a
child. I have a farm and a personal garden. I am on the
board of a very active nonprofit that works specifically on
food justice issues. Previously, I worked very hard for a
grassroots nonprofit to organize sustainable ag groups to
achieve sane federal farm policies. (THAT was and remains
depressing). So please do not say that I am "spilling bile". I
know whereof I speak.
I think the truth is that I offended your wallet. But you made
your choices: you chose an ill-fitting career and then chose to
quit and live on social security. Good for you, I try not to
judge.
I am working hard every day to create a local food economy
and GOOD JOBS(5!). I am very proud of that. A by the way,
just for a fun tidbit of info, the employer contribution to
Social Security is 2x the employee contribution. So I am
doing my part. Are you???
Admittedly I may be over-passionate about my work. Here I
am in my few free minutes (I have little kids too!) putting in
my $.03 on a silly article and responding to you! I need
balance, yes, but not soul-searching. And frankly, I think you
could use some meaningful work. Oh, and if you're worried
about the price of beans, why don't you just by some very
inexpensive dried ones, and plan ahead.
Good Food for All,
NYCMOM / Entrepreneur / Local Food and Farming Activist
/ Very personally-satisfied-person-who-is-not-satisfied-
with-our-country's-food-system (nycmom)
-----
@Susan Wood: Felisa is making CHOICES and some
of them are impractical
Or even self-destructive.
She and her husband lost their jobs in late 2008; they had
3492
two YEARS to reduce their yuppie standard of living and put

something away for the "hard times" in case they didn't find
new jobs (which they did not). They choose to move to a
VERY remote rural area (her parent's vacation cabin)
KNOWING that her husband's UI had just been cut off (after
99 weeks, ahem -- 4 times the former average).
What kind of person says they can't afford PEANUT
BUTTER -- a big jar of the generic stuff is $2.50, less on sale
-- but in other articles tells us she buys KEY LIMES
(imported from Key West, no doubt) and COCONUT OIL (at
something like $15 a jar -- and if it's the highest quality
organic, $30 a jar).
Felisa is this kind of scary broke and near hunger NOT
SIMPLY because of the economy but because of HER
CHOICES. She did not have to move to a remote cabin where
THERE ARE NO DECENT JOBS WHATSOEVER (even if
things improved). She did not have to forgo applying for
food stamps. She did not have to spend whatever windfalls
she gets from relatives or the odd Salon gig on key limes and
coconut oil.
And it doesn't have to be like this, but she STILL SAYS she
won't apply for the food stamps SHE IS ENTITLED TO,
because "she just doesn't feel right about doing that" -- she'd
rather be hungry, or forage for food, than have a pantry of
healthy, fresh, natural basic foods that would last her
through a long hard spell.
I've read a LOT about "foraging" but nothing about why she
chooses not to get the food stamps she is entitled to NOR
anything about canning or preserving or "putting food by".
Susan, you stated that this is a political problem and would
never happen in FRANCE, because France has a superior
social safety net. I can't answer for that -- I don't know what
kind of unemployment programs France has -- but I DO
KNOW that we HAVE a safety net, and it's called FOOD
3493
STAMPS and Felisa won't use them. SO I assume even if she

lived in France -- even if we adopt more comprehensive
safety net programs (universal health coverage) SHE
WON'T USE THOSE PROGRAMS.
She wants to live like this. That's what I have concluded. She
likes foraging. She likes feeling sorry for herself. She must
get some "mileage" (sympathy? Checks from the 'rents?
stories published on Salon.com?) from making herself
poorerer and more desperate than is remotely necessary.
(_bigguns)
Oh, and this:

I shop at local farmer's markets and await the first really
local produce with great anticipation each year. In
Northeastern Ohio, we have a lot of farms but a very short
growing season (compared to places like California or
Florida). We do get some amazingly great local produce --
organic and conventional alike -- from local farms (some
Amish).
I have personally found that GREAT, fabulous "family farm"
produce is CHEAPER than anything they drag up (unripe)
from Chile or elsewhere. I am confused why it would be
different where you guys are; I suspect you are being ripped
off (maybe by "Whole Paycheck").
The only slight exception is our local strawberries -- fabulous
-- but the growing season is a pathetic 3-4 weeks (less if the
weather is bad). A pint of superb local strawberries was
$4.49 this year (up from $3.99 last year) -- the tough mealy
imported ones were $2.99. I gladly pay the extra for this
rare and short-lived treat.
But in general, the local stuff is CHEAP. Not as insanely
cheap as in the past, but affordable EVEN by people on food
stamps, or the working poor.
The local squash, onions, peppers, tomatoes, corn -- it just
3494
goes on and on. The summer is a wonderful time here where

we CAN eat locally, every day, for very little.
So I buy LOCAL KALE grown on local farms and it doesn't
cost anything like nycmom's $4 a bunch (yikes! that is
seriously a lot for kale). It used to be around 79 cents; now
it's running $1.19. Again, this is family farm stuff, sometimes
Amish grown -- within 50 miles of my home.
In addition, we have several superb local farmer's markets;
two are within 3 miles of my house. The other is a giant
ethnic food market (delightfully free of yuppie pretensions
and high priced stuff) downtown. There are also a few
"farmer stalls" here and there, like at the local garden center
-- some sell "backyard" produce that is the rival of any
boutique farmers (its where I first got to taste locally grown
"San Marzano"-type tomatoes FRESH, not canned).
And on top of THAT, the local SNAP (food stamp) program
HANDS OUT gift certificates of $5 to $15 of FREE PRODUCE
for anyone with SNAP card (or on SSDI). At one stand, they
have reclaimed several old empty lots around the market
and turned them into "urban farms" growing raspberries,
blueberries, tomatoes, peppers and corn.
The rain made our corn crop late, but we are currently
enjoying awfully good California corn instead. (We'll get our
local corn, just late. When it comes in, it is 10-20 CENTS an
ear. Lordy, people, how much cheaper than THAT could it
get????)
I admire people who farm and produce stuff, but frankly
some of them (loony, self-important, entitled lefty organic
ones) are impractical and just can't figure out how to
make/grow a GOOD or GREAT product and do it at an
affordable price -- and being angry and entitled doesn't
translate into "we are bad people if we won't buy the $4
kale".
Maybe we are just middle class or working poor and trying
3495
to feed our families at a reasonable cost. That we can't afford

your "baby boutique heirloom veggies" or "$40 truffle oil"
does not translate into "we don't appreciate good, fresh,
healthy local foods". And no, I won't even buy DOG FOOD
that has been made in China; their standards are so abysmal
I can't trust any foodstuffs from there. (I caution people to
avoid Chinese garlic, when we have splendid, vastly superior
American garlic, at all price ranges. CHECK THE LABELS.)
(_bigguns)
-----
Bigguns
Good for you! You're buying direct from the farm. Better
prices for sure. Again with the judgment for zero reason. We
do not make truffle oil. We do not grow heirloom baby
vegetables. We do, however, make an amazing Roasted
Tomato Sauce that we sell at farmer's markets for $10.
Zucchini relish. Bread and Butter Pickles. Marinated
Mushrooms. Holiday pies made with 100% local fruit (that
we freeze for the winter). We farm and we buy from other
local farms. You make a lot of arrogant assumptions.
We farm and process in New York. Not Ohio. Does that make
me "angry and entitled"? Yes, I'm dyed in the wool lefty. But
I have to admit that starting a business has given me a
different perspective on the cost of doing business. How nice
that you can quote the prices of the produce you buy. Bet you
have no idea of the costs to produce.
Here in the northeast, we have a VERY short growing
season. So preserving that produce for the off-season is
important.
I NEVER said anyone is "bad" for not buying $4 kale. I never
said we sell it for that price. What I said is that I understand
the actual costs involved in growing, and getting
produce/products to market. Retailers take their own cut,
remember. We operate a low-income CSA. We take food
3496
stamps. We have a farm store. We sell to restaurants. We do

farmers markets. We know a lot about growing
(organically) at as low a cost as possible. It's still not that
low to hire local labor, and pay them fairly and legally, no
matter what you all prefer to think.
So you can make all the assumptions you like about
something you know nothing about. I would love to hear
from other growers and producers, but hey, I don't think
there are too many of them on Salon. I am not angry, I love
my work. I am often frustrated at the expense and red tape
involved. Don't call me entitled. I work around the clock and
invest money in the food system when I could be vacationing
and wearing Prada.
I am not the one being judgmental. I am offering a
perspective that is not offered often. I can promise you your
local (fruit and vegetable) farmers in every state agree with
me. It is unfortunate that food, and especially processed
products are so expensive. God knows, I wish they weren't.
But the reality is that they are. Should I offer a product
below the cost of production? There are not many other
businesses doing what we are doing, and those that are feel
the same way: that consumers must learn to pay more for
local, sustainably-produced food. That's all.
The fact that the economy is in shambles is not our fault. The
unemployment rate and income disparity is not our fault.
That fact alone ought to convince someone like me not to do
what I'm doing, but I do it anyway because it makes me
happy to offer a product that doesn't exist elsewhere. So
yeah, I guess I'm loony.
I am truly sorry and sad if that offends. (nycmom)
-----
3497
@nycmom
Rest assured that plenty of people appreciate what you've
written here. Farming is hard work, and your commitment
to organic farming says much good about you. I would buy
your stuff in a heartbeat.
One more thing, since you seem to be new here. There are
two Salon letter writers with similar names. The first is
Bigguns, a longtime Salonista who I and others like and
respect, and then there is _Bigguns (note the dash before the
B), a troll. For the sake of the former, whom you might meet
if you stick around here long enough, please don't confuse
her with the latter. (Beans&Greens)
-----
Thank You!
Thank you Beans&Greens and XyzzyAvatar. Thank you so
much. And many many apologies to the real Bigguns.
Yes, I am new to commenting and do not know the rules. I
read Salon occasionally but it takes something really big or
something about local food to really feeling active.
I am doing the best I can, as I'm sure we all are with what
we're given. I do not intend to seem angry, but I feel
attacked. And I feel attacked not for what work I am doing,
but because a few people have made some very large
assumptions. I suppose that impulse is the same one that has
caused me to jump into the issue with full abandon.
I appreciate those of you who've expressed understanding. It
means a lot. I was briefly tempted to give my company's
website so everyone can see the good things we are doing --
not for more sales because we do not ship -- but I have too
many people who are invested in the work (employees) to
invite hatefulness on my account.
And I just have say. If there is one issue that liberals and
conservatives ought to agree on, it's local food. It's good for
3498
economies, the environment, public health, employment. It

preserves land, prevents sprawl, gives families good clean
fun in the spring and fall (berry picking, pumpkins).
One person's "grocery prices" are another person's
"revenue". It is not so simple and not so small a thing. Low
price is not the only important thing in the world. I think we
all know we vote most strongly with our dollars, no matter
how many we have.
Again, I am passionate not angry (although my husband
might say zealot). Whatever. I still feel pretty good about it
all. (nycmom)
-----
@nycmom: I'm not the "enemy"

Oh - -and there is no "real bigguns". It's just a username.
Anyone can use it (or a variation on it). Even you.
The big mouth "beanbreath" (Beans&Greens) used to be
Durian Joe, but he doesn't acknowledge that. He gets to
change his username, but in every thread, he has to be SURE
to let people know "I am not the real bigguns" (though there
is no real bigguns...never was, never will be).
I can prove that. HELLO??? hello? bigguns? BIGGUNNNNS?
(See? she isn't here.)
******
I was commenting that you are angry about customers (or
potential customers) who criticize your high prices. (I am
sure your roasted tomato sauce is delicious, but that is FIVE
TIMES the cost of an ordinary jar of bottled tomato sauce;
what makes yours worth 500% more?)
You mentioned kale, which is why I commented on its price
(I love kale!).
In the final analysis, you seem to be saying "good food has to
cost a great deal more than low quality food, and if you
want HOMEGROWN STUFF, it by necessity will be very
3499
costly". I dispute that.

As I stated, I buy a LOT of local farmer products. My region
(Great Lakes) is not a lot different than yours -- long cold
winters, short growing seasons. So the costs should not be
too different.
The farmer products I buy are either WAY cheaper than the
standard fare from Chile or Mexico OR they are just slightly
higher for a dramatically better product. NOTHING LIKE
FIVE TIMES AS MUCH. I mean like 50 cents extra for
amazing local strawberries vs. awful mealy unripe ones
from Chile. I happily pay this tiny difference.
But if the good local strawberries were (like your roasted
tomato sauce) FIVE TIMES what the Chilean ones were --
like FIFTEEN DOLLARS A PINT -- I couldn't afford to eat
them. (Beanbreath could. But not me. I don't earn $240,000
a year.)
I do not know all the details of how these family farms (some
Amish) grow this amazing, gorgeous produce -- honestly, it's
like something out of Dutch still life masterpiece! -- and sell it
for peanuts, but they do. Every year. Its' one of the great,
incredible blessing of living in an ABUNDANT, food-
sufficient culture. The good part, we often do not talk about.
(We'd rather snark on the failures.)
They also are not POOR doing this. Farmers in this area are
pretty affluent. (Time Magazine did a recent piece on "Go
into farming and get rich!") The Amish are very, very self-
sufficient. They reside in large numbers just an hour south of
me, and it is a great treat to drive past their beautiful, tidy
farms and acres of corn, wheat and soybeans and other
crops, or the barns of beautiful animals.
So maybe we could take a minute, and stop whinging and
celebrate the great, wonderful abundance of American
farming. It is truly a great thing. (_bigguns)
-----
3500
@Beans&Greens
I like you very much, sir. You are indeed an inspiration. But you are
also such a tool for calling _bigguns a troll. She moves quick, has
things to say, and can do magic ... and you make her seem as dullard
as your diet, as unappealing as your hobbitan smugness. To some of
us you're BOTH the best and the worst of the baby-boomers. To be
nice, I'll just say you're both inspiringly full of life (truly, you are), and
soon -- to be not so nice -- hopefully, full of the holes some of us will
put in you, to help finally rid you out of our way.
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston: I can never make much

sense out of your letters
But this one is short and sweet. And thanks for saying that I
am not a troll (which is true).
A troll is something specific, like that loser vasumurti, who
cuts and pasts HUGE LONG multi-part screeds on veganism,
in threads that are totally unrelated.
My posts are always on topic. I also have to deal with a LOT
of Salon anger at anyone who dares to defy the "lefty liberal
politically correct meme".
Also you get huge creds in my book, Patrick, for the term
'hobbitan smugness". Wish I'd thought of it myself! You
NAILED that ridiculous, preening hypocrite!
Unfortunately, you also seem to be suggesting you are going
to shoot both of us. That's troubling. You might wish to ring
the nurse, and ask her to up your meds. (Let her read the last
line of this post, too.) (_bigguns)
-----
3501
Has anyone else noticed a disturbing trend?

I follow Felisa Rogers' columns. I also follow the comments --
all of them.
Has anyone else observed that Patrick McEvoy-Halston
(spelling is probably off) has been sounding like that state
senator who pointed a gun at a reporter?
In the comments on one of Felisa's columns (possibly the one
where she got the bicycle and saw cougar scat), he was
comparing her to a predator herself. Someone joked that it
was a werewolf. He seemed, however, to be saying that she
was preparing herself for the day when she and people like
her -- or, more to the point, like PM_H -- rose up and
attacked Baby Boomers.
He's just talked about "putting holes" in people in this
lettercolumn.
What do people have to do around here to violate the terms
of service and/or creep people out? There are a few people --
both on staff and in letters -- whose comments on sexuality
make me want to bleach my brain. There are some master
sarcastics and our resident bullies, trolls, and MRAs.
I don't think even joking remarks about "putting holes" in
people are funny, cool, or remotely safe.
Mister, if you're joking, you're not funny. If you've got
firearms, you're talking about them in an abusive and
unprofessional manner. And this is just a rabid case of
"epater le bourgeois," knock it off. (Greeneyedkzin)
@Greeneyedzkin
The essential part of the post you are referring to is not really the part
of wishing them (baby boomers like laurel and G&B) full of holes,
believe it or not, it was actually the part about them being so full of
substance, holes become more notable for their working more as
marked inversion. I'm actually not truthfully interested in even
3502
disposing them -- not even just to let some other generation have
their chance: the idea of making anyone shut up, live life with a
shrunken, diminished status is obsene to me: the idea really is just to
enfranchise everybody, and I'm glad I don't think that this is only
accomplished violently, by finding some way to disenfranchise,
discredit or monument and/or "etherealize" (as by, for instance,
making them Elders, Emeretuses -- people already half-way shuffled
off to a higher plane and half-way otherwise sedimentation) the
already strongest voices on the scene. I think baby boomers have yet
more to say, and I would have them say it: but only if it means
fighting through an enfranchised, accustomed way of looking at the
world that actually mostly does them credit -- you are mostly great,
world builders! of the great-Eden-within-a-rock-from-Wrath-of-Khan
type -- but that still prevents them from doing the good they could to
generations after them that are suffering and are determined to suffer
far more yet.
People like Felissa are my more natural true opponents. What she is
up to is I think predatorial -- she is making the worldview of baby
boomers, she is making baby boomers, seem discard-worthy, right
even before them, knowing that because of how she presents herself,
because of their own desire to fit her within their preferences, and
because of their flacid ability to recognize alien viewpoints for so ably
and for such a long time dominating the world scene that
epistemological alienness, true difference, can hardly now even be
seen, her efforts aren't likely to be spotted. Felissa isn't though just a
younger version of most of you -- dashed with the slight, not-much-
aggrieving difference that informs you you made sure her generation
developed their own voice. Her small asides aren't so much potential
draw-aways from the main point as they are actually distinctive tells.
She isn't quite so much taken to Pollan, the whole farmer's-market
scene, vegetarians because they're, though her "friends," and however
much truly admirable, just for one reason or another beyond her
lesser or restricted capacities, but because "they're" all part of a
3503
stupid, indulgent, actually counter-human scene, of the dumb

touristy kind she rejects while out of country. Baby boomers, she
believes, created a world that is removed from struggle and which has
come at the cost of making them ridiculous. They have domesticated
everything around them, removed from view all true disquiet, all true
agitants, making it seem as if the whole point of the universe was to
float up a gargantuan spread of grazers who have gobbled up every
outside affront and are without any otherwise natural inner spur.
Felissa considers this "claiming" a vulgar affront to generations that

struggled their way through their lives, against worlds quite ready to
claim them without hesitation or grief, and who proved with every
true effort -- even if after successive generations there wasn't sign that
these efforts were all that much building on one another -- that
human beings are about some kind of purpose far grander than that.
Trust me, that salamander that didn't daunt to Felissa, that,
diminutive as it is, still would have disproved its claim to its spot, has
to her more worth than a whole cattle farm of Pollan-worshipping
farm-market shoppers.
Her voice is the conservative one, the one that appears at the end of
all good times that believes that buldging flacid excess is about to get
its comeuppance, that it will be finally be showed that difference does
indeed exist out there, is and was always ultimately stronger, and that
it wants to -- quite rightly -- dine on you. Voices of this kind appear at
the beginning of liberal times, but have little weight because their
carriers are too readily made to seem the ones lacking in invigorating
spirit. When they appear at the end of liberal times their weight is
considerable because the mood shifts so that when people compare
foragers and isolationists to domesticators, exchangers, shoppers,
markets and crowds, "domestication" less seems where civilization
finally got its start than where mankind must have first lost its
fighting spirit and soul.
Though she here and there makes herself seem akin to the Michael
3504
Pollan crowd, I wish it were more obvious that when people tell
Felissa to start greenhouse-farming and going on food stamps that
this is just so laughably something she is building herself to naturally
consider more unwelcome than spotted cougar scat. What she is up to
now is hurriedly doing the struggling, the daily encounters with
survival that surely made her and our ancestors hard but reverant and
spritually great, so that she can feel through accumulation, in
constitution more akin to them. She's effortlessly becoming the story
of how she puts food onto her plate, while you bait her with
remissions that just ensure her course.
Even if the world ensures that there continue to be means for Felissa
to get better foodstuffs, and to get it easier, there is a sense she would
actually take ultimate withering over such easing: it would firmly
include her within a harsh but awesome universe that would
recognize, understand, welcome and incorporate her, in a way it
would surely not if she had allowed herself to become what she is
accused by the ignorant of being: a hipster foodie, whose life is
fundamenally about fun and play rather than … really just surviving.
But Felissa and a generation that is mostly like her, because they want
civilization to be shamefully shown up as unequal to the ground it
built itself upon, will ensure politicians happen to get in power that
can't but further wreck it, wiping out social programs that, ostensibly
-- but to her, fully debatably -- help the weak. Eventually social
programs will find their way back in, but only when they point to the
considerable fibre built into a nation of hardy survivors, not to their
absence or fast dissolution, and this is going to take an awful lot of
suffering and fear-encountering/battling days to ensure.
If I could wave an all-powerful magic wand I would have Felissa and

her generation know that the kind of conversation and company you
get amidst those farmer crowds, the pompous hipster foodie scenes,
should actually mostly draw you to them. Only because "you've" come
to draw pleasure from suffering and scarcity, from daily proving
3505
victorious over demons that really could full-on devour you, only
because you've surely been relentlessly abused and have become quite
mad does the life you're living now seem such a compelling draw to
you. For of course having no such wand, I gesture to a near equal-
though source of future-altering power: Blessed Baby Boomers,
please start really looking at people like Felissa and recognize the
difference between you and them. They're more brutal and savage --
considerably so -- and you've got to step in, somehow give them more
life, and make it harder for them to demarcate the line they're already
far-along in establishing between themselves and those like Michael
Pollan who've sadly forgotten what it is to struggle, and are forever
damned for it.
Link: When eating local is the cheapest option (Salon)

---------
Building upon a good review of the Deathly Hallows
Conclusions to fantasy epics and quest narratives pose a

diabolical problem for their creators, one that calls to mind a
remark I once read in a journal by Edmund Wilson, one of
the 20th century's greatest cultural critics. Late in his life
Wilson had decided to give up reading history, he wrote,
because "I know the kinds of things that happen." Epic
fantasy is, if possible, even more familiar than history, in
that we know exactly what will happen: Good will triumph
over evil at great price, but only after the hero endures a
crisis of self-doubt and agrees to sacrifice himself for the
greater good. So the execution of such a conclusion becomes
largely a technical matter, a matter of How more than
What, and still less Why. In the case of "Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows: Part 2," a movie with no beginning and no
middle but two-plus hours of thundering, momentous
ending, all of this is carried to a comical extreme.
3506
I'm not trying to wage some kind of King Canute battle

against the tide of approbation for this remarkable series
and its final chapter, honest. I am suggesting that we're all
congratulating the filmmakers for not having screwed the
whole thing up too badly. (Which is something to be
celebrated: Consider the ever-dwindling "Chronicles of
Narnia" series, or the disastrous efforts to turn Philip
Pullman's "His Dark Materials" and Lemony Snicket's
"Series of Unfortunate Events" into movie franchises.)
Director David Yates, screenwriter Steve Kloves and their
formerly young cast -- Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and
Emma Watson began this enterprise as schoolchildren and
now seem ready for divorces and rehab clinics -- bring the
Potter cycle to rest with a great cinematic clash of cymbals
(and symbols). "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part
2" is a grave and violent picture built around the large-scale
destruction of Hogwarts, Harry's beloved alma mater, and
the final confrontation between Harry (Radcliffe) and the
reptile-headed Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), who
are linked to each other in ways they don't quite understand.
As he began to do in "Deathly Hallows: Part 1," Yates

deliberately recalls the inspirational movies about the blitz of
London and the lonely courage with which the British faced
Hitler in the dark early years of World War II. I don't know
whether J.K. Rowling has ever discussed the Battle of Britain
as an influence on her fantasy universe, but she's precisely
the right age to have been raised on such national
mythological tales of Churchill-era nobility and sacrifice.
While most of "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" is set in and around
the climactic siege of Hogwarts -- in which, yes, some
beloved Potterworld personages will die -- we also see
Harry, red-headed Ron (Grint) and shockingly grown-up
Hermione (Watson, of course, but in this sequence also
3507
played by Helena Bonham Carter, and don't make me

explain) stage a daring raid on the Gringotts Wizarding
Bank, which ends with an abused captive dragon totally
destroying the place. Any consonance with current events,
which renders it especially satisfying to witness a bank
reduced to rubble, is presumably coincidental. (As we now
know, many financial institutions in the Muggle universe are
also run by greedy and untrustworthy goblins.)
If the Gringotts raid is one of the Potter series' most effective

uses of large-scale CGI effects, I found much of the final
battle at Hogwarts, including the O.K. Corral showdown
between Harry and Voldemort, disappointingly generic. Oh,
I don't mean that it's boring to sit through, exactly. There's a
whole lot of spell-casting and Death-Eating and exploding
Gothic architecture and Fiennes' lizard-man Voldemort
howling in pain and pointlessly murdering underlings as
Harry and friends gradually discover and destroy the
Horcruxes that contain fragments of his soul. (I can't stop
myself: The next-to-last Horcrux is inside ... mmrp! Stifled
by the Spoiler Cops, just in time.) Yates and
cinematographer Eduardo Serra do a nice job of keeping the
viewer oriented in space and time, no mean feat when space
is an imaginary digital artifact and time is completely
elastic. There's a lovely and crucial flashback sequence into
the memories of über-Goth potions expert turned Hogwarts
headmaster Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) -- for my money
the most compelling character in the whole series -- whose
long-running and ambiguous role in the Potter mythos is
finally revealed.
Along with Rickman, numerous other beloved players make

final cameos, making this peculiar film -- which is
simultaneously too short and too long -- feel an awful lot like
3508
an extended curtain call. Maggie Smith as Prof. McGonagall

and Jim Broadbent as Prof. Slughorn, Robbie Coltrane as
Hagrid, Tom Felton as the chastened Draco Malfoy, Bonham
Carter as the adorably evil Bellatrix Lestrange, David
Thewlis as lycanthrope Remus Lupin and Evanna Lynch as
New Agey Celtic seer Luna Lovegood all get a few seconds of
screen time. So do various departed characters, including
Harry's long-dead parents, Gary Oldman as Sirius Black
and of course Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore, who
appears in a misty-moisty afterlife scene where Yates
simultaneously manages to screw up a crucial plot point and
render the spiritual underpinnings of the entire Potter
franchise as total bollocks. (We also meet Dumbledore's
grouchy brother, nicely played by Ciarán Hinds, a personal
favorite.) And I guess Harry's so-called paramour Ginny
Weasley (Bonnie Wright) makes an appearance, but not so
you'd notice it. (Potter fans hate me for this one, but the
submerged sexual tension between Harry, Hermione and
Ron is a central element of this universe, and one Rowling
herself seems barely aware of. Ginny is a transparent and
inadequate attempt to defuse it.)
What bugs me about "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" may be an
inevitable consequence of the fact that Yates and Kloves,
previous directors Chris Columbus, Mike Newell and Alfonso
Cuarón, and everybody else who's worked on this amazing
14-year, eight-film odyssey has had to serve so many
masters. Loyalty to both the letter and spirit of Rowling's
books was more important than it almost ever is in a
Hollywood production, because the universe of Potter
fandom is so large, so well-organized and so vocal. But the
filmmakers also had to appeal to moviegoers who hadn't
read the books and were absorbing the whole story on-
screen, as well as casual viewers who might dip in and out,
depending on reviews or what their friends said, in search of
3509
an exciting yarn but without much caring about the history

of the Diadem of Ravenclaw or the backstage intrigue
among the Hogwarts faculty.
Viewed in that light, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

Part 2" is an adequate and often artful exercise in checking
off boxes. If you haven't imbibed a minimum of four or five
other Potter books and/or movies, including "Deathly
Hallows: Part 1," then the exposition surrounding the action
sequences will be total gibberish and you shouldn't even
bother. (By the way, I saw it in Imax 3-D, and unless you
can't stop yourself don't spend the extra money.) This is
almost entirely a movie for the Potter fan base, which may
have been the only possible outcome in adapting Rowling's
torrents of verbiage, dense plotting and encyclopedic
arcana. But this final installment, driven far less by acting
and characterization than any of the preceding seven, fails
the Peter Jackson test of becoming an affecting and
absorbing work on its own terms.
The "O Children" sequence in "Deathly Hallows: Part 1," and

indeed the entire haunted, lonely middle section of that
vastly superior movie, have stayed with me powerfully.
Hours after seeing this one, I don't look back on it with any
emotion, or even much in the way of sense-memory.
Radcliffe as Harry, and even more so Fiennes as the
wounded Voldemort, who feels victory escaping his grasp as
evil wizards always will, are both splendid. But the final
confrontation between these intertwined geniuses, at least as
we see it here, has no moral or intellectual heft; it's a
lightning-bolt battle out of a 1980s "Doctor Strange" comic.
(I'm not saying that's the worst thing in the world.) Seconds
later, I was out on the sidewalk in front of the theater, feeling
a little baffled and irritated: Wait, Dumbledore said what to
3510
Snape and what to Harry? Voldemort is incapable of killing

Harry because ... why, exactly? Which Horcrux is the giant
snake and which one is the Magic Cup of H.R. Pufnstuf?
What the Sam Hill are the Deathly Hallows again, and what
do they have to do with anything? (Answer: They don't.)
So ends this enormously important, and enormously

extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang
and whimper. Nothing quite like this series has ever been
tried before in cinema history, and as I wrote last year,
following the central trio of Radcliffe, Grint and Watson
through the aging process has itself forced the movies to
confront Rowling's central themes, which I take to be "the
painful transition from childhood to adulthood, the loss of
parents and loved ones, the first intimations of personal
mortality." For better or worse, Rowling's books and the hit-
and-miss movies based on them have reshaped not just the
marketplace for fiction and film but the contemporary
cultural imagination, re-establishing fantasy as the central
narrative mode (arguably for the first time since the Middle
Ages). I suspect that Rowling will remain popular for a long
time while the films fade a lot more rapidly into the
background. But we have only begun to live in the world
they made. (Andrew O’Hehir, “Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows Part 2,” Salon, 13 July 2011)
----------
Alas ... fantasy

Churchill-as-heroic-leader is the kind of fantasy that was being
chisseled away at in more post modern-centered departments of
universities. It's admirable to be willing to gout impossible leaders, to
not need to so much inflate reality, even if in "your" deconstruction
you're still kinda neglecting it; and I think it's THIS firm "medieval"
3511
retreat back to fantasy that I am most apprehensive of. It's what the
genre had least need of: sign that when it finally takes off and
overtakes the literary, the primarily reality-avoidist geeks are surely
in charge. This whole G.R.R Martin thing is probably the same thing:
pasture-inclined, actually knowing older critics ascenting to legitimize
a genre that looks to coast them through the rest of the way with a
steady stream of discord-obliterating lies. It has momentum, is
constituted not to confront, seems legitimate in harkening back to an
unfairly neglected, inherently meaningful manner of story-telling that
ruled before bourgeois prefences staked their claim, and is well-
written enough to cover your ass. And that's apparently plenty.
Struck me as a very astute review. I'm not sure if seeing this will do
me much good, and might just keep aside. It's nostalgia for a time
that nurtured the rebellious, irreverant period that enabled so many
striking, baby-boomer greats (I agree about Snape), without a stir to
reclaim it (the "next generation" seem to me, mini-mes, at best: I wish
them well, but I wish people would stop just complementing,
encouraging them -- trust me, they'll all soon be drawn to rage,
alchohol, and flights from reality; they're ALREADY war-torn, and yet
they'll still be amongst the BEST of their generation). It looks to be
mostly for the lost.
I'm not seeing Hobbit either. LOTR had many of the qualities I look
for, but Jackson doesn't have it to stay Paul Krugman-like on course.
It'll be lapse, not prelude. Maybe at some point at Salon we can put
aside the primarily you-pleasing Gaimans and Harry Potters, and go
with some Ursula LeGuins and Gene Wolfes and Michael Bishops--
those who'd recognize all that was going on between their characters,
and mostly motion you to really see and understand it; fantasy writers
who are really at base mostly reality OBSERVERS, not escapism
ENABLERS. If not, then how about we just tunnel our way further
into the McEwans, Kingsolvers, and Updikes.
Let us not put too fine a point on it

But the neomedieval or Gothic Revival aesthetic began in the
3512
19th century - in England in particular - and has not really

abated since then, despite every modernist claim to cultural
rupture & transgression. Gothicism is an incredibly
powerful, universal language. Consciously or not, every
generation grapples with The Gothic in it's own way (just as
they will with classicism.) There is a strong argument to be
made that it has not entirely abated at any time since the
Middle Ages, and realism, itself a fantastic kind of stylization
(that I like very much) is the anomaly.
I think it's important to point out that the reason the 19th
century Gothic revivalists were so ga-ga about the Medieval
was precisely for the purpose of establishing cultural
continuity & rebuking the idea of neoclassical, post-medieval
rupture. They meant nothing less than to heal the chain of
historical continuity that had been (and remains) broken.
You don't have to like medieval art to appreciate the wisdom
of this, and the danger of cultural amnesia and hubris that
makes a nostalgic, trite fetish of our shared past.
Having said that, these Potter movies barely scratch the

surface of medieval aesthetics & it takes disciplined
willpower to divine the medieval experience of Art. Maybe if
as a culture we dared to stop talking about budgets & deficits
& money 24-7, we would be more worthy of the privilege of
communing with our ancestors. (Del Rio)
@del rio
Will you make your point more strongly why we shouldn't want to
disconnect ourselves entire from a time of lords and peasants, of
knights, hacking one-another to death, for the smallest of slights?
Perhaps healing begins only once you've made the source of pain go
away, when you've developed the courage to balk expectations and
simply walk away.
We needn't look to the past and see relatives, you know. I simply see
3513
different people -- almost different things, and not ancestral ones;

ones I wish knew the self-aware states possible to many of us, proved
actually worthy of remembering, emulating, commuting with, without
this really amounting to wrong-headed fancy, a regreful waste of
time.
It may be that it requires "disciplined willpower to divine the
medieval experience of Art," but it surely more requires an evolved
ability to see things straight, and, in my judgment, an ability to access
mental states that are significantly inferior to your own; and I'm not
sure the two can go together. It might well be impossible to be a
Medieval historian (or historian of the Medieval Ages, if you prefer) --
what a fascinating, and quite possibly true, thought!
There seems to be an underlying

cynicism in Mr. O'Hehir's review and in the whole genre of
fantasy.
The fact is there has been no serious public scandal
surrounding the cast (Mr. Radcliffe's recent admission about
his issues was not dragged through the public eye), that all
the young actors in the film seem to have matured as a
group as pretty straight forward and regular people with
the potential to become skilled in their craft or move on to
other pursuits.
These films are a progression as the books are.
As for what is more entertaining, a repeated group of adults
getting drunk and losing consciousness in movie after movie
or a group of films that strung together that tell a story...
well, juvenalia has nothing to do with age now does it.
Nothing would have made the reviewer enjoy this movie
except the end credits. (Helpmehannah)
@helpmehannah
Re: The fact is there has been no serious public scandal surrounding
the cast (Mr. Radcliffe's recent admission about his issues was not
3514
dragged through the public eye), that all the young actors in the film
seem to have matured as a group as pretty straight forward and
regular people with the potential to become skilled in their craft or
move on to other pursuits.
These films are a progression as the books are.
As for what is more entertaining, a repeated group of adults getting
drunk and losing consciousness in movie after movie or a group of
films that strung together that tell a story... well, juvenalia has
nothing to do with age now does it.
The kids have "matured" into a time when they will spend the rest of
their lives as royalty, where the public will mostly constrain
themselves to see royalty as regal-but-plain stalwarts, and where
royalty will consent to make it very easy to imagine themselves this
way -- not insisting on dragging their whatever erroneous
misadventures/wanderings through the public eye. At some level we
understand that behind the scenes they're uncentered, skitterish,
unstable, fully-dependent and mostly-infantile catastrophic messes,
but they are constituted to stand erect and do what is expected of
them while in public, and to do what they can to at least attempt to
blanche/fagellate anything interesting and unexpected out of their
personal lives as well.
Their parents got to be individuals and free and genuinely interesting
-- even if now mostly just seen as pompous, absurd, scene-
crowding/stealing douches; these kids are the relief from true
accomplishment and will only be the publics'. I actually doubt they'll
divorce, but even if they do they'll consent to make it seem a private
matter and a themselves-discrediting shame that should be swept as
soon as possible under the table, rather than the baby-boomer style of
being unleashed and alive to the world again.
If it means sensing that the future generation is going to go along life
as if following a script they'll never know the stuff to deter from --
group suffering, heroes arising from the ranks, toppling of all-
powerful evil menace to gift a subsequent generation with the chance
of a better world -- then a strung-together, well-told story can indeed
3515
be depressing. "You'll" simply do as directed, and therefore never

really nurture your own story. You had a right to that, as much as
anyone. Hope you get a do-over.
pretty brainy responses for a kids movie!

I love to see folks exercising their grad school muscles.
O Hehir does have knee-jerk disdain for the genre, with some
good reason: when Hollywood processes books they always
come out black and white-- a mirror of events processed
through our pathetic media.
HPATDH2 displays the book's major plot weaknesses-- so
much depends on random chance, like it happening to be
Draco's mom who examines Harry, or Harry stumbling on
Shape in time to get his all-important memories.
I'm not impressed with Daniel Radcliffe-- he just doesn't
seem to have much character. Sorry, I said it. The parts of
the movie that shone for me were when the grand old actors
roused to the defense of the castle-- the kid's parts were like
Gap ads in comparison.
I don't know what O Hehir is talking about in the afterlife
scene-- that seemed very close to the book, and I thought
explained things competently.
Oh, and Ron looks like a total schlub at the end-- which, also
taken without alteration from the book, always struck me as
a parent-centered anticlimax.
But there it is-- we may grow up in a magical world, but
sooner or later we turn into boring grownups-- so don't
worry, Andrew! (Shepa Dorje)
@Shepa Dorje
This doesn't help: "pretty brainy responses for a kids movie!
I love to see folks exercising their grad school muscles."
This does: "HPATDH2 displays the book's major plot weaknesses--
so much depends on random chance, like it happening to be Draco's
3516
mom who examines Harry, or Harry stumbling on Shape in time to

get his all-important memories.
I'm not impressed with Daniel Radcliffe-- he just doesn't seem to
have much character. Sorry, I said it. The parts of the movie that
shone for me were when the grand old actors roused to the defense
of the castle-- the kid's parts were like Gap ads in comparison.
Link: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2": An

action-packed curtain call (Salon)
---------
SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2011

Marriager vows
Presidential candidates are asked to sign pledges all the

time, but the GOP primary has been roiled for the past few
days by an uncommonly influential document -- the
Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon
Marriage and Family -- put out by an Iowa group, the
Family Leader.
[. . .]
After losing in the primary, the fiercely anti-gay Vander
Plaats led the successful campaign to oust three supreme
court justices who had voted for the same-sex marriage
decision. Now at the helm of the Family Leader, he has
brought in presidential hopefuls for a speech series and is
openly cultivating an image as Iowa kingmaker.
I spoke with Vander Plaats by phone Monday night to check
in on the developments surrounding the Marriage Vow and
the presidential contest in Iowa. The following transcript of
our conversation has been edited slightly for length. (Justin
Elliott, “The man behind the marriage vow,” Salon,
12 July 2011)
----------
3517
While our laws and customs are influenced by and based on

Judeo-Christian traditions and culture, that is not the only
influence. I'm not sure what you wish to substitute for
centuries of culture and tradition -- lefty philosophy? that's
even more dubious, given the history of the 20th century,
with it's experiments in lefty stuff like communism. Polls? the
wafty (and constantly changing) theories of social scientists?
psychologists? the DSM IV?
I consider my own thoughts and beliefs, Dave, but I don't
discount thousands of years of western civilization, though,
writing and yes, faith when I do so. What YOU and your ILK
are doing is putting your lefty sympathies and social causes
ABOVE OTHER PEOPLE'S equally valid beliefs, and
ridiculing religion while you place 100% of your beliefs in
"yourself", a kind of empty, transient, shallow "Oprah" faith
that is "me centered" instead of "god centered".
You have every right to do so, and I will defend to the death
your right to have any faith, or no faith at all and practice
that freely. But it doesn't give you the right to impose your
lefty social engineering on the rest of society, in a nation that
is substantially majority Christian and where lefty atheists
are a tiny minority.
The right to PRACTICE what you believe does not give you
the right to DESTROY other people's beliefs. (_bigguns)
----
Nobody is remotely suggesting "oppressing homosexuals"
unless you think that gay people living openly and freely,
having the vote and the right to free speech, living where
they choose, owning property and businesses, having higher
than average incomes and education, constitutes
"oppression". (_bigguns)
----
The New York laws won't go into effect until the end of the
month. And I don't live in New York State.
3518
But yes, PEOPLE IN NEW YORK STATE have just had their
real marriages devalued because they have been
"downgraded" to "partners A and B" instead of husbands
and wives. The very concept of marriage in New York has
been REDEFINED from a real marriage to a pretend gay
marriage with partners, and a kind of "best friends with
benefits" relationship.
Long term, I believe this will result in fewer traditional
male/female couples bothering to marry, because the
tradition of marriage is demeaned....it isn't special or
important anymore, it's something any pair of gay guys can
do as a joke (see Savage, Dan).
I believe that NEW YORKERS themselves had a right to vote
on this, and that right was taken away from them. I can only
hope they rise up to remove their corrupt legislators who
were bribed and coerced to pass this bad legislation, and
hopefully, in time, like Iowa, they will pass a Constitutional
Amendment to define marriage as a relationship between
ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN.
Hint: you don't get to say what makes OTHER PEOPLE
suffer. I believe that gay marriage is causing a lot of
suffering, if nothing else, simply in the way it is fracturing
society, and harming the Democratic party, and might result
(again) in Republican wins, because the Democrats are
(again) so vested in a social issue they can't see the forest for
the trees and reveal they are woefully out of touch with the
public.
(And Beans: the reason YOU DON'T CARE is you don't have
kids, so you don't care about the future. For you, it's all
about YOU, and your lefty creds. If you have to sell out the
rest of humanity for that, it's A-OK with you.) (_bigguns)
-----
I continually post the anti-religion screeds here back to
places like the Jewish ADL and NOM and other faith-based
3519
organizations that wish to protect ACTUAL religious

freedom -- not just demean any people who believe, in favor
of lefty social policy. (_bigguns)
Pixie play
Laurel/_bigguns believes that legalizing gay marriage is a VERY BIG
step towards the end of civilization. Fundamentally what it does,
according to Laurel, is weaken the ethical bedrock which not just
strong marriages but civilization are/is build on -- sacrifice,
selflessness/other-concern, duty; promoting instead instant, nixie-
pixie whimsical gratification, whose aerial insubstantialness is to be
understood as finally reaching the higher plane. You combat it, and
you become rightwing -- even if your entire past has been a voting
record of middle-of-the-way, steady-as-she-goes democrats; but she
takes on the burden -- truly -- mostly out of faith to goodness -- to
you -- anyway.
Others believe Laurel/_bigguns probably isn't aware of how her
defence of marriage is mostly based on a distaste, a repulsion for gays
-- something she reveals, so believeth they, starkly, in near
essentializing gay "relationships" as two people so self-involved that
basically no intertwining, no relationship! ever takes place. They
believe that only at some level does Laurel believe homosexuality is
gene-determined, for everywhere in her portrayal of them does she
show she most deeply believes them spoiled, laggard second sons,
pursuing lifestyles of horse-gambling, drink, and excess, permitted,
enabled only because the responsible first sons committed themselves
to expected duty: she shows them as if irresponsibly choosing a
lifestyle, which if made legit, the norm, means the end of historical
cycle in a wild party of excess. They believe she thinks that promoting
gay marriage is like putting the fool in charge of the rightful king, the
self-involved stewart in place of the rightful king of Gondor: it makes
no longer tolerable our already suspect and stretched tolerance for
the dependent, babyish, hangers-on. They think she is mostly saying
that gays themselves are not okay, have too long been tolerated, that
3520
she inspires real hatred towards them, and therefore loudly let her
know what scum she is.
What this is really about is about how the next twenty years of
depression suffering is going to gets its first five or so years underway,
without liberals feeling compelled to do much to get in its way. If
you're still pushing for such things as gay marriage, you're fighting for
good, for progress, even though the country has most truly slipped
while under your sway. Once the depression is all there is, sane
"voices" like Paul Krugman's made into absurd douches, then many of
the liberals who used gay marriage to disassociate themselves from
the cementation of more important, larger "struggles," will show how
they've really come to think of gays, and there will be rather fewer
people disagreeing with Laurel than there currently now are. The
problem for Laurel will be holding back the inclination to imagine
Jews in the same fashion she imagines gays: there is a sense that in
her lambasting of gay marriage, of suspect, civilization-weakening
inclinations -- self-involvement, parasitism -- she should be reporting
herself to Jewish authorities.
-----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston:
Are child molesters "gene-determined" in your learned
opinion? (Jake007)
@Jake007
Re: Are child molesters "gene-determined" in your learned opinion?
No. They're sufferers of child-abuse/molestation/incest, just like all
conservative Christians. Children who've been abused end up
possessing voices, parental alters, in their heads, which tell them they
deserved the abuse -- a near life-saving measure, for it allows them to
believe that those they were and still are most dependent on, i.e., their
parents; their mothers especially -- weren't so much intent to hate
and hurt them but to do what needed to be done to help them; that
they've been bad, simply for being weak, needy, and vulnerable, and
3521
seek out throughout their lives weak dependents -- people like

themselves -- to victimize/punish for their own dependency and
innocence. For their being truly innocent, they are sinful, and mostly
deserving of punishment: this is the "logic"/"truth" that drives pretty
much the whole lives of conservative Christians and child-molesters.
That seems like an over-generalization

Not every child molester (or conservative Christian) was
molested as a child.
Thanks for your answer though : ) (Jake007)
@jake007
You're welcome, Jake. I hear you, but please note that I however do
not think I'm over-generalizing: I truly believe what I said.
-----
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston
You know, Patrick, I honestly think you write sincerely, but
you are so obtuse that I often literally can't tell what you
mean or how to respond to you. But I'll try to answer your
allegations.
• I do not have any distaste whatsoever for gays or lesbians.
I am not repulsed by them. I am not "squicked out" by gay
sex (or anal sex). I know a fair number of gay people -- at the
risk of sounding trite, it is FACT that some are among my
oldest friends. I also have gay family members. They all
know me to be tolerant and polite.
• There is no "one kind" of gay relationship, as human beings
are all different and have different kinds of pair bonds. I
know quiet private gay people and I know colorful
flamboyant gay people, and many degrees in between. I do
not believe in stereotypes.
• I certainly believe that gay people have "intertwined"
relationships. I do NOT believe all gay people are spoiled
3522
(any more than I think all straight people are pillars of

moral virtue). The stuff about "horse gambling" (????) and
drink are too ridiculous to even refute.
• I have voted (or supported) the candidacies of local gay
politicians, and worked for gay bosses. I have no problem
with gay people. GET OVER your pathetic stereotypes.
• In point of fact, the only really hateful, malevolent scum-
like gay people are the ones I have met HERE ON SALON,
who insist on attacking and threatening ANYONE who
opposes their views.
• The economic recession (or depression) is not related to gay
marriage; however I am increasingly appalled that many of
the brightest and most potentially effective political entities
of our generation are throwing themselves 100% at
legalizing gay marriage, while seemingly not caring that we
are actively losing the right to women's reproductive
freedom -- that global warming is worsening daily -- that
the economy IS in the toilet -- that we still don't have
universal health care coverage for all Americans. Frankly, I
believe they have thrown all those PROGRESSIVE (and
liberal) issues under the bus in order to have gay marriage
legalized as many places as they can.
• I've got NO idea what "Jewish authorities" you think I
should be "reporting myself to". Judaism is not, as you
apparently imagine, some kind of secret society where you
take a blood oath to uphold certain specific beliefs, and
where I will be punished or ostracized for what I talk about
in public. I don't imagine gay people as anything but human
beings, with the same concerns, fears and emotions as I have
-- and the same is true for Jews. We aren't some strange
exotic "other race" and frankly, I wonder about YOU, Patrick
that you think I will be "punished" by some secret Jewish
cabal for failing to support any particular agenda.
(_bigguns)
3523
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston: just read your follow up

letter to Jake
And I'm sorry I even bothered to respond to you.
You are a very VERY sick person.
ALL Christians are child molesters? Yeah, that sure is
REASONABLE. Can you PROVE any of that?
Since 80% of the US population is Christian, and even more
years ago, that would make almost every child a victim of
molestation. Which is absurd.
Your insane hatred of Christians pretty much renders
anything you say to be utter, crazy nonsense -- like "lunatic
naked guy screaming in the bus depot" crazy. Like "tin foil
hat to block the alien thought control" crazy.
No wonder you think "Jews have a secret cabal that punishes
people who speak out!" -- YIKES.
I hope there is someone who loves you enough to have you
declared mentally incompetent and put away in an asylum
for your own good. (_bigguns)
_bigguns/laurel
Re: No wonder you think "Jews have a secret cabal that punishes
people who speak out!" -- YIKES.
You have taken to LOUDLY pointing out how you're reporting
instances of anti-semitism on these threads to some-or-another
watch-groups -- that was what I was referring to.
I've said before that if America turns homophobic, not just
homosexuals but Jews will find themselves under threat. The point
will be to go against anything that isn't pure, and neither group is
secure from being imagined this way. I will defend both groups, from
peoples intent on projecting their own unwanted selves onto them,
from demonizing them. I am too reasonable, too sane, to convince
anyone actually fairly attending that I believe in cabals (the real
power is always in the masses -- the middle classes, especially: in fact
3524
so much so that if we get a society full of rich-cats and bundled

masses it's because the masses want it so: it plays to their feeling so
punishment-worthy, only poverty and being actively discriminated
against can work to shore up their sense of possessing any
innocence), and when you are more so, unless you still remain
insistant on buttressing frankly rightwing conceptions of tradition
and authority, you will know that I am hardly someone you should
disparage, Laurel.
_bigguns/Laurel
Re: In point of fact, the only really hateful, malevolent scum-like gay
people are the ones I have met HERE ON SALON, who insist on
attacking and threatening ANYONE who opposes their views.
You do work to essentialize gay relationships as less serious than
heterosexual ones; you do work to make heterosexual relationships
seem where the important stuff of civilization -- what amounts to the
bedrock: duty, selflessness, commitment -- takes place. I stand by my
assertion that you work to make homosexuals in general -- not just
the (quote-unquote) scum-like ones you are afflicted with here --
seem, at best, not serious: as, I've suggested, spoiled second sons, not
especially taken to duty or purposeful labor. Parasites.
Re: The economic recession (or depression) is not related to gay
marriage; however I am increasingly appalled that many of the
brightest and most potentially effective political entities of our
generation are throwing themselves 100% at legalizing gay
marriage, while seemingly not caring that we are actively losing the
right to women's reproductive freedom -- that global warming is
worsening daily -- that the economy IS in the toilet -- that we still
don't have universal health care coverage for all Americans.
Frankly, I believe they have thrown all those PROGRESSIVE (and
liberal) issues under the bus in order to have gay marriage legalized
as many places as they can.
I said something of the same in my post; I am curious to know why
you didn't refer to it. Anyway, the reason is because focusing on gay
3525
marriage for awhile keeps them away from looking at women, at

mothers (when they're thinking gay marriage, they don't so much
have in mind lesbians) -- even many liberals, as evidenced by how
they winced at notable-pelvic Hillary as possible president, have
sympathy-worthy mother troubles. Attending to women's
reproductive issues now would have them essentially staring straight
on at the Vulva; and you don't have to be gay-turned to already have
significant issues arisen from already having known too much of that!
They stare straight at the anti-woman/mother, the gay, and allow the
destruction of whole social programs to take place by their side,
widespread misery, so to wedge themselves some safety while
showing they agree that the American populace, for being so selfish
and therefore insufficiently MOTHER-ATTENDANT, deserve the
angry wrath inspired from awesome neglect of suffering and
punishment.
P.S.
You assert that I hate Christians ... Personally, I think that though you
are quick you write too fast and reflect nowhere near enough: please
explain how someone who asserts that conservative Christians are
people who have suffered from child-abuse, is likely to be someone
who obviously must just HATE, HATE, HATE them. Surely I am,
despite my insanity/astonishing delusionment, someone who is
actually likely to be OFFENDED when people make war with them,
indulge them with YET MORE abuse -- it's the truth; I am; and isn't it
really the more likely?
-----
Jake007
Re: Whether you want to believe it or not, you are over-
generalizing, in at least one regard. My wife and I are conservative
Christians -- and so are our four children -- and none of us were
molested as a child. Maybe we are the only six in the world, but
that's still six more than zero : )
Well, you're a "conservative" Christian who is at ease discussing
3526
civilly, familiarly, at a largely liberal website. Further, you seem good-

humored and loving: since you're surely a fount of inspiration and
growth, I am hardly mostly interested in showing how ill a person
you've become owing to your background, and more in mind to clarify
what I mean by "conservative." Very best to you.
re: Imagine the uproar here if I stated that all homosexuals were
molested as children?
A conservative Christian can expect to get in real trouble over this;
the liberal but psychoanalyticaly-inclined can most likely expect to
simply be ignored -- 40 years out of date, and all: they REALLY ARE
beyond the pale. : )
I'll wait for your definition of "conservative" then.

In the meantime, let's review:
I asked "Are child molesters 'gene-determined' in your
learned opinion?"
You answered "No. They're sufferers of child-
abuse/molestation/incest, just like all conservative
Christians."
Unless "conservative" is now being (re-)defined by you as
anyone who sufferered child-abuse/molestation/incest, I
would submit that you are proveably wrong. (Jake007)
Jake007
Okay Jake: yes, if you do not find natural kinship with liberals and
find it instead with conservative Christians, then GUARANTEED you
have suffered from child-abuse, from mother-neglect/misuse -- every
conservative embodies their early trauma, even the inventive,
charming ones (we saw more of them in the '60s and '70s, when
everyone was inflated to be essentially more liberal, more permissive
-- witness the William F. Buckleys); every liberal, more evidently,
their early good treatment and care.
There are no "six exceptions." I was playing to the part of you that is
3527
good, that aspires, not interested in simply sinking you into reject.
Are we really now further along?
Patrick, that is just plain nuts

Okay Jake: yes, if you do not find natural kindship with
liberals, and find it instead with conservative Christians,
then GUARANTTED you have suffered from child-abuse,
from mother-neglect/misuse . . .
Enough with your dime store psychoanalyzing! You do that
often in these letters pages to people you do not know at all,
and it's offensive and ridiculous.
People like Jake can be conservative, Christian or otherwise,
without having suffered childhood abuse. They simply have a
different general set of moral and ethical outlooks than
liberals, but personally, as a liberal atheist, I can find common
ground with conservative Christians on all sorts of issues.
(And no, I did not suffer childhood abuse either).
(Beans&Greens)
Freud and friends

Re: Enough with your dime store psychoanalyzing! You do that
often in these letters pages to people you do not know at all, and it's
offensive and ridiculous.
What type do you prefer? I'm not sure how posh Freud is, but do you
really mean to suggest his lust-for-the-mother thing would be okay
with you, simply for its essentially-the-same content being more
thought-out and refined? What I mean is, next time, leave out the
"dime store": your problem is simply with non-tepid, non-apologetic,
plain psychoanalysis. I know we haven't caught much sight of it since
the '70s past on, but you were around then.
People like Jake can be conservative, Christian or otherwise,
without having suffered childhood abuse. They simply have a
different general set of moral and ethical outlooks than liberals
To be conservative you have to like, find companionship with, other
3528
conservatives. Please look again at the lot of them, and ask yourself a
little harder how, if you're perfectly sane, even if you agree with their
opinions you still wouldn't be drawn to hang out with the kids at the
other table, who, despite their heresies, don't carry so much the all-
too-apparent stink of having known much neglect. The sanest
conservatives -- who, I still argue, are still a significant step behind
the sanest liberals -- are those who are more or less aloof from the
party, often truly, surprising, family-centered: witness Ron Paul, and
the twin douches, Tucker and Brooks.
Re: but personally, as a liberal atheist, I can find common ground
with conservative Christians on all sorts of issues. (And no, I did not
suffer childhood abuse either).
Prediction: 5 years from now you won't suggest any such thing: for
well-raised/loved/praise-worthingly self-satisfied you will mostly be
keeping your head, while the regression-prone, primarily DENIED --
conservatives, rightwingers -- will, through their inevitable
regressions, show more starkly the nature of their actual
"inspiration."
For some of us the evidence is ample; we indeed shake our heads that
self-satisfaction, good living, has also lead to people like you so
wanting others themselves to be full of life, that you place it squarely
there despite it being mostly a slight, there-then-absent, kindle. There
can be problems with being good-hearted, if it still means that if for
being without sufficient suspicion, you've left yourself so that if you
actually begin to suspect your opponent has something more a
problem with them than just a well-considered but ultimately
incorrect world view, s/he must then be demonic. Why not get to your
Freud now, to save yourself the self-hate that will come from the
name-calling, other-cruelty you'll ultimately otherwise find yourself
inevitably partaking in?
Moronic
Okay Jake: yes, if you do not find natural kindship with
liberals, and find it instead with conservative Christians,
3529
then GUARANTTED you have suffered from child-abuse,

from mother-neglect/misuse -- every conservative embodies
their early trauma, even the inventive, charming ones (we
saw more of them in the '60s and '70s, when everyone was
inflated to be essentially more liberal, more permissive --
witness the William F. Buckleys); every liberal, more
evidently, their early good treatment and care.
There are no "six exceptions." I was playing to the part of
you that is good, that aspires, not interested in simply
sinking you into reject. Are we really now further along?
Just moronic. Even from someone who generally despises the
mouthbreathing drooling right this is just idiotic.
May I remind you that in our parents day it was considered
impolite to discuss politics and religion (the longer I live the
more I realize they knew what they were doing). In fact it
wasn't until the 90's where am radio blowhards made it
popular to spout about politics and be proud of being a
misinformed ignoramus.
Thus, throughout history politics was not any sort of litmus
test for friendships and among many people they still aren't.
Imagine that. (atyourthroat)
@atyourthroat
Re: May I remind you that in our parents day it was considered
impolite to discuss politics and religion (the longer I live the more I
realize they knew what they were doing). In fact it wasn't until the
90's where am radio blowhards made it popular to spout about
politics and be proud of being a misinformed ignoramus.
Thus, throughout history politics was not any sort of litmus test for
friendships and among many people they still aren't.
I think there are periods of time throughout history where everyone is
more in mind to count themselves amongst people rather than go at
one-anothers' throats, and I think our parents did know a good
stretch of such times -- as I've said, as many have noted, a few
3530
decades back everyone, even the conservatives, for example, seemed

permissive -- liberal. I think you're right to favor those times, and to
disparage the '90s on (I would go earlier, and disparage the late '70s
on), but still think politics IS a litmus test for friendship -- you can
know what KIND of person someone is, if you know the kinds of
voices they find familiarity with.
Pity you didn't bring up the fact that once the all-'round good feeling
for being prosperous and American died down (i.e., our parents'
time), the left left for the coast and the right stayed fly-over: when
actual personality-differences became more inflated, more tabled, the
different-of-opinion no longer much wanted to remain close enough
to one another for there to be any point finding out the politics of
your dinner guests. That is, it wasn't mostly about economic class, but
about how your neighbor "smelled."
@Patrick McAvoy-Halston
"Prediction: 5 years from now you won't suggest any such
thing: for well-raised/loved/praise-worthingly self-satisfied
you will mostly be keeping your head, while the regression-
prone, primarily DENIED -- conservatives, rightwingers --
will, through their inevitable regressions, show more starkly
the nature of their actual "inspiration."
Well, I remember one insight from Freud: he pointed to "the
narcissism of small differences."You seem to be seeing a Black
and White opposition (scarred conservative Christians vs.
enlightened liberals) that isn't there.
Now, it's true that Michelle Bachmann and I, for instance, see
the world quite differently. But in the big picture, our
ideological difference is a tension *within* modern Western
liberalism (in the broad sense). She's a lawyer; she and her
husband own a private therapy practice; she's a *woman*
holding political office, for goodness sake. She's running for
US president!
In my opinion, Bachmann is who she is because she is modern
3531
*and* reactionary. Her worldview is one kind of adaptation to

the uncertainty of our current modern predicament; my
progressive adaptation (as a middle-aged female professional,
like Bachmann, but one who turns to the left rather than the
right) is another.
She's not my opposite. And she hardly offers proof of
childhood abuse just because she takes an extremist reaction
to the contemporary world. (Benthead)
@benthead
Re: Now, it's true that Michelle Bachmann and I, for instance, see
the world quite differently. But in the big picture, our ideological
difference is a tension *within* modern Western liberalism (in the
broad sense). She's a lawyer; she and her husband own a private
therapy practice; she's a *woman* holding political office, for
goodness sake. She's running for US president!
In my opinion, Bachmann is who she is because she is modern *and*
reactionary. Her worldview is one kind of adaptation to the
uncertainty of our current modern predicament; my progressive
adaptation (as a middle-aged female professional, like Bachmann,
but one who turns to the left rather than the right) is another.
She's not my opposite. And she hardly offers proof of childhood
abuse just because she takes an extremist reaction to the
contemporary world.
We see Bachmann differently. For one, I think you flatter her by
saying she, like you, actually SEES things, is responding, however
differently, to still the exact same plate of stimuli. Look at her eyes --
do they really seem properly focused, absent of gremlins dancing in
her view, to you? I also don't think she so much has a worldview as an
aggressively felt need to hurt as many innocent people as possible --
something that arises, in my judgment, only from having known
ample abuse and being unable to free yourself from feeling it well
deserved. The prevalence of people with similarly insufficient
childhoods is what has ensured that after a long period of prosperity
3532
we find ourselves in a situation worthy of seeming simply a

confounding predicament, apparently worthy of all kinds of, if not
reasonable, certainly still understandable responses, even extreme
ones: if so many of us didn't at our core believe ourselves still very
bad children that deserve punishment, be sure the good American,
more or less uncomplicated groove would simply have continued on.
We all -- but mostly people like Bachmann -- ENSURED this
predicament came to be.
Still the good, the sane, remain: You're likely not an adaption but a
REMINDER of where we once were before we DECIDED it time to go
off track. This, I judge, will become more apparent to you, miss
professional bent-in-the-head.
Link: The man behind the marriage vow (Salon)

---------
WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 2011

Claiming your armchair
Wether in need of examples to bolster the fight for same-sex

marriage or boost one's spirits in the face of disillusioning
high-profile failures of monogamous marriage, one need only
look to Judith Stacey.
The sociology professor at New York University is something
of an expert on alternatives, having spent more than a decade
studying everything from "monogamish" arrangements
among gay men in California to polygamy in South Africa to
nonmonogamous, matriarchal households in southwest
China.
[. . .]
She isn't recommending a break from tradition for everyone

3533
and, while she may have utopist leanings, she doesn't actually
expect Americans to suddenly reject amorous restriction in
favor of free love. She just wants people to be a little more
honest, with themselves and their partners, about what they
want and need -- regardless of whether that's a "Big Love"-
esque arrangement or strict sexual exclusivity. In that sense,
she falls right in line with Dan Savage who preached about the
same ideal of romantic truthfulness in a much-talked-about
piece in last weekend's New York Times Magazine. (Tracy
Clark-Flory, “Scouring the globe for sex advice,” Salon, 9 July
2011)
There is no way that Judith Stacey was going to look at other

"cultures" and find anything actually mostly sickly. No matter what
she found there, you know all she would allow herself to see was
variation we can learn from. This is not a person who is going to learn
much from experience because experience is under the control of her
expectations -- or rather more precisely, of her INTENTIONS. She is
not an armchair anthropologist/sociologist, but something worse:
someone whose truths suffer not from not actually being there, but
from mostly being there to entrench her a more comfortable claim to
her armchair.
Other "cultures" essentially are now mostly spiritual places in which
liberal anthropologists draw mana to inflate their own privilege and
deflect the masses. You are there to collect a predictable resource. It's
not about learning, science, but recharging and sacred rite.
I think at this point, most of us actually sense this -- even many

liberals who go along with her. What she offers are "truths" that can
be expected to irritate monogamy-worshipping mundanes -- you can
hear their shreaks while you soberly lay out your arguments;
ostensibly blunt truths that ACTUALLY SEEM, that MOSTLY
SCREAM transcendent ideals rather than fact. Grounded in to-the-
earth anthropology, but the point is to make one feel afloat and
3534
removed. "Yes, these conclusions are actually completely untethered

to reality; but since they give such ground for authority, we are
nevertheless ably existing amidst them. Alas, not so with you, my
friend. And note, if we catch sight of you, know that we know we
possess the art to abstract you out or to obliterate you within a quick
massing of your ignorances and prejudices."
@_bigguns, @Patrick McEvoy-Halston

_bigguns:
Totally.
And your excerpt regarding her "fact-free exposition" - I
almost pulled that one myself. Great minds think alike! Or
sane ones.
Speaking of examples from the animal kingdom, a good friend
of mine studied physical anthropology in the 80's. She told me
how in the late 80's, all of a sudden, all of the animals became
gay. In other words, the Leftists began to use zoology to
support the gay agenda. "Oh, look, two male bonobos are
fucking, that must mean that we are all gay!"
Patrick McEvoy-Halston:
You nailed it.
-------------------------------------
Salon has become a parody of itself. This is a very strange
phenomenon, but I now come to Salon Letters for the same
reason that I used to come to Salon - for stimulating
conversation, and new and interesting ideas, and insights.
None of that comes from Salon staff anymore. Instead, Salon
staff writes the stupidest, most insane bullshit this side of
Lenin, and the readers contribute interesting, insightful,
stimulating conversation. It's like sitting at a table with world-
class chefs at McDonalds, poring over McRib sandwiches and
Big Macs. Oh, how these burgers could be so much better! (An
expert)
3535
Link: Scouring the globe for sex advice (Salon)
---------

Stuck in an elevator, with Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins, the atheist almighty, has in a fury thrown

some rhetorical thunderbolts at someone he disagrees with.
This wouldn't be in the least bit surprising except for the fact
that his disagreement isn't over the existence of a higher being
or the significance of religion. No, he's pissed off that a female
atheist has dared to complain about unwanted advances from
a male nonbeliever.
It all started with a video blog from Rebecca Watson, founder
of Skepchick, about her experience at an atheist conference
last month in Dublin. She participated in a panel in which she
talked about the problem of sexism among atheists, and the
rape threats she had received from men in the community
who don't agree with her. Importantly, Dawkins was on the
panel and the guy who went on to hit on her was in the
audience. Afterward, she went to the hotel bar with
conference-goers until 4 a.m., when she told everyone that she
was tired and wanted to go to bed. A male attendee followed
her out of the bar and into the elevator, where he said, "Don't
take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I
would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel
room for coffee?" This is what she had to say about the
encounter:
Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don't do that.

You know, I don't really know how else to explain how
this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just
3536
sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know,

in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator,
with you, just you, and -- don't invite me back to your
hotel room right after I finish talking about how it
creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when
men sexualize me in that manner.
That's all. It took up just over a minute of an 8-minute-long

video. She didn't call for the man to be castrated or claim to be
a victim of great injustice; all she expressed was that his
overture made her feel "incredibly uncomfortable," and that
guys should generally avoid doing that. "That" being 1) hitting
on a woman after she has gone to great lengths to explain why
she doesn't want to be sexualized within the atheist
community, and 2) ignoring her remark that she is tired and
just wants to go to bed. PZ Myers, a biologist who pens the
bookmark-worthy skeptics blog Pharyngula, wrote a post
about it and then Dawkins himself -- the rock star of atheism
-- waded into the comments thread with a satirical letter
addressed to a Muslim woman:
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your
genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and ... yawn ...
don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to
drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a
male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat
you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit
adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the
suffering your poor American sisters have to put up
with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself
Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her?
A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room
for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He
3537
invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she

said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but
even so...
Who knew Dawkins had such flair for creative writing -- and
for being a dick? OK, so, many people had already concluded
the latter from his atheistic pomp -- but, being an arrogant
nonbeliever myself, I resisted such a reading of him until now.
He's of course correct that there are much worse things going
on in the world, but that's a crap rhetorical move meant to
belittle and silence. It's an argument that could be easily made
against Dawkins' own work: Why are you arguing over
whether God exists while children are starving in Africa.
[. . .]
He went on to make fun of Watson's defenders who have
pointed out that she was "stuck" in the elevator with the man,
whom she hasn't directly spoken with until then: "No escape?
I am now really puzzled. Here's how you escape from an
elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently
provided."
Clearly, Dawkins has never experienced what it's like to carry
around the fear of sexual assault, as most women do on some
level. Myers helpfully explains why fear in this particular
situation would be understandable: "Try googling 'elevator
rape'. [. . .] All that said, though, it actually sounds like
Watson didn't feel threatened by the man, only creeped out.
Remember: All Watson did was briefly call out a behavior that
made her uncomfortable; and later, she criticized the outsized
anger she received in response to that original aside. (Tracy
Clark-Flory, “Richard Dawkins: Skeptic of Women,”
Salon, 8 July 2011)
Felling good men

His problem is that he is healthy enough to be attracted to literate,
3538
liberal women; ones who, yes, have shown some hurt -- it's not quite
equal terms -- you can imagine yourself soothing, but who certainly
aren't defined by it. If he was retrograde and went for a social class we
are as a whole a bit ambivalent if maybe they don't actually DESERVE
their whatever afflictions -- like waitresses, barmaids, clerks -- he'd of
had to have had a whole line-up of them, AND been in a social
position where we've decided we'd had enough of his saintliness and
wanted to see downed for at least a bit, before anyone would care: in
fact, he'd been seen as doing something of a required social service:
reminding the lowly of just how low and humiliation-deserving they
are.
Dawkins is a very good man. A very strong man, of the kind, like Paul
Krugman, that frustrate people who actually want to submerge
themselves in a regressed mental state, without any sane "external"
present to remind them of their actually quite sickly inclinations. If
Dawkins is downed here, the message is out: time for other legendary,
larger-than-life, ostensibly "pompous" boomer types like Roger Ebert
and Krugman, whose unchecked self-assurance and self-esteem we
have long been getting irritated at but couldn't see downed previously
owing to our dependency on their strength, to be waylayed. This will
be oh so easy to do: because their first inclination has never been to
do safely within what society has deemed okay: they actually have the
temerity to lead, to follow their largely good impulses, unchecked.
I think you're possibly broken, Tracy. A liberal, probably like the
afflicted writer here, assured to do well because there won't be much
true resistance "there." You'll help take down actual good men,
leaving those who know how to tend your needs in ways you find
immediately satisfying, but are quite sinister. You'd take down those
few around who could actually lift you up.
It was probably to the writer's discredit that she DIDN'T take him up
on his offer. Someone should write an article about that.
-----
DAWKINS MUST GET REJECTED A LOT

3539
Looking fromn the photo at how geeky Dawkins is I'm certain

he's had to deal with a lifetime of rejections by women. Guys
like him who gain a position where they can lash back often
times take the opportunity to do so with gusto.
Dawkins obviously harbors many years of resentment towards
women and his angry over-reaction against this woman
reflects all of that pent up hurt. It explains his juvenile
behavior, but it does NOT excuse it.
Time for Dawkins to grow up & man up! (Ramparts)
@ramparts
re: Looking fromn the photo at how geeky Dawkins is I'm certain
he's had to deal with a lifetime of rejections by women. Guys like
him who gain a position where they can lash back often times take
the opportunity to do so with gusto.
Dawkins obviously harbors many years of resentment towards
women and his angry over-reaction against this woman reflects all
of that pent up hurt. It explains his juvenile behavior, but it does
NOT excuse it.
Salon picked an unflattering photo -- it wanted to make sport of this

good man. At some point, be assured, it will do the same to other
good men -- or as it'll make them seem, "douches" -- like Krugman
and Ebert. Any ebullient, more-or-less happy baby-boomer who
stands as an irritant to this age which wants fundamentally bullied
people -- like smoker, lack-of-affect Obama -- to serve as its lords, its
"allowance" of how jolly and self-satisfied you're allowed to be, can
expect to be disposed for some kind of inexcusable behavior. I've said
before that eventually it's going to happen here to former Salon editor
Joan Walsh, and that friends of hers, people like TCF, are going to
find themselves torn between the good part of themselves that wants
to support her and the bad part of them that is telling them she
deserves her fall for pretending to so damned much! (TCF, though
less enthusiastically than MEW, will of course ultimately lapse to the
3540
dark side.)
My guess is that Dawkins scared this woman because she's not used
to close encounters with mostly EMOTIONALLY MATURE men; not
so much geeks, but their opposite. His goodness and openess and
genuine interest in her company made him an alien species (it really
could have been coffee and conversation; he does have some issues,
but he's mostly actually sensitive to your discomfort, your prefences,
and a gentleman). It is precisely the fact that there was amazingly no
stalkerness about him, even with all the 4 am-alone-in-an-elevator-
in-a-strange-country-after-spooky-stories-and-rape-talk stuff, that
bothered, that scared her. (She likely threw in "foreign country" to
provision more armory in her war against her own self-knowledge of
his fundamental innocence and her own inquisition-worthy
skittishness.) He's too much the person she could only dream of
being; she knows at some level she runs away from exactly what she
should be more inclined -- at least -- to close with; and she felt need
to humiliate him for making bare what she does not want to face
about herself.
He lashed out at her because he knows she is one to ENTIRELY
DISPOSE of someone, if need be, just to rid herself of some
discomfort. She's the "Atonement" girl who'll never cue herself to
grow up, because we keep telling her how marvelously brave and
evolved she is, and she feels so shallowly constituted that her only
option is to listen.
-----
Oops!
Well, I've just learned that Dawkins was not the "accoster." I so
assumed it I blurred my way through the evidence. I took this as a
prompt to actually watch the video as well.
So my guess is now that she was not attracted to this guy; she was
repulsed by him -- and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out he was
a creepy, because I suspect he is the kind of guy who is perhaps
3541
foremost attracted to victimizable women: people like Rebecca, who

communicates in her every exaggerated kick-ass gesture that the
world foremost is a threat to her.
Seeing the video, is it possible to imagine Dawkins being attracted to
her? I would say actually a bit yes. Even though I stand by my
assessment of him as MOSTLY well-souled and mature, there's
enough of the hurt geek in his well-expanded-upon personality (as
there is in other wondrous "douches," like Ebert and Krugman) to be
drawn to pretty, clearly-vulnerable coltish women, charmingly
making every effort to insist themselves all grown up. If he had, she
would have spurned him, but not as effortlessly just lambasted him --
even with him being a married man and all. She's kinda the "Girl who
kicked the Hornet's Nest," and he's the man she's never really known
who'd, not only mostly do no harm, but mostly provision the
opposite.
In any event ... The most important thing to note IS that it is likely
time for good-souled baby-boomers to take their fall (it is appropriate
that this guy mostly remain anonymous, and Dawkins to stand out so
for our accosting). Their well-being and self-satisfaction makes them
an affront to our consolidating Depression mindset; serves as a
reminder of the kind of tasty goods whose eager partaking, foremost
doomed us. Rebecca and her ilk can accuse and destroy because
establishments know they can just assume them, just so long as they
ensure they can go about their ostensibly righteous destruction
against ostensibly horribly-empowered opponents without reprisals;
with ample evidence of the prowess of their firm refutation of
misogyny. When they "fightback," their opponents will only be let
known their defeat: for this repeated satisfaction, Rebecca and her ilk
will, unlike their feminist predecessors, unlike people like Joan Walsh
and Geraldine Ferraro, will only now be slaves of the establishment.
The man was creepy and not "creepy," because you all are to know
that if you get in the way of people like her, you will be managed so
that we have every right to go after you -- the only important point is
that you stood in her way. We're not about journalism or fairness, but
3542
prejudgment, reality-creation, and executing the sentence. This isn't a

time for fairness, but about wholy hypocritical and completely
unthwarted exercise of power. We'll all be food for "it," and it's all we
deserve.
Why are people bothered by "creepy"?

Why is this woman being attacked for calling a guy creepy?
It's not like she said "HE'S A RAPIST!" or "HOW DARE HE!"
She was just saying that after a talking about how unwanted
those types of approaches are all day it was kind of
disheartening and sort of creepy to be hit on in an elevator.
(M.Fast)
@M.Fast
People are objecting to "creepy" because we're all hearing the word
applied now, not in service to precision and fact, but to communicate
that what we're up to is not really so much a matter of conversation
but about repeatedly cuing how we're LONG past the point of debate
and simply into the execution of sentence. Those out there who fit
well with tyranny -- and decimated specimens, warped, insecure
feminists like Rebecca do because they can be purchased so easily by
guaranteeing them satisfying reprisals to male enemies (and their
stupid, servile female defenders) that will never stop making their
appearance -- increasingly intuit that they will be given unchecked
license to "resolve" every inner tension by unleashing wrath upon
deserving "victims," and are cuing us all to this fact while enjoying
their practice run -- their first exercise completely outside restraint --
by applying the word "creepy" to near every man in sight. As they
grow more sure, the usage might well lessen, but each use will spell
out more doom.
Link: Richard Dawkins: Skeptic of Women (Salon)

---------
3543
FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2011

Why, unlike Finland, here we torture kids and teachers
When I heard the news last week that the Department of

Education is aiming to subject 4-year-olds to high-stakes
testing, all I could do was shake my head in disbelief and
despondently mutter a slightly altered riff off "The Big
Lebowski's" Walter Sobchak.
Four-year-olds, dude.
[. . .]
Finland's story, recounted in the new documentary "The

Finland Phenomenon," is particularly striking. According to
Harvard's Tony Wagner, the country's modernization
campaign in the 1970s included a "transforming of the
preparation and selection of future teachers."
"What has happened since is that teaching has become the
most highly esteemed profession [in Finland]," says Wagner,
who narrates the film. "There is no domestic testing ...
because they have created such a high level of
professionalism, they can trust their teachers."
[. . .]
Where Finland rejects testing, nurtures teachers, and

encourages its best and brightest to become educators, we
fetishize testing, portray teachers as evil parasites, and
financially encourage top students to become Wall Streeters.
(David Sirota, “Testing 4 year olds isn’t the answer,” Salon, 8
July 2011)
Why
The obvious reason, as stated by a previous poster, is that we do not
3544
sufficiently love our kids. We still send them to school to humiliate

them, abandon them to testing that will tell them that what they are
are all potential misfits that need to be kept under constant, if distant,
surveillance and control. We like them this way: a whole nation of
little Big Macs, so still inherently sloven, slacking and ill-defined we
have just cause to round them up and send them off to war or prison
or low-paid assistants-to-aging-boomers life-long servitude, without
much accord for their rights as affirmed human beings.
Some people in this country have experienced the long and slow
growth in empathy that can happen when one generation of mothers
gives to their daughters slightly more empathic treatment than they
themselves received. These type would make teaching the most
respected occupation. Others have grown not at all; are barbarians;
and if left to their own would make education nothing but a lengthy
series of humiliations and hurts, and life would be for their children
mostly about recovering from hurts, not generating anything exciting
and new. "Society" would sit still for milleniums, which was the case
for our earliest ancestors, who had just barely arisen from the muck,
and true kindness had not yet come in the universe.
We do not respect teachers, but we make our ivy-league professors
into old-world gods. We cannot allow teachers full respect because
that would make us truly in spirit democratic, which we aren't
comfortable with because it puts ultimate authority, ultimate
responsibility, too close to home. We sense that our own psychic
makeup is such a disorded mess that we need institutions, distant
bankers, ivory-tower professors, removed presidents, up high enough
to not have their truly mundane status revealed to us on an ongoing
basis, to keep Chaos at bay. Teachers, despite an earnest attempt to
armor them with professional status, we make seem as now but older
examples of the inadequate kids they teach, as a reminder of what
inevitably happens to you when you keep kids so close: you get
leached upon, you get contaminated. They, like the kids they teach,
are inevitably lost, and so schools become garbage bins into which we
can project and contain our own vile hatred and blame-worthy
3545
insufficiency, which serves the purpose of getting rid of it and

pressing in the contaminants that the school as institution may yet
need help in enclosing.
Our society has been bad, and we seek its punishment. The worst part
of our story isn't that Big Business is really just an agent to
accomplish the suffering we feel we as a society deserve, it is that
liberals have decided that the problem will only rest with them and
other elites -- a fiction the poor can actually live with, actually WANT,
because they've known since birth that respite is only possible by
placating angry, little you-despising gods.
Link: Testing 4 year olds isn’t the answer (Salon)
---------
TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2011

Bears and werewolves
Flash-forward 10 years. The current economy has me once

again relying on eggs as a major source of protein, but this
time I have a few advantages: improved cooking skills,
superior cooking equipment, the inclination to supplement
my diet with foraged ingredients, the beginnings of a garden
and a better source of eggs, which means eggs that are lower
in cholesterol and higher in nutrients.
[. . .]
The problem began when we ran low on other food. A lag

between grocery runs and paychecks led to mostly bare
cupboards. Except for eggs, of course. Soufflé gave way to
hard-boiled eggs and fried eggs sans bread or potatoes or
3546
tortillas. We ate our nascent garden down to the nubs. Rich

was doing heavy physical labor every day, and breakfast and
lunch of hard-boiled eggs wasn't cutting it. We both admitted
to feeling a little ill and instated a two-day hiatus from eggs.
Even a short period of deprivation can have an amazing effect
on the senses. My check came in the mail, and we went
grocery shopping. A vista of possibilities opened up before
me: Suddenly I had cheese, and zucchini, and kale, and
cream, and butter. We set into eating eggs again with
enthusiasm (though this time I kept it to one meal a day). I
whipped up a cat's-ear, arugula and Cheddar frittata. Friends
came to visit for the weekend, and I made miniature oyster
mushroom quiches in a chicken-fat-infused crust, and a
traditional Nicaraguan breakfast with fried eggs and gallo
pinto. Finally, nearly two weeks after the start of our egg
challenge, I used the last dozen to make deviled eggs for a
neighbor's barbecue. Lifting the last egg from its carton was
almost surreal.
[. . .]
Heavy cream is certainly a luxury, but because the eggs were a

gift and the vegetables, spices and mushrooms were
homegrown or scavenged, this meal cost me about 70 cents
per person. If I'd paid for the eggs, it would have been about
95 cents per person. The good news is that this protein-rich
meal is still a decent value even if you shop for all of the
ingredients -- radishes are not expensive and the oyster
mushrooms are not essential to the dish. That said, I don't
think I need to mention that I didn't lose 30 pounds on this
diet. (Felisa Rogers, “Eggs, two meals a day,” Salon, 2 July
2011)
----------
3547
@Felisa: the whole eggs/cholesterol myth

That was pretty well debunked many years ago; EATING
foods with cholesterol in them does not GIVE YOU high
cholesterol. The only exception would be a small number of
people who are very sensitive to cholesterol in any food, and
already have severe coronary artery disease.
People vary in how likely they are to get high cholesterol. It is
influenced by heredity more than anything else; it is
absolutely possible to be thin and fit and still have high
cholesterol (or be fat and out of shape, and have perfect
cholesterol numbers). But very generally, it is saturated and
transfats that can push normal cholesterol numbers up, and a
diet too heavy in animal proteins.
To single out eggs never made any sense. Eggs are a very
healthy part of a normal diet EATEN IN MODERATION.
At your young age, without heart disease and at a normal
weight (and I assume living in the country, you get plenty of
exercise walking and chopping wood, etc.), eating eggs is
probably not any problem at all.
That being said: 7 dozen eggs! yikes! I'm glad you gave away a
few dozen, but it reminded me of the line (I think from
Dorothy Parker) that "eternity is two people and a ham".
Actually, it's any number of people facing down dietary
monotony for a long period of time -- even the most luscious
chocolate will be nauseating if you MUST eat it 3-4 times a
day. NOTHING is so delicious you can eat it (and nothing
BUT it) at every meal.
Eggs are still relatively cheap (though they have doubled in
price since just a few years ago) and yes, you can make may
delicious, cheap meals from them -- omelets and stratas,
frittatta's and quiche. Deviled eggs (yum!) and egg salad
sandwiches. But again, what is absolutely delicious if you have
it once in a while, is sickening if you must face it down at
3548
every single meal.

Your husband is also incorrect that eggs are an insufficient
protein for a working man doing hard physical labor. They are
every bit the perfect protein package, as good or better than
any meat. BUT I am also sure he was sick of eating hard
boiled eggs (and probably constipated).
Living so meagerly that you must wait for a check from Salon
to go grocery shopping -- Felisa, that is madness. And I JUST
DO NOT get this. Seriously, I do not. You are smart, you are
educated, you are literate. YOU KNOW BETTER THAN THIS.
Is this a stunt? or a way to create material for a book, a sort of
survivalist-forager-in-the-mountains variation on "No Impact
Man"? Frankly, I am sick of these "I did _____ for one year!"
books. They are contrived and after you read a couple, you've
read them all.
I ask you again, in the name of reason and sanity and common
sense: go on your county food stamp website (you don't even
have to DRIVE anywhere, you can apply online in Oregon -- I
checked it out for you!) and start your food stamp application.
If you can't even keep very basic foods stocked in your
cupboard -- simple things like rice and beans and pasta and
flour and canned or frozen veggies -- and you literally don't
have food to eat at times, then you CLEARLY qualify for and
deserve food stamps.
It would give you and your husband a "baseline"; enough
money to buy healthy basics like meat, milk, cheese, fresh
vegetables, bread, cereal -- and then if you WANT to
experiment foraging or creating low-cost budget meals: more
power to you! Many people are struggling today, and would
truly benefit from articles on clever ways to economize,
budget and save money.
But playing with food insufficiency is just plain stupid. At a
certain point, it won't work anymore. What if Salon ceases
publication? What if the road crew has to cut back, and your
3549
husband loses his job cutting brush? What about if your

garden fails? What if winter sets in early? What if you became
pregnant?
I don't think you prove anything by being a martyr here. Get
the food stamps; use your writing and foraging skills to share
great recipes and pragmatic ways to save money in tough
times. (_bigguns) (laurel1962)
-----
Bears
RE: It would give you and your husband a "baseline"; enough
money to buy healthy basics like meat, milk, cheese, fresh
vegetables, bread, cereal -- and then if you WANT to experiment
foraging or creating low-cost budget meals: more power to you!
Many people are struggling today, and would truly benefit from
articles on clever ways to economize, budget and save money.
But playing with food insufficiency is just plain stupid. At a certain
point, it won't work anymore. What if Salon ceases publication?
What if the road crew has to cut back, and your husband loses his
job cutting brush? What about if your garden fails? What if winter
sets in early? What if you became pregnant?
I think we get closer to what she is (and good numbers of her
generation are increasingly) about if we imagine that, after Salon
ceases publication, the road crew cuts back, her husband loses his job
cutting brush, her garden fails, the winter sets early, she becomes
pregant, her first thought thought is on how much nourishment she
might take from carving out chunks from fretfully imaginative people
like you, who have no clue that this all, the real reality of it -- that
clearly, would so scare you -- might just even better suit her mood.
She is making posts on a smug, beans-and-greens, baby-boomer-
pleasing/placating kind of site, and, admittedly, looks to be all about
youthful experimentation and foodie play -- of the kind that might
invite the understanding and appreciative baby-boomer elder to still
3550
want to wizen by cluing or even startling her (as needs be) to her true
straits, and thereby better the resources very much available to her --
but what she is, I think, is getting closer to this type: someone who
can't but forage out for sup because her primal instincts are finally
being unloosed, and, with the overall environment increasingly
responding to /echoing them than to the admittedly still-in-place,
effeminate "food stamp" safety nets, this time -- given the leverage --
there's no tightening back in the beast:
http://nplusonemag.com/mother-nature-s-sons
I'll try and respond later this weekend on this subject. It's an
important one, that delineates how the baby boomers are without
their knowledge, with them actually sort of dumbly playing into it,
being zooed while the rest of us are getting busy engaging the wild --
such a neat but true "turn" from trite simplicities like gentrification
and liberal class retreat.
-----
Bread, water -- and sickly Salonistas, if need be

Felisa has made it seem as if what she most is, is very much like most
of you, Salonistas. She moved to depressed, backwoods Oregon -- but
for reasons anyone at all human can understand: to re-engage with
home, after knowing so much constant moving about. She shirks food
stamps, but out of pride and independence -- something anyone at all
American can understand. She is younger than most of you, but in
spirit much the same as you; and so you mostly delight in her
adventures, with only a cautionary word to ensure she doesn't, owing
to inexperience, make that one youthful, arrogant misstep that you
know would stop her adventures cold. And so you viraciously defend
her, while gently cautioning her (here, even Laurel has stepped back
her attack a considerable some -- gauging Felisa mostly now a martyr
["I respect your staunchness, but you hurt yourself more than you
have to"] rather than a fraud), and she modestly but appreciately
thanks you for your support.
3551
I would suggest, however, that you all consider seeing her as -- and
I'm sorry for this, Felisa -- a worse sort than the actual foodie you
once had in mind to destroy: Gerry Mak, the struggling, unemployed
20-something who actually went on food stamps, but to buy pretty
much anything! he wanted so to find himself eating better than he
ever had before! Mak, certainly as he was first presented to us, with
pretty much his food stamp-purchased cases of Perrier, was an
affront to everything decent: in his tough times he found means to go
about life pretty much pheasant hunting-pleasantly along, leaving you
with no one to sympathize with, no one to tend to, no one to remind
that even in depressed America it's still not the Medieval Ages, dear:
“don't martyr yourself, Gerry Mak; I can tell you means to make that
foie gras/grass-fed .../blueberry fanna cotta stretch over two meals
rather than the one you had planned, before whistling in tomorrow's
lobster cognac -- why not? -- one day ahead, if you only follow how in
the same straits I cunningly made my batch of eggs-and-leeks
whatever garbage goo last two whole weeks rather than the single one
I had planned!” Mak is a genuine foodie (though he looked at last
sight to be repenting his truly-glorious achieved heights) --
fundamentally a lover of ease, a specialist in refined taste, a friend of
conversation and (therefore) of the salon, if not quite, maybe in its
present form, as clearly of Salon -- while Felisa is a fraud: not because
she might actually have money behind her she isn't owning up to --
there is a sense that, even if the case, this is of no import -- but
because she foremost isn't actually one of the foodie you; closer, is she
at least becoming, to one of McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" true-hunter
types that would make bullet-play of you for your dumb vulnerability,
your ridiculous clinging to sensible civility, if ever casually caught
glance of in a saloon.
While Mak was as effete as the delicacies he prepared, Felisa is
getting as tough as the wild bushes she hacks her way through, and as
alien and mercenary as the sword ferns she hangs from and the fir-
tips and nettles she finds some way to grind down. So someone like
Laurel cautions her away debilitation, and doesn't appreciate that
3552
Felisa is actually becoming so far away from the yuppie-seeming

hipster/yuppie who might experiment frontier after becoming bored
with "cheaper rent and hipper coffee," so much more truly, honestly,
intrinsically someone who'd look through and past all the tourist fair
while on sojourns to South America -- thanks to her entwining her
soul to a habitat still ridged and rocky, bristly and fully buckling out
the stupid eons of everywhere-else, soft-civilization silly-puddy
spread -- that each stagger into a precipice she had not anticipated
looks more likely to entrench her further into the bare but vital
survival spirit enlivening every one of the tight and taut entwined
sinews of bone and tested muscle wholy constituting her ancestors, to
the heart of the home she's seeping herself into, than it looks to
weaken or stop her.
Felisa is not a friend of the salon, of, preferrably, civilized
conversation, because she is becoming someone who thrives when
anything conceivably overwrought, precious, and delicate can be so
readily, fist-in-the-face -- or, rather, tomahawk-in-the-soon-to-be-
spilling-forebrain -- be brought up short. She isn't listening to you
about food stamps, not because she's proud -- that is, aware of your
actual true sensibleness, but staunchly faithful to her independence --
but, essentially, because you're weak. Because she knows that every
bite downed by food-stamp purchase softens you into a mingle with a
dainty, disconnected administrate already fretting the pokings-up of
the undeniably real, strong, and brutal, and about to finally know
"their" their-responsible full-on devourment; because she knows
you're farmers' cattle and on and on about the benefits of farm life,
when the care-taker farmers themselves are even now leaving as the
wild spreads and overtakes, with the doom of wolves already even
now more than one step beyond just a loud chorused, chilling howl
and an increasingly-close check-in; because she knows you're not so
much potentially saged kin as you are, if things get really
neanderthal-stark desperate, to be categorized as last-ditch food
supply, Felisa is taking advantage of your self-absorbed, past-relevant
"signaling" to but fix the clarity of her understanding of who she now
3553
is -- thinking of, and further respecting, the old ancestral, pre or

contra-civilization voices she knows she will increasingly be attending
to and be influenced from.
I am principally a Salonista, but I would encourage you again to check
out N + 1's thoughts on this new type. See the clear hunting wolf here
in omnivorant, badger-foraging clothing.
-----
Watch out, Felisa:

One of your readers is turning you into a fictional, potentially
cannibalistic werewolf.
If you're within commuting distance of Astoria, I may have a
job for you. (bettenoir)
The Wait
Bettenoir: "Felissa darling, did you hear: One of your readers is

turning you into a fictional, potentially cannibalistic werewolf."
Salonista-filled room: "Har! har! har!"
Felisa: "Well, if I'm going to likened to a lycanthrope, I guess I'll take
some comfort in being sized up as only potentially cannibalistic:
suggests some inspiriting wherewithal to improve my dire straits,
don't you think?!"
Salonista-filled Room: "Har! Har! Har!"
[Room clears in good chear and friendly goodbyes, leaving Felisa to
herself]
Felisa: "Good ... The cattle embrace an escape of warning as but
good humor to accompany their wine, cheese and base stupidity. Still,
may be best to ease up for awhile my talk of machetes and becoming
one with the unforgiving alien wilderness -- and maybe even my now
being drawn to Vince Lombardi football: a little too much old-world
imposition in that embrace of all-American heroism, and fluff up even
3554
more my talk of intrinsic lazyness, my making best with all the little I
have, my admittedly-youthful and therefore mostly-tolerable
weakness for self-pride and my girlish, hipsterish insistence on
fancies I should be ashamed, given my straits, to be even mentioning:
won't due to have them thinking I'm maybe not so much possibly
spoiled and youthfully rash as I am ... actually rather a little bit
weirdly drawn to what is genuinely unsettling in raw folklore.
It is not yet time. The ancient and pure, the composed for eternity
and most truly great, must still for a time play to the spoiled and silly,
who, though fundamentally but a longish moment, remain hoisted
for it nevertheless being their time. But God the ample fat on their
bones attracts near as much as the spread of their imbecility draws!
Still, let me see ... next time, perhaps: "Salonistas, thank you for your
patience with me; I have been a bit silly, and am thinking over your
encouragements to lay aside some of the pride and perhaps sign up
for the food stamps and visit those actually not-quite-so-far-away-as-
I've-made-seem stores that I ..."
Link: Eggs, two meals a day (Salon)
---------
Felisa’s articles (Salon):
How my hippie parents turned me into a consumer
How I learned to stop worrying and love football
How the recession turned me into a scavenger
Scraping by on stinging nettles
Scavenger: How my grandmother taught me to eat weeds
How I became a hillbilly
Hunting the fickle fiddlehead
How I (kind of) survive in the wilderness
Sourdough, the frontier way
What Costa Rica taught me about budget eating
3555
SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

Bravely facing the faux bully
On the last day of fourth grade, my youngest daughter was

tying her shoes while I stood waiting with her lunchbox. "Do
you remember fourth grade, Mom?"she asked, as she
struggled to lace up the Chuck Taylors.
My answer surprised both of us. "I hated it. It was the worst
year of school I ever had."
My fourth grade tormenter looked like a Gap Kids model. "C"
had porcelain skin, perfect white teeth, cornflower eyes, and
blond hair that hung thick and straight, regardless of weather
conditions. She arrived in Mrs. McKenna's classroom, took
one look around, and decided she wanted my best friend Kitty
to be her best friend. And she went about driving me away
from the herd the way only elementary school mean girls can.
She teased me for being fat, for wearing glasses. For days at a
time, she would be kind to me, inviting me to birthday parties
and sleepovers. Then, BAM -- I would be back in the
doghouse, with no idea what happened. I later found out that
she passed notes around to the girls in class written in her
perfect handwriting and decorated with flowers: "Don't talk to
Nancy until Friday."
I remember eating lunch alone, fleeing the classroom in tears
day after day. I begged my parents to let me transfer to a
different school. On the last day of fourth grade, relief came at
last. The middle schools in my town ran from 5th to 8th
grade, and C and I were heading in different directions for the
next four years.
When we met again in high school, I'd gained two invaluable
weapons: perspective, and confidence. With a close group of
new friends at my side, C had no power over me. She
remained beautiful and unfriendly, but now completely
irrelevant to me. As is so often the case with a bully, I learned
3556
later that C's family life had been particularly unsavory during
the year she picked on me.
A dozen years out of high school I was working in San
Francisco. I left my desk one day and went out for a late-
afternoon waddle in the November sunshine, eight months
pregnant with my first daughter, and I passed C on the
sidewalk. True to form, she was still drop dead gorgeous and,
mindful of my spherical form, I put my head down and kept
walking.
Then I thought: Why? My life turned out great. And, on some
level, I wanted her to know that. I pivoted and called her
name, and we stood there on the sidewalk chatting. Anyone
walking by might have thought we were two old friends. The
truth is, she had as big an impact on my life as any good friend
might. Her childhood cruelty stoked my own confidence;
because of how she treated me, I discovered a quality in
myself I hadn't previously recognized -- resilience. The ordeal
helped me become a compassionate adult, one who will not
tolerate bullying by my own children.
But I guess C still held one trump card, despite all my
bravado. As I only realized the other day in the front hallway,
she managed to make me hold my breath from the last day of
my fourth grade until the last day of fourth grade had passed
safely for both my daughters. (Nancy Davis Kho, “What my
grade school bully taught me,” Salon, 30 June 2011)
----------
Pity the children
Re: She remained beautiful and unfriendly, but now completely
irrelevant to me. As is so often the case with a bully, I learned later
that C's family life had been particularly unsavory during the year
she picked on me.
She had become completely irrelevant to you, but once again and it
3557
looks like for the longterm picked up relevancy in your now for some
reason having to chastise her further -- in your following noting her
absolute inability to "blanche" you, given your acquired superhero
signia of popularity and friends, with you situating in her the
principle seat of victimization and private misery. Pity you didn't also
learn later that bullies pick on people who best represent their --
you're right -- victimized selves, but your putting your head down and
scuttling along tells us what we need to know: you're still the bullied
person she keyed in on because she sensed your already-bullied
status would allow her to perfectly engage the rather more pleasing
role of the tormentor rather than the tormented, and are hoping to
work out a pretend victory against tormentors closer to home than
her -- but that you cannot even now manage to face at all -- by
effecting some kind of satisfying turn-about upon her.
You've spun out a drama of defeat-turned-into-self-realization, but

some of us doubt if you've even made step one -- it's all, perhaps, a
distraction. And you post on Open Salon, where everyone plays to
one-another's inclination to avoid, to lie, in an effort to cow truth
away by pretending through thorough mutual engagements with a
wide-spectrum of assholes and angels to have fully engaged every
possible reality. And you have it moved up to Salon -- which you still
all sense at some level as a risk into discomfortable, "not-playing-
along" adult-realm, but where increasingly ever more hands bait a
pretend freedom from long-troubling anxieties to sanity-inclined
holdouts, to make indepedent Salonistas effectively and permanently
into "lie to me" fully-dependent, infantile and lost OpenSalonistas.
You've turned into a compassionate adult, who won't tolerate her

children: Yes, from your not receiving the counsel you deserved, this
is to be expected. Pity your children and their likely sufferance to the
ongoing cycle you yourself could not absent yourself from.
3558
(addressed to Mr M-H, whose comment is above)
you DO recognize that what you are doing (accusing the writer
of this article, whom you have never met, of being weak) ... is
itself a form of bullying?
You have wrapped your point up in an enormous number of
words, but the bottom line is that you are simply attacking
her, and you do so under the guise of educating her, which is a
particularly revolting way of trying to tell someone that you
think they are weak.
Wisely, I think, Ms Kho will likely not give you the rise you are
seeking to provoke from her. But I'm quite happy to call bulls
%$t when I see it.
Re: the misuse of the forum to project and work out one's own
personal issues - have you looked in the mirror lately?
(mateomateo)
-----
ignore Paddy McHalston-Klein
He's a good example of a rare breed - a well-spoken moron.
He has a certain way with words, but when you look at the
actual content of what he's saying you discover it's pure drivel.
(Sour Scribe)
@mateomateo
This isn't simply somoeone telling us how she set herself free; it's
someone who's taking advantage of a spreading environment which
buttresses and praises those who'll lose themselves to lies, while
pretending absolutely different, and which will come, which IS
COMING, at the expense of any irritating counter who smells the rat
and is keen to point it out too. The mob is trying to blob out sane
response -- it aggresses; and the only sane response response is
letting it know you're cany to it and won't be backing down. It's about
self-defence, your survival, too.
3559
People who are bullied at school inevitably have been bullied FIRST
at home. Bullies pick on them, sensing their already-victimhood: in
picking on them, they become that much less the kind of person who
is foremost a victim themselves. This author is quite willing to dwelve
on the family abuse inevitably to found driving bullies, but not at all
interested in exploring if something of the same is at work in
producing those who'll prove their victims. In a sane world, we would
all notice that, and direct her attention to it. In a different
environment, one in which sanity is secure or on the ascent, I would
reply with much less fight. Believe it or not, I mostly do wish her well,
but not at my expense.
@Patrick M-H
You're kind of a prat, aren't you? In your world, everyone is
"mentally ill" except for yourself, is that it? What a sad little
life that must be for you, being the only healthy person on the
planet.
I have to say that the last time I saw my Grade 1-12 nemesis,
she had gotten so obese that I had to look twice to see if it was
really her. She was always heavy, but she used to have a neck.
I think she recognized me, but thought twice about talking to
me because I was laughing so hard at her that I had to sit
down.
Karma's a bitch. (Aunt Messy)
-----
Sorry - she still won

You stood there on the sidewalk, charring with er like you
"wre too old friends." So you are still playing along with her
fantasy. She gets to treat you now like *nothing ever
happened.*
Why didn't you say "Why were you such a bitch to me in 4th
grade?" Or "What made you decide to turn my life into a living
3560
hell?" or "Did you ever get over the perverse satisfaction you
got from torturing another human being, or are you still doing
that in your place of employment?"
Or even, "I heard that your family life was really unpleasant
when we were in 4th grade. Is that why you were so mean to
me?"
Then, if she denied it, you could straighten her out with an
"Oh, I see. you only remember the nice stories. Listen, babe,
you were a real piece of work. But I'm raising my daughters to
never be scared of little dictators of the type you used to be."
You were just too pusillanimous to confront her, even after all
these years. Your 4th grade self is saddened by your adult
betrayal of her. You wouldn't even fight for her! Instead, you
just wanted her to "like" you, to realize that you finally were a
person worth being let into her club.
Don't be too self-congratulatory. (ourwisemodel)
@ourwisemodel
re: You stood there on the sidewalk, charring with er like you "wre
too old friends." So you are still playing along with her fantasy. She
gets to treat you now like *nothing ever happened.*
Why didn't you say "Why were you such a bitch to me in 4th grade?"
Or "What made you decide to turn my life into a living hell?" or "Did
you ever get over the perverse satisfaction you got from torturing
another human being, or are you still doing that in your place of
employment?"
Or even, "I heard that your family life was really unpleasant when
we were in 4th grade. Is that why you were so mean to me?"
So her friend replies to her, "Perverse satisfaction? Still doing that in

my place of employment? My decision, yet family life drove me to it?
-- Look, hun, if you're looking here to show how you're not afraid of
me, how you're way past me, way past being the kind of person I
could bully and manage so efficiently, with your so-many-years-past,
3561
your new directions, baby rotunditry and busy San Francisco' employ,
the only way to have done that would have been to communicate
somehow how, though I of course still affect you, you'd come to know
how it never really was about me at all. I hurt you bad, but only
because I sensed you were someone who was ideal for hurting -- you'd
known it substantially, way before I came along: I was only following
a pre-established route. With all these years since and all you've
managed is wondering what might have been wrong with me, clearly
still too afraid to explore what is was that was wrong with you, with
your family life, that made you the particular one I keyed in on to so
easily and mercilessly pick on ... I'm not sure if you've even convinced
me you've taken step one.
Look, I'll help out: dwelve a bit; please just start, just start
considering what your mom and dad were doing to you at the time
that served you on a platter for an everyday bully like me. I guarantee
they had made you someone who was ready to shrivel, perhaps
someone who felt bad enough about herself that she actually desired
and prompted further shriveling, and I simply took advantage of that
-- using you to enable my need to feel an empowered tormenter
rather than a cowed victim -- and/or responded to your masochistic
desire to show how your bad self had gotten the fair response it surely
deserved, that you were going to seek it elsewhere in life, on and on.
At base, I'm not someone you should be looking to get square with,
but a possible prompt you should learn to use to get you in line with
where you need to get looking. The way to get mostly fully past me, to
miniature me, despite all my awful bullying, incredibly just into one
of the people you once knew, the way to ensure you'll be a
compassionate parent and not just perpetrate the crimes you've
suffered from upon your children, is to focus on how your parents --
not me -- debased you. As is, you're likely just another parent who
maintains the near life-sustaining illusion that she has the stuff to
learn from the past and escape mistakes, without the capacity to
3562
appreciate that likely inevitably for her not facing the real issue, she'll
be driven by inner haunts to look at her children the same way her
parents were driven to look at her: as deserving bullying punishment,
simply for being vulnerable and desiring of love.
If you're going to write about this encounter one day, I hope it's not at
some place where you so expect people have themselves been
sufficiently bullied to need to pretend you as having delightfully
moved on so they can pretend themselves the same, that all you've
ensured yourself are a lineup of 'you go girl!' replies. Peace."
Wow @Patrick
Based on the skimpy set of facts in her article, I'm trying to
figure out how you know so much about the writer that you
can accuse her of lying.
Also, what does "dwelve" mean? I plugged it into the
Merriam-Webster online dictionary, and "drivel" came up in
the list of words I actually might have been searching for.
(SoFla Kate)
Link: What my grade school bully taught me (Salon)

---------

Tyranny of closure
Dear Cary,
I follow your column off and on, and I appreciate the way you
handle questions from all ages and types of people. I am a 56-
year-old man, married with a teenage son. I live in the town
close to where my parents grew up. I have relatives here that I
mostly avoid, even though I was close to some of them when I
was younger. My father died about 20 years ago from
complications of alcoholism. He was living in another state
3563
(unintentional pun), and his family brought him back here to

die. I am pretty sure that they expected me to take care of
him, but I refused.
He had left us years before, and maintained very little contact.
When I told his family I wasn't going to be around to help, this
created a lot of hard feelings, and they set me up as a villain,
even telling the story to other people, their version of course. I
basically wrote them off, but have kept up marginal contact
with some of them. I don't really have many friends here and
would have left years ago, but my wife and I have good jobs,
my wife and son like it here, and my mother is here.
Now my mother, who is 87, is in a nursing home dying of
leukemia. She probably will only live another two months.
Since I am the only one of her children living here, I have had
to assume a lot of the responsibility for her care. My sister and
brother both live a day's drive from here. I owe my mother a
lot. Besides the fact that she took care of us as a single mother,
she also had to help me through an accident I had when I was
10 years old, which involved a number of surgeries; she made
sure we were housed and fed, and she pushed us to get
educations. My sister has a master's degree and my brother
and I both have Ph.D.s. She was a quiet person, and like many
women in her generation, she valued family and getting along
with others. She also served as baby sitter/daycare-giver for
one of my nieces and for my son before he started school. She
adores my son. But now she is dying, and getting weaker as
the weeks go by. She does not leave her room or bed, even
though the staff try to take her to the common areas of the
nursing home. At the same time, she doesn't seem sad. She is
mostly in good spirits. I would describe her as resigned and
content. She loves visitors and flowers, even though she won't
leave her room. I don't think she is in pain.
My problem is that I have such a hard time visiting her. All
she wants is someone to sit with her, but that is hard for me. I
3564
take my son with me sometimes, and it is wonderful to see her

face light up. She doesn't say much, but we just sit for a while
and then leave. I wish I could go there and spend more time,
but it is really hard to do that. It literally drains me of all of
my energy. I'm not complaining about her. She makes no
demands. I'm not the dying person. I feel I should want to go
see her as much as possible now.
The idea of having a funeral makes me sick. I have already
made all of the arrangements and paid for it. I had to, so that
she would qualify for Medicaid and be able to stay in the
nursing home. I went along with her wishes to be cremated. I
picked out the urn and wrote the obituary. Everything is
prepared. It is common here to have a visitation for about two
hours and then a funeral. I cannot stand the idea of the
visitation. I don't want to see my relatives from either side or
her friends and acquaintances; I don't want to be comforted
by them. I guess I am afraid I won't be able to handle it. I
don't know what to do.
Lost in an Alien World (letter to Cary Tennis, Salon, 29 June
2011)
Tyranny of closure
My mother has contrived cunning means by which my duty, after I
insisted on my adulthood, was to never cause her trouble and to try to
appease her -- make her eyes light up! No time that I subsequently
lent myself to her, did I not feel once again taken: “er, I don't exist
simply to delight you out of your depression.” If your difficulty is
actually more like mine, and it probably is, in your being the child of a
single mom who clearly has steered and intimidated you all into
thinking her always selfless rather than, say, simply masochistic ("Oh
look at me, always thinking of other people and never of myself!") --
as forever after, even though she would ostensibly never claim such a
thing, rightfully, at least, in her full always service, though you were
3565
no doubt already all along that -- and have all had difficulty never
allowing yourselves to distance yourselves too far from her, I would
recommend not seeing her. At some level, she might respect that she
raised a son who could resist her and guilt and everyone thinking him
the worst-of-the-worst, to aggressively demarcate at this time when it
easiest to disavow his true needs, that it's actually going to be about
him (and please don't lie to yourself: refusing your father was not you
remaining firm to yourself and stalwartly refusing to defer to good
opinion: it was actually easy, and probably actually mostly at your
expense, because it was an ideal way to show yourself loyal to the one
whose opinion of you you mostly need to fear, your [as the story goes]
betrayed mother). Rather than simply feeling guilty, as having missed
something you'll always regret, it must be suggested that just as likely
you might feel proud of yourself for finally this time not giving in -- so
much better than trying to take nourishment from what is actually a
false simulacrum: your giving your dying dad the bird. And
regardless, it's about time he, that you, did.
I'm guessing, though, the tale will end with her owning you the whole
of your life (and, my, doesn't that reflect badly on her!), with you
never escaping her preferred narratization of her and her use of you
("I owe her a lot!": no dear, you were pretty much born to make her
feel good; she pulped you good to nourish herself, whatever you-and-
your-sisters' accumulated shiny MA and PhD baubles, that, we won't
fail to also note, no doubt made your mom's eyes light up good!), and
you taking out the lifelong-accumulated frustrations from pains you
cannot acknowledge as such on those actually well-loved enough to
never feel it their appropriate default to give up themselves until the
very end, to their moms.
@ Patrick
I can't even be mean to you, because clearly you are in
tremendous pain and were, at least in your imagination,
horribly hard-done-by.
But please do try to remember that not every mother is
3566
abusive or narcissistic. I'm sorry if yours was. But to project

your inner torment onto a total stranger is just...wrong. It's
not the LW's fault that you are suffering. (Dorothy Parker)
@Dorothy Parker
Alchoholic father. Abandoning, betraying father. Alchoholic,
betraying, abandoning -- self-serving -- father who at the end of his
life, would deny even more of you.
Selfless angelic mother, who is to be summed up by all she has given
her kids and all they rightfully -- though she of course would make no
claim to it -- owe her.
Son who wants to delineate for himself his ability to remain true to
himself in face of cowing further expectations and guilt, but has only
worked himself up to doing so in his safe trial run: when spurning
someone he's taken care to describe as obviously having more than
earned his spurning -- his father, an act he still takes care to also
communicate his loyalty to his spurned mother, as being perhaps
principally in service to her rather to himself. "You abandoned her
when she needed you most, so I'm ignoring you now -- fair turn-
around, asshole": and so our writer surely plays the puppet for his
mother's revenge fantasy.
I recognize this guy, and see what he's working himself up to but fears
there's no way he'll manage. How about from the very available clues
he has fortunately been able to give us, we try giving him the
encouragement he really wants and needs? Wakey-wakey, people.
@Dorothy Parker
Further, if there is something Freudian going on here -- and I'm with
you in thinking there is -- it is in how the writer portrays his father.
Very likely, he cannot admit to himself how he actually understands
his life alongside his mother -- as feeling abandoned to someone
devoted to principally nourishing her own unmet needs -- but still
finds way to punish her for her endless self-satisfying in isolating her
crimes in the person he has been made to feel permitted and
3567
encouraged to resent and disparage, his father. The reason there is

such disbalance, with a father who ends up looking like he should
know he amounted at the finish to nothing that shouldn't rightly be
ignored, and who remains such a nothing he can fairly readily be
made sport for irreverant jokes, and a mother it looks like the worst of
crimes to harbor any feeling of neglecting at all, is owing to this
displacement.
@ Patrick
Never mind, dude. You're just off some kind of deep end. I
don't see any Freudian anything, I see you very blatantly
ranting about your own highly narrativized life and
attributing it to a total stranger that you claim you "know" and
"recognize" (hint: you don't, this is the Internet)...and I've just
read your other letters around Salon, and...forget it. (Dorothy
Parker)
-----
About Patricks point of view

Back again, people have been pretty hard on Patrick, but he
brings up a very relevant point. It is possible - though I would
not assume it - that part of the LW's distress in having to be
the primary relative involved in his mother's death isn't just
about dying itself, but about unfinished business. Many
parents do leave emotional scars on their children even if
there are good parts to the relationship too. When the intense
time of caretaking and taking responsibility for the parent
comes, for the adult child all those scars can get ripped open.
It's true that we don't KNOW that this is happening with the
LW, but it might be. It's like all that unfinished business roars
up to the surface for that last chance of resolution.
So LW if any of that really is happening for you, please
thinking about getting into therapy for the duration. Might be
3568
a good idea anyway to give you extra support as you see your
mother through to the end. Please don't let the judgers and
the haters bring you down. I still stand by what I posted
earlier - honor all your feelings, the need for relief and the
desire to do the right thing. (Aquatic)
-----
On Sentiment and Duty

Many in this thread have given sentimental reasons why LW
should continue to visit his mother every day: he should
"cherish" the time he spends with her; he should have
"reverence" for the death process; he should think of it as
"sacred" work. These are fine sentiments--if you have them.
But if LW were capable of sentiments like those, he would not
have needed to write for advice. It is clear that he has a strong
aversion to visiting his mother. Sometimes we can induce
feelings in others by getting them to think of things in a
certain way, but as a general rule, you cannot argue someone
into having a feeling.
In my original post, I simply advised LW to do his filial duty,
and several others on this thread have emphasized duty as
well. Admittedly, there is something impersonal about duty.
In fact, were LW to tell his mother he was visiting her because
it was his duty to do so, that would be cold. He'd be better off
not visiting her at all than to tell her that. In fact, it is part of
LW's filial duty not to let his mother think that duty is his
motive for being there, but rather that he is there because he
wants to be with her at the end. In other words, he has duty lie
about how he really feels.
But the advantage of emphasizing duty is that it is primarily a
matter of behavior. You don't have to feel anything to do your
duty. You can even have the "wrong" feelings, and still do your
duty. If LW tries to force himself to have the sentiments
3569
recommended to him, it will only make what he has to do

even more difficult. It is not in him to feel those things. But
telling him to do his duty imposes a much easier task, well
within his ability to perform. (disinterested spectator)
being the distinterested spectator

re: In fact, were LW to tell his mother he was visiting her because it
was his duty to do so, that would be cold. He'd be better off not
visiting her at all than to tell her that. In fact, it is part of LW's filial
duty not to let his mother think that duty is his motive for being
there, but rather that he is there because he wants to be with her at
the end. In other words, he has duty lie about how he really feels.
But the advantage of emphasizing duty is that it is primarily a
matter of behavior. You don't have to feel anything to do your duty.
You can even have the "wrong" feelings, and still do your duty. If
LW tries to force himself to have the sentiments recommended to
him, it will only make what he has to do even more difficult. It is not
in him to feel those things. But telling him to do his duty imposes a
much easier task, well within his ability to perform.
The problem with visiting her armored autisticly in duty is that

mother might pick up from your robotism that you're there but for
duty, even without you (more overtly) telling her such. If mother is
sensitive, alert to how you're responding to her, if you don't really
want to be there there's no way you'll not communicate this to her. If
you don't want to be there but come to her anyway, the only way
this'll work -- other than you coming to enjoy your time with her -- is
if she is someone who is readily able to take from you even while
you're evidently not in mind to be supped. But if she is such a person,
and the fact that she is explains why none of you really left so far from
her that you're not all at least potentially available for a "late-night
snack" -- even with you being the meal of choice, your siblings live but
a day's drive off -- then the reason you don't want to be with her now
is because of the carnage to self composition that might follow when
3570
duty demands than you lay down every self (defence, interest) in
deference to her, not duty. If LW listens to you, disinterested
spectator, he'll come in a knight to Duty, but Mother will make short
work of that ignoble spurning and leave him feeling royally screwed.
His only real compensense will be that he did what his siblings didn't;
but like he likely did with his father, in his in some way taking them
to task for their absence and neglect, he'll just further cast a shadow
on his mother's true legacy.
At the finish, LW, your true feelings showed you were agnostic
towards your mother. Whether you see her or not (though we all
know you will -- this letter served as the only resistance you were
going to permit yourself), time to focus on why all this selflessness on
her part still strangely left you in a state where some of us would
counsel you away from showing how you truly feel.
Link: I can’t watch my mother die (Salon)
----------
Go the F**k to Sleep
What's more absurdly hilarious than an ersatz bedtime story

called "Go the F**k to Sleep"? Funnier even than Werner
Herzog or Samuel L. Jackson reading it? Answer: The
uproariously hyperbolic opinion piece that ran Monday on
CNN – CNN! -- by author Karen Spears Zacharias, who
claims, "The violent language of 'Go the F*** to Sleep' is not
the least bit funny, when one considers how many neglected
children fall asleep each night praying for a parent who'd care
enough to hold them, nurture them and read to them." Wah
wah waaaaaaah.
Zacharias, whose bio says she has a forthcoming memoir on
the murder of 3-year-old Karly Sheehan, is careful in her piece
to state that "Nobody is suggesting that there's a connection
3571
between Adam Mansbach's book and child abuse or child

neglect" and that "Mansbach is undoubtedly the kind of father
who heaps love, affection and attention upon his daughter."
But, as she explains, "the lines of what's appropriate parenting
have become blurred" and, as a concerned Oregon attorney
says, the book is full of "violent language in association with
children." For the corker, she quotes child development expert
Dr. David Arredondo, who implores, "Imagine if this were
written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos," and she says,
"It is hard to imagine this kind of humor being tolerated by
any of the marginalized groups Arredondo cited." I wonder, is
that because the sleep habits of Jews, blacks, Muslims or
Latinos aren't relevant? Because "Take a Nap Right Now,
Goddammit, Person of Color" just doesn't make a lick of
sense?
Zacharias, whose comedic credentials include a blurb from
Jeff Foxworthy, has drummed up a world of disagreement;
her story has received over 2,000 comments in just one day
since her bizarre Op-Ed appeared. The more restrained can be
summed up by the reader who noted "Humor helps people
deal with stress" and the person who suggested, "This lady is
out of her mind."
[. . .]
Comedy explained isn't comedy at all. And when you speak up

and say that something is offensive, you inevitably run the
risk of being labeled a humorless scold. But real humor rarely
involves taking cheap shots at groups of people who are
regularly misunderstood or victimized. It comes instead from
observation of the absurdities of life, from the frustrations of
being the underdog, from sticking it to the man. Being
shocking is fine; taking lazy jabs at the already put-upon is to
bomb unforgivably.
3572
That's why it's so silly to take umbrage at "Go the F**k to

Sleep," because Zacharias doesn't seem to get who the joke is
on. She argued Monday on Twitter that "The point is that far
too many children live in homes where ugly thoughts are
acted upon," as if ugly thoughts inevitably lead to ugly deeds,
or ugly thoughts shouldn't be laughed at. It's not that
sometimes children aren't verbally browbeaten for real. But
Mansbach's humor is about the tyrannical boss -- the boss, in
this instance, being the baby. And if you're a parent, you
damn well know who wears the poop-loaded, spit-up-stained
pants in your torturously sleep-deprived relationship. (“‘Go
the F**k to Sleep’ and Tracy Morgan's comedy battle,”Mary
Elizabeth Williams, Salon, 28 June 2011)
----------
Tyrannical, demanding children are the problem

The book could be everything you say it really is, MEW, and it would
be a shame if what this is a most-welcome, fun book that mostly gives
some humor and compensense/relief to parents who overall
obviously really do love their children, but nevertheless can
sometimes of-course resent some of the wear and strain involved in
taking care of them, and who shouldn't feel guilty for some harmless
jibing back. Or, it could be what Zacharias suggests it is, part of
acceptible, guilt-free way in which a climate can be created for
parents to legitimate their desire to strike back against children for
their ostensible interminable spoiled self-centeredness and
demandingness. I've read the book, think it clearly the latter, and am
glad Zacharias spoke out -- but just wish she hadn't allowed that
Mansbach was absolutely for-sure loving of children; because the
truth is if he was that I wouldn't find the book objectionable:
regardless of where-the-shit-fuck he went with it, it would
communicate this love, and the lost-in-space, puritan dumb-tards
would be objecting a book that is actually serving their end!: those
3573
who want a climate that encourages children to feel insecure and

fearful (and please, look around, and don't deny the every evidence
that most Americans clearly do not want good things for their kids)
would actually have to discourage people from actually
reading/buying the book to have it work their way.
Perhaps you all disagree, but I sense increasingly we're having various
groups floated for "consideration," mostly for the purposes of making
their victimization something they had coming their way. While we've
all been suffering, forced to make ever more sacrifices, haven't we too
long tolerated the goodie-goodie understanding of adult motivation
that would have us feel guilty if we dare on occasion resent the child's
spoiled demand that we attend to his/her each-and-every moment-to-
moment whim?, that would impede some fair and sane turn-around
and make children seem, at least in a fairer world, in need of giving a
little bit more back to us for a change? Childrearing wasn't always
about that, we note -- forever attending to them and giving-in to
them. For quite the while it was mostly about hardening, in fact --
restraining, disciplining, shaping them. No one want to go back to
that obvious, cruel overkill of spanking and closet-time banishment,
of course, but surely if they learned something more of that young --
that not every one of their endless whims deserves attendence, and
are perhaps in need of restraint and punishment -- they won't grow
up into adults so still insisting of making a tyranny of their incessant
needs they were willing to bloat to the point of immobility both
themselves and their nation in service to them!
When adults start finding ways to legitimate a climate where more
"honest" complaints/assessments of babies can be made -- especially
about their endless needs -- be sure you're at time when adults are
feeling guilty about having in their lifetime actually managed to
satisfy some of their own. They punish themselves for this greed by,
for instance, voting in politicians who would near kill an economy just
so everyone can feel more virtuous, less selfish, more principally self-
denying and less blameless, but mostly "merge with perpetrator" and
go after those who most fundamentally represent neediness and
3574
dependency: welfare types, precariously-living immigrants, and most

especially, children.
This book is not so much much-needed relief, but sign that in this
obviously child-hating America, things are getting in line for
unimpeded persecution. Soon books like this won't have to hide
behind a "harmless" joke. "Our kids are spoiled brats; long past time
we reigned them in."
Further discussion on how we turn principally on needy, defenceless
children at the finish of prosperous times, at psychohistory.com
Link: "Go the F**k to Sleep" and Tracy Morgan's comedy battle
(Salon)
TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2011

Old Youth
You write about how poverty breeds creativity. You think

about how scavenging for wild food gives you the perfect
opportunity to slow down, to really appreciate your
surroundings. You talk about how frugality is more
environmentally sustainable. You pontificate on why creating
meals from scratch is cheaper, healthier and deeply satisfying.
Then you run out of cooking oil.
You love fat. As a child you ate margarine by the spoonful.
You didn't know any better. Now you've moved on to more
delicious pastures. As a cook you can never resist sneaking in
that extra bit of butter, that tablespoonful of olive oil, that dab
of bacon grease. You believe that cake is a vessel for frosting,
that salad dressing should be two parts oil to one part vinegar,
and that packaged low-fat foods are a symptom of the decline
of Western civilization. Fat makes food taste good.
Under the best of circumstances, you have eight or nine
varieties of fat on hand. In ascending order of importance:
chicken drippings, vegetable oil, chili oil, peanut oil, light olive
3575
oil, coconut oil, bacon grease, butter and, of course, extra

virgin olive oil. (You would sell your first-born child to be the
sort of person who could afford to use truffle oil on a regular
basis.)
[. . .]
You could, of course, borrow a cup of oil or a stick of butter
from your friends down the road. You could call upon your
neighbors. But here's the thing about being broke: Suddenly
asking a simple favor feels like begging. If you had the money
but were just trying to postpone a trip to town, it would be
easy to borrow a stick of butter. Your empty wallet changes
the nature of the errand. In your own backward way, you are
stupidly proud.
[. . .]
In your freezer there is a container full of fat and bone that
you've been saving for your friend's dogs. You think about this
fat. The excess fat was cut from a fresh piece of meat and
stored in a clean container. Nothing wrong with it. But isn't it
a little like eating dog food? It's not dog food till the dogs are
eating it, you reason. In the end, your love for fat wins over
your sense of propriety. (Felisa Rogers, “Can you live
without cooking oil,” Salon, 25 June 2011)
------
I just wonder
how the other half lives.
This was, unexpectedly from its title, a wonderful piece. From
the early comments, though, you can see what the overall tone
will be: many folks see this 'back to nature' as a smokescreen.
For those of us who grew up with a tub of lard handy, this
particular essay rings hollow.
Good writing, really, but I've never met anyone who's tasted
truffle oil. (Pulcritude)
3576
-----
Uh...lard?
Unless you live in a tree above the jungle canopy, I feel certain
that a pig farmer or abattoir lurks nearby. Lard rendered from
pork fat is beyond cheap---most butchers toss it…and the
ancillary product is yummy cracklin’s for snacking or salads.
Pork fat is WAY better for you than any veggie oil, has a
neutral taste and a very high boiling point. Fries in any other
oil or fat do not make it. I have a friend in Northern B.C. who
hunts bear and does a real snout to tail by rendering bear fat
into lard and his pancakes with wild berries are like kissing
the hem on an angel’s gown. If you’re really insistent on living
off the local land, find the oldest folks in your area who went
through the Depression and ask them how they ate…or else
just continue to be the whining dilettante. (Panama
Borsalino)
-----
It's very difficult

Offhand I can't think of a significant cuisine which doesn't
rely on cooking fat of some sort or another. It might be palm
or peanut oil. It might be lard or blubber or canola or tail fat
or butter. They all rely on some form of fat for most of the
cooking techniques.
It's not just aesthetics or tradition. We need fat soluble
vitamins. No matter what Beans&Greens gabbles on about
they're difficult to get from a vegan diet without heavy and
expensive supplementation. And they're nearly impossible
without fats.
It absolutely is hard to live without cooking oil.
Of course, this is where bulk buying and friends come in
3577
handy. You might not be able to buy your designer extra-

virgin cold-processed olive oil hand-pressed by wizened
artisans from one particular valley in the Tuscan hills. But
four people can club up and split a 20 liter jug of canola oil for
a reasonable price.
And no, the fat you saved from that cut of meat is not "dog
food". It's full of those all-important vitamins. And it doesn't
take much to get those nutrients or make a tasty meal.
(anuran)
-----
Really Enjoyable
Thank you for this piece. I so enjoyed how, all at once, you
employed enough detail to: make us realize what we have and
take for granted (down to the specific detail of city dwellers
like me who currently have both a change jar and corner
store); give a growing sense of horror while keeping a sense of
perspective on how temporary and soon-to-be-fixable it is,
even admitting things you could do but don't; and provide an
excellent recipe that I'm going to prepare for breakfast right
now. I laughed at how much this felt like a funny, scary movie:
I was just so relieved it had a happy ending of found fat and
potatoes. The "happy ending" makes the recipe itself even
better. Well done! (Agniescka)
-----
Felisa, you just seem hell-bent on making things hard

for yourself
I can't quite tell if it is a stunt -- along the lines of "No-Impact
Man" -- or you really ARE this impractical and naive.
Obviously we've discussed before that you clearly would seem
to qualify for food stamps, even if your husband works
3578
clearing brush and you sell a article every two weeks to Salon.
Clearly that is not enough for you to buy groceries regularly.
There is no reason to run out of cooking oil; it keeps a very
long time in a cool dry cupboard, if tightly sealed. It isn't very
expensive, and you can buy it on sale, or in those giant jugs at
the big box stores like Costco.
There are also "alternatives" like bacon drippings, any fat
trimmed off meat (as you actually did have in the freezer),
lard, Crisco and so on.
Apparently you have some false pride about asking neighbors
FOR A STICK OF BUTTER (or even margarine, which costs
about 30 cents a stick), and that's ridiculous. I am sure you
would gladly give a neighbor a stick of butter or margarine, a
cup of vegetable oil, and not even want to be repaid. In the
deep country, people depend on each other and THAT IS A
GOOD THING.
As I have said before, I have family in the country and yes,
they have close neighborly relationships, because so far from
things like repair guys you can call on the phone 24 hours a
day, YOU NEED a neighbor to help you with that bad tire on
your car, or the sump pump that won't work. Trying to do it
alone is almost suicidal.
They also have learned you CANNOT COUNT on short trips to
the supermarket or Kwik-E mart, so you BETTER DARNED
WELL have a plan for storing groceries, and a back up plan,
and somewhere to store staples and stuff, because if nothing
else, in the winter you might be stuck in the house for weeks
at a time.
It doesn't take much brilliance or cash to put aside a sack of
flour, dried beans (hey! Beansy! your favorite!), rice, canned
veggies, tuna, and yes, a JUG of OIL, for whatever tough times
(blizzard, flat tire, no money) is coming your way.
I also have to agree wtih emceemk, and I've mentioned this
about your other articles. You are more a citified foodie than
3579
you are a "back to nature survivalist", and it shows in every

word. It's amusing you can't see this or own up to it. Nobody
REALLY REALLY POOR would EVER have bought things like
key limes, coconut oil, wine, and other lux goodies -- because
they would have used the few extra dollars they had to do
what I suggest above: stockpile staples for the "tough times".
The cost of that coconut oil would have paid for 3 jugs of olive
oil or big enormous Costco can of Crisco.
As emceemk says (good post all round), people who REALLY
HAVE TOUGH TIMES -- who have hungry children -- who
haven't worked in TWO years -- who don't have a side job
writing foodie articles online -- who can't even FIND a job
cutting brush -- whose house is in foreclosure -- who face
homelessness -- would LOVE to have the problem of "not
enough fat/oil to cook some organic foodie dish".
I love the metaphor of "lemonade made from lemons, but with
no sugar whatsoever". Bad times teach you to be a survivor,
but they also teach you that BAD TIMES SUCK ASS, and to
try to ensure you don't reach bottom EVER AGAIN.
I also want to second the words of mattwa33186: you can
make your own butter easily from WHOLE MILK. Of course,
I'd bet my last nickel, Felisa, you guys only drink fat free skim
organic milk, that costs $6.50 a gallon, because the regular
stuff isn't good enough for you. (Note: you cannot make butter
out of SKIM milk.)
@Panama Borsalino: what you said
PRECISELY. Find an old grandmother or two who lived
through the Great Depression, or if not, at least the 50s era.
They will give you the recipes for cheap, easy meals with low
cost ingredients, reusing and repurposing everything, and
stuff like "use lard" because lard is cheaper than BUTTER and
OLIVE OIL.
I was lucky enough to grow up with two such grandma's; you
grew up eating imported truffle oil. That's just the first of your
3580
survival problems. (Greens&Beans)
-----
Stories..
Beans and Greens- I completely agree with you. They don't
live on their own land, they beg-borrow and steal to make
ends meet, have neighbors that give them meat, milk, eggs
etc.
I think that these "stories" are mostly made up by a young
(childish) idealist that thinks a life of poverty is a glamorous
adventure. She seems to have grown up with these
adventures.(Grown up may be a bit of a stretch)
Felisa, do you pay rent? Do you have access to the whole 58
acres that you talk about or just a house? How do you afford
internet service? (Internet is a priority, but basic food needs
are not?)
I also live in the country and have cows and chickens. We do
all we can to help out our neighbors in need, but eventually
you see that one or two are just living in the area so they don't
have to get real jobs.
I live on a fairly decent income in these times and certainly
can't afford things like bacon, wine and coconut oil.
I would think that things for you would be less stressful if you
lived in your car and begged on a street corner nearer to a
mini-mart than relying on your community to take care of
you. Or better yet- even 2 minimum wage jobs can pay for a
small apartment and basic needs. (By the way- what is your
husbands back ground, education and work history?)
It seems as though you can afford many comforts that most of
us cannot. Perhaps less trips to mexico would afford you some
good EVOO.
http://www.peoplesguide.com/1pages/personal/bios/writers
/felisa.html (AnnNonomouse)
3581
-----
Also, VERY bad style choice

Second-hand narration is pretentious, clumsy, and
presumptuous. It smacks of "MY experience is so important
and universal that naturally YOU would think and do exactly
as I would". Whenever I read anything formatted like this, I
keep thinking "who the hell are you talking to?" (And just FYI,
I couldn't make it past the halfway mark, it's so irritating.)
Please put away the high school essay tricks next time.
(Serai1)
-----
Reverse Classism Liar-fest

1) Nobody REALLY REALLY POOR would EVER have bought
things like key limes, coconut oil, wine, and other lux goodies
-- because they would have used the few extra dollars they had
to do what I suggest above: stockpile staples for the "tough
times" Laure1962
Really poor, multi-generational poor people buy cigs and
cheap booze --- because they usually have to work for prissy,
self-aggrandizing scum like you, and therefore they
desperately need the relief provided by mild intoxicants. Their
cigarettes alone cost more than Ms. Rogers few gourmet
tidbits. They rarely have enough space in their trailers to store
all the cheap bulk stuff you insist they live on. A pantry full of
anything is beyond their reach.
2) Please. You had coconut oil and plan to replenish your olive
oil stash? That ain't poverty.You were giving fat and bones to
a dog and hadn't made stock from it already? That ain't
poverty.Soy sauce? You can afford soy sauce? Damn, must be
nice. —NINALOCA
3582
Yeah, she tries to give something back to the neighbors who

helped her this past winter. It's called pride. As I mentioned
above, her jar of coconut oil cost about the same as 1/3rd a
carton of cigs -- at the reservation smoke shop.
3) I live on a fairly decent income in these times and certainly
can't afford things like bacon, wine and coconut oil.
I would think that things for you would be less stressful if you
lived in your car and begged on a street corner nearer to a
mini-mart than relying on your community to take care of
you. Or better yet- even 2 minimum wage jobs can pay for a
small apartment and basic needs. -- Liar
You can afford the time to post from home on your own
computer & maintain an internet connection, (midday
Saturday the libraries are verrryyy busy) but are too poor to
buy coconut oil or wine? Right. You win the trifecta of
horseshitting!
You vile, aging twits reveal your ignorance of contemporary,
rural western poverty with every filthy word you write. It's
willful ignorance, judging from what you've indicated about
yourselves. You all have hired hands & other service providers
who desperately need a smoke or three after they deal with
you.
You hate her wholly because she is young, hopeful, well-
educated and damned resourceful. The comparison between
her and you is endlessly humiliating to you -- as it should be.
(Holly McLachlan)
-----
Adapting
Wow. Lots of haters out there! For those who say "oh, none of
us have ever done that, or know anyone who has ever used
truffle oil," I think a lot of us lived differently before 2008. I
would spend $5.00/day on a mocha coffee because I thought I
3583
deserved it working at my crazy job in the big city. And then I

was unemployed and my high-minded ideals of never
stepping into a WalMart ended because they did have the
cheapest cereal in our rural town we had to move to for my
husband's job. So, enjoy the article for what it is--a story of
changes of life, adapting, cooking. Each of us experiences life
differently and through our passions; our kids, cooking,
Bunco, whatever. Oh, and if the author's articles drive you so
crazy, STOP READING THEM! (Caseystay)
-----
Loved this article.

I can sort of relate, because I've been in the running-out-of-
things situation myself, things that will just have to wait
another three days until payday. (I liked the suggestion about
making butter from whole milk, that was very clever.) My
suggestion: if you think hamburger grease is OK as a cooking
fat, always keep a pound of hamburger in the freezer. Switch it
out with another pound every so often. And always keep an
emergency stick of butter in the freezer, too. When you buy a
new carton, switch the frozen stick with a new one. That
butter will always be in there, for when you run out. (marco
polo)
-----
@NINALOCA
Nina, Felisa is a very nice young lady, with a lot of very
gourmet food tastes and a lot of naive and charming ideas of
"foraging and living off the land....FOR FREE".
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I got a lot of that from
friends and schoolmates; this idea was all the rage 40 years
ago. Communes, Birkenstock sandals, the Whole Earth
3584
Catalogue, yadda yadda yadda. Felisa is way too young to have

heard of any of that, so she must have gotten a hand-me-down
version from her parents.
Most people gave it up because honestly, it is tough way out in
the country and lonely (a bit better and easier today with cell
phones and the internet, but still) and it's not actually CHEAP
but kinda expensive (you need land and tools and seeds and
labor and fuel and stuff).
It is definitely NOT a solution to "I lost my job and my UI
benefits ran out". That's crazy talk.
That she's not thinking either "country/rural" or
"survivalist/forager" is clear because she is still spending the
pittance of income they DO have on soy sauce, olive oil,
coconut oil, key limes and other items instead of stuff like
dried milk, rice, flour, pasta, plain generic vegetable oil, lard
and other cheap, reliable menu stretchers.
I understand some of this, because frankly, I hope (AS GOD IS
MY WITNESS!) never to have to eat commercial white bread,
cheap hot dogs, margarine or powdered milk if I don't
absolutely have to, to avoid starvation. Been there, done that.
The solution is elegantly simple: APPLY FOR FOOD STAMPS.
Felisa and her husband would likely qualify for $300 in free
food (and the program is quite generous; you can buy
imported olive if you like, even truffle oil).
This is false, hair-shirt poverty -- a bit like whipping one's self
with a cat of nine tails to "beat the sin out". In this case, the
sin appears to be material well-being.
@Beansy
Just because YOU are healthy, Beans, does not translate into
"this is a healthy diet for other people". You may just be an
outlier. Or you may be a poor judge of your own health. We
could easily find a few outliers who are perfectly healthy (BP,
weight, etc.) eating at McDonalds! That doesn't make
McDonalds an ideal diet.
3585
@Alkaline
Don't burst an aneurysm, sweetie. I was making an educated
GUESS, because Felisa states "she dreams about truffle oil".
Those are not the words of a poor rural mountain gal, foraging
off the land, but a urban hipster who has expensive Whole
Foods tastes. Most of urban hipsters I know will drink
NOTHING in the dairy department EXCEPT fat free skim
organic milk, and indeed, it does cost about $6.50 a gallon. (-
Greens&Beans)
-----
@AnnNonomouse
Thanks (I think you mean me!) and yes, I think Felisa is living
in a cabin her parent's used to own (or still own) and she is
paying rent, but it seems like very minimal rent.
It sounds like she has nice caring neighbors -- they gave her
elk meat! -- but has let her reserves run down to almost
nothing anyhow. How much of this is "poor planning" vs. how
much is "I'll see how little I can get by on!" vs. "I'm dead
broke" -- I don't know. She's a bit cagey on the details.
Yes, I think like many young people having wi fi internet is a
priority over food, clothing, shelter and heat. I know people
who have been FORECLOSED ON, and their children literally
thrown out of their own bedrooms, and those people still have
i-Phones, with expensive data plans. Seriously.
Some people on Salon seem to think I am constantly hatin' on
cable TV and internet, and cell phones and lattes, but that's
not really true: I think they are all fine IF YOU CAN AFFORD
IT. My problem is when people who are seriously, no-shit,
going-down-the-tubes broke and in foreclosure and
bankruptcy and they STILL cannot give up $4.75 coffee drinks
or $125 a month data plans for their $400 smart phone.
That's ADDICTION and STUPIDITY, sorry.
3586
For the record, as much as she has stated here, Felisa was
formerly a well-paid copywriter and her husband a paralegal.
However, there are no such jobs in the RURAL MOUNTAIN
COUNTRY, and it is unclear what their long range plans are (a
book deal for her?), since you can't really expect to earn a
living from cutting brush once in a while.
BTW: thank you for the links to Felisa's bio. She has given no
indication here that she spends EVERY WINTER IN
MEXICO, nor the name of her small rural town. I agree: the
cost of even a minimal vacation would pay for a LOT of
groceries.
Also Deadwood, Oregon is a whopping one hour from Eugene,
a good sized college town....I know people who commute
further than that to WORK each day.
PS: Ooops....what Deadwood is actually near, is Mapleton,
Oregon. It is SEVEN MINUTES AWAY by car (meaning you
could WALK if you had to). Mapleton Yellow Pages listed
more than a dozen supermarkets, including Stop N Shop,
Fred Meyer, and Safeway. I think I may have to start calling
B.S. on this series. (Greens&Beans)
-----
@Holly McLachlan: thanks for the bitch-itude

Stupid-poor and smart-poor are two different things, Holly.
Nobody said that Felisa SMOKED. All poor people DO NOT
SMOKE.
Yes, there are people who are poor because they make
wretched decisions (lotto tickets instead of baby food) but
there are also people who simply have bad luck or hard times.
That you can't understand that undermines any of your
points.
I don't own a business or employ anyone, and I doubt Felisa
does, and neither do NinaLoca nor others here. To jump on us
3587
as some kind of "capitalist slime" holding down the

"proletariat" is nonsense. Go back to to your lefty Political Sci
class and on the double!
No, there is nothing wrong in giving back to your neighbors --
scraps for the dog or whatever -- but Felisa is so
uncomfortable with those same neighbors she feels she cannot
go over and BORROW ONE STICK OF MARGARINE or a cup
of corn oil, suggesting they are not as tight as you imagine.
Again, comparing coconut oil to cigarettes is unfair unless you
have reason to believe she is wasting her dollars on smoking.
75% of the US public DOES NOT SMOKE. And plenty of the
ones that do, are middle or upper class. (I see plenty of high
paid Hollywood "talent" smoking!)
I don't know AnnNonomouse's backstory, but I can tell you
that I have a USED several years old computer that I bought
second hand, and my internet costs $9.95 (dial up). It's also a
bit of an indulgence, but my husband needs to be able to pick
up work emails on the weekend.
I agree that the library, which used to be a good source of free
internet for the poor, is so terribly swamped now with victims
of the economic downturn, that its next to useless.
HOWEVER, Holly, there are plenty of people who simply
can't afford internet so THEY DO WITHOUT IT. Certainly it
does not come before FOOD.
You are insane if you think I have "servants" or am a
millionaire business owner cheating their employees. (And
Ms. Alkaline says that I make things up? HELLO! are you
reading this????) (Greens&Beans)
-----
@Leeandra Nolting
I agree. I think most country folks would be very OK with a
neighbor borrowing a stick of butter or cup of oil, and
3588
probably say "honey, don't even bother to repay me!" I think

even SUBURBAN folks would do this. It's simple
neighborliness. I pity anyone with neighbors so mean or
parsimonious they won't loan you an egg or a cup of milk in a
pinch.
Now, doing it constantly: not good. I am not endorsing
mooching, just honest borrowing once in a while. And it goes
both ways, naturally.
As you say -- and good point -- mayo can be used for an oil in
some things. I have used it in cakes to substitute or oil or
butter and it works well; mayo is made out of OIL, EGGS and
seasoning.
I've also sauteed in Italian dressing when I had nothing else
on hand; it's mostly canola oil and vinegar. It won't work for
everything, but is fine to saute some strips of chicken for a stir
fry (it won't take much heat).
Country Crock is pretty gross IMHO, but yes, it's very cheap. I
wouldn't want to sentence anyone to eating margarine -- I
believe it is very unhealthy -- unless they are dirt poor and
nothing else is possible. Corn and canola oils (generic brands)
are not expensive and some house brands of olive oil on sale
are just as cheap. Lard is even cheaper than that. I'd only eat
margarine if there was ABSOLUTELY nothing else
whatsoever. (Greens&Beans)
-----
@Holly McLachlan: well, YOU are here

I don't know about the others, but I got up early -- took my
dog for a long walk in the park -- did a couple loads of laundry
-- paid the bills -- ran them out to the post office -- went to an
neighborhood yard sale -- drove to the local park for the
annual "Green Festival" -- had a picnic lunch -- came home
about an hour ago and logged on to pick my email. Read some
3589
other stuff, then Salon and posted a few letters. Not exactly
MY WHOLE FRIGGIN' LIFE, lady.
While you have nothing of value to comment on this article
about, just to tell us all how much you despise us, while
engaging in the IDENTICAL BEHAVIORS we do.
Pot, meet kettle. (Greens&Beans)
-----
Greens-
My story- I have a small farm in rural Eastern WA. No "hired
hands" no employees. What comes in goes back out. Its a
heart felt commitment to no savings and no health insurance.
But we do well enough to take care of our needs and help out
in the community. Kids in school + homework= INTERNET
PRIORITY. Whereas gas is a priority over wine, canning
supplies over specialty oils and vacuum cleaner bags over key
limes.
I don't know Ms. Rogers or what parts of her storys are real
life. I loved the foraging articles and am a sucker for
sourdough. Very humorous and insightful, but would have
been just as enjoyable without the "feel sorry for me" pitch.
True hunger is something I don't wish on anyone, but to play
up (should I say play down) your life just to get the emotions
of the readers is fiction. These articles lead us to believe they
are honest and true experiences of the writer. Maybe they
should be categorized differently under "entertainment".
(AnnNonomouse)
-----
@Greens and Beans/Laurel

I agree that Country Crock is pretty nasty-tasting as compared
to real butter, but it's extremely cheap and you can fry things
3590
in it.
According to Wikipedia, Mapleton, Oregon, is an
unincorporated community with a population of only 918
people--so I doubt that the dozen supermarkets that advertise
in the Mapleton yellow pages actually are in Mapleton. More
likely, there's one or two grocery stores in Mapleton proper
and said dozen supermarkets you mention are in other nearby
communities.
That said, if she really WAS hungry and in need of food, the
amount of time she spent hunting edible mushrooms for a
single omelet she split with her husband and boiling down
Christmas trees for tea..well, that could be put to much more
efficient use applying for food stamps, or going down to the
local extension agency (shouldn't be too hard to find, since
she's not too far from the University of Oregon) to learn
things about how to make do, or taking the truck into the city
and shopping in bulk on Fred Meyer's double-coupon days, or
you know, looking for work that puts food on the table.
Or at least writing about how to put food on the table on the
cheap, but doing so in a way that's useful for most people who
are out of work. (Leeandra Nolting)
-----
To answer some of your questions.

Mapleton is a 45 minute drive from my house. There is one
store in Mapleton that sells groceries and it is small and, like
many country stores, expensive.
I AM working. Along with other Web-based writing and
editing work, I get paid to write about the time it takes me to
forage for mushrooms. Maybe it's not enough to live on, but at
least it kills two birds with one stone.
I did not spend the winter in Mexico, though it certainly
would have been nice.
3591
Sincere thanks to those of you who have written in my

defense, and thanks for the suggestions. Thanks to everyone
for reading.
Cordially,
Felisa Rogers
-----
As a highly urbanized meat-eater...

...I always enjoy reading Felisa Rogers' articles.
I don't see why people are so political about them.
She and her husband are of an age and temperament to try
this lifestyle out. Because they have a mind to (and she may
get a book out of it, and I hope she does), why is this a
problem?
To the politicoes: what's it taking from you that you don't
want to give? (Greeneyedkzin)
-----
No shortage of dirtbags in Republic or Spokane

Pride or not,if you can afford to give food to the neighbors
dogs you aren't POOR. Reverse classism my ass, damn near
no one in this country knows what it is to be poor or hungry.
To the first sentence: bullshit. Utter bullshit. People shared
food and medicine in concentration camps. That sharing is
a well documented part of what it means to be human. To the
second: precisely the dodge I expected, and likewise, bullshit.
The tirade you went on further down the page, about the
nature of chronic deprivation, describes the lives of many,
many young Americans today. Who don't have the time to
unload on strangers on the net, because they are out there
hustling to live -- as is Ms. Rogers.
Both you and Laure1962 rely on many service providers -- not
3592
personal pool boys, perhaps -- but every clerk at every 7-11

you shop at needs a well-deserved cigarette break after
dealing with you. Because you are pitiful, foul, ugly people.
Garbage beneath the heels of all decent folks, Ms. Rogers
included. You have no defense for your posts. You both have
made assumption about her that are unfounded, and as
negative as possible. Those assumptions mark you as
wretched, honor deficient fucks who have no business
attempting to drag down anyone else -- in any forum, for any
reason. (Holly McLachlan)
-----
@LaurelGreenBeans
"...also a local map of NEXT DOOR Mapleton, Oregon, which
has a dozen supermarkets and is close enough that she could
walk or bicycle there (less than five miles)."
Well, Laurel, people say you make things up because, well,.....
you make things up. A lot.
The closest Safeway and/or Fred Meyer to Deadwood is either
in Florence, OR (32 miles away) or in Eugene (nearly 60 miles
away).
There are NOT a dozen supermarkets in Mapleton, OR. There
seems to be but a few mom and pop type stores in that small
community.
Please do refute this: please provide a list of the dozen
supermarkets right next door in Mapleton, OR.
I am waiting with bated breath... (mamalicious)
-----
No shortage of dirtbags in Republic or Spokane

Pride or not,if you can afford to give food to the neighbors
dogs you aren't POOR. Reverse classism my ass, damn near
3593
no one in this country knows what it is to be poor or hungry.

To the first sentence: bullshit. Utter bullshit. People shared
food and medicine in concentration camps. That sharing is
a well documented part of what it means to be human. To the
second: precisely the dodge I expected, and likewise, bullshit.
The tirade you went on further down the page, about the
nature of chronic deprivation, describes the lives of many,
many young Americans today. Who don't have the time to
unload on strangers on the net, because they are out there
hustling to live -- as is Ms. Rogers.
Both you and Laure1962 rely on many service providers -- not
personal pool boys, perhaps -- but every clerk at every 7-11
you shop at needs a well-deserved cigarette break after
dealing with you. Because you are pitiful, foul, ugly people.
Garbage beneath the heels of all decent folks, Ms. Rogers
included. You have no defense for your posts. You both have
made assumption about her that are unfounded, and as
negative as possible. Those assumptions mark you as
wretched, honor deficient fucks who have no business
attempting to drag down anyone else -- in any forum, for any
reason. (Holly Mclachlan)
-----
It's the Green-eyed Monster, Greeneyedkzin

I don't see why people are so political about them. —
Greeneyedkzin
The "politics" is in their posts because they find it useful. It
can provide them allies among people who would otherwise
despise them.
Their motivation is more envy than philosophy. The envy
common to people whose best years are behind them, and
who now devote themselves to wrecking the happiness of
others.
3594
There was no hyperbole in what I wrote in my prior post,

however harsh or histrionic you might find it. There are few
things lower than people who live to deprive others of joy.
I expect Salon's editors regularly council their shocked writers
about the letters section here, and that they say something
along these lines when they do. (Holly McLachlan)
-----
@holly
You have absolutely no idea who you are hectoring and you
are so completely offbase in your assessment of me that the
urge to laugh and tell you to STFUB passed immediately and
all I could do was feel sad. It sucks to be poor and its easy to
feel as if your dignity is constantly under assault so Im going
to just assume you're not an asshole but someone whose been
fucked over and feels shitty.
BUT
If I take the time to say,'You can get 5 lbs of cheap chicken,5
lbs of rice and 5 lbs of beans for the cost of your expensive
oils" and you choose to see that as proof of hatred, contempt
and disdain for the poor thats on you.
Your concerns are at about Level 4 on Maslows Heirarchy of
Needs. Laurel and I are focusing on #1- physical survival.
When someone tells me they are hungry but then complains
that they need chocolate and EVOO and coconut oil because
fuckdammitlifeishardandicantbedeniedmhumanity it feels to
me as if I were a surgeon tring to perform an emergency c-
section but the patient starts bitching that the incision would
damage her abdomen and appearance and consequently her
selfimage and self esteem. Self esteem and dignity don't mean
jack if you're dead.Lets get you a little further from being dead
THEN lets worry about the other stuff.
Greens&Beans and I are from the same town. I wonder if its a
3595
cultural thing, because I'm 100% with her on this one.If I had
$20 and needed to feed my kids for a week, I want her to give
me advice even if it means I feel criticized for my past choices.
I dont want someone to tell me- give the bones to the dog and
go ahead and get the coconut oil.
I volunteer with the homeless a fair amount. I cook,serve food
and donate handmade items and toiletries. I always take the
time to cook nice items, to cook them as if I were cooking for
honored guests and serve them as if they were paying
customers. I donate not my leftover items, but toiletries of the
same quality that I buy for myself.I also collect them from
others to donate. And I make things for kids and I make them
nice with yarn I buy or solicit myself because life is hard and
ugly and the poor suffer enough without having to be fed
donated slop and wear donated rags and cast offs.Nothing
pisses me off more than people acting as if the poor deserve
no better than some slop they half ass cooked,some ugly assed
dismal miserable undecorated shelter to sleep in and all that.
Individuals may not be able to provide for themselves more
than the basics.Organizations may struggle to provide more
than the basics. But whenever possible,after the basic survival
needs are met I believe strongly that people also need
beauty,that good tasting food and clean aesthetically pleasing
surroundings are needs not luxuries. They just arent the
MOST urgent need.
Anyway. If food insecurity is an issue coconut oil or EVOO is a
want not a need.
I also have spent a lot of time over the past 13 years writing
blogs and teaching people the skills they need to survive and
how to make a dollar out of 15 cents, as they say. Food prep.
Menu planning. Budgeting. Gardening.Sewing. Bartering.
There but for the grace of god go I. (NINALOCA)
-----
3596
Thank you, Holly!

I am grateful for your comments, especially this one: "There
are few things lower than people who live to deprive others of
joy."
I am at the point where I am afraid to read comments on
Salon articles because of the vitriol.
Why so nasty? Why so much ego? Sadly, this foulness pops up
in so many Salon forums. Particularly annoying are the
continuous laments over how Salon is not the paragon it
supposedly used to be. Why not go read somewhere else? Poor
Tracy Clark-Flory. The comments she gets are so evil and
repetitious that I am astonished she hasn't quit yet. Wait!
Maybe she is too smart to read the comments. I hope so.
(imnrg)
-----
No
You have absolutely no idea who you are hectoring and you
are so completely offbase in your assessment of me
No. I am not.
I could be utterly incorrect about your age, sex, location and
nationality, but your lame, sick motivations are obvious. Your
retreat into pedantic nonsense is likewise, both foul and
obvious in its intent, and its motive.
You believed you had an opportunity to bully this writer with
impunity. You don't. (Holly McLachlan)
-----
@beshok semaj
Of course if one eats a diet of raw foods one doesn't have to
worry about cooking at all (except for the use of a dehydrator).
3597
Then one is being stupidly wasteful. It's been so well

established that it doesn't even need to be demonstrated
again. Raw food is much less nutritious than cooked food.
Meat. Eggs. Fruits. Vegetables. Flowers. Roots. All of it.
Cooking makes proteins much more readily available. It
gelatinizes starches. It breaks cell walls. You get significantly
more minerals, calories, protein and so on from cooked food.
In controlled experiments with the highest quality raw food
people on three to four thousand calorie a day diets could not
maintain body weight. In the studies of women of child-
bearing age even highly prepared uncooked foods in gorge-
yourself quantities were insufficient to maintain menstruation
in over half of participants. That's with modern varieties of
fruit which have undergone thousands of years of selective
breeding to be more nutritious.
There is no human society in recorded history or the
archeological record which subsisted mostly on raw foods.
Not one. Our near cousins the chimps and bonobos do. But
they have jaw muscles which go all the way to the sagittal crest
(which we no longer have), pouchy, muscular lips,
enormously stronger teeth (ours are like an ape's baby teeth),
and a significantly longer digestive tract. And at that they
spend 6-8 hours a day just chewing and digesting.
We are the ape which cooks its food. That is one of the few
universal defining characteristics of all human cultures.
(anuran)
-----
Well... I enjoyed it
Flame wars aside, I thought that was an excellently-written
article. It reminded me of my "getting started" time years ago,
when I used to comb through the couch trying to find enough
change to go buy Ramen.
3598
I don't miss those days at all. (Dancing_Angel)
-----
Wish I had found this before the trolls did

Your writing is, as always, refreshingly good. It's unfortunate
that so many people are only able to find joy in the putdown
of others. That one particular poster has time to write
numerous comments under a name that was slightly altered
from a more sensible poster tells me that she has no respect
for her own opinions and must therefore hide behind another.
She also has way to much time on her hands. Unfortunately,
she is only one of several people who take offense that you are
not living as they would have you live - though we cannot
assume that they would ever truly practice what they preach.
Your words will always be wasted on them.
Such are the problems of the Walking Wounded. These are
people who have become so broken, for whatever reason, that
they cannot see the wholeness and goodness in others. They
are incapable of understanding that another person's
experiences and goals are different from what they might have
experienced or wished for themselves. Pity them and move
on. In the meantime, I look forward to another brilliant essay.
Thank you,
Rachel (RenaissanceLady)
-----
A publication-wide eidtorial decision

Pity them and move on. In the meantime, I look forward to
another brilliant essay.
Beautifully written.
Another thing both letter writers and Salon contributors
might do is to complain to the editors (red bolded link on the
3599
lower right of the page). The letters section is under their

control. They could change the tone with a little oversight, by
removing a few posters from the contributing population
(repeatedly, until the ban sticks).
Whack-a-troll is a time-consuming endeavor, but probably
should be seen as a cost of doing business and just budgeted
in as such. The current online norm is to accept them as
unavoidable, and complain only when someone makes an
issue of it (writing off all push-back as a "flamewar"). To some
extent trolling is unavoidable. However, they can be kept at
bay. Entire letters sections don't need to become fever
swamps of dysfunction and bile. (Holly McLachlan)
-----
I read this, and thought about my in-laws...

...Who, as Dutch immigrants in the 50's and 60's kept a farm
in the far corner of Northwestern Ontario (Rainy River
district). Serious rural life, that. Predates the Trans-Canada
Highway.
In many ways, even though they've moved to the modest town
of Fort Frances, their instincts are still based on that farm.
They have a garden, from which every fall they _can_
potatoes, beans, beets and pretty much everything else they
can manage to grow there (my father-in-law grouses about the
deer that sneak in and pilfer the produce from time to time).
They buy everything in what seems to me to be ridiculous
quantities or sizes (flour, oil, eggs) and yes, save up the bacon
fat in the fridge. My father-in-law even got into making his
own wine from those kit things. He filled about half of their
basement with the results.
I can't imagine them ever running out of cooking oil, even
back when they were living on the farm (not sure, though, that
they would ever have had coconut oil on hand).
3600
So, to me this reads like someone who had idealized the rural
life, but who now has has gotten into it without having the
instincts.
Learn from this, do what the neighbours do and stock up in
quantity (on the cheap stuff -- and really, bulk canola is the
cheap stuff). And then, as other posters have said, feel more
free to borrow from them, but because you'll have bought in
bulk, you'll also have something to give back if they run low.
(Michael Mackinnon)
-----
@mammalicious
I got that info straight off of Google yellow pages. I don't live
in the area, but I can read a map! Mapleton is right next door
to Deadwood.
Even Felisa admits there are small stores in Mapleton, but
SHE DOESN'T LIKE THEM, so she won't even buy a STICK
OF BUTTER at such stores. I suspect she "has to go into
Eugene" because Eugene has a Whole Foods or other gourmet
emporium she LIKES better.
@Leeandra Nolting
I've chatted with Felisa several times about food stamps or
even food banks (which have no paperwork nor limits of
income, just "need"). She doesn't want to do it; she's either
too stubborn or too proud. (Or has some money she doesn't
want to reveal that disqualify her from the SNAP program.)
It also suggests this is a stunt, based loosely on "No Impact
Man". I don't believe a smart, educated woman would sit
there with NO FOOD IN THE CUPBOARD, and eat nettles,
when she could be eating cheese, meat, fresh veggies, fruit,
milk, bread and other healthy items.
Yes, I also said that "Country Crock is cheap but tastes awful".
Magarine is a chemical "soup" of junk vs. butter. But I know if
3601
you are poor, you can get a big tub instead of one stick of
butter at the same price. I don't look down on anyone trying
to survive poverty. (Greens&Beans)
-----
@Holly Mclachlan: you are seriously nuts, lady

Time to go back on your meds!
I don't smoke. I hardly know anybody anymore who smokes --
my stepdaughter was the last hold out and she quit last year.
I never go into the 7/11 -- I'd have to be seriously desperate for
a popsicle or something. I live in a suburb with enough other
stores that I never need to go in there.
You don't know squat about concentration camps, you hateful
ugly hag. People shared FOOD and MEDICINE with OTHER
HUMAN BEINGS -- not with dogs. I love dogs, but I don't
value dogs over human beings.
Ninaloca or whoever said that "nobody that poor would save
food for someone else's DOG' was correct. And Felisa ended
up eating the scraps!
To use the Holocaust as an example here is just despicable.
Ms. Rogers is not "hustling to live". She chose this lifestyle
quite deliberately (and I think, with the help of her parents
who OWN the cabin and loan it to her free, or very cheap)
because she sensed a book deal in it. She's a professional
writer by trade. And she could get FOOD STAMPS any day;
she choose not to. That's a very unusual choice, and we have
every right to question it. (Greens&Beans)
@NinaLoca: a word of support

Holly McLachlan is a hateful, spiteful troll. She has no point
here except "you are not allowed to EVER criticize any writer
no matter what".
She is wrong. You and I are right. I don't have any trouble
3602
saying that or sticking with it.

I am not surprised to learn you are a sensible soul from the
Midwest, or share my hometown. I also volunteer for the
Hunger Center and donate food, blankets, clothes and
toiletries to the homeless, including the City Mission. I cook
food at the local Food Bank. I work at soup kitchens on
Christmas and Thanksgiving. I am really insulted that anyone
like "Holly" would ASSUME I am talking from some arrogant
perch, looking down on people. I've been broke and
unemployed; I know what tough times are and I was raised by
Depression-era grandmothers who knew who to survive bad
times.
I am ashamed of people like Holly who think that eating
chocolate and olive oil and having "fun" outweigh basic
human survival, and that somehow criticizing anyone's bad
choices means "you must smoke cigarettes!" (????)
Nobody is "bullying" Ms. Rogers. We are making
COMMENTS on her ARTICLES which she is PAID FOR and
which are PUBLICLY PUBLISHED. If she wants the privacy to
do what she wishes, she doesn't HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT IT.
BTW: her bio on her Mexico vacation book blogs says she
"travels to Mexico EVERY WINTER". (Greens&Beans)
@Holly McLachlan: will you put your money where

your big fat ugly mouth is?
Because the "problem" at Salon is not criticism of an article,
but that posters are ROUTINELY allowed to call women "the c
word", to lie and make obscene allegations ("your gay! your
husband is gay! your ex husband is gay! your ex husband left
you for a gay man!"), to "out" people you disagree with, to call
names and make ad hominem attacks -- oh, and did I forget
"rampant anti-semitism?"
Will you speak out as eloquently about THOSE ISSUES as you
do about "one poster who thinks Felisa Rogers should get food
3603
stamps so she and her husband don't go hungry"?

Can you point out -- and please do! -- where I have used curse
words, vulgarity, allegations about people's sexual orientation
(negatively), "the C word", or OUTTED ANYONE for
expressing an opinion?
What is that? I never did such things? Yet you still want to
ban me? Thanks, you have revealed yourself to be a total
asshat and bigot.
Salon has TOTALLY FAILED to ban Zorkna (he's on like 15th
username) or Steel The First (horrible anti-semite who is on
like his 15th username), so why do you feel I will be an
exception?
Do you think literary criticism is JUST AS WRONG as anti-
semitism? Do you think asking why someone doesn't go down
the road to the country store to buy a stick of margarine is
EXACTLY THE SAME as outing someone's home address on
the internet, and telling other people to "get her!"?
Salon has so little budget for maintaining "standards" (cough,
cough -- such as they are) that they are dependent entirely on
A. unpaid student interns, B. writers off Open Salon who
charge peanuts and C. PAGE CLICKS.
They encourage flame wars to get page clicks, you dolt. Don't
you realize that????
The only person reducing this otherwise placid thread to "a
fever swamp of dysfunction and bile" IS YOU, Holly
McLachlan. (Greens&Beans)
@Miss Buggins: Still not on that 5 month camping

trip?
Guess that was another your fantasies ("lies")!
@Michael MacKinnon
I agree. I have family in the country, and they have many of
the same limitation as Felisa (small expensive country stores,
city hours away, etc.) and they NEVER run out of food -- they
3604
grow crops, they can/preserve food, they have a food

dehydrator, they freeze stuff, they save bacon grease, they
RELY ON THEIR NEIGHBORS if things get tough.
You don't need to go full-tilt into farming to have a small
kitchen garden (which should be producing by now, Felisa --
why don't you have any food from that? I don't grow much --
herbs and strawberries, and a few cherry tomatoes -- but I
already have food from my BACK DECK).
A couple of chickens would give Felisa and her husband a
ready source of protein from eggs (even if they never
butchered the chickens for meat).
I'd like to reiterate your excellent words:
"....this reads like someone who had idealized the rural life,
but who now has has gotten into it without having the
instincts.
Stocking up when you have a few bucks is basic common
sense, and you don't have to "live in the country" to realize
that.
(BTW: there are many kinds of coconut oil; the crude stuff can
be as cheap as $12.00 for a 32 ounce jar, but the really good
stuff -- organic, high grade -- is $32.00 for a 32 ounce jar. SO
yes, in most cases, you could get quite a lot of ordinary
vegetable oil for that amount, a good deal of olive oil or a
truckload of cheap margarine.) (Greens&Beans)
-----
Here is a list of what is within 20 minutes of Felisa

In 10 seconds of googling, I found these stores, all within 20
minutes of Felisa Roger's cabin in Deadwood, Oregon.
One is .4 miles away, meaning a crippled person could hobble
there on crutches in 10 minutes. (You can apply for food
stamps (SNAP) online; you don't have to drive ANYWHERE.)
3605
Randy's Riverview Market

.4 mi
10792 Highway 126, Mapleton, OR 97453 map
Swisshome General Store
3.4 mi
13298 Highway 36, Swisshome, OR 97480 map
Deadwood Country Market
6.7 mi
14699 Highway 36, Deadwood, OR 97430 map
Stop N Shop
12.0 mi
87764 Highway 101, Florence, OR 97439 map
Fred Meyer One Stop Shopping
12.1 mi
Grocery Outlet
12.4 mi
Food Services Of America
12.7 mi
1525 12th St, Florence, OR 97439 map
Safeway Pharmacy Pharmacy
12.7 mi
Market BIN
12.9 mi
1417 6 St, Florence, OR 97439 map
Cleawox Market
13.5 mi
Abhi One Stop Market
13.6 mi
Lakeview Grocery
3606
16.8 mi
19385 Highway 36, Blachly, OR 97412 map
Smith River Store
17.5 mi
16334 Lower Smith River Rd, Reedsport, OR 97467
Horton Market
21.7 mi
94636 Horton Rd, Blachly, OR 97412 map
LOW Pass Market
22.8 mi
22501 Highway 36, Cheshire, OR 97419 map
ALSO:
Waldport Food Share (a food bank that provides FREE food
supplies for needy families)
28.6 mi
*****
Felisa, my question is this -- is your problem more about a
snobbery for shopping at "down market" chain stores like
Safeway or Fred Meyer or Stop n' Shop -- OR that you are
deeply vested in shopping at the Whole Foods store (or
similar) in Eugene? and you won't "settle" for shopping
elsewhere? (Greens&Beans)
-----
The last page or so of letters proves

What does it prove?
Laurel1962sockpuppets is butthurt at being caught out. She's
still a cruel, self-righteous, dishonest, narcissistic
advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And she's still so wrong she couldn't see "mistaken" without
the Hubble Telescope. (anuran)
-----
3607
What on earth is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

The last page or so of letters proves
[] Laurel1962sockpuppets is butthurt at being caught out.
She's still a cruel, self-righteous, dishonest, narcissistic
advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. —anuran
I suspect that she is a typical upset bully -- enraged by
confrontation.
There are many good reasons to avoid push-back against
these sorts of internet freaks. However, Salon's writers,
particularly its precarious freelance piece workers, are
actually human. They aren't as wholly immune to criticism as
they would like to be.
They should have to deal with it gracefully when it's
legitimate, and done in good faith, but there is no reason why
they should be subjected to the foul rants of America's
blowsiest losers.
There is no defense for Laure1962, or NINALOCA.... or any of
the other hard-to-shake fungal infections a writer can pick up
here. (Holly McLachlan)
-----
@Felisa
I sincerely hope you get a commission on click revenue for
high-volume threads like this one. It would be the height of
delicious irony (appropriate for a food-related article) if
Laurel's craziness were actually generating you extra income.
I like to read your articles for the content, they're well-written
and evocative, but I gotta admit -- the crazy also keeps me
coming back. (whetstone)
Old youth?
It has been suggested here that Felisa Rogers has been ganged up by
3608
resentful, aging, menopausal boomers. Probably has been; but we

remember in her articles that she's not exactly been their biggest
supporter either. Felisa is about continuation of age-old traditions.
Keeping matrilineage, patrinlineage, intact; descendents keeping
faith to a blessed tradition; passing on with fidelity and love; one
generation to the next. Getting married by the same old tree whose
branches grandma used to scrape her teeth clean on. Except when it
comes to the self-indulgent boomers, who knew hardship and sparcity
only as a lifestyle choice -- letting it be known that heritage and
environment and grand/parents and the old hanging-on world were
at their service, never themselves to "it." In regards to the boomers,
tradition isn't about continuation, but exclusion. It becomes, not
about fidelity and love, but about crime and retribution -- it becomes
old, in a mean and twisted and unforgiving sort of way, pretending
them (i.e., the boomers) as a bastard aberation that strayed so far
from message -- and so readily! so maddingly flippantly! and so
damned near totally! -- they're to be at first heavily scorned at, and
then simply not to be brought up at all anymore.
Felisa is channelling the spirits of Depression-era grandparents, so to
sublimate herself into/with them. She's all about the icing on the
cake, but in her recipes she almost seems to be laying herself out bare
for their taking. Here are the spare and plain ingredients for my
(however savory) spiced nettle soup. (There's talk and evocation of
truffle oil -- but to show how rarely I'll indulge the real thing again;
how akin I am to you and your periodic Hollywood escapes to
compensation land.) Nothing so complicated to hide variation;
nothing so variant from what constitutes you to suggest my rebellion:
My coffee and sport-loving, my common, simple-loving husband and
I are fully yours, ancestors. In our recipes we fully aim not so much to
advance beyond as to close the distance to you. We will be anonymous
but worthy, in the way you were anonymous but worthy-- knowing
that every one one of our private, particular experiences we covet and
hope to pass on, is replicated by all those inceasingly multitudes now
forced to live just as fidelitous as we, and so are always also common
3609
and unexceptional. Everytime we speak our our savorings, of how we

spiced up our increasingly spare stock, you will hear as much of what
we've been denied, of what we were actually willing -- unlike our
boomer parents -- to deny ourselves, to remain fidelitous to you and
the nearly-lost virtues of your simple treasure pleasures.
Felicity is, I would suggest, very debatably the voice of youth. She
aims to be, and is succeeding in becoming, a wretched, withered
Depression ancestor brought back from the grave. Perhaps because it
is easy to imagine a stern, unforgiving tradition-guarding
grandmother stirred to life with the eager availability of such an apt
and willing vessel, I am prompted to wonder if Laurel et al. are not
truly so much responding bullyingly to youth, but in alarm and out of
fear of slippage to a spectre they long ago -- and never fully --
succeeded in beating back: a dreaded voice from the rightfully
discarded past that wouldn't allow anything beyond the most minimal
amount amount of fun to not silmutaneously speak of cold, brutal
withdrawal.
I hope here that Felisa not just appreciates the support, but the
challenge -- I think you are bent on losing yourself, drifting from
reality to some awful disassociated state, speaking always not so
much from first-hand or second-hand but from third-person
perspective -- as if looking down upon yourself at a distance which
balks, chastises your individuality and renders you a somewhat
pathetic plain "type" -- and it is mostly this some of us are concerned
to alert you to and wake you up from. If "Salon" soothes you from
internet bile, "their" blanket will also contribute to further
smothering you.
Link: Can you live without cooking oil? (Salon)

----------

Frank and Beastial
3610
In a blog post that divides the world as he sees it into "Pegs

and Holes," Dilbert creator and occasional sock puppet
master Scott Adams stirred up quite the online crapstorm
earlier this month. Unsurprisingly, a number of critics took
him to task for his assertion about "tweeting, raping,
cheating," that "the natural instincts of men are shameful and
criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal
and acceptable…. society has evolved to keep males in a state
of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as
unhappiness." Jezebel's Lane Moore took him to task for
suggesting "that 'boys' are pretty much designed to be rapists"
and Mediaite's Alex Alvarez took on the "misandrist notion
that men are base, selfish creatures who cannot control their
impulses and, thus, require something else – like women – to
act as the gatekeepers of morality." Here at Salon, I called
Adams' post, among other things,"spectacularly bonkers" and
"extremely lunkheaded," and noted "the world is full of men
who can distinguish between sexual urges and violent,
aggressive ones."
In response to his critics, Adams laid down the gauntlet in a
follow-up post: "I'd like to offer an opportunity to one of the
writers at Salon, Huffington Post, Jezebel, Mediate, or
Mediabistro. Allow me to interview you, by email, for this
blog, on the topic of why you so vehemently disagree with
your hallucination of my opinion. (Fair warning: It won't work
out well for you.)"
Well, how could I resist an offer like that? (Jezebel's Irin
Carmon also took up the challenge.) I wrote Adams that if he
would let Salon run the interview as well, I was all for it. On
Wednesday, he replied, asking me to "BRIEFLY describe your
main objection to my blog post, Pegs and Holes," and we have
both agreed to run our responses unedited. This is what
transpired, on Adams's blog. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Scott
3611
Adams takes on Salon,” Salon, 23 June 2011)
LINK TO DEBATE
----------
King Ape
If what we were debating here was if there was some deeply satisfying
pleasure we have been missing out on had society enabled the more
primitive instincts -- not just male -- in us some play, I think we're at
the point where the onus is on the person intent to disagree with this
possibility. Not so much the male self, but the rather traditionally
male-seeming neanderthal, our TRUEST WHOLE selves, everywhere
we're learning/rediscovering, has been suppressed; our everyday
normal life is being revealed not so much as civilized, however
compromised, but as perverted -- in denial of who we really are. The
food we've been eating is too processed and finely prepared; our
delicate take on children (and child-rearing), so distorted to demand
stark reveals; criminals, vandals, too tenderly treated and
optimistically imagined; Pittsburgh steel workers dispossessed and
scrambling while East Coast literatti tea; Others' sensitivities and
rituals, too long in the way of common sense and what is really good
for our country. Distortion after distortion -- it's past time to get back
to bare knuckles, to cease this nonsense of being tolerant and civil.
Both Scott and MEW seem similar in that they've both had it with
patience and are FOR the melee -- neither of them (at heart) would
seem too discomforted if the Gods and Authority in their arguments
made their opponents feel as if pressed to make their riposte while
managing a big foreign dick in their mouths. ("Does this make you
uncomfortable? Good.") They are both FOR the neanderthal, with
Scott showing himself still more essentially the cubicle man, and
MEW, that she's always been king ape, finally demonstrating her
reign. The civilized may not now even just be becoming dilettante:
convincingly, they've been cubicled, and what's up now is the rest of
us sizing up and clubbing to see who'll command the largest slab of
meat.
3612
-----
And the winner is MEW -- and Scott's overall point

Mary Elizabeth Williams just shot Scott Adams full of holes.
(Amity)
-----
I don't know what happened to nice, proper, pencil-
sharpened, assignment-neatly-filed Mary Elizabeth
Williams, Editor — I don't know, and I don't care, because I
would much rather read what this Valkyrie, this slayer, this,
okay if not towering giant then at least an upright-standing,
strong-backed, journeywoman of coherence and intensity

has to say. (Amity)
-----
MEW, well-done, you handed Scott Adams his balls, so to
speak. (mneme48)
MEW is victorious here, but in victory she mostly proves the essence
of poor, marginalized, emasculated Scott's point: that there is
something not just natural but GLORIOUS in our more aggressive,
primal selves, that feminizing civilization / sociability can only
understand as barbaric -- to be kept in check, if complete banishment
isn't possible. Scott is willing to miniature himself -- "I accept Society
is good and that it must come at the cost of my manhood" -- so to
make his castration, his grievances, more deserving of soothing, but
in truth, and especially with MEW, what this debate shows is that the
glorious, angry, uncompromising, brutal and engaged
Valkryie/neanderthal/King Ape suppressed in all of us, is
OBVIOUSLY worth a hell of a lot more than whatever had worked so
long to cage it in -- whose ostensible all-too-obvious virtues are now,
actually rather in need of being unscrolled for us again.
As Amity conveys, what MEW mostly shows here is that what
3613
society ... scratch that ... what WE need most is less of the caging and
compromising and placating, and much more of virulent "piss[ing
off" and "goad[ing]" so our inner, magnificent -- to hell with it --
FRANK AND BEASTIAL selves are aroused and finally get more play.
The debate is not so much "MEW 4 and Scott 0," but FOR drive and
unimpeded, uncomplicated conquest and THE FULL WITHDRAWAL
of finicky, touchy, tremulous civility and restraint.
Link: Scott Adams takes on Salon
----------

Debate on gay marriage
With New York state's same-sex marriage vote likely to come

any day (or hour) now, President Obama is strongly hinting
that he'll soon have a brand-new position on the issue to share
with the country. "He’s very clear about the fact that his
position is evolving," White House press secretary Jay Carney
said yesterday. That's a call-back to an unsatisfactory old line
the president once used when he wanted to assure the LGBT
community that he's secretly on their side.
[. . .]
But if marriage equality happens in New York, legislatively
and not through the courts, it will have passed with
Republican support. Which will be embarrassing for the
White House. (They're New York Republicans, yes, but Staten
Island Republicans can go toe-to-toe with the Iowa GOP any
day of the week.) With the president still "officially " opposing
gay marriage, he won't be able to celebrate the victory -- or
criticize the failure, if the New York state Senate acts like the
3614
New York state Senate and the talks collapse at the last
possible moment.
If it does pass, though, Obama will have a very nice
opportunity for a fabulous coming out party. (Alex Parene,
“Barack Obama should come out for gay marriage already,”
Salon, 21 June 2011)
---------
@sethew
1.) I do think THIS GROUP of polls that came out recently
reflect bias on the part of the people constructing them; polls
are only as useful as the questions they ask and the
methodology supported.
If indeed Americans are now solidly pro-gay marriage, than
MY OPINION should not be getting people riled out -- all
you'd need is an easy-peasy ballot issue and hurrah, gay
marriage for all. Clearly it is more complex than that.
We do have rights and they are ENUMERATED in the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and nowhere do they
address marriage (or homosexuality). They are about the right
of free speech, free assembly, the right to own firearms and
the right to own property and so forth. Gays already have ALL
THOSE RIGHTS (and had them long before women or blacks
did!).
Laws about marriage reflect our customs and traditions, and
go back to antiquity. If laws about same sex marriage are
"wrong" than laws about incest marriage and bestiality and
polygamy are also "wrong" because those all reflect morals
and social mores in our culture. (Of course Salonistas are
madly in love with incest and polygamy, so that' may not
make much of difference.)
Marriage is one of those "not mentioned" things that are left
to the states to manage, so I don't expect a nationwide
referendum on gay marriage. I have stated that I will accept
the results of any state that lets VOTERS decide this issue, if
3615
they go for legalizing gay marriage.

I wouldn't agree with it, of course, but in a DEMOCRACY
that's how you change MAJOR LAWS; not JUST by legislative
or judicial fiat. You can't just rewrite culture and society on a
WHIM. In this case, legislatures are acting KNOWING they
are going against the wishes of their constituents. (In some
cases, we have proof that special interest groups are
BLACKMAILING representatives.)
I disagree that the "vast majority of Americans" are lefty
liberals, and while the population tends to concentrate around
big cities, it is definitely NOT hard left or even "left of center".
Every Californian is OBVIOUSLY not a lefty, or Prop 8 would
not have passed handily (same percentage as Obama
received!).
Our political system is set up to have one half of Congress
represent the states equally (Senate) and one half represent
population (House), and yes I think that is fair IF THOSE
POLITICIANS follow the will of the people and do not
substitute their own beliefs, especially if they are being
coerced or blackmailed.
2. I never said that gay couples were violent or abused
children. Gay marriage is bad for society because it redefines
real marriage, into just a sort of loose partnership based on
sex, and takes away the male/female aspect of it which is
essential to REAL reproduction (not the turkey baster or the
paid surrogate type).
Nobody remotely suggests taking away the right of gay people
to cohabitate with anyone they wish to. But we cannot EVER
call that a marriage, because it does not meet the definition of
marriage.
We can't stop people from committing incest either, or living
in polyamorous groups, or having sex with animals. But we
don't have to label those things "marriage" and we don't.
3.) YES. Having gay marriage totally changes my marriage
3616
from a REAL MARRIAGE to a "gay partnership with Partner

A and Partner B". I don't want that, and I will fight to keep it
from happening.
If gay marriage passes in your state, then THERE ARE NO
MORE WIVES OR HUSBANDS, just Partners A, B (and likely
C, D, E and F, etc.). They have already changed all kinds of
documents at the Federal level to include this, using Partner A
and B. Marriage licenses in some states already have gotten
rid of Wife and Husband. Judge Vaughn Walker stated in his
opinion that "men and women are entirely interchangeable,
and have no unique differences", hence marriage can be
between ANY two people.
I do not consider this a "trivial discomfort" but a huge
intrusion into my marriage, which ultimately will debase and
devalue marriage for my children and grandchildren.
4.) No, marriage is a relationship between a man and a
woman, and should not be changed to accommodate other
people on lefty political agendas. If we "celebrate" enough, we
will soon have incest marriages and polygamy; good reason
enough NOT to change the definition of marriage.
Divorce has it's own problems, but banning divorce isn't even
on the table (if anything, divorce laws are becoming more
LIBERAL), and anyhow, most societies have legal divorce.
Only Catholics don't accept modern divorce law (in theory).
That's a dumb point.
5.) A Salonista is NOT merely one who posts here. It is
someone who is hogtied by lefty ideology and can't think for
themselves -- someone who hates America, hates families,
hates heterosexuality and generally signs on for a very
extremist agenda that is opposed to everything most normal
Americans hold dear. So it does not apply to me; I'm just a
talky visitor (Laurel1962)
-----
@Fightthetheocracy: I want to know...
3617
Canada is about to legalize polygamy.

The Netherlands has already legalized "triad marriage"
(polygamy).
Switzerland is about to legalize incest.
This is not an empty argument; these are facts. The war to
destroy marriage and family and society is very real, and
fighting to keep traditional marriage is being on the front
lines.
You don't get to decide what HARMS ME or my family. I feel
gay marriage causes me direct personal harm; I explained
why. That the lawyer for Prop 8 did a poor job doesn't mean
that the rest of us don't know we are being had, or that a lefty
political agenda is driving this thing. (Laurel1962)
-----
I dont even know where to start....
*Being gay is natural and inborn. You should be proud and
happy to be a free gay American man.* -Laurie1962
Ok...so do you think that beastiality, incest, and polygamy are
natural and inborn too? Because you also said that they are on
the same "spectrum of sexuality" and a natural consequence
of my marriage. You think Im natural and should be free to be
me - so should those who want to sleep with dogs and
relatives be allowed to do the same as long as they only live
together and never want to get *married*?
Honestly, does this even make sense to you?
I ask again - what need is being fulfilled in you by being here ?
(Doc1976)
-----
@Doc1976: I am not full of hate
I like and even love many gay and lesbian people. My kids are
not gay, but if they were I would love them! (My grandkids are
too young to know either way.)
I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff on Salon, so I see it as a forum
for ANYTHING -- they publish stuff by anti-semites and Neo-
3618
Nazis! anything I would write is tame, tame, tame by

comparison.
Also I think it is public service to tell blinder-wearing clueless
lefties the TRUTH about what MOST AMERICANS think,
because they are truly in the dark.
I resent your saying that I EVER said I hated ANYONE
because that is NOT TRUE.
I am sure you are a nice person, and so is your boyfriend.
However, you can't be married, not in the eyes of most people.
Not while DOMA stands.
You might adopt, but you will NEVER EVER have children,
because men cannot get pregnant and give birth. You need a
woman for that, my friend, and you don't have a woman in
that so-called "marriage".
Would having a child, knowing that child would NEVER
HAVE A REAL MOTHER, be the right thing to do? Or just a
selfish act by two men who care more about political
correctness than a child's wellbeing?
I never said "you were dogs" and I would fight for your right
to live freely and openly with your boyfriend, however you see
fit.
What I said was that legalizing gay marriage is just like
legalizing polygamy and incest, and that it is a path to
destroying marriage, and EVENTUALLY even things like
bestiality.
You can live anyway you choose, but you can't ever be
married, because you are two men -- and you can't ever have
children, because men are NOT CROSS FERTILE WITH
EACH OTHER.
You are probably nice guys, but honestly: time to come down
to earth.
-----
Still havent answered the question, Laurie...
Do you tell your gay friends and family members that they are
3619
among the same variants as incest and polygamy? No, really -

I want to know....do you? And if the answer is no, why not?
My marriage to my husband is recognized in my state - it is a
state's issue, right? You do know that we live in a
Constitutional Republic, don't you? Constitutional republics
attempt to weaken the threat of majoritarianism and protect
dissenting individuals and minority groups from the "tyranny
of the majority" by placing checks on the power of the
majority of the population.
No matter what you say, please go to bed tonight knowing we
have a marriage license. And that we are going to have
children. We are right here on earth living a life that you
abhor - and there is nothing you can do about it. And if one of
your grandchildren turn out to be gay, I really hope you keep
your online identity anonymous - you have no idea the
damage you would cause them. (Doc1976)
@laurel1962
Personally, I am for gay marriage / polygamy / incest MOSTLY ONLY
because of the bedrock who's for it -- the Salonistas, that you mock.
THERE IS a huge ridiculousness about them, in that they ecstatically,
enthusedly triumph things they would actuallly prefer ... that they
cannot ALLOW themselves to know too much about, because their
gleeful, righteous triumphing depends on a certain image they have of
ALL groups / ideas the rightwing, conservatives have traditionally
disparaged. For them, the disparaged must not only be discrimated
upon but in actuality be very good and worthy, so to make
rightwingers that much more awful in their perpetrations. But these
same ridiculous Salonistas ARE NOT FOR making use of these
whatever groups as poison cointainers into which they'll project
unwanted aspects of themselves -- for the purposes of annihilating
them -- something the far more horrid rightwing does and will
continue to do. They do not see squarely, but the overall impulse of
lefties is towards love while the overall impulse of the right is to hate.
3620
Gay marriage is supported by lefties; if is legalized it will

communicate a leftist victory (though if with [the efforts of] Obama,
I'll present soon a caveat): it won't help tear apart what is most
worthy about marriage because it will mostly communicate that leftist
understandings of everything -- which includes an understanding of
marriage as, not duty, and even chastisement, self-sacrifice, but as of
companionship and love and self-fulfillment still rule.
Because of liberal support, I am for gay marriage, and yet in truth I
think being gay is not biological but a defense mechanism; it is an
understandable, necessary psychic "adaptation," when presented with
intolerable, overwhelming stimuli: the overwhelming, smarming,
incestual mother. To avoid being sucked into her, women in general
are written off as sexual companions.
"...the overwhelming, smarming, incestual mother..."

Wow. I mean it. Wow.
A claim completely, totally discredited about 40+ years ago in
informed circles. Which hasn't been taught by anyone
anywhere in the mainstream in at least three decades. A
psychoanalytic theory with no evidence to support it. None.
Yet here it comes again, exhumed, dusted off and regurgitated
like forty-year-old vomit. (robwriter)
Being gay is a defense mechanism?

From a smothering mother?
People still buy that Viennese voodoo (thank you Mr.
Nabokov)?
Homosexual behavior is rampant in the animal world (as are
all kinds of "deviant" behaviors), and if you've spent any time
at all in the outdoors, you'll know that smothering mothers
are NOT rampant in nature.
So how does one account for gays who have no mother at all?
Or mothers who aren't smothering? Who have fathers who are
3621
not absent?
How does one account for gay identical twins - clones - raised
apart by different parents?
Sorry, Freud and his followers should have been literary
critics and left psychology to the scientists. (heller88)
-----
Buddy -- I can't make head of tails out of that post. I can't
even tell if you are for or against what I said, or arguing for
tolerance, or what.
The whole bit about the "incestuous mother" though-- that's
crazy talk. I know a lot of gay men (I don't even know HOW it
applies to lesbians!) and they have perfectly nice, decent,
loving moms.
Homosexuality is an inborn trait, like blue eyes or the ability
to wiggle your ears. It is neither good nor bad; just a normal
human form of sexual behavior. In any human sub-group,
there will ALWAYS be 1-2% or so that will be homosexual.
All that stuff about bad mothers and smothering is pretty
much totally debunked, and years ago.
The only remotely understandable thing I got out of your post
is that yes, liberals see this as a HUGE political victory and
that's why they are working so hard for it -- they have utterly
given up on fighting for the wars to end, or for Gitmo to close
or for heath care. This seems like an "easy victory" and yes,
they see marriage as "romantic self-fulfillment" entirely
without real obligation, fidelity, sacrifice or dedication, so is
cheap and easy to extend it to anyone who claims to want it.
(Laurie1962)
@laurel1962
Re: “This seems like an "easy victory" and yes, they see marriage as
"romantic self-fulfillment" entirely without real obligation, fidelity,
sacrifice or dedication, so is cheap and easy to extend it to anyone
3622
who claims to want it.”
Obligation, fidelity, sacrifice comes VERY, VERY easy to us. It is for

many of us an instant way to feel somewhat good as a person. Suffer
through a depression, throw yourself into whatever war, define
yourself mostly as someone "owing," and you're the Greatest
Generation, who deprived themselves so that -- ostensibly -- others
might benefit. To really believe we deserve happiness -- to do as the
flappers and hippie boomers did and make life seem mostly about
possibility -- is the much, much harder part. Whenever we evolve and
get there, voices like yours soon enough begin to takeover and all we
hear of is people's punishment-worthy, bloated vanity.
It is with fidelity to purer causes -- self-sacrifice, etc. -- that you begin
to get such things as anti-semitism, that is, the public "mounting" of
groups into which to project THEIR OWN unwanted aspects -- their
vanity, materialism, spoiledness, etc. The Germans began to feel the
need to become the self-sacrificing, selfless, personality-less Volk, and
so the Jews (and others) had to become vain, self-serving public
parasites. What moves an anti-semite, I judge, is not entirely absent
from you.
-----
@dickdworkin: excellent point and thanks for

bringing it up
There are plenty of OLDER children in foster care in the US
who DESPERATELY need permanent homes. Unfortunately,
many of these children are not technically "free" to be adopted
(because they have living parents who have not relinquished
parental rights) and mostly because they are older, black,
mixed race or have mental/physical handicaps.
People are not lined up to adopt such kids, not even gay
3623
couples. Most people want to adopt HEALTHY WHITE

INFANTS.
HEALTHY WHITE INFANTS are in very, very short supply.
Almost none are available through traditional adoption; most
people who do adopt healthy white infants either go through
the gray (or black) markets, pay a butt load of money for the
kid OR they go overseas for an expensive foreign adoption.
Foreign kids are pretty much "priced" by skin pigmentation,
with Russian/Ukrainian kids being the most expensive
("white") and the prices goes down to Asian kids, then
hispanic kids, then at the bottom, black kids (African). It's
disgusting and yes, it is racist, but that's what people want and
how their adult needs have distorted the world adoption
market.
Basically the most "desirable" kids go to the wealthiest
couples, but introducing gay couples to the mix has
complicated stuff. Now there is more competition for the most
desirable children, and many gay couples are VERY affluent,
two income partnerships. They are basically EDGING OUT
traditional families to take adoptable infants -- who are in
VERY short supply -- and denying those children a home with
a mother and a father.
The only thing protecting these children or giving them a
chance are laws favoring married straight couples. However,
with legal gay marriage, adoption agencies are FORCED BY
LAW to give babies and toddlers (who have the best shot at
having a mother and father in a traditional marriage parent
them) to gay and lesbian couples.
Naturally gays and lesbians cannot have children by ordinary
means (lesbians always have the turkey baster, but many are
too old even for that) so they by DEFINITION are going to
make up a disproportionate number of potential adoptive
parents.
Look at Doc1976: he had a marriage ceremony with his
3624
boyfriend, now he wants to ADOPT. He is a DOCTOR with

plenty of money to buy any kind of adoptive infant. Would
you want to be an ordinary middle class married straight
couple trying to compete with Doc for ONE OF THE VERY
FEW INFANTS UP FOR ADOPTION? OR compete on the
foreign market with him, when he has a huge income to travel
or hire legal assistance?
If you mean "older hard to place children", I know a few older
gay couples who are indeed raising such children. But YOUNG
gay couples refuse to consider this -- they want WHAT
STRAIGHT PEOPLE HAVE, which is a perfect tiny adorable
infant. And they often have the means to edge out ordinary
middle class straight couples in the competitive adoption
market.
If we want to talk about assisted fertility -- donor eggs, donor
sperm, surrogates -- that is a problem too. There are countless
celebrities who are at this moment openly abusing fertility
technologies designed for infertile STRAIGHT couples so they
can have a "gayby".
Most of these gay and lesbian celebs are not remotely infertile;
they are young and healthy. They just can't come to terms
with being in a non-procreative partnership and want "what
straight people have", which is an infant.
Most are so cruel and selfish that they do not consider the
needs of the child FIRST: that a child above ALL OTHER
THINGS needs a mother AND a father, if not his biological
parents, then a substitute set of male and female. Anything
else is not going to be the same, and the child will have a
serious deficit in his/her life. (Laurel1962)
-----
@Laurel1962
Re: Most are so cruel and selfish that they do not consider the needs
3625
of the child FIRST: that a child above ALL OTHER THINGS needs a
mother AND a father, if not his biological parents, then a substitute
set of male and female. Anything else is not going to be the same,
and the child will have a serious deficit in his/her life.
First off, people who are eager-ready to scold people for their
selfishness are no doubt way worse than couples who'd marry
primarily for their self-pleasure: when they have kids, be sure they'll
communicate to them mostly that what they are is primarily sinful
and selfish, from the start denying their parents the love and
admiration they deserve for commiting themselves so selflessly to
them. Anyone who rants against selfishness is someone who
"learned" early that their own rightful claims were somehow rotten,
suspect, owing to them amounting to love toward something other
than their immature parents. When they rant they imagine their own
parents approving them for defining themselves as willing to give the
whole of themselves up to satisfy other people's (their parents') needs.
They have their own self-soothing in mind; they are being selfish.
Secondly, I agree that children really need both men and women in
their lives, and I really like that the current understanding of
marriage communicates this need. However, as important as this
need is, it is rather more important that they grow up in a loving
family, and it is far more important that marriage communicate
THIS. As is, traditional marriage doesn't: the barbaric couple that'll
spend most of their parenthood either abandoning their children or
using them, looks more worthy, more essential, more right, than the
liberal gay couple, committed to human rights, who'll find ways to be
mostly kind and attendent to their children. Because of this "crime,"
marriage does need a good turn of being imagined as something other
than man / woman inextricably bound: it may be ground for making
the quality of the care the foremost "concern," essential pre-requisite
for subsequent legitimization.
3626
-----
Patrick
Loud & clear. (g50)
-----
Apocalypse Cow
It's time for another special edition of cow talk, ladies and
gents and ... er.. Laurie.
Apocalypse Cow. We believe this is an allusion to the Bayeux
Tapestry, a 50 cm by 70 m embroidered cloth which explains
the events leading up to the 1066 Norman invasion of
England.
We would welcome any enlightenment on this subject from
that master of lighten himself...@Patrick McEvoy-Halston!
Bravo, sir. Tis a sore deed that you do so deededly. Also. Well
done.
Other Worthy Moo Outs:
@Doc1976...many sincere moos of happiness and
congratulations to you and your husband. If you ever tire of
saving lives, there may be a big future in flagging waiting for
ya. A worthy aspiration on this thread.
@sienar and @orange swan... valiantly guarding the
Normandy invasion from revision and moo(t) interpretations.
Also, the Constimootion and Canada, too.
@jtanneru... for not invading Normandy, (a trick learned from
cow class) and reminding us that a person's a person no
matter how Ralph.
@Balaamsass... for the cool moo tunes, and @David
Ehrenstein & @G50 for persistence in the face of moo poo.
And, of course, also @bigguns ... our own cow talk sponsor!
And now we return to the regular insanity portion of the
Salonistas. (steppedonapoptop)
3627
Link: Barack Obama should come out for gay marriage already
(Salon)
----------
Never having abandoned the heartland
No doubt "Battle for Brooklyn" will be of most interest to New

Yorkers, and particularly to people who live or work in the
city's most populous borough. But the film's basic situation --
local residents and community activists vs. the development
schemes of major politicians and big business -- is an
archetypal element of urban life, one that can be found in
almost any city, large or small, from Maine to California.
What distinguished kazillionaire developer Bruce Ratner's
plan to remake the center of "America's fourth-largest city" (to
borrow the boosterish phrase of Brooklyn Borough President
Marty Markowitz) was primarily its size and audacity, along
with the fact that the ensuing battle turned very ugly and
inevitably attracted the attention of the national media, much
of which is headquartered a few miles away across the East
River.
[. . .]
But I would never have denied that the dilapidated Long

Island Railroad yard along Atlantic Avenue that Ratner picked
as his centerpiece, along with the mixed-use area around it,
3628
was in need of revitalization. The question was more about

how it would be developed, and who would get a say in the
decision-making process. I think the same question was being
asked all along by Daniel Goldstein and Shabnam Merchant,
the activists who met and got married and had a daughter
while the filmmakers were watching them fight against
Ratner's plans.
Goldstein got involved at first by happenstance, because he
lived in a condo building Ratner planned to demolish, and
where he ultimately became the last holdout after every other
owner had sold out. I'm not sure he and Merchant would put
it exactly this way, but their struggle -- and those of a ragtag
collection of local activists and residents -- eventually became
more symbolic in nature, an act of resistance that was always
likely to end in defeat. Among other things, they wanted to
expose the way Forest City Ratner, the development
corporation, had gamed the system by using its pull with
powerful officials like Markowitz, Mayor Mike Bloomberg and
Sen. Chuck Schumer, and had used odious and divisive racial
politics to bulldoze local opposition.
As "Battle for Brooklyn" makes clear, TV news cameras were
hypnotized by an easily comprehensible angle, the idea that
the development fight pitted privileged white yuppie
newcomers, who were a bit too easily offended by
construction equipment, against poor, black longtime
residents who wanted jobs, affordable housing and a Brooklyn
basketball team. This was never true or fair. If anything, it was
a perception deliberately created by Ratner, who funded
"grassroots" community groups that hadn't previously existed,
hired local black ministers as consultants and recruited the
now-notorious ACORN to rally housing-project residents to
his cause. African-American officials who actually represented
the neighborhood, including City Councilmember Letitia
James and the local assemblyman and state senator, were
3629
uniformly opposed to Atlantic Yards, and correctly perceived

Ratner's promises of local jobs and affordable housing as
empty. (‘“Battle for Brooklyn:’ in breaking news, Goliath beats
David,” Salon, 17 June 2011)
----------
Really, Andrew?
You live in Brooklyn? That's just astonishing! Imagine a Salon
writer who lives in Brooklyn....oh, wait. ALL Salon writers by
edict must live in either A. Brooklyn (preferably Park Slope)
or B. San Francisco/Berkeley.
It's amazing how you guys manage to bypass every writer in
flyover country, thousands of cities, 48 states (and Guam and
Puerto Rico!) and all types of writers from every religion, race,
culture, ethnic group and economic level.
How many writers here are from (or working IN) the
Midwest? The South? The Southwest? Rural Maine or urban
Des Moines, Iowa? Arizona or Rapid City, South Dakota?
Huh. That would be NONE.
How many writers here are affluent, educated, WHITE, urban
and live on the East or West Coast? Huh, that would be ALL
OF THEM.
No wonder we have no diversity here of opinion or attitude or
lifestyle or awareness of how the other 95% of American lives,
works, thinks, dreams. No wonder you are clueless and wrong
about almost everything.
Also, Andrew: there are no middle-class neighborhoods, nor
middle class people in Brooklyn, or anywhere in New York
City. That ended a long, LONG time ago when prices escalated
past madness.
You may like to think you are middle class, but no middle-
class person could afford to live in Brooklyn, where rents top
$2000 a month for a small rental unit, and $500-600K for a
small co-op or condo.
3630
If you can afford these prices, which are standard for the area,
you are not middle-class and you likely have NO IDEA what
middle-class even means. The average household income in
the US is around $45,000 a year, Andrew, which translates to
about $2200 in take-home pay. In other words, it would
require almost 90% of average American take-home pay for a
family to live in just a 1 bedroom Brooklyn apartment
(probably having to stuff the kids in a closet or large bureau
drawer).
Either you are vastly above the mean (or median, or average,
or all three) OR you are on the parental dole somehow to be
able to afford to live there, OR (my own personal theory) you
are not middle-class but well into the affluent class. Are you
Bill and Melissa Gates? Of course not. But please don't insult
real, struggling middle class families in American by claiming
to be one.
Also: I don't know anything about Atlantic Yards, but I
wonder why you think you have achieved "victory" in creating
a wasteland of parking lots instead of AFFORDABLE homes
for people who are not as wealthy and privileged as YOU ARE.
Is this a kind of closet racisim? Isn't it true that no matter the
corruption of the stadium deal (which I believe is likely true),
what you really wanted to do is block low-income housing,
and keep poor and working class people (ESPECIALLY those
with black skins) out of your white, affluent, yuppie enclave?
To protect your housing values, by keeping the area "upscale"
and exclusive?
Interestingly, your colleague Mary Elizabeth Williams, wrote
about this in great detail in her book "Gimme Shelter"; it was
fascinating for me (far away in flyover country) to read about
the obsession the literati has with Brooklyn, and certain
neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and why (the chi chi coffeeshops
and boutiques and restaurants, and "all the right people are
there", etc.). It would have been a much more interesting
3631
article had you addressed any of this honestly. (Laurie1962)
Please cool your jets on the class warfare

At least when you have NO IDEA what you're talking about --
and I do mean you, Laurie or Laurel or whatever you're calling
yourself these days.
(This is really irrelevant, but I won't resist: Yes, our writers
mostly live on the coasts -- that's where writers gravitate to!
Our current editor in chief, Kerry Lauerman, grew up in
Indiana. Joan Walsh is from Wisconsin. Off the top of my
head, other people in recent Salon history have been from
rural Pennsylvania, Texas, upstate New York. There aren't any
national journalism jobs in those places.)
Now then:
Median household income, United States of America, 2009:
$54,554
Median household income, Brooklyn, NY, 2009: $42,932
That comes from the Census Bureau. You want to start this
discussion over again?
Brooklyn is in effect a large city, with an economically,
demographically and racially mixed population of 2.5 million
people and all the associated problems that come with that.
(Only about 36 percent of Brooklynites are white, despite
what you may think you know from other sources.) It
absolutely, definitely has middle-class neighborhoods, and
mine, which was historically an African-American
neighborhood of single-family houses and now is more mixed,
is definitely one of them. (I don't live in Park Slope. Can't
afford to.) And how much do you think a movie critic for an
Internet publication gets paid, exactly? Trust me, my
household income would not define me as "rich" in
Oklahoma, let alone New York City.
As I think I made clear in the piece, African-American
3632
community leaders like Councilwoman Tish James, state Sen.

Velmanette Montgomery and the more progressive preachers
were among the leaders of the campaign against Atlantic
Yards. The collapse of Ratner's huge dream for the Yards only
had a little bit to do with the activists, though, in the end. It
was mostly a result of his grandiose overreach, since he didn't
stick to undeveloped land and sought to condemn and drive
out numerous residents and business owners, and even more
than that a result of the financial collapse.
No one thinks those acres of empty land and parking lots are a
victory. They are a monument to greed, pride and stupidity.
And it wasn't people like Tish James or Dan Goldstein who
were the proud and stupid ones. (Andrew O’Hehir)
Never having abandoned the heartland

The cultured go to Brooklyn/Berkeley, not really ESSENTIALLY
because that is just where the jobs happen to be, but because it's
prequisite to establishing them as natural aristocrats -- the best of the
best, who not only know what real culture is and where it is most
undistilled to be found, but have it them to insist on manifesting
themselves there. What is important in their letting you know how
they origined from Indiana et al. is not so much their having been
born but their having LEFT there. They can pretend otherwise, and
seem inclined to want to -- you turn instantly European and not-
American if you just loathe on the stupidly unpretentious, Nabokov
style -- but what they mostly want you to know is not that, at base,
they're still of the working class, but rather that they're so much not
that that even being born a world apart couldn't prevent them from
junking it behind them, once independent and adult. They're showing
their essential modesty in a savy way that mostly works to highlight
their exceptionalism. They laugh when people understand them as
elite, as they know that, even in living in a way they casually, easily
admit to really, really enjoying, there is pretty much everyday
sufficient aggrievances, humiliations, to make plain what they still
3633
mostly are, sigh, are at best modestly-empowered, and possibly most

truly, anonymous and small. And because those aggrieved at them are
so ignorant to jolt them to guffaw at the inflation and ridiculousness
of their visions rather than to secure and consider their truths, they
don't have to think on how their everyday true understandings of
what it is to live "at court," which serves as ready counter, both shows
them as not now merely newly arrived and makes them seem, I think,
actually part of the complicated but undeniable nesting of manners
and experience that produces the miracle of community, of civitas,
that rightly draws subsequent others in.
Yet there is a sense that that this is all quickly becoming passe.
Whereas before, to be relevant, to be truly part of "the discussion"
with the distinct, those in focus, those that matter, YOU'D BETTER
call this nexus your home -- or have gone to the right MFA schools, if
not -- I think it's quickly becoming a place that will ID you as actually
irrelevant, the wrong part of a publicly shared joke, really. It may be
that right now if you want to secure a place as a relevant
writer/thinker in the upcoming age -- which is different than just
feeling safely ensconsed as one -- your best bet would be to NOT
make the move to Brooklyn/Berekeley, as it'll make you seem
ungrounded, detached, flighty, vain, thin -- opposite of hearty, and
oblivious to the obvious. Better for you to really demonstrate your
essential groundedness, your true proletariansim, your relevance in
an age where bards must be of the same sinew and blood of the
suffering -- else just be boutique -- to have never left Indiana. I think
writers are cottoning on this. Look for more and more of them to
announce -- in what really amounts to a self-serving, tactical move --
to their being possessed of that (now special) something that drew
them, not to seek out New York, but to stay faithful to home. (Perhaps
too, to their never having been part of any signficant MFA program,
mostly out of sensed distaste for the kind of seekers, the enfranchised
mama-boys and princesses, who'd find themselves there.)
The future in writing, I'm sensing, may belong much more to the
Aaron Traisters (Pittsburgh) of the world than to the Rebecca
3634
Traisters (Brooklyn). They'll be the ones society will highlight; they'll

be buoyed and sought out; and it's going to be bloody hard, as they
posit their beer-bellies and craggy appearances smack down,
immodestly, before us, to target them as they now really are -- elite.
Our cultural critics are going to have to get really good, or these
bullies are going to ride rickshaw ...
Link: “Battle for Brooklyn”: and in breaking news, Goliath beats

David (Salon)
----------
TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2011

Debate on circumcision
The Academy Award-winning actor and father of two sons

came under fire last week for a rambling series of tweets that
kicked off with a declaration that "Circumcision is barbaric
and stupid. Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that GOD
requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect."
Predictably, he was deluged with rebuttals from followers,
and Crowe, never one to back down from a fight, seemed
happy to take them all on. When a user responded that
circumcision is "more hygienic and nobody remembers it," he
lobbed back, "Hygienic? Why don't you sew up your ass
then?" Regarding circumcision's place in the Jewish tradition,
Crowe told his followers that "... The Mayans had ceremonial
acts too." And with a direct nod to a famous pal he added, "I
love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and
the funny little hats but stop cutting yr babies @eliroth" -- a
comment that prompted actor/director Eli Roth to jokingly
reply, "You didn't seem to be complaining when I was
recutting you this afternoon."
3635
[. . .]
Yet in the harsh light of hindsight, a whole heap of backlash,
and who knows, maybe a little more clarity of thought than
when he'd originally been posting, Crowe deleted the
offending tweets and issued an apologetic message. "I have a
deep and abiding love for all people of all nationalities," he
wrote Friday. " I'm very sorry that I have said things on here
that have caused distress. My personal beliefs aside I realize
that some will interpret this debate as me mocking the rituals
and traditions of others. I am very sorry."
[. . .]
"This is a great forum for communication," he graciously
wrote this weekend. "I, like any human have my opinions and
you all have yours, thank you for trusting me with them."
Whether you agree with his views or not, you've got to give the
guy credit for being able to know when to apologize, and how
to listen. In the morass of Twitter wars and flames that can
make the Net feel like a cesspool, Crowe, it turns out, is
anything but barbaric. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Russell
Crowe’s anti-circumcision rant blows up,” Salon, 13 June
2011)
Breach
Does anyone else get a sense that with Tracy Morgan and Russell
Crowe, some shells have hit the sides of a vast and thought-
impenetrable battleship, and for the first time made some significant
dent? Yes! This here ... this is the way!
The story ostensibly here is that if you attack Hollywood, no matter
your inner bulldog, you'll find yourself backing down and apologizing
while still finding a way to pretend you've stuck to your principles.
But it isn't.
Rather, as with Tracy Morgan, the story here is that the
establishment's ability to ostensibly back you down, is beginning to
seem cover for the fact that some means has been found to effectively
3636
make a strike. After the fact with both of these two men, is that
neither really is going to take a lasting hit for their tirades. They have
been ostensibly put in a place by an empowered friend, not-at-all
associated with their mindset (a follow-up we hesitantly obliged for
Whoopi [with Gibson], but eagerly here with Roth). But with their
breaches, they are both are serving to successfully nest in the public
that there IS something intrinsically immoral and manipulative about
Jews and Gays. Mel Gibson was not permissible! Tracy Morgan and
Russell Crowe, are coming closer to just right.
Also, I am against circumcision. It's child hate. (Not much one for
God, though, either.) Can't agree with Crowe, because I think there is
intent in him to demonize people. It's not just saying what has too
long been obfuscated, and so must come out of you in a way to blast
through layers of bulk. Could be narrated this way; will be narrated
this way; but it's not mostly true. The soothing here, for some, is not
from seeing a more genteel way to handle differences, but from a
successful breach, without retraction.
But with their breaches, they are both are serving to
successfully nest in the public that there IS something
intrinsically immoral and manipulative about Jews and
Gays.
If you really believe that, then I pity you. (Beans&Greens)
@Beans&Greens
RE: But with their breaches, they are both are serving to
successfully nest in the public that there IS something intrinsically
immoral and manipulative about Jews and Gays.
If you really believe that, then I pity you.

I have no idea how from this you would assume I'm anti-Semetic /
anti-Gay. I am TRYING to help people understand that from how
these two men are being handled, we should see that anti-Semistism
3637
and homophobia is becoming more acceptible, even amongst liberals:

that is, I'm at their (i.e., Jews' / Gays') genuine service.
How are you helping, in your just saying how correct Crowe is? He's
making a dangerous breach, and you assume him as if he's making a
humane point. Anti-circumcision talk gets air in A kind of climate,
and its about progress. If it gets air in the wrong kind -- IT IS anti-
Semitism: demonization, and regress. We're in the latter kind of
climate. His God part tips us off. As does, somewhat, his never
backing down to a fight -- his disposition. There's some Mel in that --
it's not just heroism.
@ —Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Being anti-circumcision is not the same as being anti-Semitic.
I personally know (and you can find in this thread) many
proud Jews who don't feel the need to have their sons
mutilated for an imaginary bloodthirsty sky-demon. There are
anti-circumcision groups in Israel. Circumcision among Jews
in western Europe and Latin America has dropped
precipitously - not out of fear, but out of recognition that
hacking off part of a helpless baby for "G_d" is a sick
unnecessary barbaric way of welcoming a child into the world
and into a religion. If anything, Crowe is given a pass here on
the crudity of his statements due to the fact that he has always
been publicly rude, crude, abrasive and insulting. I rather
think he would make similar comments about any group, not
just Jews, with which he disagreed. That said, he is still
insulting and boorish... (eschu21)
@eshu21
re: “Being anti-circumcision is not the same as being anti-Semitic. ”
I know this. That's why I said that in some contexts anti-circumcision
is about progress -- which would never entail hatred toward another
group, because progess is always about increase in empathy and love;
about helping the child, not demonizing then hunting the perpetrator.
3638
However, it CAN mostly be anti-semitism. I've read through your

letters, and you're one of the beautiful reaching out to help stop abuse
of children, without yourself being hateful to those emotionally-
disturbed enough (cultural heritage can't move you to long appreciate
what-you-at-some-profound-level know to be abuse) to be driven to
do the tormenting. I know that circumcision has been too long
protected in America, and it is agonizing to be amongst those whose
efforts to do good are readily made to seem -- however absurdly --
evil. But please take care when taking advantage of the avenues
opening up now to finally make your argument more fully heard, as I
believe that many of the openings now owe to a public interest in
withdrawing the protections against select groups, in empowering
righteous demonization, and not to evolution in consciousness. There
is some of that too, though. My sense, not so much here with Crowe.
respectfully,
patrick
-----
Barbaric science
I think we will find that increasingly the "science" protecting
circumcision is going to be loudly questioned, that despite whatever
eras long surely protecting it, it's about to lapse and crumble very
quickly. But again, the reason will owe mostly to it being linked to an
effective means to legitimize anti-Semitism -- though every article will
take care to point out how this is NOT "their" aim, and how "they"
especially would be amongst the first to stomp-down those who
would use their research for such an end (so with it, also, a culture-
wide absolute non-tolerance amongst the civilized for blunt, loud
anti-Semites -- old models -- of the kind we get here at Salon). (True)
Progressives, largely unable to control themselves, will celebrate the
ostensible emergence of sanity over barbarism, of true clear-sighted
science over science in defiance of evidence -- false science. And with
this, they'll have spent some of their life and energy growing a worse
3639
enemy they do not want to fight. I hope they're attentive to tone.
-----
My god, what a pack of pathetic whingers

@unmutual
You moron, I'm Jewish. You say I've NEVER SEEN A
CIRCUMCISION? are you bleepin' nuts? I've seen at least 2
dozen in my lifetime, including my own son, my two nephews
and a bunch of cousins, etc. Do you think I'd allow a
procedure on my own flesh and blood if I thought it was crazy,
barbaric or painful? If the FATHERS and GRANDFATHERS
did not all have the SAME EXACT thing (and they were fine,
obviously able to have sex and reproduce)?
If it was painful and awful, the ceremonial bris at 8 days
would be a horrorshow instead of a wonderful loving warm
family get-together. A mohel is extremely well trained to do
this surgery quickly and painlessly; the baby is sedated with a
little bit of wine. I've seen babies who literally slept through
the WHOLE THING, not a whimper. Most of them cry a little
but are quickly soothed. In my EXPERIENCE, which is
considerable, it is similar to the fuss a baby makes when they
get a pin prick or small injury. You must not have kids,
because INFANTS wail over literally everything -- a wet
diaper, a loud noise, milk that isn't warm enough.
Let me emphasize for several woman-hating doofuses here:
this is a MALE ritual performed by a MALE mohel and with a
MALE rabbi attending (in most congregations) and the
FATHER of the baby presents him and stands by. Women are
on the sidelines. If this was a "vagina conspiracy", why are
men at the heart and center of choosing this FOR
THEMSELVES? (Laurie1962)
@DannyOS: you are missing the point here

3640
I don't think even the strongest proponent of circumcision for

disease prevention wants to FORCE anybody to have their
baby circumcised.
We are addressing various levels of posters -- from controlling
left social engineers like GreenBeans to pure Jew haters --
who basically want to LEGALLY PROHIBIT Jewish/Muslim
circumcision and force it underground, ideally JAILING
parents for following their RELIGIOUS FAITH, as they have
openly for HUNDREDS OF YEARS just here in the US.
That is the goal of the recent ballot initiative in California --
not to discourage gentiles from having an elective procedure,
but to FORBID AND BAN circumcision for the religious.
That's against everything I believe about religious freedom
and I have not heard one reasonable argument or example
that shows properly done circumcision is brutal or inhumane,
nor that it causes damage (but rather, SOMETIMES it is
beneficial). Adult men who are circumcised are a majority of
the US population; if they had serious sexual problems, we'd
have know it for many decades now.
Frankly, I think everyone knows this and is just doing a polite
lefty dance around the main subject -- how to FORBID Jews
from practicing a religion YOU DON'T LIKE ANYWAYS...and
of course, lack of religious freedom (you hope! you hope!)
might drive them out of the US, thus depleting their horrible
"Jew influence" on Congress, hence reducing the power you
imagine that Israel has.
Come on; nobody seriously believes this is all "penis concern
trolling". (Laurie1962)
@Durian Joe: hey! you changed your name, Mr.

Troll!
Also: as a Jew, you should be ashamed of promoting the
criminalization of an honored Jewish tradition, one that was
3641
likely done to you by LOVING PARENTS and which has

caused you no harm or torture or mutilation. (Laurie1962)
@robspost: I think I get your point just fine

Your think your ideas about "what's unnecessary" should
dovetail precisely with "everybody else", but I assure it does
not. Even with reduced rates of circumcision, MILLIONS of
families (non-Jewish) make this choice for their babies.
It makes me wonder what you think about abortion, especially
later term abortion; do you think it causes pain and is
"torture" and violates the fetus's rights? Because, robspost,
there are MILLIONS of Americans -- every one as "sure" as
you are that THEY are right -- who believe that a woman's
right to her own body is NOT AS GREAT as keeping that fetus
from potential pain. Some of them were willing to murder Dr.
George Tiller in order to enforce their viewpoints on other
people.
Obviously people DO think circumcision has great value as a
cultural and religious rite of passage. Are you willing to make
a LAW to prevent them from practicing a millennia's old
religious faith? Put them in jail?
Often anti-abortionists list their objections to abortion and
desire to make it illegal again, but clam up when asked about
their real agendas -- putting ordinary women and doctors IN
JAIL or even the death penalty for what they see as "murder
and torture" just as you see circumcision as " a violation of
human rights".
I imagine you don't give a damn, but if you are SERIOUS
about making this illegal in the US, you are going to face these
arguments over and over, so I suggest you give them some
more articulate formulation than "I, robspost, do not give a
damn what anybody else thinks or feels". Because frankly, my
dear, you are not that important. (Laurie1962)
3642
@Mr. GreenBeans (nee: Durian Joe)

Obviously circumcision is NOT THE SAME as chopping off a
nose on an adult human being. lt's not "chopping off"
anything; it's removing a small bit of skin from around the
penis in a humane manner -- usually using wine as a sedative
(a little wine for a 6 lb baby is a good sedative) OR in a
hospital under anesthesia.
Whether it is "mutilation" is obviously in the eye of the
beholder -- a great many women vastly prefer the look of a
circumcised penis. Is it "mutilation" to pin back the ears of a
kid who has Dumbo ears? Mutilation to make straight teeth
out of crooked teeth using braces (assuming no serious bite
problems are involved, just cosmetic work)? Straightening a
crossed eye (does not improve vision, just cosmetic)?
If you seriously think babies are being tortured by their
parents during a religious bris ceremony, then A. you don't
know many babies (and here I mean: 8 day old infants) and B.
you have not attended many brises.
I wonder if you would share your DIRECT observation of any
bris ceremonies you have attended -- as you state you are a
practicing Jew -- and how often you have babysat for a
NEWBORN INFANT. I'm guessing "neither". (Laurie1962)
I see analogies to abortion here. People who object to abortion

don't just think it's a sort of poor idea -- they think it is
literally murder. So they don't just want to regulate the worst
excesses, they want to ban it outright because it offends their
morality so deeply. When they say this, liberals typically
respond "you cannot legislate morality!" Yet here, they clearly
think YOU CAN legislate morality (about little boy penises,
but not about late term abortion).
When right-wingers want to ban abortion, I frequently ask
them if they have thought the whole thing through
LOGICALLY: putting ordinary people in jail for the "crime" of
3643
ending a pregnancy. They usually get all waffly at that point.

They don't quite think about what it would mean to put one
million women and hundreds of doctors IN JAIL and ON
TRIAL each and every year -- they just imagine that abortion
would magically "disappear" and women would reluctantly
(but ultimately happily) have their cute little babies.
In the same vein, the anti-circ group here just imagines that
everyone would stop circumcising automatically and accept it
without a protest. In fact, observant Jews and others would
just take it underground. So if you truly consider it "barbaric
torture", you'd have to vet baby boys by medical authorities to
see if they were "cut", then punish the parents for doing so.
Right? Is that something you see as workable? Making male
children drop trousers (so to speak), then prosecuting their
parents for following their religious faith? (Laurie1962)
@laurie1962
I personally see circumcision as child abuse, though I know of many
salutory liberal Jews, people who are heads above the level of sanity
and beneficence of most Americans, who practice it. (Their children,
who hopefully will be a notch better than they are, will hopefully
disfavor it.) But I think your fear about what an enlarging argument
against it means for Jews has real merit -- EVEN in liberal /
progressive communities, like those arguing against it in California.
For me, it's a matter of the time discrimination comes about. There
are times when a legal outlawing of such things as spanking or (for
me) circumcision would simply be a sign that humanity is becoming
more loving -- both ARE things we need as quickly as possible to see
an end to. But particularly right now, where I feel there is much more
about a desire to start oppressing than to urgently finally start
helping, it is in our cultural context with liberal-seeming causes that
this dark ID impulse (let's call it) gets the SUPER-EGO, guilt-free
pass. In my judgment, so many things are on the cusp of just being
banned, new ways forced on people, all under an amazingly
3644
impenetrable veil of enlightenment -- for it seeming an extension of

liberalism, of good things like empowerment and freedom (I'm
thinking just now of the incandescent lightbulb ban, which may be
coming to where I live, which would seem to be just about being
Earth-friendly but which is actually intended to let everyone know, to
powerfuly feel and without-a-doubt understand, how nothing in their
everyday assumed life is safe from being instantly unokayed and
withdrawn if it falls short of our new basic starting-off point).
I think voices like yours that are raising alarm, however, will be
rendered inert BECAUSE your argument is based, not just on the
REALLY problematic intentions of the “enlightened” oppressors, but
on the validness of the practices they mean to stamp out. That is, I
think circumcision will readily be revealed as harmful, the scientists
favoring it readily shown to have owed their being attended to to
some reason other than evidence, and the movement against
circumcision will likely go without being prompted to reflect on its
motives, now that its opposition has set itself up for complete
dismissal for their defending the indefensible. "They could not have
been more wrong about that -- they are surely wrong in all their
concerns," is what they'll without an afterthought think/conclude.
Careful, too, about your argument that whole huge numbers of people
couldn't have been harmed or we'd have heard it by now. It's not an
effective one just now. It strikes me that we're at a time when people
are quite ready to overturn assumed normalities, to believe they've all
been living a lie -- things like the huge paleo food movement, which
suggests everything we've assumed about food is wrong, and barefoot
walking, which assumes the same for how we've let ourselves walk,
and anti-pharma, which argues that the doctors turned wholesale to
pharmaceuticals for NO actual good, are being grabbed up. You
might, that is, be playing into people's hands.
@Partrick McEvoy-Halston
Honestly, I have a hard time reading your letter; I can't even
quite tell where you sit on this issue.
3645
I do NOT promote circumcision for gentiles; I think it should

be legal if they want it, but I don't think it should be pushed
on anyone for health reasons. There ARE health benefits, but
in western industrialized nations, the benefits are minimal.
It's a personal choice, and as such, there are "trends" and the
trend is away from circumcision for GENTILES.
However, don't expect it to just "die out" among Jews and
Muslims. Our traditions go back THOUSANDS of years and
we are not likely to give this up without a fight. I believe the
Constitution guarantees our right to practice our religion(s).
This is a harmless procedure that does NOT mutilate or harm
babies or adult men, has SOME medical benefit and is a
deeply cherished part of our history and faith. You don't like
it? Too bad.
I don't think the current California initiative will pass and if it
does, it won't survive on appeals. It is a clear cut affront to
religious freedom, and when justices get a glimpse of the
promoters "comic books" with racist caricatures of Shylock-
like mohels...I'm not seeing it upheld.
If it was ever criminalized, you'd obviously see Jews and
Muslims go "underground" and do this in secret. So you'd
have to empower some kind of squad of nurse practitioners or
physicians to do exams to "prove" little boys were not
circumcised and then to "turn in" the offenders for jail time
for "mutilating" their sons in keeping with their religious
faith.
Jews and Muslims together outnumber the gay/lesbian
population of the US, so imagine the problem in chasing
down and incarcerating EVERY PARENT of a newborn baby
boy. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be the legislators who pass
THAT piece of B.S. nonsense.
It's sad how these things, which are so extreme and out of the
mainstream (curtailing religious freedom) are so popular on
Salon, and so rigidly held. It's not enough to say "do whatever
3646
you like within your own family"; no, you must be judged and
harassed and lectured and lambasted for an ORDINARY
minor procedure that has been done to babies for
THOUSANDS OF YEARS without ill affects, but suddenly it's
"torture and mutilation".
You guys missed great careers with fundie abortion groups,
gunning for abortion doctors. You have all the techniques of
thought-control and damnation and loaded phrases and
fanaticism down pat. (Laurie1962)
Intentions
Re: “I don't have to. I have seen OVER 20 ACTUAL
CIRCUMCISIONS including my own child, you moron. I also do not
watch anti-abortion films, where they show regretful sobbing
women begging the monstrous grinning abortion doctor "not to kill
my BABEEEE" but the doctor cuts their baby up into pieces (while
the baby screams) in an OCEAN of red blood.
Do you have any idea how similar your tactics and rhetoric is to
that of the anti-abortion movement? Are you shortly planning to
have radicals execute mohels? The way Dr. Tiller was
shot?”(Laurie1962)
Your defense of circumcision reminds me, sadly, of the defenders of

such things as sex with children, which was also made to seem of
obviously of no long-term consequence to the child ("Why would I
ever want to hurt a child, I LOVE children"), and who also
complained of opponents' intentions and tactics.
RE: If you REALLY have kids, you'd know that a screaming infant is
pretty standard and they cry like that when they get necessary
vaccines; they cry when a doctor puts a thermometer up their little
butts. They cry when they are wet or lonely or scared.
Here you have some of us hoping more people come to understand
the screaming infant as NOT standard, as just normal; that they don't
describe children in the manner in which you have here, which seems
3647
dismissive of progressive and ostensibly "unreal" understandings of

their potential overall childhood experience. With the popularity of
such books as "Go the F*ck to Sleep," looks like we're heading
elsewhere, though. Even the anti-circumcision movement, if it gets
popularized, will, alas, probably be more about setting up Jews and
Muslims for righteous discrimination, about inflating and giving
righteous avenue to "our" own anger, than it will be about making
childhood that much less about surviving (truly) villainous
perpetrations: it may well here NOT actually be about the children,
however many people posting here belong to the group thinking
perhaps-entirely of them. You are actually right to get people to
consider how different their motives are from the anti-abortion
crowd, but will in your efforts FURTHER their cause with your mean
clawing away at them (better to imagine you the preying witch who
dines on innocent children), and with your fetishism, your
dehumanization, of children (little buts, golden treasures). (You also
are too willing to believe mothers in their favorable accountings of
how circumcision impacted on their own children's lives: "Wouldn't
their children have complained by now?" Please, just how easy do you
think, really, it is for a child to accuse his mother of sadistic purpose
towards him? Some think the super-ego was put in place primarily to
ensure we don't face the psychic carnage from ever daring
considering such). You communicate mostly that children, those little
treasures, exist to serve the ritual, that they must defer to It, (and so)
you do not well persuade that it at all well serves them or does them
little harm. If it did real harm, their would be significant challenge to
Ritual -- and you can't have that, regardless. Though the opposition
may be suspect in the way you imagine, you SHOULD have
opposition, a strong counter: you ARE an obstacle in the way of
children's proper happiness, even if, in your clearly considerable and
very valuable self, you are better than many or most people out there.
Link: Russell Crowe’s anti-circumcision rant (Salon)

3648
----------
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 2011

BARELY still good to be gay
But last week, he drew gasps instead of laughs during a gig in

Nashville. As audience member Kevin Rogers wrote in an
explanatory "Why I no longer 'like' Tracy Morgan" post,
Morgan peppered his set with anti-gay remarks, including the
assertion that "all this gay shit was crazy and that women are
a gift from God and that 'Born This Way' is bullshit, gay is a
choice, and the reason he knows this is exactly because 'God
don't make no mistakes' (referring to God not making
someone gay cause that would be a mistake)." He also
reportedly said that his son "better talk to me like a man and
not in a gay voice or I’ll pull out a knife and stab that little
nigger to death." Rogers says that "As far as I could see 10 to
15 people walked out. I had to fight myself to stay seated, but I
knew if I got up ... he won."
[. . .]
If there's any good to come out of Morgan's completely
boneheaded behavior, it's that he was called out for it and he
issued an apology -- something that one might optimistically
view as a teachable moment. And more than that, it's opened
up the conversation about the issue of sexual orientation and
nature vs. nurture. An astute exchange on Jezebel Friday
asked, Why should it matter? As one commenter wrote, "I've
always said that the unspoken underpinning of the 'born this
way' argument is that it tacitly legitimizes the idea that if
people chose to be gay, hating them would be justifiable.
Instead of, you know, hateful."
During his set last week, Morgan reiterated an old, self-
3649
justifying gag of his, that "if you can take a dick, you can take
a joke." But whether you're born this way or find yourself
along the way doesn't matter. You can take a joke without
taking abuse. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Tracy Morgan goes
on an anti-gay rant,” Salon, 10 June 2011)
-----------
I'll say it again: working class people don't care about

gays
And Tracy Morgan is a transplant from the working class.
This is a problem that gays are going to have to figure out.
Your alliance with liberals is skin-deep at best; it's fashion, an
affectation, like organic food.
Meanwhile the gay sons and daughters of the working class
grow up in a culture of hatred and abuse. (SedanChair)
It Gets Ugly on the Liberal Plantation

Tina Fey has let it be known that she is Tracy's boss, and that
she owns him. Without her, he would be just another talent-
less, no-name beggar in rags on the street. The statement she
has released on this issue is:
"the Tracy Morgan I know...is not a hateful man and is
generally much too sleepy and self-centred to ever hurt
another person. I hope for his sake that Tracy's apology will
be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers on 30
Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say,
clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or
a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket."
On the scale of personal insults, this is close to a 10. I would
much prefer being called a nigger. (Mobutu)
Tina Fey
"the Tracy Morgan I know...is not a hateful man and is generally
3650
much too sleepy and self-centred to ever hurt another person."

The Tracy Morgan she knows can actually be angry and hateful. The
question I would have Tina Fey ask herself is, why does she find
appealing the sort of man who could reveal himself to be, who could
strongly sway, antigay? Why isn't she just drawn to better people?
Why do we idolize her so much? Is it to put a managable ceiling on
what we'll permit to be extraordinary?
-----
This Letter was deleted from the Tracy Morgan

article,
so I reproduce it here for your viewing pleasure:
☼ ₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪ ☼
So, when overweight teens are bullied and depressed and
commit suicide, it is O.K. to stand on the stage and make
jokes about fat people, and to have comedy skits on TV
making fun of fat people.
But when gay teens are bullied, depressed, and commit
suicide, it is NOT O.K. to make jokes about gay people, and to
have comedy skits on TV making fun of gay people.
I get it. We get it. Don't worry, it gets better. No one will be
allowed to make fun of you for the rest of your life.
It's good to be gay. It's all the rage now.
☼ ₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪ ☼
Thank you, and have a pleasant tomorrow. (Scriptorum)
Barely still good to be gay

I would say it's barely still good to be gay now, Scriptorum. I think in
an age swinging strongly Depression, no one really wants to be
associated with anything he or she still thinks of as 'weak,' as in need
of spirited defenders. The impulse amongst liberals will be to at some
level communicate a hesitancy to associate yourself too strongly with
3651
them. Something of this is involved in the hipsters' movement to the

neanderthal/paleo/industrial/ grandfather 'worship.' And in the
blossoming in the acceptability of anti-boutique-liberalism-sort-of-
liberalism of back-to-fundamentals Chris Hedges. Maybe too with
Tina, where though everywhere around her are her elf-workshop
gays, I think she would rather us not think her 1/10th lesbian.
-----
Scriptorum
RE: “Liberal Jews and Gays control the media. They run it, they
staff it, they are it. And they will make fun of and trash anyone they
damn well please, but woe to the man or woman who makes fun of
or trashes them.” (Scriptorum)
The most emerging liberal voice is Chris Hedges', who maintains that
liberalism has become as exclusive, self-concerned, as unfair and
inert as you believe it to be. When you read his language of justice for
the working man, see how well anyone not typically understood to be
constituted of working stock, of pure blood, common man aspirations
-- of the Appalachians, perhaps -- could find themselves belonging
within it -- however much he may salute the gay community or what
not.
Liberals have been exclusive. The people they so eagerly disparage
have been victimized. But the people they have antagonized are WAY
worse than they. When the tide tends their way, how easy a time they
are going to have in rebuttal when many liberals are themselves
looking to distance themselves from the remnants of hippie liberalism
in favor of something stockier, and when the IMAGE of the
dispossessed minority is allowed to fade at a time when the casual
truth of who "they" everyday are, conveys an instant accusation
against them -- even if it's just simply their urbanity. "You've spent 50
years defending this! -- and against humble, unassuming, TRULY
tolerant, TRULY put-upon us!" Blood on the streets.
3652
-----
@Scriptorum
Gays are prominent in the entertainment industry because a
number of us are very entertaining!
The biz is one of the most competitive in the world. If you
aren't pleasing a lot of people in one way or another, then you
are OUT, and there are a thousand people in line behind you
ready to take your spot.
Are you bemoaning the fact that 'your folks' aren't adequately
represented in the entertainment business? Well, then, maybe
you should go into show biz and see how easy it is. Start
producing media/entertainment, instead of just being a
consumer. You'd get an education, if nothing else. (willie99)
willie99
Gays are prominent in the entertainment industry because a number
of us are very entertaining!
The biz is one of the most competitive in the world. If you aren't
pleasing a lot of people in one way or another, then you are OUT, and
there are a thousand people in line behind you ready to take your
spot.
So gays are prominent in show biz because they are more willing to
please a lot of people in one way or another than people like
Scriptorum are. This may be reality, but do you think this reality sits
well with a public that hates the fact that their feeling the need to do
the same has made them effeminate, an affliction they are spending
much of their spare time compensating for? You'll draw ire with it,
because your success mocks, and demonstrates to many people what
is most wrong with America.
@Patrick
I don't really understand your post.
3653
I don't think effeminacy is an "affliction". However, I DO

think that a lot of homophobic men (both straight and gay)
who have ignorantly equated effeminacy with homosexuality
evince an irrational fear of being perceived as effeminate, and,
therefore, they spend a lot of energy trying to compensate for
that.
It's kind of sad hearing them try to lower their voices, or mute
their facial expressions, or censor themselves in the language
they use, lest someone think they are suspiciously effeminate.
Anyway, back on topic, I hope Tina Fey fires Tracy's ass.
Tina's comments were funny, and appropriate, but Tina and
NBC need to take action, otherwise they're just hypocrites. A
tap on the wrist isn't enough. Sorry. (willie99)
willie99
I don't think effeminacy is an "affliction". However, I DO think that a
lot of homophobic men (both straight and gay) who have ignorantly
equated effeminacy with homosexuality evince an irrational fear of
being perceived as effeminate, and, therefore, they spend a lot of
energy trying to compensate for that.
Clearly YOU don't think effeminacy is an affliction, but I am
suggesting that good a good bulk of the American public
(increasingly) does. What do they think effeminacy is? -- well, of the
likes of being constituted to read and please the endless expectations
of other people, something you say is ACTUALLY sufficiently
characteristic of gays that is mostly responsible for gay success in
show biz.
-----
@Scriptorum
Re: “Jews never assimilate to the societies in which they live,
they always set themselves apart, they always look down on
others. Their own Rabbis preach that non-Jews are less
3654
human. So it is just coming out of the wash now. They can't

hide it, and they don't even try to hide it anymore.”
(Scriptorum)
I don't think any community of Rabbis is really going to keep a flock

from affiliating with Others they have a strong affinity for -- people
who, if no one was telling them "otherwise," they'd want to be social
with, out of sensed similar disposition. Like is drawn to like,
regardless. If despite this Jews can still seem bundled, it may have to
do with them actually being very different from the people you would
have them more affiliate with -- that is, the experiment you would
have them undertake, has already at some level been tried, or strongly
felt out, and they're back to what makes sense.
Should they (more affiliate)? Maybe not if they're ACTUALLY better,
and have consistently been, historically. The conservative ones aren't,
but the liberal ones as an aggregate surely are (it's Rabbit from
Updike's "Rabbit" series' overall take, though he wonders why he
always sees them with blondes) -- though they'll be doing better once
they abandon circumsicion, which IS still based on child hate. There
is a sense that what most Americans still most need is to become
more Jewish.
You're (having) at Salon for its ongoing liberalism, but as I am
making apparent, I think you can see signs of a drifting conservatism
even in what looks to be all too evidently liberal responses, and it is
that I think is most significant, am most concerned about.
Appreciate your honest take.
Link: Tracy Morgan goes on an anti-gay rant (Salon)

MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2011

Wanted by both sides
3655
Goldfield's book has been well-reviewed, because if it's

sympathetic to Southern whites, it depicts the savagery of
slavery and post-war white terrorism with unflinching and
gut-wrenching clarity. (Literally. The book's tales of slaves'
abuse and Southern white post-war savagery will make you
sick.) Still, this Civil War history challenges the absolutism of
the "Northerners were heroes, and Southerners were vicious,
violent racists" school of history. He exposes and excoriates
Southern whites' violence against black people before and
after the war. But he also links the war to the pro-business
evangelical Protestant crusade to eradicate native American
Indians, Mexicans, Irish and German Catholic immigrants,
and an emerging class of landless Northern laborers – anyone
who stood in the way of their vision of clean, hard-working,
business-friendly American progress. And he counts the
South as a victim of that Northern evangelical crusade.
Southerners were another group that simply wasn't
conforming to their doctrine of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free
Men," as the title of Eric Foner's equally complicated and
fantastic Republican Party history puts it.
[. . .]
In an interview with Leonard Lopate, he contended that the
abolition of slavery was inevitable "in a world that was
hurtling toward the Industrial Revolution." I can imagine
that, had a more politically creative group of politicians tried
to compromise on a way out of slavery – perhaps offering to
compensate slaveholders for their slaves, the way every other
country that abolished slavery did – we maybe, maybe, might
have avoided the Civil War. (Joan Walsh, “Everything you
know about the Civil War is wrong,” Salon, 9 June 2011)
From Joan Walsh

Thanks for these letters, they're thoughtful and mind-
opening. I knew nothing about the history of Galveston,
3656
incredible. Diogenes, there's a lot in the book about Darwin's

work helping forge a white North/South consusus about black
inferiority. On Twain, honestly that quote, out of context,
does look like satire, but there are several other examples of
his (temporary I think) horror at the results of universal
suffrage. cabdriver, thanks for making the point that we can
disagree about this without anyone being a neo-Confederate.
Finally, of course, I should have headlined this Everything
you know about the civil war is wrong -- unless you've studied
a lot of U.S. history. Which sadly most of us have not. (Joan
Walsh, response to post)
the reason:
We SHOULD read history, 'cause it's such a great way to distinguish
ourselves for all those Republican hippie soul-searchers.
-----
There's ALWAYS an alternative to war, if that's what you
REALLY want
I think abolition was inevitable as well, and that both sides just
happened to want war, NEEDED war -- that is, to project unwanted
aspects of themselves into convenient "containers," and eradicate
them: producing a wonderful bounty of sacrifices so a nation could
feel delightfully less burdened by sin. This said, Northerners overall
were less primitive than Southerners were. But both were crazy.
N.B. If Catholics had greater numbers and power, they'd have been
posting newspaper headlines calling for the eradication of
Protestants: they were victims, but surely quite mad as well. I hope
the book doesn't somehow communicate that being a victim makes
you surely sane and virtuous: your foes ARE projecting their own
rejected parts onto "you," it has nothing to do with who you really are
or what you've done, but you could just happen to be a nutcase.
-----
Slavery: not even homo economicus is up to something as
inhuman as that
3657
The point of slavery wasn't to make money -- it was to inflict upon a

class of people a worse facimile of the kind of torment you got in your
childhood -- so no doubt all along there was some better way to
riches. They hung on to it longer than the Europeans did, because
Europeans on average were evolving better (slightly bettering
childhoods) than American Southerners were, resulting in their
moving up a bit to still abased but slightly better ways of abusing a
whole collection of people (wage slavery et al.). So even though
Southerners were retarded on this score, Northerners, if they were
healthier, if they themselves didn't crave war and sacrifice, could have
waited out their brethrens' mass regression and made abolition
happen afterwards -- and before Southerners naturally evolved to it
(Screw you, preacher: You can't do THAT to another human being!) --
amounting to hugely less carnage. Didn't you all learn that in school?
-----
two points to Patrick McEvoy-Halston
were the south of the Mason-Dixoners the only ones to import
captured Africans?
if no was the northerners trying to make money?
@benvorhauer
They evolved out of it. Money gets made, but I like when people point
out that things like slavery and wars are so not at the root about
money that they are effected in instances when about no-one -- no
even, hardly, historians so running away from themselves they can
only understand human beings as homo economicus -- can argue it's
about the green anymore. I've seen from a few books coming out that
the idea (truth) that what is often called evil is actually lack of
empathy and an accompanying full-rim of sadism, is making way
back into discussion. Thank God. With that we'll be drawn to asking
ourselves what kinds of childhoods lead to empathy, and what kinds
not. And eventually to understanding that any period of history where
slavery can be rationalized, MUST have as its primary constituents
extremely poorly-loved people. For, if you've known love -- not an
3658
entire cultural apparatus is at a deep level going to convince you that

something screamingly wrong is being done to people with the likes
of slavery (you will KNOW them to be human, even if you've only
been told their not, 'cause you will have less of a need to see them just
as an embodiment of your own personal demons and some of the
obvious will sneak in). How do we think change comes about? A new,
more humane perspective -- even if at this point, not SO much more
humane -- when before: nothing to draw upon? It's about growth in
heart, and nothing at all really with money matters. “Homo
economicus” is more evolved than “man as wicked and sinful,” but it's
a concept bubbled up from people not yet up to seeing people as they
really are. It is ONLY when empathy is nowhere to be found, that a
quarter of a population could perish in a by-both-sides-wanted war.
Link: Everything you know about the Civil War is wrong (Salon)
----------
SUNDAY, JUNE 12, 2011

Bored lords?
This intra-critical dispute has a little to do with a lot of things,

including the symbolic schism over films as different as
Terrence Malick's family history of the universe, "The Tree of
Life," and the Marvel Comics-derived mutant-superhero opus
"X-Men: First Class." It has something to do with the utterly
unsurprising fact that most critics have decanted bucketloads
of scorn all over summer flicks like "The Hangover Part II"
and "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides," and have
seen them go on to become massive worldwide hits,
demonstrating once again that eggheads who watch 350
movies a year have become specialists or experts, of one
variety or another, and don't have much connection to
ordinary moviegoers or the reasons why they buy tickets.
3659
It has a whole lot to do with the ancient 20th-century feud

between advocates of art-house cinema, which is essentially a
remnant of what used to be called "high culture," and fans of
mass-market popcorn entertainment. Which is weird, because
one side won that battle a long time ago but refuses to
acknowledge its victory and wants to go on acting like the
aggrieved underdog. And as tempting as it is to compare the
winning side to post-Reagan conservatives who keep whining
about what victims they are, decades after their demented
ideology has permeated our culture from top to bottom, it
isn't totally fair, so I won't!
[. . .]
Now, I'm not saying that our variety of boredom was superior
to anyone else's (or, to be more honest, while I may believe
that at some level, it clearly isn't true). The boredom of
Eisenhower-era America produced that extraordinary cultural
and political efflorescence known in the aggregate as "the
'60s." The boredom of the first impoverished generations of
Parisian bohemians produced Impressionist painting and
Symbolist poetry. The boredom of the Hollywood studio
system produced Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, George
Lucas and Brian De Palma (and, boy, talk about mixed
results). The boredom of life in America's neglected Reagan-
era inner cities led to hip-hop. Watch any Chekhov play, and
you grasp the national ennui that preceded the Russian
Revolution. I'm saying that boredom is a productive and
indeed revolutionary force, by the way, not that its results are
always or everywhere pleasant.
I think what gets critics all het up about contemporary culture
from time to time is the sense that the tyranny or hegemony
of entertainment has pushed boredom so far into the margins
that it's no longer available, or at least not in the density or
quality required to produce cultural revolutions. What we
have instead is the meta-boredom of a pop culture that's all
3660
bells and whistles all the time, can't be switched off and
watches us while we're watching it, rather too much like the
telescreens of Orwell's "1984." As I wrote a few months ago
when reviewing the unbelievably boring "TRON: Legacy," it's
the "boredom of endless distraction and wall-to-wall
entertainment, the boredom of a culture where boredom is
forbidden ... and the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has
become iron law." (Andrew O’Hehir, “In praise of boredom, at
movies and in life,” Salon, 7 June 2011)
bored lords?
It's the problem with being a movie critic these days. Everytime you
watch "non-boring" movies that appeal to the current nervous state of
the masses, that play to the limited kind of stimulation they can
handle and assurances they require, you're for a couple hours
grouped in with them, always at risk of being reminded of ways you
may remain like them -- not a pleasing thing when what defines the
masses these days is not so much their low-brow taste but their for-
sure susceptibility to a brutal fate.
But at least it gives you the sense that you're still engaging with your
fears, something you couldn't get if the gig was mostly about
critiquing high-brow fare. And there is a remedy: some involved
discussion afterwards of things that remind you you aren't really SO
much one of them, despite whatever shared background and lingo.
(Even better when the discussion can count amongst its participaters
at least one who is near fully sincere.)
The reclaiming of true leisure, growth out of relaxation and boredom,
could just be all good. (I enjoyed Mark Helprin's fairly recent defense
of the same.) But it can remind you of articles like that one recently
written by David Brooks, which argue that what we need most now is
a return of a leisured, governing class -- people who are still
constituted to appreciate the slow, to deliberate, patiently, and do
what is necessary for the long-term. People like Obama, who can
remain mostly serene, cerebral and assured, governing over a nation
3661
turning itself fully over to the lords, as far away as it can from the
plebs, while making this seem somehow a return to architectural
sanity. It needed, that is, be about reclaiming the '70s, but its
opposite.
Link: In praise of boredom, at the movies and in life (Salon)
----------
FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2011

Seeming adult, without actually being so
A reader, prompted by last week's commentary on whether

great books can make you a better person, wrote in to ask a
related question. Her favorite author is Charles Dickens;
his books have been beacons for her. While she'd like to
know more about him, she recalls reading long ago that
Dickens behaved badly in his personal life. Should she
investigate further, even though she worries that this will
lead her to "doubt the impression I always had of Dickens:
that he was a kind, sensitive soul who had suffered as a
child"?
[. . .]
If Dickens sometimes behaved badly, Naipaul is
unquestionably a bad man, notorious for his floridly
abusive relationships and bigoted ideas. Does this diminish
his work? Naipaul's fiction is not to everyone's taste, but
the grace of his prose and the power of his early books,
especially "A Bend in the River," is hard to deny; I admired
much of that novel even as I gritted my teeth over its
blinkered depiction of Africans. "A House for Mr. Biswas"
is a veritable touchstone for New Yorker critic James
Wood, a tough crowd if there ever was one.
3662
For myself, I ended up feeling that Naipaul's prejudices

(less glaring in his earlier books, but still evident and
clearly fueled by cultural insecurity) bar him from the sort
of insight that renders a novelist truly wise as opposed to
merely smart. Other writers make for more ambiguous
cases. T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite, Virginia Woolf a snob
and Ezra Pound a flaming fascist, but I'm not ready to
shrug off "The Waste Land," "To the Lighthouse" or "The
Cantos."
[. . .]
Similarly, needing to believe that your favorite author lived
in an exemplary way, embodying all the virtues of his best
work, is an adolescent desire, passionate but ultimately
unfair. Learning the truth is disillusioning at first, but
enlightening in the end. Part of the sadly underrated
process of growing up is realizing that people, the world
and life are no less beautiful and amazing for being
imperfect. (Laura Miller, “When bad people write great
books,” Salon, 7 June 2011)
Hobbits
How is it grown up to enable a way to easily justify/excuse/not-
contest your love for an artist's work, upon learning about their
personal sideshow extras? Maybe the clearly damnable ostensible
other side of the author is actually front in view of you within the text
itself? Maybe you haven't just come to learn that the author you loved
has aspects that are not at all admirable, but that the love you felt for
the text itself was flawed --apparently simply damnable as well -- but
ran away to the first opt-out you could find to avoid seriously
considering that the sudden realization you had was just as much
about your own being attracted to what is perhaps ultimately suspect,
as it was the author's.
Also, really be brave: if you learn things about the author you do not
like, but still very, very much like what they wrote: don't dismiss, but
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EXPLORE what they were doing in their lapses and villainy. It might
not just be shadow, but, strangely, the light extended, from page to
life. Let's not all be hobbits afraid to venture out our door.
-----
is Carroll = pedophile
William S. Burroughs = murderer
Gunter Grass = Nazi
Have read books by all of them, enjoyed all of them.
(Krasnaya Zvezda)
@Krasnaya Zvezda
Have you considered that some part of you may be a pedophile, a
murderer, a Nazi? Or is this dark-side-of an-otherwise-brilliant-artist
concept, strong enough to keep you from ever feeling compelled to do
so?
@Patrick
Have you considered that some part of you may be a
pedophile, a murderer, a Nazi?
That is seriously the dumbest shit I've ever heard.
Have YOU considered that grown adults can read things
objectively and enjoy them on their own merits without
turning into monsters?
What are you, 11 years old? (Unsinkable Bastard)
@unsinkable bastard
What we're all concerned to protect is the idea that the vile Other
we're aghast/disheartened to learn about, is not somehow very much
ALSO within the work of art we enjoy. It maybe needed be -- but the
only reason I would allow this possibility is that I know such things
like that the majority of nazis had/have split personalities, where one
part of them detached itself from what the vile other part concerned
itself with and enjoyed: but clearly, even here, even dealing with their
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'better' parts of themselves, we're not dealing with especially

wonderful people -- the kind that would never feel the need to split off
and do/experience such things -- and for liking THAT, finding worth
in the artistic production produced by that, something is probably off
with us. I don't think we're grown up if we're not considering this
possibility. "Alas, we're all imperfect" is obviously mostly escape, not
engagement. Look for immaturity there.
Of course, we're living at a time when the good person increasingly
seems suspect of being just the NEUTERED person, determined at
the cost of any self-elaboration to show how willing they are to sit in
place for life; and at times like these, you must look for life, goodness,
in strange places. In case this isn't clear -- never, however, in Nazism.
Just use your imagination.
-----
The unspoken contract is that art, once produced,

exists in its own rarefied realm...
Though reputations and human foibles do shape which
stories are told and lost.
Speaking of bastards... Caravaggio, perhaps the greatest
artist of his or any age, was generally considered a fiend.
He accidentally murdered a rival when attempting to
castrate him.When Vasari wrote his profoundly influential
work, The Lives of the Artists he deliberately made no
mention of Caravaggio, because he personally knew and
loathed him. As a result, for centuries Caravaggio had a
diminished reputation in the art world.
Paul Gauguin abandoned his wife and children to frolic in
Tahiti with a twelve-year-old.
As noted, Dickens forced his wife to leave their home,
didn't allow her to visit her own children (her older
daughter and son secretly visited her) all so that Dickens
(one of my favorites) could cavort with a girl the age of his
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daughter, though there is still plenty of ambiguity

surrounding whether the relationship was fully sexual.
Branwell Bronte was an opium eater whose habit forced his
famously shy sisters to become governesses, jobs they
loathed. His own art career was ruined in the process.
Christopher Marlowe was a brawling SOB who fatally
stabbed himself in the eye while trying, in a drunken
temper, to kill someone else (though there are persistent
rumors that he may have been a spy). Doesn't make his
work any less great.
Mary Lamb murdered, a la Lizzie Borden, her mother; she
still wrote charming translations of 's plays for children
(though modern adults would find her syntax and diction
plenty challenging).
The man who wrote the most entries, by a large margin,for
the OED walked up to a stranger and murdered him for no
reason. W.C. Minor was a vet from the Civil War and it
seems clear that he was suffering from PTSD. His
contributions to the dictionary were written from his
prison cell.
The pages of literature and art are literally splashed with
blood, but it has always seemed to me that one of the
fantastic paradoxes of art is how, once born into the world,
it is both detached and connected to the hand that made it.
I may look askance at these lives, but I wouldn't dream of
giving up the pleasures of the work. (Morning’s Minion)
@morning's minion
You have a way of making sins seem mostly about will, deviation, and
activity -- very much part of Greatness/Genius, not its unfortunate
accompanyment.
There's no way you'll lose this argument, phrasing it as you do: to go
against you, to suggest that in your faith you've decided to
shortchange yourself future growth, you have to go up against every
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significant pillar of Civilization.

But it seems like something of this sort has to be enabled, because
most great artists I love -- and that I would think you should come to
love -- are to be known mostly for their love (the core of it all,
even/especially self-love) -- both on and off the page. Humanities
departments were kind of up to that, actually, and for quite some
while -- how many literature professors -- even at the cost of some
self-deception -- were mostly concerned to involve themselves with
'Great' works but to undermine them? -- but I think that this hubris,
though long lamented to be everywhere spread and unstoppable, is
near close to coming a full stop, owing to the re-energizing of the
power of elder-worship, youth-scorn/hate, Traditionalism.
I don't think we really care for what the Ancient Greeks were inspired
by: our concern is for what they themselves were up to. Something
like that has to be enabled for a future generation -- for them to be so
great, and so good, it really becomes mostly about them now: bye-bye
500 years of Euro story, and so the authority implicit in every
mention of its heroes. Most Great Art should at some point in human
evolution be forgotten -- there's a better 'man' to come, and should
look to what s/he's up to mostly for satisfaction and prompting self-
awareness: we were historically mostly about making sure s/he got
there, and personally about engaging thrillingly with life.
-----
very nice
Beautifully written, thought-provoking, insightful... and
from a woman no less! That oughta show mr. v. What a
dick.
As much of a feminist as I am as a man, however, I'm
having a hard time thinking of books I've read that were
written by woman... I guess I've never even thought about
the subject. I'll have to make a point of reading a novel by a
woman, a work of fiction that is. Any suggestions anyone,
something modern? (colinjames71)
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@colinjames71
If you have to make a point of reading a novel by a woman, do you

think this may have to do with your not having found that they write
as well as men do? Lots and lots of female writes out there -- What
accounts for your forced effort, do you think?
Link: When bad people write great books (Salon)
----------

Standing Tall
I don't necessarily want to be the guy who tries to hang a

discount-store T.S. Eliot essay about the Death of Culture on
yet another mediocre Hollywood sequel, but there's
something a little depressing about all the hype and
excitement surrounding "X-Men: First Class," the new
Marvel-Fox product that's expected to be among the
summer's biggest hits.
[. . .]
Oh, OK, I know why. I'm just playing Socratic idiot. It's
summertime in spirit if not in fact, and people are covered in
beer and bug-juice and have collectively lowered their
expectations. They've convinced themselves that they want to
see a big, exciting adventure with cool guys and pretty girls
and maybe the faintest hint of moral significance but not
much resemblance to real life. I suppose a ridiculous yarn
about how a group of superhuman genetic mutants in silly
costumes intervene to resolve the 1963 Cuban missile crisis
(after starting it in the first place) fits the bill, somewhat. But
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I'm pretty sure that those who are claiming that "X-Men: First
Class" is actually good are engaged in the kind of brainwashed
magical thinking that goes along with a culture where the
entire media and most of the public have to behave like savvy
insiders all the time.
[. . .]
It looks good and has some nice acting moments; as a friend
of mine used to say about poetry readings, it's better than
some TV. If it makes a butt-load of money, all of us parasites
on the sweaty underbelly of the film industry are
hypothetically better off, so we might as well like it.
[. . .]
While the whole film is professionally executed and goes
down smoothly enough, the underlying stupidity of its subject
matter can't help but show through in the end. I was left
wondering why I'd spent more than two hours in the dark
watching a story about how a kid who survived the
concentration camps grew up to be an adult who wears an
embarrassing faux-Spartan helmet and calls himself Magneto
(rhymes with neato). (Andrew O’hehir, ‘"X-Men: First Class":
Slick, dumb big-screen candy,’ Salon, 1 June 2011)
I suppose a more charitable way of saying what I said about
the collective lowered expectations of summer is that summer
movies are meant as a communal escape that's libidinal and
visceral and not really subject to intellectual analysis. Believe
it or not, I don't want to interfere with anybody's enjoyment
along those lines -- but on the other hand, it isn't my job to
congratulate Hollywood. (Andrew O’Hehir)
Standing tall
Leave out the part about you not wanting to be the discount store T.S.
Eliot essay contributer. Also the part about your bud nudging you on
how poetry readings are better than some tv. Also the (actually self-
effacing) estimation of yourself as a parasite on the underbelly of the
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film industry. Also the part in your reply about you knowing that you
haven't any influence on box-office returns. You've seen crap; know
you can will yourself to speak against a crowd, against true T.S. Eliot
types (Ebert's so casual, so American, but this Pulitzer Prize winner
qualifies a bit, doesn't he?) when it speaks to Truth; and you know
deep-down this all speaks FOR you. Communicate this. "This is crap;
and if you mostly like it, something is quite wrong with you. I
understand this means I think I'm better than you. I do; I am. Now
use what I've given you to start bettering yourself."
Also, in your reply, I don't get how you can argue that you don't want
to interfere with anyone's enjoyment along these lines (i.e., libidinal
and visceral enjoyment of a film, rather than intellectual), when your
whole review suggests that that this is in fact your drive. I think you'd
be better again to not be charitable, and EXCLUDE the film entire
from ones that do SO satisfy libidinal needs -- something not only
more basic or needed/required but more mythic (deeper?) as well --
to put those who'd just make wry cuts on the film on absolute
defence: everyone knows they're missing something essential --
Laputans.
I think you saw the film and knew that that if it became popular it
would not do to have it excused even by critics as owing to relaxed
summer expectations. I think you knew that this meant that
something very wrong was happening to people that they actually
found satisfaction -- or worse, meaning -- in this kind of shallow
offering, and had in mind to be amongst those who'd try and let them
know they were going wrong. I like that.
Link: “X-Men: First class” (Salon)
----------

Reading and the cultivation of empathy
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Seeing a favorite critic expound at length on a favorite author

is an undersung form of literary pleasure -- as close as you can
get to reading two great writers at the same time. William
Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels
Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That
Really Matter" certainly achieves that effect for this particular
reader. Like Austen, Deresiewicz is lucid, principled and
knows how to think as well as how to feel, without ever
sacrificing one to the other. He understands that most of us
want more than just an exquisite aesthetic experience from a
novel. His reviews are gratifying even when you feel inclined
to quarrel with them, and (unlike a surprising number of
esteemed critics) he has a sense of humor.
[. . .]
Does reading great literature make you a better person? I've
not seen much evidence for this common belief. Some of the
best-read people I know are thoroughgoing jerks, and some of
the kindest and noblest verge on the illiterate -- which is
admittedly an anecdotal argument, but then, when it comes to
this topic, what isn't? (Laura Miller, “Does reading great
books make you a better person?” Salon, 31 May 2011)
Empathy
How does one become emphatic? In my judgment, it owes to
spending a lot of time around people who were themselves well
enough loved to be naturally inclined to well attend to you, to love
you, rather than use you as means to hopefully satisfy some of their
own unmet needs. Like with our lifemates, I think there is an
automatic inclination to link ourselves with people who are at about
our own psychological/emotional level. It would indeed be to our
benefit if somehow we found ourselves in the company of those ...
even better: who could nurture us, so we can make a step up, rather
than feed us responses that satisfy on some level but ultimately keep
3671
us in place.
Teachers can amount to/do this -- AND through their choice of
reading material. For a short bit, they can put you in the company of
people, of authors, who are potentially better, emotionally more
healthy, than your own parents are. It is nowhere near as good as a
more involved interaction, where the text itself, THE AUTHOR
him/herself, could respond to your responses, and so on, but at the
very potentially substantial least you know what it is to be in the
company of someone you intuit would know you to be more worthy of
attendence and love than you've been made to understand. People
routinely hear about authors who love their characters, and those
authors who truly do, love their readers as well -- and their readers
also intuit this about them. From learning this, out of this gift, partial
fulfillment, your life will be just a little bit more about seeing what
you can give other people, rather than tasking them for claiming
things you never got to lay much hold of and are convinced are mostly
about MEism -- selfishness.
As far as William Deresiewicz: He speaks very well to the moment --
such clever, often true stuff about elite universities -- but I do not
trust the man.
About whom to read: the ones I turn to, who I think, can love in ways
I'm trying to reach, or reach, but sometimes fall back from, are, it
seems, falling away from the moment. But Kingsolver's one. So too
Updike, Piers Anthony, Michael Bishop, and some good bit of Ian
McEwan. The ones I see most on the upswing right now, though,
frighten me. I think they're mostly about making empathy, lightness,
incomensurate, a betrayal, of the hard times we're entering. Sort of
David Foster Wallace on Updike kind of thing, but not even as
"charitable," and certainly not as sensitively "offered." They want to
show you how bad they are, and so too you. And then agreed, all on a
hunt for those who might think of themselves, something different.
-----
3672
Empathy, but also demons

People who do not at the start of their lives obtain for themselves
sufficient love/empathy to lead to them being well-souled enough to
drift so often to how they might learn more about and help out others,
but receive it later -- through whatever means -- have a tough time in
life believing they really deserved the good nurturance, the absolute
attendence they ended up receiving. At some point, they become
convinced they'll be punished for it, and project their bad selves onto
unfortunate others, to be punished. This explains why an emergant
benefactory generation (like the '60s), a ME-ME but also evidently
YOU-YOU generation, can at the end of their term drift really
reactionary, abandon so willing those they used to forthrightly
champion, and is a truth that should be used against those who would
cancel out the possibilities of light and truth from Art simply by
showing us how a lot of formerly progressive art-lovers ultimately
drifted. "Yes, not always anywhere near to bad, mind you, but THIS
IS to be expected. After true Light, inevitably Darkness: it's its bitter
'aftertaste.'" Only the likes of miracle good people like Paul Krugman
escape it entire. (But note: he has.)
We're very comfortable saying (the likes of) we were intially asses but
learned to become better people, more attendent to other people's
needs, through --. (It's the framing for the prototypical Salon
lifestory, is it not?) We are NOT comfortable saying that we love other
people because we ourselves are pretty great and interesting -- and so
too, surely, must you be! The former assessment keeps us seeming
essentially modest and small -- of the sinful; keeps the demons at bay;
but doesn't lead to much presumption or growth. The later surely at
some point invites the demons: but for awhile can lift a generation on
to great things ... before the also-consequence. But next time around,
though the same nasty flip, it's not as devestating.
Link: Does reading great books make you a better person? (Salon)
----------
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SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2011

The "Angry Black Man" returns -- but only for a short while
Melissa Harris-Perry and Adam Serwer wrote majestic

takedowns of Cornel West's vicious and deeply personal rant
against President Obama published this week, so I didn't
think I had to. But there's one thing missing in the torrent of
reaction to West I've seen this week: a recognition that maybe
this is the way identity politics had to end, not with a bang but
a whine. Dizzying racial and personal insults have come from
all directions, and they're beginning to lose their meaning.
Much has been made of the personal pique that animated
West's attack on the president: How dare the bellhop at
West's hotel Inaugural Weekend wind up with tickets to the
event itself when West didn't? How could Obama stop
returning his calls? West's animus was impossible to miss,
and it clearly drove the awful, ad hominem anger of West's
invective.
The most tragic thing, to me, about West's meltdown was the
way he tried to frame it as a universalist defense of poor and
working-class people -- who in fact haven't gotten enough
help or attention from this too-close-to-Wall Street
administration -- but then somehow descends into personal
attacks on the president as "a black mascot of Wall Street
oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats." If that
wasn't bad enough, West claims Obama's problem is that he is
afraid of "free black men" due to his white ancestry and years
in the Ivy League. "He feels most comfortable with upper
middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves
very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they
want," West claimed.
Give Brother West credit for consistency: On MSNBC's "The
3674
Ed Show" Tuesday night, he repeated his criticism that

Obama is too close to "upper-middle-class white brothers and
Jewish brothers."
Oh no, the Jews again. Haven't we been here before?
How did the man who wrote in "Race Matters" that it's time
"to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning" come to
this? I don't disagree with some of West's critique of Obama,
but Ta-Nehisi Coates is exactly right here:
Was there something more Obama should have done to get a

public option? Should he not have traded the Bush tax cuts
for extending unemployment benefits? Did Obama settle too
quickly on a small stimulus package? Was he wrong to allow
the GOP to shut down planned parenthood in DC? Is the
strategy of increased drone attacks in Pakistan inhumane?
Was the financial reform bill he signed ultimately too weak?
I think all of this is fair game. I think Charles Ferguson's
critique in Inside Job was really solid. I think calling
someone a "black mascot" or a "black puppet" because they
don't agree with you is much less so.
The Washington Post's always terrific Jonathan Capehart says

that, essentially, West is "no better than a birther,"
challenging the president's credibility on specious, deeply
personal racial grounds. (Joan Walsh, “Cornel West’s tragic
meltdown,” Salon, 19 May 2011)
"The angry black man" returns -- but only for a short while
So the fact that we elected Obama is being tested -- successfully -- to
make the angry black man once again acceptably "the angry black
man." This way, rational, fair, mature, concerned Obama can ensure
the Depression -- his ultimate role in history, I think -- and those
most likely to be hurt, become primarily fair creatures of sport. (For
me, with the examples that foremost come to my mind -- with West,
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with Armond White, with the brother in "he's climbing in your

window…," emotional,"irrational" black men are being set up as
deserving whatever might happen to them: instantly dehumanized.)
I think this is only temporary, however. Once the Depression is really
rooted in, I think that like the last big one, everyone who had for a
short while snickered at the habits and inclinations, the evidence of
upset, of the poor and disenfranchised, will suddenly see the suffering
masses as noble. No more talk of birther-politics. And, I think, no
more illustrations of the angry black man. Instead, I think anti-
semitism rises, becomes legitimate amongst the literate classes, even.
America, everyone once again agrees, demonstrates its purity, its
intention to be true to its heritage, its brothers, its folk, by reparing
the damage done by slavery and keeping faith with black people -- by
NEVER allowing blacks to be fair subjects of sport: and who must it
have been to have done the considerable evil in temporarily swaying
them away from their faith?
Plausible?
-----
The core of the matter
Black men's "theatrics," style, heritage, voice is now being readily
deconstructed, brushed aside by liberals as really just plain
inexcusable disrespect. This is amazing. It's the opposite direction
from the '60s, which was about empowering the carnival of the
disempowered -- whatever its true virtues -- not using it as evidence
that they need not be listened to. Obama empowered this? That
because you remain in support of him the very last thing you can be is
racist, so enough of what-is-in-truth-your-inexcusable clownishness
that we've long grown tired of pretending as otherwise? It empowers
it, I think, but what motivates it is, one, that what-is-in-greatest-truth
interestingness, signs of individuality, of being well nurtured,
emboldenly ensouled -- what great black men like West and Armond
White and Jesse Jackson mostly "are" -- is not allowed anymore: that
these men flowered to the point of being so rich in individual
personality suggests the permissiveness of the '60s, not the fearful
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restraint, denial of today (something Obama, ever careful, ever

dispossessed, "embodies"); and two, because it's not going to last so
long that guilt at what we liberals are up to cripples us.
At some level we all know that two groups in particular are getting
destroyed out there: the working classes, and those most traditionally
disenfranchised -- black people. And at some level we all know that in
making Birthers the most ridiculous people in the universe, those
who most fundamentally need our opposition, we are making it so
that we don't need so much to see the awfulness that is happening to
great segments of the working classes -- those, who, if they're not
birthers, are most likely to support such populist creatures as Rush
Limbaugh. Krugman can rant all he wants about how Obama is
enlarging the dispossessed, and yet he is trumped by an image or two
of them -- that calls up the multitudes we've been exposed to and
hated on -- crazily doubting Obama's heritage. He can't really
communicate, because we've activated a switch, an alternative, which
empowers us to hear him but to not let it squarely sit -- he is referring
to a people disconnected from what is most in play in the public
arena. And at some level we know that in making it so that emotive,
"unaccountable" black intellectuals like Armond White and West are
mostly clowns or trolls, we're setting up the tradition they've been
characterized as representing, embodying, as clownish too, which
means that when we encounter the large swaths of black men who
angrily loathe on Obama, who will suffer most under his
management, our instinctive reaction is not to emphatize but to
mock, to hate. "You're not just showing your 'color' -- in fact, it's
never really been about that. You're just being disregarding and rude;
probably from the beginning, mostly deserve to be put in place; and if
this is what Obama is effecting -- good friggin' for him." We might not
allow ourselves to quite THINK this, but we feel it automatically --
and it'll doom them of empowered friends. But I think it likely that we
at some level know that we've not commited ourselves to being
opposite to two groups we're supposed to want to enfranchise and
represent: that we've untethered ourselves from exactly what made us
3677
liberals in the first place. Once the Depression has irrecovably set in --
and so long as Krugman still insists that government spending can
still sway us away, it probably hasn't -- like the last Depression,
liberals stop mocking the habits of the poor and become one hundred
percent behind them. In fact, it'll be all we'll do, non-stop, for ten
years at least. That is, even if the majority of the dispossesed were
holding the craziest political inclinations, supporting the most ugly of
populist leaders, and if black men were ranting away in the most
outlandish, disrespectful manner, all we'll let ourselves see are noble
people being unfairly picked on by cruel, corporate culture. Like the
last Depression, this won't ultimately do much for them -- it was the
awesome suffering, which empowered the belief that some gain is
now surely deserved, which ended the Depression. And, as I
suggested earlier, what it might actually empower is a spread of anti-
semitism: in full regret that they for awhile turned against the
common man and the descendents of slaves, that they swayed the
very opposite of Good, liberals will lascerate themselves -- but also
look to punish the sneaks surely responsible for their temporary,
grotesque transmogrification.
I like West, and am inclined to want to defend him, but 5 years on I
think he'll be very empowered again ... and heeded -- about what he
had to say about Jewish influence. What he has to say about Jews is
grotesque, and I am glad Joan was angered by it. It's not carnival; not
now, because it's time for other groups to be picked on, but it can
produce carnage.
Link: Cornel West’s tragic meltown (Salon)
---------
SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2011

Not sure if we can beat it
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Every couple of months, a reader sends me a link to a blog

post denouncing the influence of Master of Fine Arts
programs in creative writing, apparently in the conviction that
such challenges are rare. Yet surely the only thing more
unkillable than MFA programs is the idea that no one dares
criticize MFA programs.
[. . .]
So Mark McGurl's 2009 book, "The Program Era: Postwar
Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing," actually was rather
daring: McGurl presumed to look at the work produced by
MFA holders and find it good. He asserted that university
creative writing programs have had a profound effect on
American fiction in the past 50 years, but he really went out
on a limb when he stated that their influence has resulted in
"a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature."
Elif Batuman, an American academic and author, does not
agree, and in a lengthy review of McGurl's book for the
London Review of Books, she laid out her own objections to
"program fiction." Then McGurl, manifestly stung by what he
regarded as Batuman's "snarky slurs," wrote a slightly less
lengthy riposte for a new publication, the Los Angeles Review
of Books. He accused Batuman of being a shameless "cultural
conservative" who thinks the "masses of the world" should
not presume to encroach on the elite terrain of art. Each of
these writers misrepresents the other to a certain degree but
McGurl is guilty of greater distortions (as is often the case
when one is angry). The back-and-forth has kindled yet
another furor of denunciations and soul-searching on the
merits of MFAs. (Laura Miller, “Are MFA programs ruining
American fiction?,” Salon, 17 May 2011)
The times we live in
Not about creative writing, but stuff within academic journals has
become less interesting. That is, I think the problem I'm glad we
sense has more to do with the times we live in than anything else. If
3679
MFA/New York loses cred, if DIY U gains real life, my guess in fact is
that it'll be more about giving the wolves more space to roam and
cowing those who, even if they're not up to something interesting, will
keep the tradition alive, and perhaps have children who may yet be,
than anything else. Our Romantic period ended sometime late '70s;
we're living in the period that subsequent generations skip over. Even
if we all get a grip on it, I'm not sure if we can beat it.
There does seem to be a sense that the MFA right now is about
creating a class of innocents sheltered from what everyone else is
experiencing, yet believe that they, especially, can actually get the
core gut of it all. I suspect THEY'LL suspect soon enough that this
isn't quite true, but by that time the Depression will have worsened,
and they'll have left the schools to really get at the grime -- which,
still, they won't really get at all. That is, I think they're being nurtured
as sources of humiliation for the body public. Not as bad as the
military, but not good.
---
Guildenstern era?
As Morris Dickstein makes clear in "Dancing in the Dark," a cultural
history of the Depression, there are just some periods where
"personality," exciting individuation, THAT IS RESPONSIBLE for
drawing all to you, not just your literaryness and your obvious
consent to be of a mold, just isn't allowed. He documents how after
Fitgerald/Joyce/Chaplin et al. in the '20s, you get the factory system,
interchangeable parts (at least 'til "Kane"), and a reductive
understanding of human beings (homo economicus) by virtually all
artists: a wiping of MORE than just the smile off people's faces. And I
think that's our problem: it's not schools -- where 30 years ago there
would have been essentially no minuses to being around some of the
most deep, the best writerly minds for a few years in your early '20s
(though I appreciate the hippies who dropped out and managed at
least as well) -- and outsiders aren't the solution -- not those familiar
with all of literary history, as they're the sort to indulge in all sorts of
things that are just not as interesting as what the MFAs have been
3680
reading; and not those who don't suspect they're actually missing out
on something for not being around such truly ripened senior writers,
because the bulk of them have. It's that the age of permission has
ended, something the huge sacrifice of the war granted to the
subsequent generation (the truly great baby-boomers), and not even
generous great writers of current MFA programs are now sufficient to
buoy you on to be greater than they were -- whatever their concern,
also, that you showcase through your causes their own purity, that
you be pure and golden, and reflect back love onto them, and that you
not write much that truly agitates them.
The worst part is that the current generation increasingly senses all
this, and understand the deprival as making them "adult": we're in a
sad and grotesque period where once again, being truly withered, not
ripened, evidences your prime.
---
@Benno
You’re welcome, Benno. Hope you enjoy the work as much as I did.
There's also a bit from one of Jacques Barzun's books that comes to
mind: perhaps in "Classic, Romantic, Modern," he gets at why all of a
sudden the New -- in this case, Romanticism -- suddenly became, in
his words, "easy" to produce. The reason he offers -- that the previous
mold had exhausted itself to the point that everyone suddenly could
not but be aware the current course had exhuasted itself, and so
finally onto gleeful, productive experimentation -- is probably very
misleading, however. My guess is that all along the late classicists
were very aware they weren't really innovating -- and so felt
protected, some, when their era had suddenly made the switch to
believing people don't deserve to stand out. It took a generation
amounting to less than their predecessors, to permit a new one to
come on the scene that surpassed everyone.
Link: Are MFA programs ruining American fiction? (Salon)

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----------
TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2011

Glitters
Despite the fact that by all accounts, Baz Luhrmann is likely

well into pre-production on The Great Gatsby — which will
likely be shot in Australia, and in 3-D, and feature Leonardo
DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan in starring
roles — the elusive director refused to admit anything at a
dinner for Geoffrey Rush in Brooklyn on Thursday night.
“I’m not doing Gatsby right now for this reason,” he told
Vulture when asked why he was shooting Gatsby in
Australia when his “team” was mostly located in New York.
“Because despite what might be out there, I have made no
comment about anything. So until I say it, it’s not said, you
know.” Not really.
Luhrmann explained further, with the clarity of a murky
swamp.
What it means is, much like what goes on

in any event, when you’re in the middle
of the work, there’s all sorts of things
you’re doing, and, you know, when I’m
really clear — I, right now, my only focus
is absorbing — I’ve been studying [F.
Scott] Fitzgerald now for three years,
and my only act now is to absorb the
DNA of his world, his life, the world of
the novel. That’s why I have published on
our website all the books we’re reading.
And I think before we all engage anyone,
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the first thing to do is to do your

homework, read the books, and then let’s
talk.
Got it. So he’s not making The Great Gatsby. “No, I’m
making The Great Gatsby.” Oh. Eff it all. Good luck with this
one, Baz! Wake me when the trailer debuts. (Christopher
Rosen, “Baz Luhrmann is still full of crap,” Movieline, 11
March 2011)
------------
I can't believe someone whose aesthetic is designed to exalt

decadence and empty artifice is going to direct a horrid
misreading of the most powerful Indictment of decadence
and empty artifice ever created.
I always wanted to see a faithful Gatsby film.
Alas, it will never be. (Jack Knive)
Instinctive reaction is to insist that there is some of Gatsby's desire to

"suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder"
in Luhrmann, and that it is compelling. He can, I agree, seem so thin,
even vapid, but he strangely does draw you back to him.
True, the desperate drive and denial that pushes towards the
American "orgastic" future could be captured, at least as an
essential visual energy.
I just fear that the wealthy and their "retreat into
carelessness," essentially that the "love story" is one-sided,
that Daisy would rather live within the confines of the
illusion of control offered by material possession than risk
relating through an unmediated reality...
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I just hope he makes it the tragic portrait of the thwarted

masculine that it truly is. I don't want to see a post-feminist
revision of Fitzgerald.
And so far, Mr. Luhrmann's portraits of the Masculine and
the Feminine seem like the exaggerated plasticine figures on
a wedding cake-- what an effeminate spazz locked out of
that particular existential struggle would think of it if he
were simply reproducing its surface features.
You know- the very idea of Nicole Kidman as Woman, and
Hugh Jackman as Man. Someone is very confused. Or either
obsessed with making a subversion of gender to the degree
that this could overshadow the essence of Fitzgerald's
unflinching text. (Jack Knive)
It is odd his deciding to do Gatsby at the onset of what looks like (by
which I mean, for sure is) a new long depression, since Gatsby was
written comfortably within one of the millenium's foremost go-go
times. That itself to me seems very odd, has me suspect its moving
energy, and has me fretting the film -- though I'm for sure going to
see it now!
About your comment on material possessions: I'm turning to the
book, again suspecting Fitzgerald would have a tough time at the time
showing up luxury, never-ending glittering things, persuading us that
the text is best understood as tragedy or critique rather than
celebration, when frequent and always-varying partying, lavishness,
details, exotica, out-of-placeness, perpetual newness and perhaps
even, I'm wondering, also empty-headed insouciance had an appeal
to pretty much every someone at the time (weren't flappers somewhat
in opposition to depth; advertisements for the power and worth in
ostensible triviality?). And looking at it again this morning, I think he
did. If there isn't beauty IN all those empty material possessions, all
the beautiful things, their gloss certainly appeals. Their glitter actually
scintillates -- are part of the acuity and precision and refinery and fun
that marks, I think, most every sentence of the text -- everything
3684
vapid is so very much evidently worth delineating. Tom is supposed

to be shown up as a barbarian, as base and brutal, but reading it now,
whatever Fitzgerald's intent, I think EVEN GATSBY IS -- incredibly,
FOR his being largely unaffected by all the delicate surface beauty he
has surrounded himself with. Have a glass of champaigne and party,
you fool!
If Luhrmann does make it "a tragic portrait of the thwarted masculine
that it truly is," if he makes it ring as true to Fitzgerald as this week's
Jane Eyre is ostensibly to Bronte, it would have to be, amazingly, for
it showing Gatsby's fatal flaw being his inability to appreciate the
empty life, out of preference for the deep and meaningful. Daisy has
no soul, but is a full of hints, and is a considerable flirt -- which in this
text makes her kind of awesome, actually, though to very few, I think,
even but a year or two outside the heyday of capitalist fun and within
a depression's deflating, cowing check.
Well, that is the tragedy of the masculine-- seeking the

essence beneath the shifting masks of facade that the
feminine offers. When there is nothing beneath the shifting
masks. And, when Gatsby (or, I should say the actual human
being, James Gatz) attempts a facade of his own (the Gatsby
identity) to win her, he is in fact tragically mirroring the
facade of the feminine in his very attempt to attract a master
of facades. Takes a fake to catch a fake. But then what?
The text is about the tragedy of American inauthenticity and
narcissism. To see it any other way is to not understand
being run over by the american dream car and found
floating dead in a pool shot by a bullet meant for the bastard
who got away.
You can't get away with being a fake.
When Tom dabbles in the working class and brutalizes and
murders, he retreats to his real identity as an unaccountable
member of the upper caste. Gatsby ends up dead and
3685
blamed. And shot by another member of the lower class, to

boot. We kill each other while the Tom's and Daisy's of the
world saunter on.
The last line describes the endless search for the essential
ungraspable ineffable thing that can never be had. You
know, the nature of desire. You want it until you have it,
then you don't want it anymore. That's the engine of
american culture (or maybe all culture, but ours with extra
horsepower.)
I understand that a thinker trying to reconcile his own
narcissism and celebration of protean, shifting identities has
to try to find the fun in the nihilism-- but this is the very
reason why I say it is unfair to "correct" Fitzgerald in this
way-- his was a moral tale.
Don't make it into po-mo "aesthetic celebratory" non-sense.
To confuse the exhaustive decadence as being ambivalently
approached by the text is only as accurate as saying the
garden of eden story is about how tempting that fruit looks.
Tempting is tempting.
Tom is brutal because he can be. Because he is rich, and he
can retreat into the comfortable emptiness of lavish things
and his detached wealthy "c'est la vie" sigh.
The 20's decadence preceded the Great Depression for a
reason, just as the vast "do as you will" culture of "lifestyle
commodity" preceded our current situation (and we are
indeed still pre-depression: I assure you, you will know
when we're there for the blackouts and the gunshots out in
the hungry night.)
A properly understood Gatsby film translation is highly
necessary art at this time. Nick is saved by what he sees, and
an audience might be similarly affected (inasmuch as a piece
of media can redeem it's own alienating affect.)
"There are no second acts in American lives" is not meant to
be a condoning of how great the first act was. (Jack Knive)
3686
If Gatsby is as you say it is, entirely a moral tale that shows up the
emptiness of 20's youth culture, their lives of glitter, New York!, and
endless flirting, rather than itself a contributor to and an evocation of
it, it's hard to see why the book, which came out smack middle of the
go-go 20s (and was commenced in 1922, I believe), would have been
so popular, or how Fitzgerald could ever have been seen as someone
who was working to cement the 20s as primarily a youth-
focused/lead period, as helping instill a new (and to their elders,
vapid) morality.
For you, all the novel's scintillation, all its finely, lovingly, wondrously
delineated accountings of all the particulars in an endlessly glittering
and beckoning world, was exhausting -- deplorable, and readily
summized as decadent, probably from the start. For you, very likely, it
never was an Eden or a ripened apple tree which tempts. For me, it
was; it WAS a party I hoped to see more of, but alas the quickly
fainting Gatsby and ranging Tom episodes ensured little more of it as
the text wound down. The moralizing comes unrelentingly at the end,
and I guess if you're already in mind to agree with it the previously
encountered could be managed into a tempting-but-ultimately-evil
retrospective accounting of it, but for me the finish was ponderous,
and its moralizing, unconvincing (if you're originally from the Mid-
West you can never really lose your past, be a fashionista, au current,
abreast of the latest, a participating New Yorker??? Excuse me Nick,
but despite your whip-lashings it's pretty clear that your
extraordinary ability to see, savor and fashion [in your prose] glamor,
catch and INITIATE its evident actual spirit, powerfully contests this
thesis, and you're not so dumb not to at some level know it. All your
lesson is is that you might still find it all the more comfortable if you
sometimes keep to the sides -- but still, very much, within.), and was
in mind to partake of another big bite of life of the Big Apple myself.
(I was evicted, but was never persuasively made to see the rightness
behind the eviction: am I safely away from the tempting sin-laden
tree, or just behind "Soviet" walls, bidden to the very worst of masters
-- tired, I suppose, somewhat pleasingly familiar but awfully well-tred
3687
moral truths, and dumb sobriety?) I suspect the 20s generation that
loved the book and weren't anywhere near-ready to shift into, geez,
"mommy and daddy did know best" old-timer think, sure, took the
ending as a possible anticipation of what might follow -- we're
ultimately damned for our fun; it's all an (albeit impressive and
powerful) staving off, and we know it -- but recognized the book
overall as one OF its era, an authority and a catalyst for further
MORE of just their kind of fun, where if this here is proving a
disappointment, another surely awaits in the 'morrow, and you know
with the added focus it's sure to be more even more splendid than
ever! And this is in fact the true glory evil, degrading, past-dismissing
Capitalism befell upon them, for another four to five more years.
Lucky buggers!
I'm hoping Luhrmann helps remind us all that this great era actually
happened, and was worthy, even if this means being blasted by
incredulous critics as an attempt at a Sex and the City 3, after number
2 was just loudly everywhere damned as a must-never-be-seen-again,
worst kind of inexcusable out-of-stepness and excess. If it's just loud
and sure morality tale and damnation, then it's just Dick Diver, and
what ten years of the Depression did to Fitzgerald, as he lived out his
second act.
You're point about desire, to the hopeless task of catching and
keeping what will only surely slip out of your hands the very moment
you grasp it: Nick says something along these lines in the text, but
Fitzgerald writes him as someone who delights in his smart and
capable grasping of phenomenological experience -- in his
remarkable capturing of all that he sets out to capture. He makes the
effort constantly -- it's pretty much, for me, what the book is mostly
about; what he mostly does. And he succeeds, and he knows he
succeeds -- and in a way that would draw admiration from others and
that he himself will relish -- every time. What HE desires doesn't so
much slip away from him as he does from experiences he has already
succeeded in catching, "nailing," and savoring. And rightly so. He has
his breakfast, enjoys it, and when ready, begins his looking-forward to
3688
lunch. This isn't so much Capitalism as it is someone who is not of the

depressed. Take Nick (from the first part of Gatsby, before he
converts over to Gatsby) and place him away from New York and out
for a long spell without possessions in the wilderness, and you've got
yourself Annie Dillard from Tinker Creek, in this case, enjoying the
daily rush of experience Nature provides. She, we remember, doesn't
retreat sadly back away from the thrilling onrush of the Now and into
retrospect and past-obsession, until she has the willies startled out of
her: until something "massive" and awful stops her forward progress.
The rest wasn't her getting wise, just her recovering. I think he puts
the stop in to some extent just to steady himself -- he is not
ultimately, her equal. But put a true Westerner into the spoils of New
York, and you'd never get from him a Great Gatsby: Nick, whatever
your reticence and discomfort and breaks-on, New York was already
well within you, my friend.
Fitzgerald self-destructed because of his discomfort with the

empty artifice you describe. And his inability to ultimately
find that life palatable.
Literary works don't become popular simply because they
celebrate the culture they describe. Quite the opposite.
Usually they articulate an unspoken longing in the culture at
large for something beyond the anodyne offered as a salve to
the wound of the human existential burden of the era.
We readers have always found hope to live in the bridge
across alienation offered by evidence of another troubled
soul out there engaged in the same struggle.
Water water everywhere and none to drink. And you're
admiring the fountain.
Only a hopelessly lost narcissist longing to make their false
identity a reality would believe that the bottom line of every
text is a celebration of the self.
All true literature is critical.
"Look how pretty we all are.. and how!" is not enough of an
3689
impetus to engage with the painful construction of a work of

literature.
Read about Fitzgerald as a human being. His life is evidence
of a soul that can't give up seeking a transcendent truth
drowning in decadence.
And yes, you can side with the decadence and see Fitzgerald
as flawed for seeking "more." I think that's perfectly fair. But
then, I side with Francis.
It's called the lost generation for a reason. But clearly, you
are lost, so you interpret the exploration of being lost as an
exhortation and celebration of that meaningless series of
fragmented trajectories.
His construction of the novel was in and of itself an event to
win the poisonous psychotic Zelda. And, as Hemingway
pointed out to him over and over again-- he was a writer
who couldn't let go of the pain of never being able to truly
touch some ineffable, essential perfection.
"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to
be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you
get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful
to it as a scientist."
— Ernest Hemingway, 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Does this seem like something an intimate would write to a
glitz and glamour celebrating dilettante?
I admire your instance on the attempt to find a
phenomenological value system. I admire it the same way I
admire the beating heart behind "Jay Gatsby's" artificiality
and "James Gatz's" attempt to make his narcissistic facade a
reality.
The beauty of failure is exquisite.
The text clearly indicates that this course is tragic. But I see
that frightens you.
Just as I am frightened by the gals from Sex and the City.
This is where I'd put a smiley face emoticon.
3690
To be fair, I need to lighten up. So did Ernest and F. Scott.

But you could get a little heavier, stranger.
Let's hope Baz thinks about it at least this hard.
Truly, this dialogue gives me hope that the struggle to tackle
the dynamic between the glitz and the emptiness could be
accomplished in a nuanced, ambivalent way-- even by
someone unaware of his own denied inner depth. (Jack
Knive)
I'll remember your advice. And well met, Jack Knive!

Link: Baz Luhrmann is still full of crap (Movieline)
SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2011

Sub-humans
It’s bad enough that Michael Dowse’s retro-comedy Take Me

Home Tonight isn’t nearly as much fun as the ’80s actually
were. Even worse, it’s less fun than most ’80s comedies were
— and that’s bad. Topher Grace plays Matt, a recent MIT
grad circa 1988, whose life is stuck on “pause”: He’s working
a dead-end job at Suncoast Video, and he still has the hots
for Tori (Teresa Palmer), the golden goddess who wouldn ’t
look twice at him in high school and who barely looks once
now. She comes into the store one day; he not-so-subtly puts
the moves on her, telling her he works for Goldman Sachs (in
the old days, this was supposed to drive girls wild). They
agree to meet later at a huge Labor Day bash, where Matt
will be able to perpetuate his silly lie and, with luck, win the
girl.
[. . .]
I get that Dowse (Fubar, It’s All Gone Pete Tong) isn’t just
mimicking ’80s comedies; he’s actually trying to make one,
3691
trusting, I suppose, that the audience is in on his ultra-ironic

joke. The movie is badly lit and cheap-looking, presumably
intentionally. But if modern audiences are really looking for
sub-John Hughes, Adventures in Babysitting-caliber
filmmaking, there’s nothing to stop them from going straight
to the source: You can pick up a treasure trove of this stuff
for a few bucks from the revolving rack at your local
convenience store. (Stephanie Zacharek, Coke Adds Life —
Just Not to Take Me Home Tonight, “Movieline,” 3 March
2011)
Re: But if modern audiences are really looking for sub-John Hughes,
Adventures in Babysitting-caliber filmmaking, there’s nothing to stop
them from going straight to the source …"
That's it, that's what they're looking for: an ecosystem of worn and
repeatedly-done-before you can safely imagine participating in
without a whiff of maybe-anxiety/uncertainty-causing counter or
contention (genius or original voice, mostly certainly counting here),
to get some kind of "I exist!" thrill to take home and cuddle. The
concerned move reviewer who cares enough about what we've all got
to deal with now, might soon realize "their" task is perhaps mostly to
take whatever moment of demure stir to be found issuing from
current movies, and while praising it -- genuinely (imagine you're
dealing with terrorized, hide-prone children, and so thereby find the
way) -- still relate it carefully to something a tiny bit more daring
done before or elsewhere. It's how the good genius Stanley Greenspan
got former autists, completely set to turtle before, to never really see,
everything but a very narrow spectrum of stimuli -- a narrow
spectrum, mind you, that could be expanded to eventually make at
some point for an actual, deep conversation -- back to normal-level or
better emotional functioning, to no longer be autistic. Otherwise, the
fate may be to be tuned out entirely, except by those with already a
nose for quality, or maybe not so concerned with helping. It sadly
isn’t true that just exposing people to greatness will instill amongst
3692
many of the previously ignorant a desperate search for more of it.

Something has to tease you first through instant recognition, and you
have to be inclined to want it, for growth to happen. A whole
generation can actually want otherwise, though, to actually seek to
reduce themselves – and without it really being Big Brother’s doing;
and not even a tower of Great Artists is going to be much able to get
through to them: they’re just going to have to more or less sit this one
out, and wait for a better audience.
Link: Coke Adds Life — Just Not to Take Me Home Tonight

(Movieline)
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Labels: art, autism, big brother, stanley greenspan, take me home

tonight
SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 2011

Tomorrow's ivy-league goals
According to a new report, the roundly chilly response to

James Franco’s Oscar hosting gig has hardly lessened his
profile at Yale. In fact, the post-grad polymath — who is in
the early stages of obtaining a Ph.D. in English from the Ivy
3693
League institution — was back on the East Coast mere hours

after the Oscarcast ended, journalists in tow and mythology
expanding by the hour.
“At 9 the next morning,” notes today’s NYT, “[Franco] was in

a Starbucks in New Haven, hunched over a book and barely
recognizable in a gray sweatshirt, but still wearing his
tuxedo pants.” I mean, of course he was still in tuxedo pants.
Just add it to the legend promulgated by Franco’s peers and
faculty alike: (S.T. Vanairsdale, “Report From Yale: James
Franco Still Likes Doing Things,” Movieline, 4 March 2011)
"journalists in tow and mythology expanding by the hour" is really

good.
He, like Portman, speaks to our love of frenzied activity, of not sitting
still, and routine daily acclaim; who will speak up for the benefits of
leisure and contemplation, of great lasting deeds but perhaps-never-
even-in-your-lifetime loud acclaim? (I hated seeing Crystal on stage --
an insult to Franco and Hathaway -- but it likely made me recall now
that, unlike Franco, who wants you to know how much better he is
than you [but not in any way you could ever pin him down on, of
course] for being so unblanchedly able to reset to today's agenda even
after yesterday's titanic undertaking, he was ready to admit spending
good portions of time revisiting most of his jokes and their reactions
the nights after his hosting the Oscars -- at genuine risk, we all noted,
of making him seem needy and insecure -- affectable, injurable --
even though what he was surely just admitting to was as much just
the kind of absolutely necessary processing of experiences we all need
to do to actually grow from them).
Franzen tried, for years locking himself away from feedback while he
tried to write true -- but despite all his isolation he never convinced
with his finished products that he'd ever let himself out of the
zeitgeist: a hutzpah that cows him and lowers him before his TRUE
master and fellow isolationist, DeLillo. Gandalf's back again in a
3694
couple years -- maybe he'll do it. If not, perhaps just recall of the
Shire, and therefore some also of the Inklings and their lifetime
works.
Doesn't surprise me that Franco is not about to lose his charm
amongst youth: THEY NEED to believe he can automatically reset
after anything -- daring everyone reflecting on and obsessing over
what he had already finished to risk in quick retrospect seeming
laggard, strangely over-eager, and exposed -- so to believe their own
resets are just as complete, provisioning, and other-balking. They
identify with him too much to allow that he may have may have been
substantively affected by this, which he likely was, and hence the
prompt show of today's sufficient Starbucks study to ensure timely
completion of tomorrow's ivy-league goals.
Link: Report From Yale: James Franco Still Likes Doing Things
(Movieline)
----------
Oscar winners and cultural impact
But a gut feeling tells those of us who were only mildly

impressed by The King’s Speech that something feels wrong.
That’s not to say the multiple Oscar-winning biopic of
stuttering King George VI isn’t good. It is. But would it feel
any more right if it was The Social Network that had won
Best Pic and wound up outranking some of the above titles?
Maybe, if only because TSN felt more impactful in the
overall scheme of things, culturally speaking; the same could
be argued of Black Swan, with its stylish bravado and
unforgettable central performance.
Then again, digging into the list we’re reminded of Oscar’s
prior history of selecting dubious Best Picture winners; The
3695
King’s Speech also outranks Shakespeare in Love, Forrest

Gump, Dances with Wolves, and Crash. And that feels just
right. (Jen Yamato, “Is King’s Speech Really Better Than
Unforgiven, The Sting, and These Other Best Picture Oscar
Winners?,” Movieline, 4 March 2011)
I have a feeling that King's Speech is going to last; the friendship it

pro-offers is too interesting and inspiring -- moving -- I think, for the
movie to just have the title now owing to its commitment to and its
helping entrench a just-before-long-war preferred attitude shift
toward selfless service and sacrifice. I think the film will now do more
harm than good, but a different generation could recover it for better
purposes, and will likely want to: it evidently has a lot to teach a
nation concerned with the careful knitting of a frayed social fabric
about empathy and love. For me, it's above Unforgiven, certainly.
Forrest Gump has lasted as long as Pulp Fiction (and they both hold
that year's title in my mind). You know this -- why did you include it
with the rest of list of readily left-behinds?
----------
FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2011

When Greats finally pass up the ball, it may not be about fatherly
benefaction and selfless generosity: take heed if you accept it
ABC News: All Chinese children learn English starting in

kindergarten. By the time they are ten they are bilingual!
American schools can't teach reading and
writing one language very well.
Lloyd (Lloyd DeMause, “Learning,” Realpsychohistory, 15

Nov. 2011)
3696
-----
"ABC News: All Chinese children learn English starting in

kindergarten. By
the time they are
ten they are bilingual! American schools can't teach reading
and writing
one language very well.
Lloyd"
Lloyd. Your current posts would not make it past your own
1999 - 2005
filter for *others'* posts. (Rachel Stoltenberg)
-----
Rachel: Did you see the ABC News report on Chinese

children now all
learning English from the
beginning of their schooling? It was very detailed, had lots of
schools reporting, gave
statistical evidence that was convincing. Your doubt below is
unvalidated. Can you
give evidence the ABC News report was wrong?
Lloyd (Lloyd DeMause)

-----
Lloyd!
"Rachel: Did you see the ABC News report on Chinese
children now all
learning English from the
beginning of their schooling? It was very detailed, had lots of
3697
schools
reporting, gave
statistical evidence that was convincing. Your doubt below is
unvalidated.
Can you
give evidence the ABC News report was wrong?"
Apology. My remark appears to be in response to your last

post re. China.
It' not. It's about several of your recent posts, at least.
(Rachel Stoltenberg)
-----
Lloyd, for me the concern would be that you tend to make America
seem "bad," fully worthy of the downfall it seems intent on willing on
for itself. The rest of the United Nations – Europe, whose social
improvements you frequently delineate for us, mostly, but also now
not-so-long-ago, absolute-progress-stopping, foot-binding China (are
you for memory, or not?; or is it that you would just have us put aside
or showcase as suits the momentum of your current inclinations?) –
are by contrast mostly made to seem sane and civil. You kinda get the
sense that you're mostly concerned these days, through the like of
flattery and appropriately directed scorn, to count yourself amongst
the few deserving Americans around still able to appreciate the
maturity of the international community, and who maybe won't be
suffering from what their peers' folly has earned for themselves. The
feeling is that you're shirking most of the rest of us off, to count
yourself amongst the bland but safe. Lloyd the revolutionist is at the
end neutering himself to seem as prosaic as denatured,
internationalist Obama.
Patrick
-----
3698
Patrick wrote the following: "The > feeling is that you're

shirking
most of the rest of us off..."
My commentary: Please remember, that this is not a tea

party group but
a psychohistorical discussion group. So
your formulation "most of the rest of us" is hardly true. If
you
believe the contrary, please do so. During the times of
neoliberalism
I never used my limited ressources to discuss with
neoliberals. I did
not estimate it as something productive. I do not judge it
appropriate
to behave in another way with Tea Partiers. That's all I have
to say
to that.
Florian (Florian Galler)
-----
Patrick: You cannot tell what my views are when you have
never
subscribed to my Journal
and read my articles. You just endlessly attack me on
realpsychohistory for unstated crimes.
Lloyd (Lloyd DeMause)
-----
Not so, Florian. With posts like this he is showing he is talking

directly to (and counting himself amongst) civilized but a bit dull
people, while bleeding into the background those who've encountered
all he's done before who he knows would instantly recognize / sense
3699
his going simple (we may be sane and unpredictable, but he's quickly
judged, probably not of most consequence). (And there is a sense that
he's not even so much talking to any of us as he is to someone beyond
who would approve of all he is saying, of the clear deference [to Her]
he is with his words communicating.) He is making himself more
boring – and certainly more "in-line" – than he actually is, as Pauline
Kael used to remark about fellow critics, feeling inclined to turn
traitor, I'm sensing, on people who represent the striving and
accomplishing “Lloyd” he could never quite convince himself would
ever find safety from retributive attack.
This long story of prosperity is terminating in a colossal way. We

know who's coming, know it's payback time, and his inclination is to
skip as fast as he can to the side to get out of the way. There is always
a ball in play here, and sometimes it’s still drawing us to stretch out,
participate, and still grow, but you do get a weird sense that the
pleasure derived whenever it is made part of an
interesting game, also derives from it outing into firm remembrance
and therefore later sure punishment, who exactly it tempted to not
only take but run with it.
-----
And just a reminder, guys. When the next purity crusade is on us, an
era in absolute obeisance to the sacrifice / punishment-desiring
maternal alter, it will not come about in any form that would tip its
hat to its true nature – it cannot, cannot, cannot make the liberal,
well-behaving, civilized amongst us feel anyway GUILTY. That is, it
will not be (for example) anti-Semitic (the exact last thing it will in
fact be), anti-black, against homosexuals, anti-woman or aggressively
for the alpha male, for banning ALL alcohol, not Green, anything
really Bush / Cheney, previous prohibition-looking in origin. It will
come across as eminently sensible, reasonable, evolved, moderate,
adult. Therefore it will be FOR education reform, digitization and
access, for making America once again ahead of nations (like China,
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that now shame us) it was once so far ahead of before (as the story
goes) individualism and greed became the cancer that destroyed its
host, for reform /re-invigoration of industry, manufacturing,
transportation – the muscle fiber of the nation – for making it clean,
green, ordered, interconnected and finally vigorous again. It will be
done multiculturally, through colors of every hue, operating in a
preferred environment of cooperation, sanity, and mature decorum.
Expect the United Nations to cheer it on. And all of this will be done
to the overall effect of mounting more and more numbers to the
increasingly DESERVING suffering, to the inhibition of freedom, to
strangling what is actually good about America, though all the time its
loudest proponents will actually come from the (regressing members
of) Left.
That is, if you want to make psychohistory another means to serve

Mother, you will be offered many things by the Obama administration
that will look so very supportable but that actually work against what
is real in psychohistory. Obama can be made to seem the only option
against the Tea Party nation, and therefore a bulwark that MUST BE
supported to the psychological health, to the evolutionary progress, of
the nation – even if it this means the quieting-down / suppression,
the stigmatizing of other (dissonant) liberal voices, which ostensibly
now serve to weaken what must only now be supported – but, thank
god, there are little demons and goblins all the way through (the likes
of) Lloyd's "Emotional Life of Nations" that will be mocking you along
the way for your ultimate capitulation to the voice you've spent a
lifetime trying to steady yourself to no longer heed. I hope that if I
keep pointing these irritants out, we'll at some point have feel the
need to either address what is
evidently moving us to cooperate with the so readily offered "easy
outs" in discussion, and not stay true to what is still everywhere and
obvious in "the text," or find some way to ostensibly guilt-free "burn
the book," and in our moment of instant never-the-less-unavoidable
“what have I done!,” self-recogize and re-orient, and thereby finally
3701
once again start up our goal to keep some hope alive through a clear-
eyed look at historical motivations.
Link: Learning (Realpsychohistory)

Link: Emotional Life of Nations
----------
THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2011

Maybe the issue is now not so much what is being done, but the spirit
in which it is engaged?
As if on cue, openly gay Oscarcast co-producer Bruce Cohen

is facing the ultimate Web sanction for that censored Javier
Bardem-Josh Brolin smooch from Sunday night: an
attacked Wikipedia bio calling him a “liar” and homophobe
in cahoots with ABC. Slow clap, Internet, slow clap.
“Bruce Cohen is a liar who claims he does not partake in the
homophobia of the ABC network when clearly he does,”
reads the recent addition to Cohen’s bio — a bio that includes
Cohen having married his partner Gabriel Catone in 2008,
worn a White Knot to the 2009 Oscars in support of same-
sex marriage and earned his second Best Picture nomination
that same year for co-producing Milk. (He won for his first
nomination, American Beauty, in 2000.)
On the one hand, it seems reasonable to assume his
immunity to the Esperanza Spalding-ing of his biography.
On the other, don’t be naïve! Any and every slag tactic is on
the table these days. I’m surprised it took this long, to be
honest, or that he wasn’t targeted earlier for his
questionable taste in hosts. Thoughts? (S.T. Vanairsdale,
“‘Bruce Cohen is a Liar’: Gay Oscar Producer’s Wiki Bio
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Attacked Over Censored Kiss,” Movieline, 3 March 2011)
We've had such a long period now of seemingly-every-award-show-

manifest guy-guy or girl-girl kissing, don't you think? Instinct tells me
that two years ago he would if anything felt near ABC-directed to
focus on the kiss -- close up: the public demanded yet more instances
to demonstrate their too being enlightened, righteous, and of the
Now. It may, that is, not have most to do with sexuality as with hints
of an unimpeded spirit of indulgence and excess, when the mood has
shifted sharply to the austere, self-denying, and deferent. That's the
consideration I'm playing with.
When's the last time a guy-guy kiss has been shown on an

awards show? Or the time before that?
don't make a mistake about it, ABC decided to cut away
from this kiss because they bowed to institutionalized
homophobia, particularly when it comes to male affection.
It's got nothing to do with some imaginary swing toward
prudence by the public. Not at all.
I don't believe Cohen's homophobic as wel, however. The guy
just knows who puts food in his bowl. He also knows the
Hollywood machine is a vicious beast that doesn't forget. So
when someone questions the integrity of his masters, he's
going to lie and compromise as much as necessary.
(tommyoc, response to post)
Could be. But it does strike me that not so long ago it was definitely
the thing to be actually hetero but to show your non-Bushness / non-
Tea-Partierness / just-plain-reasonable-headedness by finding
someone center of stage of the same sex to kiss, each and every time
you possible could, and I think most of America was ALL FOR IT: it
became SO mainstream, in my judgment, the censor's ingrained first
instinct became to be most wary of FAILING to show rather than to
show it, as I just said. This here wasn't about a first man-on-man kiss
3703
at an Oscars, a broach through to-the-must-now-be-okay which

couldn't be allowed to be okay; it was about adding one more to a
huge tilting pile that seemed maybe about to spill all over everyone.
Even just a reasonably short while ago, however often it had been
done, I don't think this worry would ever have surfaced: each add-on
just continued a wished-for momentum that HAD TO be kept going,
lest we lose one of the key discoveries to keep ourselves feeling
intrinsically righteous, "unneeding" of pause or a sort of self-inquiry
there is no way we were going to risk undertaking while going about
the constant precarious balance of our lives. We could see two men
kissing, and even celebrate it: how more evolved could we possibly
become? -- Continue on!
Gay men are going to be allowed, even motioned, aggressively
prompted, to kiss, even at the Oscars: so long as "we" know it'll
mostly communicate a kind of propriety, circumspection, not
lavishness and joining in the fun. If we're looking for homophobia in
the next while -- and I think we should be looking for it -- we'll find it
in an intolerance for promiscuity and just-plain-indulgent-fun, which
for many people is the near natural way of essentializing gayness, not
in such like even gay men being impulse-drawn to pull back from men
in a kiss, out of fear of the corporate whip and broad mainstream'
disapproval. Overt, blatant disapproval for homosexuality may come
-- though I don't think it will -- but in my judgment we're going to get
a lot more of the likes of the end of "don't tell" before we come to
understand that the significant turn against homosexuals actually
began with those quite willing to end it. Obama represents the
mainstream, not the Tea Partiers: when publically-wished-for
oppression comes, it'll make itself seem holy out of its distinct
difference to what the Tea Party would expect done.
Maybe some help Movieline: instances of man-on-man kissing a few
years ago with what we're seeing (or failing to see) today? Or perhaps,
kinds of kisses -- has it maybe actually through time still increased
but moved from ravenous tongue-on-tongue to more "polite" lip-on-
lip?
3704
Link: ‘Bruce Cohen is a Liar’: Gay Oscar Producer’s Wiki Bio Attacked
Over Censored Kiss (Movieline)
----------
Apparently, from now on it'll be the limo ...
The contest:
The King's Speech:
Bertie: Can’t you just give her a nice
house and a title?
David: I won’t have her as my mistress.
Bertie: David, the Church does not
Recognize divorce and you are the
head of the Church.
David: Haven’t I any rights?
Bertie: Many privileges…
David: Not the same thing. Your beloved
Common Man may marry for love, why
not me?
Bertie: If you were the Common Man, on what
basis could you possibly claim to be King?!
David: Sounds like you’ve studied our wretched
Constitution.
Bertie: Sounds like you haven’t.
VS.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Cameron: [Ferris slowly pulls the Ferrari out of the garage] No,
Ferris. I'm putting my foot down. You're just gonna have to think of
3705
something else.
[Ferris keeps driving]
Cameron: Ferris! We could call a limo! One of those stretch jobs
with the TV and the bar. How about that?
Ferris: [Ferris pulls the car back slightly] Come on. Live a little!
[Cameron crosses himself, walks to the car]
Once, being anal and clingy only meant your likely to poop diamonds,
now it means you’re apparently just the stuff to balk back Hitlers and
are due the throne.
----------
Our various public offerings
Sheen is feeling more and more like OJ driving up the 405, ”

tweeted David Poland earlier today. “I don’t even think
people realize they are just waiting for the gun to go off. ” Oy.
Well, how about a drive down memory lane instead — to a
happier, more innocent time when Charlie Sheen actually
volunteered to leave a TV show after a healthy payday. (S.T.
Vanairsdale, “Remember Charlie Sheen Really Winning on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” Movieline, 2 March 2011)
Every once in a while there appears some celebrity with enough

Celebrity to let us feel that if we let loose all our despise upon
him/her, s/he can take it all in, and then perhaps kindly die, for a
fully restive period of, even-if-short, still-pleasing respite. We've been
denied it for quite awhile; keep on getting poor offerings -- already
fully dissipated Corey Haim and Gary Coleman -- or being effectively
checked, with undeniable momentum-carried-and-respectable-
enoughs getting in the way, as Heidi Klum did with Britney Spears, or
knowing we at-base really want kept around to become leading
examples of the kind of austere reform we all need to undertake for
3706
past gross self-allowances, as with what is slowly happening with

Tiger Woods. Charlie Sheen has Sylvester -- but his canyness-owed
surprise summer success hasn't given him much more cred than box
office' has given Gnomeo, so that won't prove enough. If he makes it
through, my guess is that it'll owe to our unwillingness to not owe him
some for his helping gift our preferred conversation about bottom-
rung women: is anything more society-approved or desired these days
than a teeth-out hunt for barmaids and hookers?
Link: Remember Charlie Sheen Really Winning on Who Wants to Be

a Millionaire? (Movieline)
----------
Spotting out the truly dangerous
Lloyd's new article is up at www.psychohistory.com.

You'll note a couple of changes in this latest work from what he's
written before. After a quick first read, these two stand out:
Current:
Kennedy soon needed a new war to consolidate his defensive

masculinity
pose, increased the U.S. military spending the largest
amount in any
peacetime, and then committed 16,300 U.S. soldiers to
Vietnam. When he
went to Dallas, where there were many highly publicized
death threats
to kill him, he needed still more “toughness,” and told his
wife,
“Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with
3707
a rifle,
nobody can stop it.” “His Secret Service aides told him he
better put
up the bulletproof plastic top on his limousine, so he
specifically
told them not to do so,” committing suicide to demonstrate
his
hypermasculinity. (Global Wars to Restore U.S. Masculinity)
Here, Kennedy is hypermasculine, even in suicide demonstrating his

toughness.
Before:
Despite all the warnings, however, Kennedy unconsciously

accepted the
martyr's role. He was, after all, used to doing all his life
what
others wanted him to do. So although a Secret Service man
told him the
city was so dangerous that he had better put up the
bulletproof
plastic top on his limousine, he specifically told him not to do
so.
In fact, someone instructed the Secret Service not to be
present ahead
of time in Dallas and check out open windows such as those
in the Book
Depository, as they normally did whenever a president
traveled in
public as Kennedy did. Only then, with the nation, the
assassin, the
Secret Service and the president all in agreement, the
assassination
3708
could be successfully carried out. (Assasination of Leaders)
Here, Kennedy is the life-long martyr, so used to compliantly doing

what others want of him he agreed to "follow through" even to his
death.
-----
Current:
In addition, the U.S. is the only nation not to sign the U.N.
Convention on the Rights of the Child—all of which helping
us
understand why the U.S. spends half of the world’s military
budget.
(Global Wars)
Before:
Sorry, can't find the exact quote. But it's more that the reason for
America's comparatively enormous military budget lies with its "right
to happiness" philosophy: that is, owing to the marked allowances
permitted by the long-ago psychoclass innovators -- the American
founders -- not its mostly reactionary (psychoclass-lagering) "core."
I wonder if Lloyd believes that America is not even home to the best
of the world anymore? That what-would-appear-to-be modest -- and
therefore benefacted -- Swedes are perhaps the most innovative in the
world as well. I know in hockey, this is appearing the case. The
best in the NHL are not Cdns or Russians anymore: other than the
important exception of Crosby, the next three are Swedes -- the Sedin
twins, and Lindstrom. People are noticing that the Swedes are less
flashy but ultimately more effective and far, far more lasting
(they're playing strong at 40, whereas everyone else is
depleted by 30 or so years of age); maybe true genius can't be seen
when what we're looking for is truly as much hightened sensation?
Or is lack of attention to America's highest psychoclass in Lloyd's
current writings owing to something else? Sweden is clearly doing
3709
great things, but it's easy to take non-individualistic Sweden as

mostly an example of a nation that quietly has all along been laying
solid foundations while reckless America has so lost all that was once
great about it to be now fairly just identified as a base, resource-
depleted nation. That is, it's easy to not look at America too clearly, if
your
efforts are to show how you now too are for the long slog, the less
flashy, but also the less selfish and more community-building: in
sympathy with the kind of mindset that dominated the communal,
purity-concerned, "simple but grounded" 1930s crowd.
My own guess is that the very highest psychoclass are still in the
States, and that Sweden's best to some extent flourish because they
bow, masochistically, before nation-before-self "philosophy," which
earns them tolerance for a more enabling state apparatus.
---------
I will add to this a note about "hypermasculine" language, something
Lloyd talks about a lot in this chapter.
I would ask anyone who is on the lookout for tough-talk so as to ID
groups or leaders as regressive to be somewhat careful, because if
you're not empowered, if you're amongst the groups that are being
heavily discriminated against, though possibly your language use
might
remain the same, very likely you'll start talking tougher. You're not
actually hypermasculine, driven mostly by your innate rage, but as
you are being pressed upon to the
point that you sense that some people are trying to completely lay
waste to you, your language will start seeming as if composed of
an alphabet of missiles while your confidently empowered opponents
-- representatives
of the Great Maternal, who they know has surely got their back -- will
have an easier
time seeming moderate, patient, more-than-fair, and perhaps even
laid-back – considering, and finally, reasonable, and grossly affronted
by your unruly conduct. This advantage wouldn't make someone like
3710
Johnson become less hyper-masculine in style, but it will probably

assist Obama in remaining so. In sum, be careful: when regressives
are getting their time, and by regressives I'm not thinking so much
tea-partiers as I am the regressing center, the regressing left -- the
Obama-loyal -- part of what'll assure them of their rightness is how
calm and reasoning they remain while their opponents flap
about like nut-cases. Remember, the likes of conservative-and-
ultimately-deficit-focussed-and-therefore-massive-sacrifice-enabling
David Brooks, who recently wrote an article titled “Make everyone
hurt” – and wasn’t so much not kidding as licking his lips – who
laughs at the more moronic of Republicans but points out more
vividly the Hitler talk used by Democratic public unions as well as
their Orwellianism, who is looking for “founding fathers of austerity”
who will show the public, “[b]y their example, [how to] [. . .] to create
habits that diverse majorities can respect and embrace, when, as
Krugman points out, it was largely through oligarchs that the deficit-
bloom was created in the first place, which should, you would think,
lead everyone to focus a bit more on what the mass of public
benefactors have to say about all this rather than to a rarified elite, is
probably playing out as the voice of reason here.
Watch all this Wisconsin business, how it plays out. Pay attention to
who is using hypermasculine terminology. My guess is that the
people under normal circumstances are least likely to use it -- the
real progressive left, those of the more advanced psychoclass - are
actuallly
going to be the ones caught out for their threatening, disturbing
aggressiveness, their unbalanced mental state. The California
students who rebelled against criminal, jolting, astonishingly cruel
sudden drastic tuition increases, became very
aggressive. Be assured, these weren't regressives but progressives
once again caught out by a state that is beginning
to seem Nazi-denatured from normal emotional response.
Perhaps rather than look for hypermasculineness -- which would just
have us shaking our heads at tea-partiers (who, I repeat, are mostly
3711
irrelevant: just the foil by which the relevant meanies make

irrefutable their ostensible own fair-headedness)
-- we need to be looking for lack of heart, disconnect, signs of a fugue-
like status -- calm language at a time when a nation is so willing to
undergo another 20 year period of uninterrupted sacrifice
(everyone is agreed: we must reduce our deficit) that in their minds
they will still persist in seeing it happen even if some miracle could
stop it from actually occurring, when if it was
truly reasoning, it could step out of it maybe even pretty much near
right away? With
this, we'll spot out the most dangerous, that much more quickly.
Link: Global Wars to Restore Masculinity (Journal of Psychohistory)

Link: Make Everybody Hurt (NYT)
----------
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2011

Fealty to the Wretched
The King’s Speech is lovely. Some of my colleagues have,

disparagingly, called it middlebrow, but I guess that
depends on where your particular brow happens to be
located.
In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite
movie of the year, Sofia Coppola’s extraordinary, steel-rod-
delicate Somewhere would be on this list. It’s not a movie
about a rich, spoiled, “Why should we care about him?”
3712
movie star; it’s a story about a human being who’s lost his
way. Apparently, that’s just not as interesting as watching
Paris fold over on itself. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Stephanie
Zacharek’s Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow,”
Movieline, 25 Feb. 2011)
"King's Speech" makes not only aesthetes but rights-of-man folk

nothing but self-indulgent, self-serving parasites. It makes the duty-
to-country crowd just plain right, and those who aren't quite prepared
to cowtow to what's ordained -- specifically, King George, in planning
to marry out of love, and in cutting down ancient trees (being old
doesn't make you grand, it just makes you old) just for a better view!,
the worse than Fredos of the family. You wanted "Avatar's" Grace to
do more chain-smoking; I'd have preferred George -- the one, we
remember, who turned down the to-Bertie acceptable idea of having a
kept mistress in preference to being allowed the company of a wife he
actually loves -- be given more a chance to extrapolate on the flaws of
be-be-be-be-Bertie's positively medieval sense of women,
commoners, loyalty, and subjugation. I'm not sure what kind of brows
I've got, but be sure they're both frowning away.
-----
Re: "In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite
movie of the year, Sofia Coppola’s extraordinary, steel-rod-delicate
Somewhere would be on this list. It’s not a movie about a rich,
spoiled, “Why should we care about him?” movie star; it’s a story
about a human being who’s lost his way."
My particular complaint about Social Network isn't that it would have
us care about someone rich and "spoiled" -- I am very interested in
knowing about and caring more for Zuckerberg; he most certainly IS
worthy -- it's what it suggests for those not either just moved along by
genteel lineage or blessed with a genius to seize the zeitgeist of the
time: people like Harvard-insufficient Erica Albright, blessed it would
have appeared with some innate goodness and keen intuition, but
3713
without anything that would surely keep her in the game, whom you
have a sense is given some chance to say something real, wounding,
and sticking because its her last words before he finds himself a
societal fixture and she is dispatched to irrevocable irrelevance.
Seemed appropriate that Sorkin betray even this to a class of people
he would see dispatched entire, as he further stomped her out (at the
Golden Globes, I believe) in establishing Zuckerberg a true
benefactor, not the asshole she had prophesized he was doomed to
become. Way to go, Aaron! For your fealty, let us anoint thee also.
Link: Stephanie Zacharek’s Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow

(Movieline)
----------
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2011

Great movies we appreciate but also rightly mock
Happy Oscar week, you third-class stowaways. Quoth the

thespian Bill Paxton, “Are you ready to go back to Titanic?”
The point is you’re not. It’s 2011 and we’re still 192 years
away from comprehending Titanic’s world-paralyzing
success, its Best Picture win, and Jack Dawson’s hack
drawing skills. He’s just never going to get into Oberlin at
that rate. You won’t find explanation for James Cameron’s
sorcery here, but near, far, wherever you are — you will
remember and recoil at the royal badness of Titanic. (Louis
Virtel, “Bad Movies We Love, Oscar Week Edition:
Titanic,”Movieline, 23 Feb. 2011)
-----
I have never understood why people liked this movie. James

3714
Cameron has never been the greatest at dialog, but this was
by far the worst script he's written. You know it's bad when
Billy Zane plays a one-dimensional character that would
actually have been more complex and nuanced if they had
given him a mustache to twirl. And I never understood the
concept of a rich woman falling in love with an eleven-year-
old boy that likes drawing boobies. And what makes it so
much more disappointing for me is that many of his other
movies (Avatar, True Lies, Terminator 1 & 2, Aliens) rank
among my favorites. (Tommy Marks, response to post)
Whatever the dialogue, Tommy -- and I don't dislike Cameron's
dialogue as much as so many others seem to -- the situations the
characters are in play out very real. I guess I'll take as genuine that
many discerning were wholly uninvolved in the movie, owing to its
stereotypical characters and embarrassing dialogue -- though I don't
buy it, really -- but however one-dimensional (rigid? uncomplicated?)
Billy Zane, when he slaps his wife-to-be around for making him a
fool: that was real. He was beyond pissed off, and you felt it: he was a
terror. I think most important, the film got at -- with the mothers'
constant watch and difficult-to-rebuff moral code -- how difficult it
was going to be for someone with a lot of natural spunk -- Rose -- to
ever really free herself. I believed that even given how considerable
she already was, without Jack, she was for-sure caught and done for
life. But with her constant dialogue, interaction with him, you
believed she could slowly come to free herself from a whole
upbringing of duty, move beyond insufficient truculent rebellions --
like a preference for the New, like Monet -- to untether herself for
good, even without the facilitation of a dislocating disaster. People
could say that the reason this romance works so well for so so many
people, is because they're just filling their own expectations and
dreams onto what is really so thinly put before them, but for me at
least, this just isn't true here. Cameron's magic isn't just in his action
and exempt everywhere else; his genius owes to his really
understanding what breaking free is, what romance and play is, and
3715
he wouldn't tolerate creating films where you couldn't hope to realize

it some for yourself as well.
The problem for me with Cameron is that though he clearly got
somewhere really good, it certainly wasn't SO good he shouldn't have
moved on a considerable some from there. I think it's false to say he's
a forever adolescent, because I would cheer if adolescence actually
meant even for a brief while feeling as uninhibited as he is. But still,
once you yourself have made passage from being the trimmed rose to
being the wild one -- and most of you blessed discerning, haven't --
you really only need revisit him now and again out of friendship, to
say thank you. He's set, in a fairly good place, but further progress lies
with you.
...
This film, though, does deserve to be in the "great movies we however
rightly mock" category, however. A service is done, by pointing out
the numerous things in this film that really are problematic, that if
viewers weren't onto, they're not a sufficient number of steps away
from stupid.
Most central for me is that it helps keep the truly ignorant and stalled
feeling smugly enlightened. If YOU know who Freud or Monet is, this
knowledge doesn't mean you're in the same position as Rose
ostensibly is: she is supposed to be an early appreciater of the New,
possess sufficient sense of independent judgment that she is on to
quality from the start, while as someone alive now your knowledge of
these folks only means you're in the same position the Edwardian
mundanes were when they'd long accustomed themselves to once
rabble-rousers, now ho-hums, such as Darwin or Dickens. That is,
your being onto Freud or Monet could easily mean that you're really
just the prosaic Cal, who actually has no appreciation for new genius,
not the avant-garde Rose -- and given how the not-especially-
inspiring mass went for it, probably does. The question you fairly ask
yourself as you remember those who found such meaning in "Titanic"
(including yourself, if you, like me, are one of them) is how many of
them could pass over the film's knuckleheadedness out of fair faith to
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its mighty spirit, and remain those of praise-worthy, TRULY

sophisticated taste? It's a question which would have you juggling
around greats like Ebert and Zacharek, ultimately deciding to let one
or the other -- or even both -- "fall."
Knuckle-headedness isn't always damning, though. Sophistication
isn't always a sign of elevation. The '60s generation were not
sophisticated, and its elders constantly hoped to blast them back into
supplicants for their untutoredness, their lack of refinement, their
"stupid" discare for how things had been and "really were," but were
spiritually evolved and Good. Late 20th/early 21st-century products
like Franzen and Martel are hugely sophisticated, smart, aware, but
maybe in the end mostly deferent and perhaps defeated and warped
-- not so good.
Link: Bad Movies We Love, Oscar Week Edition: Titanic (Movieline)
----------
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2011

Knifing the f*cker back in return
Seeing two 3-D movies in a row is pretty much my idea of

torture, and a colleague and I came very close to decamping
to see The Touch (with my beloved Elliot Gould), which is
being shown as part of the festival’s Ingmar Bergman
retrospective. In the end, persuaded by a few enthusiastic
colleagues, we — with much eye-rolling and many
deprecating remarks — opted to check out Wim Wenders’
Pina. I’m glad we did.
[….]
I’d always avoided Bausch, assuming it was all bony

dancers in drab skintone leotards, miserably acting out the
angst of mankind, or whatever. I now know how wrong I
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was. Some of Bausch’s ideas may not result in anyone’s idea

of conventional (whatever that is) beauty: She might scatter
the floor with peat moss, which would mingle with the sweat
clinging to the dancers’ dresses, resulting in damp, mother-
earth stains; a man in a tutu, being pushed along slowly on
a railway handcar, appears to be carrying some pretty
heavy-duty German sorrow and guilt on his shoulders.
But Wenders makes it all seem accessible, framing and
connecting images — sometimes very strange ones — in a
way that draws us closer rather than alienating us, without
ever softening the intended effect. [. . .] Wenders hardly
pretends this is business as usual. Rather, he coaxes us into
understanding, or at least reckoning, with the jarring but
wholly compelling image in front of us. It’s as if he were
saying, “I realize this woman has stuffed raw meat in her toe
shoes, but trust me, go with it.” (Stephanie Zacharek,
“Berlinale Dispatch: Wim Wenders Takes His Place in the 3-
D Vanguard,” Movieline, 14 Feb. 2011)
Your friend Laura Miller (kinda) wrote recently that precise prose and
careful delineations are also tiring to the eyes and mind -- slows down
reading speed, sometimes to a crawl, when you know you've got a
whole book ahead: I'm wondering if some people have to prepare for
your reviews akin to how you did this double-feature: in this case,
with a bit of "Oh God, another load of particulars and careful
delineations about some film I have no sense of!," to gird for
themselves some countering camaraderie within the melee of
stimulation they may soon be treated to? I'll wait 'til I've seen what
you've seen to make reading your review more an immediate
experience of compare and contrast -- "look, sister, I take your point,
but this is what you didn't see --." For now it's the reality-
possibilities ... like is it true that what is jarring can also be
compelling? You seem sure of it, for how else last time would "the
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land look menacing and alluring at once?" Mind you, "menacing"

already has something of the alluring within it -- you're wanted-
enough to be wholly devoured; "compelling" here is a smart wink, and
a hinted-at better path ahead, after having had a door slammed in
your face: it's harder to see how you'd ever after let yourself just be
drawn along, when all the time you're surely mostly thinking how you
can knife the f*cker back in return.
Link: Berlinale Dispatch: Wim Wenders Takes His Place in the 3-D
Vanguard (Movieline)
Link: Why We Love Bad Writing (Laura Miller, Salon)
----------
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2011

The Factory System
When you see an article titled “The Day the Movies Died,”
you can probably expect a boatload of negativity. That said,
Mark Harris’ polemic in this month’s GQ on the state of
Hollywood is pretty even-handed. After all, it blames the
upcoming string of lame comic book movies and sequels on
the one group you might not have expected: Us, the people
who do most of the hand-wringing. “We can complain until
we’re hoarse that Hollywood abandoned us by ceasing to
make the kinds of movies we want to see, but it’s just as true
that we abandoned Hollywood,” Harris writes. “Studios
make movies for people who go to the movies, and the fact is,
we don’t go anymore. […] Put simply, we’d rather stay
home, and movies are made for people who’d rather go out.”
The moral? If you like movies, start supporting the good
ones and ignoring the bad ones. [GQ] (Christopher Rosen,
“Only You Can Save Movies, and 7 Other Stories You’ll Be
Talking About Today,” Movieline, 18 Feb. 2011)
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Anyone who reads Movieline would note that the particular "adult"
movie -- Inception -- Harris laments hasn't become the model for
Hollywood, is exactly the one Stephanie here blasted for being at-the-
core infantile. And something of a sham: putting itself in place of
something -- Hitchcock -- that truly was adult, so that the truly
childish could never not know themselves to be not-adult (I hope I got
that right). They'd also know that The Social Network was hit hard by
Armond White for its uncritical look at what is essentially immaturity
and a-whole-generation-spread psychological disorder -- autism.
Black Swan, too, again by Stephanie, for being so obviously cliche-
driven, and yet flummoxingly completely ignorant of it. And though
she really liked it, still made aware by her that The King's Speech was
first reacted-to by friend critics as essentially middle-brow -- which it
is: a taste for luxury and refinement, mass taste/opinion disregard,
equals Bad; mostly maintained anal-retentiveness -- this, taking into
full consideration all the expletive-exhalation exercises -- just-
assumed self-sacrifice for the nation, equals Good. And personally,
though I loved True Grit, it had the feel of satisified film-makers
who've found their peace (congrads! you deserve it!), and are mostly
now offering the field to self-assured new-comers they'll insist to
themselves represent a vital, respect-worthy energy, rather than the
likes of the gibbering nincompoops we hear of in the film, inflated to
emboldened crusader status for embodying an energy way more foul
than that (I'm not actually so much thinking Hailee with this -- but
more what's to follow). If the lament in the article is mostly that there
are few good films being made, I'd say for me it's that the problem
Harris identifies throughout his article -- a preference for formula;
abandonment of anything "hard" or truly challenging -- afflicts the
sort of films he would see more of.
His point that stars aren't as requisite as franchise is interesting. We
are living in an age where that previously so often aired wished-for
truth for Tiger Woods by sour-grapes, other-pro golfers -- that he
wasn't bigger than the game, when, apparent to all, he couldn't more
have been at the time -- which has become truth for him, is true now
3720
for movie stars as well. It seems to me that what this means is that
there isn't going to be anything going on within a film, that out of its
uniqueness and budding power, will extend out and set a new
standard. The shell, the encasing armor, won't permit it, and the only
people who'd step inside it are the ones who wouldn't really think to
try it -- whatever their ability to contort themselves, fundamentally
they just want their place (I'm more than kinda even looking at you,
James Franco and Anne Hathaway). Perhaps that's mostly why the
smart stay out of theatres: once we agree to go, we're not really
agreeing to participate, but following into the Depression' factory-
mode like everybody else. The '60s generation was once told by its
elders that they needed to learn the language to have a real voice; they
responded -- smartly -- instead by attempting to levitate parliament
buildings through love.
I prefer their theatre, but maybe their descendants -- us -- are
showing in our own way that we're onto the same truth: participate as
directed, and they've got you. We'll let some time pass; let the
stupidity follow and take root; and take advantage of stopping
surprise and dumbfounding bafflement to hit them with a Citizen
Kane at some point, and stay more in the game after that.
Link: Only You Can Save Movies, and 7 Other Stories You’ll Be
Talking About Today (Movieline)
----------

Grabbing hold
Filmmaker, writer, performance artist, what-have-you

Miranda July ambled onto the scene in 2005 with her
debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which
became a surprise arthouse sort-of smash. Since then,
July has published a book of short stories, created art
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projects for the Venice Biennale, and put together a

performance piece. She’s working hard at becoming the
Woody Allen of the “Meh” Generation, and she’s getting
closer, and not for the better, with her new picture The
Future, which premiered at Sundance and is one of the
competition films at the Berlinale.
In The Future, a youngish couple (they’re in their mid-

30s), stalled out in their careers and their relationship,
decide to adopt a sick cat that will require constant care.
It’s never spelled out exactly why these two — they’re
named Sophie and Jason, and they’re played by July and
Hamish Linklater — have decided to embark on this shaky
adventure. Is it a trial run for a baby? Or just a joint
project that they hope will make them feel more connected
to each other and the world? Neither they nor we nor
anyone else knows, least of all the poor cat, who we hear
in voiceover reflecting on his sad, lonely life as a former
stray and counting the days until his new people will pick
him up. He needs to recover for a month at the vet’s,
though the couple is warned that if they don ’t pick him up
on the assigned day, he’ll be immediately euthanized.
[. . .]
Close, but no cigar. There’s just too much July in The

Future, and a little goes a long way. She looks like an
alien flapper doll, with her arms and legs attached at
slightly off angles, and the false modesty of her
character’s spacy observations and pronouncements
comes off as a perverse kind of self-importance. Sophie
and Jason moan about their not-so-horrible lives, while
their potential adoptee, lonely and desperate in his little
cage, waits. And waits. And waits. We know just how he
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feels. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Berlinale Dispatch: Miranda

July Can’t Quite Read The Future,” Movieline, 16 Feb.
2011)
She had her husband in "Me and You" burn his hand before their
kids, and you had a sense throughout that anything vaguely
dependent was being kept around, sometimes for knowing
commentary, but just as much to be savy but still for-sure compliant
deposits of sadism. If this proves the voice of a generation, it's one
that wants to be put out of its misery. Seems untenable; can't go on
like this. There's got to be some purpose to make self-sacrifice seem
just plain necessary or, even better, noble, rather than so apparently
just a grotesque entrenched impulse to repeatedly play with
sacrificing themselves or near-obvious "them" substitutes into the
cairn. A generation that indulges too much in being, not profoundly
lost, but repetition-driven, pointless, is going to stop licking and
pointing to its wounds when it fears that too much time is passing to
keep their old wounds and wound-makers relevant to their current
behavior; at some point, with even entrenched old tormentors surely
now onto many other things, with even the recent past, in the
increasingly rare instances we really focus on it -- as today's daily
survival and urgent reverberant events commands all our attention --
at best just a bafflement of how could they have done or thought
this?, their urgent scrambling for a hold will mean their taking
whatever proffered to upgrade from "meh" to become the "greatest"
generation: what the post 1920s depression generation did as it went
from the crowd that doesn't get to have any fun to one that
entrenched itself into cultural memory for maybe millenniums.
Even poor cats are a bit hard to imagine as having pleading eyes, or as
ever really being that attached to you; the death-dealing vet could
probably near as easily provoke it into one last purr as readily as a
ten-year owner might: I wonder if she selected a cat so to be an
improvement on the kids in her first film; something actually
stronger, more distinctly alien, to push back with an empowered
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unrelatingness against her scary, rebounding play with snuffing the

vulnerable but "hip to" out? I wonder if she’s already looking for a
better hold, and not so much just waiting, agonizingly?
Link: Berlinale Dispatch: Miranda July Can’t Quite Read The Future
(Movieline)
----------

Over John Dewey's dead body
Heads up, Harvey! Incoming fire at 10 o’clock! Don’t let the

Academy get anywhere near this hot potato: A writer at Big
Hollywood has finally said what needed to be said about the
vexed stutterer whose dramatic, heart-wrenching travails
have touched the hearts of awards voters everywhere: Who
the hell feels sorry for the King of England?
Take it away, Ned Rice:
My main problem with The King’s Speech is that the

character we’re supposed to identify with, the down-
trodden-schmuck-who-can’t-catch-a-break-but-we-
root-for-him-anyway-because-for-all-his-faults-he’s-
got-a-heart-of-gold just happens to be…THE KING
OF ENGLAND! That’s right: in order to enjoy this film
I’m supposed to feel sympathy for a man who, almost
by definition, is an unsympathetic character. Like a
Frank Capra film about the riches-to-mega-riches life
of Donald Trump, this movie simply doesn’t make any
sense to me despite fine performances by Colin Firth,
Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham Carter.
I had the same problem with The Queen, which, you’ll

3724
recall, was about the trials and tribulations of a

woman- oh, let’s call her THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND!
—whose big life crisis was being criticized for not
grieving enough after the death of Princess Diana.
Well, ain’t life a bitch? I’ll bet you after those nasty
British tabloids had their say about her Queen
Elizabeth cried all the way home to her…ENORMOUS
CASTLE. […] Call me heartless, but I just can’t feel
sorry for anyone who has their own moat.
My antipathy towards the royalty genre in movies

goes beyond the absurdity of being asked to identify
with bejeweled billionaires seated on solid gold chairs.
I frankly find it appalling, in this progressive,
politically correct, anti-Establishment age, that
supposedly civilized people like us continue to
tolerate, and even celebrate, royalty. Slavery, as we’re
reminded by the mainstream media on almost a daily
basis, was a terrible, evil institution. So was Nazism.
So was, and is, communism. So, I would argue, was
disco. But you know what was a really, really bad
institution? Royalty, the notion that God considered
some men more valuable than others, that one’s class
is an unchangeable accident of birth, and that the
lower class should be, in effect, the slaves and
property of the nobility. Does anybody not grasp the
evil of this? Who could not be enraged by the fact that
by law one man should bow down before another
simply because the two men’s ancestries were
different- and that refusing to do so could cost the
commoner his life?
Scott Rudin and Team TSN couldn’t have said it better

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themselves! (S. T. Vanairsdale, “Will This Awesome King’s

Speech Takedown Rock Oscar Race?,” Movieline, 10 Feb.
2011)
You don't get much in the way of bejeweled billionaires seated on

solid gold chairs in this film, though. THOSE kind of royalty -- the
ones that are for the most part indulgence -- are hated on in this film:
witness the portrayal of King Edward VIII, and his life of you:
indifference, me: self-concern. Or perhaps more accurately, what you
get mostly is, "what would it be like to sit on a solid gold throne for
hours on end?"--"F*cking painful!" "How the hell did you do it?"
The film argues that the reason the good king deserves all this
attention, to have every resource tried to assist him, is because there
is something royal kindling in him that is absent in most of you. God
may or may not see something more valuable in him, but we certainly
do. When we need uplift, some erection of solid nobility nobody else
can put forth -- for spending most of our lives in rendering,
distracting domestic sociability -- he still has the resources to deliver
-- given, perhaps, just the right sort of guidance.
This is still an awful, very undemocratic message. Very disparaging to
the constant, casual sociability ultimately responsible for the king's
sure speech delivery. Very disparaging to the Deweyite message the
therapist for much of the film (but maybe not, ultimately) embodies.
But I don't think it's mostly fought off by responses like this one, that
out of its ravaged spirit, its skittering, wayward progress, conveys
mostly a longing to be saved, as if the complaining masses have
already leveled everything down for so long that the energy that
excites their purpose now is covertly mostly a managed hand out for a
rescue.
This reviewer had better not be an Obama fan. If he is, he is beyond
laughable.
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Dear Ned Rice,

I think you missed the point. I'm sorry you are blinded by
illusions that money can buy happiness and freedom from
difficulty. I’m sorry that you cannot step outside of your little
bubble (or off of your high horse) and put yourself in the
shoes of another human being that is struggling to overcome
an extremely debilitating problem. It seems to me that you
would have been able to relate to the ‘average’ man who had
this same issue, but you cannot relate to someone you
perceive as NOT WORTHY of YOUR concern due to his place
in society. I’m sorry you’re a complete hypocrite. (cerealface,
response to post)
But the film is maybe not so much FOR the average man who has this
problem, concerned as it is for giving "them" the one and only dose of
support, before launching them off to unrelenting even-worse
deprival. Yes, once they're all either half-downed in combat or shell-
shocked from bombing or winnowed spiritless from endless
endurance, the film would have it that they receive receptive tending-
to for their ailments -- if the world were just. Without that, if you
already have the look and carriage of a pathetic Tiny Tim, it's for you
as well, just as automatically as it is for the king. But if you ultimately
romance and legitimate the suffering part, the overcoming should
seem suspect. I know it's not clear-cut with this film, but it's certainly
not uncontestedly against the ridiculous tortures people have endured
for no actual purpose: no film that is actually for war, for
ennoblement through collective, shared sacrifice, is against all that.
Every aesthete in the world should tell this film to go scr*w itself. To
right its wrongs -- for one thing -- for what it did to Edward VIII.
Link: Will This Awesome King’s Speech Takedown Rock Oscar Race?
(Movieline)
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----------
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2011

The inconvenient '60s: sorry guys, they happened
Judging by the trailer, the eight-part miniseries The

Kennedys, which has endured nearly as much bad luck as its
titular family, is even worse than you’ve heard. Which is
saying a lot considering how much has already been said
about the project — starring Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes
as the fabled first couple in Camelot — that the History
Channel, Showtime, FX and and Starz all flat-out refused to
air.
[. . .]
But Katie Holmes. Poor, poor Katie Holmes. Attempting to

play Jackie Kennedy was a losing battle from the start and
here, Holmes is able to look elegant and poised. The problem
appears to be when she opens her mouth. In some parts of
the trailer, she delivers a back alley acting class rendition of
Upper Class Massachusetts and in other parts, she speaks
with no accent at all — relying on that lop-sided grin and
constant blinking that Anne Hathaway parodied so
effectively on Saturday Night Live. (Julie Miller, “Katie
Holmes’ Performance Is the Biggest National Tragedy In
This Kennedys Trailer,” Movieline, 2 Feb. 2011)
Anne Hathaway is a giant compared to Katie Holmes -- SHE, like

Jackie, actually HAS presence -- so I can forgive her more than
sneaking a laugh at Katie's expense: seems but appropriate. But the
aim might be with this to make the '60s seem more like Mad Men-
light, as if everything was the same but got muted after the '50s,
3728
rather than intensified, wholly changed -- finally awakened. For those

of us who sense none of the charisma about Obama that others seem
to, we're wondering if this is all a plot to keep him and the rest of the
talented but still shortchanged (even lovely Anne Hathaway?) the
absolute perfection of human kind, rather than themselves,
significant slippage.
I know this is supposed to be a Republican take. I don't think that's
quite right: it's just the anti-hippie take.
Link: Katie Holmes’ Performance Is the Biggest National Tragedy In
This Kennedys Trailer (Movieline)
----------
Worrisome flips more than flops for scripts
In the interest of scientific exploration, I offer a few random

dialogue samples from the 3-D cavediveapalooza survival
adventure Sanctum: “Life’s not a dress rehearsal — you
gotta seize the day!” “The exit! Shit!” “Where’s my mask?
Goddammit!” “I am not wearing the wetsuit of a dead
person!” “You spend your lives wrapped in cotton wool! You
want to play at being adventurous? Yeah, this is it!” And last
but not least, the ever-popular “We’ve got to get out of here
— now!”
Sanctum wasn’t directed by James Cameron — he’s merely
an executive producer — but the script is pure Cameron
gibberooni, the kind of language that would embarrass a
’40s comic-strip character if he found it penciled into one of
his voice balloons. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Sanctum Wasn’t
Directed by James Cameron, But It’s Dumb Enough to Seem
So,” Movieline, 3 Feb. 2011)
For what it's worth, I really like this bit of dialogue from "Avatar":
GRACE:
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Alright, look -- I don't have the answers

yet, I'm just now starting to even frame
the questions. What we think we know --
is that there's some kind of
electrochemical communication between the
roots of the trees. Like the synapses
between neurons. Each tree has ten-to-the
-fourth connections to the trees around
it, and there are ten-to-the-twelfth
trees on Pandora --
SELFRIDGE:
That's a lot I'm guessing.
GRACE
: That's more connections than the human
brain. You get it? It's a network -- a
global network. And the Na'vi can access
it -- they can upload and download data --
memories -- at sites like the one you
destroyed.
SELFRIDGE
: What the hell have you people been
smoking out there? They're just.
Goddamn. Trees.
The dialogue's not embarrassing. What is is Cameron being

completely unaware that Selfridge here comes close to being the
Ripley to Grace's Carter Burke -- if only the "network" had something
3730
else on its mind rather than jungle homeostasis.
RIPLEY:
No good. How do we know it'll
effect their biochemistry? I say
we take off and nuke the entire
site from orbit. It's the only
way to be sure.
BURKE:
Now hold on a second. I'm not
authorizing that action.
RIPLEY:
Why not?
BURKE:
This is clearly an important
species we're dealing with here.
We can't just arbitrarily
exterminate them --
RIPLEY:
Bullshit!
Link: Sanctum Wasn’t Directed by James Cameron, But It’s Dumb

Enough to Seem So (Movieline)
Script excerpts from IMBD.
----------

"The King's Speech"
"The King's Speech" should be a film I like. Being a Dewey democrat,

that is, I should applaud that a film respecting of aristocracy spends
so much effort showcasing what democratic, truly mutual
3731
relationships are like -- and apparently arguing them as superior to

others. People need and deserve to be treated with respect. People
deserve our efforts at fully understanding them; they need and
deserve to be constantly listened and attended to. They need to be
encouraged to enjoy doing what they like to do, to resist doing what
they hate doing -- so long of course as this doesn't mean their staying
with comfort zones born of deprival. No one person is really superior
to any other -- whether you be King or other. This is what the film
teaches.
Or does it? At the end I admit that the sense of this film as mostly in
the democrat's camp, was perhaps more alien to it than I thought and
wished it to be. What perhaps we most get from the film, is that FOR
THE KING, and for the long-deprived, long-suffering, selfless king
mostly only, all this attention is requisite and required, but not so
everyone else. THE KING needs to be buttressed, faithfully
understood, have everything we can give provided to him to the point
of rattling every previous protocol, so he can be lead to lead a country
through a war effort which would deprive everyone else for decades.
All those faces we see at the end, listening to his speech -- the
soldiers, the families, the multitudes of ordinary bar denizens:
everyone -- know they're about to go through a period of sustained
sacrifice, and what they need, we are told, is leadership to inspire
them to nobly suffer through their deprivations, to ensure they
endure. There is NO sense that what these people truly need is for this
war effort to somehow become unnecessary, for some miracle of
diplomacy to be tried and actually work, and so each of them can
come to know more about what the film is for so long on about, like
the need for constant, nurturing attendance, of playful, non-denying
domestic life, to learn reason to know more about yourself and come
to appreciate self-love. Such a thought would be traitorous in this film
because it is at base FOR the war before being for anything else. If
through the war, you found way to somehow be consistently playful
and satisfied -- mutterings of Shakespeare; enjoying family life; every
moment, every day an added treasure to your memory store -- you
3732
would not so much be the playful but highly sagacious "fool" of a

therapist, but the irresponsible, indulgent Edward VIII: the film
would hold you to that, be sure. And you would be his equal because
he was a king in title only. Real kings, the film teaches, REALLY ARE
the best of men -- holders of a pure, regal flame that remains alight
when everyone else finds theirs diminished or out entirely, out of
attending mostly to their personal needs, their own daily concerns.
Alas, no democrat’s film, this. In fact, I mostly fear it, and dread its
upcoming Oscar knighthood.
----------
Discussing "The Social Network": film about the maker of facebook
"Immoral", Patrick? What word is left for people who steal

and rape if you're gonna call a group "immoral" for
disagreeing with you on film quality. Jesus. (Daniella Isaacs,
response to post, Mike Ryan, “Armond White Responds to
Lisa Schwarzbaum’s NYFCC Complaints by Calling Her
Racist,” Movieline, 20 January 2011)
I think it's high quality, Daniella, but I do think it immoral -- meaning

that I think it's a film aiming for high acclaim that couldn't really care
less for those without the talent to reach a kind of co-equality with
entrenched Mayflower-descendent types: the bulk of most joe and
jane facebook users out there. I think it "argues" that we really ought
to be keying in on these people, be fascinated by them, because,
despite their debauch, they CAN work significant wonders, while the
rest of you out there enjoy the genuine magic but only to come up
with your own flat notes of nothing. When people are at real risk of
losing under-girding for their already highly suspect and susceptible
respectable social standing, I don't much like films which "argue" that
if it further beyond-all-doubt looks like we've moved from something
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that could at least pretend to be a Jeffersonian democracy -- with

each "man" the equal to any other — to simply an Asian khanate, it
actually pleases, because it's more in-sync with core truth of the
distribution of focused talent or descendant-born corporeality, with
the proper regard owed those who either are or who actually do
matter.
I know there's the moral girl, the one who couldn't do Harvard, but
despite being named and brought up at beginning and end, she's still
undistinguished. (Probably, she's MOSTLY a haunt, only owing to her
insubstantiality.) We find that you can't properly moralize 'till you've
proven you're matter. Otherwise, she's just the sharpest swish a
slight, untenable cold breeze could manage: She could completely
fade away, and it is only YOUR obsession, grand facebook-maker,
which matters.
No?
Link: Armond White Responds to Lisa Schwarzbaum’s NYFCC

Complaints by Calling Her Racist (Movieline)
----------
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29, 2011

The stars, guns, and snakes, were finally enough: the Oscar snub
wasn't needed!
Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Great job,
Academy! That the AMPAS found room for everything from
Winter’s Bone to Toy Story 3 to the ferocious performance
given by Movieline favorite Jacki Weaver means they
deserve a bit of kudos. (If you’re one of those, “Yawn, I’m too
cool for the Oscars!” people, just go back to bed today.) Of
course that doesn’t mean many, many deserving nominees
were left out in the cold this morning. Ahead, the six biggest
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from the major categories. (Christopher Rosen, “Your

Favorite was Robbed: The 6 Biggest Oscar Snubs,”
Movieline, 21 January 2011)
----------
I disagree. I thought the noms were fair and on the mark. I

predicted that True Grit (this year's Blind Side) would be the
sleeper movie and the Coens would get best director. There's
an upset coming. I also predict that Colin and Jeff will split
the best acting....or Jeff walks away with the best acting
award. (response to post, Chicago48)
-----
I agree. Comparing True Grit to Lifetime movie of the week

The Blind Side is ridiculous. There is so much nuance and
meaning in True Grit. Can you really say the same thing
about The Blind Side? That movie was only Oscar nominated
because it was a crappy year with very few stand out films.
If it had come out in 2010, it wouldn't even have made a blip
on the awards radar.
I think the biggest snub this year is nominating Hailee
Steinfeld for a "Supporting" role. Did the Academy not
realize that True Grit is Mattie's story? Mattie is in every
scene, it's narrated by her character. It's told completely
from Mattie's perspective. How is that a supporting role? If
anything, Bridges and Damon were supporting her.
(response to post, Karen)
I agree. Hailee should have been nominated for best actress, best
movie, or not at all. The lesson in the film is that a smart, head-
strong, civilized girl can make most of the wild have to be at “their”
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best to not already seem akin to a tamed wild-west show. Rooster has
his (touching) wild ride, Laboeuf gets his miraculous shot, but there's
a sense that her only equal was Ned, the compelling leader of the
congress of louts. The gun recoil and the snake terror ease her into an
easing, more capitulated form, and leaves Rooster alone to
demonstrate his experience, endurance, and drivenness, but had she
been a couple years older, we would have been left without all that,
and it would have simply been: "THIS is all you can conjure ..." As is,
the night-conjured wild stars reign supreme, and clear the deck.
I'd like to have seen Damon nominated for best supporting. He's like
Wilbur proving he's really quite the pig after all, and it made me
cheer!
Link: “Your Favorite was Robbed: The 6 Biggest Oscar Snubs”

(Movieline)
----------
Who'd want to be just a horse?
Kutcher and Portman play Adam and Emma, two young

people making their way in Los Angeles with varying
degrees of success: Emma — an overachiever who admits
that she’s not particularly emotional or affectionate — is a
doctor; Adam — irrepressibly warm and affable, if a bit
goofy — works as an assistant on a weekly teen-musical
show, though he really wants to be a writer. Adam and
Emma met years earlier, as kids at summer camp — the
movie opens with that flashback, in which young Adam
(played by Dylan Hayes) fires the first of the movie’s
sexually explicit salvos when he asks Emma bluntly, “Can I
finger you?”
[. . .]
Adam agrees, though of course we know that since he’s just a
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big mushbug, he’ll be the one to cave in first. And sure

enough, he shows up at Emma’s apartment while she —
along with two of her roommates, played by Greta Gerwig
and Mindy Kaling — are all having their periods. Not only
has he brought them cupcakes, which they descend upon
with hormonally charged voraciousness; he’s also made
Emma a “period mix” CD, including obvious choices, like
U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and less obvious ones, like
Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.”
[. . .]
It’s possible that Kutcher loosens her up. That may be one of
Kutcher’s great gifts: He can, apparently, loosen anyone up.
Kutcher is one of those actors who may, for the whole of his
career, be just bubbling under. Maybe someday he’ll give a
big breakthrough performance, playing a death-row
prisoner who’s proven innocent via DNA testing or a football
player, loving dad and model citizen who’s dying of cancer. I
sure hope he doesn’t: Though I wish him success and the
chance to make many more movies, I like him the way he is,
throwing away his total adorableness as if he were Ingrid
Bergman in Saratoga Trunk, being told she’s beautiful and
laughing, “Yes! Isn’t it lucky? (Stephanie Zacharek, “Actions
speak louder than dirty words in “No Strings Attached,”
I wonder where Ashton gets his instinct to please from? Maybe there's
something in the roles he takes, or the kinds of women he tends to
date, that could give a hint? Anyway, it's surely wholly commendable
-- who'd want to just a horse when you can be the prancing pony the
whole of your life? Unless of course you could be the embarrassing
jackass, Gervais: you'd think seeming like you'd never crawled out of
the crib would count against you, but I swear he tore down the world
sensing that life-long babies are morphing into scarily-bequeathed
enfants terribles, who won't much longer have to know what it is to
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have to back down to adults.

Speaking of adults: Stephanie, you're always commendably calling for
more films for them; let's keep up some voice for more adults in film,
too: I know this one's about childish adults, but I don't want to wait
for Ashton to be in some cancer role for someone to tell him it's NOT
this time his part to play the fool.
Link: Actions speak louder than dirty words in “No Strings Attached”
(Movieline)
----------
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 2011

Loving Forrest Gump
Happy Oscar nominations, babies. You got what you

wanted, though you have to throw those gold-plated, NSFW
Andrew Garfield valentines in the trash. It could be worse.
You could be living in 1994, when the Academy honored not
Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, or my darling
Quiz Show with a Best Picture victory, but a staggering sh*t
fortress of offensive “whimsicality” called Forrest Gump. You
saw it. It’s dumb. Loony. It’s got a lot of nerve. But here’s a
secret you and I share: We’re both attracted to bastards, and
Forrest Gump’s the slimiest john I know. Let’s love it.
Synopsis: Tom Hanks plays Forrest Gump, a man with an
IQ of 75 who assures the world that in order to be an
inspiring mentally challenged person, you need only to act
like Winnie the Pooh. Point to your head and say, “Think,
think, think.” Cock your head when others are speaking.
Don’t understand when you’re playing a football game.
These things.
[. . .]
Here’s the key to loving Forrest Gump: Our hero’s life
includes run-ins with war, the Black Panther movement,
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several presidential assassinations, drug culture, and AIDS,

yet the movie manages to have nothing to say about them —
other than, “This cloying cipher doesn’t really get it. Cute as
hell. Shhh, those angry black people can learn from him. ”
Every opportunity to reinspect history is a red herring. This
movie is a red herring. This movie is like some direct-to-
video sequel of Being There called Bein’ Everywharr!, and
Chauncey the Gardener is replaced by one of the Rugrats in
a Tom Wolfe suit. This movie honestly wants you to gawk at
its glib, twee (your two favorite adjectives) instincts, forgo
common sense, and melt into its outrageous story. Word: It’s
not that hard. I just did it!
Let’s take a look at some of the zestier accomplishments in
Forrest’s life.
When a bunch of bullies approach Forrest on the street,
Forrest’s damaged friend Jenny (Robin Wright[-Penn])
encourages him to run as fast as he can. Now, Forrest starts
the movie in rigid leg braces, but no matter: He turns into
Forrest Griffith-Joyner (ya-pow!) in seconds, the leg braces
tumble off his body, and he’s cured. In high school, when
bullies follow him in a jeep, he outruns the jeep. If this Jenny
can detect who among the physically disabled can heal their
handicap and outpace a Cherokee, she deserves more than
these Curious George books she’s reading.
He plays college football and nails 99-yard touchdowns with
his nimble little gams. The crowd cheers, cries, and holds up
signs telling him to stop running once he hits the end zone.
This condescending malarkey precedes Susan Boyle by 15
years, so I can’t discredit Forrest Gump’s soothsaying
powers. It’s like the new Network that way. Except Faye
Dunaway is too subtle for this movie. For real.
He saves his lieutenant’s life in Vietnam. But war-proud Lt.
Dan (Gary Sinise) didn’t want to be saved, and he resents
Forrest afterward — until they start up a shrimping
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company together and fulfill the dream of their fallen

comrade Bubba. Lieutenant Dan pulls off the Helter Skelter
zeal well. Which makes sense because this is ThE SeVeNtIeS!!
1!
He gets real good at ping pong and it… heals international
disputes with China? I don’t even know what Rob Zemeckis
was going for here. Whatever happened, it allowed Forrest
to meet the president — an occurrence he enjoys a million
times this movie.
Holler, LBJ! Bad news: Forrest Gump isn’t a real person, so
to make his interactions with super-for-real presidents for-
real, the movie uses special effects to manipulate stock
footage of our great leaders and make their mouths look like
they’re saying droll things to Forrest. It looks freaky. LBJ’s
twitchy CGI mouth looks like lost footage from the
“Sledgehammer” video. At this point, it’s clear Forrest can
zap himself to any notable moment in history whenever he
wants. You might know this movie by its original working
title, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?. (Or Zelig Gump.)
Forrest gets on The Dick Cavett Show, mumbles something
about religion and heaven, and fellow guest John Lennon is
— Jesus, this movie — inspired to write a jingle called
“Imagine.” John Lennon would love Forrest’s absently cutesy
shtick. He so would. John Lennon was annoying sometimes,
and at least this movie understands that.
After a tedious sideplot where Forrest runs back and forth
across the country for no reason and ratchets up this movie ’s
run-time to 2.2 hours, he reunites with the tempestuous
Jenny, who secretly had his child and contracted an
unknown “virus.” Look, Jenny: Having a troubled past and
an abusive father gives you no right to ruin Forrest’s good
time. Or die of AIDS when you’ve given us two scenes notice.
Not fair. You will not score an Oscar nomination with that
gig. They’ll give it to Andie MacDowell or Joan Plowright or
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someone else who eats up screen time with major headtilt

seriousness. Or worse, they’ll soon give Sean Penn two
Oscars. Yeah, now you’re awake, Robin.
There you have it. That’s our movie. Forrest fathers his new-
found son, and by the time the credits roll, I remember that
Forrest has muttered his mother’s favorite phrase “Stupid is
as stupid does” at least a dozen times. And why is that?
Because it’s a message to home-viewers that they’re the ones
sitting through this insipid sequence of daydreams. “Stupid
is as stupid does” is easily decipherable code for “I’m not the
one watching this movie. You are.” I hear you loud and
clear, Forrest: The smart ones flee. But us? We’re placated in
our leg braces, drifting like a whimsical albatross feather
into your void. Run, dear reader. Run. Or stay. With the rest
of us. (Louis Virtel, “Bad Movies we love—Forrest Gump,”
-----------
well i see the "Bad Movie" part, but where is the "We Love?"
(response to post, Citizen Bitch)
It's there at the beginning, Citizen Bitch, but yes, I think "Forrest
Gump" is one of those works of art that if you are too much concerned
to explain why you like it, were/are affected/moved by it, you're
stained for life. Just to mind as another example, is when some Salon
writer a number of years ago "explained" why she had once fallen for
Piers Anthony's Xanth series: you ended up more aware of the series'
"ridiculousness" than its (what remain, thanks to "you")
OSTENSIBLE virtues, and you had the sense the writer had braved as
much as she was able, mostly in admitting to having liked the series
before company she'd normally expect to pull away from her after
that: her chore thereafter was to look to have pulled off the feat, but
also to have made clear that NO ONE would more shun -- or maybe
3741
stomp and kill! -- the fiend who went a smidgen further than she was
willing, in testifying to its qualities: "you" end up okay, because "you"
didn't so much break the dam but remade it anew, in territory too
riskily befouling for concerned others to consider undertaking the
nagging job (and here, discussing "Forrest Gump" was a problem that
was nagging -- IT was the one that won the oscar, as well has having
as much broad-effect as the ongoing “hero,” "Back to the Future"),
AND all the while making the snidish feel themselves open and fair.
“You” may never be a great writer/reviewer, but we remember your
sacrifice of yourself into besmirching territory.
If you mean to do the in-your-world brave and stand up for the likes
of Xanth, "Titanic," "Forrest Gump," "Dangerous Mind," it requires
an awesome feat of steadily-maintained, artful, protective
dweamorcraft to get the job done -- and I don't think I've ever seen it
managed, not even by A. O. Scott, who, for example, will often defend
Tom Cruise, but NEVER without letting you know the actor doesn't
have extensive range (very brave, A.O, very brave: how about just a
compliment, and leaving it at? Such things are possible.); if that's too
daunting, you just make the praise (as with here) amount to worse
than some (in this case, most) critiques -- that's safe enough. The
whole point is not to really get at why?, be fair to the film and its
lasting influence on you, and air it out, but to see if you can manage
something akin BUT WITHOUT being caught out by misstep -- we're
all watching -- and it makes for something of an abominably unfair
effort, and usually just a resort to curses.
Personally, I liked the brazenness of Forrest's life being tested but not
really affected by "major events" that ARE SUPPOSED to stop you
cold, if you care or are human at all: he was allowed to breathe,
following his own rhythm. Gene Siskel WAS stopped cold by these
events -- Vietnam, JFK'S death, etc -- but loved the movie for feeling
it had helped quit shocks he personally had still been suffering from.
There must be something considerable in a film to accomplish
something as wonderful as that. (According to Movieline's twitter'
feed, Gene Siskel's birthday is today. I think the episode is on
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YouTube.)
Link: Bad movies we love—Forrest Gump (Movieline)

Link: Siskel and Ebert review Forrest Gump (YouTube)
----------
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2010

Interns
Every production assistant, intern, receptionist, runner

and/or other member of Hollywood’s aspirational poor
can rejoice today as Bourne franchise and United 93
director Paul Greengrass held forth on the biggest
unresolved scourge afflicting the film industry today. No,
not piracy. No, not the Golden Globes. Greengrass has it
out for the exploiters who are “raping and pillaging
young people” for the sake of a few budget savings here or
there. Bold!
[. . .]
The filmmaker participated in the Dunhill conversation
series opposite actor David Morrissey who elicited the
following response with a simple inquiry about
Greengrass’s early days in documentary:
One of the problems we have in our industry is that young
people in our industry are being exploited. There are
companies in London, sadly, that are making very good
livings on “work experience” — which really means people
being expected to work for nothing. And if we — we in the
industry who’ve had good livings think that we are creating
a sustainable industry by raping and pillaging young
people, then we’re very, very sadly mistaken. And if I were
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to point to a single issue in our industry that is not being

dealt with and offers the most profound threat to the
regeneration of our industry, it is the way we exploit young
people.
Preach it! Or… not? I think we all know the difference
between low- or no-pay and pure exploitation — the
former offers exposure to professionals and actual work
experience on a film or TV set, while the latter amounts to
cleaning and coffee-fetching with little if any access to the
happenings either behind or in front of the camera.
Sometimes the job descriptions blur. But as someone
who’s worked an unpaid internship or gopher role on
more than a few sets and offices over the years,
opportunity is more often than not in the eye (and
initiative) of the beholder, and making smart decisions
about certain gratis duties and jobs and employers
(especially employers) can entitle rookies to a little more
experiential leverage than a paycheck gets them. (S. T.
Vanairsdale, “VIDEO: Low-Wage Hollywood Has a
Champion in Paul Greengrass,” “Movieline,” 16 Dec. 2010)
Re: "But as someone who’s worked an unpaid internship or gopher

role on more than a few sets and offices over the years, opportunity is
more often than not in the eye (and initiative) of the beholder, and
making smart decisions about certain gratis duties and jobs and
employers (especially employers) can entitle rookies to a little more
experiential leverage than a paycheck gets them. And what ’s worth
more?"
This Horatio Algeresque response -- make most of your
opportunities, be smart with your resources, and you'll succeed where
others failed -- has me thinking of this bit, from Morris Dickstein's
book about the Depression, "Dancing in the Dark," about why power-
differentials stood unchanged throughout the period:
3744
As one psychiatrist who had trained with Freud later told Studs
Terkel, "Everybody, more or less, blamed himself for his delinquency
or lack of talent or bad luck. There was an acceptance that it was your
own fault, your own indolence, your lack of ability. You took it and
kept quiet." Thanks to this "kind of shame about your own personal
failure . . . there were very few disturbances." (220)
Why must you always come up with the most vague,

nonsequitur ways of making your arguments? All I'm
saying is if you try to build an instinct for good
opportunities, and then make the most of them when they
occur, then that can add up to a fairly priceless
investment in yourself.
Will it always work? No. And it's not for everybody. In a
perfect world everyone would be paid what they're worth.
But until they are you've gotta determine what sacrifices
are worth it -- and then follow through as best you can.
Paul Greengrass is saying that abuse of youth by the film industry is

cruel, and will amount to the degeneration of the industry. If youth
mostly only encountered this wasting here, then your drawing them
to make use of what resources are available to them is apt, and maybe
very helpful, because they still have said resources to draw upon and
continue to expand / cultivate, and so learn to manage best, and
perhaps very profitably, this non-idealic "situation." However, if what
he is saying is true of what society AS A WHOLE is doing to its youth
-- and how can we not fairly from "here," "go there"? -- more making
use of them than at-all properly developing them, then it's just not
much use to point out that opportunities really do continue to exist if
they could but school themselves to make use of them (since most of
them are now by constitution doomed to be those who readily, even
masochistically deliberately, fall into traps, whatever flag waved to
3745
forestall them), but a bit cruel too, as it actually plays to the sick part
of how they're constituted in need of no further encouragement -- the
voice in their heads, that is, that reminds them over and over again, in
every unfair situation: "Quit complaining! Stop denying it: you know
if you don't succeed, that it's mostly YOUR fault, you lazy buthole ...
Things are tough. So what? -- And just what do you think should
fairly be meted out to those who just expect life to hand things to
them?"
I fully agree, though, that there remain opportunities, and people
should not be too quickly discouraged; but am perhaps mostly not too
much concerned about those who will make use of them so long as --
for instance -- every now and then they're reminded of others'
successes in similarly trying situations. Rather, my mind is on the
much larger crowd of youth who can only be saved if less-run-down /
ruined elders think more in terms of systematic change than
encouraging more one-on-one pep talks or broadly broadcasted
fireside chats.
Sunnydaze mentioned the "rich kids." I see these people all the time
doing "for experience" work, and I just know they'll do fine, that
they'll be noticed and often-enough ushered ahead, that they're on
their way. They'll never really be used, their experience of interning
will be of it as a necessary, sometimes distasteful, always hard but all-
in-all still encouraging and illuminating first step -- what the
experience is supposed to be like -- not just out of resources and
resourcefulness, that their advantaged parents / schooling gave them
sufficient skills and "get up and go" to succeed, but because they don't
so much draw out the more sadistic impulses of those over them.
Their societal role now is to just succeed, to live life near as if nothing
truly averse is happening -- everybody is beginning to now really feel
it -- and so make clearer that a class of human beings is supposed to
exist that is simply to be served, and so thereby everyone else of a
class that is just supposed to suffer, that we are determined to make
suffer, waste away, and yet still blame themselves for all of it. Stand in
the way of this "due course," at your considerable peril.
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That was the situation during the Depression, where the full
consequences of the running-down of a whole generation that
Greengrass fears (the next flappers weren't seen until the '60s, with
the hippies) is on its way was actually effected, and which I do think
we're right now once again stepping into.
Link: VIDEO: Low-Wage Hollywood Has a Champion in Paul

Greengrass (Movieline)
Appendum: Sunnnydaze’s response:

The problem isn't just with young people. The attitude in this biz is
that you are so lucky, so blessed to be involved why on earth would
you expect to get paid? This for any age of individual. Makes some
sense when a person is new to the industry but when you are 35 and
have been in your craft for 20 years being asked to "volunteer" is an
insult. It also creates an environment where the "rich kids" have all
the fun and success while people who actually need to work for a
living fall away and into other fields to survive.
----------
MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010

"Being resilient in crappy times"
Before Hollywood discovered it could reap huge profits by

adapting comic books, mainstream movies used to attempt
subjects that might have something to do with real grown-
ups’ lives. That impulse rarely surfaces these days, but it’s
the motor that drives The Company Men, John Wells’
downsizing drama set in the Boston area circa 2008, just as
the economy was beginning its long, slow-motion crash.
The harsh reality is that being able to make a decent living
from really working — as opposed to just pushing money
from one place to another — is practically a luxury not just
3747
in America but, increasingly, everywhere in the world. You

won’t get rich actually building or making things, or trying
to run a company in a way that honors or respects its
workers. The only way to make money in this climate is to
squeeze people as hard as you can and then discard them.
That’s a view The Company Men both acknowledges as a
reality and rails against.
[. . .]
But in the end, it’s simply about being resilient in crappy
times. And that’s something many of our parents and
grandparents knew something about, even though each
generation thinks its problems are original and unique.
(Stephanie Zacharek, The Company Men Offers a Rare
Portrait of the Working — and the Nonworking — World,
“Movieline,” 10 Dec. 2010)
Cautionary note: people who like the idea of being persevering,

generally ensure they end up living in an environment that
shortchanges them. You take the current lot of American humanity, in
their hunt for adultness / penance in self-sacrifice, small hopes, and
hardship, and provide them magically with instead their every dream
come true, they would hate you to the point of wanting to kill you for
giving them way beyond what they're prepared to accept -- for
adorning them after they've finally near sheared the most
compromising parts of themselves off. So instead, a future of a first
long bleakness; then some bits of New Deal solace amidst the shared
suffering, the untended to, valid complaints of indifferent, resistant,
ongoing corporate culture; until some massive sacrificial war permits
a later generation to the moving-beyond actually involved in growing
up. ("You can never outdistance your ancestors" -- I look forward to
all the "growth" that'll follow that thought / inclination.) The
challenge now is to make sure we don't too-fast race into the
depression mind-set -- getting "there" before it too much settles in,
3748
would suggest it might just be following our lead.
Your fancy prose misses the point entirely. Most Americans

are simply struggling with being poorer than they'd like to
be, and it has nothing to with a "hunt for adultness /
penance in self-sacrifice, small hopes, and hardship." And
please, no one would kill you for making their dreams come
true because they're some sort of scarred animal in a cage.
Remember: it's the economy, stupid. (Tamar)
I hear your point, but to me, people get the economy they actually
want. If they truly feel they deserve (have earned), if they truly want,
happiness, you get the like of the 30 years of on and on growth that
was 1950 to 1980. Nothing could put a stop to it, not corporations,
late capitalism -- run-amock, widespread greed -- terrestrial limits,
Celestial scorn, ancestors-all-in-disapproval -- nothing. However, if
what they want is to be "Americans simply struggling with being
poorer than they'd like to be," to be some (idiotic) generation that
renewed all the "ennobling," "necessary" sacrifices their grandparents
were stupefied (and stupided) by, who could believe themselves truly
desiring of better ONLY given there being little chance any such
would befall them, then nothing could stop it either. If aliens landed
on the earth right now and forced endless bunches of riches into
everyone's pockets, we're very near the point where we spoiled
Americans would monk and monastery ourselves before the
abundance. If they took that refuge away, and forced us forever into
5-star accommodations, then we'd deem virtual reality the "truer"
one, and absolutely refuse to forego the Xbox so we could reify (yes,
maybe even the likes of snobbish "I don't own a TV" critics) the likes
of "Fallout 3" until the even-more-appropriate "Penance 2morrow"
could be made. If they took that away, then we'd slowly go insane,
depriving, UGLIFYING ourselves near to the point of hacking off our
3749
own limbs -- even if that 5 star-occupying, top-of-the-line refrigerator

couldn't be managed to be appropriately tumbled to provide some
unlikely-but-maybe-still-possibly? excuse
... unless of course they yet somehow proved killable, then, yes, we
would kill them, for feeding us abundance when what we want is
hardening through suffering, for drawing out our deepest, and truly
regrettable, wishes, and forcing us to catch some sight of them. The
zombified of the 1930s weren't perseverers; they were (in greater
truth) grotesque willers of their own penance-born deterioration.
Some (the interesting) mocked their own back then -- that is until
everyone was about ennobling. Let's start with that, and see where it
gets us -- I don't want a rehash of the 1930s/40s, even if it did end up
serving out "adult" dishes of grace and wit, in film, in art, that
apparently no critic seems to see the main drawback to (that it was
always born out of and remained true to an ethos of compensation,
not really enrichment).
Most of us have the hard choice between time or money.

With money you have comfort which you can't enjoy because
you are at work all the time... With time you have no comfort
because the fuse has been lit and the bomb will go off at any
minute, but you do get odd moments of true freedom before
the sh*t hits the fan.
God did not decide this is the way things should be. Jesus
doesn't want you to pay rent nor does Mohammad respect
you for all of your hard work. This system was created by
humanity and humanity VOLUNTEERS to work with-in.
The bottom has dropped out leaving people who work at
Wal-mart paying money to eat at Red Lobster so the people
who work at Red Lobster can afford to shop at Wal-mart.
The only real change will occur when enough people say,
"I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Thru out history this is known as REVOLUTION. And
3750
sometimes, this point of action succeeds in evoking positive

change. Many times it just cuts off the head of one beast and
replaces it with another more or less terrible entity.
But when things have gone as far as they can go, and things
have gotten as bad as they can get> Is it worth the risk?
Gandhi once said, "10,0000 Englishmen simply cannot
control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to
cooperate."
This has become us and our corporate masters.
Question is> What are you going to do? (Sunnydaze)
I disagree. When people are mad as hell and not going to take it
anymore!, they do the likes of chopping off leaders' heads -- along
with those of anyone even remotely connected to them, until numbers
pile up beyond number, and even your best friend begins to seem
suspicious. Only AFTER bodies of both sides lie everywhere, now so
much seeming more born of the same purpose than foes of opposite
stripe, only AFTER people have begun to forget the point of it all but
still gauge that surely some awful blood price has more than fully
been repaid, does society move ahead -- rock and roll, flower power,
and even soldier mockery. Revolutionaries mostly want to sacrifice
themselves, along with you too, more than probably. Never readily
trust them, or their grievances -- they'd be shortchanged if their foes
ever agreed to an agreeable compromise, and / or offered fair redress:
almost always, that's not what they want. (There are exceptions ... I'd
trust Krugman, for instance.) Society doesn't so much grow when
people are prepared to fight hard for their fair lot; it actually mostly
grows when people feel permitted to partake in and enjoy the rather
ample lot that looks like it might be opening up for them -- even if it
really doesn't end up requiring much of a fight. Their enemies could
in fact step aside; amplitude, really just theirs for the ready-taking;
and yet they'd manage even being somewhat truly pleased it proved
all so all-so-easily-guilt-arousingly easy -- they're in mind to relax,
3751
and enjoy themselves some while, not to fight to salvage what is at

least necessary for human dignity, from bastards who couldn't care
less how much they've suffered, only that they yet try and shave,
shower every now and then, serve, but otherwise be done with.
Link: The Company Men Offers a Rare Portrait of the Working — and
the Nonworking — World (Movieline)
----------
First, then second, consideration
The Tourist is one of those movies that will leave some

viewers scratching their heads, wondering why there isn ’t
more action, more snazzy editing, more obvious crackle
between its stars, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. But I
suspect the people who get The Tourist will simply adore it:
It’s the kind of espionage caper that doesn’t get made
anymore, a visually sensuous picture made with tender
attention to detail and an elegant, understated sense of
humor. (Stephanie Zacharek, Espionage Caper The Tourist
Offers Mystery and Glamour, Plus Depp and Jolie,
“Movieline,” 9 Dec. 2010)
KEY SPOILER ALERT

(First consideration) She is really good and appropriate in this
picture. Something about how Angelina refuses the viewer, and her
spare personality, works to remind you to attend to everything else
perfectly worthwhile in the picture. Elegance, a sure splendor of it --
it's hard to imagine anything making an appearance in the film that
wasn't (as Stephanie says, tenderly and appreciatively)
"considered" ... But I followed this by re-watching "Knight and Day" --
a movie I just can't deny as one of favorites from this year -- and I'm
3752
reminded why something in the TRULY "Wisconsin"-born (read:

large-hearted, big-souled American) (once Depp reveals his true
identity, we should wish him well but still be quite ready to leave him
behind -- his human undeterminedness was fake: he's as furnished
and complete as the beautiful hotels he for a glorious time inhabited),
hammy, down-to-earthness, can ultimately trump every element of
fragile stunning beauty some place like Venice has to offer, perhaps in
the same way a single human life, perhaps even before its begat into
something storied and interesting, can still trump the whole awesome
complexity of the entire rest of the ecosphere: no, I'm sorry, whatever
your -- albeit -- formidable luxury of experiences and details,
whatever the extent of patience required to appreciate all that's in
their tiniest sliver, there's no comparing even the sum of it to
spending time along someone with sufficient soul to remainder it all
to backdrop.
Where Stephanie really scores points with me in this lovely, faithful

review, is that Americans should be able to appreciate this (kind of)
film, all that it respects enough to quite-to-the-exact-precarious-
point-of distraction think about and love -- not just loud star vehicles
-- and how many can? The film loses me, for its making its lesson by
noticeably submitting the human -- nothing they "existed" made me
really forget the kind of hotels (and trains, and such) they had been
in. Great PEOPLE made those grand hotels, but more LIVING, vital
presences should still readily backdrop them, and they didn't enough
-- struck me as about near always-even (not quite, they surely existed
more than the other human-types that "accompanied" them) -- for
my preference. I COULD take my eyes off them, and though it opened
things up, in retrospect, this isn't so much quite the thing I supposed
it was on first consideration. Still a really good film, though.
Link: Espionage Caper The Tourist Offers Mystery and Glamour, Plus
Depp and Jolie (Movieline)
----------
3753
Keeping the con alive
Salon readers have never been the shy and retiring type, but
Monday's Life story -- "How I Became a Con Artist" --
certainly brought out the knives. "You don't deserve to live in
a civilized society," read one of the 200+ outraged comments,
peppered with such descriptors as douchebag, degenerate and
morally bankrupt. At least one furious reader actually e-
mailed writer Jason Jellick's employer to complain. Readers
directed their scorn at us as well. "Is this the best Salon can
do, especially at the start of the Christmas holiday season?"
Ouch. We weren't just ethically bankrupt. We were ruining
Christmas.
To clarify, Salon doesn't advocate stealing -- but for that
matter, neither does Jellick. His account of a youth spent
indulging in petty crimes against chain stores and other
corporations ends with a hard stare at his own shady
behavior, with a realization at just how much damage his
behavior has wrought. Jellick's story is one of regret as much
as misdeed. It is about the lies we tell ourselves -- that we are
better and smarter than everyone else, that we deserve more
than the shreds we've been given, that our swinging fist
doesn't hurt anyone. Like all our Life Stories, his tale offers a
window into human behavior in its imperfections and
complexity. All of us have tiny private shames we're afraid to
tell others. To confess them isn't just fascinating. It's
liberating. (Sarah Hepola, “Our con story – and yours,” Salon,
2 Dec. 2010)
-----
Thank you for your expulsion from Eden; welcome to Salon
3754
His account of a youth spent indulging in petty crimes against

chain stores and other corporations ends with a hard stare at
his own shady behavior, with a realization at just how much
damage his behavior has wrought.
All your life stories read like this, to the point of feeling prescribed.
This isn't about discovery; and certainly not complexity, either. It's
more about self-fashioning, and probably mostly about salvation: a
collective concern to identify yourselves as amongst the repentant,
and therefore feel less guilty. So much so, that I bet the author of this
piece doesn't even allow himself to partake of what this piece is
tantalizingly ripe to offer him -- namely, further sense that in he is
rather still, artfully, nimbly, making use of others' route requirements
to benefit himself -- the fox.
At some level, the author believes himself braver than most others.
His true lack of courage comes not only -- as Hutman pointed out --
not doing anything near the Michael Moore and doing his thing
directly before empowered adults (though it is true that some people
might not manage what he managed, even if required for truly good
benefit, and that this lack isn't to be shamed but certainly to be dealt
with, to be insistently pointed out), but in his Salon-preference need
to demonstrate himself imperfect but repentant, ultimately more
formula, general-type, sumupable, quiescent, than an interesting,
riseable particular, so he might count himself amongst those actually
less worthy of a beating in these purity concerned times. If it still
seems as if he's too much rejoicing in his memory of the "score," don't
worry: though he is still laughing at you a bit (he can permit himself
some of this -- after all, you're outside the gates in the land of the
loud, pained, but ultimately powerless and distinctly separated letter
writers; you're the plebs whose role is to uninterruptedly experience
the snub, with never any worth-affirming real attention or
recompense), he'll make it about further demonstance of his blatant
(but ultimately actually redeeming) human weakness, and further
3755
expunge this voice in later writings.

And this bit:
It is about the lies we tell ourselves -- that we are better and

smarter than everyone else, that we deserve more than the
shreds we've been given, that our swinging fist doesn't hurt
anyone.
is gross. How on earth are we supposed to accomplish anything if

some of us don't imagine we might do better than what was done
before, insist on better than we were handed, conceive of ourselves as
noteworthy and perhaps special? But you're about flattening a sinning
generation now, aren't you? Submerging personality, uniqueness;
every individual's desire sublimating into something the crowd would
okay (I noticed how Andrew Leonard managed his desire to once
again self-absorb in video games, by making it into part of a collective
ritual of primarily more selflessness-intended sharing across
generations. He made his son, that is, serve his lie.) Everyone
abandoning every pretense to something special, sinking themselves
as close to the ground, as obsequiously within the okays of the group,
only rising to cut the legs out from those who would dare roam about
on their own. Welcome to righteous, jealous-eyed, village life.
Welcome to the the shamed covering-up, followed by the grim, self-
preserving pointing of fingers, that follows the unaccounted for,
hugely blasphemic, orgy. Welcome to Salon.
-----
Regret
You do need to be able to con. You do need to be able, if there is just
cause, to be able -- in an instant -- do otherwise than what you've
always been told you're supposed to do. If society is turning puritan,
for example, you do need to be able to protect, hide, those that are
being assigned the role of the rats. If society is corporate, against
cooperative efforts, you need to be able to find some way to help
communicate that its control is not total. A first step toward this, may
3756
just come from the likes of returning books you never purchased: you
may actually thereby be safely convincing yourself you can thwart
authority, and survive: foundation for scarier, more relevant, efforts.
If you sense that this is part of what your own cons were about, to do
most good, you don't repudiate all you once did -- just work on why
your efforts became to seem near mostly about repetition compulsion,
about always proving you can avoid the scrutiny of the angry eye,
from your own projected parental-figure, about why you keep keeping
it within a context whereby not corporations but vulnerable,
perennially-trapped people kinda like yourself, are actually the ones
you imagine most at risk of being taken in your scams. There is
psychological work you could make of this, and it could make it so
that rather than a repentant, you become more truly what you once
(however still faintly) set out to be: a truly moral person, who respects
"the human" enough to be a potentially change-prompting, certainly
anger-arousing, irritant, when appropriate.
I remember reading "Why They Kill," of how rapists and killers get
"there" by first partaking of smaller thrills they believe others would
fear to similarly manage, so I'm not ignorant: the truest villains can
be made to seem heroes, if what you're mostly doing is championing
deviance, deviation, defiance. Still, though there is a world of
difference, heroes ARE those who can brave anxiety-provoking
experiences, for some better purpose, and I do sense a little bit of the
hero in this person. I just wish that there was an environment around
to encourage it. As is, he's just doing what Tiger Woods is about to do,
and castrate himself to a larger order, and participate in society's
revenge against those who would dare range about as selfishly as he
once did.
Link: Our con story – and yours
----------
3757
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2010

When the good-parent Dumbledore is artfully being shown the door
How Should the University Evolve?, part 1 of 2 from BLSCI on

Vimeo.
and the Q&A is here:
I’m in the midst of Thanksgiving prep so don’t have time to
contribute my own commentary. Basically we were a bit at
cross purposes. Siva gave a theatrically impassioned and well-
supported defense of the traditional university and I tried to
make the point that I don’t care much what happens to the
traditional university. I come neither to bury nor to praise it,
but to talk about the needs that learners have (whether
students or no) and how those needs might best be met (using
both technology and traditional forms and new hybrids of the
same).
This discourse was pronounced both “empowering” and
“bullshit” on Twitter, and rightfully so I think. Kyra Gaunt, an
anthropology professor at Baruch, a TED fellow, and a hero of
mine, gave out more truth at the microphone during the Q&A
than I heard coming from the stage all night. She correctly
intuited”My sense: @sivavaid who really liked your book was
doing the academic devils advocacy thing which I hate.
#debateisnotengagement”
At some point academics end and you have to take a stand on
stuff. My fave Tweet was this one:
@unboundstudent: @anya1anya @sivavaid DIYU Takeaway?
future of higher ed is a conversation of the ppl! (Anya
Kamenetz, “Video of Debate with Siva Vaidyanathan at
Baruch College on 11/18,” 24 Nov. DIY U)
At one point you mentioned that no thing was guaranteed (to last, to
remain), and were okay with that, and Siva responded that he hoped
3758
university could be, that is must be. I sided with Siva here a bit. I
think you’ve got a high self-esteem, and it is this that makes it so that
for you now the disappearance of ostensible societal necessities —
wiki or what-not — needn’t automatically register as if your safety
blanket was suddenly lost to you. You’re more like, well, okay,
something substantial did just go down -- but is it possible that what
remains and is now better exposed to view, is actually better? And if
it is, you’re glad the older, more primitive form is lost, and get to
making the more mature and evolved forms reach their potential
ends. And if it isn’t, you point out the current flaws, and get back
what was wrongly disposed of. You’re fair, appropriately excited by
what could and should be, and just as appropriately impatient with
the mediocre and insufficient in its loud fight to on-and-on-and-on
still-prosper. But most people don’t strike me as healthy as you are,
as secure as you are, and actually need some secure place that can
withstand their own storms as well as outside ones — some
Hogwarts — to exist, for them to have some chance of not becoming
mostly survivalist, feral, truly lost — incapable of doing much
interesting with sophisticated technology, open acess, not out of
unfamiliarity, or from being priced out, but because they haven ’t at
any time in their lives known the lengthy period of guaranteed
support that enables everything else worthwhile (including openness
to risk, to loss) to develop. Even if they don’t make it to university,
have no plans “thereof,” they intuit and are to some extent buoyed by
the overall nurturing, good character of a society, if it is pronounced
in its fight to erect and support institutions (government,
universities) primarily UNDERSTOOD as for, well, guarantees,
respite, fellowship and support.
For you it’s something stodgy, elitist, and inhibiting being rightly
challenged by what is vital, most democratic, and promising. But for
most of the public my guess is that this conversation will be about
whether it wants to eliminate the good parent Dumbledore (the
university) for an environment that leaves more and more children
unsheltered, exposed to errant mischance (the free market, as it
3759
understands it now), with less of a chance of any child

misunderstanding it for different (for us to create such a world, what
must we truly think of you, dear child?). University that is more aloof,
and harder to reach, and the rest of it a wild of perhaps pot-luck
success but mostly scammers. My concern is that their increasing
support of you (DIY U and such) will not be born of caught-sight of a
perhaps better way, but because they think their children deserve a
more desolate, less certain environment to unlearn them of their fixed
spoiledness. Whatever your hopes, America has in mind to make of
your righteous cause, further means to hurt its kids. It’s that sick.
Even many of its liberals.
Link: Video of Debate with Siva Vaidyanathan at Baruch

College on 11/18 DIY U
----------
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2010

Sauron thrived when things grew dark, too
Hillenbrand's second book, seven years in the making, is

"Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and
Redemption" and likely to be as big a hit as "Seabiscuit." The
theme is identical -- the triumph of an indomitable underdog
in the face of titanic obstacles -- but this time the protagonist
is human: Louis Zamperini, an Olympian in his own right (he
ran in the 1936 games in Berlin), war hero, POW camp
survivor and inspirational speaker.
[. . .]
Those hopes were, of course, pulverized by the outbreak of
war, and Zamperini became a bombardier in the Army Air
Corps, stationed in Hawaii. The book's exciting descriptions
3760
of foot races give way to even more exciting accounts of

bombing raids and airborne battles.
[. . .]
Zamperini and Phillips' luck ran out when, while on a rescue

operation, their plane conked out and crashed at sea. Only the
two of them and a third serviceman survived, floating on rafts
through shark-infested waters for 47 days, a record. They
survived on snared sea birds and collected rain, and after a
Japanese fighter plane peppered their raft with bullets, they
had to simultaneously bail, fight off sharks and patch the
holes until it was restored to a fragile seaworthiness.
Miraculously, they finally floated toward land -- only to be
captured by the Japanese.
And so "Unbroken" segues once again, from man-against-the-
elements survival yarn to an even darker tale of human
cruelty and defiance.
[. . .]
When the war ended, Zamperini returned home in triumph,

only to have the terror and impotent rage he felt in the camps
come back to him every night in his dreams. The greatest
generation (and you can only regard this moniker as
thoroughly earned after reading "Unbroken") suffered from
post-traumatic stress disorder, too, and Zamperini's
desperate efforts to overcome this final and perhaps most
challenging trial serve as a pointed reminder of the difficulties
so many of the current generation's vets are facing right now.
(Laura Miller, “‘Unbroken,’ ‘Seabiscuit’ author’s latest
triumph,” Salon, 14 Nov. 2010)
3761
Juiced?
I'm quite sure that every nation that went to war has examples of such
men. They were all -- Americans, Germans, Brits, Italians, Egyptians,
Russians, Japanese -- I suppose, members of the greatest generation.
But one has to wonder who it was who brought about this ready
heroism-enabling, life-destroying war about in the first place? Sure,
they fought off some sharks, but for collectively seeing the necessity of
wasting away millions of lives, maybe an asterisk beside their
extraordinary tales of heroic perseverance?
Remember Goldhagen ("Hitler’s willing executioners") -- it's not
(just) the leaders: it's (primarily) the people, what they want.
Patrick
You would have preferred the alternative to the fight.
You would have been a Loyalist 235 years ago in the name of
peace. On yur knees MFer. You would have preferred allowing
the South to secede, splitting the Union and continuing their
slave industry in the name of peace. You would have stood
aside 68 years ago railing against the French Resistance as
violent extremists. You're pathetic. (oda7103sf)
oda
The Greatest Generation was a generation that got heroism, but out of
war. That's sick. They were sick. With this tale, near makes me root
for the sharks ... and I hate sharks.
-----
Can the same person "care for the soul," who would hack
their arm off to survive? Or is this just the province of the
3762
beastial?
It is true that what you've given here is what you denied in your anti-
National Novel Writing Month post. A whole generation is worthy for
their mostly anonymous replication of the kind of marathon
struggling people like this dude demonstrated. Some of these very
same people who forced their way to 50 000 words in a month, might
just in the future be the ones to marshal their way through a
war/depression-induced hell of obstacles. (I couldn't do 50 000 in a
month, and you're not going to remember me for hacking off my arm
to save my life, either.) Given the power of your previous impress, you
come pretty close to implicitly making war into the missing backdrop.
(i.e. Their mistake is not that they would as a horde show fantastic
perseverance at the cost of discretion and care, of denying themselves
the ripened ability to enjoy other people's artistic talents, but that
they are doing as much outside of a context which would instantly
awe all outsiders to their exhausting performance.)
How about try instead, a whole generation left the experimental,
original (19) 20s for depression and war ravishment. When you take
any two who used to converse profitably but fall into squabble, there
may still be something exciting in their coming to and lasting through
blows, but boy does it pale compared to what they had going before
they broke down into squabbling and self-cover. I don't really want to
hear about those who survived or heroiced their way through bleak
striving: there must be something savage in them for them to
accustom themselves so readily to that much bleakness; and it's an
insult to those who might shrivel up some then, but who naturally
blossom when people SHOULD naturally do so -- when the
atmosphere is allowing, patient, gentle, kind.
Link: “Unbroken,’” “Seabiscui”’ author’s latest triumph (Salon)

----------
Kindness
3763
Conservative commentators have been bemoaning the decline

of the American man almost as long as the American man has
been in existence. As it turns out, they are right: Men these
days are a mere shadow of what we once were. We've become
physically weaker than our ancestors. We're slower runners.
We can't jump as high as we once did. As Peter McAllister, an
archaeologist with the University of Western Australia and
the author of the new book "Manthropology: The Science of
Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be," puts it,
we might be the "sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens
to ever walk the planet." I, for one, blame guyliner. (Thomas
Rogers, “The dramatic decline of modern man,” Salon, 14
Nov. 2010)
Ice Age aboriginal tribesmen, he discovers, were able to run

long distances at approximately the same speed as modern-
day Olympic sprinters. Classic Grecian rowers could attain
speeds of 7.5 miles an hour, which today's rowers can only
attain for short bursts of time. Our culture may be obsessed
with muscles: He notes that, since 1982, G.I. Joe's Sgt. Savage
has gotten three times more muscular and Barbie's Ken now
has a chest circumference attainable by only one in 50 men,
but the luxuries of our contemporary lifestyle have caused a
steady decline in genuine physical power.
[. . .]
Up until about 20,000 years, Homo sapiens were very, very

robust in comparison to what we are these days. It's not that
we're so different from those robust Homo sapien males, but
our bodies are actually geared up to respond to pressures that
we don't get anymore. There's the example of aboriginal
3764
runners who, we know from fossilized footprints, could run as

fast if not faster than [Olympic sprinter] Usain Bolt. And the
reason why is that they did it from a very early age. The Greek
trireme rowers could do feats that can't be duplicated by
modern rowers. Greece was a very tough country to make a
living in. Everybody walked everywhere. The people lived as
shepherds, it was a very rough existence. Our bones are about
40 percent less mass than the bones of Homo erectus, but
genetically ours are not that different. It's just that we don't
get put under that kind of pressure. Arm bones of tennis
players, for example, are almost as thick as those of Homo
erectus.
There are some interesting statistics there about how hard
people could work during the Industrial Revolution -- these
rather small, malnourished men were able to wield these
incredibly heavy sledgehammers all day, and the same
phenomenon still applies to Nepalese hill porters. These little
guys of about 55 kilos carry 90 kilo weights for about 75 miles
over a period of days. It doesn't seem to have any
degenerative effects on them as well.
[. . .]
There's been this movement all through history. The dandies,

the macaronis and other feminized males were popular
during times of great assurance, when England ruled the
waves. That people want those stronger, more masculine
figures in times of crisis makes sense to me.
[. . .]
It says something about the substitution of pomp and show

for real manliness. There is an inherent male and female
attraction to muscularity -- it's an instinctual thing. Big
3765
muscles are very, very sexually attractive. There's no doubt

about that.
[. . .]
I've cited some studies of children of the Viking Berserkers [a

group of notorious Norse warriors known for their
aggression], and found that these are hyperviolent men and
actually did have more children than comparable warriors in
that society.
[. . .]
Nearly every group I've ever come across does it [i.e., hazing]
in some way, and the fact that the civilized, affluent West still
does it shows that it's, for want of a better word, a very
natural practice. One of the paradoxes is that this very violent,
abusive treatment actually serves to greatly heighten the need
of the initiate to belong to that group. It strips away their own
personal power and individuality, it makes them crave
belonging to the group and it makes them bond more tightly
to it. I'm not arguing, at all, in favor of hazing. I'm just
pointing out that it does seem to have a very strong resonance
within the heart of masculinity.
It seems to be a very deep, masculine thing. I think it relates
to human societies being so patrilineally based. And
incidentally, we could argue that's largely why there's malaise
among men these days, because we're naturally so geared to
being a part of a band of brothers. It seems to be a very deep,
inherent thing. At the moment, I'm in an area of Australia
called the Little Sandy Desert, and I'm dealing with Martu
aboriginal men. In about a month, they're going to round up
all the young men from all the settlements and they're going
to take them out to the bush and circumcise their penises.
3766
Just a little way over they actually subincise them. (Peter

McAllister, interviewed by Thomas Rogers, “The dramatic
decline of modern man,” Salon, 14 Nov. 2010)
Displaced into the city

RE: "I'm dealing with Martu aboriginal men. In about a
month, they're going to round up all the young men from all
the settlements and they're going to take them out to the
bush and circumcise their penises. Just a little way over
they actually subincise them."
I wonder how this would look if we replaced the periods with

exclamation marks?
"I'm dealing with Martu aboriginal men! In about a month,

they're going to round up all the young men from all the
settlements and they're going to take them out to the bush
and circumcise their penises!! Just a little way over they
actually subincise them!!!!"
Yes, as I thought, more honest. I hope you enjoy the show of what
finely-muscled Martu men can do to boys they've taken out into the
bush (take a break to sneak-peak on the boys just a little way over
"actually being subincised"!?). Remember, though, if ever back in the
city you see a lot of men rounding up street kids for maybe something
similarly penile-related, you probably ought to switch modes and
report it rather than report ON it. I'm sure they're actually just being
made manly men, but displaced into the less virile, less vigor-
appreciating city, it'll be deemed wrong.
-----
3767
What do we expect from anthropologists?

Anthropologists find that our earliest ancestors were greater athletes,
less "weak," than we are. It seems near frustratingly difficult to argue
for the virtues of apparently effeminate civitas, in their company. But
what should we expect with those who stayed all the way? For if at
some point before certification they judged their studies' brawny
performance a bit of a no-thing, juvenile, a bore, wouldn't they have
soon-thereafter abandoned apish men for the couth and actually
interesting?
Could it be that once modern wo/man is finally past all its
primitiveness fetishizing, its astute angling over others amongst the
civilized, s/he will conclude that there is in fact nothing much
interesting to be learned from past shells, our discards? Rather than
just evolution taking us a different way, maybe we just grew moral,
considerate and considering, and moved on ... for a reason.
-----
Shakespeare's 2 cents
"Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed [i.e.,
bald] men, and such as sleep o' nights. Yond Cassius has a
lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are
dangerous."
"Julius Caesar" (Act 1, Scene2) (austinboy, response to post)
*
This article is exhibit one.

What a dumb premise. How do we define fitness? Brawn?
Speed? Virility? Then why aren't the chimps running things?
And which ancestors? Paleolithic, neolithic? The romans?
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From this perspective it's been nothing but downhill since the
days that H. erectus was cock of the walk with their weakling
smartypants use of fire and refined toolmaking and cooked
food. (dogu44)
*
"The British archers at Agincourt could draw a longbow at

about 150 lbs with good accuracy. This is more than twice the
draw of modern longbows of about 60 lbs. The archers started
training as young boys."
This is true (though you may have overstated the draw weight
of those bows).
Yet, the English would eventually put aside the longbow in
favor of the musket, even though your average musketeer was
less deadly than your average longbowman (until rifled
cartridges became more available).
So why the change? Because musketeers were a more reliable
option. Lost longbowmen could take upwards of a year to
replace; musketeers a matter of weeks. This made armies that
utilized musketeers more effective, since losses could be
replaced much easier.
My point? Longbowmen may have been physically strong and
effective specialized troops, but technology (in this case,
muskets) made an average man the match of a highly trained
longbowman. Society doesn't need to count on large numbers
of men to be exceptionally strong or athletic, thanks to
technology. (moidalize)
*
Society's Development and Evolution

This article completely ignores the fact, as a society...we have
evolved to the point where intellectually man can develop
since he is no longer tasked with basic needs every day.
This specialization has allowed development since innovation
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happens around those circumstances.

The non-scientific humour seems trite and precocious to me.
Thank you for wasting my time, Thomas Rogers.
You made no mention of the size of mankind's brain
dwindling, just the size of his dick. Thank you for that.
(Ra_earth_wind-Fire)
*
One example that came to my mind is that in the running of

the first "marathon", the runner died. After running 26 miles.
Today, tens of thousands compete in marathons without ill
affect. If ancient men were so fast, fit and hearty, shouldn't a
long run like that have been a piece of cake? Or the death
noted as really unusual?
One thing you can't argue with it that people used to live far
shorter lives -- nasty, brutal and short. Again, as Silence
points out, generation after generation of men killed
themselves in pointless, endless wars of aggression. Women
died in childbirth. The average lifespan was roughly 45-50,
and THAT assumes you didn't die in childbirth or from some
infection or plague, or got killed in war. Women didn't even
live long enough, on average, to go through menopause.
(Laure1962)
Tough times
It could have been that our ancestors were not in fact stronger and
faster than we are, anthropologists could have uncovered that by 20
they were in fact so beat upon they had the constitutions of modern-
day 90 year olds, bones of brittle not hard metal, so long as we
concerned about perhaps lost virility no one who once ranged about
the plains, prepared to prey on or otherwise be preyed upon by beasts
and other men, can easily be apprehended by the brain as "weak." For
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me, it doesn't do to show how those physically-softened but strong-

in-mind are truly more potent, or to show how the flabby are more
predictable and less riseable -- and therefore actually better for the
overall health and maintenance (the sturdy constitution) of the
"commonwealth": our complaint must rest with those concerned to
make the "issue" about strength and weakness in the first place, for
such people are orienting / priming, setting parameters around a
debate which will leave no room for valuing things most valuable
about our finally becoming civilized.
Men don't become "strong" when, rather than abuse their boys
through the kinds of "hardening" rituals they themselves might have
been subject to, they instead seek to free them from all that trauma
and seek another way -- they grow kind, compassionate. When we
start finding extreme physical exertion a bit exhausting to watch /
experience, and hard to imagine anyone want doing / celebrating, we
haven't gone soft, but become a bit more mature in our tastes.
Chimps weren't our ancestors, but I would suggest that when we're in
the right frame of mind there's nothing about virile homo erectuses or
now-"redeemed" bone-hardened 4 ft- tall Victorian factory workers
that should draw us to agree to recognize much of a link with them
either. Our concern is how to make our world more kind and fun --
not more virile or more fit. I know that the 18th-century liberal Brits
fended off their conservative "kin" by arguing that you could have as
much, a nation of shopkeepers, of fanciful fops, and still also the
strongest navy and most assured nation ever known, but this still
tipped the hat too much to those primitive-enough to still insist at-
bottom it has to be about meek and strong, meek and strong: as if to
move too far away from that, is to lose all that is most truly, assuredly,
human. Their fancy is okay, but BECAUSE it's proved itself just
another variant of the strong: the first stretches of a kind, welfare
state -- the 18th-century genteel were for animal rights, child-safety,
against slavery -- may have been defended by such thinking, but it
wasn't born out of it.
If we agree to this, to argue in terms of virility and strength, we are
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agreeing to enter into a darker period of human existence: for no age

built on commerce, entertainment, experimentation and self-growth,
is not ever surely insusceptible to being charged luxurious and fallen
-- better to go back into base mode, less ample mode, more
restricting, more striving mode, where just being part meant
demonstrating you had it in you to live in tough times. But later, a
more mature generation will emerge, that will shirk you off like the
Tudor courtiers did their numbskull, French (effeminacy)-fearing,
dark age ancestors. They might relapse too into numbskullery, but at
some point humanity will streamline, and then just grow, peacefully
on.
Link: The dramatic decline of modern man (Salon)
----------
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2010

Spending time with better people
Welcome to the second session of Salon's Reading Club,

everyone. For those just joining us, we're discussing Jonathan
Franzen's new novel, "Freedom." Last week, we talked about
the first part of the book, "Good Neighbors," through the end
of Patty's "autobiography" (pages 1 through 187). This week,
we'll consider half of the second part, "2004," reading
through the end of the chapter titled "Enough Already" (pages
191 to 382).
[. . .]
All of this raises a question I've been wanting to ask since we

started, concerning an observation people often make about
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Franzen's (and many other authors') characters, which is that

they are "unlikable." I confess, I've grown to hate such
remarks. It makes me feel like we're all back in grammar
school, talking about which kids are "nice" and which kids are
"mean." It's a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a
work of literature.
James Wood, in his book "How Fiction Works," wrote that
this complaint implies that "artists should not ask us to try to
understand characters we cannot approve of -- or not until
after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them."
That we might recognize a character's unappealing qualities
while simultaneously seeing life through her eyes, "and that
this moving out of ourselves into realms beyond our daily
experience might be a moral and sympathetic education of its
own kind," doesn't seem to occur to far too many readers.
Wood calls this sort of criticism, so common in Amazon
reader reviews, a "contagion of moralizing niceness."
Patty is not nice. She does some bad things, and she can be
grouchy and bitter. I wouldn't necessarily want her as a
friend, but then that's not really an option because she's not a
real person. She's a literary character -- which means it's not
imperative that we take a moral stance on every single thing
she does. Literature is an experiment of the imagination, and
if we don't try to leave behind our contemporary compulsion
to pass judgment on everything and everyone when we enter
into that experiment, then we are the ones who lose out.
Speaking of "beyond our daily experience," I for one found
Richard's views on "female bullshit" fascinating and
astringently delightful. Few women ever get a glimpse of the
inside of a consummate womanizer's mind, and I, like
axelrod, underlined the passage where a client's flirtatious
wife makes what she thinks are challenging remarks about
Richard's music and then "waited, with parted lips and a
saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the
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drama of being her -- was registering." How I love that

miniature, well-barbed character sketch!
So, fellow Salon Reading Club members, what do you think?
Do you find the characters in "Freedom" likable or not -- and
does it matter? (Laura Miller, “Why must a novel’s characters
be likeable?,” Salon, 11 Sept. 2010)
Tweaking
You give those who complain about having to spend so much time
with unlikeable characters, quite the scolding. You sick an erudite
critic on them, and equate them all to Amazon-commenter slosh. I
admit to appreciating spending time with characters who show what
it is to live better than I currently now do. Some of this same desire is
expressed in the novel, toward the end (please forgive the small
cheat), when certain characters address why they seek Walter out
(though you probably thought these imperfect meanderers, just
adults, the mature turn-away from implausible mary janes). MY
desire for someone better, at least, was motivated FOR a desire for
moral / sympathetic education, something I thought I found less of in
this author's knowing descent than I might of if I spent more time
with someone who found means to be generous-hearted and open in
a world in dispirit / defeat, alongside an author / narrator (or author-
directed narrator, if you prefer) who himself knows the inner-
dialogue of such people best for its matching his own. (Note: I do like
Franzen, though, just not as much as I like, say, Barbara Kingsolver,
who I just sense to be a grander, more beautiful human being.) Maybe
there are others out there amongst the complainers who aren't simply
interested in spending more time before their own mirrors? And let's
be fair: these people ARE (meant to be) us. Be sure, many of those
who think they see inferiors are just being given a taste of how an
intelligent, disinterested other could show them to actually be.
Franzen would meet them, ignore their petty judgments and see their
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own Pattyness pretty plainly -- and this no doubt is part of Franzen's

point, and perhaps, stern intent ("You are, you are, you are -- flawed
[with some upside]; you are how others see you, but also how others
made you to be.").
RE: "She's a literary character -- which means it's not

imperative that we take a moral stance on every single thing
she does. Literature is an experiment of the imagination,
and if we don't try to leave behind our contemporary
compulsion to pass judgment on everything and everyone
when we enter into that experiment, then we are the ones
who lose out."
I guess we see here more evidence of why you dumped hate on

"Reality Hunger" -- that is, his "Fiction these days is just clothed
biography; why not just go for the even realer stuff?, attend most
closely to those with enough self-trust to bypass the well-guarded
avenue to mostly hide?" In my judgment, if you experience a
character as not just believable, but real; if you experience reading a
novel as being proxy to, involved with, actual happenings -- i.e., it's
really real while you read it; you follow along because someone's
situation is so convincing it looks to delineate your own fate -- then
when someone thereafter spooks out at you for your
misapprehension, like Laura here does, consider that SHE may be the
one inherently in the wrong. What is happening here is as close to
real as Franzen could make it, arguably so that whatever moral
stances / considerations, disappointments and accomplishments it
encourages / delineates could also be applied to that oh-so-close
simulacrum to the read world we emerge from -- the real world -- so
that modest, deflating Franzen would be in the grand position to say,
"here's about where we are; here's what it is to be one moral point in
our seemingly played-out but actually still possibly -- thank god -- ex
potentia moral universe," and have others skip argument, discussion,
right to feeling their way to solutions / renewal. Some fiction IS really
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just reality once more before us, with some tweaking, and with a
guide -- we'd sense if it was just one ultimately limited / skewed /
directed someone else's experiment / opinion. Yes of course, though,
we shouldn't just judge so we don't have to courageously,
imaginatively, reflect and explore -- Laura's right about that.
Link: Why must a novel’s character be likeable? (Salon)
----------
Frozen Franzenage
What do you think of the phrase "Franzenfreude"?
I think in German it literally means "joy in Franzen." But I'm

no stranger to literary envy and am in no position to deplore it
in others.
There's been discussion in the Salon Reading Club

about which character in "Freedom" most represents
you. Which one is it?
All four characters draw equally on my experience of life,

though I admit to having a particular fondness for the
youngest of them.
The characters in "Freedom" appear to make

decisions, but they're all rooted in their experience
and biology. It's striking, for example, how much like
Patty's father Walter turns out to be, and her
relationships with both Walter and Richard make all
sorts of sense on the basis of her upbringing. Where
do you come down, ultimately, on the question of
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free will?
This is exactly the kind of question I want to leave to the

reader. The novelist is responsible for creating an experience,
not for interpreting it.
The book has received a tremendous amount of

publicity. Is there another book that you really liked
that has recently come out, that you think might have
been overshadowed by your own?
I've been so busy with publicity that I haven't been able to

read any recent releases, but reliable friends have told me that
Jennifer Egan's and Gary Shteyngart's new books are very
good.
Of the criticisms you've read of the book, which hits
home the hardest?
Well, I don't read reviews, so I'm not familiar with the

criticisms. But I'm sad when I do a public event and
somebody tells me -- as if an author would want to hear this!
-- that my characters are unlikable. I feel like I'm being told
that I myself am unlikable.
[. . .]
Obama famously was photographed with a copy of

"Freedom." If he read it, what do you hope he took
away?
I hope he was so preoccupied with urgent national affairs that

he wasn't able to take away much more than a general
enjoyment of the experience. I didn't vote for him in
expectation of his mooning around pondering literary novels.
3777
In a way, the book is about watching flawed humans

during the downturn of an empire using their
glorious "freedom" to do damage to those they love,
to animals, to other countries. In writing the book,
were you thinking of George W. Bush's use and
misuse of the word "freedom"?
I was indeed. (Jonathan Franzen interviewed by Laura

Miller, “Reading Club interview: Jonathan Franzen
answers your questions,” Salon, 25 Sept. 2010)
-----
That's It?
I was somewhat disappointed in the short, rather superficial
answers to the questions considering all the hype this Q&A
received over the past month. (Jason C)
Jason C
He knows we're looking for more, to open him up, so he answers
questions in such a way that HE remains tight and WE are likely to
feel as if we were less interested in answers than in satisfaction at his
expense ... even if we weren't (we're all flawed, don't you know --
though much more flawed than our superb but self-effacing and
delightfully polished and restrained god, Obama. [Franzen knows
this, and so his flawed self still has one up on all of us.]). It's not an
interview, it's a moral lesson. The best you can get from him is a draw.
He'll offer an answer that can be readily argued as inarguably
complete and honest -- all what we said we were looking for -- but
feels deliberately cut-short and essentially withholding. And you can
drumbeat keep moving on through with your interview. The world is
3778
made a better place.

He doesn't read reviews ... One wonders how much of the current love
for Franzen (including Oprah's), is born out of our seeking abeyance
and approval by the cold and withholding? Even in his icyness, he's
probably just responding to our needs, and resents the hell out of us
for this.
Even in a frozen Franzenage, I'd still "take" Kingsolver. But not
without some power-ups -- his chill is everywhere, man!
Link: Reading Club interview: Jonathan Franzen answers your

questions (Salon)
----------
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2010

Provoking the dread
For me, the end of October is always slightly tinged with

dread -- provoked not by Halloween spooks, not even by
election season, but by the advent of something called
NaNoWriMo. If those syllables are nothing but babble to you,
then I salute you. They stand for National Novel Writing
Month.
[. . .]
The purpose of NaNoWriMo seems laudable enough. Above
all, it fosters the habit of writing every single day, the closest
thing to a universally prescribed strategy for eventually
producing a book. NaNoWriMo spurs aspiring authors to
conquer their inner critics and blow past blocks. Only by
producing really, really bad first drafts can many writers
move on to the practice that results in decent work: revision.
[. . .]
I am not the first person to point out that "writing a lot of
crap" doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an
entire month, even if it is November. And from rumblings in
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the Twitterverse, it's clear that NaNoWriMo winners

frequently ignore official advice about the importance of
revision; editors and agents are already flinching in
anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly
receive.
[. . .]
Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so

often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read
it? [. . .] But even if every one of these 30-day novelists
prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the
time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike
me as misplaced.
[. . .]
It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces

once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken
over by the narcissistic commerce of writing. And an
astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former
will confess to never doing the latter.
[. . .]
This is not to say that I don't hope that more novels will be
written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new
books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of
excitement. [. . .] But I'm confident those novels would still
get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.
Yet while there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is
a shortage of readers for these books. (Laura Miller, “Better
yet, DON’T write that novel,” Salon, 2 Nov. 2010)
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Valid complaint
Re: “And from rumblings in the Twitterverse, it's clear that
NaNoWriMo winners frequently ignore official advice about the
importance of revision; editors and agents are already flinching in
anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive.”
This to me is the problem. Potentially, if every child was born into a

challenging, nurturing, uber-literate environment (and what are we
as a species fighting for, if not that), we could have a whole
population efforting to write their first novel some November-on, and
they'd all smack of unmistakable promise -- and given the evidence of
such good work, we'd force ourselves beyond the appealing
workableness of the idea that there is never more than a near
curriculum-containing number of true artists out there, and get to
work figuring out how the most appropriate readers of a work do end
up finding that particular work from amongst the ridiculous treasure-
horde of excess (if you only had twenty readers of your work, if they
were all Shelleys, Coleridges, or Alcotts, would you care?).
But since in actuality few do the editing, the refinement, the being-
fair-to-their-own-material, to their own potential ability to articulate
best (or at least better) what they want to say, you do have the sense
that few amongst them actually are literate, really appreciate what
literacy has to offer you OVER dopamine-rush excitements in
whatever form -- whether hurried novel-writing, or losing some two
hundred pounds of fat (and gaining a taut mind that thereafter only
thinks of muscle) to urgent use of the treadmill -- and I think it is fair
game here for Laura to insist on their trying-out a measured bit of
library book light-lifting instead.
Too bad, though, because there is a more interesting conversation to
be had here, one that would challenge literate writers to appreciate
that given all that they now tend to do when they edit, they might be
at the point where their work would benefit more than it loses from
being loosed out of grasp before the second-glance can reconvene and
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reconsider.
You work that superior dance, church lady.
How do you survive existing among such lesser beings?
—softdog
@softdog
Re: "You work that superior dance, church lady.
How do you survive existing among such lesser beings?"
After our conversation / essential agreement on "Almost Famous,"
my sense was we were more the same than different. Still, I included
way too many "works" in my first post, and am too humble-feeling
now to orient on your most-any-other-time fair question.
This is a harder issue to just agree on than you might think, though.
Unlike Laura, I find what we get most of from our "best" writers is
agreeable, well-written work, that should still ultimately launch us
into tirades out of it being at bottom too nice, too safe, too much in
accord, too much of what literature is not supposed to be about, but
doesn't because we have enough sense of our current fragility, that
there are, unfortunately, possibilities out there whose consideration
we know would rock us silly, to go anywhere near broaching the issue.
So I think it is convenient for these writers, or for literate reviewers
like Laura, that there are maybe no massings out there right now (for
me, Stewart and Colbert included) properly identified as both
populist AND sane, because the truth of this fact is so informed by
generous lending-to and earnest experience of, that almost any
counter is too accurately sized up as ignorant or gross-appetite-
inhibition born to do anything but the preferred: abate self-doubts,
and root current preferences more trenchedly in place.
Right now at least, I do not trust earnest, mass efforts. It is the
aristocratic "take," and such can be cruelly intended and completely
3782
misinformed, but right now individualism, a fully-formed personality,

is in the path of aggressive, swarming, insistent group-think /
impulse, and I despise when those who ought to know better praise
the inclinations of those who would eat them up. Other times, it could
well be democratic, generous, and open: ranging, wild, Louisianan
sniper-fire that makes mincemeat of ordered British regimentation.
But not now.
@Patrick Mc... Halston

Patrick: "But since in actuality few do the editing, the
refinement, the being-fair-to-their-own-material..."
Serious question: How do you know the ratio of people who
are self-critical and realistic to those who are self-
congratulatory and delusional?
Patrick: "...few amongst them actually are literate, really
appreciate what literacy has to offer you OVER dopamine-
rush excitements in whatever form -- whether hurried novel-
writing..."
A regimented writing exercise might be many things, but a
generator of dopamine-rush excitement is not one of them.
Writing eight pages of text per day, even lousy text, still
requires a degree of patience, focus and frustration. The way
you describe it, the writer is sitting there merrily typing away,
going "Wooo hooo! I'm making literature here!" and then
collapsing into a misguided heap of euphoria.
Patrick: "I think it is fair-game here for Laura to insist on
their trying-out a measured bit of library-book light-lifting
instead."
Again with the Fallacy of Mutual Exclusivity. There is no
reason why a person could not both participate in NNWM and
also devote time and effort to reading more. (Obviously that
person would be strapped for time if he tried to do both in
November, but you get my drift.) (Xrandadu Hutman,
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response to post))
@Xrandadu Hutman
Re: "Serious question: How do you know the ratio of people
who are self-critical and realistic to those who are self-
congratulatory and delusional?"
Okay. Honestly. Laura's comment that few in fact do the editing that
they all ostensibly agree is required, is a big tip-off. Also, I don't
believe we are going through a time when any collective effort that
would principally appeal to the self-critical and realistic, is going to
reach mass form. Franzen frowned on Oprah, for good reason; she is
still too much sensation. As mentioned in my post to softdog, I am
thinking of Stewart and Colbert's massing-for-sanity as well.
Re: "A regimented writing exercise might be many things,

but a generator of dopamine-rush excitement is not one of
them. Writing eight pages of text per day, even lousy text,
still requires a degree of patience, focus and frustration.
The way you describe it, the writer is sitting there merrily
typing away, going "Wooo hooo! I'm making literature
here!" and then collapsing into a misguided heap of
euphoria."
Well, there is some play here. But, yeah, I considered this point before
I wrote, but still wrote what I wrote because it smacked more true
than false. Pretty much the entirety of a year-long war can be (largely,
essentially) irrational, primarily dopamine-fueled and sustained,
despite the pin-point shot amidst the errant-fire, the frequent
intermissions, the thereafter General's talk of strategy and tactics; a
one-month slog at a novel is a stretch beyond the evening blur, but to
me, still readily potentially mostly rush. Barbarians used to raid bare-
chested, mostly drunk, sacrificing themselves to their foes; they were
3784
coordinated enough to master running, charging, and axe-slicing, but

they went about their albeit-somewhat-coordinated business in poor
fashion for victory. I know I'm not convincing you with this, but it's
what comes to mind.
Re: "Again with the Fallacy of Mutual Exclusivity. There is

no reason why a person could not both participate in
NNWM and also devote time and effort to reading more.
(Obviously that person would be strapped for time if he
tried to do both in November, but you get my drift.)"
But Laura is saying that something about (the coloring of) this
movement attracts people who in the end DON'T do both, and it may
be true that something of the selling of this movement actually
further UPRAISES those intent on exhaling themselves all over the
rest of us, and DISCOURAGES, wicked step sister-like pushes away,
those into self-recalibration and interested, respectful, other-
attendance.
Do You Really Believe, @Patrick....

... that people who try to write a novel during NaNoWiMo
really need Laura Miller, or you, to "insist" that they "[try] out
a measured bit of library-book light-lifting instead"?
I just don't know who it is you people are talking to. I've never
met anybody involved in this activity who wasn't also an avid
reader. Maybe not during November - but are they really
cheating the literary world if they don't read other people's
book EVERY month of their lives?
This is a way for people to try out writing, rather than just
thinking about it. There are, of course, other ways to try out
writing - but this is a way that a bunch of people seem to enjoy
and get something out of. I have no idea why "real writers"
like you and Laura Miller feel the need to denigrate the effort,
3785
much less "insist" (!) that they do something else instead.

People enjoying themselves, engaging with the written word,
having a sense of accomplishment, maybe getting past some
of their blocks - what a disaster for Real Literature! (Spectrum
Rider)
@Spectrum Rider
A whole novel in a single month, is like a plateful of hotdogs stuffed
into your mouth. If you market book writing as if you're appealing to
the carnival-accomplishment taste of the Doritos crowd, then I think
you should expect for the discerning to shy away, and creatures of
appetite to be all over it!
Like I said, massings can afford safety, and be all about wonderful
productivity and shared fun. A multiplication of but not really
different from the group games that lead Mary Shelley to write
"Frankenstein," and inspired her for the first time to actually feel fully
individuated and self-determined. My experience of groups right now
suggests this isn't much the time for this kind of thing, that just
hearing of collective enterprise should spur on individualists to take
on the mass. Laura I think is intent to take them on -- she wants them
to improve. This makes her different from many of the cruelly and
truly snobbish (e.g. most movie critics who went after fan-boys of
"Inception"), who would produce in their own mind a land full of
stupids even if no such constituted the actual lay of the land.
She's Saying It, @Patrick

"But Laura is saying that something about (the coloring of)
this movement attracts people who in the end DON'T do both,
and it may be true that something of the selling of this
movement actually further UPRAISES those intent on
exhaling themselves all over the rest of us, and
DISCOURAGES, Cinderalla-like pushes away, those into self-
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recalibration and interested, respectful, other-attendence."

Yes, she's saying it. Based on the NNWM people I've know, I
don't believe it. Why do you?
It seems to be an opinion shared by "real" writers and "real"
editors, but not by the folks on the ground here. I think it's
sheer snobbishness. Those foolish jerks who THINK they can
write a novel - they simply MUST be spoiling it for the rest of
us! (Spectrum Rider)
*
@McEvoy-Halston
"we could have a whole population efforting to write their first
novel"
I'll read your criticism when your literacy and writing skills
improve to the point that it's beyond babbling incoherence.
And "efforting?" SERIOUSLY??? (Discoursarian)
*
Patrick: "Laura is saying that something about (the coloring
of) this movement attracts people who in the end DON'T do
both, and it may be true that something of the selling of this
movement actually further UPRAISES those intent on
exhaling themselves all over the rest of us, and
DISCOURAGES, Cinderalla-like pushes away, those into self-
recalibration and interested, respectful, other-attendence."
I realize that's what Laura is saying; what I don't see is any
proof of it. Upraises how? Discourages how? The way I see it,
if people are encouraged to write, and to connect with each
other over their writing, then a likely by-product is that they
will also be reading each other's works. I would also think that
the experience of writing a whole novel would bring a fresh
perspective to the act of reading.
I just don't understand the very idea of Laura Miller knocking
3787
what is essentially a program to encourage people's

imaginations and creativity. She's supposed to be a person
with an appreciation for the act of creativity, yet here she is
taking a dump on those who would have the gall to participate
in the creative process. It seems entirely wrongheaded to me,
and I feel like it is, in itself, an article gimmick (the idea being
that more people will click on a negative story than a positive
one) rather than a genuine sentiment.
Like I said, imagine a film lover telling people they're foolish
for participating in the 48-Hour Film Project.
Or imagine a music critic scoffing at a program that
encourages bands to write and record songs, because the
critic thinks "The last thing the world needs is another album"
and "A lot of those bands probably won't do the hard work of
remixing their recordings." (Xrandadu Hutman)
Xrandadu
Re: "Like I said, imagine a film lover telling people they're
foolish for participating in the 48-Hour Film Project.
Or imagine a music critic scoffing at a program that
encourages bands to write and record songs, because the
critic thinks "The last thing the world needs is another
album" and "A lot of those bands probably won't do the
hard work of remixing their recordings."
I do not believe that Laura is telling people to desist mostly because

she sighs that the last thing the world needs is yet another novel-
writer; she does so because she believes / senses / knows that the last
thing these would-be novelists need is another avenue to extend their
indulgent selves. Rather, if they are up to the truly considerable and
self-and-other-benefiting enterprise, she believes they should first
broaden their range through the compare-and-contrast of literature,
become more self-aware, profound, interesting, and then launch at us
3788
-- at whatever speed -- something perhaps unrefined but obviously

considerable that might take us aback, drives us some place
unfamiliar most everyone interesting will at least consider exploring.
If I was noting from 48-Hour Film Projects that the produced work is
not really working to deepen film-makers, and in fact was cooperating
in making thin novices feel that their high from manic self-exertion /
enterprise and "I made a film!" exhilaration, also really comes from
their having demonstrated that they are such quick-learners, so
foruitously constituted, that they have moved beyond the patient,
slow learning ostensibly necessarily required for true
accomplishment, then I would alert them to the fact that Deweyite
"learning through action" true wisdom is clearly failing, at least for
them, that they're going to have to learn to appreciate extending
themselves on turf that will provide them with less pleasing, more
confounding, resistance. If I noticed otherwise, that these projects
were working not just to extend their abilities but deepen what they
have to offer, then I might even discourage them from too much
attendance to what others have come up with, and attack those who
would school down their efforts through calls for a more disciplined,
restrained, approach.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: "I do not believe that Laura is
telling people to desist mostly because she sighs that the last
thing the world needs is yet another novel-writer..."
That is explicitly what she said. In any case, I'm not sure what
is to be benefited from doing guesswork as to Laura Miller's
motives.
Patrick: "she does so because she believes / senses / knows

that the last thing these would-be novelists need is another
avenue to extend their indulgent selves."
3789
Another avenue in addition to what? Are there a bunch of

other write-a-novel-in-a-month programs out there?
Patrick: "she believes they should first broaden their range

through the compare-and-contrast of literature"
I see you're doubling down on the Fallacy of Mutual

Exclusivity.
Patrick: "If I was noting from 48-Hour Film Projects that the
produced work is not really working to deepen film-makers"
The point of the project, nor of the NNWM, is about the

creative process. The NNWM program materials make it very
clear that for the purposes of this exercise, they favor quantity
over quality. Obviously, the NNWM creators know full well
the limitations that come with that approach, and, let me
repeat this for about the fifth time: They aren't claiming
people are going to end up with ready-to-publish works.
Patrick: "...and in fact was cooperating in making thin-novices

feel that their high...also really comes from their having
demonstrated that they are such quick-learners, so foruitously
constituted, that they have moved beyond the patient, slow
learning ostensibly necessarily required for true
accomplishment..."
Wow, you really labored to come up with that mashed-

potatoes pile of assumptions, didn't you? That's practically a
miniature Devil's Tower of Worst Case Scenario.
Sorry, but with everybody making hot dog metaphors, I can't
help but join in with some potatoes. (Xrandadu Hutman)
*
3790
@Lary Crews
I bet you had to walk to school in snow up to your chest,
uphill, both ways, too!
Eh, different people are different. Anyone who doesn't
understand that is not human enough to be the kind of writer
I would want to read. Some people need a push, or a
challenge, or some way to turn off those nagging voices in
their heads.
Whatever works. NaNoWriMo works for some.
To you, and Laura and Patrick - get over yourselves. You're
not that special. (khalleron)
khalleron
You believe it's hard to get writing, and that NaNoWriMo is about
challenging, prompting, cajoling / aggravating people to finally get
doing what they've always wanted to do. It's a much-needed /
appreciated agitant, not some facile enabler: it's actually working to
bring people a bit closer to where Laura would hope they become, and
it could only be out of still-haughty ignorance that some good person
like her could disparage it. Some of us see the situation differently,
sense the movement is somehow mostly about gathering,
aggrandizing, authoratizing mass "preferences" (your brave extension
is for us a sighted effort of significant overlay we are no so stupid as to
dismiss), and hope some people out there in some credible position to
do so will insist on doing the soon truly dangerous but intrinsically
kind / hopeful, and prompt, aggravate, members of the forming
assemble so that it settles less readily / assuredly into something that
would block from consideration what is clear-seeing, en potentia --
sane.
When Stephanie Zacharek insisted in her review of "Inception" that
Nolan is no Hitchcock, she wasn't just being smug; she was trying to
be fair to her informed sense of what is truly right, and be helpful. She
3791
sensed the encroachment, the false substitution, and knew it was

ultimately instigated out of a need to do the required to block from
view authorities that still "stand" that complicate efforts towards
uncontested group-think, that could disturb one or another from
trance, and played to whatever part exists in those who are
succumbing that has been drawn previously to what she has to say, in
hopes of keeping that much more sanity "in play."
Laura is doing the same thing here. If you like what Laura has to say
before this, please know for sure that if she met more of you, caught
better sight of how much you actually do read, actually participated in
the event, and read more of your produced work, she wouldn't think
any different. You honestly think you want to "acquaint" her, but
don't realize just how much you would rather more have her
succumb. (The instant Laura stood amongst you, you'd know the
issue is how to break her -- she will not cooperate, "friend.") We know
you're about the modest, the smallest pretense, claiming only the
tiniest of space and most modest portion of our time, but we sense
something in the nature of the time we live in that tells us you're
actually already probably at some level aware you're going to be
carried along to trample all over us. You think elites like Laura are the
ones with power -- and right now you'd prefer to never think different
-- but power now really belongs in those who would abstain from
being interesting and would orient the elite to be less true counter
and more an assumed part of the story. The most sane and good
"about town," won't go down without a fight, for both your and our
sakes. Franzen obliged Oprah, and "Freedom" was his proof of
submission; his friend, Laura, liked his book but was irked by its
terminating capitulation, and stands still, trying to not let you down.
@Patrick
Oh, did I hit a nerve?
Good.
I love puncturing pomposity, it's my fourth or fifth favorite
3792
pastime.
Boo! (khalleron)
-----
Why not...
As a published writer, NaNoWriMo interested me. I have
previously only written poetry, and if there's anything that
sells fewer copies than fiction, it's poetry. In fact, fewer poetry
books are actually read, purchased, or stolen than any other
genre. I applaud anyone who picks up a book of poetry and
actually reads it. (Windebygirl)
*
Everyone's entitled to an opinion
I'm am an independent author who'd never written anything
longer than a short story before learning of NaNoWriMo back
in 2007. (Gldrummond)
*
Respectfully, you missed the point

Laura,
I found your piece and read it thoughtfully. I completely
understand your point of view and agree that you make some
fine points when speaking in generalities.
However, NaNoWriMo's contribution to art and letters is not
about the hundred thousand participants who never finish
their novel. Nor is it about the thousands more who fail to
properly set the first draft aside, move on to another project
to reinforce the habit of writing each day, and later return to
the initial manuscript for an honest and thorough rewrite.
NaNoWriMo, in my opinion, isn't even entirely for the
hundreds of writers who *will* follow the proper steps,
perform the due diligence and just fall short on the talent
3793
curve.
NaNoWriMo, in my opinion, is for two kinds of people: buried
treasures and lifelong readers eager to try their hand at
creating what they have so voraciously consumed. (Statesboro
blues)
*
It was about two weeks when I read Andrew O'Herir's (a

writer whom I've enjoyed a great deal) review of the newly-
released "Secretariat".
Between the gratuitous references to "burning crosses",
etcetera?...I reacted by writing a letter (the tone of which was
a mix of irritation and disappointment) in which I basically
asked why in the world O'Herir was suddenly writing such
transparently "click inducing" (as in most of the bait offered
by "Broadsheet") crap.
It just occurred to me (and, yes, Otherwise-Unengaged Me
has come back, this morning, to this letter thread)...Oh?..has
someone told Miller (whose work has always been duly
appreciated, without raising any sort of ruckus) that she
needs to write something that GETS MORE CLICKS!!!!!!
I think it was just last week that I wondered why she was
suddenly (and this is a cheap, obvious gimmick that's simply
become all-too-common on Salon) asking "What fictional
characters would YOU equip with modern
technology?....WRITE IN AND TELL US WHAT YOU
WOULD DO!!!!!!! We'll look forward to seeing your responses
on Salon.com!!!!!".
I read that (and I've obviously paraphrased it) and was
instantly reminded of the recent time when I heard that a
previously very-fine program produced by our local NPR
affiliate was going to be IMPROVED (!) by adding "listener
call-in, requests, and audience INTERACTION!!!!". (David
Terry, aka Dterrydraw)
3794
What a cow!
Ms Miller,
You are an arrogant (insert ugly word of your choice).
You don't sell well and perhaps you need to read something
along the type of books you write: Article Writing for
Dummies. (Anya Khan)
You're entitled to your opinion...

But we all know what opinion's and diapers have in
common.... And well here's mine...(rasplundjr)
*
You are missing the point of NaNoWriMo

Laura,
I think you misunderstand both the purpose of NaNoWriMo
and the novel writing process.
NaNoWriMo does not claim that you will have a
*publishable* novel by the end of the month, nor does it claim
that you should send your NaNo novel off to agents. NaNo is
about getting words down on paper. I had to write 3,000
pages of crap to get to my 324-page (published by Simon &
Schuster) novel. (Dorothy hearst)
*
Poor woman wasn't a winner.

I suspect Ms. Miller attempted NaNoWriMo and failed. No
one could possibly be this worked up over something that
others do for fun without having personal experience with it.
Lol (BlueBKLYN)
*
Disappointing
3795
Another published novelist here -- in about 10 countries, with

fiction nominated for major awards and, to top it off, a Ph.D.
and publications in VOGUE, NY TIMES, and many other
prestigious markets. Am I good enough to address you, Ms.
Miller? (Greeneyedkzin)
*
more than just writing

I have always loved reading Laura Miller's defense of readers,
and as someone who works in publishing I understand the
"don't flood the market with schlock you were encouraged to
write badly" message. But I think this time she's missed the
mark by focusing on what NaNoWriMo sometimes produces
(overeager novelists unwilling to revise) instead of what the
process provides. (meganlyn)
When someone's shown she no longer need be considered

Well, the whole spectrum has shown up to inform Laura she doesn't
know what she's talking about. Not just spurned participants, that is,
but well-published authors who've never tried the thing, as well as
editors who know slush-pile better than Laura does -- even of picky-
picky literary journals. Heck, even the voice of all that is generous,
patient, allowing, reluctant, restrained, thoughtful and considering --
David "draw" Terry -- has decided he must show up to let Laura know
she's maybe having a bit of an off-day with this one. David does all his
modesty and fairness in a way which probably makes more than just
me feel as if he's being wide-stanced into a corner while listening to
this most 'greeable of personages, but, overall, we're still though,
comfortably all-agreed: Laura is so beyond-all-evidence off on this
thing it may not even be unfair to start considering if she IS actually
lessening into a witch, an isolated cretin whose crime though is not
just ignorance but greedy jealousy, who figures some score that no
other than she is aware of will be settled if she collects together some
3796
large share of clicks from out of other people's misery.

But is it possible for representatives of every position to "convene,"
representing the entirety of everything at-all possible to be
considered, and yet for it still to amount to a collective assembled to
keep out anything dissonant that does exist and that would provoke it
out of a drama it's drifting into and that JUST MUST be lived out?
Well, yes, it is. During the Great Depression, for instance. For a few
years at the commencement there were pot-shots taken at the
struggling / trying, but very soon everyone was agreed -- the
astonishingly literate and completely illiterate, the earnest and wise-
cracking: all -- that the people are as they are being presented here,
decent "folk" with no pretensions, giving it their best shot, doing the
intrinsically American and just trying to make something more of
themselves and of their lives, and only the hugest ass would know
them different. The few people who "objected," who argued, no, these
people are shrunk, lacking in sustenance, personality -- requiring not
a voice at the table but some beginning of a differentiated voice at-all
worth hearing -- hardly existed, and when present, hardly known,
gaining larger recognition only 30-years on, after the war, with the
beginning of a new era-long period where everything that was known
for sure could finally be seen in a different light, and be reevaluated.
As Morris Dickstein recently said of Nathaniel West, who saw in the
folk simply still the "drained-out" mass, he "would paint their fury
with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power and aware that
they had it in them to destroy civilization." Laura IS civitas. If people
like her succumb, soften their stance, see your point-of-view and try
in the future to be fairer to you, it's going to naught but prescribed
agreement the rest of the way on. If this isn't your thing, you're going
to have to learn to take solace with that maybe subsequent generation
who might better recall you, while you're removed from today's hot-
seat back to the corner playing solitaire.
3797
The 60s, or 30s?

One final admission. The 1960s was not a time for restrained,
discerning readers (maybe not even for readers, so much more was it
into rock 'n roll, community life, and your own take); it was more
about letting out the previously contained / denied, the irrational, the
not-tried-out, than it was about the 2nd, 3rd, 4th careful re-edit. The
old T. S. Eliotian trinity of irony, ambiguity, paradox was being
challenged by a favoring of spirit and appetite, and the old guard
could only lament how even their best pupils were drifting away from
"profound and carefully organized" writing toward the "hopped-up"
and way-too-insufficiently considered (Dickstein, "Gates of Eden").
And it wasn't as it is now an elite Brooklyn/Berkeley control, but
funneling out of every variant nobody corner of the land. Any piece,
however inarticulate, that spoke your truth, was better than the
mountain-castle of learned but repressed naysayers, hiding. You had
at least begun, whereas their whole effort was about telling people not
to.
And the 60s was the best decade known to wo/man.
So if you think NaMoWrMo is mostly about recognizing, encouraging,
developing the at-least possibly beautiful that is so often contained by
intolerant, self-protecting elites -- your creativity, for instance -- look
back to the 60s: you've got ammo on your side that might balk back
arguments that you're not reading enough, or that you're not reading
the right type, or that you may be reading the right type but not in the
right way, without any recourse to proof of contra; for all the same
was said of even the intellectuals of the 60s, and who now looks to
Trilling as Ginsberg's master/better?
But if we're heading into another 30s / 40s, then understand that you
aren't going to prove true Romantics, together, urging on your own
voice / creativity, but a gobbling, intolerant horde -- the most
profoundly societal-inhibiting / repressive / scolding / all-
determining force; the soon-to-be-in Laura's ostensible place -- and
you'll be making sure that the few people like she who is not
dismayed, find no respected vehicle for their voice to be heard.
3798
Link: Better yet, DON’T read that novel (Salon)
----------
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2010

Absorption / Deflection
"In modern democratic nations, we usually don't actually kill our

leaders; we periodically throw them out of office and replace them
with revitalized substitutes. But the decline in potency of the leader,
his inexorable abandonment of us as we grow still is felt today. This is
because the leader is a less a figure of authority than he is a delegate,
someone who tells us to do what we tell him we want done, someone
who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated
alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without
collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the
leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they
can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him.
In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are
regularly sacrificed when the leader is under attack." (Llooyd
DeMause, Psychogenic Theory of History)
Is is possible that Jon Stewart and his gathering crowd are attempting
to serve as "filth men," in the way Lloyd describes? Jon Stewart has
Obama on his show to cement the link, and then gathers his crowd in
Washington to intercept / counter poisonous feelings ("insanity")
directed at him (Obama) during this unnerving midterm election.
Obama, we know, is losing Rahm, and for the most part seems more
"naked" than he does at other times (casual self in "supplicant" /
lower position on "Daily Show"). Tea Partiers will get their place;
they will find office at a time when Obama is less potent than he will
3799
likely at some point once again become; but a considerable body has
manifested itself near the same time in Washington that shows it
exists to absorb / counter some / much of the hatred that Obama
might
for the moment be imagined as not quite being able to handle without
"collapsing."
Different thought: We know that after long periods of growth, when
we're about to enter that horrifying stretch of time that follows
manic growth, the termination of the historical cycle, we're all
inclined to merge back with the engulfing mother and sacrifice
substitutes of ourselves to Her.
Is this move into government, in near proximity to socialist /
engulfing Obama, means for the Tea Party movement to in fact
become
part of Her (Obama as agent of Mother) (something Jon Stewart is
also
doing, and perhaps ultimately for the same reason, in his own
massing
on Washington)? Should we expect them to function as Gingrich et al.
once did and continuously oppose the president? Or will they at some
point -- after he has suffered and endured their anger, accepted their
presence within government -- essentially serve as extensions of him,
and cripple -- believe it or not -- other righteous "crazies"? Should
we expect Tea Partiers to in fact quickly become denatured -- offering
up their own potency to Obama, perhaps -- a non-story, and begin its
own Obama-lead crackdown on people who behave pretty much
exactly like
they did (excited, angry, claiming) before their ascension to
Washington?
Last thought: If Obama is Hoover -- someone elected principally to
ensure the Depression, and not "lead" our way through it -- he will
never become more present, less distant, in our lives. This will fall
on our subsequent delegate. From the beginning I remember Pat
Buchanan saying that Obama doesn't speak with heart; maybe rather
3800
than
a messiah, we rejoiced in the erection of a thoroughly / already
known,
pretty place-holder, which would content / assure us as we isolate
ourselves and slowly succumb to the psychological modifications that
would drift us towards a simpler, more emotive, less complicated
leader. As is obvious, I'm not sure of what exactly we truly wish of
him, just yet.
Patrick
-----
Amendment:
Concerning my last thought: It may be that what we need time for
isn't just to slip into a more disassociated state, but to make a
forthcoming long Depression, extensive sacrifice, less guilt-arousing,
something we may in fact be doing by the likes of the apparent
scholarly return to / redemption of "culture of poverty" thinking,
which -- as it suggests government is limited in what it can do to
change people, and has historically been used to effectively
stigmatize the poor as being largely responsible for their own debased
condition -- works against the efforts of near-undeniably, wholly-
conscious, good people like Paul Krugman to make us feel like some
foul part of us must actually want sacrifices to not now allow the
spending we know from history would have prevented the Great
Depression from ever occurring in the first place.
Patrick
-----
Further thought: If a Depression was ensured during time of a

Democratic president and congress, this might prove far too guilt-
arousing for actual-sacrifice-wishing liberals to take, even if they had
already begun to make poverty a near-"natural," deply-ingrained
"condition," via the resurrection of culture of poverty theories. A
Republican-lead congress would abate all guilt, entire. "We were just
3801
18-months in, and were prevented from the further progress we

would surely have effected!"
My sense of most liberals now, is that they would feel very
uncomfortable if they actually were able to forestall the depression
and initiate a period of unrepentant, all-benefiting growth.
Reason: Mother looms, and is ready to destroy any show of an
unwillingness to just go along with the curtailment of individuality.
What they want is the guaranteed depression, guaranteed sacrifices,
then -- like they did in the last great depression -- to join the
masses, imagining them not now as "crazies" but as the
unjustly suffering -- the folk. I feel the compulsion toward this
narrative is
very powerful, and hope that there are enough of the advanced
psychoclass out there to show that very visibly, some liberals have
now almost entirely escaped the need to shift from being innovative
thinkers to being depressed ones. Who wants to wait for the
termination of a ten-year depression, and some giant war, for liberals
to once again show their stuff? Show instead that instead of being
incarcerated, rendered invisible, this generation of the more evolved
can frustrate the grotesque compulsions of the regressing middle.
Krugman has escaped, and believes Republicans could thwart
Democratic
wishes. As I have been suggesting, it is possible that Krugman is in
error about the desires of Democrats, and mistakes for sure conflict
what might end up proving -- complicity. If so, use this to find your
own, Krugman, not abandon all in astonishment and disgust.
Patrick
Link: "Deflection and / or absorption" (realpsychohistory, 30 October
2010)
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2010

The Stewart and Colbert Purity Crusade
3802
Many of you probably watched the famous Jon Stewart "smackdown"

of -- in particular -- Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. I knew then that the
primary crime Tucker was guilty of was possessing too much
personality (his punchy bow-tie, pink shirts, buoyant, boyish hair),
self-determination / initiative (he is famous for being the ostensible
conservative who did the non-permissable, the treasonous, in
accurately reporting the extent of Bush's "potty-mouth.") at a time
when Stewart's accrued fame and true power had accumulated to the
point where his maternal alter would hereafter determine his course,
telling him to activate to suppress / destroy those who most closely
represent his own desire for full autonomy / actualization and
satisfaction.
Stewart and Colbert still now strike me as the type liberals will look
to to ensure a guilt-free purity crusade. Ostensibly, what they
champion is sanity, reasoned discourse, but what they are against is
uncurbed personality, individuation, show that you still respect /
value (are reluctant to denigrate) that part of you that still aims to
make your own particular mark on the world (Colbert's "I AM
AMERICA"): they want denatured, reasoned neuters reporting both
sides
of the news, becalmed not from being reasonable but for being in
denial of agitating emotions, for being wholly in sync with the needs
of the purity crusade -- for the pervasiveness of this type, and its
successful idealization, will show Mother that the kind of self-
attendance (mother-neglect) that leads to personality has been
throughly repudiated from the public scene.
The following DeMause quotes are playing on my mind (taken from
"War
as Righteous Rape"). From them, I am alert to think of non-pejorative
forms of our desires that people like Stewart and Colbert are blasting
in their call for sanity. Along with genuine lack of reasoning (as
we see every time Stewart showcases any of the genuinely always-
unreasoning FOX News types), we will see grouped its actual
3803
opposite:
the impassioned fight to resist obfuscation, curtailment of truth,
flight from sanity toward group disassociation, we consistently find
with the likes of Joan Walsh and Chris Matthews (two liberals who
have
showcased as insane -- or at least as talking insanely -- by
Stewart). As I have suggested elsewhere, I have no doubt that
Krugman will be targeted by liberal "reasonables" as amongst the
clearly unreasonable. They have to (go after him), for he has too
strong a claim on being reasonable right now himself -- on defining
what it is to be reasonable in our current era -- and yet so
strongly and genuinely opposes the sort of personality-killing
depression / suppression most liberals are increasingly drawn to
near openly insist upon. It's risky, because disposing him
(considerably) arouses
the spectre of undeniable guilt -- of feeling impure, fraudulent,
intrinsically hypocritical. So when they close in on him,
psychohistorians have to be prepared to remind them throughout
their
efforts of deposition that the only way HE could now be the one they
target is if THEY are in fact the ones behaving irrationally, crazily
-- scrutiny-worthy. That is, their upcoming attack on Krugman will in
my judgment be our best means of playing to the part of liberals that
may yet resist this strong pull towards ensuring the depressive end to
this historical cycle (of seeing huge crimes against people). It can
be used to draw some back to sanity, and keep some part of our age
still innovation-prone, genuinely aspiring and happy, despite the
clawing, claiming efforts of the regressive-prone.
Patrick
DeMause quotes:
1) If there ever were a society where parents really helped their
children to individuate, it would be a society without growth panics,
without engulfment fears and without delusional enemies. The enemy
3804
is
a poison container for groups failing to grapple with the problems of
an emerging self. The enemy therefore inherits the imagery of their
growth panic, so the enemy is usually described in terms of our
childhood desires for growth. "They" (for instance, Jews) are
imagined
to be guilty of the pejorative form of every one of our desires:
"greed" (all our wants); "lust" (our sexual desire); "pushiness" (our
striving) and so on. It isn't even necessary that the enemy really
exist. Simple societies imagine that witches, ancestors and spirits
are relentlessly persecuting enemies, and some nations-including
Japan
today-can even imagine Jews as bloodsucking national enemies when
there are virtually no Jews in their country.
2) In fact, nations enter into depressions because they feel
persecuted for their prosperity and individuation by what Jungians
have termed the "Dragon Mother"--the needy, "devouring mother of
infancy...who cannot let her children go because she needs them for
her own psychic survival." Weston has found anorexics in particular
are dominated by fantasies of persecution by the Dragon Mother, who
"gives her child the impossible task of filling her ‘limitless void'''
so the child fears being "eaten alive." To prevent this, when these
children grow up and try to individuate, they refuse to eat so they
won't have any flesh on them for the Dragon Mother to devour.
Economic
depressions evidence similar group-fantasies of devouring mommies;
they are "economic anorexias" where nations inflict economic wounds
upon themselves to limit consumption, become "all bones" and not
tempt
the devouring Dragon Mother. Banks, in particular, are often pictured
as greedy dragons. For instance, President Jackson imagined the
Bank
of the United States was what he called the "Mother Bank" that by
issuing paper money was a "bad mother dominating her children"
3805
who had
to be stopped before the nation was eaten up, and so conducted a "kill
the Great Monster" campaign that would "strangle the many-headed
hydra" and kill it. Needless to say, his success in "crushing the
Mother Bank dragon" led to an economic downturn.
Link: The Stewart and Colbert Purity Crusade (realpsychohistory)
Evidence
The U.K. has cut back expenses hugely and fired millions.
It will certainly go into a major Depression. As Tony Blair
said when asked why he hit his one-year-old baby: "You
have to discipline them!"
Lloyd ("U.K. Cuts Back Gov't Expenses,"
realpsychohistory, 21 Oct. 2010)
-----
The U.K has unveiled a new National Security Strategy

this week --- mostly about cuts in defense spending, and
making sure that future efforts are tied to specific
national interests and defense goals. It seems hard to
argue with this. The U.S. needs to do the same thing.
-------Jim (response to post)
-----
You may all have read it already, but here's Paul Krugman on the
cutbacks:
Both the new British budget announced on Wednesday

and the rhetoric
that accompanied the announcement might have come
3806
straight from the

desk of Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary who told
President
Herbert Hoover to fight the Depression by liquidating the
farmers,
liquidating the workers, and driving down wages. Or if
you prefer more
British precedents, it echoes the Snowden budget of 1931,
which tried
to restore confidence but ended up deepening the
economic crisis.
The British government’s plan is bold, say the pundits —
and so it is.
But it boldly goes in exactly the wrong direction. It would
cut
government employment by 490,000 workers — the
equivalent of almost
three million layoffs in the United States — at a time when
the
private sector is in no position to provide alternative
employment. It
would slash spending at a time when private demand isn’t
at all ready
to take up the slack.
Why is the British government doing this? The real reason
has a lot to
do with ideology: the Tories are using the deficit as an
excuse to
downsize the welfare state. But the official rationale is
that there
is no alternative.
Indeed, there has been a noticeable change in the rhetoric
of the
government of Prime Minister David Cameron over the
3807
past few weeks — a

shift from hope to fear. In his speech announcing the
budget plan,
George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, seemed
to have given
up on the confidence fairy — that is, on claims that the
plan would
have positive effects on employment and growth.
Instead, it was all about the apocalypse looming if Britain
failed to
go down this route. Never mind that British debt as a
percentage of
national income is actually below its historical average;
never mind
that British interest rates stayed low even as the nation ’s
budget
deficit soared, reflecting the belief of investors that the
country
can and will get its finances under control. Britain,
declared Mr.
Osborne, was on the “brink of bankruptcy.” ("British
Fashion Victims," NYT, 22 October 2010)
-----
Krugman certainly gives a needed point of view, an

important counterpoint to the cracker-barrel economics
still taught and believed by, presumably, most people in
the world (or at least America) that are paying attention
at all.
However, whenever I read his work --- and I do enjoy it
--- I am usually struck by the observation that he
conveniently leaves off an essential part of his neo-
Keynesian argument.
3808
That point is that the reason the U.S. can get away with
heavy deficits, and heavier trade deficits, is because of our
military control of MidEast oil. As long as this remains in
effect, the excess dollars can be exported overseas and
other countries, particularly China and Japan, are
obliged to accept them -- as OPEC oil is sold for dollars.
Thus those excess dollars
can be buried in the desert sand, i.e., recycled by Arab
elites into Dubai skyscrapers or Saudi Rolls Royces, or
sent more directly back to the U.S. in purchase of low
interest Government notes and bonds, and high priced
U.S. stocks.
The U.S. military control of the oceans is a key part of
this. If China were to get too horsey about accepting the
diminishing-value US dollars, the U.S. Navy could shut off
China's oil supply at will. This may sound drastic, but the
step was actually carried out, very successfully against
Japan (before Pearl Harbor!), and has been hinted at as
recently as this year in the currency disputes between the
countries.
There are a couple of problems with continuation of this
neocon wet dream, of course. One is the possibility that
U.S. deficits and debt hit a tipping point, where the dollar
actually collapses. contemporary Kondratiev wave theory
would suggest (according to some professional
interpreters) that the hyperinflation danger is still at least
a couple of decades away. The other challenge is the
mysterious potential that MidEast Oil depletion takes
effect sooner rather than later. When/if this occurs, the
grand strategy of the U.S. will have the rug pulled out
from under it.
Oh yes ... I do recall that this discussion is about the U.K.
But the U.K. banking system is joined at the hip with the
U.S., as are its petrol industry and military affairs. Thus,
3809
it should be OK, economically, as long as the U.S.

dominance holds out.
In theory, alternative or renewable energy sources could
also affect the world balance of power, but none of these
appears to be close to unseating petroleum at the present
time.
--------Jim
-----
James, Krugman is the only advanced psychoclass (or at least very

near) economist I'm aware of; as such he doesn't for me so much offer
a "counterpoint" as he does the main-line argument. leave it to the
regressing others to chip in / at, here and there.
Brits wouldn't continue to get away (naughty! naughty!) with heavy
deficits if they could: those in charge are right now responding to
the overall desire for a depression to be ensured through tight-money
policies. If the Brits were in a wholly different mood, even if it
wasn't through borrowing, they'd find some way to make sure they
didn't waste away a whole generation in a 20-year-long chill.
Patrick
-----
Patrick, this reasoning is totally circular. Unless you have

access to information about the early childhoods of
Krugman and other economists, then you are simply NOT
permitted to make assumptions about psychoclass based
solely upon observations of the adult.
What you have done (not the first on this list to commit
this error, BTW) is to start with a theory that less coercive
childrearing leads to some desirable personality outcomes
for adults, and then turned its on its head by asserting
that anyone you agree with must have had such a
3810
childhood. This is the logical fallacy of circular reasoning,

and is actually vacuous of meaningful content.
Not to mention that my discussion was about the role of
geopolitics in the world's economic reality, not about
political leanings of Krugman or anyone else.
-------Jim
-----
Re: Unless you have access to information about the early childhoods
of Krugman and other economists, then you are simply NOT
permitted to make assumptions about psychoclass based solely upon
observations of the adult.
(James, if I'm not sane, don't bother reading what I've uncovered
about someone's childhood. If I'm sane, focus on what I've observed
from sheer experience of the living presence of the thing. Circular,
square, linear -- whatever; it's true.)
We of the advanced psychoclass recognize one another. There is
warmth
and sanity in Krugman, chill or at least repression in most others
(i.e., "crazyness"). From the adult formation, you know the origins.
I do. You can't win an argument with someone who wants to convince
you that Obama, for example, is high psychoclass through their
studious digging-away at his childhood, because these people are
intent to make what is so readily before you for assessment ("I'm
right here, guys -- on friggin' Oprah, for heaven's sakes. No
historical figure, me") something to be trumped by what they feel they
are in position to put a smothering control on. When Lloyd was in
mood to convince us that Obama is well loved -- capital "P" progress
-- you couldn't counter by showing how evidently uncomfortable he
was
sitting beside Hillary during the campaign (he always seemed to turn
away from her, drawing back from her maternal thighs; a boy who
3811
knew
what it was to cower before mama -- and often) -- that is, by pointing
at the obvious -- you couldn't effectively counter at all, because he
oriented on a particular uncovering of his childhood as "true proof,"
one he could count on (with he himself being silent on this one) being
defended as unassailable not merely by the here-and-there Obama-
rejoicing psychohistorians, not merely by the wall of the type of
timid liberal historians he has spend a lifetime lampooning and being
lampooned by, but by the Historical Enterprise itself. "What is your
lone opinion, intuition, against this mass of adult, authoritative
research and evidence, young man?" ("But sir, if I can't read him
well now, what makes you think I'll focus well on what is offered up
from his childhood past?" "Does anything you've ever written say
different?") This was Lloyd of recent past, as he leveraged History
in its sense as the most conservative and repressive of studies, as an
abode of monastic, professional stewardship / control, as he smacked
of everything he has spent a lifetime lashing out at.
On a related note. One of the great things about psychohistory is how
wonderfully hippie anti-authoritarian it can be. Some Phd launches at
you with tombs of research, and contends that you can't even begin
until you plumbed somewhere near equal. The advanced-psychoclass
lounger responds by lamenting that the Phd didn't spend all that time
in nurturing therapy so s/he could have commenced the whole
enterprise in a spirit closer approximating sanity ("In short, I'm not
really quite sure you've even begun, sir." "That is, it's probably on
the mark to say that once I begin sentence one, I'm already ahead of
your library of time with the thing.").
Patrick
-----
Patrick said "We of the advanced psychoclass recognize

one another. There
is warmth
3812
and sanity in Krugman, chill or at least repression in most

others
(i.e., "crazyness"). "
Problem is, every one knows that they're right. Good luck
finding some one
who really believes that they are crazy, wrong and out of
touch. These
crazy, chilling, repressed folks you mention know, like
you, that they are
correct. Why, they can just *feel it*.
Rachel
-----
With my sense of (at least current times) America, Rachel, I'd have
been more convinced if you'd argued that most everyone deep-down
thinks they're shit, that they probably don't deserve to be happy
(they've got their maternal alters to thank for that), only that hippie-
types who hope they might be / deserve otherwise, and the poor and
vulnerable who publicly demonstrate their very own shameworthy
neediness and dependency, are so much more rotten than they are.
Once on crusade against them, in service of the Maternal rather than
to themselves ... yeah, they might own up to feeling pretty righteous,
I'll grant you that. But in reality these monsters are FEEDING, not
feeling -- that's what their would-be food, us hippie-type,
emotionally-healthy, advanced-class hipsters do. You know it.
Patrick
-----
Patrick said, "I'd have

been more convinced if you'd argued that most everyone
deep-down
thinks they're shit, that they probably don't deserve to be
3813
happy"
Well, yes. But now you seem to be suggesting that low self
regard can't
exist with an inflated self image in the same person, or
that this has
something to do with being convinced of a certain
worldview - any world
view. The point stands: everybody thinks they're right.
The person with
low or no self regard has still convinved themselves.
Otherwise, they
wouldn't have the beliefs or think the thoughts that they
do.
This is veering into philosophy 101. Sturges, I think, was
pointing out,
not so gently, that you were skipping the most important
steps and assuming
too much. That somehow, a group called They has this
problem called not
being self aware enough, but you don't need to be.
Because you're right.
No big deal as this is a mistake we all make, maybe the
easiest one to make
- and I would guess, the main reason this particular
online group exists.
-----
re: Problem is, every one knows that they're right. Good luck
finding some one who really believes that they are crazy, wrong and
out of touch.
These crazy, chilling, repressed folks you mention know, like you, that
they
are correct. Why, they can just *feel it*.
3814
It is possible to read this, Rachel, and actually think you're talking

most here about how right they feel ABOUT THEMSELVES -- not
their
opinions, their take on the world -- about how they deep-down,
ESSENTIALLY, think about themselves as human beings -- are they
crazy? wrong? out of touch? So I don't think they do, in this sense,
know themselves to be "correct," or "right," in the sense that "chill"
people like me do. If you feel yourself to be right as a human
being, to deserve to live an uninhibited, happy life, I don't think
you're likely to be one of the crazy, repressed folks I mentioned.
This is mostly why I answered you the way I did.
James was saying that I was skipping the most important part. I know
that (he thought that), and it's probably why in the next post I
jumped right to it: with psychohistory, it's not about the argument
anymore; it's about your state of well being. James's point that with
psychohistory you can't infer backwards (which is dubious, or at least
very, very complicated, to me) is not something I got into, because to
mind instantly I knew that this whole thing isn't so much about
knowing more, but about caring / feeling more. The more advanced
psychoclass is able to, and cares now to, see the abundant cruelty,
insanities, that previous generations, more regressed people, could
not see, despite it being everywhere before them. Members of such a
psychoclass can't be convinced that to convince what they need is
more information, or different sources, not just because they just
know they've already got plenty before them of a kind that "proves the
point" (If Jimmie Carter listens well, respecting you, respecting your
point, but never deferingly / self-diminishingly; if Paul Krugman
talks with charm and style but also with deep concern and serious
intent; if Jim Henson reaches out in ways that make it no surprise
that beyond a generation have through their encounter with him felt
more worthy of being loved; and you see / sense all this, you just
want to laugh when someone feels this isn't what you should be
3815
pointing at to prove how a person is constituted [i.e., their

psychoclass]), but because they know the problem before them isn't
really evidence -- it's the inability, disinclination, of the person
you are talking to see the obvious. I know I'm not going to convince
by digging at childhoods "here" (which to me was foremost here who
Obama
is now as a person, not how you just know he must have "gotten on"
with his mother), so I don't get into it. What I do is try to prompt
out people to act in ways which show them aspects of themselves
which
I suspect may be used to suggest to them that the problem isn't really
my inability to argue properly -- however well I am in fact arguing --
or to look at what I should have drawn upon, but in factors working
against their ability to cooperate in well attending to what I have to
say. How does Lloyd convince (and the point can be made that even
amongst psychohistorians, he HASN'T, mostly -- how often do you
encounter psychohistorians talk about how their mothers have
determined the course of their lives: point number one of DeMausian
psychohistory?)? By argument? By historical evidence? Or is it by
perhaps by playing to a part of ourselves that is still yet not
defeated in its struggle to not betray itself, to not defer to how it
senses it is being instructed to see and exist in the world before it,
to see what the better off of us at some level ALREADY KNOW TO BE
TRUE, and just need support, demonstrated proof that you can fight
back without being destroyed, to help us acknowledge it? If this here
is philosophy 101, then even if no job there is I think still
something valuable to be had via an undergrad education. (A PhD
could
only make you godly.)
Maybe if I felt that the person I was talking to could be swayed with
a different kind of proof, with references to childhood behavior, I
might have ventured there, despite me thinking it not necessary. If I
doubt it, I go a more appropriate route -- if I sense the point can
somehow still be made (otherwise I wish them well, and go bye-bye).
3816
With James, always ... despite his Libertarian leanings and

Republican
daughters.
Patrick
-----
"...I don't think you're likely to be one of the crazy,

repressed folks I
mentioned."
Doesn't change things if I am. The comments from me
have just been
impersonal, basic log-in-your-eye stuff. Yes, most /
many / maybe all
people rely on a gut feeling, or what have you, based upon
communication
cues and a "feeling" when projecting on, er, judging a
person- you kind of
have to - and you also have to shed this strong tendency
when effectively
talking about the subject matter here and move forward.
This has careened off topic, which was U.K. cuts back
gov't expenses, so I
think this is the last I'll say about it.
re: Problem is, every one knows that they're right. Good
luck
-----
Very good point, Rachel.

There are some on this list who persist in thinking that
Group Fantasy motivation is only the province of people
they disagree with -- not seeming to understand the core
PH principle that fantasy underlies all human
3817
thought/behavior and Group Fantasy underlies all group

behavior.
-------Jim
-----
By "you" here I didn't mean you yourself, Rachel.

By all means, Rachel, lead the way. If impersonal, tight-to-the-chest
reasoned discussion is not an enemy of naked, vulnerable full
disclosure -- what I clearly think psychohistory needs more of, and
why it must wait for the next hippie-revolution to once again grow
wings -- if it can take us further, I'm for it. I knew James would
call my argument circular; I knew it (my argument) was absolutely
vulnerable to being accused of being circular when I felt it's
intrinsic truth and insisted on saying it bare and plain (rather than
with some kind of accompaniment to lure truth to some place I knew
it
didn't belong, would sully it). This, I think, should interest /
intrigue you (and James); should count against what identifying an
argument as "circular" is supposed to do to facilitate understanding.
Rather than extend yourself, you use the strict and available and do
an immediate superego close-down on an interesting possibility. We
won't come up with anything unless we're prepared to appear
embarrassing, reckless. Read how historians greeted Lloyd's first
works. To them, he never did anything a serious academic must do to
demonstrate himself worth attendance: he was more curl up under
covers into a fetal position to access a medieval's childhood origins,
but he might also have put forward the circular argument or two. His
subsequent works are better warded against attack, but perhaps --
despite even the massive brilliance of Emotional Life of nations --
not to the better legacy of psychohistory.
Patrick
-----
3818
OK, Patrick. If you intended to disarm me with this, you

have succeeded. Anyone that would actually say they are
waiting for a revival of the 60's-early 70's hippie-
revolution movement is worthy in my book of a second, a
third, a fourth etc. look. I am truly impressed by this
thought. It is so off-the-wall ... and yet deep down I admit
that I wish for it myself.
Just in case Santa Claus is reading this ... if a new hippie-
revolution movement is too much to ask for, then how
about a redo of the 90's? I'm sure I could time the bubble
right this time.
---------Jim
Link: U.K. Cuts Back Gov’t Expenses (realpsychohistory)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010

In consideration of all he has accomplished
BOYCOTT THE HACK ZACH ... in perpetuity

I think it's simply a "travesty" that a supremely spoiled
sophomoric pack of so-called ACTORS can RULE the film
industry. LIKE anybody in THAT CAST has EVER DONE
anything (frankly) remarkable in THEIR ENTIRE LIVES.
WHO HASN'T DONE THINGS THEY REGRET ?? ... THAT
they SHOULD JUDGE MEL GIBSON?
Basically "character" actors, which NEVER had the IMPACT
in this industry -- or THE WORLDWIDE audiences Mel has.
(iconklee, response to post, “‘The Hangover 2’s’ Mel Gibson
controversy, Matt Zoller Seitz, Salon, 22 October 2010)
.....
Roman Polanski is a child molesting douchebag. he doesn't
3819
seem to have stopped his shenanigans, evades punishment,

has been arrogant and crazy and makes movies I won't
watch. (mrsmonkey)
.....
Significant artists throughout history have had
reputations
Not all guys who do questionable things are great artists or
creators, but many of the most respected and lauded artists
of the past have had remarkably controversial lives.
In the end, the ART or the CRREATION won out, regardless
of what all the lip smackers and victorian prudes today have
to say about it.
So I would not worry about it so much. I personally do not
watch much of Gibson's output, but it is not unlikely that
future generations would laud his Christ movie of
Braveheart or some other output. Already, Road Warrior
has become a legend in sci fi, MOSTLY due to Gibson's acting
in that film.
Let the ninnies have their stand. I am sure future
generations will have long forgotten the Hangover while
Gibson's output remains in the public consciousness.
(Liberty2Day)
.....
Something that does allow for continued acceptability in the
public eye, for right or wrong, is the public apology. Alec
Baldwin issued one of those along with a promise to work on
behalf of those suffering from parental alienation (whatever
that is). But this kind of apology/redemption narrative is
demanded for continued work. This is alongside the
punishment.
The problem is that Mel Gibson, at this moment, has fallen in
to the repeat offender category, with each revelation and
instance more appalling than the last. As anyone with a
sense of history knows, it has not been his anti-Semitism that
3820
did him in. While it was a bad moment, people were willing
to look past-- but then after that comes some fairly powerful
racism, more sexism, and violence (punches to his
girlfriend’s teeth) and I suppose all we can say at this
moment is: too soon. There is no sign of remorse or
betterment. (Hunterwali)
.....
Hey, out there, whoever you are: So you don't watch "30
Rock" because Alec Baldwin is an asshole? So you don't buy
the "Mad Max" trilogy on Blu-Ray because Mel Gibson is an
anti-semite? So you can't ever watch a Woody Allen film
again because he's a dirty old man? You don't listen to the
Dixie Chicks because they insulted George W. Bush? So you
don't buy Norman Mailer's books because he stabbed his
wife (a lot bigger deal than simply getting in some drunken
fights, aarong, and it's awfully cheap of you to minimize it
the way you did). So you don't watch any Leni Riefenstahl's
documentaries because she was Hitler's cheerleader, and
you won't buy "Birth of a Nation" on DVD because D.W.
Griffith was a racist and you don't want any of his family
members getting a dime of your money.
Bully for you for drawing the line against an artist, alive or
dead, current or ancient, and making your own principles
plain. Whoever you are, whatever your rationale is, I don't
disagree or agree with you. Do whatever you think is right.
Go with God.
I'll be over here watching, reading and listening to the work.
All of it. (Matt Zoller Seitz)
Ralph Nader, Geraldine Ferraro

I think it is misleading to focus on things like racism, murder,
(notably) wife/child abuse, to rightly get at what is so readily
condemnation-worthy at this point. We can get closer, I think, when
3821
we consider how aggrieved the mounted defenses are that someone

who has evidently accomplished so friggin' much, consistently, over
such a long period of time, someone who has impressed themselves
on the national psyche owing to their brilliance and originality, could
be so readily, presumptively, be assailed by those "constituted" of
nothing more than spirited vacancy. “YOU are in authority (and we
note -- however incredulously -- that you indeed are) over (legendary)
HIM/HER -- HOW is this possible?!?”
It's possible, predictable, because when nations are being driven by
guilt over their previous selfishness, there is no greater crime "before
you" than personal, unique accomplishment. If you've done
something -- good, that is; truly noteworthy -- you may be suspect, for
no one accomplishes anything noteworthy who isn't focused heavily
on their own craft, that is, intently on their own selves -- who didn't
follow their own inclinations enough to mature into their own
distinctive, unique person. Past personality, your crime in being too
much self-lead, now shows up rather obviously in your not automatic
response/repositioning to the daily changes in mood.
The vacuous are full of themselves, will continue laughing their way
through all of us, because they are the way they are from being
foremost responders to other people's cues. They are much more truly
selfLESS, and for this abandonment, for their being beaten enough to
have succumbed to being lifelong puppets of others' whims, they get
now the long, assured, easy ride, as retributive History assumes them
and uses them, and hunts those still seemingly intent on building on
themselves. Here at Salon we've seen Mel Gibson, (recently) Pat
Buchanan, Jodie Foster, Geraldine Ferraro, Ralph Nader get this
arrogant treatment. Jew-hating Gibson, that is, actually gets it for the
same reason Hippie-man Nader gets it: It's not about having once
raped/viscously hated somebody, but about having spent enough
time in your past being loyal to yourself. We point to all they've
accomplished, and try to make the presumed verdict the crime, when
all we're really doing is laying out the proof that justice has here
clearly been served.
3822
Link: “Hangover 2’s” Mel Gibson controversy (Salon)
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2010

Substituting a goat
Substituting a goat
And in other miracle-related news, some people in

Hollywood decided to stand on principle.
The issue was Mel Gibson, charismatic movie star, Oscar-
winning filmmaker and drunken, bigoted, death-threat-
issuing lout. Gibson was supposed to make a cameo in
"The Hangover 2," the sequel to the 2009 hit "The
Hangover," but was booted from the production,
reportedly after cast members -- supposedly led by costar
Zach Galifianakis -- told the film's director, Todd Phillips,
that they were uncomfortable working with Gibson. The
cast apparently was not uncomfortable appearing in the
last "Hangover" opposite convicted rapist and onetime
mugger Mike Tyson, who subsequently told ESPN radio
that he did the cameo "for drug money."
[. . .]
If artists should be publicly censured and denied

employment on the basis of offenses they commit in
private life, how come Gibson is a pariah right now for
threatening and hitting his ex-girlfriend Oksana
Grigorieva, while Alec Baldwin, who verbally abused his
11-year-old daughter on the phone, lashed out at a
photographer, and has a long record of frightening
3823
behavior toward his ex-wife Kim Basinger, is currently

one of the most beloved figures on network TV?
[. . .]
Instead of either/or, how about both/and? Baldwin is a

hot-tempered, maudlin, navel-gazing bozo, and one of the
great character actors and improvisational comics alive.
Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, a sexist, a homophobe, and
very possibly a deranged religious fanatic; he's also one of
the few bona fide movie stars of the last three decades and
the most brilliant action filmmaker since Sam Peckinpah.
Polanski is a great director and a sex offender. Kazan was
a great director and a rat. Lohan and Moss are substance
abusers and arresting beauties whose most interesting
work probably lies ahead of them. Sheen is a master of
droll self-parody and an unexpectedly charming sitcom
star, and a wife-abusing scum that should be behind bars
right now. (Matt Zoller Seitz, "‘The Hangover 2's’ Mel
Gibson hypocrisy,” Salon, 22 October 2010)
What is it if you've never raped, if you're Tom Cruise

I'm with Matt, it smells. One wonders if the worst thing you can do is
be someone we used to adore, and then not find some means to
announce yourself as wholly willing to undergo whatever
rehabilitation we ask of you ("I ... will suck ... your dick."). Even if you
never really did anything. I'm pretty sure the only thing Tom Cruise
did was jump up and down on a couch, showing he will never not be
the possessed Tom Cruise we grew up with and loved. He needed to
have been able to have quickly shown he thought himself an ass-
clown for his behavior, to have some chance of figuring for continued
relevance. The Tropic Thunder resurrection was a little late, a little
too completely last straw: "kinda appreciate the gesture, but there's
something of you, Tom, that though we take as staleness or complete
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derangement still smacks -- annoyingly -- of integrity, if you can

believe it. As if something might be off -- WITH US -- for not wanting
to stay related to you: We have no interest in even innocently being
made to feel as if it us, in our jumping on cue, on and off trends, who
is dancing fool.
Except of course for "grandma" Betty White. She could have humped
a whole kindergarten and some would still kill to keep her cool. ("I
literally screwed them for life -- two dozen of them, dripping in vagina
goo -- and you still want me to repeat on SNL?" "That would be
'Yes.'") What does that say about our era?
.....
If your artist stewed of small children, he never in fact

created Art.
I still think, though, that finding out someone was "likely a killer" or
was for sure a rapist should mean a pretty profound re-examination
of what it is about us that drew us to like "his" films in the first place.
(We condemn loudly, perhaps, so we feel less implicated.) I don't
think we should be much drawn to artistic work done by people who
raped or killed. Knowing that we were, and still perhaps are, amounts
to a wonderful prompt to stop and see what is stalling us -- for
something is indeed, for sure, off with us. The killer, the rapist, is NO
DOUBT in my mind in the work itself (an artist of two temperaments,
two minds -- one that creates, the other that rages -- is even in the
sympathetic, saner part, "incomplete," still crazy). (Artists may be
delegates; do what we wish/prompt but do not dare. But no one sane
responds this way.) If you find out a culture was cannibalistic or
sacrificed legions of virgins to some hairy god, take another look at
the colorful art you used to praise: hopefully it required looking at it a
bit distracted/askew or objective-intent, to deem it Beautiful. But the
problem isn't just in the art or the artist, it is you too. Reassess,
slowly; be kind to your former self; and hopefully grow. That creation
fundamentally comes out of knowing love and tolerance is only made
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hard to see for it being historically rare. Amidst cultures that sacrifice
children, substituting an innocent goat that-never-did-no-harm-to-
nobody is a miraculous, beautiful thing.
Link: "The Hangover 2's" Mel Gibson hypocrisy (Salon)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2010

Repeat
The time has come to admit it -- Jodie Foster is not all that.
Foster, beloved child actress turned two-time Academy
Award winner, Yale magna cum laude, respected director
and person who has lived in the public eye for 40 years
without a nip slip, bar brawl or nutty Twitter outburst,
seems in many ways the epitome of graceful modern
womanhood. She is serious about her work, she is devoted to
her children and she was honored Monday as one of Elle
magazine's top women in Hollywood. And it was there that
she spoke of "an amazing actor, an incredible friend, a loyal
friend of mine for 18 years." She described him as
"incredibly loved by everyone who ever comes into contact
with him or works with him ... truly the most loved man in
the film business, so, hopefully that stands for something."
She was talking about Mel Gibson. Say what?
[. . .]
Yet Foster's suspect loyalty to internationally acclaimed,

unrepentant creeps doesn't end with "the most loved man in
show business." She'll soon be heading to Europe to costar in
"The God of Carnage," directed by Oscar-winning child
rapist Roman Polanski.
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[. . .]
Perhaps the oddest thing about Foster, however, is how she

continues to be lauded as an icon. Aside from publicly
thanking "my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through
all the rotten and the bliss" three years ago, she's steadfastly
never acknowledged her personal life or relationships,
which, frankly, for somebody of her power and influence, is
pretty cowardly. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Jodie Foster’s
baffling Mel Gibson defense,” 21 October 2010)
Whittling with your whip

I guarantee it, at some point Salon will go after Paul Krugman. With
liberals, at least, the point for Salon isn't that you too are crazy, but
that you're showing you may not be one to dutifully follow along
when liberalism becomes one long crazed sequence of whip-lashings
against the misbehaving. Fight to keep your head, to think for
yourself, to reach out and truly do good, and Salon will hope to hurt
you bad for reminding "them" of a fairness they know at some level
they were so eager-ready to leave behind.
At some point too, MEW will join an emerging chorus and go after
Joan Walsh as well (remember her [Walsh's] fair and genuine
concern for Rush Limbaugh? It was too deeply rooted to be just a "be-
careful-with-that," once-only.). Since I suspect that right now they're
(MEW and Walsh) friends, the dynamics involved in this will be
fascinating to watch.
However, I don't care who his friends are (or are not) and
certainly do not judge people for staying friends with
someone I myself would personally not hang around with. If
you do that, MEW, in very short order you will find yourself
with few friends (or none at all) as human beings are
naturally and perhaps tragically very imperfect beings.
(Laure1962, response to post)
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"Friends"
MEW is at no risk of losing friends with this, because she is showing
here that she is intent to smear anyone out there who suggests some
kind of troubling independence, someone who can't ultimately be
counted on to just defer, who isn't yet defeated and might balk, is
resisting, stalling, beginning to talk/snarl back, and most of her
friends will increasingly be defined by their "subscription" to this life
prescription. Well, not friends, maybe, but a whole host of people
conjoined in servicing the current ethos -- "show you will be no
different; show you will defer." There will soon be lots of them, but for
awhile they'll feel themselves first-ascendants to an exclusive,
exhilarating adventure -- maybe the only one actually available right
now: they'll be smeared by those they cast off, will feel themselves
brave and afflicted, loyal and (therefore) loved: they'll think
themselves friends, and may never know different.
The point of these early depression years seems to be about
"familiarizing" everyone with the new ethos -- true individualism,
pokings-about in what may be genuinely new directions rather than
whatever sanctioned ones, resistance to trends that just must take
over -- is over. You will be cued as to what you are supposed to
think/believe "now" -- likely, first hate the stupidity/spoiled
indulgence of everyone everywhere, then, when the depression has
fully kicked in years hence, count yourself once again amongst the
"injustly suffering masses" (i.e., the mass you did everything you
could to create by not too much focusing on the economic decisions
which ensured their creation during the first years of the depression,
and instead mostly on the particular variant of craziness in the
unveiling list of never-ending crazies -- such a perfect counterpoint to
the distanced-but-rational primary Depression executor, Obama) --
and you will be made to feel as if your very survival depends on your
speed of adoption.
They're starting off easy, for an assured trial run. Past-date Jodie
Foster and anti-Semitism. Repeat. But so you're properly on the
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watch, notice now the long, long stretch required to dethrone (or at
least submerge) Krugman, which you feel they're already
"considering," finding some way of floating into consciousness,
seemingly just to show their frowning-upon-it but actually also to
venture out for further straight, larger public consideration, and
which looks like it will commence shortly. The frown-prone Brits are
currently frowning upon Keynesian economics (Krugman is all
Keynesian: spend! Goddamn it, spend! -- what are you waiting
for?!?). Will this luring, brutal British “stoicness” prove means for
some sanity-intent liberals to join Republicans in venturing him as
possibly too hippie, too permissive, for our current, deadly serious,
economic conundrums?
...
Why Salon? Because it feels like where the fight for the soul of all
liberals will be staged; lost or won. It looks like where we will
determine whether hope, true straight-talk, is something that can
sustain through the heat of battle, survive the light of day, or
compelled to lurk in shadows, find friendship with the oblique,
deform into it, to be less visible, more overlookable, but less
penetrable/vulnerable. Right now, it's certainly "be alert to and fear
the whip," but the fight hasn't fully settled yet.
Link: Jodie Foster’s baffling Mel Gibson defense (Salon)
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Retreat
Welcome to the third and final session of the Salon Reading

Club for Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom." Last week, we
took the discussion up through Page 382, and now it's time
to consider the book's conclusion.
[. . .]
I'm a little ambivalent about the ending of "Freedom." While
it was definitely satisfying to see Walter and Patty reunited,
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part of me thinks it's not very realistic. But perhaps that's

the point; if those characters had done what most divorced
couples do and kept moving on to new lives, they'd be
exercising the American-style freedom about which Franzen
is clearly so ambivalent.
[. . .]
What did you think of the way Franzen depicts the political
climate of the mid-2000s? Walter's road trip with Lalitha to
promote Free Space is a Magical Hysteria Tour of the
endemic rage of the period, which Walter regards as
"loony," even though it is, in a fashion, a reflection of the
repressed anger he's been nursing since his boyhood in the
motel. There's a strong sense that Americans have been
making their politics carry an emotional load displaced
from their personal lives -- it's a lot less destabilizing to rant
on the Internet about Dick Cheney or Bill Clinton than to get
into it with your spouse and parents, let alone your own
messed-up self -- to the detriment of public life.
[. . .]
In fact, the whole little neighborhood drama about the cats
and the songbirds at the end deftly encapsulates the themes
of the book: Walter is right, but in the wrong way. Linda is a
monster, but taking her cat to the pound only makes him
one, too. But, again, I'm not sure I'm optimistic enough to
believe in Patty's solution -- even if I'd like to. (Laura Miller,
Road trips, political rage and catnapping,” Salon, 18 Sept.
2010)
Retreat
Freedom, apparently, is something we pursue until the point where
we can chase down what we really want -- rapprochement -- under
our terms. All this early consideration of the rape, as if it were a
"rosebud" moment, when what it was was a vehicle to leave parents
behind you -- justifiably -- so that you can explore / be carried along
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the currents of the times that move / accompany your adulthood, and
rejoin your heritage later as an encounter between one who has
experienced and lived and those who have been kept back. Patty
doesn't only find her way back into old patterns; she pins down as
much as possible both parents on points that have always concerned
her. With neither of them is there much potential for an enlarged
conversation -- which is just fine if the point is to momentarily enjoy
your ability to stand before them undaunted, witness their fainting
back and retreating, and thereafter without complication just savor
their ties to old assured ways and old strengths before admitting
you're -- alas -- confined to always be one of them, intent as you are
now to merge back into them.
To this particular contemporary reader, the book feels like (I
experienced it as) an accurate account of the last 20 years of
liberaldom. A good stretch at first of other-daunting, hells-bells,
frontier-like freedom -- ethical households multiplying out of
nowhere in run-down neighborhoods -- experienced as without
doubt, as pushed forward, as is any first opening of a frontier ("Good
neighbors"). Then, Iraq, and terrible self-damning experiences of
guilt for voting in a near unified swath of Democratic politicians who
supported the war, of seeming as oil-stained as any ol' coarse
Republican ("Mountaintop," "Bad News"). Rescue, with Obama --
dramatic re-imagination of image -- ("Fiend of Washington") but
troubles still with the economy, with the first couple years, especially,
where no one was really confident that the sorts of people who were
most going to go under had crystallized (first struggles between
Walter, alone, and Linda). And then at the end some sights of a
gradual awakening to a realization that a certain class of liberals were
going to do okay, to the sense that a certain, specific kind of target
was desired, and that you actually have more freedom than you think
to move about, to err, and, apparently, to be arrogant (Walter's soul-
saving, other-diminishing tirade; then more confidently Patty's
expertly managed sequence of pseudo-kindness to Linda, sudden
total abandonment of her, and signed, departing "gift" of a cat-
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balking, bird-turd enclosure), because your central concern for self-

abnegating rapprochement over freedom, your overall willingness to
cooperate in favoring the downing of emerging age-designated targets
-- even if not always with fervor or without regret -- has been
repeatedly noticed and unerringly proven to ensure you aren't one of
them, and that the way ahead will shortly be guaranteed for you and
as gratifyingly delimited, denatured, and era-defining (other drama-
obfuscating) as is a settled-upon war (Tea-baggers vs. the Obama-
loyal; mangy cats vs. implacable birds).
Walter is a monster for steeling himself to kill the cat, but he sees and
recollects Bobby's individuality, and through it, Linda and her
family's own worth. Patty "maturely" desists in attacking her
daughter's blog postings, choosing instead to restrain her true
response to it, to her, and just support her enthusiastically with
bland, unfocussed praise. To me, our near last sight of Walter was our
last glance of something maybe opening up, before a terminus that
sealed down everything that might otherwise have been challenged
and pithily grown.
Link: Road trips, political rage and cat-nappings
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010

Chelsea
The Democrats, as usual, are still fighting the internecine

party battles of the '90s. While Jerry Brown struggles with
the 1992 presidential primaries out in California, Bill Clinton
is attacking a prominent liberal critic and defending his
legacy of triangulation.
At a joint appearance with former British prime minister
and warmonger Tony Blair, Clinton complained about
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (without naming her) for,
basically, telling the truth about his presidency. (Alex
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Pareene, “Bill Clinton peeved that Rachel Maddow called

him a Republican,” Salon, 14 Sept. 2010)
Chelsea
I foremost think of Republicans as emotionally-neutered individuals.
Subdued blues; nothing bright, pink, and affecting. As such,
Maddows and Obama (and Jon Stewart / Colbert) feel more
Republican to me than do either of the Clintons. Take a look at who
they begat: bright, spunky, welcoming Chelsea: the Democratic
essence stirs in them. Too bad they had their reign when they could
only reign, Republican-light.
Link: Bill Clinton peeved that Rachel Maddow called him a
Republican (Salon)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

Hillary Clinton
The thing that had a radicalizing impact on me began after

[Hillary lost in] Iowa. Because there was this pile-on, and to
me it was mind-bending. It was coming often from people on
the left. It was like something they had been keeping inside
as they bit their tongues and covered this woman who had
the gall to be the front-runner and the "inevitable"
candidate, which was the word that they threw out there.
And finally she had shown weakness, and they were just
going nuts.
[. . .]
Eventually I became a lot more aware of the ways in which
not only Hillary but also her supporters were being talked
about. I became increasingly sensitive to the scorn directed
at her, and it built and built as she continued to fight, and it
drove me nuts. Because I thought her continuing to fight was
awesome and hilarious. I thought it was completely
redefining how we view women and our expectations for
them in public and political life. She would not comply. She
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would not give in. She would not do what the pundits
wanted her to do, what her opponents wanted her to do,
what reporters were insisting that she do, what everyone
was telling her was the smart thing to do or, in one case, the
classy thing to do. She just kept going. (Rebecca Traister,
quoted in Curtis Sittenfield, “‘Big Girls Don't Cry’: The
election that changed everything for women,” Salon, 12 Sept.
2010)
Hillary
HRC WAS way better than Obama, guys. Only she reminded people of
their swarming, intentful mothers, so they looked away, moved apart,
and voted in the more denatured, affectless Obama. She WAS brutally
treated during the campaign; reporters could barely look at her, and
looked away as soon as excuse was given. Credit is due Rebecca for
noticing this; discredit, or considerable suspicion, for not being
drawn to her from the start.
@Patrick McAvoy-Halston
Patrick: "HRC WAS way better than Obama, guys."
Strange that you direct this comment at "guys." So there
weren't any female Obama supporters, is that it?
Patrick: "Only she reminded people of their
swarming, intentful mothers, so they looked away,
moved apart, and voted in the more denatured,
affectless Obama."
Okay, let me ask you: Are you joking? Is this some sort of
satire? If not, then I am amazed at your ability to
psychoanalyze an entire voting bloc. I'm even more amazed
at your extra-sensory powers in detecting that hundreds of
thousands of voters have "swarming" and "intentful"
mothers! (I didn't realize the primaries were decided by
honeybee larvae.)
Patrick: "She WAS brutally treated during the
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campaign;"
"Brutally"? Really? Which part was brutal-est? Was there
anything much more brutal than the later claim that Obama
"pals around with terrorists"?
I think it's really cute how people want to claim Obama
supporters were "BRUTAL!" to Hillary. But when Obama
supporters point out that it works both ways, suddenly
people are saying, "Oh, she's just feisty!" and "She paid him
the respect of giving him a good, hard fight!"
I also vividly recall Obama getting raked over the coals
because the pastor at his old church was obnoxious. But that
wasn't brutal, that was fair, right? So let's see: If people are
critical of Hillary, they're being "brutal," (practically
woman batterers, if you want to get clinical about it) but if
people are critical of Obama, it's peachy. Got it.
Patrick: "...reporters could barely look at her, and
looked away as soon as excuse was given."
Now, again, this has to be satire, right? Because I am pretty
sure that people looked at Hillary Clinton on an ongoing
basis, very intently.
Okay, no, I am convinced you're kidding. Sorry for missing
it up till now. (Xrandadu Hutman, response to post)
@Xrandadu Hutman
No, not satire. When they (the press) could switch from talking to
Hillary to talking to Obama, they seemed relieved. They did almost
enough (though not enough: note the SNL skits which played on the
press's strange aversion to Hillary) to save face, but it WAS as if they
were risking close contact / involvement with some toxic medusa.
They engaged with her scrunched up in a grimace, bracing themselves
to the first touch of her affect. Obama was cool, smoke in hand. For
all the talk of charisma, it was his sparing absence which drew "us" to
him.
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Palin you can bond to, have carry around her like a pistol in her
holster, because you'll be killing baby seals and runt liberals, not
bonding with her in some cuddled global village. The first sense we
have that she's turning to make us into one of her sprats, we'll turn
her into our first lady, permanently ensconced as secondary to
Obama. There is a sense, perhaps, that she's settling into that position
right now. Can Obama master his uppity (Palin) wife, like he did his
previous mistress?
That Salon gave Hillary support, speaks FOR Salon.
Link: “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The election that changed everything for
women (Salon)
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

Liberal "crazies"
(Hofstadter pointed out that the left is certainly not free of

this mind-set, and so Dick Cheney and Halliburton have
often served as the designated superhumanly competent
malefactors for the other side, as in the 9/11 "Truth"
movement.)
[. . .]
Is it any wonder, then, that a growing number of Americans
insist on believing that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim?
This fantasy is the last piece needed to make an imaginary
international Islamic conspiracy fit the formula for political
paranoia laid out by Hofstadter 46 years ago. (Laura Miller,
“The paranoid style in American punditry,” Salon, 15 Sept.
2010)
liberal crazies
The thing to be careful of is equating the crackpots--the "extremes"
on both the right and the left. If they're on the right, they are those of
3836
such psychic fragility that they cannot stand when society changes or
grows too much, so when it does they cannot but come untethered. If
they're on the left, then they're those of such psychic healthiness that
they can see that the next period of American political life will largely
be about coating ongoing economic disparities and war in a way
Obama-liberals can well live with, feel right about, and are hardly in
the mood to cooperate with this evil. Both will scream and screech,
only one will register madness, while the other, fair alarm; but to
Obama-liberals they'll both neatly be grouped within the same arising
wave of loonies-emerging.
Also, if you're a liberal who is coming to understand that s/he is going
to be of the ones who'll actually prosper under Obama, one who still
gets, is in sync with, his "style," his age, then its pretty easy for you to
remain becalmed and rational. What emotional agitation you do feel
can safely be expressed, manifested through the rest of us, so you
don't have to be at all troubled by it.
Link: The paranoid style in American punditry (Salon)
What do the weak exist for?
When the Jon Meachams and Mika Brzezinskis work up the

courage to condemn the people who have done and are
continuing to do this for the "blood they have on their
hands," then their purported outrage and beliefs can be
viewed as sincere. But they don't do that and won't do that.
Righteous anger at those who spill blood is reserved only for
hated foreigners (Osama bin Laden) and for the
marginalized and powerless who haven't actually spilled
any blood (the Koran-burning Pastor and WikiLeaks). That's
why this Pastor circus has received so much media
attention: it's a cheap, petty and easy way for people with
enormous amounts of blood on their own hands to show
what Good, Caring People they are by pretending that they
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hate those who cause it to be spilled. (Glenn Greenwald, “The

Pastor and Cheap, Selective Concern for Blood-letting,”
Salon, 10 Sept. 3010)
What do the weak exist for, except to be trod upon?

It's a matter of aesthetics. Both sides want slaughter; one side is just
better at using the other to make their own execution seem clean,
matter-of-course. Obama was elected, so that slaughter could
continue, but in a way that would enable many liberals to join in and
comfortably settle into.
I personally think we're near past the point where pointing out a
prejudice against the weak and ready deference to the strong, could
be shame-inducing: too strong to mind would come the sense of
forthcoming reward. That beating up the weak is just good right now
might explain why we might soon experience a period where the weak
are beat upon, just 'cause. A stretch of untethered free-fall we use to
consolidate our understanding of the essential motivator behind our
attacks, before we clothe it again in more overtly righteous -- but not
especially essential -- cover. The weak exist to be savaged; the strong,
to be served: how can such essential simplicity / coherency be
anything other than right?
Link: The Pastor and Cheap, Selective Concern for Blood-letting

(Salon)

What to do when history is not on your side?
I can’t believe we’re going through this again.

In January 2005, Time magazine featured on its cover a
photo of a young man in a shirt and dress slacks sitting in a
sandbox. The headline: “They Just Won’t Grow Up.” The
article featured the research of one Jeffrey Jensen Arnett,
PhD, a developmental psychologist who coined the term
3838
“emerging adulthood” to explain these puzzling, infantilized

adults.
The cover story of the New York Times Magazine this
weekend, already situated snugly at the top of the Most-
Emailed List, is a near-exact repeat of this story from 5
years ago, this time asking “What is it About Twenty-
Somethings?” Again Arnett is the resident featured expert.
The Times’ only innovation, besides the slightly higher
quality of the writing and the greater length, is tarting up
the article with lots of sexy pictures of 20somethings (“I’m
lying on my bed, all angsty! Look down my shirt!”) so
readers can lust after them while simultaneously shaking
their heads.
[. . .]
There is no mysterious collective 20something malaise. The
poor position of our nation’s future workforce is the
outgrowth of decades of economic policy–the growth of
consumer and national debt and the deterioration of the
American job market, the protection of old-people programs
like Social Security and Medicare and the faltering of
opportunity-creating programs like education and health
care for all. Maybe the Times should be talking to its own
Paul Krugman, not a psychologist. (Anya Kamenentz,
“What’s up with Twentysomethings? In a Word, Economics,”
DIY U, 19 August 2010)
I think that the economy has certainly helped ensure a “delayed

transition,” but it isn’t the cause of it. The cause is whatever was on
the minds of adults that ensured that they (note: not greedy elites)
created a world that would leave their children scrambling to
convince themselves they’ll ever be as adult – as mature — as their
own parents were/are. If your own parents kind of like the idea of
their kids being unlikely to ever effectively warrant their holding
presumptive moral authority over them, kind of like the idea of a
3839
world that ensures that their kids will never quite feel secure and safe
enough to roam too far from their own expectations / wishes of them,
then you’re fighting against a lot that might keep you from feeling
trenchantly independent, even if you were to score a franchise of
husband-wife, career, house, children by the age of 25
(accoutrements, of course, that demonstrate you are living the life
others expect of you — that you are playing along: there is no escape).
There are people hovering over you, of the type that (increasingly —
maybe not even) covertly partake in the seemingly now guilt-free
opportunity to peer down your shirt that your blameworthy /
childish / bad-lingering has somehow freely opened up for them,
while overtly sighing and wishing you would finally grow up: they’re
clearly ones to enjoy the fruits of a situation they are pretending only
to decry. If you’ve spent your youth amongst parents/elders like that,
long experiencing unresolvable, contradictory expectations from
you– in what R.D. Laing once determined as a schizophrenia-
inducing kind of environment — you haven’t the sanity or the stuff to
create your own 60s to clear your way free of your parent’s intention
to always be your overlords. Rather, there will be something in you
working away until you yourself are convinced you are as lazy and
indulgent as your parents perceive you as — whatever the state of
economy, how impossible an environment you’ve been given to prove
you’re up to snuff. Repeatedly through history, but a good while back,
this kind of horrific, impossible environment drew many to eagerly
sign up for war. Instantly, they were war heroes, ready to
demonstrate their in fact existing virtue in their willingness to play to
the sacrificial wishes of their mother-country. A shorter while back,
we remember Faramir sacrificing himself so his disapproving steward
father would finally for once “think better of him,” and how an
audience engaged with what was on screen, with what they felt inside
themselves.
The 60s generation made their way free because after the mass
sacrifice of WW2, allowance / permission (even if at first, cautious)
had power over restriction / punishment — hemming parents were
3840
pit not so much against their children as against historical law, and
surely felt and maybe knew their fate was to be neutralized until their
own children had franchised themselves to the point that they were
now ready to statue their slowly-crumbling parents as the Greatest
Generation. There is no such great wind behind the backs of today ’s
millenials; their best bet is if some of them — despite Reagan, 80s on
— actually have the self-assurance / self-esteem they keep being
credited for possessing: with that they might smartly placate but
never dumbly play into the desires of an older populace, increasingly
intent on ensuring that the one thing kids do not do is lead / possess
their own independent lives.
Note: If charged, emotive talk of mass child-sacrifice seems out of
place in an economic discussion, please skip Paul Krugman’s most
recent NYT article. Mind you, since he’s moved from repeatedly
calling current economic policies “cruel” to thinking of them as willed
blood-lettings of the-mad-but-in-charge, I’m not quite sure how long
Krugman will keep his hold “as a man to be reckoned with.” What do
you do with a man who once routinely offered sober reasonings but
now finds explanations in strange analogies, runes and animal guts?
Krugman link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20krugman.html?hp
FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2010

Thoughts on "The Switch"
(Originally posted at Movieline.com)

Wallie tries to explain to Cassie what he had done, essentially
immediately after he recalls his having made the switch 6 years
before. Cold sober, chilled but vividly intent, he is well on the way to
explaining ... and then the movie takes his moment away from him.
Very evident that he is in the effort of trying to say something of huge
import that he fears will damage both of their lives thereafter, that
could ruin everything they shared between one another before then,
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the movie has her recoil away when her own embarrassing admission
"demands" she suddenly stop him in his effort and squirrel back
inside her apartment. Better, the movie seems to think, that he make
his sin clear at a moment when it would look more last-straw and
inadequate, which would allow her to announce that future contact
would be under her terms and you wouldn't feel that she would even
in this still be reckoning with someone with real "sand." She relents
because he's there for him, and he's a good guy, not because she
found herself struck, shaken in his unmistakably having moved
beyond being a best friend you could presume upon. There was touch
here of a bracing, but ultimately more here of the "Marley and Me" --
I'm compromised but (apparently, actually, quite depending on this)
still happy -- new man. Outstanding.
Xbox your movie
Xbox your movie

3D will interest when it seems linked to an argument that the whole
experience of BEING TOLD a story for two hours straight needs
explanation, when the possibility might be opened up that you could
rather play a part in the movie-world you've "entered." Right now,
we're on the wall somewhere -- a camera, a microphone. Attending,
listening -- not a chance to further participate until the movie-world
shuts down and we're talking about it a reality away. If 3D takes us
more transparently into the world, maybe we'll soon insist on having
a voice there as well. But if this isn't already our inkling, 3D alone
won't take us there, though. You're more immersed, but still straight-
jacketed. Even if it comes to the art film, this may not be progress.
How might we redeem the turn from watching a film to actively living
/ experiencing / determining a new reality -- making it reality -- so
that it doesn't seem a freedom craved only by the finger-twitching
XBOX sort?
3842
Link: 3-D filmmaking's radical, revolutionary potential

When people are porn
My story has occasioned a healthy amount of reaction

around the web, including from TED and Chris Anderson
himself.
First, the snark: Maura at The Awl (a commentary site run
by ex-Gawkers) calls the story “breathless” and “smug”.
Most of the commentators admit that they enjoy watching
TED talks anyway. I batted back with some snark of my own
but also tried to answer what i took as her serious point,
which was that TED seems just as elitist as the old-line
institutions it’s being compared with:
“I actually think we have similar concerns about elitism vs.
openness.
My contention is that many of the cool things that TED does
spread more widely than the cool things that Harvard does,
because of its attitude toward openness and its use of social
media.
Harvard has a crappy open courseware site–it’s very
difficult to find and view many Harvard lectures online. MIT
has the best open courseware site, but even the most-
watched video lectures have been watched a few hundred K
times, while the most watched TED talks have been viewed
over 6 million times.
Lectures are admittedly a small percentage of the benefit
offered by either TED or Harvard, but they’re not nothing.
The spread of the TEDx platform with over 600 events
worldwide offers a way for ever-more people to participate,
often for free, in a much closer approximation to the TED
experience. I would love to see Harvard & Yale try
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something like that.”

Open Culture, a cultural blog, took umbrage too: “Will
watching 18 minute lectures – ones that barely scratch the
surface of an expert’s knowledge – really teach you much?
And when the 18 minutes are over, will the experts stick
around and help you become a critical thinker, which is the
main undertaking of the modern university after all?”
I responded: “I never claimed that watching TED
talks=attending Harvard. If you read the article closely, I’m
asking if *participating in* TED–and to a lesser but broader
extent, TEDx–-confers a lot of the benefits of attending
Harvard, albeit in abbreviated (and much cheaper) form.
That means talking about the ideas with the presenters,
including asking questions; forming relationships with
fellow TEDsters; and having TED on your resume, which
can open all kinds of doors.
In addition, I’m asking if there’s any way that Harvard and
other universities can follow TED’s lead and open up to more
people. When a single Harvard lecture has been viewed 5
million + times on YouTube, this goal will be closer to being
reached.
[. . .]
Finally, TED’s Chris Anderson seems to be getting concerned
that TED is being accused of overreaching. When the article
came out, he Tweeted “Fast Company have just published
a truly amazing feature on #TED. Wow.
http://bit.ly/aNOsQH.”
Today, he added, linking to Salam’s and Yglesias’s posts
above, “For the record, we don’t for 1 min think “TED is
the new Harvard”! http://bit.ly/arU8Z1 Backlash!
http://bit.ly/ciCJEV“ (Anya Kamenentz, “Is TED the New
Harvar? Reactions from around the web,” DIY U, 16 August
2010)
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People seem irritated that your response wasn’t properly subdued

(i.e., too breathless). Your real “problem” — as is true with other good
people like Alfie Kohn — is that you truly understand that
EDUCATION, LEARNING is the point, with how we get “there” a
truly open possibility. The way you think is that if someone is
educated, and you find out that this person got that way sans
university but simply Goodwill Hunting-like through a library card,
then you’re one to give the library full credence: “it” doesn’t first
acknowledge the university (as) clear master before listing its
strengths, but, through evidence, has proven it can stand fully equal
to all. This isn’t what’s going on in other people’s minds, and to them
it’s merely convenient that TED’s lectures are gratefully near-
dismissably only 18 minutes long. What they’re thinking is that
becoming educated is primarily about being educated, being acted
upon, by someone else — being broken in. They dismiss TED for its
apparent lack of interactivity, but what they hate about it is actually
that it seems to privilege the individual’s right to be an active,
choosing, fully-enabled “consumer” of education — what they see
probably as its “fickleness.” In a way, to a certain extent, the web-
browser becomes akin to empowered gentleman-amateur of the past,
who would attend a professional’s lectures but never once feel his
inferior: s/he has picked and chosen, sampled and savored, and
became more worldly; the professional wallows in a technician’s
expertise. People just now aren’t any longer allowed / permitted to
think of themselves that way: the web has demonstrated that people
are porn, not participants or prodigies. Itunes U (to them) is better,
because it’s potentially more arduous — it’s not so much about
entertaining, about lecturers finding ways to please your credit-
worthy sensibilities, but about you developing the discipline, the
seriousness, to best engage with them: they’re reaching out, but the
signal will not be received unless you’re able to listen (a talent best
nurtured, of course, after serious engagement with a physical
university). The “they” I’m talking about are moving away from the
more Romantic estimation of people as flowering best away from
3845
institutions, toward understanding them as requiring the breaking-in

that institutions can still yet enable. Names like “Harvard,”
“Princeton,” “MIT” are summoned not to be matched or breezed-by,
but because the overall cacophony and indulgent behavior is such
that it REQUIRES the attention, the schooling-down, of long-
experienced 'wakening Kings.
Interactivity is being mentioned a lot. I’m with Stanley Greenspan
(note: he’s as good as Kohn) in thinking that back-and-forth
conversation is so all. But as the psychiatrist R.D. Laing made clear
when he established how the wrong sorts of conversations can lead to
the like of schizophrenia, further involvement isn’t always to be
preferred to standing back, aloof, and in charge. Personally, I don ’t
much trust that interactivity in universities isn’t now more about a
way to feel more securely enmeshed behind walls that are keeping the
rabble at bay. Not about responsiveness for growth, but about further
relinquishing for security and safety.
Link: Is TED the New Harvard? Reactions from around the web
How eager should we expect the civilized to be?
“The essence of learning is found neither inside nor outside

the classroom, neither online nor offline. It’s in the flow from
lived experience and practice, to listening, researching, and
sharing the fruits of your work with a community and back
out to the world again. Now that so much high-quality
information is available for free–like the 1,900 courses on
MIT Open Courseware–and platforms to allow people to
exchange words, images and sound online are exploding in
use, many of us are excited about the possibilities of self-
organized education that is pared down to this essence, thus
affordable, efficient and accessible. But whether or not you
attend a traditional university, you will need to trace this
path again and again, from experience to theory, from
empirical to abstract, from action to reflection, from real to
3846
ideal, in order to keep learning throughout your life.

Today there’s a lot of emphasis on getting the best value for
money in higher education. This is important. But the most
important resource in higher education is free. That ’s the
motivated learner. That’s you.” (Anya Kamenentz, “DIY U in
Forbes,” DIY U, 13 August, 2010)
Increasingly, the net is being conceived as an abode for loud, impulse-

ridden losers. “We’ve given it it’s chance,” is what they say, “and even
if there are gems amidst the slush … couldn’t they just tone it down
some?” Owing to this, traditional universities aren’t seeming quite as
ridiculous as they should for their stodginess. I would hazard a guess
that the most important resource in higher education is now perhaps
more the CIVILIZED learner (that is, the tamed-down one), more
than it is the motivated (eager) one. Universities may be where people
go to become gentlemen / ladies — if to an elite one, then up a notch
to aristocrat. I’m noticing it more: it’s not so much what you have to
say as how you say it (impatiently? excitedly? did you drool?). The
winners may be those who say nothing much new, but do so
becalmed, with consideration.
Link: DIY U

Glum and glam
Like its star, Salt is a spare and lean piece of work; it ’s

everything a modern action movie should be, a picture made
with confidence but not arrogance, one that believes so
wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come
to make perfect alt-universe sense. The story — the script is
by Kurt Wimmer — draws numerous outrageous loops, but
Noyce neither dwells on them ponderously nor speeds
through them in a misguided attempt to energize his
3847
audience. And he makes fine use of his star, an actress

whose lanky gait is as delicious to watch as her spring-
loaded leaps are. Noyce frames the movie around Jolie’s
finely tuned sense of movement, and yet it’s her
expressiveness that anchors the story emotionally: In an
old-fashioned, old-Hollywood way, Noyce and his
cinematographer, Robert Elswit, are wholly alive to her face
and all its possibilities.
[. . .]
Noyce has made his share of action thrillers (he’s the
director behind the Tom Clancy adaptations Patriot Games
and Clear and Present Danger), but he’s pulled off more
serious, emotionally complex material too (like his
meticulous and thoughtful version of Graham Greene’s The
Quiet American). Salt is, of course, closer in style to the
former than the latter; still, Noyce approaches the material
with a healthy sense of humor. The subject matter alone is
likely to give moviegoers of a certain age a pleasant shiver
of Cold War nostalgia, and Noyce runs with that. (The Cold
War wasn’t so much fun while it was going on, but as much
as we feared that the Soviets might someday come over and
liquefy our buildings, they never actually did so.) Touches
like Orlov’s dumpling-thick Russian accent, or the way Salt
wraps herself in a swishy fur-trimmed cape, topped off with
a Dr. Zhivago toque, are served up with a sly wink.
(Stephanie Zacharek, Salt, Angelina Jolie Deliver the Action-
Packed Summer Blockbuster Goods, Movieline, 21 July
2010)
-----
It's a mark of the stupidity (and hypocrisy) of Stephanie's
lazy fanboys that they actually admire her for her critical
double standards, her inane protocols, and her lack of
intellectual rigor. For her review (gee what a surprise that
an Angelina Jolie starrer gets an unqualified rave from
3848
Stephanie - gosh darn it, never saw that one coming!!)

praises Salt for all the same qualities she derided
Inception for having: an unbelievable plot set in an "alt
universe," "outlandish plot twists," over-the-top images
which equate "awesomeness" with "greatness," paper-thin
characterization, etc., etc. No use trying to find consistency
and fairness in a Stephanie Zacharek evaluation. Read
between the lines and she's basically excusing Salt for
containing the exact same elements she found objectionable
and tiresome in Inception. To describe a movie as taking
place in an "alt universe" where "outlandish plot twists"
occur is to admit the movie is junk after all.
The only difference is that Salt doesn't take itself too
seriously: being self-consciously "hip" rather than
attempting to be "deep," and also having a glam heroine
rather than a gloomy hero, Steph can ignore the fact that in
all other respects, it's just as undistinguished as the other
film she panned.
Essentially she loved Salt for one main reason: because it
has Angelina Jolie as a kick-ass heroine. Since Stephanie,
like so many of her smug admirers, has always been a
delusional, self-congratulatory narcissist, of course that
combo would go down well. It always does.
Secret to making a movie that SZ is guaranteed to love:
make the plot knowingly "hip" in its outrageousness. Make
sure you include plenty of preposterous plot twists, but make
sure you show, every step of the way, you're in on the joke.
That way no one can accuse you of taking yourself too
seriously. That also is guaranteed to make SZ and like-
minded hipsters feel super-cool and "with it" when they
watch.
Next, add in a glam-girl heroine who, despite looking like a
waif, can by some miracle kick ass effortlessly, even when
up against men twice her size. Stephanie, being a narcissist,
3849
will always praise any movie that allows her to "identify"

(the way a little kid "identifies" with her barbie dolls) with a
sexy, witty, butt-kicking, devil-may-care babe. (Never mind
that in real life, a woman with Jolie's physique would last
about 30 seconds against any of these heavies: in today's
market, movies are about flattering the female ago just as
much as the teen male ego. At least James Cameron,
whatever his other faults, cast the brawny Linda Hamilton
as his female ass-kicker.) Most people outgrow this kind of
dumb fantasy long before they're Steph's age.
Finally, cast Angelina Jolie in the lead. This isn't always
necessary, but it's a marked bonus.
What's especially funny is that I guessed more or less what
SZ was going to write the moment I saw the poster for Salt.
She has become that crushingly predictable. There wasn't a
single paragraph of this review that took me by surprise.
Stephanie, you truly are a paint-by-numbers hack.
This part of SZ's review made me laugh:
The movie opens with a flashback, jolting us back to
early-2000’s North Korea. A semi-naked Salt is
being tortured by soldiers in a dank-looking
dungeon. They keep insisting she’s a spy; she keeps
repeating, with unwavering authority, “I’m not a
spy, I’m a businesswoman”
God, I've never seen that one before! Didn't Madonna
parody this one in her "Die Another Day" video? Isn't it the
opening scene of every episode of Alias ever? Thank God
Salt's there to keep the hoariest of cliches alive. (Chris,
response to post)
Chris: I think you do a good service in getting us to compare her

reviews. Having read her review of "Prince of Persia," for example,
with its key praise for it being that though it isn't perfect it does at
least aim for "grandeur" ([i]n a moviegoing climate where so many
3850
people — out of necessity or preference — end up watching movies at

home on DVD"), I think you really should ask for some explanation as
to why "Inception" was so panned SPECIFICALLY FOR its aiming at
the OMG! awesome. I don't think it's quite a contradiction because I
think she really appreciates ambitious reach, lavish and scale, and
wants us to extend ourselves to films that generously offer as much,
but doesn't want to sense that a film's grandeur / awesomeness
depends on your willingness as a filmgoer to experience it as an
acolyte oh-so-ready to lose yourself to rapture, or just on your having
sat before a film that will willy-nilly juice you until you're brain-fried,
but it's worthy of a clarification, and my guess is that few who read
both reviews thought one was required.
Reading this review, I myself would want to know how exactly a
reviewer would square praising a film for it "believ[ing] so
wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come to make
perfect alt-universe sense," with its also deserving kudos for its
"healthy sense of humor." It seems, at least, that the same film is
credited for its level of seriousness and immersion but also for its
laid-backness and modesty, its evidencing of a knowing and awry
distance / detachment. Maybe the two can go together, but not
obviously so; and it's worth a check to see if with this film they're
congruent and / or that if for some reason to a certain reviewer taking
oneself seriously is always a precarious lurch, even when its clearly
established as a subject of praise. I don't want to be prepared to be
generous with a film simply because a film maker shows s/he's
prepared to shift tones / weight if what s/he's up to "now" is making
me uncomfortable -- not simply because it gives me room to think /
feel for myself -- or because it extends some reach but beyond what
remain MOSTLY ACCEPTED perimeters (i.e., standard summer
blockbuster fair): I'd be concerned, I think, that what I foremost
want / expect movies to show me is that they are first of all MY
subject -- i.e., just a movie -- with from there being the starting place,
the only place, from which something worthwhile might develop. I'd
be afraid that previous shocks were delimiting, were limiting, current
3851
explorations, who I might still become. Or is it sheerly childish to ask

that a movie be allowed still to alter you, morph beyond being just a
movie to actually become a life-changing event -- to a certain extent
even without your permission -- with adulthood being about
attenuation, modest reconsideration / recalibration to a largely
settled core? Do we actually APPRECIATE the bossyness in the
Nolans -- the bossy Nolans -- if "they" help us color all of what might
be good for us but what we can't bear to brave, so we can engage them
optionally, perhaps LARGELY laughing, mocking, deriding and
closed?
Re: “I think you really should ask for some

explanation as to why "Inception" was so panned
SPECIFICALLY FOR its aiming at the OMG!
awesome. I don't think it's quite a contradiction,
because I think she really appreciates ambitious
reach, lavish and scale, and wants us to extend
ourselves to films that generously offer as much,
but doesn't want to sense that a film's grandeur /
awesomeness depends on your willingness as a
filmgoer to experience it as an acolyte oh-so-ready
to lose yourself to rapture”
Patrick, I understand that everyone has their personal
quirks and biases, and that what turns one person's crank
won't turn another's. Every single critic and moviegoer on
the planet brings her or his own personal prejudices to the
table. And I know there's no objectively "right" or "wrong"
opinion about any movie under the sun. (And I must repeat:
I'm fairly lukewarm on Christopher Nolan myself.)
But Stephanie takes subjectivity of response to a nearly
psychotic extreme. Skim through her reviews and it becomes
glaringly obvious she just plain likes certain qualities that
aren't inherently "better" or "worse" than others she detests:
she just likes movies that contain certain ingredients and
3852
that's that. It doesn't matter if the ingredients are sloppily

flung together, it doesn't matter if the recipe is poorly
prepared in the kitchen, all that matters is that it contains
Stephanie's favorite ingredients. She's like a restaurant who
loves pasta more than anything in the world, so therefore
gives every single Italian restaurant she visits a four-star
review. Whereas she hates Chinese food, so every Chinese
place gets the thumbs down regardless of how good or bad
the food is. Just the fact that it serves Chinese food is enough
for her to give a restaurant a thrashing. Have critical
standards sunk so low that we now revere individual
reviewers simply for not saying the same thing as everyone
else? One can be a moron as long as one isn't a sheep? Just
because Zacharek departs from the general consensus on
Chris Nolan movies, she's to be revered as some sort of hero?
Having read (like a masochist) enough of Stephanie's
reviews over the years, I'm prepared to say again that the
main reason she loved Salt and hated Inception is this (to
quote from myself): Salt is a movie having a glam
heroine rather than a gloomy hero.
Again and again SZ says nice things about movies with
heroines who play into SZ's wish-fulfillment fantasies. It's
quite revealing what she does and doesn't like about the
movies she reviews. What really irritates her about
Inception and The Dark Knight is that the kind of wish-
fulfillment they tap into is more of a guy thing, whereas SZ
likes chick flicks of a certain sort, not gushily sentimental
ones like Titanic, but Angelina's movies, or the TV show
Sex and the City, chick shows and chicklit and chick flicks
of a certain hip, cool register. Chris Nolan's universe is too
much of a geeky boy's club, but it isn't actually "worse"
artistically so much as it appeals to a different niche.
.....
Oops, this....
3853
She's like a restaurant who loves pasta more than

anything in the world
should read She's like a restaurant REVIEWER who
loves pasta.... etc. (Chris, response to post)
She really liked "Letters to Juliet," and it wasn't so much cool and hip
(in fact it wasn't at all that) as it was bright, warm, relaxed and ---
conditionally -- AVAILABLE: I think, the opposite of hipster. I think
you can provide a lot of examples of the cool and hip she goes for, but
it would as you know need targeting to convince, because with just
hearing that she goes for the hip and cool it's too easy to think of
movies that are a kind of cool, that are in fact so LAMENTABLY
cooled down that you recall most vividly her attending to the few
instances of vibrant "aliveness" the films did allow, the refreshing bit
of color -- glam? -- in landscapes otherwise so everywhere neutered
and grey. Your claim that she is attracted to glam is interesting,
though. As I've suggested / implied, it could be made to be about her
preference for color over drabness, part of her war against freezing
mannerisms -- which would be a sign of her own aliveness, her
expectancy for soulfulness, much more than it would her girlish
adolescence -- but you mostly want to make it equivalent to the
stunted guy's going for glum and grime it would seem.
You made the point earlier that the legacy of Pauline Kael (I
remember now I actually did try to get into her work -- a couple of
times in fact -- but so wasn't drawn in that I could barely recall having
tried her on: I was always way, way more for Nathaniel Branden than
I was the kinda alien creature-seeming Ayn Rand as well) has been
the omnipresence of critics who cannot allow that their ostensibly
more evolved, more involved engagement with films has mostly been
a kind of cunning skating on the surface, an ongoing disinclination to
throughly analyze, deeply involve oneself with film, in preference to
sporting with them. You focus on Stephanie because you think she's
so beholden to her, because she represents THE PROBLEM -- the log
jam -- it would mostly seem, and not because you're a masochist
3854
(though you say this, and I accept it, and hope you know it's worth
your exploring too). And it seems -- from one of the things you said
on the "Inception" thread -- also because you have seen what she can
do, and sense her potential. If I were you, I would continue to finesse
out where she goes wrong, and -- very much please -- at some point
also where she goes so wonderfully right, for all our sakes. Maybe you
could best do so by responding after you've just seen a film she's
"taken on."
You know the challenge involved in showing the kind of reviewer who
seems attendant and responsive to every film molecule to be actually
mostly closed off / shut down, so I wish you a universe of good luck,
as well as an unbeknownst deity or two to have your back. But my
rooting for your cause is genuine: Wouldn't it be wonderful if one day
Stephanie looked back and recalled "Avatar" in such a way that you
wouldn't be drawn, as one commenter on the Salon thread did, to ask
if she in fact had a limbic system? As I thought the alien flower she so
appreciated and attended to in the film notable but still so easily and
immediately trumped preamble, I had to wonder too, and would
certainly cheer at this!
Link: Angelina Jolie Deliver the Action-Packed Summer Blockbuster

Good (Movieline)
SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 2010
Ammoing up
The Killer Inside Me isn’t a misogynist picture.

Winterbottom takes great care to show his own attitude
toward the brutal suffering of both of these characters. And
it’s easy to accept that he’s made the violence graphic so we’ll
grasp the full moral weight of it — this isn’t jazzily cut
cartoon brutality presented for kicks.
But that doesn’t mean that in addressing that violence,
Winterbottom has made the right choices, artistically or
emotionally. (Those who are extremely sensitive to spoilers
3855
and who haven’t already read Thompson’s book might want

to stop reading here.)
In an online interview with The Wall Street Journal this past
April, around the time his film was presented at the Tribeca
Film Festival, Winterbottom expressed dismay when the
interviewer mentioned that the women in The Killer Inside
Me enjoyed having rough sex. “That’s interesting, you think
that they enjoyed the violence?” Winterbottom said. “The
story is being told from [Lou’s] point of view so it’s his
version of what happened. In his head at least, there’s no
doubt that these women love him.” Yet the movie clearly
shows us both women enjoying, and sharing in, Lou’s sexual
proclivities. Are we to believe what a filmmaker tells us with
his camera, or how he explains himself in an interview? And
if a story is told from one character’s point of view, does that
mean a filmmaker has abdicated his role in shaping the
material? Who’s in charge here, the character or the
director?
[. . .]
I’m not looking for a “tasteful” treatment of violent material
— if I were, I wouldn’t feel the admiration I do for
Thompson’s novel. But I’d argue that extending the violence,
as Winterbottom does, is actually anti-Thompson in its lack
of economy. Thompson describes Joyce’s murder in five brief
paragraphs, several of them only one sentence long but each
one hitting with the weight of a lead-crystal candlestick. “I
backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like
pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at
once,” Thompson writes in two tersely horrific sentences.
Thompson takes 21 words to get to the heart of a vivid,
sickening idea. Winterbottom takes a good five minutes, and
that’s 280 seconds too many. (Stephanie Zacharek,
“Characters deserve better in violent ‘Killer Inside Me,’”
Movieline, 17 June 2010)
3856
This may not be a misogynistic; it need not be misogynistic; but it is

certainly seeming lately that the way for liberal, self-protecting men
to express in-some-way-need-to-be-expressed, apparently near
furious anger at women, is to enact brutal "revenge" with high-
purpose cover. Right now it may be the liberal men can get away with
saying that "anyone who might find the violence in this movie
gratifying or arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of
professional help" (Andrew O'Hehir), but if as I suspect we see more
Watchmen/ Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/ Killer Inside of Me follow-
up, at some point we've got to suspect that high-concept / purpose
has become the last hold-out for expressing deeply felt gripes against
terribly wounding female treatment. One suspects it already in their
ammoing up.
Link: Characters deserve better in violent “Killer Inside Me”

(Movieline)
FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2010

Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 takes a rather dark turn near the end (be
prepared for this if you plan on taking really little kids), but
the resolution is so funny and so joyous — truly a
“Sometimes there’s God so quickly” moment — that I don’t
think it will cause any nightmares. (Stephanie Zacharek,
“Toy Story 3 brings series to brilliant, bittersweet close,”
Movieline, 17 June 2010)
It should give you nightmares. Two futures are presented in this film,
one that will soon be familiar to the cast-aside -- a nightmare of being
used, tortured and ruled over, without respite, until you're broken
and finally gone -- and the other for those who have found some way
to sculpt themselves to be relevant -- another couple decades of
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feeling vital to the future of the American dream. I think most liberals
feel that if they continue to fight for the impoverished, to fully side
with them, they risk joining the nightmare of junk, and sense that if
they only persuade themselves Brad Bird-like that there is simply no
hope for the damaged-to-the-point-of-grotesque, that they can
continue to accumulate and thrive, enjoying even a sense of now rare
election (in a suitably self-downplaying way, of course): it's simply the
way of the times. Bird showed he was for construing society so that
many of those who saw his films should probably rot, a few films ago.
"Wall-E" showed Lasseter still moved by enough of something special
that he seemed still for all of us. Not here, though. Another liberal on
the other side. May he at least feel guilt pains.
"It's vintage!": for safety, another clue to abandon your status as a
hipster, and possibly as a homosexual.
-----
And it was brilliant and funny and exciting. But it was also
possibly one of the tear-jerkingiest movies to come out of
Pixar yet. Click through to see what scenes caused the most
waterworks, but, of course, beware of spoilers.
5. The Toys Accept That Andy Won’t Play With
Them Anymore
4. Andy’s Mom Takes In Andy’s Room
3. Woody Has to Leave Bullseye the Horse Behind
2. Woody and Friends Accept Death Together
1. Andy Hesitates Handing Woody Over to Bonnie
(Dixon Gaines, “You got a friend in me: 5 tear-
jerking moments from Toy Story 3, Movieline, 20
June 2010)
Re #5: It's not so much that they're not needed, but that they don't fit
his understanding of himself as one of the chosen still permitted the
path of blue skies, clipped yards and picket fences; college on; the full
realization of the American dream. Bringing one precious toy with
him would just show anyone who happened inside his dorm room
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that he came from the right past of involved parents and idyllic
(romanced traditional) childhood interests and attachments. Bringing
the whole horde would suggest he's too much akin to those broken
who won't now find their way to college (increasingly, probably not
even the full way through high school), who cannot but now cling to
everything with some, with even the faintest bit of, friendly link, as
the threat of abandonment or disaster can never now be pushed far
enough away from conscious presence to not seem an any-moment
possibility.
Re #4: Andy's mom is acting out the drama of son departing for
college, in just the fashion all mothers continue to dream of acting out
-- because of its resonance of family fitness, healthiness, job-well-
done election -- but which we all know and sense that fewer and fewer
will able to realize. The mother's look inside the barren room is
today's version of Marie's "let them eat cake." Sad indeed.
Re #3: Woody is still infused with a sense of election from proving to
have the stuff to be the only toy to find uncompromising relevance in
Andy's movement along the right path, his shift away from all that
might compromise him. "Bullseye, you're just so sad. Just like a kid,
you were always too dependent: no would-be emerging adult in this
biting world wants to be reminded of having once been THAT
vulnerable. May you find solace in the trash ... but whatever you
dumb clinging pony: just find some way out of my sight. Now that's a
good pony."
Re #2: Sad, because we all know it's a result of Woody's naive sudden
trust of Lotso (what happened to the Woody who took like forever to
accept the spaceman?), which seems strangely out of character, and
possibly therefore born of some kind of death-wish, willingness,
desire to be placed in a situation where you'll be sacrificed. Last
straw, or the realization of foremost desire? I suspect the later; may
no Afghanistan-bound young American see this film lest s/he believe
solace, group camaraderie, sweet-resting-home and eternal
acceptance lies in letting oneself passively be drawn into its inner,
urgent, hungry maw.
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Re #1: The toys go to Bonnie, and get a 5-year reprieve -- until she
discovers boys. After that they'll need a PR savy spider to join their
cause and "spin them" as the "most specialest of toys," so as to give
them some chance of not being donated to some of the increasing
numbers of mongoloid, bent kids, who will obliterate themselves once
they've finished off everything before them, and whose mothers
cannot but call thrift stores their home.
-----
Wow. You use a lot of big fancy words.
But it doesn't disguise that you're wrong.
The Woody of the first film isn't cynical. He's assured
because of his place. When he loses that place to Buzz, he's
angry (like a small child) but grows to realize that trusting
and placing his trust in another (Buzz) is his only hope of
salvation.
The Woody of the second film BEGINS the movie saying that
no toy gets left behind. Woody wouldn't abandon anyone,
and is quick to even give Stinky Pete a chance at happiness
with Andy. He is truly shocked when Pete betrays that trust.
The Woody who gives Lotso a reprieve is a culmination of
Woody's journey from self-assured ruler of the roost to
loving and caring leader of the toy family, and one who
believes that every toy should get a chance.
Which is why your analysis is wrong. (Duane, response to
post)
Thanks for the great counter -- particularly your Stinky Pete example,
which I admit I don't remember all that well, and will have to look at
again. Examples aside, though, my overall sense of Woody as
someone too worldly-wise and adult -- and sometimes cynical -- to
not only feel the need to urgently rescue Lotso but to trust him to
rescue them rather than once again deceive and abandon them, was
established in the first film, with his long exasperation at everyone
elses' idiotic simple trust and naivety (their pre-schoolness), their
3860
dumb eager willingness to fall for what should be the most obvious of
scams. In TS 3, his instant naivety was meant to make him seem too
innocent to thrive, and make their rescue and new home more
salvation-like and cling-worthy -- you weren't thinking of the games
they were going to enjoy, but simply that they'll have the mercy of a
few more years away from the curb.
-----
"because we all know it's a result of Woody's naive sudden
trust of the bear-thing (what happened to the Woody who
took like forever to accept the spaceman?), which seems
strangely out of character..."
Nope, not out of character...he saved Lotso because he was
going to die. It would have been out of Woody's character to
watch a helpless toy die. (LEM, response to post)
It was meant to play out as Woody being (apparently) doomed for

being in the moment immediately receptive and trusting (and
therefore the considered play of the bear being wide-eyed frightened,
pinned, weak, and vulnerable). He wasn't principled though
begrudging, but naive and trusting: simple. From my remembered
sense of him, this isn't the Woody from the first two films, who could
get wickedly upset when his friends fall for simple charms. Not meant
for the real world is this Woody, whose innocent gallantry could make
him fall for the first deception a slickster puts in his way.
Relevant, recalled Lloyd DeMause quote: "Of course, in true

borderline style, the price of some closeness with God is total
devotion, the medieval Christian saying: 'To my beloved, I will forever
be His servant, His slave, All for God, and nothing for me.' As
contemporary borderlines say: 'I know you will love and take care of
me if I don’t self-activate. I’ll please you by clinging and complying
with your wishes, so you will take care of me, and these bad
(abandonment) feelings will go away.' (Evolution of Psyche and
Society)
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Link: Toy Story 3 brings series to brilliant, bittersweet close

(Movieline)
Link: You got a friend in me: 5 tear-jerking moments from Toy Story
3
the uncomfortable
What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets

going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit
the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form,
swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by
the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?
You've either experienced slush or you haven't, and the
difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job
of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent
to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically
have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is
out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the
vast majority of it is. Civilians who kvetch about the bad
writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely
popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much
trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of
traditional publishing. They haven't seen the vast majority
of what didn't get published -- and believe me, if you have,
it's enough to make your blood run cold, thinking about that
stuff being introduced into the general population.
Everybody acknowledges that there have to be a few gems
out in the slush pile -- one manuscript in 10,000, say --
buried under all the dreck. The problem lies in finding it. A
diamond encased in a mountain of solid granite may be
truly valuable, but at a certain point the cost of extracting it
exceeds the value of the jewel. With slush, the cost is not only
financial (many publishers can no longer afford to assign
3862
junior editors to read unsolicited manuscripts) but also -- as

is less often admitted -- emotional and even moral.
It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being
bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent
grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters -- not
to mention ton after metric ton of clichés -- for hours on end
induces a state of existential despair that's almost impossible
to communicate to anyone who hasn't been there
themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door
pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a
crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy
who said, "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for
my revolver" might have had a point after all.
[. . .]
Perhaps this system will work better, but I'm not so sure.
Contrary to the way they're often depicted by frustrated
authors, the agents and editors I've met are in fact
committed to finding and nurturing books and authors they
believe in as well as books that will sell. Also, bloggers or
self-appointed experts on particular genres and types of
writing are, in my experience, just as clubby and as likely to
plug or promote their friends and associates as anybody
else. Above all, this possible future doesn't eliminate
gatekeepers: It just sets up new ones, equally human and no
doubt equally flawed. How long before the authors
neglected by the new breed of tastemaker begin to accuse
them of being out-of-touch, biased dinosaurs? (Laura Miller,
“When anyone can be a published author,” Salon, 22 June
2010)
Watch when they get the vote, and then you'll see!
Re: "Contrary to the way they're often depicted by frustrated
authors, the agents and editors I've met are in fact committed to
finding and nurturing books and authors they believe in as well as
3863
books that will sell. Also, bloggers or self-appointed experts on

particular genres and types of writing are, in my experience, just as
clubby and as likely to plug or promote their friends and associates
as anybody else. Above all, this possible future doesn't eliminate
gatekeepers: It just sets up new ones, equally human and no doubt
equally flawed."
Probably would have been better to have written, "Though they ARE
clubby and likely to plug or promote their friends' works, the agents
and editors I've met are also committed to ..." As you wrote it, the
bloggers or self-appointed experts take the big hit you ostensibly
meant to be spread all around. Also, I gather you didn't mean to have
us thinking of the ghastly accumulation of oil spillage when you
referred us to this horrific massing of slush, but given all the inertia
and choking and pure ugliness we've endured of the former "spread,"
we may be a bit more primed to agree with your argument that we
might otherwise be -- for what American is going to readily assent to
the aristocrat's / gentleman's point-of-view: "Friend of democracy,
are you? .... let me show you some of the nincompoops of this navel-
gazing mob you so want to champion but completely misunderstand,
and we'll see if you'll still desire they be given the vote any time this
millenium!"
Sometimes the fall of a system represents evolution of HUMANITY,
of spirit, not just technology. There are huge hordes of bloggers /
writers out there that will create something WAY WORSE, more
punitive and self-serving, than what's currently in place, as they strive
to find their way to become what they've always loathed and
misapprehended (the gatekeepers). But there are good bunches of
people out there who sense that the current conception of, the
realities of, the publishing industry, though better than other
possibilities, is still insufficient to, unreflective of, their own
conception of democracy and brotherly / sisterly love. They want the
idea of the author, the publishing house, to go bye-bye, as it currently
works against the realization of what they sense could be our
democratic world. I'm with them.
3864
-----
I have a friend who is a wannabe writer-
- and one of the things she has mentioned is that sheer
hostility to writers from the publishing industry. Especially
beginner writers, who make up the vast bulk of the slush
pile.
I always thought she was exaggerating a bit, but after
reading this article and the comments, I'm not so sure.
What other art form, what other activity, is it perfectly okay
(in fact, almost expected) to dump on people for the sin of
being novices? Words like "garbage" and "really, really,
really, really terrible", "dreck".
What other kind of artists would take this kind of casual
abuse but writers?
And she isn't saying that the vast majority of manuscripts
are not bad, she's saying they are bad because, by and large,
they are by beginner writers, so why all the hate? (Tobbar,
response to post)
Superego world
Tobbar,
I disagree that the problem is just that they're novices. If that was the
problem, Laura would have pointed that out -- she is very much one
to recognize and champion novice writers. What she is thinking of,
and has herself been damaged by experiencing, are the ghastly
multitudes of damaged people who believe they've got what it takes,
but who really are in truth sadly undeveloped, deformed people with
worse than nothing good to say -- to the point that "you're" left
stunned that they aren't on, even in the smallest degree, to the gaping
extent of their own awfulness.
But I don't trust that publishers, editors, have the stuff to recognize
and praise work that makes them uncomfortable. I think they would
begin to become uncomfortable, be less genial, with a competent but
novice writer if s/he ventured into areas, ways of writing, they find
3865
inexplicable, beyond disproved and everyone-knows asinine -- there

are so many things you're simply not allowed to say these days: what
have the last twenty years been about, if not that? If they had their
say, s/he would be disowned, removed from the conversation and
forgotten about. And that's not good enough.
-----
To Patrick:
I’m going to have to disagree with your disagreement of my
original observation re: hatred of novices. I think that Laura
Miller champions a few select novice writers who are
already published or well on their way.
To use a borderline racist term that my friend assures me is
all the rage in the publishing world, Laura Miller seems to
champion the “special snowflakes” who have managed to
rise to prominence.
Further, although Ms. Miller may be sympathetic to novices,
you yourself do not seem to be: “ghastly multitudes of
damaged people who believe they've got what it takes, but
who really are in truth sadly undeveloped, deformed people
with worse than nothing good to say -- to the point that
"you're" left stunned that they aren't on, even in the smallest
degree, to the gaping extent of their own awfulness.”
Honestly, how can you know this about these people?
Beginner yoga students are probably undeveloped
(flexibility-wise) with worse than no skills in regards to
knowledge of poses, and may even be unaware of their
shortcomings, but is it standard practice in yoga studios to
dump so savagely on those beginners?
Again I have to ask—why the hate? Why the language that
seems to thrive on denigrating the writers?
As to your last comment about editor’s lack-of ability to risk
reading outside of what they know, or maybe even what
they already like, I can’t really speak to that, but you bring
up a good point. What is that old saying, the surest way to
3866
lose the present war is to re-fight the last one? (Tobbar,

response to post)
Being real
Re: "Honestly, how can you know this about these people? Beginner
yoga students are probably undeveloped (flexibility-wise) with
worse than no skills in regards to knowledge of poses, and may even
be unaware of their shortcomings, but is it standard practice in
yoga studios to dump so savagely on those beginners?
Again I have to ask—why the hate? Why the language that seems to
thrive on denigrating the writers?"
It's not hate, Tobbar -- I'm just being real. I've read enough of Laura's
work to know that if most submissions were inadequate mostly owing
to the fact that their writers were still at the beginning of their
journeys, she would never have written her piece this way, as she has
always wanted to believe that in everyone out there is, or could be, an
inspired artist (or art appreciator) waiting to be born. She doesn't so
much believe this anymore because her long experience with what is
put in her hands -- and her strong hold on sanity -- has shattered her
preferred and high estimation of the average Sue submitter's
capabilities, as she has come to conclude that something very wrong
lies in emotional / cognitive makeup of these people. My experience
of people, of what has happened to them after near 30 years of social
assistance withdrawal, of enduring the realities of a meaner society,
has made clear to me that many people out there aren't so much
better than Hogarth's gin-drinkers, that we've pretty much forced
them to devolve to the point that you figure it's pretty much done for
them, and you're mostly hoping they don't have too many kids. We're
not all blank slates. Whole bunches of us are near born, filth-smeared
and broken. I'm figuring many of these might estimate themselves a
genteel author, and do the pre-requisites (send the finished
masterpiece to a reputable publishing house), but also that you'll
meet nary one of them in your average yoga class.
-----
3867
the uncomfortable
Also, about the gifted writer / thinker who puts forward the
uncomfortable: Lloyd deMause's books have all been self-published,
and they've proven amongst the most important I've ever read. His
version of psychohistory was something you could almost get away
with in the more permissive, free-wheeling 70s, but even then, though
a few prominent and even universally respected names (the historian
Lawrence Stone comes to mind) were considering giving his unusual
ideas credence (Stone eventually backed away), most historians were
affronted whenever his essays found their way amongst more
preferred takings of history, and his longer works had to be self-
published. Today's "Lloyd deMause" would have it worse: even in
Laura Miller's trepidation in an author arguing a king would envision
"the nation as a version of his own body and vice versa" (a bit from a
book review of hers), I saw how the palest version of a kind of
exploration I find most meaningful and fruitful, has become more
bemusing than Freud's most far-fetched. If it's psychohistory, and it's
published, it'll be the most tepid, backpedalling of stuff -- there is no
other option. Self-published -- it might just be a prompt for where we
can go next. So I'm for self-publishing, and seeing what self-
publishers might just be up to.
Link: When anyone can be a published author (Salon)
THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 2010

spirit of punishment
Talk about snakebit: Peggy Noonan chose Friday to publish

a column writing off President Obama off as an unlucky
president, comparing him to Jimmy Carter, just when his
presidency has a little spring back in its step. Its title is
luscious: "A Snakebit President: Americans want leaders on
whom the sun shines."
3868
The sun seemed to shine on Obama this week. It's true his
Tuesday night speech wasn't his best, but that's because it
lacked the news he was able to reveal Wednesday: That BP
had agreed to create a $20 billion escrow fund to
compensate the victims of its Gulf oil disaster, to have it
administered by the tough Kenneth Feinberg of the 9/11
fund, and also to put off paying shareholder dividends
through the end of the year.
And on Thursday, Obama got relief from the harsh,
unnatural media glare in the wake of the disaster, which
had landed upon him in the absence of any other visible hero
or villain in the mess, when Tony Hayward testified before
the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Hayward's
constant insistence that he either didn't know or couldn't
recall ... virtually anything he was asked, finally made clear
there is one leader whose lack of preparedness can be
blamed for the crisis, and his name is Tony Hayward. (Joan
Walsh, “Barack Obama’s very good week,” Joan Walsh,
Salon, 18 June 2010)
1) Spirit of punishment
People who aim to show how ineffectual this president is / will be,
will be rendered absurd as Obama will prove again and again,
increasingly and increasingly, someone who can transcend
expectations, produce something of a miracle, after weeks or months
of surely-THIS-TIME-nothing-will-be-done. Healthcare is in, and not
wavering. BP coughed up 20 billion, as if in response to an emperor's
slight motion to fall on his sword. This administration HAS power
because we -- everyone, including corporations, including many
republicans --WANT IT to have power.
After long periods of pleasant or manic excess (i.e., happiness), we
begin to want leaders in who will set the scene for prolonged sacrifice
and (guiltless) other-demonization, through depressions, huge wars
-- whatever. It will always seem to be about helping out the
distraught, but the reason everyone -- including corporations -- will
3869
ultimately prove surprisingly ready to bow to him, is that they sense

he is the primary incarnation of a spirit of brutal punishment these
"bad boys" are terrified of, and that will -- and they want to -- rule this
age.
Edit:
Amendment: He is the primary ARM of a spirit of punishment. He is
not the incarnation itself. That seems more accurate.
-----
2) The media may conclude that the people have once again proved
themselves impatient and impulsively needy, ultimately unequal to
the poised, patient, thoughtful and resourceful man they've elected
president -- as it did after Obama got healthcare. Obama is not Carter,
mostly because people want now more to turn on themselves than
they do this emotionally distant, possibly judgmental, president, who
hovers over an age of unbelievable excess, lack of restraint. "Reagan"
won't follow him because "Reagan" would do what we want of him --
which would drive us to a state of sinfulness that would be paralyzing.
Obama acts under his own terms, at his own pace, seeing the filth at
the heart of the ordinary man that would drive any sane man away --
why else do so want him to show some responsiveness than to
confirm he knows the degree of our own fallenness? Don't
underestimate our desire to turn on ourselves and ultimately
INCREASE our loyalty to Obama. That's my sense. (Note: THIS post
-- #2 -- originally posted at realpsychohistory, 16 June 2010)
Link: Barack Obama’s very good week (Salon)
the killer inside of you
As I wrote in April, to complain that "The Killer Inside Me"

is full of misogynistic violence is a little like reading "Moby-
Dick" and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Violence
against women is Thompson's text and theme and central
metaphor -- and in case I haven't made this clear, anyone
3870
who might find the violence in this movie gratifying or

arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of
professional help.
[. . .]
Within the first few minutes of the film, Lou is sent to run
Joyce out of town and she responds by slapping and
slugging him. She's bored and lonely and sick of sleeping
with ugly guys for money; she's looking for a reaction, and
she gets one: On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back
and tackles her, pulling down her panties and whipping her
bare ass with his belt. The sequence is both erotic and
violent, profoundly troubling and potentially arousing,
designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional, psychological
and libidinal responses. It sets the table for what follows: an
exploration of the dividing line between sex and death that's
at least as morbid and philosophical as anything in
modernist European literature. (Andrew O’hehir, “‘The
Killer Inside Me:’ Much ado about misogyny,” Salon, 17 June
2010)
Arousal
Re: “On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back and tackles her,
pulling down her panties and whipping her bare ass with his belt. The
sequence is both erotic and violent, profoundly troubling and
potentially arousing, designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional,
psychological and libidinal responses.”
Are you saying here that YOU found this panties-being-pulled-down,
this bare-ass whipping erotic, that you are to be counted amongst the
"potentials" who were aroused while watching it? Or that it JUST IS
erotic and violent, smartly rigged to potentially or even likely trigger
libidinal responses, ostensibly possessed by all of us?
If YOU found the scene erotic, I wish you had just said as much, and
made clear whether or not you were also aroused by it -- and if not,
how you were able to sense that others would find it so -- and either
defended the remarkable possibility that you can be fundamentally
3871
woman-loving and experience eroticism and arousal in a scene of this

nature, or brought forward the possibility that the fact that you did
enjoy a scene you suspect you shouldn't have enjoyed, means you're
not quite in fact so distinguished from the clearly mongrel, beyond-
the-pale male who relishes this kind of violence.
-----
Killer inside of you
Personally, I think it unlikely that many men don't get a hard-on
while watching explicit scenes of female victimization, not because
they all regrettably still are in the possession of reptilian brian-stems
that make they forever capable of lapsing brute animalistic, but
because most were raised by mothers who were severely
emotionally / intellectually deprived in the patriarchal societies /
families they grew up in, and therefore spent their earliest part of
their lives foremost serving their mothers' unmet needs rather than
their own. Deprived mothers aren't magically capable of producing
nurturance; nurturance only comes from the well-cared-for, the
respected, the loved. So most men find ways -- are driven to find ways
-- to enact revenge for their being used, but also to pretend that this
isn't what they are up to, as they also learned early on that the one
thing you don't do -- at the threat of abandonment, of experiencing
catastrophic aloneness, destitution -- is to convey that you are on to
the fact that mothers weren't entirely self-sacrificial and marvelous in
their motives (their version, the only version), that they wanted to
squeeze every bit of attendance out of you before they abandoned you
once aging, teenagerdom, turned you on to other things. Patriarchy
hurts mothers; hurt mothers hurt their kids: any other version is a lie
"good boys and girls" have learned to, have been scared into, tell
(ing).
Link: "The Killer Inside Me": Much ado about misogyny

(Salon)
sacrifice
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Only today, the Associated Press revealed that a Kasich

operative advised a state pension fund executive on how to
minimize Lehman's role in the fund's losses when talking to
reporters. So Kasich was understandably a little sensitive
about the issue, accused me of a "smear" and complained
that I was "picking on" him. He also advised me to read his
book "so you can learn how to control yourself." Yikes! It's
called "Hardball," sir.
Also, in the "things I wish I'd said" department: TPM
reported in January that Kasich was warning his fellow
Republicans that the Tea Party movement was so angry,
they would "hang" Republicans "from the nearest tree" if
they didn't endorse their far-right agenda. That doesn't
make them sound like the reasonable folks Kasich was
describing today. (Joan Walsh, “John Kasich, Lehman
Brothers populist!,” Salon, 16 June 2010)
sacrifice
Kasich got to speak most of the time, with Chris trying to make him
feel respected and at ease, yet despite the pro-offered time and space
blew up when Joan poked at him for a brief moment. Once again,
mommy issues? Of course. You can't get to the heart of republicanism
and patriarchy without understanding that. Something to be explored
further -- and not simply derisively -- perhaps?
I also wish Joan had focused mostly on refuting the contention that
tea-baggers are reasoning and sane, like she did when Buchanan blew
up at her. They are insane, "not well," and we need to spend more
time announcing this fact, getting comfortable being derided as
liberal elitists when we make our understanding of this clear, so we
can move beyond to exploring exactly what this means. Kasich feels it
means they'll (tea-baggers) respond to a world-view that entrenches
an elite, and resonates everywhere of "sacrifice" and children being
served. I think he's right about that.
3873
Link: John Kasich, Lehman Brothers populist! (Salon)

Unresolved parental issues
You can call that pragmatism in the face of harsh political

reality if you like. That's not a bad description. But the truth
is that there was never any point in time when getting cap-
and-trade passed was going to be anything but
extraordinarily difficult. It still will be now, if Obama tries.
A White House that gave up on the issue when it seemed too
hard and came haltingly back when it seems marginally
easier isn't exactly the picture of idealism Obama painted
when he talked about how his presidency would be
remembered. At least on this issue, I thought we were
getting a big president. (Gabriel Winant, “The medium-big
president,” Salon, 15 June 2010)
-----
Unresolved Parental Issues
I am becoming increasingly convinced that large swathes of
the US media have unresolved parental issues. Why the
obsession with incessantly noting that "Daddy" is not acting
like we want him to, not matter what he does? (Phyllis Beck
Kritek, response to post, “The medium-big president”)
Re: Unresolved Parental Issues

On this subject, it could be judged that pretty much all of us have
unresolved parental issues, making pointing this out more a prompt
for serious exploration than a point for mockery.
We may assume that what we want out of a president is a fully
responsive leader, but some have argued that if we didn't have
parents who were immediately responsive to us, we actually feel
uncomfortable with leader-figures who too readily attend and smartly
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deliver. This speaks more to than just how our parents treatment of
us determines our leadership preferences, but on the subject of how
instances in the "crib" determine the nature of the larger landscape, I
offer this:
Every childrearing practice in history is restaged in adult
political behavior. Children whose mothers swaddled them
and were "not there" emotionally could not as adults maintain
object consistency and grew up paranoid, imagining
"enemies" everywhere. Children whose mothers regularly did
not feed them in a timely fashion experienced the world as
malevolently withholding. Children whose mothers rejected
them with depressive silence experienced peaceful
international periods as threatening. Children whose mothers
dominated them and who were engulfing often choose
totalitarian political leaders. Children whose mothers were so
needy they describe their children as "born selfish and
demanding" and or who saw them as "angry since birth"
experienced other nations as demanding too much or as angry
"bad babies." Children whose mothers used them as
antidepressants chose manic, often violent leaders to counter
their own depression. And mothers who ridiculed and
humiliated their children whenever their activities didn't
coincide with her own were experienced in the international
sphere as poison containers of intolerable ridicule and shame
-- as in "the shame of Versailles." (Lloyd deMause, Emotional
Life of Nations)
Link: The medium-big president (Salon)
Flushing out more lefties
There are two pressing reasons that I find Obama's current

stasis so worrisome. One is that we're at a dangerous time,
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given the world economy, and on the right, Obama's election

has worsened a 20-year pattern of Republican obstruction
and destruction (and it's got an undercurrent of hate and
demonization that can't be denied.) At the same time,
Obama has an incredible moment to articulate what
Democratic leadership stands for: Improving the lives of
ordinary Americans, protecting the country from the
unbridled, deregulated dangerous corporate excess, and
moving boldly on problems, like climate change, that
require boldness and leadership. Between the BP oil disaster
and the near-collapse of the world economy thanks to the
finance industry – both have in common a corporate
arrogance that big risks to make big money were worth
taking, no matter the impact on the rest of us – Obama has
the perfect context for laying out why government matters,
and why Democrats run the government best. Instead he's
carping about "folks up there" in Washington and
complaining that if he'd tried to regulate the oil industry
before the spill, people would have said bad things about
him. Grow up, Mr. President. (Joan Walsh, “Protecting the
Obama brand,” 13 June 2010)
As Obama frustrates more and more of the left, how sure is the
Republican leadership that its own people won't develop more love
for the man?
As Obama responds to every crisis in a distant, unemotional,
unresponsive, withholding manner, how sure are we that the
American people won't respond to him PRIMARILY by distinguishing
themselves from the disloyal "complainers," and actually increase
their attachment to the man, in hopes thereby of receiving more love.
During a time that is proving itself rotten primarily by previous
excess, how sure are we that we would actually be comfortable with a
president that did all we would ask of him? Maybe his role now is to
prompt out those who maintain such hubris for the rest of us to
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swarm over and dissolve, so we can feel like we're at least beginning
to make some amends?
-----
Guests tonight include ...
I think some people here have a chance to be invited to Obama's next
basketball game / water fight, and some don't. When the disloyal
finally reveal themselves, do those who remain true feel a rush of
satisfaction and a sense of election? Maybe at some point our
commander-in-chief will encourage you to put a clamp on us, or at
least suggest in some way that he might notice your efforts if you were
to serve your country in this most appropos of ways? After all, how is
he to be expected to get anything done when those now most guilty --
those abandoning him on the left, who should be steadfast behind
him after their withering after decades of Republican system-sullying
-- suggest to all that what-have-you-done-for-me-lately support, is all
the support this president should expect?
-----
He's compromised, just like you
Being a corporate democrat does not mean being the corporations'
man: it means being the peoples'. When the first wave of lefties
expressed their dismay at Obama's betrayal (over healthcare, where it
came to a head), other democrats, including many of those now
composing the second wave of lefties to near abandon him, ridiculed
their brethren for not realizing the always obvious: that Obama was
the man of his previous in-plain-view record, and would always be
attendant to corporations' needs / requests and all other in-this-time
unavoidable political realities. That is, the label "corporate democrat"
proved hardly libel (for Obama, not for the complainers), and rather
just another reminder that he was a complex, nimble, realistic man --
the only kind of person who could be counted on to help navigate our
way through very compromised times.
Now a second wave is right-ready to reject him, and "corporate
democrat" is again used to disparage him, when it will prove once
again to remind people that Obama, like you, who hears almost
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nothing in any medium that doesn't have a catch, who is subject to

possible manipulations from beginning of morning to end of day, who
grew up knowing it spoiled to expect mommy and daddy to give us
what we want, AND WHO FINDS HIM/HERSELF ALMOST
COMFORTABLE WITH THIS ENVIRONMENT, is part of the same
story-universe as you are, and will ultimately be responsive to your
needs for plotting, climax, sacrifice; and is not in the least bit related
to people like Hillary Clinton, who you sense could never be
sufficiently "tarred" by whatever corporate influence to not seem a
60's hippie who could come close herself to truly do without the
cheeseburger, the bathroom smoke, the suspect bit of extra-
something on the side.
I'm sure Obama will one day seem very uncompromised -- and we
will be shown -- but right now we enjoy how his delays, his watering-
downs, his indirectness, is working to make squack those we will soon
have not the least bit of tolerance for.
Link: Protecting the Obama brand (Salon)

A-Team
For a movie that reportedly required 11 writers and more

than 10 years to complete -- all without any real reason for
existing in the first place -- "The A-Team" is reasonably good
fun. If you're a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry
Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain
cells, that is.
[. . .]
OK, I do have two younger colleagues who sheepishly admit
that they thought Stephen J. Cannell's NBC series, which
starred George Peppard and Mr. T (he of Nancy Reagan
fame) and ran from 1983 to 1987, was "cool." They were
little kids at the time; I suppose it's forgivable.
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[. . .]
This "A-Team" reminds me of the sub-James Bond action
movies I used to enjoy on Saturday afternoons, 30-odd years
ago: The "Saint" franchise, or Olympic skier Jean-Claude
Killy in "Snow Job" (which I went home and told my parents
was the best film I'd ever seen) or Alistair MacLean
adaptations like "Puppet on a Chain" or "Force 10 From
Navarone." It presents the same utterly bogus version of
masculine bonhomie, the same shorthand character
development (wisecracks under pressure = toughness), the
same ludicrous death-defying stunts, and the same
implausible chicks who appear every so often to lend an
almost-grown-up veneer and then vanish again, to
everyone's obvious relief.
Or rather, "The A-Team" presents all those things turned up
to 11.9, injected with crystal meth and steroids, and CGI'd
right up the wazoo.
[. . .]
Carnahan's action sequences have a lot of "kinetic energy,"
which is a nice way of saying that after the first 15 seconds
you have absolutely no idea who is where or which way is
up or what the hell is supposed to be happening, beyond the
fact that some shit is blowing up and the good guys are
kicking some tail. If you can switch your mind off entirely, so
you become measurably dumber during the two hours
you're sitting there, and you never think about the fact that
the gross national product of Equatorial Guinea was spent
several times over on this stupid, empty and noisy event, it's
largely painless. But then, I do still have a 12-year-old
entombed inside me, and, Jesus, is he high on Twizzlers.
(Andrew O’Hehir, “A-team: A cheerful C -,” 10 June 2010)
So was it fun, or wasn't it?

Is this review what you get when a reviewer actually enjoys a film he
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knows he is not now supposed to have enjoyed? I'm not entirely sure,
but it reads like an id vs. superego showdown, where a 12-year-old's
joy is simultaneously choked AND satisfied.
For those interested in having the smallest range of independent
personality, maybe critics could supply us a list of media you can
enjoy without needing to cover with some sort of admission of sin.
Link: A-Team: A cheerful C – (Salon)
Re: Sadness of the Gore split
There is oil gushing into the ocean and people are killing
humanitarian aid workers and the earth is still warming.
Those things are on a different plane of sad and have
already left us all terribly afraid and depressed and angry
this early summer. I didn't know I had any room at all to
care about the Gores' relationship, but maybe because it's
something so much smaller, so much more personal, a
headline so much easier to absorb than the other larger
tragedies playing out around the globe that this small piece
of political gossip turns out to be such an unbelievable
freaking bummer. (Rebecca Traister, “the sadness of the
Gore split,” Salon, 1 June 2010)
Giving way
On the bright side, it makes it that much more likely that we'll never
need to doubt Obama's marriage -- our dependency on its beauty is
now upped a further notch, so that he could actually have been a
Tiger Woods, a thousand skeletons could begin to funnel out of his
closet, and we know we'd collectively pluck our eyes out before having
to attend to any of them.
A few further lords out of the way so Obama can be King.
Link: The sadness of the Gore split (Salon)
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The movement would hurt people
Is that the Tea Party philosophy at work: "Accidents

happen," people die, and private industry should be left
alone, not even criticized, when they do?
I'm getting a little weary of people insisting journalists must
pay homage to the Tea Party as a great infusion of political
energy, and not call them racist, and examine their ideas
with respect. As I've stated before, it is pretty clear from
polling that the Tea Party is just another name for the
traditional Republican base -- older, whiter, heavier on
males and angrier than the rest of the country. Aside from
their costumes and protests, I don't think they're that
revolutionary or newsworthy. But OK, I'm willing to respect
them. Respect means asking them what they'd do if they
were in government, reporting on what they say, and letting
the world know. (Joan Walsh, “Taking the Tea Party
seriously,” Salon, 21 May 2010)
The movement would hurt people, which is what we want,
and why it is (accepted as) legitimate
Tea partiers are racists -- or rather those so self-hating they readily
project aspects of themselves they would disown into other people --
but so were -- comparatively -- our parents. Since depression periods
are always those where elder wisdom, where "I told you so," once
again rules supreme, tea partiers, for demanding people fend for
themselves, for wanting for people to be left without resources to offer
options other than long-suffering without complaint, is accepted as
legitimate.
Any public, good progressive will find him/herself dumbfounded by
how many of his/her ostensible friends will turn on them. I wouldn't
count on Rachel Maddow, for instance.
Link: Taking the Tea Party seriously (Salon)
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Be careful!
Undoubtedly, had this been the behavior of a Republican

administration, "the left's" big environmental organizations
would be scheduling D.C. protests and calling for firings, if
not criminal charges. Yet, somehow, there are no protests.
Somehow, there have been almost no calls for the
resignation of Salazar, who oversaw this disaster and who,
before that, took $323,000 in campaign contributions from
energy interests and backed more offshore drilling as a U.S.
senator. Somehow, facing environmental apocalypse, there
has been mostly silence from "the left." (David Sirota,
“Laying bare the myth of the ‘left,’” Salon, 21 May 2010)
Be careful
When primitive civilizations used to feel guilty for excess and too
good living, they devised sacrificial wars where all their best and
brightest -- representatives of happiness, ambition -- could be offered
up to placate the anger of their abandonment-suspecting gods.
What we're doing now is trying to entice our best and brightest --
those who cannot be stopped for fighting for a progressive, nurturing,
fair society -- to clearly ID themselves by marching on to Washington.
The rest of us liberals will wildly cheer them on, which they'll
misinterpret as larger support -- "maybe we'll get some senators out
of this!" But once they're pot-banging and out in the open, we'll
withdraw and actually join the chorus in understanding now that
what is actually substantially worse than a tea bagger who wants to
limit support, is the ridiculous hippie who in an age of withdrawal
and the circumscibed, just can't stop from demanding more and
more.
Progressives, understand that Obama supporters are those who are
looking for ways to show they're not in fact one of you -- that they'd
spit on you, if they had the chance. Don't play into the public desire
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for the crazies on the LEFT, now, to come out and ID themselves.
Thanks for being you, David.
Link: Laying bare the myth of the left (Salon)
TUESDAY, MAY 18, 2010

Review of "Robin Hood"
One of the surprising things about the “tea-bagger revolution,” is that

without any of the sort of in-film help kindly proffered in “Life of
Brian,” it suddenly becomes much harder to hear of peasant revolts
against unfair taxes and instantly hate the surely unjust, greedy lords
at work cruelly starving the populace, just to fight primarily vanity-
driven, foreign wars. Instead, for at least a moment or two, we
wonder if there might in fact have been some justice in the taxing,
and some (not starvation driven) insanity in the peasants, and further
that if we continue to cheer on those we are directed to cheer for, if
we’re not in some way taking in of the same very bad inputs which
produced these American misanthropes in the first place.
This isn’t the first time with Ridley Scott, but despite every bit of force
motioning us to despise the new king for dismissing the long-serving
Earl Marshall, I cheered for the royalty. In this case I specifically
cheered -- build ’dem roads! get ’dem taxes! Even if in this film
universe the money’s primarily going to wars and not as the king
argues, to run the country, and even if the reticent withholding
northern lords aren’t withholding from the king because grain isn’t
even on hand to supply their own dinner plates, let alone feed their
people, but in fact because they horde away their riches in gross
portions in the fashion of Friar Tuck and his stored-away barreled
conglomeration of honey, I know that the royalty, the government,
elsewhere --most everywhere -- has a good point: how do you do
anything new with your country when well-positioned people in your
own retinue judge all change as lapse of wisdom in pull of impulse
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and whimsy? Scott didn’t intend this, but when good people are for
one, mostly old, and completely frozen in disposition -- in grimace --
and outlook, all his ostensible villains need to do is poke at their
stoned faces with the slightest bit of sneer or mockery, have the
slightest bit of teasing fun with them, and our sympathies should be
theirs.
The film would have us believe that the greatest unearthed treasure
here is the revelation that way back in the 12th-century, a man
produced a document with implications so revolutionary they might
stop us in our tracks, even today, if we allowed ourselves to think on
them a bit. But for me it was the young to-be-king’s continuing to sex
his french vixen, while his wizened, wrinkled, grandmother,
impotently beamed all her supply of wrathful looks upon him. What a
treasure! He understood his grandmother as just another of
England’s stony looming gargoyles, who scare away with show of
eternal judgment but who are born out of fear of life, of stupid
ignorance and misunderstanding of anything beyond familiar reach,
not lifetimes of accrued wisdom; and showed himself in tune with the
slow breaking of routine and duty in favor of mischief, mirth and
experimentation that marked the beginning of the English learning
from the French and the Italians, which marked the beginning of the
roots for the English renaissance!
Intriguingly, Scott doesn’t actually have it in for the French. They are
it seems by nature driven to be smartly and ruthlessly conquistatorial
and scheming -- it’s just who they are -- and they aren’t so
individually self-inflating they can’t readily accept that they might
function better as each one of them part of a larger state, and so at
worst always have a comprehensive functioning state while England
could at any turn disintegrate into a swath of broken, squabbling
chiefdoms, and are possessed of an arrogant -- and actually in a way,
self-diminishing -- and ultimately limited, but still formidable
understanding of human tendencies. They are a formidable
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opponent; are right to doubt that there is anything actually really

existing and worthy when the English are in mood to bash their
shields and herald their virtue before them; and they serve as a test as
to how well the English are embodying their in-truth potentially
superior selves -- as truly uncompromised, noble individuals, obliged
to a King but whose castles are their own homes, who when united
can repel huge armadas and armies as can any vibrant young body,
multitudes of weakness-drawn contagens. Who he has it in for are the
English who don’t understand that their way to best form, is not to be
seduced by French novelties, things suited really only to those of
apparently unadulterated French constitution, but to uncover basic
truths concerning their nobility they seem everywhere either prone to
forget or cover over, or to twist into worst possible deviant forms.
This means remembering / learning to be honest, forthright, brave,
unrelenting, and so forth. It means boasting the soul of a stone-
mason -- bearing-out truths you’d inscribe on an otherwise
unadorned sword: It means life becoming about not an increasing
awareness of, and adding of and an appreciation for complexities, but
about refusing to add layers, life, story, to sully perfect and simple
beginnings.
To say that Scott would have the English, would have us, work against
life amounting to a story, to make maturity delightful because it
means a constant conversation of previous experience, perspective,
with the newly encountered and just understood, is, for the most part,
actually fair. His heroes are too often attractive men and woman who
ultimately disappoint because they not just accord themselves with
but seem trapped in code: they are trapped to be noble because they
exist to show up other people’s deficiencies or fallenness, and take
vengeance on them for it. But there is enough of another possibility at
work in his work that I’ll certainly mention it: and that is, an
argument not against change, but in favor of cultivating a state of
being that makes you able to enjoy a life of mature enjoyment and
development, without diverting oneself onto wayward paths opened
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up by the pettiest of motivations. You sense amongst his main

principles, that is, self-esteem. You do. Robin Longstride is the better
man for returning the sword to the family of a deceased good-hearted
man, and acting without pretense while returning it. His stay in
Nottingham, with Marion and father Loxley, offers what you never
believed would have opened up in “Gladiator” had the turn in that
movie had been to allow Maximus to return to his family -- namely, a
fairly convincing show of amiability, friendship, comfort and good
living, you would be hard-pressed not to kill and kill again, if such
was necessary, to have some chance of reclaiming or returning to it.
But since his characters for the most part seem to stop developing at
some point, at exactly the same point, it seems, that they finally learn
how to properly comport themselves and become wholly principled,
Scott ultimately does not make self-esteem the beginnings of onward
journeys, but it’s termination -- the beginning of character stasis. To
be noble is to lose self-confliction, but to become a bore -- and just
look what that did to the English king’s foxy vixen French wife:
Plunge the dagger into yourself, my dear, you’ve surrendered your
sizzle and mischief in your giving in to grandma -- don’t allow
yourself to live long enough to prove an example of how others
similarly vitally sexed can sabotage everything great in them to show
off the knowingness and majesty in vastly too long-lived, aged owls.
What Scott does, though, is make character cementation the

beginning of their involvement in his movies greatest battles -- and as
such there is a sense that they’ve been molded into familiar pieces
that will be involved in none the less surprising, you-never-know --
even when at some level, you do know -- military engagements. Chess
pieces -- rooks, bishops, knights, pawns, kings -- that can each be
downed by strategy or errant happenstance, at any instance. Where
bravery and skill we find really does count, but in execution seems so
much more subtle, invisible, amongst the multitudes of intentions,
one-on-ones, variant goings-on, that even a charging, competent king
at the front of the battle seems in need of having his bravery being
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recounted afterwards -- so that it can be poetically foregrounded -- to

seem as glorious as we might have wanted him to be in the instant,
and who could be quitted -- and not just killed -- by attendance to
something else unusual or at least unexpected but not in fact out of
ordinary for the occasion, like a cook experimenting away from his
post to crossbow (what turns out to be) a king, or even -- for me at
least -- just his bringing up of soup, for a brief time-out for harried,
exhausted soldiers, at top of the castle’s turret. For Scott, battles are
where we get what we would have hoped to receive in conversations
between characters -- where unexpected turns are met with
improvisations that show our heroes as heroic for inspired reactions
to developments before them, for being able to see the battle as a
story they can yet sway into some variant form rather than another.
Yes, Robin’s “ask me nicely,” the whole bedchamber sequence with
Marion, is an example of wonderful improvisation and discovery
through conversation, but it is not Scott’s main fortay or inclination.
Instead, heroes are mostly plain and stalwart in conversation -- this
shows their minds already know everything they need to know, so
every conversation away from the everyday is just a potential lean on
them toward the bad -- and villains, those most prone to complicate
what we might expect with turns toward some possibility we might
not have accounted for. Villains will show that they shouldn’t be
killed, because their best-loved cousin is french -- a farceful play, that
seems to have swayed his french foe -- or that they shouldn’t accord
their self-righteous mothers’ wishes, because though confronted with
those wearing-thick plain virtue, they can easily, correctly, but still
remarkably show how even while themselves undressed and in
seemingly the baldest of compromised positions, they’re actually
evidently right in insisting they’re not the ones foremost in bed with
those shorn all decency and allegiance to duty.
In battles, everything seems tossed up and kind of random and

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unpredictable -- in the moment of it, and despite all experience of

how these things normally go, still hard to foretell -- and so it is in
Scott’s battles where everything that the healthcare-fearing tea-
bagger would despise -- the chance for meaningful change and
unpredictable, onward growth -- is manifested. The battles are where
we still may sense Scott embraced by baby boomers who remember
how the 60’s social battles were moved by sufficient expectation for
change, that every twist and turn in any particular engagement might
just determine exactly how the future would take shape. You could be
great and fearless, and yet find yourself suddenly surprised by
beginning a battle with two arrows in you that have already doomed
you -- as happened to the german warrior in “Kingdom of Heaven” --
that ensures we’ll mostly just see in your perseverance just how good
you must have been in the battles that built your reputation. Or in a
moment of slight over-extension, be ended after a lifetime of killer-
blows to everyone else -- as happened to the muslim knight, again in
“Kingdom of Heaven.” You could deliver what we have been given
every bit of evidence -- in battles that rain arrows just about
everywhere -- to suspect as just as likely as any other possibility, a
purely random shot that ends the life of a king. Your efforts may
amount to cruel nothing, or make the greatest of differences. And so
while I feel I haven’t much more interest in Scott, for I loathe his
foreclosing of character development, his making of potentially
interesting people into dull chess pieces, his most boring, dumb, and
unmoving solutes to democratic principles, I still see in his work
some evidence for understanding living best as being open to
unexpected nuances that could lead to grandscale changes, of being
open and desiring of life amounting to the surefooted engaging
willingly in forays that could have them slip, for the unexpected -- and
maybe even -- the better.
SATURDAY, MAY 15, 2010

There is place for growth in leisured paradise: Review of "Letters to
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Juliet"
It is unbecoming of a lady to marry her steward, and so the pseudo-

Italian fiancee, who is expert and fussy-obsessed with all the variant
particulars concerning his “estate” -- his newly opened restaurant -- is
to be discarded for a gentleman who’s only obligation is to show
himself good-looking, vital, and inherently decent and well-mannered
-- a proper lord. This is one of the things you understand while
watching “Letters to Juliet,” yet another film which must be objected
to lest we become unable to see reality.
Our lady, Sophie, has gone to Brown, what has apparently become
THE finishing school for ladies in our times, being not so ardent-
seeming that it might coarsen you with too professional a sense of
purpose, yet still as established and esteemed as any of the more
prominent ivyies. If you’ve gone to Brown, you may be the sort who is
just not pushy enough to have already scored a career as a major
writer at the New Yorker by the time she’s twenty-two, not brutally
driven enough to have portfolioed herself into the most obvious
upmost echelons, like Harvard or Princeton, but who’s relaxed
possession of larger qualities, whose preference for discreteness,
anonymity, quiet grace, makes you EXACTLY what lords of
commercial society need as near to them as possible to suggest their
own timelessness and quality -- certain by divine right, to survive and
continue to prosper, if the time's primary henceforth call is for people
to define themselves as either sacrifice or to-be-satisfied.
She’s gone where Lady Di might have gone to if she was an American,
and her future husband has gone to Oxford -- where all boyish princes
who would be Kings must go. If he’d gone to Cambridge, it would
have again made him REALLY seem invested in doing something for
the country by craft or trade -- which would have lowered and
coarsened him -- when it is his loftiness -- his sheer existence -- which
most keeps the regression-prone countryside from devolving into
dispersions of the-really-quite-insane, gnarly, garish multitudes. Yes,
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of course, he’s supposed to be a lawyer devoted to helping the weak,

which is supposed to sound like the lord turning away from
expectation and risking being forgotten about but which by this time
we all REALLY know means he’s perfectly orthodox -- perfectly
“certain,” and safe, given our newly updated standards concerning
how lords are to define themselves.
It isn’t a good thing when being as alive as a sunflower but not a wit
more interesting, can’t make you -- an ostensibly ambitious human
being -- the subject of some ridicule. And yet this might now just be
where we are -- in that too many who can at some level see that these
leisured, liberal humanists / gentry, who ostensibly have the time,
quietness, and tutored capacity to range greatly and uninterruptedly
while in this world, are just beautiful script, lines curling up, down,
and on through a plot already known and before them, content to
take pleasure in the variances of sensation they can see ahead and
know are coming, but still very much to be taken pleasure in, because
vividness exists primarily in the rush of what is before you not in the
nagging memory of what you once knew, because they are in-mind to
give up the reigns to someone else themselves, and want no evidence
anywhere extant that makes them feel small, feel guilty, for doing so.
Claire --the grandmother -- could be a problem. Which is why all her
genuine gravitas is summoned but drawn to essential vacancy -- her
love of her life, who she once loved and never --ostensibly rightly --
learned to lose interest in, is SO MUCH perfect acquisition, perfect
object, well-groomed and already, beautifully-told story, that she
serves as unmistakable proof in the pudding, as General Colin Powell
to George Bush, that what is not actually here in the film, IS actually
there, if only you had the capacity to find it.
Photo still: "Letters to Juliet." www.celebritywonder.com
I want one!
The picture never looks fussed-over or flattened — it

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breathes, as opposed to just looking merely pretty.

Pontecorvo approaches the actresses with the same
uncalculated respect.
The actors here offer plenty sturdy support for their female
counterparts: Bernal’s character is scattered but
sympathetic; Egan, deeply unlikable at first, by the end
opens himself to the camera in a way you’d never see
coming. But the picture really belongs to its two leads.
Seyfried gives a wonderfully loose, unstudied performance
— nothing she does is forced. And it doesn’t hurt that she has
the most gorgeous, enormous eyes in movies today: Not even
Disney’s Nine Old Men could have dreamed them up.
[. . .]
Nero makes his entrance here, Lancelot-style, on a white
horse. It’s a touch so perfect, so silly-wonderful, that it’s
something of a salve after the almost-too-painful moment
that comes immediately before. Redgrave is now 73, but it
takes zero imagination to see the face of the young
Guenevere in this older one. She isn’t merely beautiful; she’s
a living assurance that the young people we once were can
stay alive inside us, no matter how much we grow and
change. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Leading ladies lift lovely
‘Letters to Juliet,’” Movieline, 13 May 2010)
From a guy's perspective, it's not so much the eyes as it is the breasts
-- of course the film didn't feel flat: not even Disney's Nine Old Men
could have dreamed them up! Egan was too nice: caught in a film
where the guy's dragging his gal all about the place is cause for
“divorce,” but where "his" driving Daisy everywhere she needs is
gentlemanly and appropriate, if he didn't evidence some
disgruntlement before the end, slobbering CALIBAN would have
climbed that tree, not sweet Percival.
Redgrave is living assurance that true love means a vineyard-owning,
warm Italian, with gentle manners: As a grown-up still-15-year-old
3891
who's moved on from ponies -- or Tony Stark, in regards to "melons"

-- would say –“you just want one.”
-----
Further, I'M a bit disgruntled that this film made losing your mom
into a mercilessly effective bargaining-chip -- as if the romancing the
self-abnegating knight bit wasn't enough to plot out how your man
might be wholly owned.
Link: Leading ladies lift lovely “Letters to Juliet” (Movieline)
FRIDAY, MAY 14, 2010

Correct thought
One of the less trumpeted features of the Internet is the

unprecedented access it provides to really, really bad
writing. Of course, awful books have always been with us,
but nowadays a specimen of unkempt, puffed-up prose or
stumbling, lugubrious verse doesn't even need to make it
past an editor or publisher to glide slimily into the
awareness of the unsuspecting public.
[. . .]
In the early 20th century, dinner party guests would
entertain each other by reciting passages from the
alliteration-heavy works of one Amanda McKittrick Ros
(1860-1939), regarded by experts as the greatest bad
novelist of all time. In Oxford, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and
their friends competed to see who could read aloud from
Ros' books the longest before cracking up. (Laura Miller,
“Bad writing: What is it good for,” Salon, 11 May 2010)
Correct thought
I think if you laugh at prose so that it strips it of authority (what the
Moderns did with their Victorian predecessors), so that your own
3892
artistic ventures feel more legitimate, it is a sound thing to do. More

than this, it is a GOOD thing to do -- as laughter, mockery, is at the
service of growth.
If you're laughing at prose without any real authority, then you're not
servicing your own growth, rather, you're foreclosing it: as who
amongst the legitimate would risk writing anything that would leave
themselves open for laughter from their peers? None at all -- and so a
culture freezes in its preferred prose, state of mind, and current
grammatical correctness. Some time later, after they've crumbled
away, a new generation emerges that laughs "their" way on toward
unusual things. Or not -- and we're left with successive generations of
elites against the mob, complaining of plagiarism, not knowing that
IN ESSENCE, that is all they are.
Link: Bad writing: What is it good for?
WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 2010

Divides
In fact, while it's possible that before Hunter started

speaking on her own behalf, I might have entertained the
notion that she was a slightly dopey lady who fell hard for a
bad man who was running for president and got caught in a
very unfortunate saga, I now feel quite confident that in fact
she is a borderline simpleton, fame-seeking narcissist whose
self-interested grab for attention is likely doing further
permanent damage to the Edwards family, including her
daughter and her siblings. If her appearance on the Oprah
show seemed like an unjust setup, then Hunter proved that,
every once in a while, someone so amply meets all
expectations for awfulness that it's impossible to muster
anything other than loathing for them. (Rebecca Traister,
Rielle Hunter's undeniable awfulness,” Salon, 29 April 2010)
3893
Good girls get their consolation prize

RE: "I now feel quite confident that in fact she is a borderline
simpleton, fame-seeking narcissist whose self-interested grab for
attention [. . .]"
Is this the consolation prize -- ripping her, ripping people like her,
apart -- for your being a "classic good girl," for there not being any
way for you to "alter [your] fundamentally conscientious, perpetually
guilt-ridden, grateful-for-a-job sense that [you] should always be
working harder than [you] were, and that [you] [were] probably
already being overcompensated for whatever [you] [were] doing?"
By punishing her, do you feel even more the good girl, feel good at
last being the good girl -- the person you ostensibly regret being
forced to become?
Whoah, thank you for reading my work with such attention!
I don't think that my reaction to Hunter's televised
revelations about her personal life have any connection to
my assessment of my own professional habits. But I'm very
flattered that you're such an avid reader.
Best,
Rebecca (Rebecca Traiser, response to post)
Divides
Rebecca,
If you felt the same pressure to be a good girl in your personal life as
you admit you did/do in your professional, then it strikes me that
what you are doing here would be working to make your
compromised state less compromise and more advantage -- it would
be working against efforts on your part to free yourself of deeply
ingrained "good girl" inclinations -- and that anyone who is at all
good, who cares about your future journeys, should point this out.
Since you only feel/felt this pressure in your professional life, then I
can understand this particular attack on the "bad girl" not seeming
3894
related to your very previous post, where you railed against all that
hems women into the good girl mold.
Link: Rielle Hunter's undeniable awfulness
Oysters
The fact is, we tell women that being good people involves
agreeability, cooperation and a little bit of self-sacrifice. In
addition to telling them to be polite and deferential, we teach
little girls from the beginning that life is going to be hard
and involve compromise. This dose of realism is not terrible;
it girds us for some hardship along the way. But it also
lowers expectations for remuneration and recognition.
Despite those who say that women have lately been told that
they could "have it all," that promise has, in my experience,
always been accompanied by caveats that a) we probably
can't, b) if we do, it's going to be incredibly difficult, and c)
that if we somehow do manage to achieve any kind of
satisfaction or balance, we should be damn grateful.
Gratitude, I've found, is not an attitude that results in
promotions and raises. (Rebecca Traister, “A nice girl’s
guide to getting ahead,” Salon, 26 April 2010)
Oysters
I think we all need to remember that during the medieval ages, men
did their best to become like women, so they might imagine
themselves more worthy of claiming love from their mothers -- as
Lloyd deMause explains:
Since Christians were bipolar, they were either manic
(violent warriors) or depressive (masochistic clerics,
martyrs), but in either case they risked “dying for God” their
whole lives: “For Your sake we have been killed all of the
day.” Martyrs would sometimes castrate themselves “to
demonstrate their potency and devotion to God.” In fact,
3895
clerics were said to have “become female” when they gave up

fighting, because “the male must become female in order to
escape the moral dangers of his masculine state.” In fact,
Christianity can be seen as a way for males to become more
like females—thus priests didn’t get married and wore
female dresses—because young boys experienced their
mothers as preferring her more passive daughters to her
“rough, impudent” sons.
I chased down this quote because I think this is about where we are
today: men who do the the things that are supposedly lauded -- show
initiative, refuse to kow-tow -- in truth go the Jerry Maguire route,
ending up rejected and cloaked in failure, whereas men who try and
make themselves women by showing in some fashion that they can be
broken by whatever authority-figure they happen to be working for --
are allowed to pass on and on and on, on our current, good girl, A+
route of societal approval.
Male or female, if you grow up these days with truly healthy self-
esteem, you'll be too busy dealing with the unleashed sharks to find
any of those damned world-oysters you were expecting. Be glad
you're still inclined to self-lacerate, Rebecca. Cover's better.
Link: A nice girl's guide to getting ahead
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2010

Psychology of hoarding
Psychology of hoarding--explained?
1) When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we
think, "This is useless," but a hoarder sees the shape and the
3896
color and the texture and the form. All these details give it
value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all -- it may be a
special gift or a special ability. The problem is being able to
control it. (Randy O. Frost, interview with Thomas Rogers,
“‘Stuff’: the psychology of hoarding,” Salon, 25 April 2010)
The hoarder is Robin Williams from the Fisher King: a humble life-
poet who sees the magic in the (quote unquote) junk. Or a young Luke
Skywalker, in touch with the energy field created by all things.
Future prospects: A future magician who will show us the magic in
everyday life, help us move away from a consumption-oriented
society. Must learn to control his power, so it doesn't control him.
2) If you spend one weekend with someone with a camera
crew, a cleaning crew and no therapy, you’re making some
educational contribution by showing people what hoarding
is -- and that it’s really an illness [. . .]. (Randy O. Frost)
The hoarder is mentally ill. Tread with care.

Future prospects: One house-cleaning away from the crazy-house.
Patrick Mcevoy-Halston is mentally ill

Tread with care.
Dude, I'm all for esoteric, but WTF are you talking about?
(untimelydemise, response to post)
Response
We are offered two different accounts of hoarding here. One (the first
quote) makes it primarily a gift, possessed by someone who feels the
beauty in things in a culture that can no longer do the same. The
other (the second quote) makes it primarily an illness, to the extent
that a cruel show that effectively traumatizes those it pretends to help
still deserves kudos for it at least making this point clear.
If they're wizards, then not just house cleaners but therapists too need
to tread carefully, for they are dealing with those well beyond their
3897
capacity to understand, and whom they must primarily not so much

try and help but begin to try and learn from.
If they are sick, then all this appreciation for shapes, textures, colors
of objects the rest of us understand less meaningfully, has to be
contextualized so we understand that the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer
appreciated certain objects this same way too.
Hope that's clear.
-----
Culture Changes
In the U.S., we've also gone from a culture where some
degree of hoarding was helpful and even necessary (when
items were expensive and stores were far between) to a
culture where "things" are widely available and cheap. It's
not surprising that some people go overboard.
My mother grew up in a poor farming family during the
Depression. To my grandparents, saving things was a
matter of survival. You saved every bit of wood and piece of
string, and reused every container and washed out every
bag, because you had to. My mother lived in the suburbs, but
she had a closet full of carefully saved plastic bags and
magarine tubs - it was just too ingrained in her to save and
reuse, she just couldn't throw away something that was still
good. She wasn't a hoarder - she didn't buy extra things just
to save them and she threw things out when she ran out of
space - but that impulse to stock up and save things "just in
case" is something that used to be a necessary part of life,
especially in rural areas. So many people now think of it as
dysfunctional and puzzling now that we live in smaller
spaces and when you can easily replace anything you throw
out, but the hoarder is just an extreme version of what many
people were doing a couple of generations ago. (KayWWW,

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Friday, December 15, 2017

Discussion of Daniel Shaw's book on

Reading a bit of Daniel Shaw's work (his

come to agree with their unloved parents' (he

their wills on their own behaviour, and these

His theories, in my early reading of his work,

him will prove "effective" is if he fails to carry

He's written (on his Facebook page) that the

will surely bring an end to parental

He denies on his Facebook page that Hillary

few decades to produce a class of victims

him, or if we've kind of just decided not to

Patrick McEvoy-Halston Daniel, I recently read

1980s working class acceptance of the depletion

feel exactly the same way towards them that you

invisible to their hatred of women while loudly

feeling their way into the pains of the exposed

at December 15, 2017 No comments: Links to this post

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Discussions about Al Franken at Clio's

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)

Another case of it's-not-actually-trauma,

gives him carte blanche to grab women’s

fact that Donald Trump could say that was

You're over-reaching in defensiveness

just sort of booked it towards the door and he

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston Dec

"Clio's Psyche" needs to have members who

empowered to finally say something. (This

out? Would they sense we'd rather prefer

hugger but a Trumpian predator of those he

feel small and used -- a shame they'd have to

this if they themselves were victimized as

accusers (representatives of their own

grabbed her friend and fled to the bathroom

On Thursday, Kemplin told CNN that when

How dare anyone grab my breasts like this

“I was completely mortified,” she added.

I'd like to ask who on this list didn't feel it

opinion of what I've seen come up and what I

me (Patrick McEvoy- 11:10 AM (1

Al Franken, Eli Weisel, Garrison Keillor, Bill

taken down, but with the others, yes.

this uncomfortable habit of ending up

incurred by mass difficulties during the

in the publishing world. Charles W. Socarides

If someone knows of another venue that

at December 14, 2017 No comments: Links to this post

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Conversations about Richard's Best 2017

Richard Brody shared a link.

culture) and how it relates to the state of the

The Best Movies of 2017

John Salvatore Because critics have

fact, the grandmother, whose house this is,

Patrick McEvoy-Halston "Wonder

this, they were clearly forced into). Here's

John Salvatore Surprised to see Song to

always needed, even if it's done without the

Ruben Carranza Thank you that

Conversations about Ingrid Bergman at

Richard Brody shared a link.

when it played at the branch of the