Anything is Possible – A blessing or a curse?

Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Anything is Possible, seems to me to be her bleakest offering yet.  I have written about her Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, which I used to teach personality theory, and this book is structured like that one – every story has some tie – usually many of them – to a single character, but in Anything is Possible, Lucy Barton, about whom Strout has previously written a novel, does not shows up in every stand-alone chapter if only to breeze through as Olive did – in fact she only appears in person in one of them.  There are ties to her – and all of the other characters - in every chapter, though.  Sometimes the ties are are obscure and it is only when the chapter is almost over that we realize, “Oh, that’s the same Charlie who she talked about in the last chapter,” and sometimes we don’t even realize that the selfsame people are being referenced.  Some of the interconnections are so obscure that we are only likely to catch them on a second reading.

So the ghost who is at the center of this book and ties all of the short stories together is a novelist who grew up in the most psychologically and economically poor family in a small psychologically and economically impoverished farming community in Illinois.  She became an unbelievable success and now appears on talk shows and regularly churns out best sellers.  So, we have our first experience of “anything is possible”.  But I‘d like to start at the end of the book, where the phrase is actually used for the only time, to explore the phrase’s underside, which this books seems to explore over and over and over in a variety of ways and with subtle gradations, but with a consistent, haunting theme of decay and demise that belies its surface message of hope.

In the final chapter, one of the truly successful “graduates” of the next small town over, who is one of Lucy Barton’s cousins and used to eat garbage with her out of the dumpster when he would visit in the summer, is now living a comfortable life in suburban Chicago.  Abel Blaine is prosperous, running the heating and air conditioning company that he inherited from his father in law.  He is now a grandfather who has had a heart attack, and he is watching an annual production of A Christmas Carol that he has seen many times before with his family.  Scrooge is played by a bad actor who has been panned in the suburban news that morning and there is a power outage in the middle of the play.  Abel is hungry – he missed dinner because he was late from the office and when he gets home from the theater he wants to spend time with his granddaughter rather than eat, but then he discovers that his granddaughter has left her plastic pony at the theater.  He returns to the theater where the actor playing Scrooge is alone there, lets him in, and then corners him in a locked room, taunting him and decrying his own failures and acknowledging the he, Scrooge, turned off the power remotely in the middle of the performance to introduce chaos into the room.  Lucy’s cousin (and we) sees that Scrooge is unhinged just before Abel has another heart attack, which motivates Scrooge to call 911.  As the cousin is being carried away by the medics, he is struck that the interaction with the Scrooge character was a genuine interaction – and he imagines that, because of this genuineness, they are friends.  The novel then ends ambiguously, suggesting that he feels anything is possible – perhaps meaning that he can die and be free of life’s encumbrances or that he can live and look this man up and begin a relationship with him.

This book continues, in the wake of Lucy Barton, to be a meditation on the need for a writer, but more importantly a person, to be honest true and genuine and the complicated consequences of doing that.  Lucy Barton, the author in the book – and some kind of alter ego of Elizabeth Strout, the author of the book – continues to exhort people who watch her on TV to write truthful sentences.  This is, I think, a moral directive that was given to Lucy Barton by one of her revered writers when they had a chance meeting in a bookstore.  And the truth is that anything is possible – you can eat out of a dumpster when you are a kid (as Lucy and Abel did together), become fat and happy as an adult (as Abel has done – Lucy is lean and not happy but she is also successful), but also that you could then die hungry and lonely in a strange theater where you finally feel connected to someone – someone who appears to be unhinged.  And this comes in the wake of feeling, early in the conversation, that you are just saying the lines – as you felt the actors were doing in the play.  Then you begin to speak honestly – and so does Scrooge – and you are now in your own little Christmas Carol – seeing the past, the present, and, perhaps, the future. 

So, yes, anything is possible, but would you want the eventualities this would bring?  Those who postulate the existence of infinite universes caution that there is then, an infinite number of ways in which misery can be expressed.  But I think that Strout is proposing that to be the case within this one universe of ours, with its infinite possibilities, but also realities – realities that are harsh and lonely.  And, I think, she is proposing that the hope – and I think this is a very American Dream hope – that anything is possible – is a cruel hope – one that keeps us hanging in there, hoping against hope that the next relationship, the next job, the next moment, will bring happiness.   That hope is never quite realized, but we manage to squeeze enough juice out of it to keep us going – we realize that we don’t need happiness, perhaps all we need is hope, but that means that to honestly and directly articulate our experience as it actually is will deplete us of that hope and leave us withered and alone, as impoverished as Lucy Barton ever was in the worst moments of her childhood.

This feels to me to be an awful and cruel vision, but also, on some level, a true one.  We build dams against time, we accomplish a great deal, but in the end, we have also built dams between ourselves, we are isolated and alone, and what we cherish – what we hunger and yearn for, is not what we have invested ourselves in pursuing.  We have been distracted by shiny objects, we have worked to protect ourselves when protection wasn’t needed, and we have thus alienated those we love. 

As I have posted on Elizabeth’s books twice before, and the last time I did, a friend sent me an interview with Strout about her writing process.  Strout does not map out a book ahead of time.  She writes bits of it as they come to her, in longhand on pieces of paper and she arranges the pieces until the book has formed itself.  She writes from within her characters and allows herself to be distracted, when writing Lucy Barton, for instance, by Lucy’s acquaintances, and to write about them when they come to her, and by the time she has finished the one book, the other is almost written as well.  In that process, I think that Strout is searching for truthful sentences.  And she uses these as building blocks to write truthful stories. 

I think that we can sometimes write stories – and deceive ourselves in the process.  They have happy endings.  Don’t get me wrong.  Happy endings are a good and maybe even necessary thing.  In my profession, Dr. Karl Menninger exhorted us never to underestimate hope – the kind of hope that the phrase “anything is possible” engenders.  But I think we also have to be truthful.  I think that sometimes in these posts and sometimes in my work with my students, my patients and in my role as a parent and a spouse, I am less than truthful.  I want to believe that anything is possible.  And I think that Strout is pointing out the essential role that hope plays – but also that it can veil the truth of the thinness of the life we are living from us.  We can live for tomorrow – for the American Dream to play out – but in order to do that, as a recent spoken word artist pointed out in her performance – we have to be asleep.  And sleep walking through life creates holes where filled spots should be. 

In another part of the interview,  Strout maintains that this book is partly about the people who stay.  Most of them are women are she is writing about a time when women had to stay – when it was harder for them to leave.  And I think she may be talking about the things that help them stay – the ways in which they promise themselves that things will get better.  But she gets that this is not just the phenomenon of the woman – Abel has been making himself stay at his job and with his wife – though he does get moments of pure pleasure with his granddaughter – when he is doing what he wants – when he is feeding himself what he is truly hungry for.  But these moments are few and far between.  Because they are possible, we hang in there.  And even in our dying moments we hope for more of them and they end up being enough to sustain us – but, truth be told, there are times when that is all they do, sustain us – they keep us hanging on until we can find the next moment that will provide some sustenance – never enough to fully satisfy, but enough to keep us alive.

  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

I have previously posted about Strout's other books My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge.

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Get Out! Fear and Horror

Fear:  this is the predominant subjective experience of African Americans as related by DorothyHolmes, an African American Psychoanalyst, in her Plenary Address to theAmerican Psychoanalytic Association. 

Horror: what better means of conveying fear to an audience within a movie setting?  The master of horror – before it became a cheap thrill industry – was Hitchcock, and it was Hitchcock’s conscious intent to induce in the audience the fear he felt as a five year old child when he was taken to be locked in the local constable’s jail cell for an overnight stay after some infraction that he had committed at home.  Apparently his father was friends with the constable and thought this would teach young Alfred a lesson – boy did it ever (btw, there are various versions of this tale, I don’t know which is true – I offer this one less as a historical note than to illustrate that movies can be used to communicate emotions – and fear is one that Hitchcock traded in – apparently from some early trauma which induced fear in him).

Jordan Peele is the director of Get Out.  I know his work primarily from the Key and Peele show, which I generally am seeing streaming on the T.V. when the oldest reluctant stepdaughter is watching it.  The show is witty and sometimes downright funny, but it can also seem loose and it occasionally beats a joke to death (I’m thinking of the sketch about weird names associated with African American football players).  He is the more rotund of the pair...

This movie is not loose.  It is incredibly tight, well-acted, and the plot is so well crafted that the ending is a delightful blind side – this movie is Hitchcockian in both the intense suspense, but also in the production value.  So, if you haven’t seen it and intend to, stop now before I ruin your experience and come back and read this once you’ve seen it.  I will let you know that it is a bit gory in the more modern horror tradition, but not over the top gory – in fact, the reluctant wife who saw it with me and is more uncomfortable with violence onscreen than I currently am, found the gore to be almost cathartic.  That said, there are some surgical moments that she and I had to look away from (and now I am coming close to the spoiler time, so if there is a chance you will see it and haven’t, really do stop reading).

Before the opening credits, we are treated to a violent kidnapping – one that takes place not in the inner city, but in the suburbs, and the violence is done by a helmeted – though it could be a KKK hatted – white against an African American male who is freaked out by being in the suburbs - and knows that he is vulnerable there.  Without explanation, we transition after the credits to a wonderfully warm interaction between a black man, Chris (played by Daniel Kaluuya) whose photographs adorn the walls in his hip apartment and his white girlfriend Rose (played warmly, authentically and then chillingly by Allison Williams) as they prepare to go to her home in the country to meet the parents – who have not been told that the boyfriend is black.  This is the first warning signal to Chris – and to us – that something might be amiss.  Rose reassures Chris that her parents are liberal – her father will tell him that he would have voted for Obama a third time – but Chris – and we – are uneasy.  This is her first black boyfriend she is bringing home and we know that will be an issue.  Perhaps even more so for a family that denies their own racism.

Chris and Rose meet the Parents

After killing a deer with their car on the way up – which we just know is foretelling what is to come – Chris enters Rose’s parent’s home like a deer in the headlights.  After being treated to a tour of the house by Rose’s father (played in as straightforward and comfortable a fashion as I have seen Bradley Whitford play a role), where Chris learns that Rose’s paternal grandfather lost his chance to race in front of Hitler because he was beaten by the great black track star Jesse Owens – and that “he almost got over it”, and seeing the kitchen “where a slice of Rose’s paternal grandmother” remains – in the form of the black maid who cared for her when she died, and the black gardener who cared for the grandfather is also still working on what is beginning to feel like a plantation – we get more worried.  And it all seems a little too weird that Chris and Rose are to bunk together in Rose’s room – there’s an “it’s cool” vibe that feels forced.  Yes, she is an adult.  Yes adults can choose who will sleep in their rooms.  But she is going home to her parents and they, who don’t even know how long the couple has been dating, are fine with them sleeping together?  Oh, and there’s the reunion party this weekend that Rose didn’t know about – like she should have figured it out and of course the parents didn’t need to mention it when she talked about coming up.  Huh?

Creepy...

But the part that is the spookiest and that clues us in (as if we didn’t know from the advertising) that this is a horror movie, is the behavior of the black servants.  They looked hypnotized or drugged or something – and they don’t act black. Or maybe they are acting old time black – where they are subservient in an obsequious manner – but they don’t drop this when they talk with Chris – another African American… They are odd.  And oddness is the hallmark of horror.  Something isn’t right – and over time we discover what that is.  In the worst horror movies – and I have been treated to Texas Chainsaw Massacre – what is not right is so over the top that the movie falls apart and you can laugh at it – or so my friend claimed who promised to meet us at the Chainsaw Massacre film to laugh at it – as if it were a comedy (and then my friends never showed - the joke was on us, I guess).  But generally, at least for me, by the time the thing falls apart I am so horrified, grossed out, and nauseous that I don’t gain any pleasure from how thin the premise is that is holding the movie together.  So I expected that the secret behind the odd behavior of the blacks would be the unravelling of the movie.

The comic relief centered around one explanation of the black servants.  Chris’s friend Rod (played by Lil Rel Howery), whom Chris calls to talk about this creepy place he is staying, keeps howling that they are using the blacks as “sex slaves” which makes sense because Rod is hearing the description in phone calls from Chris, but if he were actually seeing these spaced out creatures, he would never imagine that – these are the least sexual beings you could imagine.  They are all but dead.  But they are creepy.

So things just get more bizarre when Chris gets up in the night to go outside to smoke a cigarette and the groundskeeper comes running at him at a million miles an hour and the maid looks at him sidelong out the window and then he is hypnotized by Rose’s mother (played by Catherine Keener) who is a psychiatrist.  He has a deeply disturbing experience in which he remembers his mother’s death and then feels himself falling into despair – and he is suspended in space – unable to return to the room – but then awakens in bed and it all feels like a bad dream, except that he has no desire to smoke – one of the promised benefits of the hypnotism that he had, the day before, refused when it had been offered.  Chris now, as Rose’s father promised he would after hypnotism, wants to vomit just at the thought of smoking.

The reunion party turns out to be an odd collection of people who interact with Chris around his blackness – in ways that are incredibly creepy.  He meets another weird black guy – one who is so not black that he returns a fist bump with a handshake.  When Chris takes a flash picture of the man, he becomes black and tells Chris in genuine terror to “Get Out” (he is, btw, the person who was abducted in the opening scene, so we are now beginning to put pieces together).  After the black man is calmed down – returned to being not black - Chris and Rose go to have some alone time while the adults play Bingo, which is, in reality, an auction and we just know that they are bidding on Chris.

And this is one of those places where a horror movie should break down.  Who would collude to get together and auction a person?  Civilized people would not do this, right?  But of course they have.  The myth of the old south, promulgated by films such as Gone with the Wind, is that there was never a higher nor more honorable society than that one.  And one of its bases was, of course, the buying and selling of slaves.  This horrific movie, which is going to tell us about a fictional and unsupportable reality, is actually based on an ugly truth that we can’t erase.  This film, when it should begin to fray, becomes tighter.  We are now locked into something that is both unbelievable and undeniably true.  How can this be?

So, the next step – the horrendous moment when this becomes Frankensteinian and we should scoff at it, becomes oddly chilling.  And the gore that accompanies it – the gore of the surgery that will allow the highest bidder to occupy the majority of Chris’s cranium and keep just enough of him (a sliver) around to run the arms and legs and work the sensory apparatus becomes difficult to watch – as I mentioned before, we turned away – and this helps this most difficult part of the film seem oddly plausible – even though the notion of a surgery this complex taking place in a basement with only one assistant who is unreliable is incredibly ridiculous.  We are turning away not just from the surgery but from the unreality of what is happening onscreen.

And the other gore that occurs – the vengeance of the black man done wrong – of Chris who uses the cotton that his ancestors picked to stop his ears and prevent the continuing hypnotism that is leading relentlessly to his psychological death – is welcomed, even by those of us who are averse to violence.  We do not look away but take some joy in the retribution.  This is violence in the name of good over evil – until we see the cops come and just know that Chris is going to be blamed for all of this and go to jail for ever, especially when Rose finally quits being the cold trawler for black booty that she was all along and goes back into an act, this time pleading with what we know will be a white officer to save her from this brutal beast of a black man – and we are suddenly terrified not by the family nor by Chris and his violence – but for Chris.  We know that he will be done wrong by the system – by the man – and there is nothing that will save him.  At this moment – and it only lasts a moment – the filmmaker has, I believe, achieved his goal.  We have an empathic moment with the black man whose life is in peril not because of what he has done, but because of what he has been pulled into.  And we somehow know what it means to be scared because of who we are – not because of what we have done.

Jordan Peele releases this tension quickly – he does not hold us in it – but let’s us return to a reality where good people don’t have bad things happen to them.  He has terrified us enough in the film and with this moment.  We are like the black men who have been awakened by the flash only to return to being docile – because if we aren’t docile the whole of civilization will come tumbling down.  We need to go back to being in denial and we need to have a happy (ish) ending.

Fortunately this movie is not yet over for us.  Yes the credits roll and we leave the theater or turn off the T.V., but we stew about it.  And we put pieces together as we reconstruct it from the vantage point of knowing what was really going on.  So when Chris describes his parents by saying that his father was never in the picture and that his mother died when he was 11, I realize that I was played for a mark.  My prejudiced thought – something like this is a typical back story for an African American male – hides that this is the intent of Rose – to find someone with no family ties because they will be vulnerable to the kidnapping and destruction.  But then, to fold it back out, my prejudice is based in part on fact – the fracturing of the African American family has – what? – made African American men terribly vulnerable to, for instance, being jailed and losing the better parts of their productive lives.

This film is a deep and disturbing commentary on race in America at the present time.  In this commentary, it is the connections within the African American community that will protect vulnerable men like Chris.  These are, I think, being portrayed as being shredded by the assimilation of blacks into white culture that occurs when African Americans move into the mainstream culture.  I think that the Zombie like performances where the whites have taken over the black brains is a not too subtle reference to what Dave Chappelle noted in his Emmy winning Saturday Night Live monologue the week after Trump was elected.  He compared successful blacks to Brooklyn where, as their success increases, the blacks  in their lives move out and the whites move in.  Now this sentiment, if it is there, is deeply coded.  I don’t know if this last interpretation is correct.  But I think this movie serves a platform for many thoughts like that – and it can give us pause as we struggle with how to view current race relations in the U.S.  

  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

Another Peele movie, Nope, is discussed here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

• To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Philomena: Relationships at the Movies...

     

         

This small but mighty movie about a woman reclaiming a part of her life that was taken from her caught my attention in part because I am thinking about it very differently than I usually do films – I am thinking about it through an interpersonal rather than an intrapsychic lens and that turns it into a different way of understanding the intrapsychic.  OK, I know that just sounded like mumbo jumbo, so let me talk about the film and then get back to this point when I have a way of talking about it using the film to illustrate the ideas.

Philomena, played very sensitively by Dame Judi Dench, is a simple Irish woman who “dropped her knickers” for a young man when she was at a fair.  She became pregnant without knowing that intercourse led to pregnancy, but believed that she had sinned because it felt so good – it had to be sinful.  She was taken in by an order of Nuns who cared for her until she had her child, and then she was indentured for four years’ service to pay them back for caring for her.  Her child, Anthony, was raised by the nuns and she able to see him for an hour a day.  Anthony was adopted out, without her consent, by a family who had come to adopt Anthony’s best friend Mary – he was adopted in a package deal when he wouldn’t let Mary go.  Little did he realize (at age 2 or 3 or so – and a painfully cute kid he was) that his attachment would sever his relationship with his mother.

Martin Sixsmith (played spot-on by Steve Coogan) is an upper class English gent, “Oxbridge” educated – as Philomena pokes him by conflating the schools into one – who has lost his political spin job in the government because he has been tarred with having said something he denies having said, and now he cannot get his old job back at the BBC or anywhere else and, rather than just writing a boring book on Russia, decides to take on an investigative/human interest journalistic endeavor to help Philomena find her son – something that is so clearly beneath him that his politeness towards Philomena all but delivers his contempt on a tray.

The ensuing drama of finding out what happens to Philomena’s son – and how the two protagonists react to it – is drawn from the real life engagement between these two people.  And that is the nub that creates the dilemma that I opened with.  You see, as John Le Carré talks about in an interview with Terry Gross, and as countless other fiction authors have recounted, the characters in the story are aspects of the author’s self or persona.  The book is then a well-crafted dream in which the aspects of the person dance with each other.  Now adaptations of history can serve this purpose – in Hamilton!: The Revolution, Lin Manuel-Miranda acknowledges that both Hamilton and Burr are representations of his own personality.  So interpreting a play or movie rarely goes too far off the tracks, in my mind, when it is viewed as an interpretation of the dream of the author – as if it were just what goes on in his or head – that is, the intrapsychic in the introductory paragraph.

The Real Martin and Philomena

The problem with this perspective is that movies and books (and our analysands) are portraying real or imagined events in real or imagined lives in which people do not just inhabit their own minds, but are actually interacting with each other.  While I might be able to forgive – as the Martin character does in this movie – my own cold dismissal of an attendant who is waiting on me and doing her best to be helpful; other people – in this case Philomena – might notice that this is a cold and heartless part of me and might a) not like it and b) notice that I sometimes direct that same arrogance at her and c) point out to me that I can be insufferable – that I am an angry person – and that, while I might be able to rationalize to myself that I am suffering fools around me, as one of those fools, Philomena can point out just how damaging the behavioral aspect of whatever intrapsychic stew it is that produces my intolerance can be both to those around me and to me.

Watching the movie as an interaction, then, gives a new vantage point on the intrapsychic.  It is not just a lovely mélange of stuff that can be understood, but it can also be a complex fortress with arrow slits that allow us to defend ourselves, but a fortress that can also cause damage – damage that isolates us as much or more than the outrageous arrows of misattributed quotations.  The movie, thankfully, does not leave Martin in this prison.  Philomena ends up being the vehicle of his (very partial) release.  Employed in a task which he finds repugnant because it will appeal to the basest of the instincts of readers he despises, he none the less finds himself caught up in the story – and in the ways that Philomena has been abused.  And she has been abused.  We are distressed to learn that it was worse than we would have imagined – more so than we would have expected as the plot creates twists that the simple romance type novels that she relates to Martin could never have duplicated.  We are appalled at the behavior of the nuns.  And so is Martin.  And he is angry about it.

Philomena is angry, too.  But she turns out to be a much more complex character than her apparent simple engagement with the world (and her romance novels) led us to believe.  She has internalized a remarkably pure meaning of the Christian message that has been handed to her on a very perverse plate – and she is able to employ it to keep her bearings in a world that might cause others to reel.  Philomena ends up, I think, using Martin to express aspects of her concern – is it concern?  Is it anger? – about the situation, while being able to forgive rather than crucify those who have harmed her.

Perhaps because this is based on real events, Philomena comes off as being somewhat saintly in the other worldly sense.  She is certainly much wiser about various aspects of Anthony’s later life than Martin or we the viewer would have expected her to be.  She displays a comfort with the complexities of personal living while also being able to function on a level that is more simple, direct and immediate than anything Martin can muster.  Her capacity to see things as they are and to deal with them – not to imagine that they should be different or to be put off because they aren’t – is remarkable (that said, she is rather put out by Martin – and I think she does wish that he would be more civil).  But she also uses Martin’s anger, outrage and skills to broadcast her story.  Philomena’s internal world – no matter how simple her exterior demeanor – is quite complex, but it is also, oddly, less on display; we are left admiring, but on some level not knowing, Philomena.  While we get to know Martin, and get to see him making subtle shifts, we don’t have a sense of how that will play out for him.  Philomena, we feel confident, will turn out just fine, thank you very much.  How she achieves her groundedness and keeps it while all around her have lost their base is left to us as a bit of a mystery.   I think this ultimately has to do with the intrapsychic.  The book this film was based on was written by Martin.  We have much more access to his mind here than to hers; what we access of Philomena includes how she was helpful to Martin to see the world in new ways.  We may have to wait for her book to understand how she was able to do that.  But, in the meantime, we get a bit of the intrapsychic from Martin, and a big dose of the corrective interpersonal from his interactions with Philomena. 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Casablanca: Isolationism’s Cure

A couple of years ago I blogged about my Mom’s continued productivity into her eighties when I reviewed a play of hers about Frank Lloyd Wright.  This year, for the eighth year in a row, she and her troupe have written and she has directed them in producing an original play.  I found this one particularly timely and instructive – it was about the film Casablanca – its creation, its meaning, and its place in our collective experience of film going.  After the play, the reluctant wife and I watched the film – for me it was my third time.  The first time I saw it was in high school – I found the film difficult to piece together.  Without historical context, I found the city and the agendas of the inhabitants and the bar to be foreign.  I was even somewhat confused by the love story – who was this Rick guy – this hard-hearted guy and what was the tenderness that he had experienced in Paris in that filmy flashback?

The second time that I saw the film was ten years ago when it was shown at our local institute and the love story was interpreted from an analytic perspective as the classic oedipal triangle with Rick being in love with the maternal figure of Ilsa who was married, unbeknownst to him, to Victor Laszlo, the hero of the underground movement.  She, for her part, allowed herself to fall in love with Rick only because she thought Laszlo dead, and so Rick’s heroic disavowal of their love at the end was the healthy resolution of the oedipal romance, with Rick choosing to quit mooning for someone who wasn’t his own, to make sure that his parents had the marriage they deserved and he set off with new friends for new adventures, free to love in whatever way he chose.

Mom’s troupe presented a very different historical – political perspective based on recent books about the making of the film.  They did this in the context of the troupe starting out as a kind of book club interested in the film, and the members of the club morphed into characters in the play and then the film, but also into the characters who wrote and produced and watched the film, and the censoring board (hilariously played as a “church-lady” type) – as well as being the actors in the film off stage – being the people that they really were.  It was an enchanting play – including a moving sing along to “The Marseillaise” at the moment in the film when it was sung in defiance of the Germans in Rick’s bar.  After seeing the play, I could appreciate just how tightly written this film is and that, despite Bogart’s experience of it as just another of the many studio movies he was under contract to churn out, it was, in fact, anything but.

The play, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s”, was purchased by Jack Warner – one of the two Eastern European Jewish brothers who had come to the U.S., changed their names to Warner, and built a movie studio – as a vehicle to help the U.S. move out of its isolationist position with regard to World War II.  Everybody Comes to Rick’s, in turn, was based on the experiences of an American watching the torturous route that refugees were taking to try to escape the ever expanding grip of the Nazis and reporting on this trail to a friend who was a playwright.  The play was written but never produced before being bought by Jack Warner for $20,000.  There aren’t many editions of the play currently available, but a librarian friend of my Mom’s was able to find a copy and the troupe was able to produce some of the scenes.

Ilsa, who is so effective as the morally torn woman at the center of the film was, in the play, a floozy with another name who had toyed with Rick’s heart in Paris – exactly the kind of person that Rick unjustly accuses Ilsa of being when he is drunk and angry with her in the film.  But this would not do for Jack Warner and the producers and writers he hired to turn this into a movie that would help move the US off the dime.  You see, the government had put an embargo on films about the war.  We wanted to stay out of what was seen as a European problem.  Let them sort things out for themselves, we said.  We will stay over here - even after Paris fell – and having knowledge of what was happening to the Jews – we did not want to commit ourselves to a problem that was not of our own making.

I get that.  In the wake of September 11^th, when we were gearing up for a war with Iraq, I had a conversation with a fellow faculty member’s 18 year old son who was arguing that we should go and fight for a variety of reasons – including that the Iraqis were living under the rule of a dictator who was taking their right to a free life away.  I agreed with him that this was not right, but I also said that I was reluctant to risk his life, which could certainly happen if the draft was reinstated, so that the people of Iraq could live freely.  This brought both of us up short and made an argument that had seemed hypothetical and philosophically obvious suddenly immediate and uncomfortable for both us.

 So Jack Warner’s crew needed a hero, someone who never stuck his neck out for anyone, but also someone who embodied who it is that we, as Americans, would identify with, someone who had deep convictions about right and wrong.  So Rick had a very important relationship with Sam – his piano player – an egalitarian relationship with someone who called him boss, but with whom he shared the profits of the casino and with whom he worked as a sort of “colleague".  It was important that our exceptionalism, our vision of ourselves as doing well by our former slaves – a fiction that Ne-Tahisi Coates and many, many others have exposed as a lie – be depicted.  Rick's character, as portrayed in his relationship with Sam was (ironically) written to appeal to our better selves, to the self who always rooted for the underdog.  And Rick needed to be principled - having helped the underdog in wars, but also helping a very visible underdog - an African American.

In this film, only three of the named actors were born in the United States.  Most of them were recent immigrants and some of those playing Nazis were Jews who had just fled Europe.  The actor playing Victor Laszlo was a European star who was now in exile and angry about being outside of the central romantic lead that he was used to playing.  Ingrid Bergman, one of the few actors of her day who kept her given name, was working hard to understand her character and how to play her – which was difficult because the conclusion of the film had not yet been written – no one knew how the conflict was going to be resolved – and because Bogart was incredibly remote and unresponsive – disappearing into his trailer when not on set.

So Mom’s troupe explained that the pivotal scene, when the Germans start to sing a patriotic song in Rick’s bar using Sam’s piano, was constructed in an interesting way.  Rick, the person who was so firmly in charge of his nightclub that no one was admitted to the illegal casino without a nod from him, the man who never drank with a customer, and the man who didn’t bat an eye when a man who relied on him was shot when Rick refused to intervene to save his life, gave the nod to the band to play the Marseillaise when Victor Laszlo stood up to lead them.  In the filming, Bogart was told, "This will be a light day, just come on set and give a nod.", which he did before retiring to his trailer.  The actors who sang the Marseillaise and the band who played, many of them recent immigrants, cried real tears of grief and joy at this show of mettle in the bully’s face.  And Jack Warner had the moment he needed – the taciturn isolationist who remained staunchly neutral giving tacit approval to the resistance.

Of course, the real drama occurs in the last few minutes, when neither we, nor apparently the cast, know how the movie will resolve.  Rick is selling his business to Ferrari, the owner of the Blue Parrot across the street who has coveted it, in anticipation of running off with Ilsa, who has entrusted their future to Rick, as Rick double crosses Laszlo and delivers him to the Nazis.  When it becomes apparent that this is not, in fact, Rick’s plan, we are left with the fear that the Nazi commandant, who has been contacted by the brilliantly played French Captain Louis Renault, will prevent Laszlo and Ilsa’s flight to Lisbon.  All is nicely resolved and Rick and Louis, who have just worked to double cross each other, recognize that each of them, with their long history of being spineless exploiters of the plight of the Jews fleeing Europe through Casablanca, is, in fact, a deeply principled person and they resolve together to begin a new kind of friendship based on that shared resolve.  In that beautiful moment, we witness Rick’s transformation through Renault’s eyes, and we identify with Rick’s being the good, decent and just man we always knew him, and we, ourselves, to have been.

One of the things that my Mom’s production clarified was the integral role that the censorship board played in making this a truly great movie.  They would not allow the most egregiously immoral aspects of the Casablancan milieu to be directly depicted.  Thus, they censored out the original versions of the script where Renault’s trading sex for visas were spelled out, so the script had to be clean enough that the censor’s wouldn’t object, and Claude Rains’ performance had to be smarmy enough that we couldn’t not know.  Similarly, Rick giving a key to Ilsa to come to his room, and Ilsa showing up the next morning in the dress she had worn the night before, had to be cut – Ilsa is a married woman, after all – so Ilsa has to take a back stair – and they have to be interrupted mid reconciliation by Laszlo’s appearance in the bar – and all of this heightens the tension as we experience their unrequited love burning and smoldering and not being consummated. 

I think, for what it is worth, that all of the censor’s work and that of Jack Warner to have Rick be the person the US as a country could identify with, also led to my objection to the straight Oedipal interpretation ten years ago.    I think it is Ilsa, not Rick, who is in the infantile position.  She was a child who had an Oedipal crush on the older, wiser, more worldly Laszlo – and the oedipal “victory” (which is really a defeat because it imprisons the child in the infantile position admiring the distant and superior parent) of being loved by a father figure.  His apparent death in the concentration camps relieved her to fall in love with someone more like her – a peer – and created the possibility of her having the kind of romantic life that a mature woman should have – with a person with whom she can discover the world – together – as peers.  But this man – Rick – betrays her need for just such a relationship.  He could have put Laszlo on that plane and run off with Ilsa to fight the bad guys together in their own way, but he doesn’t do that.  He decides for her – paternalistically (just as he apparently decided for Sam, despite his protestation that he doesn’t buy or sell people, that being “owned” by Ferrari was in his best interest) that remaining the adored young child, is the best role her.

So, to summarize, Jack Warner won the war.  He got the US to get out of its isolationist Rick mode and helped us recognize our better selves.  But he did this, in part, by censoring something about ourselves that is very important but that we didn’t want to know or couldn’t yet know: that we infantilize minorities and women – we use them to our own ends while claiming that we are doing what is best for them.  Coming to grips with these hidden aspects of ourselves is put off while we fight a greater evil.  Yes, we needed to defeat Nazism.  And, in the process of doing that, Rosie the Riveter and the armed services as a promoter of racial equality began to chip away at the enemy of paternalism, but Jack Warner’s support of the American Dream, of our exceptionalism, also allowed us to continue to slumber.  Perhaps now we are awakening from that sleep – but it is a rude awakening.  We had to elect a President who promised to Make America Great Again – which, for some of us, was code for Make America Paternalistic Again – make us the kind of country that Rick personified.  The kind of country that is certain of itself and assigns roles to people that work – as we imagine it, for the people we are assigning the roles to – but in fact, and outside of our awareness, those roles are assigned primarily based on what is good for ourselves.  Perhaps we need to see our narcissism personified on a huge stage in order to actually see it for what it is and to recoil against it – to redefine ourselves in new, more humane ways.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates visited our campus last year and I have been looking forward to reading his memoir, Between the World and Me, since then.  He had me at the opening words, “Dear Son,”.  He is writing to his son about what it means to be an African American Male, but he was speaking for me – in a parallel world vernacular – as the reluctant son prepares to go off to college.  How do we tell our children – how does a man tell his son – what he needs to know?  I want to know.  I am reading with Coates from the first line.  And what he is telling me about is something that I balked when I first heard a black analyst, Dorothy Holmes, say it, but that I have, across time and as a result of many experiences, including with Mr. Coates himself, come to appreciate.  He is telling me that the primary concern of the American Black Male is with the integrity of his body – a body that he does not feel is, in some primal and fundamental way, his own.

Had I read this a couple of years ago, I think he might have lost me at this point.  Wait a minute, I would have said, we are 150 years out from the civil war and the emancipation.  What do you mean that your body is not yet your own?  But Coates patiently walks us, his co-author of the letter to his son, through the experience of growing up in a culture where a boy is beaten regularly by people who love him to protect him from acting in ways that could lead to his being arrested or worse.  He is also, if he is growing up in a ghetto, as Coates did, fearing for his life from other quarters – he has to know which blocks are safe to navigate and which are not.  And then he becomes puzzled and envious of those who, as he would and does provide for his son – provide a different kind of protective layer so that his son does not have to experience the same fearsome forces determining his life – until his son discovers that an innocent black boy has been murdered by a policeman and the policeman will not be charged – and his son, despite his privileged and protected life – is confronted by his own variant on the mortal fears that have plagued the father.  And isn’t there something universal about this wish of a father to have his son escape the traps and turmoil that he has found himself in only to find that the son, despite his best efforts, must confront some variant of them?  And don’t we want to provide some succor, some guidance, as he does this?  And, at least for me, I wish that I could be as eloquent – as readable – as Coates is.  I wish that my son would read what I wrote or, barring that, that someone would, as people have read Coates.

So he tells his son about his experience – about going to Howard University in Washington, D.C.  And I have told my son about my own experience of going to college.  And he has chosen to go to a college that was not mine.  And Coates acknowledges that his son will have to make his own choices in life – but I sense that he deeply and powerfully wishes that his son would experience Howard – the Mecca – as he experienced it, filled with celebrities – some of them known to me and some of them not – as likely his son would hear the names – it is amazing to me how many people I know on a first name basis who are unknown to my children and to my students because of the barriers that time erects – and between Coates and me there are social barriers where he is reciting names of people that are celebrities within the African American community, but not so much within mine.  He is building bridges to, but also necessarily pointing out divides between, he and his son and he and me.

Coates revels in his blackness – he celebrates it – and then he pulls up short of imagining that the black universe is the entire universe, something that he once wanted to do.  He connects with me (the “white” reader – whatever and whoever “white” is) when he owns the entire human race and all of its magnificent production as his own.  I am proud of my family – and proud of their products – they get some extra juice and vigarish and I overvalue them because of my knowing and being related to them.  I am also proud of my various brushes with fame and overvalue the production of those individuals.  But I am also proud of and feel related to the whole human race – what we have accomplished – despite all the trouble we have also managed to cause – is nothing short of miraculous – and Coates shares in that appreciation – and that becomes another connection point.  Implicitly, at his moment, he invites me to appreciate “his” world as he is appreciating “mine” and I feel more comfortable acknowledging what he would have me see – that African Americans, despite my prejudice of being a drag on the economy, have been one of our most important economic engines.  This land is our land.

I experience this as the result of a kind of openness that feels like it flows off the page.  There is an honesty that is palpable and, while I think I have been as honest with my son as he is being with his, sometimes in ways that make me wonder (for both of us) “Should I have told him that?”, when I told a psychoanalytic friend that I was reading Between the World and Me, he commented on how defended Coates is in it.  By this he means that the flow is not free – that this is not a series of Freudian free associations unencumbered by what we call defensive functioning – where we craft our sentences to hide as well as reveal.  And I suppose he is right.  This is a very well-crafted book – it reads like poetry or spoken word soul – which sounds spontaneous but is deeply and carefully crafted.  And, as a reader, I appreciate that.  I have the sense that I am in the hands of a craftsman.  That this sentence, this paragraph, this page, this section will resolve.  So I suppose that crafting a piece of writing is like interpreting a dream and then using that interpretation to address a problem area.  Sometimes I will flat-footedly say, “I had this dream and I think it was about this and it resolved in this way and I think that is a really good idea, what do you think?”, but I frequently get more mileage out of the dream if I think about how to engage with a person so that they, too, feel the solution that the dream presented or the way that the dream articulated the problem is useful for us to consider as we work on the problem, and this requires crafting – working the solution into the interaction between us as we work together on the problem.

Coates has taken what I think are real, raw direct experiences of the world and worked them into a form that engages the reader.  He wants to connect.  He wants us to be with him.  This requires craftsmanship – especially when working across racial, ethnic or social lines.  It requires honesty, but also appreciation of how what we have to say will be perceived.  We have to write – and then read our writing not just as editors but as the Other – how will this be heard by someone who is not me?  And he has, at least with this me, allowed me to read it as if it were me – as if I had written it, which of course I couldn’t have.  What could be further from my capacity to write about than the subjectivity of a black man?  In an earlier post, I noted that the white author of The Help was wise to avoid writing in the first person about any of the blacks (she did with the whites) in her book.  It may be that I am able to read this piece in part because I have been working to understand this perspective, but I think I am able to read it as something that I might have written because Coates has crafted it to be that.  I can imagine myself in his shoes.  I feel his concerns to be my own.  This is an accomplishment that is partly based on the crafted nature of the writing, but also I think on the honesty of it.  While it may include defensive components, it comes, I believe, from a heartfelt and genuine place – the kind of place that we can discover when we sit with the parts of ourselves and the world that are beautiful and ugly and see them as directly as we are able.

The writing then, is the writing of an empowered person.  A person who feels free to say what he believes and to do that without inhibiting himself - though doing that with sensitivity to his audience - not because he is kowtowing to them, but because he cares about them as equals.  He cares about them as similarly free people who will necessarily relate from their own place to what he has to say, just as he will say what he has to say from his own place. 

This book has become an Important Book – but it is not weighty or tough to plow through.  It does not deliver all that it might promise to a hungry son, but we have been warned that what we want and what Dad wants is not the same thing – and I think more than that, that Dad is a seeker, too, and that he has not come to the end of his search.  I did think Dad was going to become a hero – by taking up the task of reporting on the wanton killing of black men he moved from passive victim to actively working to address the situation.  I was rooting for him.  But the resolution was less complete than that.  And, in the wake of the events this week in Charlottesville – where white supremacists gathered to promote racial hatred and were tacitly supported by a President who had not yet been elected when this book was written, anything like a resolution to the issues that are raised in this book would be way premature.  This book is about engaging us – Coates’s  son, his people, and all people – in an ongoing struggle.  There is hope here, but it is the hope that comes from Coates’s capacity – and ours in sympathy – to look at a situation and to appraise it honestly and directly, no matter how painful and uncomfortable that might be.  For me, because of that, this is a quintessentially psychoanalytic book.     

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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Thank You For Being Late

Thomas Friedman feels like an old friend at this point.  His voice is calm and rational and he talks about things that seem irreconcilable or impossible in measured tones of patient optimism.  His most recent book, subtitled An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, was given to both me and my son by another optimist, my Aunt Julie – someone who has, at best, cautiously embraced technological change – the central theme of this book.  So she must have been taken both by the evidence that Friedman marshals that we have passed a critical moment in technological advances, and he does, indeed, make a compelling argument for the confluence of the technologies of the smart phone, Artificial Intelligence and the capacities of the cloud creating a new world order he characterizes as a supernova that we don’t yet appreciate, and that this wave is something that we should stay on top of especially if we, like my son, are about to enter the workforce.  If we don’t stay on top of it, the message is, we will be drowned by it (can you tell that I am returning from a vacation that included body surfing in big waves generated by a distant tropical storm?).

This book was published before Trump’s election and it was anticipating – or aware of – some of his early campaign rhetoric, but did not, I don’t think, take seriously the possibility that he might get elected, even though the British Exit from the European Union was cited as a current measure of our cultural zeitgeist.  Friedman is terribly concerned by the breakdown in the ability of Washington to work collaboratively, something that has, at least to this point in the summer of 2017, only been exacerbated by the Trump presidency.  Even more, the country is deeply divided, with Trump having historically low rates of approval at this point in his presidency – 40% of the electorate disapprove of him – but incredibly high rates of approval among registered Republicans – 85% of whom approve of him.  So the only way, I think, to get that 40% overall number is to realize that almost no one who is not a republican approves of Trump, but almost everyone who is, does.  Ouch.

My Aunt Julie is a political conservative – but a liberal human being who has travelled to over 100 countries.  She has done a lot of travelling in what Friedman calls “The World of Disorder”, the places where the rule of law does not exist.  She is, I think, an old school conservative – and Friedman lists the progressive accomplishments of a variety of republican leaders – though he neglects to include Nixon’s opening of trade with China – something that Aunt Julie used as an opportunity to become one of the first American tourists there in many, many years.  All that said, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Julie had voted for Trump – though I haven’t asked her.  But I think that Aunt Julie, in part by her having recommended this book to me, is not really the person that we need to worry about.  And we do need to worry about people.  You see, Friedman is proposing that, to move forward in this new world, we need to do that as a community – we need to have support from others to make transitions – we need to figure out how to harness the power of the hurricane while living in the relatively still center of it – a center that is always moving – but one that we can stay safely inside of when we have others who are working with us to track the progress of the storm.  To simply stick a stake in the ground and stay here – as Trump seems to be proposing with his Make America Great Again agenda – and the do nothing congress is doing with gridlock – would, in the long run, doom us to failure.

So who is it that we need to bring on board?  Who do we need to convince that what Friedman is saying makes sense?  And how do we go about doing that?  Friedman’s proposal is that we have leaders who do that.  Fortunately he is banking as much or more on local as national leaders; people who work to build communities wherever we are.  Friedman literally goes home to the town of St. Louis Park – a town that can be seen as a suburb of Minneapolis – St. Paul, but a town that Friedman takes pains to point out is a complete community – not a satellite.  This town was the first to welcome Jews who emigrated from the Minneapolis ghetto they had shared with African Americans until the 1950s.  The town today has held onto the embracing ethos that was in place then and more than 40 languages are spoken by its 47,000 residents.  At its heart is a strong school system that is well funded by local taxes and attracts superb teachers.  Also at its heart is a sense of trust – among and between city leaders who work together to solve problems – and between the leaders and the citizens, citizens who understand that the leaders have the best interests of the community in mind and, when those leaders mess up – as they did when they bought a Wi-Fi system paid for by the city that would provide free internet access for the town and it failed when the solar panels driving it didn’t melt the snow and ice covering them – the citizens forgive the council members and asked them what is the next thing that we are going to try because they get it that the council members were doing their best to do something that would make everyone’s life better.  Friedman acknowledges, however, that one thing that has buoyed this community is the relative stability of the local economy – one that has led to real economic growth of 2% per year for decades – and one that has meant that people’s children end up earning more than their parents did – a pillar of the American dream that has not occurred in the places chronicled in Hillbilly Elegy, a book that discusses rust belt cities in Ohio and holler towns in Kentucky.

Somewhere in between Friedman’s St. Louis Park and HillbillyElegy’s Middletown lie a lot of people.  These people are frequently smart and capable.  They may own small businesses or work for them.  The central metaphor of this book will, however, be lost on many of them because the central metaphor is that our society should mirror mother nature and evolve a la Darwin’s theory of evolution.  I hate to tell you this Tom, but a lot of people don’t buy evolution.  In fact, according to my history of psychology text, fewer people believe in the US today believe in evolution than did in the 1920s.  Ironically, as we become more enamored of technology and as it takes over more and more of our lives, we seem to have figured out how to separate it from the science that spawned it.

Evolution was a hard thing for me to wrap my head around.  When I read Darwin, much of his evidence for evolution had to do with relatively quick adaptations to the environment.  Moths that were white and were quickly eaten when the bark was black were suddenly dominant after white ash from industry covered the bark and the black moths were easily spotted prey.  Evolution as a whole has taken a whole lot longer and has involved many more parts than Darwin could have known about.  I learned at the natural history museum in Chicago last summer that that our atmosphere was generated by sea plants and animals – land animals couldn’t have existed until millions of years of oxygen had been collected in the areas around the earth – and the atmosphere fended off many of the deadliest of cosmic rays.  Or at least that is how I remember it.  In any case, it took me a long time to realize that a million years is a long time and that a lot of mistakes can be made in that time in the process of discovering a mutation that is helpful rather than harmful.

But some very smart people don’t buy that.  They have a much narrower view of history and, on top of that, they have some kind of belief system that generally includes the ways in which the world will end in the relatively near future – and some kind of grand cosmic scheme will be realized.  There is an almost surreal fascination with this.  But I am getting derailed.  The point is that Friedman thought he was preaching to the choir – he thought he was talking the rational majority of us, but at this moment it feels like the rational ones are in the minority.  I think if he were to rewrite the book today he would have to acknowledge that our “world of order” has many more powerful lines of disorder in it than he originally imagined.  And I think he would have spent more time talking about the importance of education – in both the world of order and the world of disorder.  We need a population that can think in order to stay ahead of this supernova.  We can’t just access facts on the web, we have to have a cogent approach to the world as a whole and to learn about how we use evidence to make decisions – not just intuition and folklore.

One of the striking moments in the documentary about building the biggest house in America, The Queen of Versailles, is when the mother of the title is worried about their losing their wealth and that the children may have to get an education because the wealth would have protected them from having to prepare for a vocation, which is what she experienced college and graduate school as being about.  Unfortunately the board and administrators of my liberal arts college agree with her and are trying to market us as a means to a financially secure future.  I don’t disagree that this is a byproduct of a college education, but my belief is antiquated one – one that is a holdover from when landed gentry were the only ones eligible to vote.  Education should provide an informed electorate.  If we are going to govern ourselves, we need to be prepared to think like governors – and we need to cooperatively utilize our strengths to build the best possible union. 

As a psychoanalyst and an educator, I am aware of multiple ironies at this point.  One is that education, like evolution, inevitably leads to change, so those who are entrenched in positions that don’t acknowledge the supernova and its impact are not going to support education.  At this point I can hear the reluctant wife quoting the former secretary of the Veteran’s Administration, Eric Shinseki, who stated that if you don’t like change, you will like irrelevancy even less.  The more immediate ironies are that teachers like me, who are change agents and tend to be supportive of personal and cultural change -  tend to work in institutions that are very conservative and slow to change.  Well, the supernova, I think, has us in its cross hairs.  We need to figure out how to use it to educate – though it is, in its current configuration, best at conveying facts, not at teaching how to think – and interact – like governors.  I am also aware of psychoanalysis as a discipline that emphasizes the functioning of the individual over the functioning of the group – not that we haven’t, since Freud, had a lot to say about the ways that groups function.  But I think we need to up our game on that front – and even more to track the ways in which the supernova is impacting the functioning of the individual.

Ironically in terms of the culture as a whole, which seems to be headed for a foxhole, and the corners of that culture that I am most identified with, this book clarifies that the supernova positions us to be able to cooperate on a scale that was unthinkable before.  We are within spitting distance of a worldwide community where we can figure out how to be virtually in touch with virtually everyone on the planet.  We can (and Friedman maintains will) build communities that address and solve problems and, he maintains, our diversity as a species – the range of abilities that we have and that can be harnessed, will continue to allow us to adapt to the changing environments in ways that allow us reap the rewards of the problem solving that we accomplish.  Implicit in his thinking may be that, despite our potential for huge communities, it is smaller ones - ones in which we actually know the others in the group - even if they live half way around the world - that may best fuel the kinds of changes that we need to adapt to survive as a species.  In a week when our president seems to be urging North Korea, the most disordered part of the disordered world, to wreak havoc on the world of order – and is encouraging us to be barbaric towards them, I am ready to bet on small rather than large communities.  I am also hoping that Friedman’s (and Aunt Julie’s) optimism is well placed.

Post Script: This post led to a correspondence with Aunt Julie in which she clarified that she did not vote for Trump - she is a fiscal, but not a social conservative.  We have not finished the conversation about our values and how they mesh and contrast, and probably never will; one of the joys and frustrations of being human.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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