Nuclear Armageddon

Have you ever envisioned the equivalent of a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl in therapeutic terms? Let’s imagine that the interior core of a psychotherapist is like a great nuclear reactor filled with highly combustible materials deposited there by patients. Imagine the Catholic confessional as a bomb filled with conventional explosives. The difference between confession and psychoanalysis (the most intensive form of psychotherapy) is the difference between the kind of explosive device used by the allies in the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo and the kind of nuclear weapon tested at Bikini Atoll, a hydrogen bomb that creates a fusion explosion from heavy water. Now, let’s say that one of these fusion-level devices falls into the hands of someone like Kim Jong-il, the hermaphroditic despot of North Korea, which recently triggered another international crisis by sinking a South Korean vessel. That’s what it would be like if a psychoanalyst went off his rocker, symbolically starting a chain reaction that culminated with him spilling the beans. The fission and fusion reactions in atomic and hydrogen bombs, respectively, are ignited by detonators that are essentially conventional explosives. Similarly, the unleashing of the kind of incendiary material that lurks within the typical psychoanalyst would have to be facilitated by some sort of event that acted as a detonator. We are reminded of the television newscaster played by Peter Finch in Network, who urges his audience to go to their windows and scream out, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Which therapeutic session, which bout of navel-gazing by the narcissistic patient, is going to finally throw the long-suffering analyst over the edge? What combination of private school and college rejections, of spousal abuse and infidelity, of financial instability, of thwarted ambitions and unfulfilled loves, of roads more or less traveled, will become the equivalent of putting what is supposed to be a deterrent into the hands of a rogue state? Let’s say Iran acquires enough nuclear fuel to create a bomb, or Osama bin Laden hatches an ingenious plot with the North Koreans, or let’s say the Opus Dei takes over the Vatican à la Dan Brown, or Orthodox Jews who don’t even believe Israel should exist decide to take the Middle East situation into their own hands, or let’s say gentle old Denmark or Sweden suddenly has a collective nervous breakdown and raids the papers of Nils Bohr the way children playing with matches start forest fires. Imagine what will happen when the cultivated person sitting behind you, asking gently if you have fallen asleep when you are supposed to be free-associating, suddenly says to himself, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Lives of Our Leaders: It's Hard to be the King II

It’s doubtful that there will be any more Abe Lincolns, Teddy or Franklin Roosevelts, or John F. Kennedys. It’s not that there aren’t honorable, even inspired men in politics. It’s just that the job description has changed. It’s one thing to triumph over Everest, but quite another to conquer the entire Himalayan range. Health care, financial reform, Iran, Iraq, Middle East crisis in general, borrowing crisis in Europe, North Korean hermaphroditic bad boy, Social Security on the fritz, oil glorious oil (spilling), tea party uprisings, terrorism at home and abroad, intractable Afghanistan, burial ground of ideological warriors, and now anti-missiles that don’t do the job (“Review Cites Flaws in U.S. Antimissile Program," NYT, 5/17/10). Things were looking up for Obama, but will he be humbled by the sheer magnitude of the challenge, as the results of the upcoming mid-term elections might suggest? What the world requires is a Dirty Harry, a Terminator, someone who will punish the bad guys and free the good. But our avenging angel can’t be too concerned with due process or all the things that make America great. To get things done, America needs a brash, territorial president like Lyndon Johnson, whose canine behavior was demonstrated when he boldly exhibited himself after urinating in the congressional bathrooms. Obama wants to be a man of action, but he is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, the thinking man, the troubled smoking prince who suffers a fitful sleep. Tyranny is the only working political system in these parlous times, and Obama lacks all the qualities of a good tyrant. Firstly, he stubbornly refuses to embrace a xenophobic view of the world. He refuses to create an enemy over which he can lord with self-congratulatory moral superiority. He is a believer in the politics of inclusion. He also refuses steadfastly to lay the blame on his predecessors. Finally, he seems to be faithful to his wife. One of the most important qualities of a great statesman is that he be principled when it comes to humanity as a whole, but a total hypocrite and cad in his relationships with women. This shows that the leader of civilized society has cojones, and will blow out the brains of anyone who tries to get in his way.

Opium Wars

It’s not surprising to discover that Iran has been building a weapons-grade nuclear reactor near the holy city of Qum. War and religion have gone hand in hand since ancient times, the conjunction of the two seemingly opposing phenomena reaching its apotheosis with the Crusades in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the most fought-over piece of real estate in the world is Palestine, the cradle of the three Adamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

The expression “no good deed goes unpunished” comes to mind in response to this contrariety of human nature. What is religion but an organized aspiration for the greater good? But curiously, the desire to disseminate good works and helpful information has historically ended in violence.

Family life is a microcosm of religious wars, and what greater description of domestic conflict than the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs and their rivalrous broods? Parents pass on experience to their children, who find the phenomenology tainted by an outlook they consider foreign to their own. Baby boomers who became the flower children of the ‘60s were perennially at odds with their Depression-era parents, who unwittingly educated their children into an opposing worldview. Few graduates of elite colleges would cotton to Polonius’s famous advice to Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

The other thing that religion and war have in common is the notion of an army. An army of believers is hardly distinguishable from a military army, and members of both subsume the self to a higher authority. As Shinto kamikazes and Islamic suicide bombers illustrate, belief is a powerful weapon that can produce destructive, not to mention self-destructive, results. Very few modern religions have been founded on principles of skepticism, and few would subscribe to Wittgenstein’s famous last proposition from his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence,” which limits the possibility of grandiose proclamations.

Many of the most violent battles of the past decades have been in places where there is religious conflict, whether Serbia and Croatia, Afghanistan, Israel, or Sudan. (Curiously, the First and Second World Wars were secular conflicts motivated by desires for political and economic hegemony). Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The French philosopher Raymond Aron went on to say, “Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.” In the l9th century, the British fought the Opium Wars with China. But aren’t all wars opium wars? Religion just happens to be the most powerful opiate that fuels the delirium.