Was Stalin Bulimic?

                                       U.S Signal Corps

Was Stalin bulimic? Does that explain his purges? Out of the frying pan and into the fire is the expression, but it may seem like a long road from the toilet to the gulag. But who is to say how the functioning of the GI tract and the varying sphincters of the body affect the creation of personality. Back in 2005 Paul Starobin wrote an essay in The Atlantic called “The Accidental Autocrat” about another Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Starobin attributed some of the games Putin plays on the stage of history to morphological singularities. Starobin cites Brenda L Connors “a certified ' 'movement analyst’" at the Naval War college to show that “he seems to lack what is called contra-lateral movement and instead tends to move in a head-to-tail patern, like a fish or reptile." Starobin quotes Connors to the effect that reptiles “patrol their borders, and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively.” Like reptiles Putin is particularly border conscious. Starobin is more skeptical about Connors’ irredentist hypothesis that Putin’s “instinct to make himself whole is mirrored in his imperative to keep Russian from breaking up.” However, it would be interesting to look at whether Stalin suffered from some grave eating disorder which became the only tool available for him to deal with his paranoia. It’s easy to test the DNA from the remains of a dying person and famously Einstein’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde, but it’s impossible to get a stool sample from a corpse and even if Stalin had ever seen a GI guy for any of his complaints, it would take a pretty wily researcher to attain those records. But it’s not hard to imagine Stalin gorging himself on Chicken Kiev at some state dinner and stealthily going off to the bathroom, sticking his finger down his throat and later ordering the elimination of a good portion of the attendees.

Offensively Defensive or When to Cut the Cheese

photo: Eric Draper

You’ve undoubtedly heard the expression, “the only good defense is an effective offense.” It’s obviously something Putin has taken to heart and he’s a trained pugilist with a background in the martial arts. So his diplomacy is based at least on his experience. The Atlantic ran an article back in 2005 by Paul Starobin entitled “The Accidental Autocrat,” tying Putin’s personality to a morphological disfigurement which made his body and by proxy his personality akin to certain reptiles. Citing Brenda L. Connors a senior fellow at the Naval War College who specializes in the analysis of body movement Starobin remarks, “Connors doubts Putin ever crawled as an infant; he seems to lack what is called contra-lateral movement and instead tends to move in a head-to-tail pattern, like a fish or a reptile...the characteristic of reptiles, Connors says, is that ’they patrol their borders and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively.’” Diplomacy aside, a good offense can also be to be simply offensive. Let’s say the world momentarily opens its arms to you. You’re likely to be disappointed so why not be proactive in anticipating a potential failure by cutting a very smelly fart—say in one of those highly wrought situations in which both love and work are conjoined and the sun, moon and earth are in syzygy. Simply be really insulting to a woman or man you have fantasies about and desire the minute they give you the least bit of attention. Human beings have very short memories and those who were once attracted to you will quickly forget they ever liked you. No they will simply think of you as a repulsive excrescence and then you can spend the rest of your life feeling sorry for yourself and regretting another missed opportunity.

Beyond An Unreasonable Doubt

In a review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them in The Atlantic (“Why We Fight—And Can We Stop,” November 2013) Robert Wright deals a unique approach to the Trolley Problem. The famous conundrum posed by the ethical philosopher Philippa Foot deals with the decision to sacrifice one life in order to save many by diverting a runaway trolley. “Greene’s inspiration was to do brain scans of people while they thought about the trolley problem,” Wright says. “The results suggested that people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.” In an article in Foreign Affairs (“Never Saw It Coming: Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise,” November/December 2013)former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan introduces a similar idea in an economic rather than moral context. Citing “’animal spirits,’ the term Keynes famously coined in l936 to refer to 'a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction,’" Greenspan argues that no understanding of “Homo economicus” can be had unless one understands the irrational emotion underlying seemingly rational choices. “From the perspective of a forecaster, the issue is not whether behavior is rational but whether it is sufficiently repetitive and systematic to be numerically measured and predicted,” he says. "The challenge is to better understand what Daniel Kahneman, a leading behavioral economist, refers to as ‘fast thinking' : the quick reaction judgments on which people tend to base much, if not all, of their day-to-day decisions about financial markets. No one is immune to the emotions of fear and euphoria, which are among the predominant drivers of speculative markets. But people respond to fear and euphoria in different ways, and those responses  create specific, observable patterns of thought and behavior.” So what Wright and Greenspun are doing is in essence placing thought itself under scrutiny. The Iowa Gambling Task, devised by the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Antoine Bechara, Steven Anderson and Daniel Tranel, which uses card games and skin respiration tests, to measure the presence of emotions as complex as Schadenfreude is another iteration of a similar idea. Reason, like Newtonian physics in a world of relativity, is again left in the dust.

Park Ave S&M Mag Ring Exposed!

Undercover investigators have discovered a ring aimed at placing highly graphic sadomasochistic pornography in the practices of prominent Park Avenue internists. Informed sources within the office of the Manhattan DA have reported highly detailed blueprints showing how magazines like People in Stocks, Anus Mirabilis and The Scarlet Letter would be added to the worn piles of innocuous weeklies and monthlies like The New Yorker, Time, The Atlantic and Smithsonian which generally appeal to affluent patients. It is uncertain what the purpose of the ring was, but there has been speculation that it might be part of the disruptive activities engineered by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Others have speculated that the plans might have emanated from a totally opposite side of the political spectrum, for example Tea Party organizers hoping to foment a tide of revulsion which could adversely affect First Amendment rights. The plan to place the magazines in the doctors’ offices is regarded as a civil rights violation as well as a terrorist act to the extent that the images in question could cause immediate harm and even death in certain cases. The investigation which has been going on for years has resulted in the arrests of ten suspects who have been charged with conspiracy to provoke  under a number of statutes in the Homeland Security Act. The ten suspects who have already been water boarded, arraigned and released on bail could face lengthy prison terms if convicted.

The Dukes of Hazard

The January/February issue of The Atlantic ran a piece by Caitlin Flanagan called “The Hazards of Duke,” about Karen Owen, a Duke student who produced a PowerPoint thesis detailing her promiscuous sexual activity with 13 of the university’s athletes. The allusion to the popular ’80s television series is more than incidental. The Dukes of Hazzard made light comedy out of a pair of moonshiners, while Karen Owen’s story involves blackout drinking that results in anonymous and sometimes painful sex. The subject of brutal sex was reprised in the same issue of The Atlantic in an article on Internet porn called “Hard Core” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper. In the piece, Vargas-Cooper describes a one-night-stand of her own that didn’t go well: “…in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, ‘Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.’” Needless to say, the old adage “if it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s been said, it’s been done” still holds true. There are parts of The Canterbury Tales that will still shock if you read Chaucer carefully enough, to say nothing of Rabelais, the Marquis de Sade, Montaigne (who was quite candid on the subject of sexual dysfunction), Pauline Réage (aka Anne Desclos) and Pasolini (whose Salo is the ne plus ultra of boundary-breaking). But Vargas-Cooper points out that, in the past, acquiring graphic depictions of violent sexuality often involved a quest. At the least, you had to sneak into the house with your VHS cassette and succeed in not being discovered watching it on TV. But the advent of the Internet has made the most forbidden subject matter (coprophilia, water sports, asphyxiation, even necrophilia) available at the click of a mouse. Was the subject of the first article (the increasing casualness of rough sex) in some way the result of the phenomenon (the increasing presence of sex online) broached in the second article? Does the Internet give license to and even validate some of our more more aggressive urges, or were they always just well kept secrets? Did the horse precede the cart, or vice versa? Is the medium ultimately the message?