*
SUICIDE SONG
But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself
Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge
At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea
Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope
But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way,
And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely.
No longer do I live by the law of me,
No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness,
And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude
For sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated
Pickles they place at the edge of your plate.
Killing yourself is wasteful, like spilling oil
At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given,
And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?
Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole
Because you haven't been excused,
You haven't finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness
To chew this food.
It is a stone, it is an inconvenience, it is an innocence,
And I turn against it like a record
Turns against the needle
That makes it play.
~ Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
At first I thought I’d never seen this poem before, but when I got to “I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely,” that line seemed familiar. And then
You stay alive you stupid asshole
Because you haven't been excused,
You haven't finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness
To chew this food
made me certain: I’d seen those striking lines before. Not only seen them, but internalized them: “because you haven’t been excused.” It was like that saying in the Talmud that you are not required to complete the work, but you are not permitted to abandon it. If you’re alive, it’s a sign you can still contribute, perhaps in an unexpected way.
And that unexpectedness, so much an essential feature of life, also makes it interesting — even astonishing. Each day brings it surprises and discoveries, big or small. I'm always curious about the next surprise. Sometimes I think that it’s my curiosity that has kept me alive.
But I confess that the line that delighted me this time was the funniest one:
And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?
Especially the underwear — you know the classic line, mother’s warning about being in an accident, and oops, your underwear isn’t up to par. I’d definitely have to buy new underwear, and just the thought of having to go shopping for panties is so discouraging. And then, once you have the new underwear and the perfect outfit, what a waste to just die rather than get some use out of them.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about suicide over the years, and I have to admit that the choice of clothes in which I’d be found did play a part. Typically I settled for a long black skirt and a fancy white blouse, my “poetry uniform” that I tended to wear to give a poetry reading.
This is not entirely trivial. It shows that suicide is a social act. At least when we are not yet utterly consumed by despair, we think of matters such as being found, and women at least — but here we have an example of a man — would want to look nice. That’s why I always rejected hanging or blowing out my brains.
To return to something more substantial (by conventional standards): the duty to recycle the kisses — that’s more rabbinical wisdom. We are supposed to recycle all the love we’ve been given — it’s a moral duty, like paying off your debts.
Speaking of debts, that brings me to gratitude — a suicide does show ingratitude. And yes, it is wasteful — your life, after so much effort and struggle, spilled like oil rather than used for some worthy purpose, even if it’s just watering the lawn — don’t despise the grass for being common! It creates oxygen, not to mention provides the wonderful inspiration by being able to pierce through concrete (not the only plant that can do that, but the vigor of a mere blade of grass in defeating concrete is stupendous).
Altogether, this is a marvelous poem because it contains wisdom. You have to have lived for a while to have gained this wisdom. Even then, it’s a rare treasure. Sure, there is a kind of “timeless wisdom” that’s typical of poetry — the celebration of love and beauty, for instance — but those things have been said forever and ever, to the point that we usually say that poetry is not about WHAT is said (Homer already said it millennia ago), but about HOW it is said. Poems are about leaves falling in autumn, and budding again in the spring. If you find a new way to say it, that’s fine, that’s enough.
Not this poem. It makes fun of conventional poeticizing by following sunsets with beehive hairdos and corrugated pickles, but the humor serves the wisdom — it keeps it safe from the charge of moralizing and sermonizing. And hey, the beehive hairdos and corrugated pickles show that someone has made an effort to please you, among others — that we exist as a part of a larger whole — and no, we haven’t been excused from contributing to that larger whole.
Suicide (we are not talking about the special case of terminal illness) does hurt others — there is even something called “revenge suicide,” an act of murderous meanness (and insanity, of course). Tony is aware that suicide is a social act. He knows that just being a human living among other humans creates an obligation; we are all in it together. It's difficult, and at times may even seem unbearable; but no, you are not an isolated being, and no, you can't just desert your post or quit your job; you have not been excused.
I met Tony at Yaddo, when he was still undergoing treatments for lymphoma. Lymphoma is one of the most survivable cancers, but it can drag on for years — and chemo is never pleasant, to put it mildly. While nobody ever lacks a reason for suicide, with Tony this was particularly acute. And in spite of that — or maybe because of that — he managed to write the best anti-suicide poem I know.
Not corrugated pickle slices, but rather pickles splayed in a squid-like shape (OK, find your own simile). The point is that someone made an effort to create something special. People try so hard.WHO IS HAPPY OR UNHAPPY IN AMERICA
~ “Who is happy in America? Author Gary Shteyngart took a bus trip across the country to find out — and the answer surprised him. Hedge fund managers, some of the most successful Americans by standards of economic achievement, tended to be miserable. College professors, meanwhile, enjoyed “the feeling that they were a part of something bigger.”
GS: Being a Leningrad-born sap, or Soviet Ashkenazi pessimist, let's start with the unhappy people, hedge fund managers. There was the competitive nature of their job, the sense that nothing was ever enough, and the fact that the money they earned represented not a means of sustenance, but a form of winning, of being right, of proving to their fellow competitors that they had the answers to the universe.
Then there was the Greyhound. The unhappiest people there seemed to be those who perceived they were about to suffer a fall in status, as well as financial well-being.
Around Louisiana, a group of white supremacists boarded the bus and spoke loudly of crucifying Muslims and Jews. As we drove past Grambling State University, a historically African-American college, one of the white supremacists pointed to a group of summer students and said, "Well, they have their colleges, and one day, we will have ours.”
"Which part of Dartmouth don't you understand?" I wanted to say to him.
So, who were the happiest people? First-generation college students were a permanent fixture of my month on the bus. Often, they would cross state lines to see their folks or their girlfriends or boyfriends.
They still talked about their prospects, the way we imagine young Americans always have, with ambition and resilience and humor.
I discovered perhaps the happiest people of all, professors at the University of Texas at El Paso. They led lives of relative wealth and contentment, along with a feeling that they were a part of something bigger.
Indeed, what can bring more fulfillment than the knowledge that you have changed someone's life, and not just by giving to a charity, but by helping to educate someone for whom higher education is not a birthright, but a shining goal?
Community was the surest indication of happiness on my long journey. Those who worked with people, and not just basis points on a Bloomberg monitor, were optimistic. They had hope for the people they mentored and hope for our fractious country as a whole.
Along the border with Mexico, at one of the southwest extremities of our country, I found the kind of people I wanted to become.
The future, I believe, is theirs for the taking.” ~
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-cross-country-bus-trip-helped-gary-shteyngart-understand-american-happiness
**
Oriana:
College teaching is exhausting — one of my professors said, “Teaching is giving blood” — but it’s also very fulfilling. I speak here of the kind of old-fashioned classroom teaching that I’ve done: relatively small classes with a lot of face-to-face interaction. I bewail the trend toward online education. I believe it’s less satisfying for the students as well. I took only one poetry workshop and said “No more.” The examples and assignments were pretty interesting, and the feedback was fine — but something was profoundly missing. A friend of mine had a similar reaction: “You just don’t get very much out of it compared to a live workshop.”
I think we have to confront the fact that we humans are social animals. We thrive on the right kind of social interaction — and a guided discussion can be very satisfying. “Face time” with kindred minds increases our happiness.
Another factor is living in blame versus living in gratitude. Note that the white supremacists have found someone to blame for all their troubles. Other hate groups may have different scapegoats — incels (men who are “involuntary celibates”) blame women, for instance. The problem is spending time wallowing in a negative emotion, augmenting it until your thinking becomes downright delusional.
Living in gratitude also seems to bring about a greater readiness to be of service to others — which also tends to make us happy. Service jobs often pay less, but since they tend to provide greater satisfaction, people are willing to accept a lower salary.
Gary Shteyngart**
JAMES BUCHANAN AND THE STEALTH DISMANTLING OF DEMOCRACY
~ “Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.
The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.
That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back.
A Theory of Property Supremacy
Buchanan [who died in 2013], a 1940 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University who later attended the University of Chicago for graduate study, started out as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process.
Buchanan began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and ‘60s, a time when economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about the need for government intervention in markets to protect people from flaws so clearly demonstrated in the Great Depression held sway. Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?
Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.
The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.
All the while, a ghost hovered in the background — that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the United States.
Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South from the 1820s until his death in 1850, expending his formidable energy to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the “Marx of the Master Class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create “constitutional gadgets” to constrict the operations of government.
Economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted the two men’s affinities, heralding Calhoun “a precursor of modern public choice theory” who “anticipates” Buchanan’s thinking. MacLean observes that both focused on how democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of voters. She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.
Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.
Gravy Train to Oligarchy
MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:
“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”
Buchanan’s school focused on public choice theory, later adding constitutional economics and the new field of law and economics to its core research and advocacy. The economist saw that his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on who rules. It was much better to focus on the rules themselves, and that required a “constitutional revolution.”
Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”
With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.
At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.
The Oligarchic Revolution Unfolds
Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.” The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.
To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”
MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.
The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty. If you have been wondering about the end result of the Virginia school philosophy, well, the economist helpfully spelled it out.
A World of Slaves
Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.
MacLean notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?
It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing.
[MacLean] observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these privatizing strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.
MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.
Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.
Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes.
To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way of thinking that has deep roots in America. In Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative (2005), Buchanan considers the charge of heartlessness made against the kind of classic liberal that he took himself to be. MacLean interprets his discussion to mean that people who “failed to foresee and save money for their future needs” are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, “as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’”
Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the Trump-obsessed media hardly notices, like pumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.
“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”
Nobody can say we weren’t warned.” ~
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america?fbclid=IwAR3dLryyRXDZVzuAw6kEbDtbomiPdhkKXoWCXEsTCp-n9JGy1HyGaq5OmGM
Oriana:
Believe me, I’ve abbreviated this article as much as I could without sacrificing its message: property rights ahead of human rights. The Civil War has never ended: the arguments used to justify “property rights” in the ante-bellum South are alive and flourishing, and the stealth dismantling of democracy has been working well.
But is democracy per se the highest value? As one commenter said: “Forget democracy — how about basic morality or human decency?”
It astonishes me how much of current politics has intimate ties with the apologetics for slavery. Wasn’t that resolved more than 150 years ago? Isn’t it clear that human rights are more sacred than property rights? Apparently not. Buchanan’s repulsive views are alive and well. I see his arguments repeated over and over in social media. Children not having water that’s safe to drink? That’s their parents’ problem, not ours. After all, these are not OUR children.
A society so privatized that the nation’s children are unimportant — a society that cannot see that ALL children are OUR children — is that a civilization, which is after all based on cooperation for the sake of the common good? Is it even sustainable, a society that says to hell with the common good, let’s give the rich another tax cut? A world of masters and slaves? The Civil War grinds on.
James McGill Buchanan, 1919 - 2013*
“Ideology shopper tip: before buying one, think how assholes could (and will) exploit it for self-aggrandizement.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
Or, as Jeremy previously pointed out, when it comes to revolutions, no matter how good the intentions, how noble the slogans, the psychopaths take over. No absolutist ideology is worth that price.
*
THERE ARE NO SOULMATES
~ “Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.
Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives.
Historians tell us that marriage education in America began as a way to keep women’s sexuality in check. “Marriage education has been for hundreds of years aimed at women. It was considered their responsibility to keep the marriage going,” Stephanie Coontz, co-chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage: A History, tells me. During the 1920s and 1930s, Coontz explains in her book, fears about sexual liberation and the future of marriage led eugenics proponents like Paul Popenoe to become enthusiastic about marriage counseling. “If we were going to promote a sound population, we would not have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married,” Popenoe wrote.
College-level marriage courses became even more popular during the post-World War II period, when marriage rates were at an all-time high and women were encouraged to embrace a new role as happy homemakers. Marriage education during that time, Coontz explains, was similarly driven by a strong emphasis on stereotypical gender, race, and class ideas about how a marriage should ideally be conducted. “The received wisdom of the day was that the only way to have a happy marriage was for the woman to give up any aspirations that might threaten the man’s sense of superiority, to make his interests hers, and to never ask for help around the house.”
In one case, cited in Rebecca Davis’s book More Perfect Unions, a young wife became convinced, after a series of sessions at Ohio State University’s marriage clinic, that her husband’s straying was a result of her failing to do her duty by taking care of her looks and keeping a proper home. And New York University’s College of Engineering presented “Good Wife Awards” to women who put their spouses first, providing the domestic support that allowed their husbands to concentrate on their studies.
*
Today’s marriage education classes are most often aimed at high-school students, usually as part of a home economics or health class, where teens are taught how family structure affects child well-being, learn basic relationship and communication skills, or are required to carry around a sack filled with flour for a week so they can learn what is entailed in being responsible for a baby 24 hours a day. Other courses are taught at specifically religious colleges, or are meant for engaged couples, like Pre-Cana, a marriage prep course required of all couples desiring to marry in a Catholic church.
Northwestern’s Marriage 101 is unique among liberal arts universities in offering a course that is comprehensively and directly focused on the experiential, on self-exploration: on walking students through the actual practice of learning to love well.
Self-understanding is the first step to having a good relationship
“The foundation of our course is based on correcting a misconception: that to make a marriage work, you have to find the right person. The fact is, you have to be the right person,” Solomon declares. “Our message is countercultural: Our focus is on whether you are the right person. Given that we’re dealing with 19-, 20-, 21-year olds, we think the best thing to do at this stage in the game, rather than look for the right partner, is do the work they need to understand who they are, where they are, where they came from, so they can then invite in a compatible suitable partner.”
To that end, students keep a journal, interview friends about their own weaknesses, and discuss what triggers their own reactions and behaviors in order to understand their own issues, hot buttons, and values. “Being blind to these causes people to experience problems as due to someone else—not to themselves,” Solomon explains. “We all have triggers, blind spots, growing edges, vulnerabilities. The best thing we can do is be aware of them, take responsibility for them, and learn how to work with them effectively.”
You can’t avoid marital conflict, but you can learn how to handle it better
The instructors teach that self-discovery is impossible without knowing where you came from. “Understanding your past and the family you grew up in helps you to understand who you are now and what you value,” Solomon says. To help students recognize what has shaped their views on love, she and her colleagues have students extensively interview their own parents about their own relationship. Many find this to be the most demanding and yet the most rewarding assignment of the course. Maddy Bloch, who took the course two years ago along with her boyfriend at the time, learned a lot when she interviewed her own parents about their own marriage, despite the fact that they are divorced. “I learned that in an intimate relationship each person holds a tremendous amount of power that you can easily turn on someone,” she says. “This is why relationships require a lot of mutual trust and vulnerability.”
Once you have a sound, objective sense of why you behave the way you do, you are better equipped to deal with conflicts—inevitable in any long-term relationship—with the appropriate tincture of self-awareness so that you avoid behaving in ways that make your partner defensive. The class instructors teach their students that blaming, oversimplifying, and seeing themselves as victims are all common traits of unhappy couples and failed marriages. They aim to teach students that rather than viewing conflicts from a zero-sum position, where one wins and one loses, they would benefit from a paradigm shift that allows them to see a couple as “two people standing shoulder to shoulder looking together at the problem.”
Thus, one of many concrete conflict-resolution skills that they teach is to frame statements as “X, Y, Z” statements, rather than finger pointing: When you did X, in situation Y, I felt Z. In other words, calmly telling my husband that when he left his clothes on the bathroom floor in the morning because he was late for a meeting, I felt resentful because I felt he didn’t notice that I was busy too, would lead to a better outcome than if I were to reactively lash out and accuse him of being a messy and careless slob. “‘You’ statements,” Solomon explains, “invite the other partner’s defensiveness, inviting them to put their walls up.” So too do words (tempting though they may sound in the moment) such as “always” or “never.”
A good marriage takes skill
The reality is that most of us don’t have adequate communication skills going into marriage. That’s why Marriage 101 students are required to interview another couple in addition to their own parents: a mentor couple (typically a local couple who has been married anywhere from several years to several decades). The professors hand out a list of more than 80 suggested questions and tell their students to think of the interview as a sort of lab experiment, a chance to observe the theoretical concepts they’ve been learning in a real-life context. During a 90-minute interview, a pair of students asks each couple questions such as what most attracted them to the other at the start of their relationship, which moments stand out as the best ones of their marriage, how they’ve weathered severe stresses, whether they ever thought about divorce, and what their sex life has been like over time. They watch the couple interact and engage in good couple skills: bringing a spouse a glass of water, for instance, as an unspoken gesture of caretaking. The interview is itself also a chance to observe a couple doing something that research shows is good for marriage: reminisce together as they look back on their relationship.
You and your partner need a similar worldview
Yet, despite how often we hear about the importance of good communication, even the best communication skills won’t help a couple that sees the world completely differently. One of the texts used in the course, Will Our Love Last? by Sam R. Hamburg, argues that people can be incredibly proficient communicators, yet never see eye to eye because they simply can’t understand how their partner can hold a position they see as untenable. “For people to be happy in their marriage they must be able to understand not just what their partner is saying, but the experience behind the words,” writes Hamburg. If partners are unable to do that, “they cannot understand what it’s like to be their partner—to understand their partner empathically—and the best communication in the world won’t help.”
The more aligned you are on certain crucial dimensions—such as day-to-day compatibility, or whether you are on the same wavelength about larger issues—the better off you’ll be as a couple. All the communication skills in the world won’t help if you haven’t learned how to recognize and invite in a compatible partner. “How similarly you spend your day, your money, how you view the world, greatly affects that day-to-day happiness with your partner, more than whether you have initial attraction.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-first-lesson-of-marriage-101-there-are-no-soul-mates-545334583
Oriana:
There is no one and only soulmate that you are the perfect match for, the “missing half”
we need to learn to love (or rather: show affection to) whoever is available to be loved.
Nevertheless, having enough similarity helps a great deal.
Secondly, what helps is knowing that no one is perfect, and learning to ignore those things about the partner that aren’t all that important — or his or her occasional mistakes or less-than-kind words. “Grow a little deaf” remains my favorite relationship advice. That critical comment? You simply never heard it.
This is selective attention, the point of which is to focus on the gifts your partner brings you, and being grateful for those. When you practice gratitude, you don’t have to “work on forgiveness.” Gratitude does all the work.
~ “Marriage 101, one of the most popular undergraduate classes at Northwestern University, was launched in 2001 by William M. Pinsof, a founding father of couples therapy, and Arthur Nielsen, a psychiatry professor. What if you could teach about love, sex, and marriage before people chose a partner, Pinsof and Nielsen wondered—before they developed bad habits? The class was meant to be a sort of preemptive strike against unhappy marriages. Under Alexandra Solomon, the psychology professor who took over the course six years ago, it has become, secondarily, a strike against what she sees as the romantic and sexual stunting of a generation. She assigns students to ask someone else out on a date, for example, something many have never done.
Over the course of numerous conversations [with students], Solomon has come to various conclusions about hookup culture, or what might more accurately be described as lack-of-relationship culture. For one thing, she believes it is both a cause and an effect of social stunting. Or, as one of her students put it to her: “We hook up because we have no social skills. We have no social skills because we hook up.” For another, insofar as her students find themselves choosing between casual sex and no sex, they are doing so because an obvious third option—relationship sex—strikes many of them as not only unattainable but potentially irresponsible.
Most Marriage 101 students have had at least one romantic relationship over the course of their college career; the class naturally attracts relationship-oriented students, she points out. Nonetheless, she believes that many students have absorbed the idea that love is secondary to academic and professional success—or, at any rate, is best delayed until those other things have been secured. “Over and over,” she has written, “my undergraduates tell me they try hard not to fall in love during college, imagining that would mess up their plans.”
“You’re supposed to have so much before you can get into a relationship,” one woman offered. Another said that when she was in high school, her parents, who are both professionals with advanced degrees, had discouraged relationships on the grounds that they might diminish her focus. Even today, in graduate school, she was finding the attitude hard to shake. “Now I need to finish school, I need to get a practice going, I need to do this and this, and then I’ll think about love. But by 30, you’re like, What is love? What’s it like to be in love?”
Learning sex in the context of one-off hookups isn’t helping either. Research suggests that, for most people, casual sex tends to be less physically pleasurable than sex with a regular partner. Paula England, a sociologist at NYU who has studied hookup culture extensively, attributes this partly to the importance of “partner-specific sexual skills”—that is, knowing what your partner likes. If young people are delaying serious relationships until later in adulthood, more and more of them may be left without any knowledge of what good sex really feels like.
As I was reporting this piece, quite a few people told me that they were taking a break from sex and dating. This tracks with research by Lucia O’Sullivan, who finds that even after young adults’ sex lives start up, they are often paused for long periods of time. Some people told me of sexual and romantic dormancy triggered by assault or depression; others talked about the decision to abstain as if they were taking a sabbatical from an unfulfilling job.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/
Oriana:
As a New Yorker cartoon put it: “Sex is nice, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.” Such is the madness of narrowly defined success.
But the emphasis on sex may be misplaced. The real issue is love. If there is no love in your life, you are not a success. No matter how rich you are, or how many awards you’ve won, if there is no one you love and no one loves you, you’re a pathetic failure. If only more people understood that . . .
Sculpture by Robin Wight*
WARSAW WEST
This used to be “my” train station. Coming back to Warsaw from anywhere else (summer vacations, for example, but also from the other side of the city so taking a train made the most sense and was the fastest way), I’d get off at Warsaw West. “In my days” it used to be a modest building, maybe two stories high (I forget — it was one of those forgettable buildings, except for the sign, whose meaning was HOME). Warsaw Centrum (i.e. downtown, close to the Palace of Culture) had all the glamor, such as glamor used to be (perhaps like the language of fishes spoken without them). My point here, or rather a sigh, is that for me personally this new train station might as well be on Mars.
NARCISSISTS DON’T HAVE HIGH SELF-ESTEEM: THEY ARE DEEPLY INSECURE
~ “There’s a long standing belief, reinforced by books like The Narcissism Epidemic, that narcissists actually feel great about themselves, despite everyone’s suspicion—dating back to age old wisdom about schoolyard bullies—that no one who has to push people down to feel bigger than everyone else on the planet could possibly possess anything even approaching healthy self-regard.
Much of the “evidence” that narcissists have high self-esteem comes from a measure called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which includes items like “I am assertive” and “I’m a born leader.” Narcissists, who tend to score high on the NPI, claim to have terrific self-esteem and oodles of confidence on all or most of these items. Ergo, the researchers concluded, they must have high self-esteem.
The only problem is study after study shows that once you pull out the self-esteem heavy items on the NPI, nothing healthy is left.
Zilch. Nada. Bupkis.
Which stands to reason.
Would anyone gifted with truly high self-esteem need to insult others to feel superior, attack anyone who criticizes them, treat people like playthings, pick “trophy wives” and “trophy husbands” over loving partners, demand constant accolades or—in intimate relationships—perfect unwavering attention, and finally, devalue love and relationships? Because these are all features that NPI narcissists seem to proudly flaunt right along side their “high self-esteem.”
Savvier researchers recognized that the emperor had no clothes. Extroverted narcissists of the kind measured by the NPI say they’re great at everything, so it’s no surprise they’d claim to feel great about themselves, too. Which led one set of researchers to try something new. They hooked the narcissists up to a lie detector (fake), then asked them how they felt about themselves. Suddenly their high self-esteem vanished.
And psychologists didn’t stop there. They also devised new measures, ones that didn’t lump healthy self-esteem in with nasty habits like exploitation and entitlement. Once again, what appeared to be healthy self-esteem vanished like Keyser Soze.
Perhaps the most damning evidence that narcissists are not, in fact, secure, is their open admission that they devalue caring relationships. Sorry narcissistic guys and gals, by definition, that’s about as insecure as it gets: it’s called insecure attachment (avoidant, to be precise).
So are narcissism and self-esteem the same? Not by a long shot.” ~
http://www.drcraigmalkin.com/blog/proof-once-and-for-all-that-narcissist-are-deeply-insecure
Oriana:
If there is a theme to this blog, it’s that being self-centered (and narcissism is extreme self-centeredness) does not lead to happiness. As a Chinese sage said, “No self, no problem.”
Now, you may say that you are sick of all this advice to drop the self. It can’t be done.
I agree: not entirely. But we can become less self-centered, and thus stronger and happier, by gazing at the world, as Larry Levis advised his poetry students. There is so much beauty in the world.
*
“HERE BE DRAGONS”
Elizabeth Vandiver, a scholar of classical mythology, has observed that the ancients used to place monsters at the far-flung corners of the earth, in unexplored regions (“Here be dragons” on old maps), and the Golden Age in the remote past. In a radical shift, we moderns (having run out of unexplored earthly regions) place monsters in interstellar space, and the Golden Age in the remote future (e.g. the Star Trek series). Recently, however, dystopian sci-fi seems in ascendance: the Golden Age is right now; the future will be the Dark Ages again.
FRIENDLY BRAIN BACTERIA?
~ “Talking hoarsely above the din of the exhibit hall on Tuesday evening, neuroanatomist Rosalinda Roberts of The University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB), told attendees about a tentative finding that, if true, suggests an unexpectedly intimate relationship between microbes and the brain.
Her lab looks for differences between healthy people and those with schizophrenia by examining slices of brain tissue preserved in the hours after death. About 5 years ago, neuroscientist Courtney Walker, then an undergraduate in Roberts’s lab, became fascinated by unidentified rod-shaped objects that showed up in finely detailed images of these slices, captured with an electron microscope. Roberts had seen the shapes before. “But I just dismissed them, because I was looking for something else,” she says. “I would say ‘Oh, here are those things again.’”
But Walker was persistent, and Roberts started to consult colleagues at UAB. This year, a bacteriologist gave her unexpected news: They were bacteria. Her team has now found bacteria somewhere in every brain they’ve checked—34 in all—about half of them healthy, and half from people with schizophrenia.
Roberts wondered whether bacteria from the gut could have leaked from blood vessels into the brain in the hours between a person’s death and the brain’s removal. So she looked at healthy mouse brains, which were preserved immediately after the mice were killed. More bacteria. Then she looked at the brains of germ-free mice, which are carefully raised to be devoid of microbial life. They were uniformly clean.
RNA sequencing revealed that most of the bacteria were from three phyla common to the gut: Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, and Bacteroidetes. Roberts doesn’t know how these bacteria could have gotten into the brain. They may have crossed from blood vessels, traveling up nerves from the gut, or even come in through the nose. And she can’t say much about whether they’re helpful or harmful. She saw no signs of inflammation to suggest they were causing harm, but hasn’t yet quantified them or systematically compared the schizophrenic and healthy brains. If it turns out that there are major differences, future research could examine how this proposed “brain microbiome” could maintain or threaten the health of the brain.
In the initial survey of the electron micrographs, Roberts’s team observed that resident bacteria had puzzling preferences. They seemed to inhabit star-shaped cells called astrocytes, which interact with and support neurons. In particular, the microbes clustered in and around the ends of astrocytes that encircle blood vessels at the blood-brain barrier. They also appeared to be more abundant around the long projections of neurons that are sheathed in the fatty substance called myelin. Roberts can’t explain those preferences but wonders whether the bacteria are attracted to fat and sugar in these brain cells.
Why haven’t more researchers seen bacteria in the brain? One reason could be that few researchers subject postmortem brains to electron microscopy, Roberts says. “Pairing up a neuroanatomist with a brain collection just doesn’t happen very often.” And neuroscientists may—as she did until recently—disregard or fail to recognize bacteria in their samples.
Roberts acknowledges that her team still needs to rule out contamination. For example, could microbes from the air or from surgical instruments make it into the tissue during brain extraction? She plans to hunt for such evidence. She also wants to rule out that the solutions that preserve mouse brains introduce or nourish bacteria. Among visitors to the poster, “There were a few skeptics,” Roberts notes. “I have that part of me, too.” But even if the bacteria were never really thriving in living brains, the patterns of their postmortem invasion are intriguing, she says.
If we really have the brain microbiome Roberts proposes, “There is much to investigate,” says Teodor Postolache, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. He has studied the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which invades the brain but doesn’t always cause obvious disease. “I’m not very surprised that other things can live in the brain, but of course, it’s revolutionary if it’s so,” he says. If these common gut bacteria are a routine, benign presence in and around brain cells, he says, they might play a key role in regulating the brain’s immune activity. “It’s a long road to actually prove that,” he says, but “it’s an exciting path.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/do-gut-bacteria-make-second-home-our-brains
Bacteria in a brain slice, shown here to the left of a blood vessel
*“Dogs are like Christianity: your god will always love you and forgive you. I'm more of a Cats worshipper, which is like being Jewish; you have a god but it will never do what you ask him and you're not sure if your god hates your kind. Mormons would be like those people that only love pure breed dogs and Horses are like Scientology cause you need a lot of money to worship them.” ~ Hugo Isaac Serrano
**
ending on beauty
Had I been raised by doves
wouldn’t I have learned
to fly
By wolves
to hunt in packs
Had I been raised by gods
wouldn’t I too
be godlike
In the movies the orphan
is the killer
not loved enough
unwanted
But wasn’t I
most
wanted
~ Mary-Kim Arnold, Self-Portrait as Semiramis (legend has it that Semiramis was raised by doves)
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