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August 31, 2003

Mental Illness: a View From the Third Half

 by Jeremy

There?s an important and old debate about mental illness -- the nature vs. nurture debate, approximately, with its attendant side-battles about whether mental illness should be treated with pills and injections, talk therapy, behavioral techniques, spiritual counseling -- that occasionally threatens to take a more prominent place in the mainstream. It flubbed one of its better opportunities a decade or so ago when all that press about Prozac spiraled down into an embarrassing series of spooky fictions about the fancy new pill that, you?d think, was some kinder gentler form of eugenics. It was taken as a given that Prozac would instantly turn Franz Kafka into Wayne Newton, the question was simply ?is that a good thing??

What brings it into this blog today is a story in the Washington Post about a group of people who are engaged in a hunger strike to bring accountability to the psychiatric profession for its overuse of drugs to treat mental illness.

Cara and I worked in the ?mental health? field for a combined total of about 20 years. We both started entry level, so we were never clinical professionals. But we have met, conversed with, shared good and bad times with many, many people diagnosed with many, many types of mental illness. Throughout my first week working with profoundly mentally ill people I had to struggle every minute of every day to keep from breaking down in tears, not for them, I later realized, but for some weird, wounded part of myself that I narcissistically thought was being dramatized in front of me. Not only did I have to get over that self-indulgent sorrow, but I had to get over feeling ashamed of it. Just about everybody is scared to death of mental illness and, actually, that?s nothing to be ashamed of. It is, however, something we have to get past. And this culture does not go out of its way to help us do it (I?m not aware of a culture that does).

To make matters worse, science has had a hell of a time figuring out what makes the mind tick, really.

So which side of the debate am I on? As is often the case these days, on the third side: the third hand, the third fifty percent, the third half of the half full or half empty glass. Yes, many people like to think that mental illness is a clean, clinical problem, like strep throat that, one day, will be swept away by the perfect drug. And yes, many people would have us believe that mental illness is just the outgassing of a dysfunctional and brutal society and so all one need do is get re-parented, re-socialized, de-toxified, etc.

The third fifty percent of us, however, have learned that there are so many different forms of mental illness with so many different causes, that there can?t be any single true path to mental health. I?ve met many people who seemed perpetually doped into oblivion on their psych meds. I?ve also met people who would go off their meds to get high. I?ve met people who?ve tried suicide because they were abused or neglected as children. And I worked with one guy who survived two violent suicide attempts but who, when I naively asked him how often he felt depressed, gave me a bemused smile and said ?oh, I don?t get depressed.? His family was healthy and supportive. His problem was not that he wanted to die, but that he?d get a normal, crazy-impulse and there was nothing in his brain that kicked in to stop it. He?d be falling from a bridge before he could think better of it, unless he?d taken his medication.

So it?s important to tune into both sides of this ethical and philosophical struggle over the nature of mental illness, provided one waves off attempts to paint it as a battle between reason and irrationality, or between personal dignity and dehumanizing science.

Does this seem familiar, this choosing-sides-for-kickball approach to cultural debate? I?m so tired of that way of thinking, and I love the blogoshpere for providing the perfect antidote to it.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 01:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 28, 2003

e-books and the seduction of the innocent

 by Jeremy

Interesting news in the New York Times about electronic paper, also known as electronic ink (can't get much more Zen than blurring the distinction between paper and ink). I've read about this before...the "ink" consists of little beads of pigment which change alignment in response to a small electrical charge, or something like that. Its debut in commercial production, it seems, will be in the form of billboards rather than books. This seems to defy common sense. If you're going to do something why not start small. On the other hand, in a world where paper is ink, it can also be said that big is small -- a bit easier, in other words, to make big pictures look good than to make small pictures look good.

I've long refuted e-book naysayers (of which, actually, I am one) by pointing out that it's only today's e-books that are utterly for shit, that one fine day there will be books virtually indistinguishable from paper and ink books except they will be digitally alterable (and they will, too, put to rest the bourgeois fallacy that there is a distinction to be made between paper and ink). These books, I go on to explain, will have all the sensual something-or-other that real books have, but you will not need to annoy your spouse by trying to force three hundred of them into the rooms of your small ranch-style house. One day, I say, they will be so affordable that you may have fifteen or twenty or seventy or them so that you need not be denied the joy of running your eyes and your fingers over them where they sit on your bookshelf. And you will have a sloppy stack of them at your bedside. But you will no longer need to overstuff your house, breed bookworms, kill trees.

According to this article, the first true e-book may soon be put on the market (though no details). Now what do I do? While I'm sure e-books will continue to suck tenaciously for years to come, what will I do when they actually become as nifty and near-real as I've been prophesying? Why, I'll have to make know-it-all pronouncements about how they will affect the art of fiction itself.

Is it not bad enough that few modern writers of "serious" fiction these days can tell a simple story without rigging the thing with all kinds of postmodern dribble glasses and whoopee cushions? Not that there's anything wrong with that. Honestly, I do like some of that stuff, in moderation. But what will they do when they get their mischievous little paws on, and minds around, the concept of a printed page that can change in real time. Not only will you be made to feel disconcertingly aware of the blurred boundaries between author, reader, text, memory, symbol (or whatever), you may find you're being downright fucked with. What happens when the smarmy guy you're reading about in the latest Martin Amis novel exchanges quips with his paid escort about how the current reader (ie: you, by name) just bought another tube of anti-fungal cream at the local pharmacy ("do you have your Extra Care card sir?"). Ok, that's a bit over the top. Thing is, it would be possible. And there will be people eager to pay for the privilege.

And you know what, that actually sounds kind of fun when I read it back. The point is this, though: You will please note that I was the first to go on record with wise-ass predictions of pomos run amuck through the world of the new e-book, and I was saying it way back in the early 00's.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 26, 2003

Longshore Drift in Eye of a Storm

 by Cara

Or,...My Continuing Struggle to Desperately Try and Make Sense of Post 9/11 ?Lefties?

It?s a perfect summer?s day.
I?m sitting on the beach reading my page-turner mystery while intermittently waving to my friends as they frolic in the ocean a few yards in front of me, relaxing on my sand chair. (Someone has to stay to guard the bags, purses and wallets.) Pleased that everyone is having so much fun I look down to read a couple more juicy pages. Our hero has just stumbled upon another big clue, so I become more engrossed and read further for a while. Just as the detective puts on his disguise I feel a distinct chill move over me as the sun too has gone under cover and I wonder why the familiar splashing sounds my friends were making have stopped. So I look up, away from Moses Wine for a second, taking in the fact that a storm seems to be gathering. Where are my friends? A sudden panic takes over for a few seconds until I realize with relief that the tide has brought them, ever so slowly and subtly, further down shore. I see them now far away, seemingly unaware that they?ve drifted. They look up, expecting to see me but only have a clearer view of the lifeguard chair instead.

So it seems they?d drifted away from me, unaware of the current?s surge, enhanced by the beginning of a storm that has moved them down shore. And even though Moses Wine has moved closer to the killer, I am in the exact same spot, tide and storm fast approaching.

Suddenly, alone on the beach, the storm?s all around me, but from where I?m sitting it?s eerily still and quiet. I see all this debris flying through the air, all this energy in full force raging around and around but strangely when I reach out to grab hold of anything, there?s nothing there and then when I look straight up all I see is clear blue sky. What?s going on here?

I?ve realized that this is how it feels as I grapple with figuring out what has happened to the ?left? that I thought I knew. This is also how it feels trying to explain my experiences working in the ?lefty? worker-owned collective that I was once so proud to be a part of. I?ve also realized that both these storms are really one and the same. For now, let?s say that they both have the same ?root causes?.

There are so many assumptions made each and every day by good loyal ?lefty? practitioners that these assumptions have become invisible and automatic. These assumptions have become like unconscious facts. These assumptions, I think, used to be considerably more flexible, treated more like guidelines, but have turned rigid and unmovable in the wake of 9/11. My lefty friends now behave as if these assumptions were carved in literal lefty stone. And it is just this literal interpretation of events that leaves them convinced that, because they no longer see me on the beach directly in front of them, I?m the one who has disappeared from the lefty beach party.

-to be continued...

-Cara

Posted by Cara at 10:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Truth is Stranger Than Fiction, But Fiction is Fun Too

 by Jeremy

Something karmic is happening.
Michael Totten has posted a splendid piece of short fiction...
and, proving truth is stranger -- and far less believable -- than fiction, there is Roger Simon's post about Trotsky's great-grandaughter (no self respecting blog with a shrugging Karl Marx for a logo could fail to link to that one) and Jeff Jarvis' link to an equally astounding story of a guy getting his sight back after 40 odd years. And I hope you've read Cara's post above.
Call in sick to work if you have to, but read all of these!

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 07:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 24, 2003

IWW getting a bit Wobbly?

 by Jeremy

I am a card carrying member (actually, a little red book carrying member) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Not because I'm a supporter, but for the same reason most people join unions -- they happen to be the one my workplace has its contract through. I do have a bit of pride in belonging to a group with a proud, if brief, history of honestly aiding the working people of this country. But, it turns out, there's a reason they now only have 3 or 4 hundred members left. It's really not the same group. They now seem to be more of a mascot for not especially oppressed hippie food co-ops, and such. I don't think they put their lives on the line defending coal miners much anymore.

Whic is OK -- neither do I. I'm not judging them for that. I am judging them for posting a link on their news site to an Indymedia page containing an "Appeal from the Iraqi Communist Party (English)." What it turns out to be is an alleged Iraqi Communist explaining how the Iraqi Communist party has been hijacked by the CIA and urging Iraqis not to believe that any true Iraqi Communist would have cooperated in any way with the liberation.

When the statement says:

"The occupation is our first enemy and we work with all our energy to expel him."

Is that as scary and disgusting as I think it is? Hmm, no they couldn't mean go ahead and keep shooting soldiers in the back of the head and blowing up oil and power infrastructure and, perhaps, U.N. buildings.

And when it calls on Iraqis:

"Not to deal with the occupation authorities except by totally rejecting them and rising in armed resistance!"

I'm sure they're simply calling for a commitment to a true social democracy for one and all.

Now, even if you were silly enough to believe that this was the "real" Iraqi Communist Party (must be since they're suitably anti-U.S.) why would you think that this would be a call you'd be willing to give the appearance of advocating? The most generous accusation I can devise is that the IWW people who posted this didn't really read the thing. But that's no excuse. Indeed that makes is scarier to me. This is how people willing buy into the ugliest lies end up lending their support to those who should be their ideological enemies. Orwell did an eloquent job of showing how many prominent pacifists in England blundered into (again, a generous spin on my part) supporting Nazism.

I'm not a blind apologist for the actual Iraqi Communist Party, but their most recent (actual) public statement was in condemnation of the bombing of the UN:

"The crumbling remnants of [Saddam's] regime have attempted to continue the same criminal policies by means of sabotage targeting what remains of the infrastructure...This ugly crime is a flagrant coward aggression against the UN and its sincere efforts to help the Iraqi people out of their current ordeal."

Gee, that sounds like a humane and rational reaction to a horrible crime against the U.N. I guess they must be lackeys for the CIA.

By the way, this one's not exactly Indymedia's fault, since the link was to their "open publishing newswire" on which any ill meaning scum can post anything they want. So the fault is with the IWW for foisting this upon its readers as if it were something to credit and support.

I no longer feel guilty for not having paid my union dues for the past few months.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 09:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

AlJazeera ShmalJazeera

 by Jeremy

I was cruising the web and found a website of links to 9/11 related info from numerous perspectives. I really don't know anything about the site except that its got some interesting links. What caught my eye, and brought my 98.6 up a few degrees fahrenheit is the animated cartoon that will pop up when you click the link below (I'd have embedded it, but seeing it once is plenty). It, and some of its charming siblings can be found on the AlJazeera webpage (it's in Arabic, but fortunately the cartoons are in the international language of Hateful Bullshit). I'm currently researching the proper diplomatic channels through which one must go for this, but I'd like to cordially invite Al Jazeera to kiss my fucking ass.

View image

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 03:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2003

Blogs, Communists and Sidewalk Paintings

 by Jeremy

New to the blog-creating trip, Cara and I have been talking a lot about what it all means to us. Cara has been teaching me that a blog can be a place where you publish your well reasoned arguments, your glib (but sincere) gropings, your self-indulgent blatherings (preferably brief), your wee-hour epiphanies (which may stale by noon the next day), your reflections on what other bloggers are saying...

I think it's great. This is the kind of free exchange of ideas and creative impulses that I had once believed was the sole province of the Left (pause for a chuckle). When I was a kid, living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, I knew oodles of people in our building. Many of them, like the quasi-hippies next door, seemed to live their lives in a sort of religious devotion to the same kinds of things that made me excited to be alive. When my parents took my brother and me to see Mary Poppins, I left the theater feeling crushed that I would never be able to jump into a sidewalk painting the way Dick Van Dyke and company could. My hippie neighbors seemed to understand where I was "coming from" on that one -- they had an ornate, upright piano which they'd painted with a glossy, ivory enamel, and then filled in the baroque scrollwork using every color of the rainbow. This to me, on some subconscious level, was a shrine to the world inside those sidewalk paintings.

And there was a man named Paul Kornbluth who lived upstairs with his wife and 3 kids. He was a New York Communist of a breed not often seen these days -- he raved and debated and pounded tables...all that stuff. He was an impressive guy. His eldest son, Josh Kornbluth, did (still does?) a monologue back in the 90's called "Red Diaper Baby." It's not so much a critique of Marxism as a hilarious look at the strange sidewalk-painting-world of the New York far Left which he seems to have wished he could leap out of (not that I know anything about Josh's politics, but I'm guessing that politics, then as now, were not always what it was ultimately about for the far Left). Anyway he tells his tale with much love and much hilarity, and it's available in book form.

There's much about the community of the Left, coming out of the 60's, that I wish hadn't died. They had some lovely dreams about connecting and opening up and making the world a better place. Something about searching for that inner vision, etc. Where that stuff has failed in my estimation is that -- despite many dollars spent on EST and Transcendental Meditation -- they weren't as concerned with outer truths. They searched hard for exotic wisdom and consigned the mainstream wisdom of their own culture to the trash heap. Dick Cavett once clusmisly praised Ravi Shankar's "exotic" music, to which Shankar replied -- a bit put off -- that his music wasn't exotic at all. To Ravi Shankar, presumably, Indian Classical music is conservative, mainstream (though just a likely, or not, to be mind-opening and "progressive" as some strange avant garde 12 tone thing).

Anyway...
It's exciting to know that there's a community of people who are enthused, socially concerned, eager to make the world a better place, but who are not tripping over themselves to deny basic facts of the world around them in service of some once lovely, now rancid, dream of a world that just doesn't exist. I still believe there are sidewalk paintings to jump into, somewhere, and that searching for them is probably more important than finding them. But when that search comes at the expense of basic truth, then something has gone terribly wrong (and they know it too, those zany Lefties of today, which is why they're so damned angry -- they'd be inside their trippy valhalla already, if not for the nefarious schemes of maybe three-four guys in the Bush administration).

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 20, 2003

If you haven?t checked out

 by Jeremy

If you haven?t checked out Roger Simon?s latest post, first about the terror attack in Israel, then about his daughter shocking her school teacher by playing ?Get Saddam? during recess, you should check it out.

It caused me to make a small connection or two that I thought would be worth sharing. First, I think this sort of incident gives you a good look at how kids are systematically trained to mistrust their own fears and instincts. Are you scared senseless by those things you?ve heard about Saddam?s torture chambers, about his mass graves? Well before you go feeling scared or angry you?d better check with an adult supervisor to be told what to feel and how to express it. This, perhaps, is the dynamic that shapes people into truth-phobic ?progressives? as they grow older and ?wiser.? Now I?m not one to foist the old canard that kids are morally pristine, or that they have a wisdom in all things that we adults shouldn?t dare question. But when it comes to the open expression of pure feeling, kids are pretty hard to top. This is a realm in which kids rule, and we should preserve this instinct in children so that it will still be there when they grow up (at which time, sure, one would hope they?ll have learned to temper it with empathy and tact).

But on to the second connection and the second link: if there?s anyone left who hasn?t picked up a copy of Paul Berman?s book, ?Terror and Liberalism? I suggest doing so immediately. I just started reading it and It?s a breath of fresh air. Toward the beginning he says something very quotable and, I think, very topical:

?A ?realist,? like a Marxist, is someone who, no matter what bizarre events may take place around the world, will profess not to be surprised. This is ?realism?s weakness, though. Wisdom consists of the ability to be shocked.?

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Roger Simon has chimed in

 by Cara

Roger Simon has chimed in once again with remarkable clarity in response to the most recent violence, noting that this war is bigger than WWII, and I agree. Not long after 9/11 I remember saying to my husband Jeremy that all of this really felt like a world war. The gravity of this is immense and has to be faced. Meanwhile, folks on the far left continue to spin around on the same old 60?s tape loop, getting more and more frenzied as their supernatural hatred of Bush reaches fetish proportions. (i.e. Having worked, until very recently, in a copy shop I was given the extraordinary opportunity, which I gracefully refused, to make oversized copies of a customer?s stunning charcoal work picturing George W. bound and gagged with duct tape. Boy did I ever pine for the gentler days of refusing to copy homemade drawings of Bush sporting that famous little moustache.) They?re never quite able to spare any of this precious energy for the real Bad Guys though. Obscene, I believe, is the word.
-Cara

Posted by Cara at 07:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 19, 2003

Has anyone installed the anti-blaster

 by Jeremy

Has anyone installed the anti-blaster Windows patch and found it to have caused more problems than the worm itself would? I Can't keep an internet connection alive for more than about a minute since installing that thing.

And it's bad timing the very week we start our very own blog. We'll soldier on, though, and post tomorrow from the public library if we have to.
-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 11:38 PM | Comments (1)

August 18, 2003

Hypocritical Mass

 by Cara & Jeremy

Yes, that's Karl Marx's sheepish shrug next to the title, "Who Knew?" So what kind of cryptic tomfoolery are we playing at? Well, basically, here's the deal...

We are a husband and wife blogging team who, until this past year, wouldn't have known -- or cared -- what the word "blog" even meant. But, as lefty/liberal types living in Western Massachusetts, we've been confused, angry, even a little heart-broken at what we see as the failure of many of our "comrades" on the left to have anything meaningful to offer in this post 9/11 world. That's putting it very politely, folks. Has anyone seen "invasion of the body snatchers?" What do you call people who honestly believe that George W Bush is a bigger threat to the world than the likes of Bin Laden and the Baathists. Here are a few stabs at it: "reactionary left (ie: militantly struggling to preserve the cozy familiarity of the cold war era, reality notwithstanding)," "deer-in-the-headlights left, (ie: traumatized into idiocy by 9/11 while pretending it no longer bothers them)" "left fundamentalists," We could go on (and we plan to).

We live in the "Happy Valley" (the Amherst, MA area) whose only rival for capital of the "cartoon left" (there's another one) is probably Berkley. "Pro War" is a minority opinion in Amherst. And we've alienated just about all of our friends and, as of dinner last night, some of our parents.

At first we thought that Christopher Hitchens was the only other person on Earth who knew what we were going through. But the blogs have increasingly helped Hitch keep the faith. They've been our life raft, a hint that we may not be the insane dupes of American imperialism we?ve been seen as. We're starting to realize that we're not alone. There seem to be a lot of people like us on the left who have been marginalized by our former colleagues and friends. Yet while the loony left (one more for the list) have been shouting through megaphones in the public square, we have been scratching our heads, licking our wounds and pinching ourselves to see if this is really happening. Now we're starting to speak up too. And the blogs are where we're being heard the loudest. We think it's vital that people of our ilk connect and that we no longer allow ourselves be shouted down by glib, sloganeers who brag about not reading the papers. And we'll be damned if we let terms like "left" and "liberal" die a morbid, co-opted death.

So yes, If Marx were alive today we think he'd look a little apologetic.

- Cara and Jeremy

Posted by Cara & Jeremy at 12:18 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack