Nevermind Just "What do Women Want" 

but 

What Do We Want in the Last Quarter

COVID-19 has us, as they say, Locked Down. In our homes! Alone or with family. Down to basics? I suppose for some but not for all. Still, most of us have slowed down. There's a scene in the 1950's Thousand Clowns, just as the movie opens. As I recall, Jason Robards is looking down from a very high window or maybe it's the moderator, himself, panning Wall Street with throngs of bug-small people moving about going somewhere. The plot wonders if maybe they're going nowhere. Perhaps, today, we'd call it a Gyph! A graphic trope! Matters little but it goes along with the plot-line centered on a man who is coming against a burgeoning society that was beginning to move in the direction of these earliest -- but pre-COVID -- months of the 21st Century. Madness! Entropic energy! We worry about the parents who bury their kids in music and math and dance and karate and baseball and ... and a neverending and unfolding of hustles and bustles competing only with the TV Adverts that move at five times 78rpm, betimes so quickly that one begins before the previous one has ended.

In my good COVID moments, I think of these seven weeks in the way 19th C. Sampson Raphael Hirsch thought of the practice of restfulness ... of sabbath. He reasoned that the biblical prescription for a day of rest helped humanity recognize that, in spite of their aspirations for greatness and creativity and a Porsche in the driveway, we members of Clan Anthropos are creations, just like the dog under the dining room table and the slug in the garden. We pretend to create. Judy Collins, the Kohelles-like chanteuse of a generation, sang: "Everything comes and goes/Marked by lovers and styles of clothes!" So, too, after some 50 years of labor and writing and building, I get my months -- funny they should come in the Last Quarter -- of reminders that, in some sense, we and I spend our time pretty much just moving one pile into an apparently neater one.

Still, even if we're doing nothing more than being born, rearranging some furniture and dying, we have some good times. We Eat and we Dance and we Sing and we Make Love and some of us choose to reproduce and raise our spawn "in their Good Times and in their Bad." And lest anyone reading this seeks to have me sent off for a Rest Cure for some Deep Depression, let me say that I've had a very Good Ride with lots of fun and occasions for both sadness in saying goodbye and some pretty whacky glee in times that I've been able to play with my fellow travelers. No way I'd choose not to have been born or to live a shorter life. I say: Bring me More of the Same!

Good enough. So, what do I want from this Last Quarter and however much Overtime I get to have. The Biblical character Jacob asked for "some clothing to wear and bread to eat!" In his last hurrah, standing before Egypt's Pharaoh, he whine: I'm an Old Man and my Days have been Just Awful. In the scriptural readings in my Faith Tradition, I always like getting to Chapters 48-50 in Genesis. It means, frankly, that I don't have to read any more, this year, about poor Old Jacob and his self-absorbed misery. Miserable people are, well ... miserable. 

There is essentially one and, perhaps, only thing about which Dennis Prager -- he is a Conservative Trump-and Fracking Supporting thinker who also is a Happiness Speaker -- and I agree (my Sister suggested I listen to Prager on Happiness): 'expressions of happiness are a gift we give and a debt we pay to others. Withholding it is nasty.' I don't think it's something, by the way, that we owe others every moment ... but often. Indeed, one of the greatest gifts I receive is when one of my near and dear or even an actor on stage shares their deep sadness with me. Sadness is not Depression (unless you're Big Pharma selling pills). Depression, like Anger, pushes people away. Sadness welcomes people to come near and hold. And so does Happiness. And Sadness is not Unhappiness and can often commingle with Happiness. I am, let me digress, quite sad that a dear old friend is dying and M and I cannot visit her during COVID. Still, I am quite Happy to hear her on the phone playing cards with her 24 year old grand-daughter who came to help Grandma and Grandpa when Grandma was diagnosed last year. Maybe those are Wedding Tears ... tears of joy. One sees the Bride and Groom celebrating Future and, like Proust, we're sad that we cannot quite ever again experience that transcendent feeling of a Big Sky Future.

So, in my extended Months of Sabbath, I hope for some joys, too, but something else, as well. Interesting how our News Programs often end with this other shared sentiment. I'm referring to Kindness. I'm not certain exactly what Kindness is but as a Justice once said about Pornography: "I know it when I see it." Show me two people interacting with each other and I'll tell you whether there's Kindness, in the mix.

We're not born Kind; we're born Needy. "His Majesty the Baby" (Freud's 1914 way of noting the demanding neediness of the infant and baby) has Needs and Others either fulfill those Needs or FAILS to do so. Somewhere in the first three years, the child begins to realize that Others are not only different than s/he but also very similar. They, too, have Needs. Until that moment, Others are mostly like Chess Pieces manipulated on a Board to the end of satisfying some Pleasure or Need. They have no Subjectivity as Subjects have their own Needs and Wishes and Motivations.

That Moment when the Child recognizes that it's possible to be motivated-to-action by others' needs or wishes moves the child from a narcissistically-hedonistic state of being into one where it is sometimes possible to be motivated to act due to the wishes of this Special Other ... Parent? Sibling? Child? Friend or Homeless Person. The Hairy Little Caterpillar becomes a Butterfly, a being that not only hides itself protectively with its patterned wings but brings Beauty to some Others. The Butterfly's beauty is truly only apparent in the eyes of those who can behold and reflect on what they see. 

I don't know what Kindness is but it is nonetheless what I think I most crave Playing in the Last Quarter. But of some things I feel certain:

• Kindness is about sharing one's beautiful wings with another;
• Kindness is about being motivated to make others Joyful;
• Kindness is about not raining on Others' parades;
• Kindness is not Greedy but seeks to Share; and
• Kindness IS the the stuff that Bonds us Electrons, together in these teaming madness that we think of as life.

Just Another Day in COVID-City

I'm not among those suffering. I am one of those lucky 70+'ers whose likely to be hunkered down for the Summer but I can work from home and we have access to enough victuals to carry us through.

I'm not among those suffering alone ... No Eleanor Rigby, here. I have a partner and a dog ... M for a very long time (some friends wonder if M's suffering being with me?) and Maisie for a couple of years, now. I'd like to think that I rescued M from her Mother in 1965 and Maisie from being euthanized in some W. Virginia Dog Shelter. I think of myself as a decent sort, as old Professor Higgins opined on himself, "an ordinary man ..."

I just read a piece from a psychiatric colleague who noted that our Elected President seems to place no value in the expertise or the health of Medical Staff. I suppose Trump only admires those who don't get caught by the virus and thinks of those who do as weak as Sen. McCain.

His writing certainly hit home. It fascinates me to watch how each segment of the population in an autocratic state becomes targeted due to some narcissistically pragmatic need of the would-be-Despot. Indeed, this administration has shown no respect for any expertise ... nor for any extant structures or organization that predates his rule ... not for the generals, not the heroic soldiers, not the Goldstar parents, not the economists, not the House, not the Meat-Packing workers, not the Judiciary, the Senate, NATO or WHO and now neither OSHA, CDC or ...  quelle surprise! ... the Healthcare World. It brought to mind the prose of a German Post-War cleric who famously wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

I tried for many years to write about the administration. I started a FB Group named Free Citizen Therapists more than three years ago to provide a forum for therapists to discuss the need to balance the rights of public figures to their private lives (The Goldwater Rule) with the rights that the electorate has to expect the Mental Health Community to clue them in on when a leader was dangerous ... and dangerous in a way that threatened people. I joined other therapists in writing a book on The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. And while I think those writings may have helped get the word out, it has become rather unavoidable to at least consider that there's nothing more to do with this storm except ride it out.

For the moment ... at least at this moment on the last day of April 2020 ... I've given up. I have little doubt that I will be re-energized sometime soon but, today, I feel helpless to do anything to help the Doctors, Nurses, CNA's and Staff of the Hospitals to stay safe in Trump's America. I don't know what to do for the Meat Packers who are being threatened with intentionally induced poverty (no job? no unemployment, either) if they don't join the active troops in Gen. Trump's Wartime Army, conscripted to Kill or Outlive COVID (TWACKOC).

So, if y'ever wanna find me, I'm here gettin' old and puttin' on the COVID-15 ... those 15 pounds that most of us are gleaning from grazing like the cows and bulls being slaughtered, today, wish they were doing. I'm doing my work and having a snack. Then a little more and another snack, maybe some lunch. I call it the COVID Bovine Diet.

I have nothing really to complain about and, as Thomas Merton wrote some 60 years ago:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself.

This much I know: I've lost a step here and there ... but I'm OK.

DON'T ASK FOR WHOM THE MICROWAVE DINGS; IT DINGS FOR THEE ... & ME!

I saw the skinny black cat, this morning. I don't know it's name but it's the very same cat that struts in front of the french doors in the dining room driving Maisie the Pooch to bark and to do so as if she were tough as "a junkyard dog." My mind, though, didn't turn to the dog but immediately to the street cats of Brooklyn in the early 1950's. Skinny cats waiting for Wednesday -- or was it Thursday -- when the horse-drawn fishcart would ride up W. 5th Street, stopping to disembowel fish for waiting housewives of the Post-War era.

I don't know what to call the Coney Island that I remember -- not the Coney of rides and sideshows and hotdogs that I wasn't permitted to eat but -- the neighborhood peopled with Mr. Goldman the Plumber, Schneider the Painter, the Johnsons and Engles, Perry's bald Dad, Sam, who drove a hack, Stevie's Dad who worked for the NY Subway System and the holocaust survivors next door. 

Coney Island was the neighborhood I was born into -- no choice, there. I was the fourth kid and the only one born after Dad came home pretty angry from Korea. We lived upstairs from Mom's parents, he was a clergyman with a following and a pretty-open-door policy to the poor and scholars, alike;  Grandma cooked and baked and interpreted dreams from a 15th C. dreambook that my brother later would translate.

So, why was I remembering those cats and not the half-dozen furry quadrupedal friends who have agreed to live with M and I during the past 55 years. We have no cat, now, just Maisie the Pooch. Can't rightly say "why." Still, my next thought was of the isolation that I remember first experiencing downstairs in my Grandfather's Waiting-Room/Living-Room/Office where he would greet his visitors and where he would teach me the biblical stories and wisdom of our people. It was a daily thing, learning with him while my older Sibs would be off in school and Mom would be upstairs. I can't say that I know what Mom was doing. The war had been tough for her. Not only was her husband not there to help tend to the three kids born before and during WW2 and not there, now, but off in a factory printing table-cloths and wall paper. More than that, Mom had lost dozens of people in her native Hungary which she had left in the early 1920's. Mom did a lot of sketching. She'd wanted to be an artist -- I'd say that she was -- but Cooper Union wasn't in the cards for the daughter of Rabbi Adolph Klein.

It was in Grandpa's room that I first remember feeling deep sadness. I wrote about that experience in 1998 (1998/2016-Oedipal Paradigms in Collision):

As a child, two to six years of age, I daily visited an aged and bearded scholar whose self-appointed task it was to instruct me in the reading, writing and lore of my forebears. This grandfather of mine would sit at his desk; I would stand at his knee, trying to steal glimpses of the surface of his desk, of the pens, of the books — with their pages crumbling and browned — that laid upon this surface. I felt bathed in a warmth that I cannot articulate. He frequently would say that learning should be sweet; so it was. He seemed to possess the ages, to be one with the past. Perchance, it can be said that the Old have no present or future in the eyes of the Young, only a past. For two hours each day, he would recite stories told to him by his mentors. These stories from the ancient Writ and, possibly, the voice of the old man telling them had the tone and feeling of lullabies that might attend a child being lulled to sleep at mother’s breast, a warm and quiet symbiosis.

Occasionally, a visitor would knock at his door. At times, it was one of his adherents coming for spiritual counseling or advice. Sometimes it was another bearded and precisely-speaking old man, while, at still other times, it was a poor person coming for their dose of warmth and a cup of tea. The scholar would get up responding to this knock on the door, welcome this stranger and appear to thoroughly forget the young fellow not quite tall enough to reach the desk. I was not introduced to the visitor; try as I might to break into these conversations between the old man and his guest, it was not to be. After the interloper left, the grandfather would gather-up his grandson from behind a certain chair in the corner of the room and would proceed with the lesson. My earliest recollections of questions surrounding existence and non-existence, attachment and terror, seem to emanate from behind that chair. These concerns must, in actuality, be more ancient still but the older memories are no more. There was, or so my memory would have it, no doubt in my mind that this man loved me, and yet it was equally obvious to me that the flow of this love ceased in the presence of another. 

The lone cat? Me in Coney Island, I suppose. I'm waiting for the big kids and my Father to come home from wherever big people go so I can go upstairs, away from Grandma's cooking and baking and into Mom's kitchen for quiet nights in the years before television came to our home. Maybe? Feels right that the lone cat and my loneliness as a child are connected somewhere in my psyche.

Corona! Corona! It's been 6 full weeks of M and I and Maisie in the house. We stay in except for a few airings ... drives to nowhere. I remember a bridge in Niagara Falls, Canada. It goes half way into the river just above the Falls ... and stops. Corona, Corona! We're doing OK. We're not among the sufferers. We're comfortable at home ... warm ... well-fed. I get to see the people who before 6 weeks ago would visit my psychoanalytic office. Patients and Supervisees. Nice people. Good people. I see them on a video platform. A name appears in my virtual waiting room and, at the time of our appointment, I welcome them in. I until 6 weeks ago spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the offices I share with my daughter in town. I suppose the plants are all dead there, now. "Where have all the Flowers gone?"

At least one night each week, I attend a Support Group for therapists. I feel angry, there, but don't blow up at my colleagues. I tell them that I am not particularly interested in discussions of Technology or theoretical presentations on patients' traumas. "I've come here to talk about OUR traumas ... People ... Patients ... Psychotherapists." "Our" is the key word. COVID has demonstrated to us how similar we are. COVID isn't a very discerning bloke: He'll kill you or your Mother. Makes no difference to COVID ... though he does seem to have his eyes focused on people over 70 and the vulnerable.

He reminds me of all the despots who see no subjectivity in another. Despots are not racist or agist or sexist. There's them and their adoring sycophants and there's everybody else. Oh, yes, they use race or religion or gender, as it suits their need to split the country into With'me and Agin'me. But they're really so psychically primitive as to have no other alliances ... no tribes to which they belong. They are, that is to say, pre-racist ... pre-Tribal ... pre-Sexual, for that matter ... lost in a sadistic form of Narcissism that knows only Me and Not Me.  I've been living in Trump's Amerika for 3 years ... or is it closer to five years if one considers the Sermon on the Escalator, the one that was satisfied demeaning Hispanics and demonizing the Chinese. Five years of listening to a Little Rich-Boy-who- Would-Be-Emperor. I got really scared when he told an interviewer, after the Khan incident, that he sacrificed a lot by giving thousands of people jobs. What horrified me, you might ask. I suppose it was the idea that someone who thought that paying someone for a day's work, as the Bible demands, was not an exchange ... good labor for good pay ... but a gift that Pharaoh gives to Slaves. Could Amerika fall into this hole? I thought not until election night.

I feel no small amount of shame for not realizing that important constituent parts of our Democracy could well be destroyed by on "Stable Genius" and his minions. Who would've guessed that a McConnell or a Barr would sign on to such an agenda? They were Amerikans. Maybe I disagreed with them but they couldn't possibly -- or so, I thought -- sell the Country that gave my family citizenship Down the River. Who would've thunk it?

M and I, two over-70-year olds, feel hot rage about the administration. M mutters at the TV; I do, too. I find myself writing nasty polemics about the President. I'll close with one:

The Butcher of Queens 

(54,000 deaths into Git-on with Armageddonald)

We're on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Driving at a petty good clip.

The Driver knows the destination

He's told us where he was going all along.

We keep not listening well-enough

And we keep forgetting.

We're driving on the BQE

While people are dying in droves at St. Elizabeth's.

The Driver told us all along.

From the beginning.

He told us where he was headed.

Hearing Aids aren't covered by Medicare.

The Driver told us

That giving people jobs

Was a sacrifice.

He told us, too, that

"Soldiers who get captured?

They're fools.

I am America.

America is First."

We're driving on the BQ Expressway.

The Blaupunkt brings us Jared's voice.

"Nothing is yours anymore.

Nothing is the People's

Not Of. Not by. Not for.

Get your own ventilator!

These are ours, not yours anymore."

We're on the BQE and

We pretend to be surprised.

When the Butcher of Queens is driving

When Aunt Sadie is dying alone

When we're being driven on his BQ Expressway

And we're sitting in the back seat

Together but all alone …

When Jared is singing on the radio

And the Bible thumpers are calling him God.

Hey!

Now is a particularly inopportune time

To begin reflecting or imagining

A Respirator

That's still in China

marked:

Gefahr! Achtung!

PROPERTY OF THE BUTCHER OF QUEENS

Et FILS!

Enough, for today. The Microwave is beeping; musta left something in there.

Trumped

"It's not easy being Green," according to Kermit and getting on in years is not promising to get easier. My younger-than-me wife is turning 70 ... You'go, Girl! We still have one kid in her 40's and none of our Grandkids are talking marriage, yet.

Still, life ain't easy. Came back from my Downtown office (where I spend two half-days each week) on New Years Eve and was exhausted ... functioning in my "Deflated Maus" state of mind. I visit that mindset far more often than I did just several years ago. It's not that I was in pain though I do experience the usual aches of late middle age and the guilt that I never really paid too much attention to my parents' pains when they were in their 70's. We lived 100 miles away from my parents and 300 miles away from M's parents since the early-mid 1970's. Never really appreciated how difficult it must have been for them to travel to us. I suppose I thought ... 'Hey, we've got kids and are really busy ... they've got time to burn.' Ah! The Narcissism of Youth!

We did make it that evening to see friends and three of their Grandkids. The table was beautifully set and at one of the table-ends there were five candles and a picture of a friend who died just a couple of months ago and who would be there, with his wife, every New Years Eve since the 70's when we all ended up in Philadelphia. Alu was a wonderful Soul. Rajanatham was his name but his Western friends had problems with pronouncing 4 syllables. Hard to believe he wouldn't be there. Oh! And my friends. She was just diagnosed this past Summer with one of those cancer diagnoses that don't bode well for a future. I don't know what her three grandkids were thinking ... I can only imagine.

We left not much later than 8 pm, after dinner and headed over briefly to see our oldest and youngest's families. We are blessed to see them frequently ... 4 of 6 of our grandkids were there and two grand-dogs and two grand-cats, too and an inlaw. By the time we got home at 9:30, we were ready for bed and quietly went off to sleep hoping our neighbor's midnight fireworks failed to burn down our home for one more time.

Happy New Year!

It's been a long time ... 5 months or so since I sat to think/write about Playing in the Last Quarter. When I began these notes, I saw some humor in the word "Last" ... a play on maybe Football: "Down by 15 the home team still can pull it out ... it has before ... just two touchdowns, one with a two point conversion!" .... Yeah, yeah.

This Game has an expected -- even if not scheduled -- end. Frankly, the past year has been pretty good in terms of my health. Haven't had an arrhythmia in 11 months ... though my cardiologists ball me out about not being willing to take all the meds I was taking when I was out of Normal Cardiac Sinus Rhythm half the time. They seem to think that I come to hear what I should do, rather than to consult with them on my options. When I asked for where his recommendation was supported in the literature, he told me I could go find it. I suppose I heard: "You can go fuck yourself."

Doctors in the late 20th-early 21st Century are an interesting lot. I was kicked out of one practice for asking for my copay back so that I could go see one of my own patients at the time of their appointment. Even though the Doctor was late for >1.5 hours now for the second time, the receptionist explained that since I wasn't keeping my "appointment," I was not entitled to my copay. I initially pointed out quietly that an appointment was a meeting at an appointed time and I had kept my appointment. She refused. I told her I was from Brooklyn, originally, and would stand on one of the waiting room tables and make a wondrous scene. She gave me my check back and, a week later, my PCP got a note saying that I wasn't welcome in her practice.

Any case, it's not just my health that plays out in the last quarter. Children are aging and I have four grandkids with serious illnesses. My wife who was young in 1965 when we married is no longer young. And I'm an orphan. It's not guaranteed that I outlive the current insanity in Washington, DC ... and that gets to me. My wife's dear friend, Adelaide, who was Emeritus at UPenn had wanted to see the end of der Shrub ... der Kleine Bush. My sweet 88 year old friend used to sign-off on her emails to me: Fuck Bush. Hungarian-Italian celebrating firecracker that she was. Seeing Obama sworn in would have meant the World to her. Seeing Sen. Klobuchar's inauguration would mean that to me, too.

All this? Still ... What a blessing to be given the opportunity to paint on my own canvas ... even if the canvas has been of unknown proportions ... Who could not have gratitude for having lived?

Piece in Progress ... Wish it were Peace in Progress

Do Labels Matter? Bullies or Sociopaths … 

While thinking of Sen. McCain

When work on the Wall was halted, the Giza                                                                      
Pyramids, China's Great Wall and the                                                     
supports for Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging                                                             
Gardens all shook. Some of the citizenry                                                              
were shocked that the Greatest American                                                      
since FDR hadn't lived to see it completed                                                      
and they gathered together hither and yon to                                                      
call out:

Long Live the King! Long Live the King!

Alas! The Wall around Graceland never was completed. 

Kidding, of course —which may be the best I can do, today, as I attempt to discern whether I and we are living through a tragic-comedy or rather a comic-tragedy —may not be fully fitting the gravity of our present situation moving towards the 2018 midterms and the 2020 Presidential elections. Sorry. Best I can do! I don't know that a day will ever come when a great wall will be built guarding the United States from Mexico but, in any case, I have been fated to live out the Last Quarter of My Life ... in the years before any such Wall was to be a fait accompli ...

I am, however and for the moment, thinking of an earlier Quarter of my own life, one well before Halftime when I was for a couple of years tasked with leading an inner city high school for adolescents designated by the state as Socially and Emotionally Maladjusted (SEM), the descriptor-language of the 1970’s Education community for a broad array of adolescents.  Among our students were emotionally disturbed ones, delinquent kids, and learning disabled students. I was asked not to use the passé: Socially and Emotionally Disturbed (SED … which had gone out-of-favor) and was ordered, indeed, to call the school a Service Delivery System. As suggested in the title: Language seems to matter.  Anyhow, some of the kids were “pure forms,” I suppose, but most were mix-labeled ...  what you call something or someone, I repeat, apparently  matters a great deal.

There was a particular type, though, who my staff and I spoke of as “bullies.” They, I suppose, were not so different than the guys or gals who run roughshod over prison yards ... or maybe they were but wannabes.  These students were dismissive of all others and showed no obvious concern for how those others who came under their domination might feel. The bullies split their world into those who were with them, those who were against them and those who were so passive as to be almost invisible. Animals similarly and under the sway of their biologically prescribed instincts, recognize prey, predator and kin. We all have some of that splitting of our others into categories. These folk, though, were/are quite unstable in their divisions and stark in any demarcations they may define between them.  There was no wiggle-room in these adolescents for someone to not unilaterally support them: any shift in allegiance moved someone from kin to emotional predator and immediately, thereafter, to prey status. 

I should say that Narcissism is, too, present in us all. When on a dark and clear night, we look up at the stars, we find it difficult to recognize our sheer  unimportance in even our little Milky Way with its billions of stars and planets. We write poetry about the Heavens in order to make it our own, we name it by its sections or we boundary it with studies in Astronomy. Who could find sleep knowing just how insignificant we are to the Cosmos? 

Even those of us who are not caught up in paranoiac delusions look for evidence that everyday slights are intentionally present to cause us distress. "God is testing me," as if She wasn't busy tending to her other Earthly flock and the other sheep on distant Planets! All this is to say that we all, indeed, suffer from Splitting and Narcissistic vulnerability — to a greater or lesser extent.

These bullying types went further, though. They had no respect for legalities and none for the rules of the school which were — within limits — regulated by community meetings run democratically by Faculty, Students and Staff, functioning as a single judicial/legislative group. These students would snicker and smirk at any mention of regulations, as if they not only didn’t apply to them but were just plain silly and either refuse to attend or else ignore the proceedings while in progress. There was no recognition that laws and rules are put in place so that others, the members of a given polity could feel secure in their day by day activities … no sense that these others require security, just as they do, in responding to their own vulnerabilities by becoming bullies. For them, after all, 'what difference could it possibly make to these Objects who are available to me to be arranged and manipulated?' 

During these same years, I was invited by a Tough Love parent group to speak to them about their kids. I was about to begin my prepared remarks when one of the parents respectfully but forcefully asked: ‘Before you begin, could you tell us what it means to be civilized?’ Oops, I thought! I had been set up. No theories would still the disappointed passions in this crowd. These parents had been failed by the clinicians treating their kids, were expectedly upset by their kids’ delinquent behavior and, as a psychoanalyst, saw me as an apt and available goat to be roasted on the altar of their resentments. What to do? I could offer them some psycho-gobble-de-gook and tell them that their kids lacked a functional conscience ... I could even call that inner-voice by Freud’s German uber-Ich ... an Over I or Observing I or Superego. But calling something by name doesn’t define it; it labels it and maybe that’s what I’m trying to get at in these rambling thoughts. Maybe? it matters what something is at least as much as what we call it!

I found myself opining out loud, that night: ‘being civilized is the ability to stop at a red light in Rindge, NH, population 75, at 2 AM with full half-mile visibility in both directions.’ The crowd was quiet and the public hanging that I had feared was — at least temporarily — stayed. I went on to explain that Rules and Regs were not in place because they made rational sense but for other reasons. One parent, in agreement, then noted that she couldn’t fault her son’s logic and she agreed with him that it made no sense to make his bed every morning. Another couldn’t disagree, either, with her kid's repetitive claim that Alcohol was more dangerous than Pot. Her family home had, however, been ransacked by the Police using a duly executed search warrant looking for her son’s stash.   “Who’s fault was that?!” I suggested that we return to the example of the NH red light. We, as drivers and pedestrians, don’t want to suffer in what manner every driver is deciding for themselves how to interpret what that signal means, i.e., whether people will stop. Similarly, I reasoned that her Family had an expectation that members wouldn’t put each other at risk of being disturbed by the gendarmes or anyone else because of one family member’s well-reasoned decision that Pot was less dangerous than alcohol and, therefore, SHOULD be legal. Civilization is the recognition that, independent of what one may think, the welfare of other members of the community is a filter through which each of us must pass our planned behaviors prior to acting on it.

So, back to bullies. We already touched on a deficient store of empathy which cascades into both a splitting between with-me and agin’-me and to their sense that the only rules that matter are their rules. We saw how they offer no proffer  to Laws, Governments, or Agreements which have been  formulated or organized by others (current and prior) who are not Subjects in their Own Right but Objects to be manipulated ... pieces on a game board. Objects have no thoughts, no ideas and no relationships with others. "My subjectivity and mine alone has relevance."

There are other consequences, too, that precipitate from this failure to see others as Subjects and not manipulatable objects and some may be advantageous to them. Bullies possess little or no ability to hold two or more not-unreasonable thoughts in mind and do — in part, due to this — think more quickly than most of us — which in the jungle can be a good thing, an advantage in survival.  As creatures of instincts, they don't measure the relative value of different actions. Instincts are efficient. I remember being awakened by the yapping of two little dogs — like Romeos in a courtyard. They were singing to my estrous St. Bernard looking down upon them — a long-eared Juliet —  from an open window. No thought was to be paid by these diminutive courters to feasibility studies — these two little pip-squeaks would've required stilts to mount this Grand Dame. Still, their instincts — mediated by their noses — sang a different tune.  Instincts are not about choice but about immediate action; choice and nuance are not efficient, as they are not quick.

The sex-drive in healthy humans is, indeed, different than than the sex-instinct in animals. Freud was quite careful in calling the former triebe and the latter Insinkt; his translators were less careful.   To put it both simply and directly: rapists and other sociopaths are dominated by instinct, while healthy sexuality and other transactions are modulated by concern for the other … for the partner in whatever behaviors are being indulged. Fetishists are somewhere in between. Unlike animals and rapists, they recognize the existence of their sex-partners. But to a greater or lesser extent, fetishists replace the lover with a part, a specific ambience or a melody. It is no mean task to find a cur who requires candle-light or naughty lingerie to mount any available estrous bitch. 

Lastly and an effect of all the above styles-of-being is the absurdity to such bullies in thinking of any truth that goes beyond their own thought in the moment. They quite completely appear, at least, to believe that the only truth is the one they have just now-and-in-the-moment conjured up in their thinking. This applies equally to their ability to dismiss thoughts that occurred to them just moments prior to this expostulation — the only one that counts.

Let me backtrack to the question asked by the struggling Mother at the Tough Love  meeting about what her son lacked that would render him civilized — and, again, I return many decades to personal experiences. I trust the reader will excuse me, accepting the thought that what we members of Clan Anthropos know best is garnered from our experiences.

Woody Allen (“Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind”, Tikkun, Jan/Feb 1990, pp. 13-15) recommended in Tikkun that the editors consider removing any reference to Jewishness from the subtitle of their magazine. He reasoned that all forms of chauvinism lead to adversarialness and … war! I took it to mean that — in his reflections — any allegiances were a danger to life on earth.

I briefly recount the response I gave (which the Editors didn't publish). It occurred to me that there were four but not five positions that defined a civilization.

The least developed among us sees the existence of the other as an intolerable danger and openly seeks the other’s destruction. The other is accorded no subjectivity at all and any thoughts to the contrary by a member of their kin-group is, more or less, interpreted as traitorous and the equivalent of seeking membership in the hated group.

A slightly more developed person might be described by his war-cries: convert or die! The out-group is permitted existence if and only if it gives up its uniqueness and its identity and joins the person's kin-group. The Crusaders — those who marched on the Turks and sundry other infidels along their way giving them the choice to accept Christendom or die — were markedly different than a true-believer Nazi who, under no circumstances, could allow Gypsies, homosexuals, or Jews to enter the Aryan kingdom of heaven. It is not clear where to place the House Un-American Activities Hearings of America’s midcentury but, assuredly, many hate-mongerers and supremacists function on these primitive two levels.

Still more developed folk represent a far more civil manifestation of this sense of chosen-ness. A member of such a group vitiates the value of another’s prayers or political affiliations while paying lip-service to the out-group’s right to indulge their silliness. With this type of functioning, we see varying degrees of effort expended in order to achieve the in-group’s perspective. A kindly missionary functioned in this manner, when in a brief encounter, he — in a variety of ways — noted that I was chosen but misguided and suffering without Jesus from a deadly AIDS-like disease; he had only my best interest at heart and expressed his love for me and bemoaned the misfortunes that would befall me in the Next World.

The fourth and, perhaps, most progressed type of chauvinistic individual attains a primus inter pares (first among equals) view of myself with other. Such a person recognizes that his ideology, his religion, his thoughts and relationships are of great importance to him, in the same manner as his other's are to him. This, we may comfortably add, is quite a reach in itself. Those who progress to this mode of relating — to my way of thinking — have reached the pinnacle of civilized human relationship.

I suspect there are those who imagine that anthropos is capable of transcending even this fourth state and achieving a thoroughly achauvinistic state of being (e.g., Woody Allen); this writer is not among them. And while I don't wish to pigeon-hole some of my fellow travelers or limit them to this or that "basket," I cannot hide my sense that when we speak — as so many do, these days — of hitching a ride on the Wings of Our Better Angels, we are speaking of this capacity to see the other as a Subject in his or her own Right — just like me — a Primus inter Pares swimming about in this big Pot o'Soup that is life in the Twenty First Century.

Let me close with the following brief thoughts:

• What a relief from the burden of acting in a civilized manner it must be to gather about a school-yard bully and watch him act aggressively, wantonly and without the weight of concern for his others.

• What separates Schoolyard Bullies from Sociopathic Leaders is likely little more than age, position and firepower.

• What separates the Dog from the Man includes the capacity to indulge nuance and to measure before acting on an instinct.

• What separated a pugnacious John McCain from an adversarial Donald Trump was Sen. McCain's willingness to see others as Subjects in Their Own Right … loosely speaking? his ability to love … country, colleagues and family… however flawed the lover … however flawed the beloved.

*********************************

“Tell me, Father. How shall I know when the Great Unravelling has begun?”

             “Look not for signs and wonders in the sky, 

              my Son.”

“Then, how shall I know, Father?”

           “Look for an extra flutter in the sparrow’s wing.

            Listen to the cries of children seeking their Mothers!

            Hear the small voice seeking to be heard 

over the Evil King’s great din!

            The sparrow will speak to you, my Son, and I pray 

    you’ll listen.”

The Wall

Do Labels Matter? Bullies and Sociopaths

When the Wall was finally built, the Giza Pyramids, China's Great Wall and the supports for Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens all shook. Some of the people were sad that the Greatest American since FDR hadn't lived to see it completed and they gathered together hither and  yon to call out:

Long Live the King! Long Live the King!

Alas! The Wall around Graceland was never built. 

Kidding, of course, which may be the best I can do as I attempt to discern whether I and we are living through a tragic-comedy or a comic-tragedy. I don't know that such a day will ever come when a great wall will be built guarding the United States from Mexico but, in any case, I have been fated to live the Last Quarter of My Life ... in the years before any such Wall was a fait accompli ...