Retrospection

Retrospection could be the name of a new volume by some kind of futuristic thinker who was a mix of Borges and William Gibson, the author of such volumes as Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition. Imagine it as the novel to end all novels predicated on the idea that human life has come to an end and now all that is left is hindsight, which is, as the saying goes, always 20/20. In this fictional universe mankind has finally come up against a wall. Time goes on, but there's no way it will be recorded. It’s the old “if a tree drops in the forest and no one is there to hear it” problem. There are no planets orbiting Kepler stars 1200 light years from earth for which civilization will set its sights since a viral malfunction has caused all DNA to unravel. Of course in order for the novel to be written and have any real meaning all of this would really have to happen (which would be a problem from a writing point of view since the fictional possibilities would still be endless). Pure fiction, based only on the imagination of disaster, could never ascertain the whole and complete picture of the decline and fall of Homo Sapiens in any meaningful or saleable way. It would also be such a massive document that not even a Kindle could hold it. Oh, Retrospection would have one more problem.  It wouldn’t sell a copy since no one would be left to read it.  

The Final Solution: Bring Back the Charmin

Sometimes international relations take on a particularly down to earth flavor. The double entendre implicit in a journal which calls itself Foreign Affairs is not lost on many readers in a world rife with infidelities. But a recent headline “Toilet Paper Shortage Strikes Taiwan Amidst PricingPanic,” (NYT, 2/27/18) brought home the biblical homily “man cannot live by bread alone.” Remember Taiwan, also known as Nationalist China, is what was left of Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party and it’s a country not even recognized by the United States. In fact, when Trump accepted a phone call from the Taiwanese president after the election, he incurred the wrath of the authorities on the mainland. But what are the Taiwanese to do amidst the particular drought that the Times piece documents? The  “domino theory” supported our prosecution of the Vietnam war. It was an idea heartily advocated by John Foster Dulles,  Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. The idea was that each bit of Communist aggression had to be met with a response or Vietnam would lead to Cambodia, Cambodia to Laos etc. It was essentially correct, though a protracted war in which many lives were lost was probably not the best solution to the problem. Shrinking stocks of toilet paper on Taiwan may seem a slight and even harmless condition, but one thing leads to the next and before you know it Taiwanese citizens will seek refugee status on the Mainland where toilet paper may be more plentiful. If something is not done to fill the empty shelves, the North Koreans may even fill their warheads with toilet paper as they struggle for hegemony in the Far East.

Talking Candidly About Flatulence

ED was once not dinner party conversation. The only ED people talked about in polite company had a Mister before its name. Now that’s all changed and ED is as American as “cherry pie” to reiterate H. Rap Brown’s famous words about violence. But the bar is always getting higher or lower as it were and flatulence is still not considered appropriate dinner party conversation, both flatulence and shit. But let’s stick to flatulence since it’s actually the lower bar to jump. Everyone breaks wind. Some do it quietly (“silent but deadly”) and others are like the big bad wolf who threatens the three little pigs. Still others radiate the worst of both worlds being both loud and smelly. Emily Post never dealt with the etiquette of farting on somebody, but when you’ve slept in the same bad for decades, it’s bound to happen. Talking about gas candidly with like-minded individuals hopefully will be a commonplace occurrence as people give up antiquated prejudices against bodily functions. If you're a person who farts a great deal, there's no reason to recuse yourself from society. Of course the litmus test is  whether you yourself are revolted by the smell of your own farts, but it’s probably more useful to cross that bridge when you come to it. The real subject is shame and the more everyone owns up to their farting and realizes that they’re all in this together the better off mankind will be. In the meanwhile, you'll be doing a great service to humanity if the next time you cut one you don’t try to pass the buck by looking accusingly in the direction of some innocent person.

Homophobia and The Winter's Tale

Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus illustrated one of  Freud’s most cherished theories—at the time a shocker which belied the notion of childhood in innocence in asserting that young boys might want to kill their father and sleep with their mother. In our age of Queer Theory you don’t often hear such classic psychoanalytic paradigms anymore. The work of Ernst Kris and Phyllis Greenacre, two prominent analysts who wrote cogently on art and literature, has been eclipsed by that of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which is much sexier today. But sometimes old paradigms come in handy. Take for instance a late Shakespeare Play like The Winter’s Tale. Most readers push back when it comes to the precipitous behavior of King Leontes. He’s murderously jealous like Othello, but there’s no Iago with the “motiveless malignity” that Coleridge once described. It’s hard to figure out what is going on. But let’s look at the plot through a classic psychoanalytic lens. Could we say that Leontes is troubled by his homosexual feelings towards  Polixenes, a friend since childhood, and that his jealousy results from his projecting them onto Hermione? As you may recall he'd enlisted her into trying to convince Polixenes to stay in Sicily, but is it simply her fervidness that sets him off? That there's no reason for his anguish is the point. It’s neurotic. If Leontes had been in therapy he might have discovered that there was no need to be so afraid of his own wishes. You hear textual and cultural interpretations, but these kinds of psychoanalytic insights, which have fallen by the wayside, can be helpful in understanding complex characters like Hamlet and Leontes, whose behavior, on the surface, seems to defy explanation.

The Secret Agent

In a piece entitled "Tuskegee Truth Teller" (American Scholar, Winter 2018), Carl Elliot describes a notorious scandal in which "hundreds of poor black men with syphilis" were lured "into an experiment in which they would receive no treatment for a potentially deadely disease." Elliot later introduces a famous figure from the history of social psychology in commenting on the complicity involved in this medical scandal. “Milgram called this surrender of autonomy the ‘agentic state.’” Stanley Milgram’s Yale experiment with authority has become like the social butterfly who pops up at every party in town. There are certain concepts and poetic phrases that you can’t get away from. Yeats’ “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” is one. Keats's "negative capability" is another. However, ‘agentic state’ may be a new one for even those who are familiar with that famous moment  where the participants in an experiment didn’t realize they were the actual subjects. If you remember the idea was that volunteers sitting behind a glass window were asked to apply increasingly large amounts of electric current to actors who made it look like they were in pain. In fact, there was no current. This particular experiment would seem to have at least partially accounted for the claim of many Hitler henchman that they were merely following orders. Elliot’s piece cites the Manchurian Candidate as another, albeit even more extreme case, of such programming in which the subject was turned into a kind of zombie. But the problem, in some ways, is stubborn and hard to avoid. Even when you're consciously resisting authority (by being reactive), aren't you still following orders?