COVID; Empire of Pain; Patrick Radden Keefe; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Denial
COVID Chronicles XXVIII: How will we move on from our Empire of Pain?
As a sort of prelude to vacation, the reluctant wife and I
spent a week in Washington DC. She is
working at the job she commutes to there and I was teleworking in a reversal of
our usual roles. I was seeing my
patients virtually and working on various projects in our hotel room between
sight seeing jaunts. It was the week of
the final (for now) January sixth hearings, and I had been cognizant of them as
I wandered across town.
I flew in on Friday so that the reluctant wife, who had been
there all week, could stay the weekend and we could have that time together in
the city where neither of us had to work before she returned to work on Monday. On that Friday, after her work, we went out
to dinner and then went for a walk around the tidal basin. We walked past the Vietnam War Memorial –
that slash in the ground that depicts the dark underbelly of the wars that are
celebrated for what they have accomplished with the gleaming marble structures
that are reflected in it – Washington’s victory over the British and Lincoln’s
war to unite the country. This monument,
like many others in the town, is inscribed with the names of those who were
killed in war.
We went from there to the Lincoln Memorial. I was as stirred by it, and the words of the
Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s second inaugural address, as I was by being
able to stand on the spot from which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I
have a dream” speech. So, it was fitting
to be able to walk, for the first time, from there to the Martin Luther King
Memorial. And there King is standing,
looking across the tidal basin at the Jefferson Memorial as if to say, “Here I
am, working on the next step of the process that you began (and Lincoln, the man
behind me, continued to work on).”
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| MKL on Vietnam |
A collection of King’s actual words are cut into stone behind him. One of his turns of phrase I read, initially, as a poor grammatical construction. In fact, as the reluctant wife pointed out, it was an intentional reworking of our usual manner of speaking. Instead of urging us to be a moral example “to the world”, he urged us to be a moral example “of the world”; urging us to demonstrate not our exceptionalism, but our ordinary human capacity to do the right thing.
We walked quickly through the FDR memorial, one that is
sprawling and a bit of a jumble – part of it intentional as it is depicting the
disorder of the world war, and it, like the Lincoln and King Memorials, was
liberally sprinkled with the words of the one remembered (e.g. “We have nothing
to fear but fear itself.”). We were walking through it to get back in time - to get to the Jefferson Memorial, another memorial that I have not visited before.
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| The White House and Jefferson |
What was most striking about the Jefferson Memorial, besides
Jefferson’s words, which clarified that King was, indeed, working to create the
kind of country that Jefferson was envisioning, even if Jefferson himself could
not live up to those aspirations, was its location. It was apparent as we approached it that the
sight lines put it directly in the center of the view from the living quarters
of the White House. How would it be to
be President and wake up in the morning and see, just to the left of the
Washington Monument, Jefferson’s dome?
It would, for most people, be a bit humbling to think of the legacy that
one would be called to uphold.
But in wandering the streets of the capitol this week, what
is impressive is that it is not just the monuments, not just the museums, but
the buildings themselves that are big piles of stone and steel and concrete and
on these buildings there are numerous inscriptions – statements about the
values that would define our culture. They are etched in that stone or rock or
concrete. These values have to do with
what we are called to be. They are
aspirational statements. Especially as a
psychoanalyst, I am aware of how difficult it is to achieve those
aspirations. We need to build a version
of ourselves that manages and re-channels our immature but powerful impulses
into possibilities imagined by our visionaries and made real, in so far as they
are, by the lives and deaths of the many others who are memorialized. Of course, we fail at this – in small and in
big ways (Jefferson and King both failed in their own ways), but having the aspirations can allow us, at crucial moments, to be
guided by them; if we construct ourselves to be open to that.
So, it was with interest that we watched the January Sixth
hearings – where Liz Cheney and the rest of the panel reminded us, as they have
from the beginning, of the oaths of office that our executives took when they were
sworn in. She was clarifying that we
should etch into our hearts what has been written in stone throughout this
town. And she was clarifying that an
individual inhabited the highest office in the land, and, rather than using the
monuments as a calling to become a better version of himself, used the power of
his position to deceive people into supporting his attempts to subvert the
system that we have relied on. He
attempted a coup d’état. This is, of
course, difficult to prove. Perhaps he
believed that he had won an election that was being stolen from him. So, the committee focused on his inaction
when the Capitol was under attack.
We are a flawed nation.
We have failed in so many ways.
Half of the Washington Monument and all of the White House were built by
slaves. The brutality of the slave
system and its visible legacy is comparable only to the near extinction of our
indigenous people and the theft of their lands.
More recently, we have frequently failed to live up to King’s admonition
to be a moral example “of the world”, with the Vietnam war being one of many
examples of that and
our torturing of captives a more recent example. Presidents have deceived us, occasionally for
their own purposes, but on a consistent basis to enforce actions – including
torture – that we find abhorrent.
But failing to intervene in an attack on the Capitol?
Would that this was simply an aberrant leader who was
indulging his own wildly narcissistic fantasy that was shared by a few loyal
nuts, but I think it is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise. We have forgotten how far we have come in a
very few hundred years and what discipline is required to have done that. We seem to have forgotten that it is ideas
that have propelled us forward. Ideas
that have been argued and discussed and tried out – some of them used, most of
them discarded. But when we have come to
a conclusion, we have acted – decisively and with common cause and purpose.
This summer, COVID has surged again, but we seem to be
largely blithely oblivious to it. My
students who have been sickened by it do not report that it has been a mild
disruption, but a significant one – one that lays them up for a week or more
and has lingering after effects. Do we
know what the long-term effects are? Not
yet. And they may prove to be nominal.
But we could have nipped this in the bud through collective action. Once we knew that this was spread through the
air, universal masking would have been an effective deterrent to the creation
of variants, which now have open season to spread and evolve into the best,
most effective versions of themselves, to figure out what is the best way to
use our bodies to keep themselves alive, regardless of the cost to us.
Of course, this may turn out to simply another chronic issue
that we need to manage, and there may be little annual cost to it. Like the flu, it may help us cull the herd,
taking out the weak and the elderly.
That last sentence was intended to clarify that we, along with our
ideals, have also espoused such things as Social Darwinism, and this would be
the latest, medical, iteration of that.
It felt to me to be a callous statement.
We have been given a precious gift: life, but more than that, we have
been given the gift and the responsibility to exert influence and, indeed,
dominion over creation. Have we used
that responsibility well? Are we prepared
to make sacrifices – hopefully not the kinds that those who have fought in wars
have done, but much more reasonable ones – to wear masks, to change energy
policies, to build a world that is sustainable?
After the week in Washington, we travelled far south and
east – to the Virgin Islands. I successfully
snorkeled for the first time and discovered a world that was fantastical – the world
of tropical fish, swimming in a paradise that was previously unknown to me –
except in the movie Nemo and on nature shows.
My appreciation (and criticism) of My
Octopus Teacher would now have a completely different feel.
The psychoanalytically intriguing thing about this is that I think the family was as convinced that they were providing a useful analgesic to the public as Donald Trump was that he had won the election. That is to say: I think that both Trump and Sacklers knew that what they wanted to believe was not true and they simultaneously did not know that. Neither Trump nor the Sacklers allowed themselves to believe what was apparent to rational people around them because to believe that would threaten the cornerstone that their self-worth was built on. To protect that cornerstone, they engaged in massive denial of obvious and clear facts, and became isolated in their fantasy world with devastating consequences. This, by the way, was not caused by a "Chemical Imbalance". The fault lies in the character structure of individuals whose addiction to greed and self aggrandizement appears to be as powerful as the pull of Oxycontin to mask physical and, as in the case of Trump and the Sacklers, psychological pain.
Keefe offered two central metaphors to describe the current and future state of the Sackler family, who
have avoided taking any responsibility, have not been significantly financially
impacted, and have not been found guilty of crimes that led to almost a million
deaths and a 2 trillion-dollar impact on the economy. The Sacklers used their money for many things
– but what seemed important to them was being perceived to be philanthropists
by, for instance, bringing the Temple of Dendur from Egypt to the Metropolitan
Museum and to install it in the Sackler wing.
That temple includes graffiti from an early traveler. It also does NOT include graffiti from a
later traveler – graffiti that was apparent in early photographs, but that has
since washed off. The removal of the
Sackler name from the wing and from many other institutions around the world
was offered as a penalty – their fame will be fleeting and they will not
achieve the immortality they craved - for the failure of the family to appreciate
that they lived in a community.
The other metaphor was the Hearst Mansion, as it is
represented in the movie Citizen Kane.
Richard Sackler, the scion who was personally responsible for the
aggressive and deceptive selling of Oxycontin, was pictured as living alone in
his father’s mansion in Connecticut, perhaps as isolated as Kane/Hearst at the
end of their shared life… This was
clearly Keefe offering us solace for the massive failure of justice that he chronicled.
This, in turn, caused me to reflect on the ways in which we
discovered who the essential workers are during COVID. Those who were remanded to do the most
dangerous work were not those who were most highly compensated, but those who
are least compensated. And yet the work
they do is of the greatest value when push comes to shove. We literally cannot live without the grocery
store clerk, and the trucker who delivers the groceries, and the workers who harvest
and package and prepare the food.
I think, in fact, that we are all essential. We do need a system that protects those
workers, and all of us, so the government is something that we need. But we need it to recognize what its role
is. And in a democracy that means we ourselves need to recognize its role and to support it as it does its own (and therefore our own) essential
functions.
We all need to inscribe on our hearts both our own value,
but also the realization that this value is realized in the context of a
community that we depend on to support us.
We need to value and care not just for ourselves, but for each other,
even if only out of self-interest. So, it is
with some relief that the Senate has decided that the value of the planet is as
important as the income of big oil companies and their stockholders (including
me). That the fish living in the ocean
are as essential as the plutocrats who ply the surface of those fish’s home in
their yachts is something that I am coming to believe.
Will we value our own lives and mask up to get over the surge that will surely happen when school starts though? I doubt it.
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