Category Archives: Uncategorized
Bridges
What to do. What do you want to do? Build a bridge, or design a bridge, or are you content to fit the rivets, and not worry if they’ll hold—that’s someone else’s job, because design was their ambition and still is. At heart, you want the same things as this mythical other; were once running side by side, heading on the same path. Consciously, that meant a class you once took together, sitting in adjacent aisles, facing forward towards studied authority and muted inspiration. Who knows who will build the bridges of the future, said the pedagogue, gazing at the range of miscreants, sheep, plus the odd hero or two. The two in the middle of the mass were heroes of different kinds, half aware of their futures, but already nursing a path through habits of thought and action. Beta Ray took his pills, did his exercise, watched his weight and glanced at Mary Lou at lunchtime, waiting for an invite that need only be a subtle gesture, for Beta Ray was sensitive and brave. Alpha Joe was laid back, waiting for ideas to come, and some kind of service to arrive at his door. He had other things to do, thoughts to indulge. He was clever. Everyone said so, which was a problem.
Beta Ray went to war for a while, after he was recruited into the military, hoping he’d get to travel, learn a trade; be disciplined. Maybe fight. He didn’t help build bridges. Instead, for a while, he helped to destroy bridges, because bridges organize, create supply lines, build a society. Problem is, war is meant to dissemble the organized, break the supply lines and isolate the miscreant enemy. Beta Ray would have shaken his head at the unnamed and unknown adversary. It wasn’t personal, he’d say of the battle lines drawn and the shots fired. He was just following orders. As for the adversary, well, maybe if they followed orders, or rules, then things wouldn’t be the way they are. Anyway, that was someone else’s call, thought Beta Ray. Someone else’s problem. His problem was doing the best he could to survive the battle, make a pretty packet, and then head back home to pretty Mary Lou, whom he married just prior to being called up and sent out to combat. No complaints. That was the risk he took signing up, but now she’s pregnant so they’re expecting an addition to their lives, a family to organize Beta Ray’s idea of what to do in this world.
Alpha Joe thought sparingly of the war that was thousands of miles away. He didn’t have to. Just a few short years after high school, his fortunes were soaring, taking him to the heights of industry wherein he designed buildings and at last—his favorite—bridges. His latest project, a suspension bridge that would connect a populated peninsula with a densely commercial city, was underway, if over-budget, but most importantly, with Alpha Joe in charge and calling the non-militant shots. Finally, he had in reality the situation that seemed to match his long-held, as in adolescent and even pre-adolescent delusions: nearly everyone who worked with him was a subordinate, there to support him, follow him; never gainsay his ideas. He could get out of bed whenever he felt like it, drink as much as he wanted on the weekend, as long as he came up with the answers when called upon on Monday. His talent, his bursts of inspiration and energy, coupled with his winning charm, would see him through. His only problem was that he was alone. Alpha Joe had scored a number of relationships through his college years and now beyond, but no one had quite cut the mustard in order to stick around. No one was good enough for him, it seemed.
Beta Ray dreams nightly of being lost in a crowd, dodging shells and strafing bullets. He lives in a world of night vision, of black on illuminated green, followed by daylight in which sight is obscured by daylight dust. The dreams are an accurate depiction of what’s happening in reality, except he’s not there. Meaning, he can’t locate himself, as in his body, or any semblance of thought. There are no words, it seems—not even commands from an officer to follow. He’s scrambling, crawling, hiding, and then leaping or taking cover. He sometimes discharges his weapon, but he’s just aiming at a space, never seeing an enemy. He can’t see them, doesn’t know what they look like. He doesn’t know them because he knows nothing of them, so they might as well be as invisible as him. Beta Ray breathes heavily, cries out in frustration, wakes up in a sweat and conjures Mary Lou’s face and the image of an unborn child. He doesn’t belong here, he thinks, as he meets the nonplussed gaze of a bunk mate whom he’s awakened.
Alpha Joe is bored and successful. Life is easy. The job is easy, and the bridge is getting made. His boss loves him. The city mayor wants to meet him. They might even want to join him on a Wednesday night ahead of a next-day presentation, because Alpha Joe is still up at 1am, hosting a pair of models whom he’d met at a downtown club. Now they’re in his living room, doing cocaine lines while looking out a window at a view of the bridge-in-progress that Alpha Joe has designed. They are impressed, feeling high in Joe’s high-rise apartment, shooting hot glances at him over their shoulders and shedding clothes as he lays prostrate upon a silk-sheeted bed, bored. He had a dream the previous night: it featured him kicking over a mound of sand that he’d built upon a beach. The castle wasn’t up to his standards. It wasn’t good enough, so he wanted to kick it down, start over. Now, he doesn’t want to go back to sleep and possibly revisit that dream. He’s looking past the hot models, through the window and out towards the nearly finished, suspension bridge prize. At once, he feels an urge to get out there and destroy it.
Beta Ray was really feeling it the next day. That is, he was feeling energized, inspired. He didn’t really know what cause he was fighting for. As ever, he hadn’t really done the homework. He was all about doing what he was told to do. But now he felt something different. He didn’t know what. He just knew that something was going to happen—something big. The previous night, after he’d fallen back to sleep, he had one more dream, and this time he was able to locate himself and discern what he was, and what his purpose was in this nightmarish realm. It seemed to him that he was a fish, and that his job was to head up stream, survive, and in being alive, transform into some other kind of life. It would take some kind of change, the dream seemed to say. His body seemed to morph upon a climactic dash. His fish-like body speared and thrust through thick liquid, a seeming dust and toxic rain. At the end of a river was a bridge, a half-built or half-broken fixture that needed to be taken, as in conquered. But upon his arrival, he was turned away. A man of indeterminate rank, someone who claimed to know what was happening, changed the plan, the rules. Stay with this group, he ordered, even pleaded. If you keep them safe until reinforcements arrive, we will win this day, and you will survive and go home.
The next day, Alpha Joe was a mess. He showed up ten minutes late to his presentation, which felt reminiscent of his senior year in high school. His boss, a woman who reminded him of an indulgent English teacher from that era, smiled thinly at him, hoping his lateness was the worst thing that would happen that day. It wasn’t. Ten minutes into the exercise, Joe was ready to collapse, to give up this surreal exercise, this not-quite dream of building something that would help people, change lives, even communities. He paused upon this thought, injected another reverie. This is why he hadn’t sought a family, he considered. His cause had been an impersonal task, laid out for the benefit of a nameless mass, which would line his pockets but somehow not match his real ambition. He flashed back to the beautiful women from the night before, standing before a window, flanking between them the image of the not-quite beautiful enough bridge. He’ll never get to build what he really wants to build, he realized. He thought of his dream, of kicking down the sand castle. I want to fight, he next thought. I need something…not easy, like a battle–a down and dirty battle. He turned to his assistant, a gifted architect, another woman, as gifted as him, but more diligent, if less winning in her personal style. At that moment, Alpha Joe shocked the room, declaring two things: firstly, that he was resigning his position, leaving the company; secondly, that he was recommending his assistant as the new project manager, confident that she would complete the job and that everyone would be satisfied. Buoyant, as in floating on air, as if he couldn’t locate his body, Alpha Joe left the room, with everyone thinking this a dream.
Beta Ray was going home. More, Beta Ray was going home upon being decorated for acts of heroism in combat. He had indeed been energized, inspired, over a course of months. Over that time, the nightmares abated, and Ray’s fear in combat was subsumed under a gritty determination that won him the admiration and plaudits of comrades and officers. The culmination of this stretch of good soldiering was a mission in which he and his platoon were tasked with holding a bridge across enemy lines while waiting for reinforcements. Then, a further twist: with hours to go before being relieved, Ray and his platoon were besieged by refugees desperate to make it across the bridge, hoping to reach a border to safe territory just beyond the river. With civilians dashing into danger, Ray and his fellow soldiers were forced into action to protect the unarmed. Shells rained down over mostly women and children attempting to cross the bridge. Bullets strafed the innocent. From his armored vehicle, Ray saw a woman hit the ground and drop to the burning asphalt a child that looked to be no more than three months old. Choking upon terror, Ray thought instantly of Mary Lou and of a child that was a month from being due. Next, without thinking, he leapt from the vehicle and sprinted to the woman’s body, collecting the infant in his arms, and then returning the child to safety. Reinforcements arrived minutes later and the child was placed in protective care while murmurings of awe were directed at Ray. In the days ahead, he learned of the accolades that were forthcoming, and more importantly, of the honorable discharge that would be his true reward. However, he could not stop thinking of the fallen woman, and of the child that stared back at him when being shepherded away.
At a military airport in a desert land, Beta Ray sat in a terminal wearing a uniform that was now decorated with medals, unaware that he was being admiringly assessed by a pair of women seated across from him. He was waiting for a flight home, looking forward to seeing Mary Lou, hoping he’d be in time for another kind of arrival. As he heard an announcement for his flight, he leapt up with calm determination, and headed for the departure door. First, he and others had to wait for the passengers of the incoming arrival to disembark. Filing through the gate was a score of incoming recruits, there to replace the likes of Beta Ray. As they passed by, he gave them a solemn, reverent nod in acknowledgement of the battles and sacrifices that were to come. Most of the passing recruits responded in kind. One in particular looked ready, willing, and eager to do his bit. He even looked familiar.
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No one wants to see a sad animal
What happened? It went away, my last essay. I didn’t even say goodbye. It just disappeared, vanished into the cloud, it promised, only it didn’t settle there. Why? Because its keeper, its God, the internet, was not turned on. It had turned a blind eye, so the elegiac missive was gone, now shut behind a door (or “window”), that read something like, we’re not sure what happened—did you delete? It was my fault, basically, said the computer. And so, it was my fault, this unnoticing of detail, my inattention to detail. Pity, I thought, not angrily, more forlornly. Oh well, more thoughts down the drain, rather like the residue of a dream. But there is continuity, I’ve thought in the hours since. There’s continuity in similar problems arising, with similar underpinning themes: I missed a box here, having not checked something materially important. I didn’t dot an I; I failed to reset a password. As a result, there will be no access to pragmatic life. Problems, like deaths, happen in threes, and nothing gets sent to a heavenly cloud for safekeeping. Rather, I am stuck here on earth amongst the weeds and the glitches, contemplating something…something like the links between happenings.
I mean, it is at least apropos that the lost essay had something to do with death, and in particular, a good-humored, if sardonic look at death. It featured a not-quite dream but written rather something like a dream story about a figure who is announcing their forthcoming death to a group of half-attentive friends. They are getting messages about a memorial date for a passing that hasn’t yet happened; a passing that, by implication, will occur suicidally, hence the precise anticipation. The responses of the friend group are variably confused. Their text messages were really funny, I can tell you. I know because I wrote the lines and then sent them to the cloud, thinking it would keep them safe—that it had a hard and reliable foundation. A cloud holds, I believe, but it also releases in rain. And I’d missed something important about how that works. Anyway, back to those friends and their funny if dispiriting reactions. They would not make it to the memorial because they weren’t given the proper notice. They need a week, they were consistently saying. And that was the joke, the central gag: people aren’t there for the big stuff, the death stuff; they are elsewhere, busy with their lives, but often pretending they are there for one another, like my essay was there for me fleetingly, and promising to stick around. It would catch me later, it seemed to say. It would never—what’s the term— “ghost” me.
My protagonist, my guy, Jim, was set to ghost people, first by dying, but then, even before that, by not talking to them anymore. That’s how pissed he was by the half-hearted and therefore heartless reaction to his admittedly desperate memorial ploy. Only one person gave him the time of day. Rachel, a one-time crush and then heartbreaker, had always cared enough to appear out of thin air from her own itinerant life to come save the day or do something decisive and right. She’d act the angel, I thought, now thinking she could emerge from the same cloud in which the previous essay was buried. What’s the problem, she’d chide, though she knew really what was up. She’d gotten news through a sparse grapevine that my guy was in despair over an illness that was tying the hands of doctors. Oncologists, I called them, alluding to the specifics but dodging the C word. Jim never liked that word. Doesn’t like the way it sounds, the way its cadence spreads. Let’s cut to the chase, past the unmentionable pain, and then get to an even less mentionable pain: whether people in his life will show up for him, actually make an effort and care.
“That sounds like self-pity”. Good old Rachel. Not angelic, but always cutting to the chase in another sense. Straight to the point. Good stuff. In fact, Jim never liked this side of Rachel. It’s the reason he got over the crush. He wanted softness in her to match the softness in his own belly. He wanted to lie on his back and have her rub his, ya know, belly.
“And that’s bad, I guess?” That was about the memorial, not the belly.
“Well, what did you expect? And I’m not talking about how gruff and clueless Paul is, or how preoccupied Jane is with her life. But…a memorial, really?”
“What?”
“Kinda creepy. I mean, is that a joke? Are we meant to say, oh sure, go ahead and kill yourself, we’ll be there on Saturday”
“Well, no one even mentioned that part, it was—”
“It’s hard to know when to take you seriously on that shit. You have a dark humor. It’s not the first time you’ve made a sideways suicide threat, plus it sends people into denial. They don’t know what to do”.
“Well, they could do something, not just not say anything”
“They did. They texted me, asked me to call you, and yes—part of that is not knowing how to deal with it—the other part was thinking I could”
Jim wasn’t sure he agreed with that assessment and felt like saying so, but Rachel brooks no cheap jokes when she’s in her righteous stride, so he thought the better of it. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go, he reflected in a protracted, silent pause. Rachel was silent also, waiting for what she figured was Jim’s sulking to pass. This wasn’t even how this author figured this would go. My head was in the clouds, chasing lost words. Originally, this was a surrealist skit about deadness in society dropped into a little mischief about deadness. The lost script featured quips about whether the memorial could be re-scheduled for another day; whether refreshments would serve Vegans—that sort of thing. It was dually designed to lighten people up and yet make them feel uncomfortable. What Jim truly wanted he couldn’t ask for, but he could allude to it by speaking on behalf of his German Shepherd, Beowulf. He wanted someone to commit to taking care of the dog: to feed him, adopt him, whatever. He figured that would touch everyone’s heart, stir some action upon the loss of the master. The reasons would touch upon Rachel’s critique of Jim, which no one would direct at Beowulf. They’d all want to see his tail wag. No one wants to see a sad animal.
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Scrooge 2023
You are Scrooge and it is Christmas 2023. You’re at home, which is a one-bedroom apartment in the city that costs 3K$ per month. You are alone with your Uber Eats, playing a video game that rewards the killing of elves, and as you rack up a record score you imagine that you might be visited later that night by a ghost who may warn that video games and Uber Eats will stunt your growth. Just desserts, the ghost will imply. Tomorrow, Christmas is a day off—your one day off per year, more or less enforced by the absence of anyone else, co-workers or customers. Actually, you don’t have co-workers per se, just a couple of subordinates at the start-up you own, one local, the other in Katmandu, which is in India, or is it Nepal? You don’t really care. The local employee, Bob, has been asking for a benefits package recently, now that’s he’s working over thirty hours a week. He’s got a disabled son—cerebral palsy, muscular diaspora, or something—and he needs benefits, has got rising medical costs. You’re tempted to say he should move overseas, work remote, like the guy in Katmandu. Does he know about medicine there? The guy was traveling recently, went hiking near the Everest base camp. Not exactly a metropolis. Anyway, next day he’s feeling a pain in his lower stomach, one that worsens over three hours. He realizes he needs help, takes a cab to a hospital, gets diagnosed with a kidney stone, spends the next few days on an IV, taking painkillers, feeling nothing and watching Netflix. Best few days of his trip, he later says, and the bill? $2500! If that was here, with the drugs, the MRIs, and everything, the bill would’ve been more like 50K$. Benefits? Nah, too expensive here. But you’ll pay. You’ll pay because otherwise your local guy, Bob, will leave. He’ll leave like your partner Jacob left.
Okay, you just killed another Elf. Thinking of Jacob juiced you up a bit, spiked your hate and sharpened your reflexes at just the right moment. Jacob’s down south now, in LA working as a software engineer, designing new product that will rival yours. Making good money. Taking days off. He’ll be off tomorrow, swimming in the ocean in the dead of winter. Scuba diving, maybe. Jacob has dreams, wants different things, isn’t focused enough for a start-up. Wants to act. Hah! You think he’s crazy, guy thinks he’ll be famous. He won’t even get parts. I mean, right now he’s likely auditioning for a role as an extra in something that won’t get streamed—a part a robot could do, or a woman, or a transgendered woman, or any person of color. Anyone other than a white guy who works in tech and scuba dives on the weekend. But hey, maybe he’ll catch a break. You hear they’re re-making JAWS down there, with an all-female cast, including Meryl Streep, who’s playing Quint and will likely get another Oscar. Jacob might get a part as a diver that gets munched in the opening scene, ending up as a part, literally. Serves him right, you think. At least he won’t need benefits. With the day job he’s got and shouldn’t give up, he’ll have that covered.
Your niece is doing well, you think. Yeah, you have no kids. Just the kids of your sister Fan to think of at this time of year. Kids to send cards to, shoot a text to. Zooey, the niece, is an EMT living in Colorado, also spends half the year in Yellowstone, rescuing incompetent hikers that get lost in the wild. Recently she had an ordeal, was out in the woods on a call when she came across a grizzly. Cocaine bear. It was the only film you saw last year. It filled you up, sated a bloodthirsty streak in you not dealt with by elf-killing video games. But it made you worry about Zooey, being chased in a forest. On that last occasion she was rescued—actually, inadvertently—when her partner Fred got stuck in a redwood tree only to get knocked off by a low flying eagle that clipped his ear. He would have fallen to his death had the fall not been broken by the crazed bear that was stalking Zooey and about to make its kill when impact occurred, causing concussion. The bear was out, will have to retire from his game, maybe. There’s no telling where and when miracles will happen, in the city or in the wild. Anyway, it’s enough to make you believe in things like God and Christmas. Well, it almost makes you believe in God and Christmas.
You wish you could skip this holiday and head straight for New Year’s. How come no one queries your famous ancestor’s mood on that night? Given that it’s just a week later, at the climax of the year, a new page to be turned, you’d think posterity would take notice. After all, if the story is about redemption, making new resolutions and sticking to them, wouldn’t we want to know about the new leaf on January 1st and how long it will last. Couldn’t that have been the sequel, the reboot, or even the video game? Humbug. Back to New Year’s 2023. You can’t wait for the show that Ticketmaster ripped you off for. Deep Purple is replacing a Pink Floyd cover band at Red Rocks in Colorado because the latter band’s members all got Yellow Fever ahead of a benefit concert for Incels that have blue balls. It’s all a joke, of course. Someone from Dickens’ homeland is taking the piss, as they’d say, hiding where the profits are really going. Can’t trust any of these people, but you don’t care so long as it’s a good show and DP plays “Smoke on the Water”.
It’s a good thing it’s a joke for another reason. You don’t like charity gigs, mostly because you don’t like charity. That’s why you’ve begged off a show happening the following week, also in Colorado. It’s an anniversary bash for a “friends of” January 6th group that’s been put on by one of your investors and a former employer, Mr. Fezziwig. You think the emphasis should be on the word bash. Fezziwigg wasn’t a right-wing nutjob when you first met him. He was just a hound-dog who liked to make as much money as possible and then spend it on strippers in his free time. Then, during the lock-down, all the strip-joints closed down and Fezziwig was lost. He couldn’t even get a handjob at the local rub and tug. If only he played video games, you could’ve lent a helping hand, helped him get through the loneliness and the boredom. No, not that kind of helping hand! You’d have helped him count his money, assuming he’d get some kind of kick out of that. But Fezziwig went another way, wanted someone to blame, someone to take revenge upon. Not that you mind a little bad attitude and grumbling, but starting wars or claiming that coups d’etats have happened in the nation’s capital isn’t quite your cup of tea or figgy pudding. Humbug, you say to him, wanting no part of his ugly social vision. In fact, as you think of it, you’re sick of the game you’re playing, the elf thing. You’ve broken the record. The little people are strewn over digital asphalt. You suddenly want a power failure, and for Alexa to answer every one of your questions wrong. You’ve placed too much faith in the inanimate, the material.
Your phone pings at midnight. The girl who once broke up with you found your neglected, much swiped-past profile on Tinder. “What’s up?” writes Belle in a text, plus “Merry Christmas!”. “What’s up with you profile? You don’t like long hikes”, she chides. “You like money, and you like video games”.
“I’m learning to like elves,” you reply.
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Fail Safe
Fail-Safe. It seems to mean limit, the point of no return. Fail-Safe, a rather stoic film from 1964 about accidental nuclear war, was released a few months after its more famous twin, Dr. Strangelove, an almost doppelganger treatment of the same subject. The later release of Fail-Safe was no accident. According to fact as well as folklore, it was tabled as a result of a lawsuit filed by, among others, Stanley Kubrick, the principal auteur of Strangelove, who will have thought Fail-Safe a rival to his now legendary satire, hence the legal action. Of course, affording Kubrick a commercial head-start was not the reason for the settlement that ensued: producers compromised and agreed that Kubrick’s film would get first release. The premise of the suit was the assertion, apparently upheld, that the script of Fail-Safe, actually based on a novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, was too close in substance to the source material of Strangelove, a Peter George novel called Red Alert, so a copyright infringement was determined. Anyway, in the books, a mechanical failure results in a false order for planes armed with nuclear weapons to attack their targets in the Soviet Union.
The main theme of Fail-Safe, now seemingly hackneyed in our A.I. obsessed angst of the 21st century, is that our machines are getting away from us, that we are moving too fast, being careless in our complacent regard for the power of technology. Okay, so Ukraine, Israel and Hamas notwithstanding, World War Three might finish third in a 2023 list of social concerns, behind, say, privacy erosion or the problem of our carbon foot prints–the problem of being replaced, if not destroyed–but the ominous gist is similar. Back to Fail Safe: the film’s script proceeds logically, setting up the motif: during early scenes, we are given a tour of a military installation, shown how satellite photography can locate the positions of enemy missile sites from space; how Soviet submarines are positioned just fifty miles off the Pacific coast. An overseeing general is proud of the officers and technicians that he commands. He has utmost faith in the reliability of the system they control. He and his subordinates are even unperturbed by a preliminary drama: the appearance of a UFO somewhere in the north Atlantic that triggers an air force alert system. A routine precaution, he blithely says of the monitoring that occurs. A visiting congressman—yeah, what a coinkydink—is not so sure. Somewhat awed, the politician seizes the chance to give pontificating warnings: who’s in control of all this technology? An accompanying academic supplements the concern. The computer systems—remember, this is 1964—operate too quickly, are so sophisticated that despite human oversight, mechanical operations are too subtle to be captured by human beings. Mistakes are inevitable.
Strangelove isn’t nearly as pedantic, or even reverent. Perceiving a darker human theme in the source material, Kubrick’s film alters the premise of the nuclear accident. In Strangelove, the problem is not in the machines per se, but rather in the question that the congressman in Fail-Safe had asked: who’s in charge? Well, a nutjob general not accidentally named Jack Ripper is in charge. In his opening scene, Ripper calls his second in command, inexplicably a foreign exchange officer from the UK, played by Peter Sellers, to announce an attack on the Soviet Union that he personally has authorized, though he implies White House and Pentagon approval. Group captain Mandrake is the sanest character in Strangelove. That is, he is its soul of neurotic denial: a humble officer, a soldier with an eye upon order and reality, plus glitches* in a system that displace from a more fundamental human problem: death wish. Though the reasons for the unwieldy technology in Strangelove are likely the same as those suggested in Fail Safe—namely, the hubris and complacency of leaders—in Strangelove, the deeper problem is the hell bent hatred, paranoia, or just plain lunacy of almost everyone involved.
In Fail Safe, the characters are mostly earnest, well-intentioned, even noble figures. The principal hero is played by Henry Fonda as a fatherly president, not donning that role for the first time, as I recall. Watching Fail Safe today, I can just about imagine Barack Obama playing his part: Fonda is relaxed, genial with subordinates, the everywoman secretary or his nervous Russian translator, played by Larry Hagman, just before his Dream of Jeannie period. Fonda’s character is naturally in charge as he enters the fray. He may not save the day, but he’ll do the right thing, at least. He’ll lead with calmness, compassion and tender strength; issue sage words from time to time, and deliver a great speech at the end. Too bad he can’t do anything about the system that’s gotten out of control. Too bad his familiar voice doesn’t sway a dutiful pilot whom he finally reaches by radio communication. The man can’t follow the presidential order to abort the accidentally-triggered bomb-dropping mission to Moscow because he’s been trained to ignore what may be tricks by the enemy. Interestingly, the scenes where the Fonda character or the wife of the pilot are desperately crying out for mission retreat seem as absurd (or perhaps just over-acted) as anything in Strangelove.
And this would seem to have been why Kubrick and his script-writers changed things ahead of their filming. They just found the scenarios depicted in Red Alert too silly to be taken seriously, so they doubled down, went with the absurdity. The result was a comedy that mocked, not lamented the hubris of military systems. It mocked patriotism, anti-communism, even the sexual neurosis and narcissism that underpins human aggression. As for the concept of “limited” nuclear war, which Fail-Safe addresses like a class lecture inserted into the script’s middle third, Strangelove, uh, blows it away, injecting a comic-book doomsday idea, as introduced by its namesake character, also played by Sellers. It’s unfortunate yet also interesting that Fail-Safe has a less farcical answer to the wheelchair bound loon that Sellers plays. Walter Matthau’s role, similar in purpose to that of the more famous Sellers character, is that of a chip-on-the-shoulder nerd who becomes a virulent political scientist. Actually, he’s an excellent foil to the virtuous Fonda character, or the character of general Black, the man whose angst about nuclear war disturbs his sleep, sending him nightmares in which he identifies with a “killer” matador.
Again, much about the legacy of Fail-Safe seems either unfortunate or sort of…too bad. It’s like its depressive ending: a too serious, too straight-faced handwringing about a hard subject. Even its climactic theme—one of sacrifice (New York gets deliberately nuked by the US to reciprocate for the accidental destruction of Moscow)—seems to reflect its fate as both a film and an artifact of how its audience dealt with mortal terror. In earlier times, during World War II for example, audiences may have clamored for and easily consumed straightforward, hero-worshipping fare in cinema. The crowd would have heeded the dire warnings of artists-as-social critics, but retained its belief that their leaders are good people with our best interests at heart. Had Henry Fonda not been available, then Spencer Tracy might have played the role that delivers fatherly blessings at the end. But 1964 was a turning point on something, I think: JFK had just been assassinated. Vietnam was about to get worse, and America’s sense of being infallible was eroding. Nixon would further the cynicism a decade later, and comedians ranging from Lenny Bruce to Monty Python to Saturday Night Live were altering what we laughed at. Wholesome humor still exists, but edgier tastes seem to dominate, and might have passed a point of no return in our robotic present-day.
We’ll laugh at anything if it’s telling the truth, plus something else perennial: at times we listen more to the jester than the pedagogue. That’s the indelible message of Strangelove, the reason it stands up better than its worthy rival of 1964. It didn’t need the lawsuit to win its lasting influence.
** Incidentally, this program froze on 3 separate occasions during the writing of this blog essay
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Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
Want more on guilt and shame, how they get confused, the one feeling obscuring the other? Well, let’s look to cinema again, and more specifically, to the fast-fading iconography of the boomer era. In 1968, the year of my birth, the name Mrs. Robinson quickly became a shorthand for a proto-feminist, Betty Friedan era woman who had missed her chance to take life by the scruff, so instead she dons the role of seductress and settles upon a hapless young man as her target of revenge.
That’s at best half the premise of The Graduate, a great sixties artifact that is otherwise about generational divides: young versus old, war versus peace, complacent materialism (“I’ve one word for you, Ben—plastics!) versus the implied vows of poverty from those who would tune in, turn on, and drop out. Ben, as in Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist, gets to take his time before dropping out of anything. In the film’s opening scenes, he is drifting amongst his parents’ friends, amidst the ephemera of white, upper middle-class wealth. He has graduated from college, has won some kind of award for athletic excellence, and is poised to join the rat race, climb the social ladder, find a nice girl to marry—you know, all those unfashionable yet routinely chosen privileges that lay before him, waiting like appetizers on a lavish buffet table. Ben is stolid, lonely and depressed, not to mention repressed, and disillusioned, and as he wades through a celebratory crowd trading platitudes with party guests, the filmmaker captures a fleeting glance of a fly in the ointment: the watchful, likewise alienated Mrs. Robinson. She has Benjamin Braddock in her crosshairs.
The wife of a long-time partner of Ben’s father (their business type stays unidentified), Mrs. Robinson follows Ben to an upstairs room—his childhood bedroom, we’re meant to guess—and appears suggestively at his door, asking for two things: a cigarette, plus a ride home. Right off the bat, the viewer gathers that she is as bored as Ben is by the graduation party at his parent’s home, though her initial queries to him seem like those of a gossipy, traditional house-wife. Is he depressed over a girl? She asks. Unlike Ben’s parents, she is at least attentive to his feeling and curious as to his thoughts, which signals a running theme to the story: the lack of empathy between young and old. Clueless and self-absorbed, Ben is slow to recognize the intentions of the apparently long-time neighbor, but he complies with her wishes (the ride home) out of politeness, or perhaps to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the party. Arriving at her home, she entices him indoors, again with traditional artifice (she wants to be escorted to the door), while Ben still seems reluctant and put out, as if this is all stealing time better spent with private ruminations. Impatiently, he indulges her questions, agrees to wait with her until her husband arrives home, and then, finally, after the queries get increasingly personal and a bit of clothing gets shed, he cottons on to her desire.
Thus, the stage is set for an unlikely affair that takes comic and then dark twists and turns. Not quite a May-December coupling, there is enough of an age difference between the two to make her the dominant personality. However, after traversing first-timish jitters, Ben relaxes enough to request sincere conversation on one of their clandestine hotel nights, during which he manages to get under Mrs. Robinson’s skin. It turns out that she was once an aspiring artist, or at least an art student in college. Dolefully and briefly, she recounts the history of an unhappy marriage, of an aspirational life thwarted because of a grubby sexual fumbling in the back seat of a car, resulting in pregnancy and the later birth of her daughter, the soon-to-be-real love interest of her now younger lover. What kind of car? Ben asks, betraying his callow, nerdy side. Mrs. Robinson scoffs at his irrelevant question, but it is nothing compared to the offense she feels upon hearing his next remarks: “so old Elaine Robinson was conceived in the back seat of a—” (I don’t recall what car it was and it matters even less that I remember the make), followed by an ill-advised quip about dating the daughter, Elaine, in part because that’s what Mr. Robinson keeps hinting at in his odd, cuckolded scenes. In their hotel bed, Mrs. Robinson becomes a black widow, grabbing Ben’s hair, jabbing a finger at him and compelling a promise that he’d never go near her daughter.
Initially bullied into a false promise, Ben soon gets hot under his own collar, thinking that Mrs. R. has now insulted him by implying that he’s “not good enough for her daughter”. It’s not clear why she’d think this besides having good reason to believe he’d not be a faithful partner, which is at least hypocritical of her given that she clearly made the initial advances towards him. One supposes that Mrs. Robinson is feeling protective of Elaine, who is similarly naïve as Ben, yet by implication less corrupted than he is at this point in the story. But regardless, the cover story of “not good enough” seems unconvincing, a not-good-enough narrative of what’s actually happening. Firstly, each seems to be getting very ahead of themselves, as if something is already known and felt about the characters (Ben and Elaine) who at this point in the film have not yet interacted, though they will have been acquainted as kids and it’s tacitly understood that each is attractive. So, there is a putative jealousy in the older woman’s aggression, but that also seems an imprecise takeaway, unless the viewer is meant to infer a profound dearth of self-esteem in her character such that she would react with such venom towards Ben’s suggestion. It’s a kind of how dare you think of her the way you might of me expression. Anyway, Mrs. Robinson apologizes to Ben for offending him, though she stops short of explaining herself more fully and Ben is likewise avoidant of unpleasant truths, at last saying “let’s not talk. Let’s not talk at all”.
Shame. Let’s not talk. Let’s just do that thing we do; that thing that was fun when it started, full of intrigue, mischief, an escape from something banal. That Ben is full of self-doubt and therefore believes he is looked down upon by his older lover is not shocking. We’d seen it in his Hamlet eyes from the first shot of the movie. It was that dissociated gaze that was meant to signify lost if talented youth, floundering in the aftermath of a Kennedy assassination, struggling to maintain fragile ideals. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, and all that. That Mrs. Robinson has regrets, low self-esteem is not shocking. We observe it in her bitter air, caustic expressions and alcoholism. This mid-life crisis, this affair with a younger man, would dwindle from this scene onwards and the prohibition that she aims at Ben regarding Elaine would go the way of many other instructions from her generation: it would be rebelled against. And what of the absent daughter? She pops up mid-way into the story, cheerful and pretty, unremarkably bright yet somewhat oblivious to the cynicism that’s all around her. Under pressure from his parents, Ben does indeed date Elaine. It’s as if his father and hers had arranged their marriage when they were ten or something, though clearly Mrs. Robinson wasn’t consulted on this mooted plan.
Is he good enough for her? We don’t learn the answer to that question, or learn that Mrs. Robinson was necessarily motivated by jealousy when she forbade Ben from pursuing Elaine, or even when she spitefully outs her affair with Ben to Elaine, which temporarily blows that budding romance while sinking the affair that has been a guilty pleasure to observe. What follows is an interesting spell wherein the viewer is left to consider the ironies of what relationships are forbidden and why. In other words, the forbidden match of Ben and Elaine is a displacement from the more forbidden affair of Ben and Mrs. Robinson. Regarding the motivation of the seductress, I suspect a reversal of what she first conveyed to Ben in that hotel bed is closer to the truth. See, her morose reminiscence about a life unfulfilled plus a climactic line from Elaine to her are clues that Mrs. Robinson was likely envious of her daughter’s lot in life rather than merely jealous of Elaine’s youth, charm and beauty. This isn’t mirror, mirror on the wall, and it’s not that Ben is not good enough for her daughter; it’s that he is good enough, that he represents passion and idealism despite his fumbling actions. Ben represents the kind of young man that Mrs. Robinson may have wanted as a partner earlier in life: he’d be a good partner to Elaine; unthreatened by her promise, supportive of her aspirations, faithful—a good friend as well as an attentive lover. And that’s the problem.
“It’s too late”, says Mrs. Robinson when Ben arrives at a church to disrupt the wedding between Elaine and a frat house robot she’d met somewhere along the line. Mrs. Robinson’s pronouncement is delivered twice: smugly at first, but then in a panic as Ben seizes Elaine’s hand. A young woman rips her white wedding dress and dashes from the altar. A mother attempts to pull her daughter from a wedding crasher/bride hijacker who is also her former lover. Yes, the times they are a changin’. “Not for me, it isn’t”, Elaine replies, now matching her mother’s wits. And there it is: a knowing moment between women across a generational divide. A parent is supposed to want what’s best for her child; she is meant to want more for that child than she ever obtained for herself. That’s our Superego talking, injecting guilt into the equation. The Graduate posits amongst its more famous themes that Oedipal rivalry between women exists; that parents’ envy of their children’s hopes is a thing. But it’s okay, Mrs. Robinson. We—meaning the audience that made you famous—celebrate your complexity, your dark humor, your blend of old and new, of good and evil. Ben’s heroism notwithstanding, you were actually the most memorable character in The Graduate, and as your song goes, Jesus loves you more than you will know.
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Scarlet Letters are really blue
That sex addiction is an excuse for licentious behavior is itself one of contemporary society’s displacement arguments. It’s also a displacement to argue that sex addiction treatment is a coded endorsement of monogamy. It is. But this argument is only half made on behalf of the religious. What progressive-leaning, anti-religion commentators won’t add is that the monogamous implications of sex addiction treatment are made on behalf of the largely monogamous women who comprise the majority of impacted partners, who find in sex addiction treatment a partly-medical, partly-psychotherapeutic premise for an overreaching critique of masculine sexuality: the too frequent demands for sex of heterosexual men; the objectifying, “performative”, “penetrative”, but not “intimate” sexual needs of misattuned, inattentive, sexually remedial men.
Why am I going here in Getting Real About Sex Addiction? Well, I might not have had I not been encouraged to explore what editors and early readers described as “intersectionality”. Of course, they meant that sex addiction treatment intersects with matters of social justice in a way that draws attention to how social groups like women are disadvantaged in treatment circles, not how they have tacitly garnered allies and are seated at the side of righteous authority, being cast as “betrayed” or “survivors”, in keeping with monogamous agreements and trauma model theories. So, I did a naughty thing in mine and Joe Farley’s book and went the other way. The reason: I didn’t want to write a load of trite BS, basically. I know about the hoary biases that society and the medical establishment have aimed at girls and women over the decades, but at the risk of being glib or seeming dismissive about that which I haven’t endured personally, that’s not the zeistgeist that is in place within the field of sex addiction treatment, nor is it likely the trend in a profession now dominated by women (numerically, at least); and by the way, that “trend” has been in place for some time now.
Sex addiction treatment, its principles or underlying assumptions, intersect with our protean sexual mores, our notions of what is objectifying treatment of human beings, for example, because many practitioners in this field, and in the wider field of psychotherapy, routinely attach their interventions to thoughts about what is happening in the culture at large, all in the name of concepts like intersectionality. There can be no doubt that in some quarters, the matter of sex addiction is attached to movements against sex slavery, or so-called gender-based violence, and that protests against such phenomena are aimed against a sex addiction treatment population that is dominantly comprised of heterosexual men. The treatment of sex addiction—the invoked theory, if you like—is girded by psychoanalytically-derived observations of obsessive sexual fantasy that casts sex partners as sex objects, treating persons as interchangeable bodies and images, or part-objects, as they are also termed.
This dovetails with a feminist critique of masculine ego primarily, hence the pathologizing of men more than women in sex addiction circles—a reactionary trend. The pathologizing of women, by male practitioners especially, is largely discredited in the current discussion of sex addiction. To assess a female patient as a sex addict is to risk being branded a slut-shaming misogynist, perpetrating an iatrogenic, traumatizing intervention, thwarting the fragile sexual freedoms of women. If a female therapist were to assess a male patient as a sex addict, she might be branded a misandrist, but this is less likely, if only because most people, including many mental health professionals don’t even know that word. Such is the bumper sticker, Twitter (or “X”)-speak vocabulary of many in our society. Meanwhile, opponents of sex addiction treatment like to pretend that sex addiction theory is a fabrication of religious zealots because it is politically correct to scapegoat religion for all of the guilt and shame that stems from our neurotic relationship to sex.
The guilt and shame that feminists might like to induce in male sex addicts, or men in general, is not called guilt and shame when such feelings emerge. Not typically. Dodging religious associations with those words, they’d call the phenomena something else—justice, probably. Only in this respect would I concede that our book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, is anti-feminist, because no less than any impacted partner of a sex addict, I do not like being gaslighted. Though not religious myself, I don’t think it’s right that religion takes so much on the chin in sex addiction treatment when social justice is the real moral lens of the field and has been for some time. Secondly, if you think that male sex addicts, or that masculine ego in general deserves a moral reckoning, I may say fair enough. But let’s stop pretending that treatment protocols, which have practitioner sex addiction specialists standing with polygraph machines nearby, full disclosure confessional exercises, all-day, or all-weekend workshops, and provisional labels of sex addiction (which is not yet recognized by the American Psychiatric Association) plus gratuitous extras like Narcissistic Personality Disorder (which is), are privileging its subjects. Stop pretending that your nomenclature is anything other than pejorative, and that your scarlet letter agendas haven’t turned blue.
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Theory filtered through politics
With choppy rhythm plus an aversion to run-on thought, the following sentence begins a paragraph in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction (I shall blame Joe for the choppy rhythm): “Undercurrents filter down into therapists’ offices, lurking as assumptions that inflect counsel”. This teasing opinion, one of many offhand expressions in our text, signals a critique of what lies in the cuts of sex addiction treatment. Via jargon, popular or theoretical, and often derivative of older, more esoteric theory, sex addiction specialists (and others, to be fair) impart a repertoire of ideas reflecting biases, and psychological theory, like scientific data, is a tool of manipulation; a means to an end.
In this blog, I’ve made numerous allusions to psychoanalytic theory or psychodynamic technique without giving many examples of either. Partly, the reason is that theory and especially interventions are hard to represent out of context, meaning case illustrations, and case illustrations are lengthy and, I suppose, not blog-worthy, though I’m not quite sure what I mean by that. I guess I mean something similar to my use of the word “teasing”: I’m introducing a book, not delivering it in serial form. Anyway, it seems apt to give illustrations of theoretical ideas, especially ones that can be represented economically. I’ve decided as much as I begin my latest and likely final perusal of copyedits and notice a certain pause upon the concept of reaction formation. It is a pause of sustained interest, not doubt.
Reaction formation is one of several fraught concepts in the Sigmund Freud lexicon: meaning, it is controversial, but that only depends upon its application. That in turn means that reaction formation is subject to bullying; it is a kicked around idea, used to represent standard thought, establishment thought, ill-advised thought…taken for granted thought. If you’re not an avid reader of psychoanalytic literature, you won’t know the term, but you’ll know its meaning. You’ll have observed its application, even employed it yourself, on countless occasions. Basically, the concept refers to a reversal of feeling based upon a defensive position that counters an uncomfortable thought and feeling. Wait, what does that mean? Well, it means something derived from a famous line in a Shakespeare play: “the lady doth protest too much”. When you take a position of opposition to something—a position of moral offense or disgust—a psychoanalyst will suspect that your offended position conveys the opposite of your desire, as a defense against a wish that is incompatible with ego, Superego, etc.
In our text, I make reference to reaction formation numerous times. The reason, as you might imagine, is that sex addiction, porn addiction, sexual deviancy, or just plain sex, is subject to moral objection, of course. In (fact?), what incurs moral objection or disgust more than sex, or that which falls under the general heading of sex? Anything? Notice I’m adding the word disgust to the term moral objection. This cues an example I noted in the manuscript: a man prone to sexually addictive habits, including certain “perversions”, elicits disgust from his wife, which he in turn finds arousing. This is an example of a paradoxical reaction—a reaction formation—to an adverse stimuli: to counter the unpleasant with a pleasure reaction, thus defending against anxiety and revulsion. More commonly, we tend to understand reaction formation as something like the wife’s reaction: a reaction of moral disgust to the sexual demands of her husband. Moral indignation: men only want one thing, etc.
What we suspect of her isn’t nice. It isn’t politically correct, to cue the secondary purpose of this entry: to indicate the selective application of this commonly known phenomenon with an obscure name. In the current zeitgeist, it is likely deemed sexist to interpret arousal from revulsion…at least as it pertains to what heterosexual men perceive in women. And don’t get me wrong. It is politically incorrect for some sensible reasons. Perceiving arousal within rejection has rationalized innumerous episodes of sexual harassment and assault, no doubt. Therefore, to rebuke an interpretation of reaction formation within a sexual rejection is to prevent danger. But that is about censoring thought due to fear of its behavioral corollary—not so much to cement a counter-truth that would govern the thought itself.
When reaction formations are deemed less dangerous, or else when they seem to represent worthy retributions, they are given a pass. In the realm of sex, we might therefore consider the issue of homosexuality. Within the history of psychoanalysis, and likely beyond amid a dominant heteronormative culture, homosexuality has been deemed a reaction formation, or again, as something like it. Freud offered that a same-sex sexual orientation results from a failure to properly identify with the opposite-sex parent; in the case of boys (Freud’s focus), it represents an excessive identification with a mother such that a boy would mirror her sexuality and thus aim libidinal interest at men. Mainstream society more or less agreed with this idea and at some point (possibly before Freud, for all I know) coined a derisive shorthand for this phenomenon: “mama’s boy”. To be gay is to fail at acquiring a Superego, which in a dominant heteronormative culture means adopting the conscience and moral repertoire of the traditionalist, largely patriarchal system.
However, Superegos change because culture changes, and in the 21st century, within the largely diversified as well as secularized world of psychotherapy, Freud is often chastised for his sexism while his anti-religious positions are for the most part forgotten or ignored. As for homosexuality and the perception of that trait, another kind of reversal has taken effect, possibly a reaction formation of another kind. So, think of the following example: a man exhibits moral objection, even disgust, at the advances of another man towards him, and issues a rebuke to the offending figure. A commonly held opinion is to cast the man exhibiting the disgust as a homophobe. He is exhibiting a reaction formation: a reversal of idea to counter feelings within himself about which he is uncomfortable. He does not have a phobia in a medicalized sense (he doesn’t have panic attacks, necessarily), so the use of the term phobe or phobic is figurative and offhand. However, the assignment of reversed affect is in earnest.
And so, these examples illustrate the infiltration of social mores into psychological theory. Indeed, they illustrate how theory is subordinate to culture and historical change, whether that change is institutionally imposed, or else populist. Science has its data, its facts, and sometimes those facts define phenomena. In psychology, data is thin and is often spun to designate truth. Instead, it defines a surface layer of truth while an interior truth is left to speculation, theory, interpretation and bias. Speculation and theory represent what we want them to represent, only the “we” is variable. Some think the we is more inclusive than it once was. Probably. Or maybe. More substitutive, I’d suggest.
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Glancing Views of Peripheral Matter
Within psychoanalysis, much has been written about perversion. Ever since Freud’s 1905 work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we’ve wondered about child sexuality, and while inclined to attribute sexualization to childhood trauma, we (meaning, psychoanalytic thinkers) still consider that unconscious oedipal and pre-oedipal fantasy remains significant in psychosexual development. Addiction, especially sex addiction, has taken a back seat to perversion in analytic literature, with few even bothering to address the topic of addiction, thinking it derivative, perhaps, of the Freudian lexicon. They may be right. Meanwhile, practitioners and theorists outside of the psychoanalytic tradition dominate the sub-field of sex addiction, which more or less compelled a distracting polemic in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, published in 2022. In that milieu, which markets to a consumer (patient) base that generally seeks practical, short-term treatment options and is thinly aware of deepening analytic approaches, professionals like me work to tear away from bad objects that have hijacked standards of concept and intervention, acting upon zeitgeist notions of what men owe women, especially.
This is why some of the suggestions that inflect our non-fiction, fitting in between the lines of other narratives, offering readers a glancing view of peripheral matters, might disorient yet give pause—have them consider a reversal. There are comments here and there, footnotes that add density to offhand assertions, especially those that pertain to childhood sexual abuse, perversion—ya know, the mooted etiology of men’s preoccupation with porn, prostitution, or deviant sex. I allude to the intimate relationship between a mother and child, of a mother’s seductiveness, her influence upon psychosexual development. My comments are provocative, if hardly original. Readers looking for attachment history accounts of abusive or neglectful fathers or mothers may nod in recognition of some familiar verbiage, but they may recoil as they read theories that go way beyond what standard attachment theory proponents offer. Take Graeme Taylor’s 2019 article, “Creativity and Perversion: waiting for the muse”: published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, this paper offers a case illustration of an adult male who presented with depression plus a fetish for giant women, which began as a foot fetish when he was three years old. The man spent time drawing pictures of giant women, which represented a perversion (a “distortion”) of a once observed talent. The patient’s mother had once idealized her son’s artful abilities, but pushed him in his adolescent years in ways that met her narcissistic needs. Pressured to accommodate her, the patient lost his sense of identity, ceasing to draw creatively and pursuing an unrewarding career in book-keeping, seemingly in denial of himself. He disavowed his gift and his sexuality, eschewing sublimation while he acted out a dread of annihilation, turning it into pleasure.
Though he kept drawing, the patient’s depiction of nude or giant women was a part-rebellion, as his mother had been prudish, disapproving of nudes and not allowing him to watch films with scenes of nudity or violence. Jealous mother, we might think. Meanwhile, in his adult life, she was intrusive with her own physicality, kissing him on the lips whenever they met. Further, the patient’s father was a passive man, seemingly unable to take a firm stand with other people, including the patient’s mother. Guilty that he was not utilizing his talent to its fullest extent, the patient was nonetheless stifled, dreading separation from his mother but acting subversively with respect to her wishes for him, the guilt countering the aggression he felt. The giant woman fantasy was a source of comfort for the man, allowing him to deny unacceptable feelings of hate for his mother; indeed, to transform such feelings into sexual excitement. A reversal.
In Getting Real, I reference this kind of reversal, backgrounded as glancing illustrations of emotionally (perhaps physically) incestuous mothers who represent bad internal objects while good internal objects (passive or absent fathers) are missing. In Taylor’s essay, he draws from numerous sources to describe the role of a muse: a traditionally female figure that represents either an equal or an internal good object that facilitates creativity. He disagrees with analysts who believe that the focus of treatment (of perversions) might focus upon the sexual and generally physical inadequacies of the subject. In this Adlerian-sounding formulation, the subject counters feelings of “being small” (and therefore not gratifying the seductive mother) with fantasies of largesse. From the analytic perspective, creativity requires a degree of aggression, which in turn requires an identification with a potent object, or else an introjection of a good-enough mother, as conceptualized by Winnicott. A traumatizing, not-good-enough mother fails to contain her young child’s terror and emotional pain, and the child’s image of her becomes fused with the mother’s rage, plus the oral and anal-sadistic impulses that the child projects onto her. The Medusa-like figure fosters annihilation anxieties which generate helplessness, plus an ongoing struggle to sublimate, but it does not inhibit the split-off rage via acting out behaviors.
Here, the term “acting out behaviors”, so common in sex addiction treatment circles and therefore in Getting Real, replaces the term perversion, more commonly employed by analytic writers, even though the term acting out connotes re-enactment. The terms acting out and perversion are more or less synonymous as they pertain to dynamics that subjects experience with their objects. However, as I wrote previously in “The biggest elephants slip out of sight”, the tendency in SA treatment, besides avoiding terms that suggest “judgement” (as if we couldn’t simply define perversion as distortion) is to assign acting out behaviors to a root-cause of castrating fathers rather than powerful, abusive mothers. More specifically, the tendency is to follow classical psychoanalysis in an unthinking way: blame the abusive (hitting, yelling) father, for that thinking retains the masculine identity of abuse, which is in turn ego-syntonic with populist thought. The shift in analytic thinking, which may not be a shift but rather simply a contextual alternative for flexible thinkers, reflects a Kleinian versus Freudian conception of childhood development wherein the nexus of development is the breast, not the phallus.
In one respect, I envy the likes of Graeme Taylor, or at least that’s what I felt reading his essay. See, as I read his analytic formulation of a fetish-obsessed man, I wondered about the backgrounded figures, like the impacted spouse of his possibly addictive pattern—the shadow consumers, as I have less flatteringly dubbed them. Regarding Taylor, I think, how do you do it? I mean, do you live in a psychoanalytic vacuum, cut off from pop psychology, the pull of the sex addiction zeitgeist? All this stuff about annihilating objects, oral and anal sadistic impulses, and not once do you mention the m word: misogyny. Remarkable. You’re in a different world, mate, assuming you’re not catching flak from circular arguments. See, if you cast a husband as Frankenstein to his wife, then you’re describing misogyny. You cast a wife as Medusa, then you’re describing misogyny. Get it? Okay, maybe Frankenstein is a more sympathetic character, but my point is that demonizing is perceived differentially. The men in my therapy groups, versus those who choose or whom I invite into analysis, live in a world of social justice, of love languages, mindfulness training workshops, not sweating small stuff and working the steps. Upon hearing the Oedipal theory, some would subscribe to the castrating father story (though they’d invariably refer to “abuse”, not castration), as the Kleinian theory is more emasculating. It says that men who suffer from perversions feel dominated by women, and some (though not many) in a group of men would admit to that. They are also less likely to report drawing giant women and masturbating afterwards.
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Basketball and Football
The gash in the tire was the first elephant in the room, or rather facility, or center. Jim had lived at the Wagner assisted living home for three months now, was still calling it a facility or center. It wasn’t home, was his point. It was an institution—a benevolent one, perhaps, and no longer the prison that constituted his first impression—but not yet a place where he’d commit to stay. That’s why he kept getting away for hours at a time, in a four-wheel drive van that he’d owned for a decade and a half. Transposing wheels and limbs, he admitted the car was on its last legs, which recently included the set of four tires, all of which were looking a bit threadbare, so none would take the kind of impact that Jim had given one tire on a Sunday morning.
“I was in a rush, I suppose”, he offered palely.
“On a Sunday morning…why? Where do you have to go to so quickly anymore?” This was Frank, Jim’s curt, middle-aged son, who visited on weekends and was accustomed to fixing problems for his dad—usually problems like a frozen computer, or a frozen bank account. Sometimes a blocked-up toilet dirtied the chore list. Frank looked at the gash in the front driver’s side tire, half-impressed as well as concerned. It was shaped like a goal mouth, or a doorway turned sideways, and it could be peeled backwards to reveal the hollow interior into which goodness knows what had flown. Inconsequential debris, maybe. Strange, how physics works, Frank wondered. What kind of impact makes that kind of tear? Anyway, it didn’t matter. Jim wanted it fixed, and Frank wasn’t inclined to replace the tire himself, though he might have. He could have, he may have wanted to say. Get your hands dirty. Flex those slender, brittle, keyboard-tapping fingers of yours. Show your old man that despite the years of bookish study and interior living, that you can still muster some good-old-fashioned grit and change a goddamned tire!
Anyway, elephants. The issue was whether Jim should be driving at all, not whether Frank could remove and replace a piece of mutilated rubber. While Frank formulated words for a feeble inquiry about living skills and the future, Jim pulled out his Smartphone, another item whose functions he could barely manage, and called for road service. Surprisingly, Jim about managed this next task, having readied his driver’s license and his triple A card, and despite soon being thrown by the gratuitous instructions of an unctuous dispatcher. Text messages and verification codes and such. “What?” and “sorry?” Jim said twice each before the voice on the other end seemed to give up and accede to a past generation’s understandings. “A driver will be there in about thirty minutes”, the voice said tiredly. Jim shook his head and chuckled, pleased to have heard those golden words yet baffled as to why they hadn’t been said until several minutes into the call. Moments later, he was lamenting a complicated new world, speaking as uncharitably about that dispatcher as he had about the construction project that had blocked the main street, forcing him onto a sidewalk curb, hence the u-shaped gash in the front driver’s side tire.
“You drove on the sidewalk?” Frank asked, like he was still collecting evidence for a later argument.
“No, no. Of course not. Not the sidewalk. I mean the…whattadyercallit…the thing that does the water”
A broken, uncomprehending pause followed.
“A hydrant,” Frank said. “You hit a hydrant?”
“I hit something.” Jim shrugged. “There was a stream of water, anyway”. Another complaint, it seemed.
About twenty minutes later, a road service vehicle appeared, flagged down by Frank’s waving arms, and pulled up next to Jim’s van. He stepped up eagerly, pleased by the relatively quick service. This is more like it, he evinced, turning to his son. At that moment, Frank was peering over his father’s shoulder, his eyes fixed upon the service vehicle’s driver’s side. Inside, hands and arms linked to an unseen face scribbled on a notepad and then opened a driver’s side door. Moments later, out stepped a uniformed black man, about six foot six inches tall, and looking like he weighed about three hundred pounds. Frank nodded, seeing the exiting giant first.
“What’s up,” the man greeted. Immediately, he seemed stolid, would likely be terse, if not necessarily rude for the rest of this meeting.
Jim, who moved in all directions slowly and gingerly, at least when not driving, turned from Frank to regard the service worker whom he was eager to have change his tire because his effete, not-anywhere-close-to-three-hundred-pound son would likely demur on the task.
“Whoa”, Jim uttered, followed by, “basketball?”
What? Frank thought. Fleeting denial. A stifled guffaw. The service worker understood immediately, appeared to take it in stride, emitting a small chuckle that contained the protest of race. He raised his chin, striking a slightly affronted pose, and breathily replied: “Football”.
The fix-it job lasted minutes, during which Frank stewed, thinking about the friends and family with whom he’d share this culture clash-capturing moment; this brief exchange that would say everything and nothing…about something he’d give cursory thought, ultimately. Juneteenth was last week. Basketball? Football. Let’s call the whole thing off, the old song goes. Joe, Frank’s now deceased, once obsessively irreverent and probably racist friend, would have had a grand chortle about this scene. Frank’s sister, a somewhat more conscientious, as in bumper-sticker-committed observer of white guilt, would have issued thin amusement, coupled with a prim tsk tsking thought for their elderly an un-woke father. Indeed, Jim would not have awakened to anything but the pleasure of his suppositions, the privileging of physical rigor, physical acts, tacitly working-class ethics, plus the joy of getting his tire fixed so that he might resume his driving. These were final days of his feeling free in his dotage, unworried by his own carelessness. He glanced at Frank, smiling and concluding, “I think he’s done this before” as the worker swiftly completed his job.
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Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 