February 23, 2025 · 8:30 am

Bumper sticker treatment

I’ve heard it before a thousand times. I wrote about it in a book that was published three years ago by a prominent exponent of modern psyche literature: Rowman & Littlefield, now Bloomsbury. Getting Real About Sex Addiction could have been written twenty or thirty years ago, largely because not much has changed in that time. Some who toil in the field of sex addiction think that much has changed in that time because they weren’t in the field prior to that point and think that the things they observe and talk about weren’t being noticed before they came along. Well, some things, like bumper sticker treatment, have not changed at all.

              A woman calls me up, asks if I treat sex addiction, as my web profile suggests I do. I confirm that I do, though I add that I don’t presume that condition upon meeting a prospective patient. Rather, I assess a person’s situation over time, explore the meaning of concepts like addiction, compulsion, voyeurism, monogamy, sexual freedom, etc. “Uh-huh”, says the woman. “What about integrity?” she asks, which signals that she’s either done some reading on these subjects or else had a conversation or two with a sex addiction specialist. I think this because SA specialists like to use words like integrity while claiming they aren’t judgmental and aren’t looking to impose their morality on anyone. That means they think masturbation isn’t as sinful as religious zealots think it is, that pre-marital sex is normal and healthy, and that habitual porn use might be okay as long as one isn’t lying about it to an intimate partner. Pause. That is an area of moral judgmental, they might concede: don’t lie, or keep secrets and then lie when confronted about said secrets. Actually, that’s not a moral judgement, they’ll amend. It’s merely ethical, or it’s about values, which is conveniently broad and ambiguous. Ethics is not the same thing as morals. Ethics is morality light, and it’s humanistic, vaguely feministic, as opposed to being hoarily patriarchal and otherwise over-doggish.

              Anyway, my woman caller sort of blocked out of her mind the bit about exploring meaning because she’s already determined certain meanings. She dissociated, some might offer, on the hint of uncertainty—an aspect of her trauma, perhaps. When trauma is invoked in this context it’s another way of saying that thinking has stopped when something cognitively dissonant arises. She’s already diagnosed her husband as a sex addict having checked boxes on an online questionnaire and then watched videos about narcissism, which is often tagged as a sex addiction companion. “It’s not a diagnosis”, I say pedantically, referring to sex addiction, not narcissism. It doesn’t matter. It might as well be a diagnosis as far as this caller is concerned. She thinks several other labels are diagnoses also, all because someone has attached the word disorder to a series of bad words. She says she’s done her research. That doesn’t mean scholarly, peer-reviewed professional psyche literature. She’s been listening to a podcast about betrayed partners comprised entirely of female subjects, and speaking to a sex addiction specialist who delivered a familiar chestnut of preliminary telephone consultation: “his behavior has nothing to do with you”. It’s hard to say when this greatest hit of infidelity treatment intervention was first drawn from the pop psyche toolkit. Claudia Black’s Deceived, published in 2009, featured a chapter that was headed by the phrase, and I’ve heard it quoted back to me countless times since, at least. Apologists for this brand of proto-counsel will staunchly defend the necessity of making such a pronouncement early in a treatment episode, even before it has properly begun. The rationale includes the following: the importance of reducing blame that is typically directed at impacted partners, which includes the likelihood that the sexually addictive pattern has been lied about for protracted periods, possibly years, and that the betrayed partner has been made to feel stupid or crazy for having harbored suspicions of secretive, unfaithful behavior. Beyond the compulsivity of the behavior itself, this pattern of lying, of obfuscating (SA specialists like that word too) constitutes a form of psychological abuse tantamount to an act of rape. Therefore, it is necessary to validate the long-denied suspicions and declare a new era of healing wherein all assertions by the designated sex addict are taken with a fat grain of salt.

              Just one or two…or three, four, or five things to inject here: firstly, as suggested earlier, this assessment category—sex addiction—is not exactly an exactly defined condition, let alone something that can be pronounced with ironic impulsivity. So, as an introductory intervention, the treatment-orienting, bumper sticker pronouncement—“his behavior has nothing to do with you”—is predicated on an assessment of sex addiction that has not been properly made when this pearl of support is typically delivered the first time. It is an a priori, or presumptive supposition. Were a range of unfaithful behaviors cast as hitherto unknown, in which case the full scope of the behavioral pattern would also be unknown, the behaviors might be characterized as non-addictive, maybe aberrant, and therefore imbued with relational meaning: it was a “revenge” affair; the unfaithful partner was feeling lonely because the so-called impacted partner was verbally abusive, neglectful—in other words, the unfaithful behavior was very much to do with them, as it were. As the reader might glean, or know if having read my 2-year old blog entries or a handful of my podcast episodes over the last couple of years, this narrative is largely reserved for women who present for infidelity or sex addiction treatment. Actually, back up: the presumptive narrative is such that a would-be female patient would likely not be cast as a sex addict so quickly unless they were self-identifying as such.

              This is the real reason why sex addiction treatment is dominantly aimed at men—nothing to do with “lesser resources for women in psychotherapy”, which is a BS cover story promulgated informally by sex addiction cognoscenti who either ignore that most psychotherapists are now women, or they tacitly believe that anyone who hasn’t earned one of their precious sex addiction merit badge certificates is not really qualified to indoctrinate the consumer base with their bloated assumptions and derivative theories. The theory and meta-psychology on the gender disparity is as follows: many social workers, couples therapists, psychologists, etc., hold a semi-educated view that Freudian theory remains applicable to masculine sexuality and ego while asserting that it doesn’t apply to women. That Freudian theory holds that the human mind operates in a more or less economic manner, discharging libido, seeking to achieve a state of homeostasis that controls or lessens stimulation, including excitement and restive anxiety. Humans “discharge” is the idea, ultimately seeking equilibrium. The psyche or mental apparatus, as Freud put it, experiences vicissitudes, quotas of affect, a primarily quantitative manifestation of desire and need. Many still believe heartily that this theory of mind adequately explains masculine mentality, or at least masculine sexuality, therefore male sex behavior is not relational: “he” seeks pleasure regardless of context, or emotional state, much less the qualitative state of an intimate relationship. Ergo, the phenomenon of sex addiction, including the prejudice that it exists much more in men, is simply a derivative of this roughly one-hundred year old economic model of the mind.

              See, somewhere in the mid-20th century, along came object relations theory (a subdivision of psychoanalysis), plus humanistic and feminist influences upon modern psychology, to assert that not all minds work like this, and that women’s minds certainly don’t work like this, and that we should all think more positively, more wholesomely, more relationally, about what drives the human soul, whether we think religiously/spiritually about these matters or not. So, while “boys will be boys” ideas are readily grafted onto psyche assessments and verbose theoretical pronouncements, those of girls and women are nuanced to integrate elements of social conscious/unconscious forces: societal influences, the oppressive sexist external, not so much an impinging libidinal “drive” from within. For at least fifty years, the foot soldiers of our mental health army, including myself, have been trained to think that problems besetting the feminine are borne of social forces that are inhibitive, not an internal, biological compulsion, or a biological drive supplemented by an internalized social force that privileges rather than inhibits. Fifty years! That’s a long time to consider how things have changed or should change. It’s a long time to recite bullet points, learn the jargon, the right vocabulary, answer the questions correctly on an exam, or write the correct thing in an academic paper, or post on the Psychology Today letters to the editor, or more latterly, their popular blog-spaces, sympathetic, progressive ideas about psychological phenomena.

              Phenomenology is a big word signifying a rabbit-hole topic about why things are as they are, and how we as a collective got here in this state of affairs, as Esther Perel puts it. Bumper stickers, like letters to an editor, are likewise anachronistic, if better for the near-sighted. Blogs seem passe also, buried in the internet miasma. Tik tok and podcast presenters: these are the carriers of messaging these days, not writers. And the message is a formulaic, mini-essayistic delivery, something that will fly off the tongue and serve as a validating selling point—sorry, intervention tool—for a consumer who says they need treatment in order to learn something new about themselves, something they don’t understand, something previously unconscious…ya know, something that will make them feel better (NOT!). What do you want to hear? If you’re a provider, meaning a therapist, a social worker—a sex addiction “specialist”—what are you prepared to say if something rare happens, like a man calling you up for a consultation who claims that his wife is a sex addict, and he is a betrayed, impacted partner? The chestnut phrase coined by advocates, not neutrals, will come to mind. You know how it goes: “his…wait…her? His”, you start again, stammering because your tongue is letting you down, confused. Her behavior has nothing to do with you. Would you think it? Could you say it if you did?

And do we have to lean in further to gender stereotype to find what’s truly axiomatic amid bumper sticker thinking? So, as stated, I’ve heard the catch-phrases a thousand times. I’ve pushed back with something I’ve said maybe a hundred times, and written at least once before in, ya know, that book I mentioned. It’s this: of course, the person engaging in the behavior of taking their sexuality outside of a committed relationship is solely responsible for that likely repetitive behavior. The “acting out” person needs to own that, as SA specialists say, and not blame a partner for having gained weight or becoming conservative in their sexual tastes, or whatever the trope on this part of the debate is. Incidentally, the term “acting out”, widely used now in psychotherapy, was first coined by Sigmund Freud in 1914 as part of a paper that introduced another seminal term and idea, the “compulsion to repeat”. The concept of acting out refers to action (behavior) that unconsciously replaces thought, feeling, and memory. Okay, all that’s already too long for a bumper sticker, and simplistic treatment providers who con people with catch-phrases that make them feel better are reinforcing defenses when they, in effect, say you don’t have to look at your part in this. What’s this mooted “part”? It’s part two of the axiom, the twist if you like:

Addicts, non-addicts, cheaters, co-dependents, wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, theys and thems–whatever label you’re using to describe yourself: if you’re in a committed relationship then you have and have had a responsibility to talk, listen, and do those activities properly, as in think about what someone is saying to you, as in empathize, suspend for some indeterminate period how you think, even how you see the world. In psychoanalysis, this is termed “taking back projections”–yeah, I know, another catch-phrase. Take a look at your reactions to events, notice your struggle with dichotomies of good versus bad, villain versus hero, perpetrator versus victim, instead of good and bad, the idea that heroes and villains are contained in each of us but often projected onto others. No, once again, I don’t mean you’re responsible for someone else’s affair-seeking behavior or porn use. If you read this and then think, “so, you’re saying it’s my fault”, then you’re illustrating my point about the problem of dichotomizing. I mean that you’re responsible for the many problems in a relationship that you don’t want to deal with.

Try to explore the antecedents of your trauma responses and then notice that “….has nothing to do with you” in the context of an intimate adult relationship is a profoundly wrong suggestion. You think this is blaming, trying to get you to listen, and to think about what you bring to a flawed relationship? If you’re an impacted partner, you think this is “disrespecting” or not understanding your trauma? Okay, do a little research on that topic (trauma, I mean), and I don’t mean re-reading your favorite chapter in a self-help workbook. Actually, do a fair amount of research, act as if this is worth your time. Read American Psychiatric Association criteria for PTSD and find categories pertaining to avoidance of distressing stimuli, what afflicted persons do, repeatedly, to avoid uncomfortable feelings, alternating between states of dissociation, which essentially means emotional cut-off, hyper (meaning excessive) and hypo (under-reactive) states of arousal. Do a Wikipedia search on a man named Sandor Ferenczi, who wrote about trauma, childhood sexual abuse and how that impacts people in adulthood, nearly a hundred years ago. Revitalizing Freud’s once proposed and then renounced Seduction Theory, he paved the way for generations of traumatologists by arguing that episodes of trauma are not self-contained but rather re-enactments of developmental trauma, likely spawned in childhood. You’ll find that addictive states and those of trauma are eerily analogous, at times crossing over in individuals, otherwise blended within a dyad (a couple) in which the pathologies only appear to be segregated. This is probably why afflicted people tend to find and bond with each other, feeling compelled to repeat something forgotten.

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January 26, 2025 · 8:46 am

Strangelove Today

A black screen with a simple piece of script, Dr. Strangelove, loomed over the gathering audience at the Noel Coward Theater in London’s West End. The subtitle of the source work—how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb—had been shorn from the script. A curious omission, as almost every other aspect of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece of black comedy had been embellished or tweaked by the modern idiom, but not reduced. It’s a surprise there weren’t more injections of topical humor into this 2024 stage version. One might have thought that a recent election stateside, a revival of Russian enmity over the last decade or so, plus the emergence of oligarchic eccentrics on the stage of social media would have made for a kaleidoscopic bash of re-booted jokes.

              Enter cartoon-faced Steve Coogan, a British comic who has long skipped along the fringes of Hollywood stardom, to don four roles in the play, three of which were once inhabited by the late Peter Sellers, and front the ship of this Dr. Strangelove revival. Coogan is the star, the central pivot in the cast, and its comic center. The behind-the-scenes folks, plus the supporting players are less known to me, worthy as they all are of recognition. Someone woke up one day with a good idea, at least. Strange that it hadn’t happened earlier. A story about accidental nuclear war. A cast of paranoid, oafish narcissists bent on destroying the world. A satire about the folly of creating an absurd militaristic system that is destined towards disaster. Yes, this was the stuff of cold war fantasy from the 50s and early 60s. But why had it taken sixty years to give this a stage treatment? Of course, one answer is that Dr. Strangelove is a great film. How could anyone improve upon such greatness. Who would have the balls to tamper with it? After all, Wicked notwithstanding, no one bothers to remake The Wizard of Oz. The difference is that this is not a movie remake. It’s a play with a few amendments that otherwise retains the themes and plot of the original work. Furthermore, it retains for the most part the narrative structure of the film, which is like a play in so far as it features only a few sets, most of which are indoors, which also makes it conducive to a theatrical adaptation.

              So, is it an improvement, this latter-day remake, designed for the stage but not the big screen? Is it a worthy, next-gen effort at an idea that perhaps each generation should shake a stick at? Yes, is my cautious answer to this latter question at least, though I am still left wondering why it was made and what it really adds to the original work. I ask this last question because other recent revivals—and I’m integrating Wicked into the comment—do indeed build upon an original story. The story and characters of Wicked take everything you might have wondered about The Wizard of Oz and runs with the imagination. The same is true of Peacock’s remake of The Day of the Jackal, which has taken a two-hour film and inflated it to a series, and not a moment is wasted, I’d say. Is the same true of this Strangelove stage-play? Hardly. And it’s not as if the opportunities weren’t there. In the opening scenes, for example, Coogan’s Mandrake character (the first of Sellers’ three from DS 1964) engages in a Marx Brothers-like piece of wordplay with the story’s putative villain, the psychotic General Ripper, who has not accidentally but rather deliberately ordered a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union because—okay, here’s the short version—he blames communists for contaminating the water supply of the western world which has in turn made him sexually impotent. Mandrake learns this in an unfolding conversation with General nutjob after the latter has cut off all communication to the air force base from which he has ordered the nuclear attack. However, Coogan’s Mandrake, wittier and more sarcastic than Sellers’ everyman original, seems aware of the General’s craziness from the get-go. This gives a story-familiar audience a nudge and a wink about themes that implicate dictatorial ramrods the world over, but in my opinion, it compromises the horror of the plot.

              What’s more effective is to suggest the complicity of normal human beings with our broken systems by having the supporting characters act as haplessly and as unknowingly as possible. The point here is that someone had risen to the level of militaristic authority, was positioned if not authorized to launch a nuclear strike, and no one had seemed to notice that he was not all there, so to speak. To be fair, Coogan’s Mandrake is of course helpless in response to the attack that Ripper has launched, and he likewise flounders when another nutjob named Bat Guano shows up to capture the General, only to find that he has committed suicide, which leaves Mandrake and others to desperately figure out how to prevent the nuclear attack thereafter. But prior to this point, Coogan’s character issues quips at the rogue general and attempts to argue with him, which feels unconvincing. Because of Sellers’ more understated performance, which has a forlornness throughout, the dialogue between Mandrake and Ripper is at turns cringe-worthy and poignant. Here, Mandrake is too scared to verbally spar with the general whom he’s only just realized is a psychotic. He knows he can’t reason with him. Only when the air force base is secured by government troops, and the now frightened Ripper becomes fleetingly regretful, does Mandrake transform into an assertive, even compassionate figure—one who attempts to connect with Ripper’s essential brokenness. Only it’s too late.

              An alteration of the plot pertains to a character that Peter Sellers was supposed to play in the original film but didn’t because of a back injury during production. Major King Kong is the pilot of one of the B-52s that has been ordered by Ripper to drop a hydrogen bomb on a Russian target. In the film, this plane is attacked by either Russian or American missiles attempting to thwart the nuclear strike, but not shot down. Instead, it continues on its bomb run, its radio devices damaged. The radio damage is significant because this prevents the reception of a mission recall code that is concurrently being figured out by the Mandrake character after Ripper’s death. Anyway, in the play, the Kong character, now played by Coogan, is a MAGA allusion: like the original character, he is a Southern caricature, but he is not just a dutiful soldier. He is a Ripper parallel: a conspiratorialist fanatic who will not accept his co-pilot’s assertion that a recall code has been issued, which should end the mission. As a result, this plane continues its bomb run, drops the load, with Kong riding a missile down rodeo-style, just as he did in the movie, and the play winds to a conclusion rather like the film does, with the wheelchair-bound Strangelove character lecturing at the Pentagon about surviving a nuclear winter in mine-shafts inhabited by alpha males and subservient women.  

              I felt more neutral about this relatively minor plot change, thinking it gratuitous but not especially damaging to the film’s climax. I suppose I was waiting throughout for a scene that would aim a dig at modern extremists, the culture of misinformation, or AI intrusion. Overall, I was surprised to feel that the more modern version was not as well acted as the original film. I suppose this reflects a prejudice that older films or theatrical productions tend to be cheesier, more melodramatic or heavy-handed in their style. But here, it is the remake, reboot, or whatever this is that disappoints slightly with its more farcical tone, quick pace, and supplemental gags. The extra dialogue fills the gaps that film editing would obscure, no doubt, but there’s little excuse for the feeling of rushed lines, the lack of silence in between words. I am reminded that Strangelove, as a film, was a special breed of artwork: at times farcical, it is nonetheless sober. As a viewer, you’re meant to be stilled in its quiet moments, sit nervously and bite one’s lip. In the opening minutes of the film, as Sellers’ Mandrake realizes what is really happening when he looks down at a radio that is playing civilian broadcasting when it shouldn’t, we’re meant to feel the horror and aloneness of a situation that we’re discovering with him. Maybe the differences in production lie in our less naive observation of this plot and subtext, hence the knowing (or pre-taliating, as the play plays) humor of this Strangelove Today exercise. It’s like a lot of things now, I guess, which is why now is as good as any time for Strangelove to revisit us: we sort of know how we got here, but when the moment of shit happening hits, it’s somehow still a surprise.

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December 22, 2024 · 5:11 pm

Take the bus sweet sixteen

Sweet sixteen. Takes a while to get there, I’d say. Also, it’s not as sexy as it sounds; not the debutante ball it’s chalked up to be. It’s a pinnacle of a problem. Throw up thirteen. Fuck off fourteen. Gross fifteen. Sickness. You hang around teenagers, amid their sniffles, dripping of various fluids, you’ll feel under the weather fairly soon. And minimal conversation. In my teens I was missing because of television, video games that sucked the air from my brain, dulling my imagination. The fingers did the walking, and seemingly the thinking as they flitted about remotes, joysticks, or a keyboard. Now it’s a deft index digit skimming over the small buttons of a cell phone. Eyes scan over the dashing pages. They appear and then disappear like cells of thought dancing about. Get a word in—you know, words—and a head may pop up and recognize external stimuli. Something from within, a hunger, signals that sustenance of an original kind is necessary. An utterance, a cry or a bark burst out with a need. Food is soon engorged. A refrigerator is emptied. Check the front door. Food is often dashed there these days. No dice. The debris of packets, spills, and a stain is all that’s left of the consumption.

Does it peak at sixteen? Does it get better afterwards, this life of or with a teenager? Savage seventeen, asshole eighteen. Nearly done nineteen. It’s not as if they’re not aware of this state of affairs, these diseases they carry. I mean, who likes teenagers? Who says or writes nice things about them? Not me. Read the first paragraph. Adults mock them or wring their hands over them. Grandparents are wary, and strain to relate. Smaller children fear them as if they were monsters lurking in closets. They don’t understand their habits: the curious disarray of belongings, the expanse of ephemera; the clumps of tissue paper, bloodied or rendered sticky, tossed about a toilet. This is why teens start forming an identity, a sense of togetherness, of esprit de corps. The world is against them, or concerned for them, which is vaguely worse. We celebrate their individualism while we lament that very incipience because it intrudes and takes over. We envy the beginning of a prime: sexual confidence is not yet there but it’s coming; athletic prowess, litheness and invincibility are upon them whether they feel it, take advantage of it, or not. Lovingly, we hope this developmental combo of affliction and power will be like one of their illnesses: that it will pass soon and drift into memory, only to be revisited every five years with terrible reunions. The worst of us will not go to those events because they’re too painful. Or, we’ll go, but much later, long after the symptoms of adolescence have abated and others’ memory of our teenage selves has dwindled.

This was true in my case. Yes, I’m not a teenager. Not anymore. Not chronologically. It’s behind me. I’m in recovery now. Or it’s in disguise, hiding like a stash of dirty magazines. Magazines? What are those, asks a contemporary teen. Don’t get me wrong. I have warm feelings towards teenagers, the few that I know, that let me get to know them. They’re both terrible and wonderful, like I was. They compel my interest while they alienate and push away. Some of them plunder and gambol about– rolling objects ever at risk of knocking down the household furniture. When they rest, they seem immovable, forgetful, unrousable. An analyst once said to me that teens are the way they are because they are mimicking the ill or absent objects they are looking to rouse. By object he meant parent. Unconsciously, analysts use the word object to signify how parents start to feel as parents. Infants pull at, chew, or cling to their parents. They drape their limbs over their heads, hug knees and ankles. They grab and scratch, give you a cold at least once per financial quarter. Parenting a small child is a workout of chasing and wrestling, interspersed with household chores, seized naps, a comradely debriefing with a weary co-parent. The teen years grant a reprieve in the form of distance. The onset of puberty, the libidinal surge, generates space and tension: privacy and basic needs do battle, forcing outbursts that juxtapose rejection and appeal. Help. Guidance. Give. Then kindly fuck off.

You’d think they’d want this stage of life to be over; that they’d want to move on. But they linger, don’t they: teenagers. The affliction bleeds into the twenties, and for some, beyond. Certain habits, the masturbatory, the dissociative, solipsistic, drifting whimsy doesn’t seem to leave. We don’t want this period of indulgence blended with insecurity to go. It’s in the dishes left by the sink; the T-shirt spread over the washing machine, left for someone else to deal with. It’s in the stolid gaze, the hapless shrug that you receive when you ask after the thoughts that linked to these actions. Were there thoughts, you wonder? Was there shame, guilt, or rather conscience, ethics, righteousness: all the qualities that magically appear when the tables are turned, a divide is crossed. One day the adolescent finishes school, gets a job, assumes responsibility and has to lead, guide, or soothe another being. As a parent, you thought to give them a head start by getting a pet, or having a second child. Feed it, walk it, babysit them, etc. That was the point, you thought.

At some point, you thought to foster independence for your own good; to take a break, thinking a massive stage of the parenting job was done. Go online, sign up for Indeed. Download that App that will get you a credit card. Get a reference, network. Find out what a deductible means. These are your decreasingly patient instructions. Take a moment. No, take several. Take years, actually. Think back to when you were a teen, or just the last time a stage of life was coming to an end, forcing you to change. Routines stopped or altered. Someone or thing modifies a system, changes the rules, or the assumptions underlying the rules. Some of those teenagers are growing up and assuming authority because they are alright as teens. They’re polite to strangers, reflective when asked questions that call for meaning. That’s amazing, you think, when you first observe or hear of this–when you get those lovely yet irritating compliments from other adults about your kids. They (the kids) are still rebelling, actually, only it’s not called that when you’re in charge and you’re organized and well-spoken; when you’re empowered and separate from the enmeshed family tree. See, they only seem empowered, or entitled if you prefer, when they’re lounging on your dime, playing the music loud, drowning out your life. It feels not quite as threatening when they’re out and about, filling the sidewalks in packs, in gaggles of giggling, mutually-interrupting, shouting groups. Give them access to a car and this gets worse. Their windows are down and the heavy bass sounds of rap coupled with raucous singing is on public display. Not everyone in the pack is like this. On the sidewalk is a couple engrossed in an intimate moment. Hands in his pockets, a reticent boy is making an effort in the dawn of an aged ritual: he is solicitous and gentle. He is sweet, the accompanying girl will think. Sweet sixteen. Keeping his hands to himself, his head down, his glances glancing, he is not yet the boorish oaf he may soon appear to be. And the prim girl is likewise demure and self-effacing, not yet the disdainful, prickly woman she may “grow up” to become. Twenty years from now they’ll have a teenage boy or girl, or someone who will identify as neither: someone who will nonetheless expect basics of food and shelter, then games and fun; then free time and space to exercise free will, often with things that are not free. They cost money because of the rules that previous generations made. Yes, you might say to the requests that demand an easier passage through the world you made and they didn’t. Yes, you will help with some things, the things you know. Well, not all things. No, I won’t give you a ride, you’ll say, alluding to an old-fashioned artifact you might have used. Take the bus.

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November 2, 2024 · 12:54 am

My Peers

I’m trippin’ on the word, hearing its layered meaning, the play. I’m trippin’ on them, my peers with their protruding toes, hearing their footsteps outside my stall, their muted grumblings about the meeting. The break is nearly over. The clatter of paper and soap dispensers, the water from a fawcett, the violence of a flush, are all sounding out, signaling an end to the break. My peers are filing out, ready to reconvene the meeting. I can’t move. I can’t make anything happen. I’m stuck in my porcelain seat, waiting to evacuate, but then find something within that will gird me for the next round of work. All work. No play.

              I hear one or two peers circling about. I feel their eyes upon my stall door. Do they know it’s me in here, collecting my thoughts? He can’t do it—that’s what they’re thinking. He’s stuck. They glance at one another, sharing their suspicions, but they’re not supposed to say. In here, you’re not supposed to say anything. It’s private time, pre-verbal time, in a private space, and no one is at their best in such moments, we’re all inclined to think. That’s our big boy voice, saying pull up your big boy pants. Just do what’s necessary, wash your hands, then leave and start talking, doing your thing. Back to work. He’s gotta come out, thinks the peer who seems to linger at the basin, washing his hands. He’s the last one there. Otherwise, the place is silent. Everyone’s break is over, except mine. I feel his eyes upon the outside door, his voice poised to speak, say what everyone else was thinking a minute or two ago: two minutes, Ray. It’s nearly ten. You comin’?

It wasn’t like this back in the day. Back when we were kids. These guys: they won’t remember. They don’t know anything from before the age of nine, when games were fun. Yeah, they liked to win. I liked to win, but winning wasn’t everything. Fun was the thing. Funny—funnee—was the thing. Silly was a thing, ridiculous was a thing. We could be ridiculous, look ridiculous, before we were nine. Was it nine? Maybe ten. I can’t remember myself. I remember laughing, and wanting to be the one that made the others laugh. It made ‘em laugh, shaking my thing outside the stalls, flanking the showers. “Keep the noise down”. That was the only complaint: a gruff, peace-seeking rebuke from beyond an eyewitness (but not earshot) threshold by a locker room attendant—a truly miserable man who wasn’t winning at anything and didn’t like to play games or even hear evidence of them. A buddy of mine and I: we did a dance opposite each other, taking turns, like the display was a preening competition. We were showing off, but feeling silly, ridiculous. Nothing serious. Then it changed. After the noise complaint, the game broke up, but only for a moment, like it was the receding of a stream that would return via another channel in moments. Let’s do something else, someone said. They gestured to a pair of urinals, then stood in front of them like they were targets. His beckoned a peer to his side, held his hand to his mouth like he was telling a secret, excluding anyone who wasn’t up for a duel.

Maybe he was telling a joke, a play on words. That’s what comes to mind now, still seated in my stall, not playing the game, not returning to the meeting that will happen without me, even though I am in charge, sort of. I don’t want to play their game, take part in their name-dropping but not naming game—their nounless attack upon substance, and my word-drooling response: it’s a leaking, or a falling out of words, this civilly symbolization; a mouth bowel movement, disguised. They know it. I feel it, the primitivism, and the inhibition of later games. I didn’t play that game that replaced mine when I was nine, or nearly ten. I didn’t want to play the peeing game, seeing who could pee the farthest and still hit targets. I don’t want that kind of comparison; to win or to lose, those cul de sac dichotomies. Don’t want to step on toes or have anyone step on mine. I don’t want to stick my neck out. I don’t want to leave my stall anymore, deal with my peers. Yeah, that’s right: my peers, my fellow pee-ers.

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October 10, 2024 · 5:13 am

Three years later

It’s three years after something bad happened. Someone left this plane, this earth, and they won’t return. It feels like stubbornness, like they’re off somewhere thinking of how to return but changing their mind, knowing it’s against the rules. Funny, he was both a rebel and a stickler for rules, my friend. In games, he was dogmatic, autocratic, plus a few other “ics” in the mix. He wanted things his way—that was the annoying, and ultimately tragic governing principle. Today, I say goodbye to him again, it being an anniversary. I recall the good parts of his self, and only allude to the bad, following the tacit rules of grief. My shoulds enter the fray, influenced by what others say and write, their forlorn and sentimentalist tributes. He was a good this, a great that. We miss him. We are grateful for the time we had together, etc. He had a range of qualities, from good to bad, plus a vast in-between that renders the binary choices less palatable. I feel some pressure to represent him fully, and yet to hold back, to speak around the truth, and in doing so, effect some manner of taking care.

              In a way, we’re following his lead. He led in this way, entering into the fray of most relationships, daggering in with his knifey wit, his manic rage. His truth. This was only sometimes, though the instances were memorable—indeed, they were traumatic, the way melt-downs usually are. Mostly, he was alternately aloof and jovial, and in this way protective of others while signaling the presence of an inveterate problem. He wouldn’t change, he often exuded. On occasion, he’d offer a promissory opposite: exhibiting a new self, cleaned up, polished, even wholesome. He could quote scripture, subscribe to conventional belief systems, be regularly friendly, consumerist, even mainstream in his tastes, his politics; an average good citizen. Only he wasn’t average. It was difficult masking the mild disappointment I might feel at these times—the disorienting reluctance to accept the loss of the miscreant genius in whose hijinks (largely un-violent) I lived vicariously. To watch him grow up was to let some part of my own childhood go. Recess is over. Time to go back to work. It’s like the malaise you feel when an exciting villain or clown gets subdued for the good of society. And there is no turning back. But there was a turning back, because in time his un-wholesome self would return, and in that return there would be a relief, plus a guilty pleasure that would vie with obligation. Yes, we must do something about this problem…someday.

              That someday never really came. A change came eventually, in the form of a passing, which started in a park on the outskirts of a city whose reputation is almost synonymous with the derelicted down and out. That was a place to collapse in and not wake up—to be picked up off the ground by stoical if diligent caregivers, anonymous to my dying friend. It would be hours before loved ones would gather and feel what he was already not feeling due a loss of consciousness, the horror of his last moments. If he could have spoken he might have told us to get lost, not wanting to be seen as he was then: bloated, pumped with chemicals that were meant to keep his kidneys going and thus keep him alive. He’d have whispered past the tube that was in his mouth that he didn’t want to be seen that way; that he wished he could be alone, for our benefit as well as his, because this ending was not worth watching. Get away, he might have said, his words slurring, his eyes glazing over, becoming dull. The lively clown, the sometimes villain, sometimes hero and more often something in between that friends and family adored, would not have wanted the final scene he was granted; the witnessing that he would have preferred to not have. Remember me differently, he would have pleaded. Think of me as I’ve been more often than not, more than three years ago.

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September 2, 2024 · 7:12 pm

What if Hitch had been clean

A modern filmmaker** muses about elegant solutions to problems that are created by complex systems, intertwining realities: a blend of pop culture influences—Star Wars-like imagery—juxtaposed against contemporaneous events, Central American coups, jungle poverty. In a world extrapolated from present-day reality, people act in accordance with the reality in which they are thrust. Their personalities are blended into a background, hidden yet subtly apparent to an observer. If we are attentive enough. If the act is good enough.

The filmmaker’s view is that artists had to try harder in his day to send messages, especially those that conflict with a zeitgeist, with what’s de rigeur. He calls them elegant solutions, these laconic expressions, these collisions of image and idea that insinuate an individual voice, but then represses because there’s a massive wall ahead. There’s much attention to detail in the filmmaker’s art: the displacement of ideas onto the trivial. Freud would have approved, and perhaps he should have approved more, the filmmaker opines, as it’s not as though surrealists of Freud’s era didn’t try to engage the Viennese doctor on the matter of film. Alas, Sigmund was more of a literary and history enthusiast than a cinephile. He’d write about Shakespeare, muse on Moses, much more readily than he’d comment on the tales and tricks of cinema.

He could be forgiven, I think, for thinking the silent era of film frivolous: that Charlie Chaplin was little more than a clown fit for children’s consumption, not the worldly dreams of adults. He might have thought that Stroheim’s Greed was ponderous, and likewise anything Eisenstein was making; that Lang’s Metropolis was facile, depicting a society that wasn’t anything nearly as ugly as it was in the years between two world wars, much less what Freud didn’t live to observe. Might he have thought D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation racist? That westerns were condoning genocide? Would he have cared about whether Greta Garbo spoke? In the twilight of his life, might he have been charmed by Shirley Temple or Judy Garland; recalled The Wizard Oz from the bookshelves of an earlier time, and in his last hours dreamed of lovely things beckoning from over a rainbow? Had he lived beyond the nineteen thirties, he might have taken notice of an up-and-coming cineaste who was a bit like himself—who in time would be subject to as much caricature as Freud himself.

The iconography that surrounds Alfred Hitchcock is similar to that which permeates Freud’s world: the latter had his cigars, his couch, pince-nez glasses, tweed attire, and imperious gaze. Hitchcock’s image is likewise severe: he poses with his chin up, looking cold and menacing, invariably dressed in black, ever conjuring a next generation of American Gothic. British born, he was a natural fit for Hollywood tastes: a born entertainer without inhibitions except those imposed externally; a sadistic figure eager to use whatever tool that would tease and torment his suspense-addicted audience; a snaky rebel looking to twist and turn around all the rules and regulations that were in his way. This was the forties through the sixties, roughly: Hitch’s time. His canvas. Like the surrealists, he could play with symbols, use birds, trains, pieces of clothing, to displace the sexual and aggressive. As he got older, he played along as restrictions ebbed: the ratings system that replaced the previously censorious Hays code for the motion picture industry. Into the seventies, he could show nudity, be more explicit with his killings.

Interestingly, this didn’t make him more popular, or a better filmmaker. Frenzy, from 1972, has its moments of gore—one or two scenes are a bit grisly, even. But its best moment emerges from the kind of artifice that Hitchcock could have used twenty years earlier and easily passed by censors. As the film’s villain prepares to commit his second murder, taking a victim into a private room, the camera pulls away—I mean pull away, not cut—and takes the viewer slowly down a staircase, knowing what’s happening off camera. Ugh. That’s cold, one might say. The framework is similar to that of Psycho, the more iconic horror-show prototype of a decade earlier. Only 2 or 3 killings are necessary to make a point, to stir fear.

Less is more. Spielberg was influenced by this idea, which is one of the reasons Jaws is scarier than any of its copycats or stupid sequels. Less shown and more imagined pertains to sex also. At the risk of sounding like a conservative boomer, I prefer the cheeky suggestion to the soft-porn display. It’s not quite as suspenseful. At the end of North By Northwest, as Cary Grant saves Eva Marie Saint from the cliff-edge, which then cuts to him pulling her onto the bed in the train cabin wherein they’d first met, which then cuts to a shot of the (presumably) same train entering a tunnel, we get the point. And he’s Cary Grant, whom we like, so we want what will happen next—a happy ending, so to speak. We didn’t always get happy endings in Hitchcock films. The implicitly gay couple in Rope will be tried for murder, we’re led to believe. Norman Bates will be institutionalized, his psychotic affliction with an Oedipal underpinning to be treated by a psychoanalyst, perhaps. Jimmy Stewart is a tragic figure in Vertigo. He loses Madeleine, twice, which punishes the perversity that has been latent within his heroic persona. We don’t know what will happen to the characters of The Birds. Its heroine appears to survive that metaphorical attack from nature. She might bond with the jealous mother of her newfound lover. Unlike one of the birds’ victims, her eyes have not been gouged out. This all seems to remind us of something.

What if it had been different? What if Hitch had been born twenty or so years later. Might he have depicted the birds’ picking meat off the bones of their victims, tearing away flesh with no inhibition? What if he’d visibly shown all five or six or however many knife slashes tore down upon Janet Leigh’s body in Psycho? This is interesting to think about given post-feminist critiques of Hitchcock’s films. The admirer of artistic vision celebrates that tact of giving us a largely aural experience of the famous shower-scene death, coupled with flashes of naked flesh, plus an unrealistically thin streak of blood streaming down a drain. Because that era’s censors blocked all that was graphic, we forgive Hitchcock for the liberties he took with realism. We get that he was doubling down on fantasy, speaking to our fears and secret desires. Had he not hidden himself well with cheeky suggestion, the outcry against his obvious misogyny would have been louder. He might have lost the plot—the plot we want as much as anything—had he not been restrained. Imagine, for example, if his alter-ego leading man from NBW, Cary Grant, had murdered Eva Marie Saint for manipulating him? What if It’s-a-Wonderful-Life-Jimmy Stewart had overcome his vertigo in time to capture Kim Novak (another hoodwinking female) and then beat and/or raped her before she stumbles and falls to her death?

It wouldn’t be as clean. Or would it? Is clean clean because it represses, or does honesty, even brutal honesty, cleanse? A re-boot Vertigo can’t make us innocent. It wouldn’t be a film that we love because it protects us from really knowing something awful and exciting. It wouldn’t be like a dream that both censors and reveals.

** the mystery filmmaker here is Terry Gilliam, speaking of his film, Brazil

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July 5, 2024 · 6:05 am

This is what Eric said

“I was a jerk,” says a patient about an argument with his spouse. He says the conflict was about dishes, and before that about whose turn it was to put the baby to sleep. Later, he reveals layers: he’s been trying to quit alcohol while his wife comes home drunk from a weekly “girls’ night”. He is further disentitled following her discovery of his recurrent porn use on their shared laptop a few weeks earlier. Their sex life has been negligible for nearly a year. They don’t talk about that. They argue about dishes.

In the treatment of compulsive sexual behaviors and their impacts upon loved ones, much attention is paid to the dual habits of pleasure seeking and conflict avoidance. Within the problem of conflict avoidance, an often employed if not directly identified habit is displacement, a defense mechanism first characterized by Sigmund Freud (1913) as that which transfers emotions from one idea to another to allay anxiety in the face of sexual and aggressive impulses. The alcoholic substitutes the bottle for the breast, gratifying an infantile oral impulse while disguising its expression. How does compulsive sex displace sexual instinct or substitute for it? Via perversion, Freud argued. Voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism, Don Juanism: these recurrent, habitual behaviors are all deemed unhealthy to one degree or another, but none is as “deviant” as an original sexual impulse from which the libidinal energy is displaced: incestuous desire.

Modern psychoanalysis does not insist that its unwitting patients engage in problem sexual behaviors because of an unconscious and unresolved Oedipal conflict, however much its adherents may think the theory still has merit. One derivative theory of displacement was popularized by Dr. Patrick Carnes in the treatment of what he terms sex addiction. Carnes (1983) explains that a sex addict holds negative core self-beliefs such as “I can’t trust anyone”, “no one would like me if they knew me”, and “my most important need is sex”. The antecedents of these beliefs are desexualized in Carnes’ model. The sex addict transfers onto ritualized sex his or her needs for companionship, tenderness, understanding, control and self-esteem; hence a rationale for a psychotherapeutic treatment that encourages patients to open up with their uncomfortable feeling states and seek alternative methods of affect regulation versus the “self-soothing” that compulsive sexual behaviors yield.

In diagnostic criteria and assessment protocols, “loss of control” is a sine qua non of substance use disorders and other addictive patterns. Amongst contemporary psychoanalysts who treat addiction, such as Dodes (2003), Director (2005), and Volkan (2021), a compulsive person’s loss of control is deemed paradoxical. The afflicted person seems drawn to experience that also appears to motivate an escape from the same phenomena. The alcoholic, sex addict, or compulsively “acting out” figure seems motivated to control an environment, other people; to seem omnipotent, in denial of “split off” states of vulnerability, of underlying helplessness. The result of their compulsive behavior, plus the indicator of a problem that merits treatment, is the loss of this sought-after control. Scrambling efforts to re-establish control are sometimes observed in extreme reversals, termed reaction formations by Freud (1907). The person with the escalating habit may adopt judgmental attitudes towards those who engage in the same problem behaviors. The impulse towards an opposing position (“I was a jerk”), or self-denial in the aftermath of a compulsive act, lessens the anxiety produced by the problem behavior in the first place.

The term “acting out”, often used by self-identifying sex addicts to denote a range of compulsive behaviors, is also derivative of psychoanalytic theory. Freud (1914) used the term acting out to indicate action that replaces memory, thought and feeling: “what is he acting out? His inhibitions, his attitudes, his pathological character traits”. This is a feature of the subject’s compulsion to repeat, in order to achieve mastery of trauma (via repetition), plus an unconscious desire to restore an original inorganic state (Freud, 1920). Death drive. An inclination towards insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result”—self destructive action or tendency, a recovering addict might translate.

Regarding diagnosis, among the criteria for loss of control is the patient’s experience of “marked distress” related to recurrent behaviors and their impacts upon occupational or educational activity, or social and family functioning. Ley (2024) writes that it’s problematic if criteria for diagnosis is met simply because failure to control intense, sexual impulses or urges elicits distress due to moral incongruence based on religious values. Ley reports that he and others are pleased to see that the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 category of compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD) features an exclusion statement for those whose marked distress is due entirely to moral judgments and disapproval about sexual impulses, urges, or behaviors. So, recurrent sexual behaviors should not be deemed out of control simply because they place someone at odds with religious dogma. But what about moral judgments that are not religious in pedigree, that are based upon a more fashionable Superego? What if, in the course of treatment, a subject is “educated” in a humanistic moral view which states that compulsive sexual behaviors demean and objectify women, or the view that CSBD induces betrayal trauma in impacted partners? If a subject is initially unmoved or unaware of the consequences of their behaviors but later exhibits distress because they’ve been taught that their behaviors harm loved ones and strangers, would they then meet criteria for the CSBD diagnosis? The question and grey area that’s being mined here is whether a person’s distress is externally-sourced and not the result of an internal conflict.

Psychoanalysis holds that assessment of that which is internalized is problematic when ideas are repressed and affects are dissociated. However, just because the subject is unconscious of internal experience doesn’t mean that distress isn’t in the psyche, there to be uncovered in treatment. The subject acts, repeats, instead of remembering, thinking, or feeling, and while Freud was not writing in the context of addiction per se when he conceptualized repetition compulsion, he may have provided with it the most important foundational idea in modern psychology pertaining to addiction. Further, this theory is relevant to treatment of impacted partners of sex addicts/those diagnosed with CSBD. Stephanie Carnes (2008) writes, “you may be questioning how your family background contributed to your choice to be in relationship with an addict. When older, it’s possible that you sought out mates who replicated aspects of your childhood”. In my experience, this kind of speculation is unpopular with some impacted partners, especially those who adopt a fixed, “your problem, not mine” attitude in treatment.

This patient’s idea for their own treatment is a palliative approach designed to offer emotional support and relief of suffering, not interpretations of underlying pathology that may lead to re-enactments of relationship problems. This is “victim-blaming”, assert clinicians who are allied to this position. Often, the result is a muddied clinical picture in which impacted partner patients are educated about complex trauma, which suggests developmental arrests that long predate the discovery of a partner’s compulsive sexual behaviors. Meanwhile, a preferred takeaway from treatment is that of an episodic trauma assessment and related syndrome, derived principally from the discovery-of-sexual behavior event, with long-standing lingering effects. The complexity is assigned to the extension of hyper and hypo arousal reactions to a variety of contexts, including “triggers” that don’t explicitly concern sexual behaviors. This patient feels threatened by any exploration of their pre-discovery, historical traumas, believing alongside their advocates that it will falsely mitigate the responsibility of their sexually compulsive partners.

A notable exception is their recognition of parallels to discovery events and prior clues towards disturbing problems. I find amongst impacted partners a tendency to remember instances in families of origin wherein family problems were denied or rationalized, or else censored from discussion until evidence of problems crossed a threshold—something like a discovery event—that compelled attention to the once ignored problems. These partners speak of “felt” experiences, times they knew something was wrong but didn’t protest, only to then feel betrayed and enraged when they later felt entitled to speak. Discovery of sexually compulsive patterns in their later partners does indeed replicate this history, they observe. One thing they won’t know is how this kind of phenomena was characterized in yet another psychoanalytic theory that has been paraphrased or re-branded by other models of treatment. What Freud called deferred action, or afterwardness as early as 1895, and what French psychoanalysts later called the apres-coup, refers to how sexuality in particular is transmitted in childhood via enigmatic messages, are constructed in fantasies, and are later presented in reality, the sexual-as-translated, which is then disturbing in effect. We don’t speak or even think of what we don’t or didn’t once understand, or that which is forbidden to speak of or think about. We speak about the dishes instead.

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May 28, 2024 · 7:01 am

Wembley Attack

Twas a good weekend in the world of football, my world of football. The FA Cup final took me back in time, though not in any way I’d expected beforehand. It was good. My team, Manchester United, unexpectedly won. They beat their cross-town rival, Manchester City, an erstwhile juggernaut, a force like the one United were twenty years ago. United’s victory redeemed a mediocre season marred by injuries, humiliating last-minute collapses; the disgrace of being one of the world’s most famous sporting franchises, comprised of the most expensively assembled squad of players…and not winning. United’s victory on Saturday—a plucky endeavor forged by emergent youth plus a few stalwart veterans—redeemed somewhat something else from the world of football. More on that later. Firstly, back to that trip in time, to 1977 and a similar scenario. Back then, in the mid-seventies, when football, like everything else, was less complicated, less digital, and somehow less exclusive despite the lack of racial diversity, Liverpool FC were the team to beat. Manchester United were what they are today: a mid-table team, playing inconsistently, but finding a way in cup competitions to a final. The biggest and best (and oldest) was the FA Cup competition. If you know soccer, then you’ll know that the FA Cup is the oldest knockout club competition in the world. It’s a domestic competition, featuring hundreds of clubs from across England, some of which will be amateur, participating in the opening rounds.

May 77’ is the oldest final I remember watching. I knew Liverpool were better than United. I knew they had won the English league a week before the final, and were due to play in the European Cup final in another week against I-don’t-remember who. They had players like Kevin Keegan, a prolific, goal-scoring striker, and Ray Clemence, then the goalie for the England national team. Everyone else on their team was English, too, as these were the days before an influx of foreign players had gained a deserved foothold in English football. United’s team was more diverse in the sense that half of their players were either Irish or Scots, with only Scotland’s national team being on a similar level to that of England. That day, at Wembley stadium, under a hot early summer sun, United’s lesser lights were gritty and opportunistic. They fought for every ball, not allowing Liverpool any space to penetrate United’s half of the field. They counter-attacked, hitting their opponents on the break. A second half goal from Stuart Pearson broke a nil-nil deadlock. A forty thousand-deep army of United fans raucously celebrated. They swayed, revealing the density of a standing-room only crowd. No seats back then, only stands. To the naked eye, it looked dangerous, like you’d be trampled on if you were small and not sturdy. Minutes later, the Pool equalized, and given their superior possession skills, it seemed for a moment as though they would complete their imperial march towards a league and cup double.

Then we (United) broke again, and got a bit of luck. A ball over the top of Liverpool’s defenders reached a United forward, who held the ball up, passing back to a striking partner who unleashed a shot that deflected off a defender and then looped over Ray Clemence’s head, into the back of Liverpool’s goal. 2-1! The upset was back on again. The remaining twenty minutes were nervy, but United held on, and what I recall from afterwards were the images of exhausted yet happy United players, lifting the iconic FA cup, parading it around the perimeter of the pitch after the final whistle, celebrating with their spirited yet generally well-behaved sea of fans. Liverpool were soundly beaten that day, though they went on to complete a double success, defeating some foreign club in the European Cup a week later. That was a great era for English clubs. While England’s national team struggled to even qualify for World Cup competitions, our clubs dominated European football, and again, this was during a period when the clubs were exclusively comprised of British players. Weird. Anyway, a year or so later, I emigrated with my family to the United States where soccer was almost an unknown sport at the time, so I didn’t watch an FA Cup final for at least another decade. In the interim years, English soccer and English soccer fans earned a bad reputation for unruly, drunken, violent behavior. By the nineties, that was largely corrected (it took a pair of 80s disasters to spur changes in stadium seating policies); meanwhile, clubs like Liverpool and especially Manchester United were becoming worldwide brands.

All this is past, prologue, and aftermath to an episode from just three years ago, captured in a Netflix documentary entitled Wembley Attack. The setting was a new Wembley Stadium for the 21st century, still the home of English football: the scene of FA Cup finals, plus international matches, often but not always featuring the England national team. It was chosen as the site of the 2020 Euro Nations Cup, with England competing as the host nation, in a tournament that was delayed a year because of the previous year’s Covid lockdown. The England team that made the final of the 2020 Euro Nations Cup final was better than most England teams of the last fifty years. They had made a final of a major tournament for the first time since 1966 (when they won their only World Cup), and had assembled a young, vibrant, and racially diverse squad of players that would contest a more veteran, journeyman squad from Italy in the final match. We were the favorites, but not by much. Italy has a better pedigree in international football, and while its current generation of talent lacks as many stand-out players, the experience, skill and intelligence of its core group would render them formidable.

But as the title of the documentary suggested, the football, as in the game on the field, was not the story of the delayed 2020 Euro Nations Cup final. The fans were, and not in a good way. As the timeline of the film begins, problems began before final day, with many wanting to buy tickets but failing to do so because of exorbitant ticket prices being bid for and sold over the internet. People who were desperate to attend the final, who had never known in their lifetimes an England team that had made a final, made plans to travel to London, to descend upon the area around Wembley Stadium prior to the match; to party until game-time, and then infiltrate the stadium by any means necessary. It was a disaster waiting to happen, as thousands of fans, mostly male, loitered about, taking selfies, drinking, wheezing, dancing in the streets, hopping above buses—obstructing buses. The first half of the film is a record of this massive street party, with footage capturing images of a good time being had by all. That is, until late afternoon, roughly. That’s when fans with tickets started moving towards the stadium, ready to take their seats. They’d have to wade through the mass of fans who were becoming increasingly unruly. At the turnstiles, opportunists would look to skip past a gate and a steward. Others were pushing over fences, running over security guards. Behind the scenes, heads of security were monitoring the crowd through closed circuit TVs, devising stratagems to keep out the miscreants.

They lost that battle, the head of police later said. There were simply too many people gathered, overwhelming the sparse security forces. Extra police were summoned, mostly to contain a large crowd that were kept outside while the match transpired. The game started mid-evening, with some fans, dignitaries like Prince William, plus other VIPs, seemingly unaware of the violent scenes in and around the stadium. I was watching it on TV from California and had no idea what was going on away from the match itself. Watching the documentary, I was aghast. Was I shocked? Not in one sense. English hooligans misbehaving at soccer matches is a worldwide, fifty-year old trope. No, what was shocking was that I didn’t know it was happening. There were fights going on all over the place. People were vandalizing, spraying beer around, turning over vehicles. Fans were running down stadium aisles like it was a cattle-run. It was chaos. Not knowing that this occurred is like living through the 2020 Presidential election and not knowing that January sixth happened. About a hundred people were injured, some police, others were fans, or whatever else you call the people who behaved this way. No one was killed, which given the violence captured by the cameras, was a blessed miracle.

England lost the football match, which might have spelled trouble in the form of more violence but for more commonplace reactions to defeat. The chief of police had called it, watching the tense penalty shoot-out that decided the match in the Italians’ favor. As 19 year old Bukayo Saka missed his fateful kick, signifying England’s defeat, the throngs of fans plus hooligans, both inside and waiting outside the stadium, plunged heads in hands, gazed haplessly, and within minutes, turned and walked away, wholly subdued. Had the final been on foreign soil, many of those fans would have rioted further. Not this time. The police chief breathed an ironic sigh of relief. As an Englishman, he will have wanted as much as anyone for England to win. But he also knew that an elated crowd, a largely drunken crowd, would have been more dangerous. They were already lucky to have avoided fatalities. England losing was the best result for the safety of all.

But there was more to the story. Saka was one of three England players—unfortunately all black– that were pilloried on social media for having missed their kicks during the shoot out. A mural of Marcus Rashford, a Man Utd player who is also celebrated for his social activism, was defaced in Manchester. The racist invective directed at him and the other black players was indeed despicable, and yet not as despicable as a sequence in the documentary that featured interviews with two of the hooligan fans who had attended the event and either rioted outside or infiltrated the stadium without tickets. It’s to their credit that they offered their points of view, from the backdrop of wanting to attend the match but feeling priced out, to their participant/witness accounts of the violence that built up over the hours that day. However, their rationalizations for having behaved so irresponsibly, followed by an audacious critique of the racist messages directed at some players, were frankly sickening: a crapulent belch of proto-thought from the dregs of British society. Their actions contributed to the injury of around a hundred people, and terrorized countless others. I just could not believe it when one of these idiots, whose IQ could likely not be charted and whom I would not trust to sit properly on a toilet, had the nerve to tell racist sore losers to “grow up”. Correct message. Wrong person delivering it.

I’ve been in a daze, in denial that some things haven’t changed much. I’ve been a long-distance fan of English football/soccer for a long time, and will be for as long as I’m alive. I still love its spirited atmosphere, its raucous energy, David v. Goliath moments; the aftermaths wherein goodwill and sportsmanship generally prevail. But an ugly side of its culture still exists, leaving a sour taste, plus some manner of hangover.

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April 28, 2024 · 7:17 am

Squirt out the good stuff

Last night I had a dream, and in this dream the world was thousands of years older, yet everything was the same. Well, not everything. I mean, the world looked familiar: there were streets, buildings and infrastructure that looked like that of our present day. There was electricity in the form of traffic lights, in vehicles that were like cars though not quite—more like jeeps—and various devices or fixtures that will have needed electricity in order to function. I’m not sure what other resources were being used: maybe gas, solar. Anyway, that covered the man-made stuff. Nature looked more or less the same. There were trees and green hills spotted about, and a hint of sea on a horizon. The sky was blue and without haze and the sun was out, suggesting a generally healthy outdoors. I didn’t see any animals, but this was an urban scene with a wilderness backgrounded, so perhaps there were critters in hiding; predators elsewhere, dogs and cats crawling after scraps, etc. Who knows what era this truly was because I’m told dreams are timeless. They represent what we think and feel, not what we know in a rational sense. They tell us who we are now.

Who were we in this dream? I mean, that’s when it got weird, for it was the people who made everything seem like we’d gone back to some kind of beginning. I was wandering through a throng that was gathered in a square before a stately edifice. It was an outdoor gathering, a conference of chatter and debate, informally arranged and proceeding inchoately. There was no structure, no one obviously in charge. That was in dispute, it seemed, as there was no hierarchy, no system of leadership or government presiding over the event—just a commotion of voices. They spoke English, the men and women who were there. The language I heard reflected me, where I come from, plus what age I feel sometimes. The people in the dream were articulate, but only just so, lacking adult syntax or vocabulary when they spoke to one another, seeming like children in a playground. What were they talking about? Hard to say, for I was capturing words and thoughts piecemeal, yet piecing together motifs from passing exchanges.

One couple, a man and a woman, seemed to be discussing ethics, or maybe style. That was the theme, gleaned from the words that surrounded an unidentified subject. That subject might have been sex. Or, that might have been me assigning that theme to whatever subject was actually being discussed. I’m told that’s timeless also, sex. The reason I thought they were talking about sex was because of my stereotypes and gutter imagination: the man was talking of speed and efficiency. The woman: it was all about patience, slowing down, being methodical. Talk about timeless. She acted like they had all the time in the world. The man bristled. There were things to do, priorities to be set. We didn’t have time, he insisted, to waste. Not any longer. But history will judge us harshly, the woman rebutted, if we don’t apply caution, develop something like—and here her words let her down—something like a method for getting together and doing stuff. There are things like…she meant preambles and mission statements. We need ways (she meant strategies) of going about deciding, like, how to be. She was using her hands, trying to move the air, to make something like an idea happen and stick.

This wasn’t about basic needs. I’m recalling my twentieth century now, my Abraham Maslow recall. Everyone gathered was holding either glasses or plates, eating snacks or drinking recreational libations. This society had plenty food and drink. Also, everyone seemed well-dressed, groomed, clean and hygienic. Again, looking around, it seemed as though this world’s physical demands had been managed. Much doing had occurred. Compulsion had wrought success. It was the internal that was missing. Obsession, as in that which breeds contemplation, or contrarily, delay, was invisible at least. But it was being called for, apparently. The man’s vernacular was no more impressive or organized at first. He mimicked action, that omanota—something. Squirt. Jab. Cling. The first word was about the intoxicants that were on offer, plus an expression the man seemed proud of—“you gotta squirt out the good stuff”—as if he thought he was capturing the essence of life in his turn of phrase. I gleaned from his last syllable, cling, that he was also speaking of property. Somebody had to own this stuff all around them, he seemed to be saying. There needs to be a way to divvy it up, and from that, determine where we go from there. The woman disagreed, said everyone had been fine so far without deciding upon who owns what. We all own it, she declared, gesturing around her.

Heads perked up at the invoking of a once heralded concept: the we. It was being replaced by the I, some were saying. The I(s) were having it, gaining popularity, that is. They wanted things. They…they just wanted, period. And they wanted now, whatever they were wanting. Time mattered all of sudden. Time is short. However long these people had been around, they’d noticed that it wasn’t long enough, this time thing. From that point, I inferred that death existed in this world. It wasn’t so new that no one had known mortality, and loss. Indeed, from another discussion, sort of adjacent to the first one, that death and the manner of death, and beyond that, what we do about the dead was a source of great anxiety. There was even an air of guilt about, as if someone, or quite a few people, had been doing something they shouldn’t be doing.

Shoulds. It was as if they hadn’t thought of this before, this idea of how to behave and how not to. It was as if behavior had never been regulated before, as if right and wrong didn’t exist. And given what the woman had been saying, or implying, perhaps they hadn’t needed to think in such terms. The world, this world, might have been an oyster so far. It had seemed to not have limits, and therefore no one was at risk, or dependent upon one another. There was fruit on the trees for everyone, and none of it was forbidden. That concept—the forbidden—didn’t seem to exist either. Or, it didn’t yet. Suddenly, I had a feeling that I’d traveled to a moment in time when not just morality, but reflective thought, was in its infancy. Confused expressions abounded. About me there was a sense of pain that was dimly felt in bodies but was otherwise located, and emerging. They didn’t know what to call it, this thing. No one had conceived of a mind, only a body, but they knew that it was a problem, this new feeling from somewhere. The man from the first debate stepped up to a raised platform before the edifice. He coughed and then raised his voice to the gathered masses. Then he began a speech that referenced some leaflets and an overlooking billboard that would soon reveal revolutionary thoughts. We must develop groups that come together and reproduce from within, the man announced, now sounding regal and eloquent. He issued a strange decree: From groups, individuals from within a group can collect goods and property, and trade with other groups, but pass on property only to those within its own group.

It was time for a new society, the man was saying. Until now we have been a fit collective, sharing what was abundant and therefore not stirring our fears of what unknown lay beyond the horizon or above the sky. But goods are limited, we are realizing. Property is limited. This world we live in: we see its horizon, but now we know it has an end. He continued in a respectful voice: unlike his worthy female peer, he believed that rationing of goods equally between people was not the answer. That would work in the short-term only, when there was famine, perhaps. I was impressed. It was as if someone had grown in a moment, found a voice and taken an evolutionary step. The statesmanship forged his climactic thesis: we must craft a world wherein competition and vigor create opportunity and growth. Some will lose in this plan, but those who remain will prosper, and our offspring will be an improvement upon us as a result. His tone darkened, for he next spoke to the urban legend that had caused the gathering in the first place. We must avoid the calamity that has befallen our friends from elsewhere. We must not allow our supplies to get so low that we stoop to levels wherein we turn to each other for our basic needs. We cannot eat one another ever again! We cannot have relations with those who birthed us. The results, as we have seen or felt, are ugly. It is a horror to us, we have discovered. A moment of silence followed before the man raised an arm and gestured to the billboard, whose tarp-like cover was now withdrawn. I looked up to regard an advertisers invention familiar to the world from which my mind had traveled. With a marketing panache at home in any era, its message read, “Just say no to Incest”.

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March 27, 2024 · 5:15 am

Jonny Reasonable

Hi, I’m Jonny—Jonny Reasonable. Not my real name, of course. In print, it’s my pseudonym. On the streets, amongst friends, it’s my handle, moniker. Ya know, a nickname. It’s necessary cuz I’m a criminal. At least, that’s what the state thinks of me. Me, I prefer a less judgmental label. See, I identify as legally diverse.

Relax, that’s a joke. You can relax around me because of the second reason I’m called Jonny Reasonable. It’s that I am reasonable. Seriously, though I won’t tell you what I get up to day-to-day, I’ll say what I’m like and what you’d likely think if you had to deal with me. Firstly, I don’t yell. I never yell, at least not in front of others. It’s vulgar. Immediately puts you on the back foot, cast as the villain. Comes under the heading of abuse, you see. Yell and the neighbors can hear you. You’re in the wrong from the get go. Yell and your adversary can easily say that you’re yelling and use that as a pretext for not listening. Actually, they might try that tact anyway, even suggesting that you’re yelling when you’re not. Anyway, it’s lesson one: stay calm, don’t raise your voice. It’s unnecessary.

Necessary for what? For appearing reasonable, of course. That’s what this is about, appearing reasonable. Don’t worry so much about what’s true, or right, or just. That’s for later, or not at all in some instances. Next, the language. This is about aesthetics, the semblance of reason. Practice verbosity. That is, learn the buzzwords of a subject, the phrases that kill the clock, filibuster through an argument. Be it business or personal, use words like “boundaries”, and “space” to indicate you honor autonomy, will not impinge on anyone’s rights. This is crucial if what you intend is to, ya know, violate people’s rights. I know. Isn’t my turn of phrase cute? Doesn’t it seem reticent, discreet, as if I know that words might hurt if I don’t use them properly? Speaking of phrases, there are a few phrases that don’t mean much, except one or two that suggest other meanings, and they’re useful as thought appendages that make you look, well, reasonable.

I mean terms and phrases like “per se”, or “so to speak”, or my favorite, “as it were”. I’m not sure what the last one means. I think it’s about playing, as in a play upon words. Regardless, it’ll make you sound smart, charming, or mischievous, but not sinister. Not wrong. That’s the point. If wrongness is a prospect, prepare to cheat. Preface an assertion with “naturally”, or “obviously”, to set the bias. Even if your pronouncement is anything but natural or obvious, you can make it seem so just by how you carry the idea. Practice these tricks a lot or at length and it’ll pay dividends—mark my words. Relax with your words, let yourself play, and let your partner, co-worker, whatever—your adversary—flounder with theirs, especially if it’s vernacular, or—and here’s a no-no: profanity. Or, check that. Use profanity, but not in anger. Not in attack. Use it with a smile, as a bonding gesture, or as something that punctuates a thought but deflates pomposity. Try it. It works. It fuckin’ works!

Now, about touch. This one’s touchy, as we’re in a no-touch world, a hands-off era. A gentle hand on a wrist works sometimes to settle nerves, or a hand on a knee if you and someone are seated next to each other. If you’re standing and you step close, then loom softly, gliding your hands upon the arms of the other, just above the elbow. And be prepared to pull away quickly, even briskly, as that suggests the touchiness of the person you’re in an argument with—it makes them look overly sensitive, unreasonable. Plus, you look like their potential victim. Don’t raise your hands. That signifies assault. The same with gesticulation, as in don’t do it. Makes you look out of control, overly emotional. That’s the thing about reason: it’s about being less emotional, more thoughtful.

Of course it won’t improve intimacy, this strategy. Not intimacy as some talk about it anyway. This is about advantages, not closeness. Being reasonable, so reasonable, will gather enemies. You will annoy people, some of whom will call bullshit on your tactics, make a fuss in public. But they’ll be the ones working harder as the onlookers approach and encircle the scene. The onlookers are more likely to side with you because that’s what happens when neutral opinion steps in and testimonies are called for; when the gavel later strikes. Don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s no advantage to me that you know my tricks. No loss either, perhaps. You don’t know me. I’m just Jonny Reasonable, and I know how to win an argument. It beats feeling like a criminal.

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