Bling Bling in the ATL

Winter is coming, and for the first time in many years I feel an old gladness. Summer is such a heady season - glittery and bright, frivolous and shallow. Coming off it is like nightfall after a long day drinking beers in the sun. My feelings probably come from years of thoughtless vacations followed by the beginning of school, but regardless, something about cold and dark says 'buckle down'. Its a little ironic that I'm in research, where the work cycle is the reverse of education.

My mother is in Samoa, which is across the equator, so she's well into the hot and rainy season now. No one has heard from her but I for one don't need to. I can well imagine daily life at the Lee household, and if anything important transpires, like good therapy, it will unfold over several months. I am happy to learn of my mother's conclusions and the consequences of those conclusions then. Hopefully one consequence will be that my mother realizes she needs some sort of retirement income, and will finally take US citizenship so she can recieve social security benefits.

I recently read 'Bush on the Couch' - an 'applied psychoanalysis' of George W. Bush by object relations theorist Justin Frank. He appears to be well qualified. Somehow, of all the theories I've read to explain the Bush administration, Dr. Frank's approach seemed the most relevant of all. That Bush is a delusional tyrant who has drawn the world into some replay of his primary traumas seems self-evident. What is not clear is what to do about it. Justin Frank is better versed in the second half of 'applied psychoanalysis' than in the first.

Some of Dr. Frank's suggestions seem useful. He has the insight to guess what might drive President Bush mad - interruptions to his vacations, truthtelling, confrontation. However, the whole approach seems limited as far as political action goes. For reasons of integrity, I'm not interested in pursuing this through PsychOps or marketing literature, so I've been looking at ideas about the authoritarian personality, which (partially) grew out of a need to understand anti-semitism after WWII.

I wish I could say I'd been at it for long enough to come up with good suggestions for how to proceed politically but so far nothing. Except more reading lists - next is Erich Fromm. I came to him from several sources, the most relevant being the current New Yorker, which has an interesting article called "Breaking Ranks" about Brent Scowcroft.

Scowcroft relates colourful vignettes about his front row seats to the crazy-making theater in the Bush inner circle. And Scowcroft cites Fromm as a fundamental reason for opposing Gulf War II.

“I believe that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history,” he says. “This notion that inside every human being is the burning desire for freedom and liberty, much less democracy, is probably not the case. I don’t think anyone knows what burns inside others. Food, shelter, security, stability. Have you read Erich Fromm, ‘Escape from Freedom’? I don’t agree with him, but some people don’t really want to be free.”

Somehow the concepts bring to mind Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 'Solitude of Self.' Anyways. Its nice to read a sane discussion of our policy options in Iraq. The article is a good read.

Ciao,

Ms. Bling