Holiday Surprise

Are we merely a generation or so away from a true kindness therapy: "oxytocin, the small, celebrated peptide hormone...helps lubricate our every prosocial exchange, the thousands of acts of kindness, kind-of kindness and not-as-nakedly-venal-as-I-could-have-been kindness that make human society possible." Maybe there is hope for humanity after all.

Don't know if oxytocin will help these guys, though. Do not doubt for an instant that if they start instituting 'purity tests' among themselves when they are out of power they will want to institute 'patriotism' or 'loyalty oaths' when they're back in office. It's in their DNA. It's encouraging that even oxytocin doesn't prevent you from recognizing assholes:"

Yet the hormone doesn’t turn you into a sucker. In the Nov. 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry, Simone Shamay-Tsoory of the University of Haifa and her colleagues reported that when participants in a game of chance were pitted against a player they considered arrogant, a nasal spritz of oxytocin augmented their feelings both of envy whenever the haughty one won and of schadenfreudian gloating when their opponent lost."

Ooh, she said schadenfreudian. I have goosebumps. Maybe you could spritz some of that stuff on mean old Uncle Ernie's turkey.

"Bleggalgazing" (to borrow a neologism from blogger extraordinaire BDR): What is blog that thou are mindful of it? Speaking of purity, here's Zadie Smith:

"There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.

Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self." (emphasis supplied)

Maybe, Zadie, essay-writing (a/k/a blogging) is just easier than art. Essay. Easy. Get it? Art. Hard.

But... but... but... if all the arguments for god's existence are flawed [that, of course, doesn't necessarily mean god doesn't exist; it just means we can't argue very well] to whom are we giving thanks this Thanksgiving holiday?



The soundtrack of our (younger) lives: The thrill of 'discovering' an obscure band that all your buddies thought was cool. (Always wanted to be an A & R man.) Steve Almond gets it just about right—a little sentimental and nostalgic, perhaps, but pretty much on the mark. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Family of Values: Truth

This is an inaugural post in what I propose to be an on-going, though intermittent, series discussing some core Western values—e.g., Truth, Knowledge, Meaning, Beauty, Justice, Fairness, Equality, Respect, Love, Goodness, Kindness, Wisdom, Creativity, Rationality, Freedom, Order, The Good Life, etc.

In 1986, Harry Frankfurt first published an essay in the magazine 'Raritan' entitled On Bullshit. Bullshit is, essentially, a disregard for the the truth of what one says. It isn't quite lying—which is deliberately stating something that is untrue—it is, on Frankfurt's account, something worse. When later published in book form in 2005, Frankfurt's essay seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the time. Public figures were more interested in advancing an agenda than speaking truth. Sales and marketing and PR forces were more interested in selling credit default swaps or SUVs or mid-East wars or fraudulent memoirs or $5/gallon oil than counting their true costs.

Bullshit heedlessly admixes truths with untruths. Bullshit leaves the hearer confused, foundering, scrambling for a purchase on reality. In politics, bullshit is particularly useful in a politics of a certain style. This style does not fret about hypocrisy or correspondence with reality; rather, it uses every means at its disposal to assail its adversaries. That is its sole purpose. That is to say, bullshit is a tool in the politics of destruction, rather than construction. It is part and parcel of the politics of force, rather than of consensus. Inconvenient truths, on this model, are scorned. Truth-tellers in the Bush administration, e.g., were often ridiculed (Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke) or silenced (Lawrence Lindsay, climate scientists) or publicly attacked (Plame/Wilson) or simply shit-canned (Shinseki).

Why is truth so devalued in our society? Philosophers have long recognized that truth is a "meta" value. To say something is true is to make a value-statement about a statement-of-fact. We don't say 'the snow is true', e.g. We say, rather, 'snow is white.' And, along with Alfred Tarski, we say further "the statement 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white."

So, when we say something is a "meta" value we are dealing in the world of modernism, the world of analysis, the world of metaphysics (semantics) strictly construed: a Tractarian world, if you will, where what matters is 'what is the case.' We are dealing with normative statements about other statements, not statements about the world. And the only legitimate statements are statements that are grounded in knowledge. Truth does not exist in the real world; it exists only as a value in our attempt to understand facts about the real world.

We are living, however, in what many would call a post-modern world. A world where authenticity, simplicity, and action are prime. Not a world of thought, complexity, and reflection. In such a world, it doesn't really matter what you think; it matters what you feel. It doesn't matter whether you understand something; it matters what your opinion is. It doesn't matter what you know; it matters what you believe. It doesn't matter what is true; it matters who you are and what your attitude is—say or do what you will. So long as your point-of-view prevails.

But there is nothing new about this post-modern world; it is a reversion to the world of the sophists, the target of much of Socrates's arguments. In this morass, truth is merely one among any number of competing values (if that), and the people who try to tell the truth are shouted down either by the people with the platforms and the agendas or the ignoramuses (or, more likely, a toxic combination of both).

Truth is uninteresting, boring even. Journalists who try to be truthful are grey. Factual. So what if snow is white? So what if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the atrocities of 9/11? So what if Iraq had no WMD? So what if the surpluses in the public treasury have been siphoned off by politically-connected private interests who, in turn, use their wealth and influence to prop up their political benefactors? So what if Dick Cheney tells a flat-out lie on camera to Gloria Borger? So what if the sky is falling?

Advocacy journalists, on the other hand, are interesting. Dynamic. Yellow. They can rant and rave and say pretty much whatever they please ungoverned by (or at least not restricted to) truth, so long as their ratings or readership stays high—which they will.

As an aside: It's amazing how much that passes for 'news' on the cable news networks originates from Public Relations firms. That, I think, is the story of the age that continues to go untold. Rather than investigating and reporting, these news organizations passively and mostly unquestioningly rely on what they are spoon-fed by professionals whose job it is to advance the agendas of their clients, whether they be celebrities or politicians or government entities.

To end this first piece in this series, I'll leave you with a quote from this article which calls contemporary journalists to be accountable for truth:

"we need journalists who scrutinize and question not just government officials, PR releases, and leaked documents, but their own preconceptions about every aspect of their business. We need journalists who think about how many examples are required to assert a generalization, what the role of the press ought to be in the state, how the boundaries of words are fixed or indeterminate in Wittgensteinian ways, and how their daily practice does or does not resemble art or science." Carlin Romano, "We Need 'Philosophy of Journalism'". 11/15/09 The Chronicle Review (h/t the estimable Arts & Letters Daily)

Blunderbuss

President Obama, according to press reports, is considering options for Afghanistan policy. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the current commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, has reportedly requested upwards of 40,000 troops for his counterinsurgency and 'hearts-and-minds' campaign needs. U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, himself a former U.S. general, has reportedly urged caution in expanding the Afghanistan counterinsurgency because the current Afghan government is rife with corruption and incompetence (which may be a nice way of saying the recipients of our aid and largesse are not necessarily loyally acting in our best interests). Interestingly, both reports, which were presumedly meant to be classified and for the President's eyes, came from leaks to the press.

The 'leak war' is a sideshow. The President of the United States is the Constitutional Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military. This President, Barack Obama, has a decision to make about the direction of the undeclared war in Afghanistan. He can continue along the path that was in place when he took office as urged by Gen. McChrystal (a tactical decision) or he can establish a direction of his own (a strategic decision). I urge the President to think strategically and refocus our effort on the original mission of the Afghan campaign

A brief history is in order here: On October 7, 2001, the United States and Great Britain invaded Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, an effort in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 to take out al Qaeda, the perpetrators of that terrorist assault within the borders of the United States. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld set the operation in motion. This, in my view, was precisely the correct strategic response to the 9/11 attacks.

Since that initial incursion, however, the Afghan strategy has suffered from a lack of support from Washington and from mission creep. First, it was widely reported that in their zeal to expand what they termed the 'Global War on Terror' and take the fight to Saddam Hussein, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld decided to take the focus off the Afghan campaign and launch a new front in Iraq. Second, Rumsfeld is widely credited with implementing a policy that, essentially, sought to fight this 'war' "on the cheap." Third, as a result of this neglect, the initial mission in Afghanistan has lost its focus.

Throughout the Bush years, Afghan strategy was treated as the poor cousin to the favored Iraq adventure. Political attention and military materiel were diverted from destroying al Qaeda. Meanwhile, the military mission in Afghanistan expanded to include such efforts as fighting the Taliban, supporting democratic reforms, and nation building, recently implementing the same sort of counterinsurgency measures that succeeded, at long last, in quelling the Iraq situation.

The bottom lime is that in eight plus years, the vaunted American military has failed in its initial goal to capture and/or kill the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This is a national disgrace. And there is plenty of blame to go around.

With the Iraq situation seemingly better in control, the current President has his first opportunity to do something about the situation—something he promised to do in his campaign. By all accounts, he has now turned his—and the country's—attention back to the conflict in Afghanistan. He should refocus on what was just and right about the Afghan campaign from the start. The military must accomplish its central mission: destroy al Qaeda. Then, and only then, should they worry about the rest—much of which can be dealt with politically and diplomatically.

Strategically, the Afghan campaign and, in my view, the entire 'Global War on Terror' should have been a surgical strike. Go in, find the perpetrators of 9/11 in their lairs, and take them out. End of story. Instead, the prior administration fired off what amounted to a blunderbuss: a noisy, blunt, and crude weapon lacking in accuracy or range. Its effort in response to 9/11 was too scattershot. They allowed their own political interests and ideologies to intervene, and they missed their true target. They wanted to get Saddam Hussein for peripheral reasons which they never convincingly articulated. This took the focus off Afghanistan, and we now find ourselves as occupiers in a country known as the place where empires go to die. And we still haven't gotten Usama bin Laden.

I urge Predsident Obama to refocus his, the nation's, and the military's attention on the true mission of the conflict in Afghanistan. His generals will continue to urge him to provide them with greater authority, a larger mission, and more materiel and troops. These are tactical requests and should be taken as such. The President's duty as Commander-in-Chief is to think strategically. He must define the mission and then, and only then, allocate resources accordingly. The generals' job is to implement this strategy. And the only just, strategic mission is to sew up al Qaeda and their enablers and supporters, get bin Laden, and get out. It was the correct strategic mission in 2001, and, despite nearly a decade of neglect and mismanagement, it is the correct mission now.

Broken Man

Here in the U.S., our schools support athletic teams: football, basketball, baseball, soccer, gymnastics, etc. Kids, beginning in the middle school grades (ages 12+) compete on behalf of their schools against other schools. They wear uniforms with school colors. Often there are costumed mascots and uniformed cheerleaders rousing the crowd's passion for their team. It is well-known that our previous president, George W. Bush, was a cheerleader at his prep school. And here're pictures.

It is a measure of school 'spirit' or 'pride' for the non-participating students to cheer on and support their athletic teams by attending the games, by participating in 'pep rallies' to honor or energize their athlete heroes, and by raising funds to help pay for travel, uniforms, coaches, etc. In the state of Georgia, where I currently reside, football is the king of sports—high school and college. High school games are played on Friday nights during the Autumn, and it is like a secular religion in some areas of the state. This sense of spirit or pride in one's school's athletics carries over into university for some. It transmutes in the greater society to professional athletics. My British and South American readers can certainly identify with the passions they feel for their own futbol teams.

The spectacle of athletics is a civilized model, of course, for warfare: our team vs. their team in a winner-take-all contest. As a nation, we are goaded into 'supporting the troops' much the way we were scolded to 'support the team' in high school. Under this model, supporting wars and cheering on the soldiers that fight them become the true measure of patriotism for many.

Today, Nov. 11, in the U.S., is Veterans Day. Much of the rest of the world celebrates it as Armistice Day, remembering the conclusion of WWI.

Here's how our medical/insurance industrial complex supports our troops: "The number of US veterans [2,266] who died in 2008 because they lacked health insurance was 14 times higher than the US military death toll in Afghanistan that year, according to a new study." The Republican Party, principal goader and patriotic scold in the U.S., believes our health care system needs no reform.

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On Thursday Nov. 5, 2009, an Army-trained psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, allegedly opened fire and killed 13 people, wounding some 38 others on the Ft. Hood Army Base near Killeen, Texas. Fort Hood "boasts of being the largest active duty armored post in the United States Armed Services."

Some basic facts about Maj. Hasan have been published: 1) he is a soldier in the Army Medical Corps who participated in the "Officer Basic Leadership Course (OBLC), a basic orientation course to the Army Health Care system, Army doctrine, and basic soldier and leader skills," 2) he is an M.D. psychiatrist, 3) he is a Muslim (possibly with ties to radical Islam), 4) in this country, he is a member of an ethnic minority, 5) he was willing to sacrifice his own life (though in this case it did not happen) to carry out this attack. Using these five coordinates, I think we can draw certain conclusions about why this horrific attack happened that avoid the sort of knee-jerk responses/analyses flooding the media.

If you had the patience to read through my longish series of posts on "Thyraphobia" (or recall some of the observations from my earlier "Swarm" series), you will recall I posed the following conclusion:

"Concretely: if I am invested with some sort of political or spiritual authority and have dreams of warfare (either offensive or defensive), to get you to do my warlike bidding and enlist you in my cause, I must first convince you of our natural affinity (family, community, nation, race, religion, etc.) and our mutual grievances against a common threat, stressing the goodness and rightness and love of our cause and the evilness and hate of our foe. To get you to be willing to sacrifice your own life in the service of this cause, I must break down your natural emotional defenses (to wit: fear and self-preservation) by demeaning you and your life. I accomplish this by appealing to your own existential situation of misery (it is caused by the devious threats of our enemy) and your natural emotion of shame (you are a fallen creature, weak, flawed, and unworthy). My cause, I assert, will ennoble your own life and, in the process, make things better for those about whom you care. Then I must cement your loyalty by promising you and convincing you that your faithfulness will surely result in some form of reward—physical (loot, booty, spoils, heroic acclaim, etc.) or spiritual (eternal life and favor in paradise). That is the formula. They all use it; they always have, and they always will."

Is it possible to make some sense of this incident through this lens? I believe so.

The military, medical school, and religion all seek to break down a person's individuality, to inculcate a certain professionalism. The military seeks to purge the individual of the emotion of fear and instill a sense of 'unit cohesion'; you must be willing to give up your life for your unit or your buddies. Medical school seeks to break down the complex emotions of sympathy and fellow-feeling; if you allow yourself to indulge in normal feelings of sympathy toward all the suffering you have to deal with over and over and over, world without end, you can easily become overwhelmed and burn out. Further, the psychiatrist is trained to recognize and avoid "countertransference", that is, to avoid any normal sense of empathy with his patients in order to keep a therapeutic distance. And religion (not just Muslim, but Christian and others as well, as discussed passim) encourages its adherents to deny themselves and look past the shamefulness of this fallen world (of which the individual religionist is a part) to a greater place and eternal world. [By the same token, law school seeks to break down the individual's moral sense so s/he can represent murderers, rapists, Enron, 'Scooter' Libbey, etc. without feeling guilty.] Each of these institutions has, at bottom, a depersonalizing effect on the individual, and Maj. Hasan, I think we can safely assume, has been subject to each sort of indoctrination. He has been broken down in different ways by each institution and, ultimately, alienated from himself.

Not once, not twice, but four times that we can count, this formula was applied to Maj. Hasan. And he, apparently, could not handle the strain.

This is not by way of an excuse or justification for his actions. I don't know Maj. Hasan. His thoughts and emotions are his own. I have no idea why he acted the way he did. He allegedly committed a brutal act, a crime, an atrocity. But warriors, by definition, are trained in the arts of atrocity, and wars are merely nationally sanctioned crimes. It only becomes news when warriors turn on their own—when sports team members fight among themselves. And now, in this respect, it is a legal matter for the military/judicial system to handle.

This is merely an attempt to understand what happened to a man, a frail human being, who appears to have been broken down once too often. The Army thought their mojo was stronger. In this case, it turns out they were wrong.

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Of course, Maj. Hasan is not the only broken military man. The story of the broken war veteran returning home to an uncomprehending civilian society is practically as old as literature itself, ancient even at the time of the Odyssey. If you didn't see it, take a look at this wise essay in Sunday's NY Times.

When soldiers are among themselves, they are trained to cohere as a unit. They must depend absolutely on each other in life-threatening situations. They are uniformly broken down and indoctrinated to understand what war is and what their role in in it. When they come home, they are broken men and women. Their unit support system collapses. They have no idea, often, what their role in the society is anymore. And civil society, for good reason, does not share their understanding of the brutal nature of war—other than the superficial games model of sports. Some returning veterans are able to transition back into society because they have adequate social networks of family and friends who care for them. Others cannot because they do not.

In many respects, we are all broken individuals. Some more than others. Today—Veterans Day—we non-warriors cannot claim to understand what veterans' lives at war have been like, but we can express a sense of our shared humanity, our shared brokenness. And without cheering on wars and warfare as such, we can at least recognize the painful odyssey these men and women have had trying to find their way back into a place in civilized society and leave the horrors and brutality and dehumanization of warfare behind.

"Fringe"

In case you were wondering, here're the shoes.

"Fringe"

(continued from this post)

In accordance with proposed new FTC rules regarding product endorsements, let me just say right up front: I paid cash at retail for my Vibram Five-Finger (VFF) shoes. No one compensated me for their use or endorsement at any time in the past & I have no expectation of receiving any compensation in the future.

When I first got my VFF shoes in late August, Wisdoc, being as supportive as she honestly could, laughed and said: "Well, honey, they are sort of..." she paused, "fringe. You're certainly making a statement, putting yourself out there." It's good to be married to someone who can keep you honest. But I knew that what she was saying was true. All you have to do is read some of the websites that are oriented toward barefoot running. Some are hard-core (barefoot only!), others encourage flexibility (minimal shoes are okay, too). I'm including a number of these sites for future reference:

Running Barefoot
Barefoot Ted
Barefoot Runner.com
Barefoot Running Shoes
Running Barefoot Yahoo! Group
Minimalist Runner Google Group
Runner's World Forum

There are more, but those sites have lots of information about this whole 'fringe' phenomenon. If you're starting out, look especially at training, easing into, and technique discussions.

Here's the key article on the topic. The point being made is that high-tech running shoes (elevated heel, shock-absorbing mid-sole, orthotic inserts/insoles, stabilizing technology, cushioning, etc.), besides being heavy, interfere with and possibly hinder the body's (foot's) natural proprioceptive functioning, thus increasing the risk of chronic plantar, Achilles, ankle, knee, and even hip injury. The feet and ankles and calves have natural shock-absorbing and stabilization capacities. Relying on shoes to perform these functions weakens the body's own adaptive mechanisms. Further, as a matter of straight physics, because each step barefootin' or wearing minimal support shoes such as the VFFs is lighter when compared to shoes, mid-soles, orthotics, etc., the body exerts less effort and, therefore, uses less oxygen over distance. As one friend said, "it's kind of like cheating." Well, yes and no. You still run the same distance, you just don't carry as much weight per step (x # of strides x distance covered).

Still, you have to be careful when you change over; there are risks of other sorts of injury such as puncture wounds, contusions, blisters, scrapes, etc. But, the point is, when you run barefoot or minimally shod you are more conscious of each step and pay closer attention to the placement of each footfall—that's the point of proprioception. By adjusting each step to the varied terrain (which you don't have to do in padded, structured shoes), you avoid repetitive motion injuries. Think of the VFFs as a second skin on the bottoms of your feet. You'll be amazed at how much protections they actually provide.

Also, you change the way you run. This is big. And it requires some discussion.

Mainly, you learn to strike the ground differently. Instead of heel-striking, you strike the ground with your mid-foot—balls of the feet and arches. This strengthens the muscles of your feet. My feet are actually larger now because they are more muscular. It also uses the calf-muscles; that's why if you don't ease into it, you can really get sore calves. My calves and ankles are larger now, too, more muscular. The advantage, though, is it takes pressure off your hips and knees. With my old running shoes, my knees locked on each stride, absorbed upward force, and it felt like I was jamming my thigh bones up into my hip. Now, I feel my core muscles working and my glutes are stronger.



The key to remember here is NOT to extend your leg out in front of you and land on your heel and roll your foot forward as feels natural in stabilizing and cushioned types of shoes. You should land on your mid-sole underneath your center of gravity. The idea is that each time you strike with your heel you are technically 'braking' or halting your own forward momentum. When you land mid-sole or slightly on the balls of your feet, you propel yourself along almost like your feet are wheeling.

One other thing, if you run barefoot or, like me, wear your VFFs in public—say, at a race or popular jogging route—you have to be prepared to be 'that guy.' As in, 'did you see that guy with the shoes?' People are always curious, and since there have been articles in a number of running magazines and McDougall's book is getting a lot of publicity, they want a first-hand report. And me? I'm always willing to oblige. It's a great ice-breaker.

I don't do a lot of pre-run stretching. I like to walk about a half-mile before I start, to loosen up my hamstrings and my feet. Then I jog the first mile more slowly than I know I can. But, I do feel the need to do a few stretches for flexibility. Here they are:



Then I do some foot exercises

And then I have to make sure my 'calves aren't too tight, bro''

So, last Saturday I ran a 15K road race. I finished, running the entire way! It was easily the longest distance I'd run since I was in my twenties. It's Sunday and I've got some lingering minor calf soreness. I had a little bit of foot pain in the ninth mile, but fortunately the road for that last mile had a broad, grassy shoulder. I ran on the grass and the foot pain went away almost immediately. I still have some adjustments to do w/r/t my stride, but that is par for the course when using the VFFs or going barefoot. Every stride is an adjustment.

Next week I'm running another 15K, but this time it's a trail run. I don't expect to have the same foot pain. And I prefer—no, I love—trail runs. Here, check out the course. It looks magical.



Finally, here's the bottom line on all this 'fringe' activity for me:

• Things that are larger: my feet, ankles, and calf muscles.

• Things that are smaller and tighter: my waist (from 36" to 33"), my glutes, my thighs.

• Things that are stronger: all the above plus my toes, my arches, my Achilles, my knees, my core, and my cardio-vascular system.

• Things that are longer and more flexible: my hamstrings! (Don't ask me why; I don't know.)

• Thing I have to get used to being: 'that guy', i.e., the one with the funny toe shoes.

• Thing I haven't seen in probably 15 years: the left side of 170 lbs on my bathroom scales!

• Things I can do now that I couldn't do this summer: run 10Ks and 15Ks relatively pain free.

• Things I aspire to do that I haven't ever aspired to do: run a mini-marathon and possibly a full marathon.

• Thing I forgot I was addicted to: the morphine-like endorphin firing in my brain when I run long distances.

Oh, and as for that 'fringe' crack: Wisdoc and I used to run a lot together when we first met in Philadelphia, along the river, by the museum, around U. Penn, Haverford cross-country track, St. Jo's, etc. Now, because of her schedule, she only gets to run in the morning's on our running machine. But she does it barefoot. Last week, after hearing me go on and on ("and on and on" apparently) about my VFFs and all the new strides I've been making in my running over the last couple of months, she made me take her to REI and buy her a pair of these 'fringe' shoes. Turns out, her New Balance shoes were making her knees hurt whenever she got the opportunity to run outside in them, too.

Go figure.

Drop me an email or leave a comment and I'll be glad to answer any questions I can.

Miscellany

We interrupt this (short) series on running to bring you links and such:

Narrative and sports. "To a remarkable degree, bloggers aren't storytellers. They are partisans, ranters, linkers. Bloggers give away their entire plot in the first sentence, or perhaps even in their URL (www.i-hate-everyone.com)."

"The real question in the months and years ahead is whether there's a business model that can support good stories." (h/t Dennis)

As if in response, a British study found that people who illegally download and share music spent "four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans."

Edmond Caldwell & Steven Augustine & Helen deWitt (each of whom has something to say on these matters): put that in your literary pipes and smoke it. The iPod did not destroy the music industry; it changed it in unexpected ways. More music is available and yet more is demanded. It's quite likely a similar thing can happen in the "book" industry with the advent of the Kindle, Apple reader [whatever & whenever]. More content will be demanded. Keep writing mes amis. The market is sure to turn our way.

MobyLives weighs in on Norway's decision to ban the Amazon Kindle because of the Animal Farm (ironically) controversy here.

Richard Eoin Nash, natch, is there already. Or at least he was, in Frankfurt.

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Mark Athitakis points to a James Salter interview—yummy goodness. Light Years is still one of my favorite best novels of all time. Thanks for that, Mark.
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Sometimes the words flow onto the screen just right. Here's Dan Green getting it just right:

"If a particular work of fiction does provoke a strong emotion--which for me actually happens only rarely--I presume that this is the emotion the text was designed to create (otherwise I'm just reading badly) and that my role as reader is to meet the text halfway and pursue that emotion where it's going to lead. That I would try to actively resist the work's effects--emotional, psychological, or formal--seems antithetical to my understanding of what a "reading experience" has to offer."

Who's your daddy, Dan? How about this guy?
Claude Levi-Strauss, pioneering structuralist, dead.

"Phenomenology I found unacceptable, in so far as it postulated a continuity between experience and reality. That the latter enveloped and explained the former I was quite willing to agree, but I had learnt from my three mistresses [Freud, Marx, Geology] that there is no continuity in the passage between the two and that to reach reality we must first repudiate experience, even though we may later reintegrate it in an objective synthesis in which sentimentality plays no part. As for the trend of thought which was to find fulfillment in existentialism, it seemed to me to be the exact opposite of true thought, by reason of its indulgent attitude towards the illusions of subjectivity. To promote private preoccupations to the rank of philosophical problems is dangerous, and may end in a kind of shop-girl's philosophy—excusable as an element in teaching procedure, but perilous in the extreme if it leads the philosopher to turn his back on his mission. That mission [which he holds only until science is strong enough to take over from philosophy] is to understand Being in relation to itself, and not in relation to oneself. Phenomenology and existentialism did not abolish metaphysics: they merely introduced new ways of finding alibis for metaphysics." Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 50 (trans. John Russell 1961).

By that metric, these guys would be your cousins. Say Simon Critchley & Tom McCarthy:

"All cults of authenticity, it is declared, whether they celebrate it in the guise of transcendence, unity or totality, for aesthetic, religious or political ends, “should be abandoned”"

Thomas McGonigle at ABC of Reading nails two birds with one stone: Harold Brodkey & James Wood. Thanks for reminding me of what an intense fascination I had with Brodkey's books some years back. Perhaps it's time for a re-look.

Mark Sarvas, after some brief interruptions, seems to be back at blogging with regularity. Welcome back, Mark. Here he posts a Philip Roth interview with Daily Beast publisher Tina Brown. Good stuff.

In case you missed it, over at his fine blog, Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito has been blog-covering the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. Here are links to several of his posts:

Take a look at some hand-drawn illuminations from Carl Jung's Red Book
h/t Levi Asher

Speaking of getting it right, Steven Beattie does, too:

"Novels – at least the ones that endure – take time, commitment, and patience, all things that are in short supply in today’s jacked-up, Internet-driven society, and all things that are antithetical to the very idea of NaNoWriMo. "

Oh, and thanks, Steven, for reminding me that I'm not going to do NaNoWriMo again this year. When I was in grad school, I 'free wrote' an entire novel over a summer on my portable Underwood typewriter. It sucked so bad. I have it sitting on my desk (I'm looking at it right this minute), and I still can't read it. Now my writing happens sort of like this: I load up (reading and absorbing novels, poetry, criticism, theory, philosophy, lit blogs, relevant non-fiction, anything & everything I can get my hands on), I reflect and refine, & I write. When I do it fueled up in this way, good stuff comes out—though it still needs copious & meticulous & judicious editing. They don't tell you that there.

Nevertheless, zunguzungu decides to give it a 'shot' (pun way intended).

Josh Corey says:

"Next time, I hope to think through the seductions of realism, and why it is that I've been unable to resist them, in spite of a healthy suspicion of the claims usually made on realism's behalf."

I'm all atwitter.

Meanwhile, Jacob Russell's dog is still barking, creating a new reality with each "arf":

I've played Colson Whitehead's game for years: One of the things you can also do is combine genres.

On the science front, this seems like an important technology. The next resource wars are likely to be over water. Cheap and effective desalination could usher in another golden age of peace and prosperity.

And last: teach your children well, Dog.

"Fringe"

I've been sitting on this post for some time now. It's not so much a lit-crit or lit or political essay as a personal statement.

First, some background: I began running in college. In high school, if I could make it twice around the track without being completely winded, I felt I had accomplished something. In college I discovered running trails and around multi-field soccer complexes. I loved running on grass. In grad school I started extending my distances and ran some 10Ks in fairly decent times (sub-7s). New York City and professional and parental obligations slowed me down and fattened me up some. After moving to ATL, in order to regain some fitness, I began jogging a mile or two.

As a middle-aged man, I began feeling some adverse effects from running: (1) something resembling Plantar fasciitis in my left heel, (2) a weak left knee, (3) a left hip ache that felt like my spine/hip connection was malaligned, among others. I would run, say, two miles and have to spend a couple days recovering—stretching, doing yoga, inversion table, etc.—to get right. I spent good money on top running shoes, but to no avail.

In August my life changed! On August 18, I saw Christopher MacDougall on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His tale about barefoot or barely-shod ultramarathon runners caught my attention. I did some on-line research and thought, "Geez, if I could run again without pain, how wonderful would that be?"

I found a large soccer field and ran some laps around it, first with shoes, then without. It felt odd, but invigorating. And NO PAIN! I began walking around my neighborhood streets barefooted to build calluses on my soles, but all I got was a few blisters. This was not going to work on the rough concrete streets around here for me. Zola Budd I ain't.

I continued to read up and found discussions of Vibram Five-Finger shoes. I had seen them in the local, funky shoe store where my teenagers got their Birkenstocks and in the local REI outdoor store. So, when I had a free hour, I went to REI, fitted a pair, and decided to try them out. I needed a new pair of running shoes, and these were one-half to one-third the price of the sort of good pair I felt I needed. What the hell! If they didn't work out for running, I could wear them for driving or water shoes or whatever.

I love them! I absolutely love them! I began running in them the first day, on the soccer field and a short trail I discovered in a neighboring neighborhood. I couldn't believe how they felt. I was stronger, able to run further, and felt great. I knew I could use them on trail runs and did my normal, short local trail run several times that first week. The infatuation was on.

Then I decided to take them out on the road. I did my "long" two-mile run—successfully. I wasn't winded and felt I could go longer. I was incredulous. The next time I decided to extend it. At about mile four, my calf muscles seized up like they were made of bricks. I hobbled back home and Wisdoc lovingly massaged my calves that night. But here's the thing: no PF, no weak left knee, no hip/spine pain. None. It was like my calves were taking the shock that had my heels, knees, and hips had been absorbing. This calf pain, I realized, was of the 'no-pain-no-gain' type, not the incipient injury type.

I read more and discovered that you really are supposed to ease into this style of running because you exercise different configurations of muscles than with running shoes. I rested for four days and the calf pain faded away. My next road run was just two miles; no soreness. And I eased up the distances. Three weeks ago, after a few longish runs of about 4 and 5 miles, on a whim, I ran a 10K for the first time in about 25 years. I pushed myself and, after minimal training, had 10 minute splits for the miles. I finished the 6.2 miles in just over an hour. My calves were sore but not nearly as much as before. I took my daughter shopping that afternoon and coached a baseball game the next day.

Bottom line: I bought the shoes in late August. I ran a painless 10K road race in early October and I'm running10-15 miles a week comfortably now. The shoes were a revelation.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 15)

(cont'd)

This serial post has gotten way out of hand. This is the fifteenth post under this title. Other matters have been put aside or shelved. My blog socializing has diminished while I've been drafting it. More to the point, my thoughts have been meandering seemingly aimlessly into matters far afield of my own experience that afternoon last summer when I failed to talk myself into jumping out of an airplane. It's time now to wrap things up.

Thanks to all who've had the patience to read over or through this seemingly endless series. And, especially, thanks to someone I don't know personally (hell, I don't even know his name), but whom I consider a blog-friend, BlckDgRd, who has faithfully linked, if I'm not mistaken, to every single one of these posts. Go read his blog. Go on, do it now. Then come back. I'm not going anywhere. But, yeah, read his blog every day (except maybe those days when he rants about DC United. Heh!)

This, then, will be my last post on this topic, under this title.
-----------------------
Resolved: I will never be a soldier, much less a good one. I knew this back when they threatened to draft me to fight in the police action in Southeast Asia where I knew I would surely die. The fear is too great in me. But, so is its flipside: my love of life and self.

One's life is the most important thing one has. It is, really, all one has: everything. A great and marvelous gift. Once it is gone, self, identity, and consciousness of the world vanish. Life is not something to be given up lightly or surrendered—especially under false or illusory pretenses.

Once you get beyond the ritual and dogma and supernatural claims, there is a great and wise truth at the base of Christianity, and it stems from the story of the life and death of Jesus. One verse (and I don't want to be taken for a proof-texting, verse-quoting preacher here) captures this thought: There is no greater love than that a man should give up his own life for the sake of his friends. That point is stated outright in the Gospel of John 15:13. Theological scholars, i.e., the Jesus Seminar, do not necessarily believe this was an actual saying of Jesus primarily because it comes in a passage in which Jesus calls for loyalty to himself. It has Jesus predicting what will happen to him after he and his unruly friends trash the main temple in Jerusalem during Passover: he will step up and take the rap for his gang of rowdies so they can live to fight another day in their quest to bring about the end of time. It may, in substance, have been a true teaching of Jesus, but, in all likelihood, the saying itself was a later ascription to him by the community of believers. Already, here, they are using Jesus as a symbol around which to cement the bonds of aggrieved community, to manipulate the loyalty of a small, committed cadre. This, I've said, we are to be wary of.

Still, it does state a fundamental, yet all-too-forgotten (or -ignored) truth of Christianity: we ought to love one another. Sacrifice to make others' lives better, to make a better world here and now. The argument is, of course, who are these others—one's friends in the biblical language—and what constitutes a better world? That is for each person to decide.

The sentiment is this: love is a great and powerful emotion, greater than fear or hatred or shame or anger—the complex of emotions I've been examining in this series. It is the cement of human community [see here]. Factionalism and eternalism alike have been used to pervert that love, to demean it, and turn it into its opposites. Fellow-feeling (to borrow Scheler's term, see here) can be manipulated by playing on people's insecurities, by telling them who their friends are and what their vision of a better world should be.

Concretely: if I am invested with some sort of political or spiritual authority and have dreams of warfare (either offensive or defensive), to get you to do my warlike bidding and enlist you in my cause, I must first convince you of our natural affinity (family, community, nation, race, religion, etc.) and our mutual grievances against a common threat, stressing the goodness and rightness and love of our cause and the evilness and hate of our foe. To get you to be willing to sacrifice your own life in the service of this cause, I must break down your natural emotional defenses (to wit: fear and self-preservation) by demeaning you and your life. I accomplish this by appealing to your own existential situation of misery (it is caused by the devious threats of our enemy) and your natural emotion of shame (you are a fallen creature, weak, flawed, and unworthy). My cause, I assert, will ennoble your own life and, in the process, make things better for those about whom you care. Then I must cement your loyalty by promising you and convincing you that your faithfulness will surely result in some form of reward—physical (loot, booty, spoils, heroic acclaim, etc.) or spiritual (eternal life and favor in paradise).

That is the formula. They all use it; they always have, and they always will.

In dreams, Carl Jung asserts, doors represent opportunities for change and transformation. One should never refuse the opportunity to enter them, to grow, to deepen one's understanding of one's self and one's world—in dreams. In an airplane at 14,000 ft. listing to one side with an open door, something I've been calling thyraphobia prevented me from taking that chance. But that was in reality. It was not a dream.

Yet, by not going through that open door, I gained the opportunity to understand something about myself and my own limitations. I learned that I am not afraid of fear itself. I was ok with it at the time, even though it overtook me completely, even though it rocked my world. And, upon reflection (some may call it rationalization or justification), I'm still ok with it: fear is a defense, an emotion tied to self-preservation and love of life. It is nothing to be ashamed of, not a thing to hate in oneself. It is, in effect, the reason I am skeptical of power and deeply anti-authoritarian. It is the reason I am, by and large and for the most part, a pacifist.

I was not destroyed by my fear and shame. I did not seek to lash out at some foe, real or imagined. I owned my thyraphobia, claimed it as mine. As part of who I am.

It was a rational fear—though somewhat hypertrophied. It had a real-world stimulus. No one told me I had to fear this thing. No one broke down my resistances. If anything, this fear was resistance itself. And it arose out of a deeply rooted sense of self-preservation, if not self-love. Not, I emphasize, vanity. But a love of life, a love of the world, a love of the experience of its awe and majesty, its miracle and, yes, its ugliness and evil, its fear and shame. It was a direct expression of my will to survive, of my desire to experience as much of the world as I possibly can within the four score years the Fates have putatively allotted me. And yes, it was an expression of who I am—who any of us is at heart.

But it was also a holy fear. To live is to be afraid: everything we have and do, every accomplishment and affinity, every battle we fight, is an effort to stave off this fundamental truth. We erect barriers and buffers between us and this primordial shock of recognition at how small and insignificant we truly are in the face of an at-best neutral universe.

Not to fear life and reality is not to respect it. Fear and the complex of concomitant emotions that flow from it are not to be dealt with lightly. They are to be nurtured—for they are life itself.

That day, in that airplane some two miles above the surface of the earth, when it came my time to jump, I met the fear—pure and crystalline—at the heart of my very being, at the heart of all being, and I've made peace with it in all its power. And, as I said, I will never not jump again.

Standing waiting for a man to show
Wide eyed one eye fixed on the door...

You know it makes sense, don't even think about it
Life and death are just things you do when you're bored.
Say fear is a man's best friend;
You add it up it brings you down.

"Fear Is A Man's Best Friend," John Cale

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 14)

(cont'd from previous posts)

How were the men who hijacked and commandeered four commercial jetliners on 9/11/2001 able to conquer what I can only assume was their innate, very human immediate fear of heights and death, disregarding whatever love of life they might have had and aim the planes they were flying into buildings on the ground and certain death?

One conventional, somewhat simplistic answer making the rounds after the attacks of 9/11/2001 was that "they hate America." That may have been the case. Hatred is a strong emotion. Hatred of the 'other' is a species of misanthropy which, as I noted earlier, is a symptom of a deeper malady: distrust, fear. The 'other' is out to get me. If you are not with me, you are against me. Me against my brother, my brother and me against my family, my family against the clan, my clan against my tribe, my tribe against my race, my race against my nation, my nation against the world. Or something to that effect. But, it is too facile to ascribe such a simplistic emotion to people who put together such an involved plot that included their own destruction. An entire plot was hatched, plotted in minute detail, funded, and executed. It was an act of war, futile in many respects, but war nonetheless. Embattlement seems insufficient.

Many have pointed to the alleged reward of the martyrs as the motivating factor behind the pilots and their accomplices: 72 full-breasted, black-eyed virgins and lots of wine and a place in paradise. The carrot to the stick. It supplies a spiritual motive, of sorts, to their actions. But this somewhat caricatured version ascribes base, sexual motives to the pilots' spirituality. There is some dispute as to the precise translation of the boons of the Islamic paradise of the martyrs. But it bears noting that imputing the motive of sexual and sensual pleasure to the terrorists' religiosity effectively serves to demean them in Puritanical, Protestant American eyes.

Translation issues aside, this view that suicide bombers and terrorists are motivated by dreams of some sort of paradise seems to have some grounding in fact. It is not unprecedented in the Western Christian tradition: consider the promises to the early Crusaders that death in the struggle to liberate the Holy Land from Saracens would bring remission of their sins and admittance to heaven.

Clearly, though, paradise is meant to be a better place. Better than what? we might ask. Better than this place. Better than this life.

They are led to disdain this world and the things of this world which, presumably, includes themselves. Ashamed of their lot in life, ashamed of themselves, blame must be laid. And America looms large as a convenient target for their hatred—and fear.

Overcoming this fallen world, overcoming the shameful self, is the first step to conquering the instinct of self-preservation. Why preserve what you have been convinced you should be ashamed of? Why fear the loss of this fallen, shame-laden life?

Death is a doorway to a better place, a more acceptable self. To stature. To pleasure. To love. To pride. Thyraphobia is a bad thing, a sign of weakness or cowardice in the warrior—spiritual and physical. The suicider need not fear this door. The terrorist is eternally welcome on the other side of this door. If he goes through this door, his abased life will not have been in vain.

Fear—the pure, raw, immediate feeling I felt as I stared down two miles to the drop zone—is thus thoroughly expunged by convincing the victim (yes let's call him a victim) that his life is shameful and miserable, and that he can escape that lowly misery by overcoming his fears of heights and dying. He is convinced that the source of all his misery is not only his enemy, but the enemy of his brother, his family, his clan, his tribe, his race, his nation, his civilization. He has a duty to screw his courage to the sticking place, overcome this paltry fear, and go through that doorway to the glories of martyrdom.

Anger, hatred, shame, and fear: every warlord—whether it is Osama bin Laden or Dick Cheney, Ho Chi Minh or LBJ, Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill, Saladin or Richard the Lionhearted, Alexander the Great or Darius III, Xerxes the Great or Themistocles—must master the art of manipulating these emotions in the hearts of his warriors and his people. It is an ancient art and, thus, an effective one because these emotions are so profound, so deeply central to who we are as human beings.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 13)

(cont'd from previous posts)

It's important to be wary of imputing motives to others' actions: I know I, for one, despise it when some angry person—say, a drunk in a bar or a belligerent neighbor or a frustrated boss or an aggressive lawyer who knows he's losing his case or a political opponent or just about anyone with a borderline personality disorder—starts telling me what I'm thinking and why I did something and what I meant by whatever words I might have said.

It is not my intention here to do that, to project my own insecurities onto others, or to score political points against the previous administration. I'm trying to forge some sort of understanding of myself and, in effect, all of us, trying to operate at human baseline.

If—and I stress the hypothetical here—it is safe to say that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld (and especially Cheney) are heirs to what Richard Hostadter termed the "paranoid style" and that not only did they vicariously feel the terror (being, as predators, ever-sensitive to that weakness in others as well as under the civic duty of their offices) that we all felt on Sept. 11, 2001, but also, if they are at all human, that they experienced deep shame at their own failure to do what they loudly claimed their political enemies, the Democrats, were incapable of—to wit, keep us safe from terror—, that would seem to vindicate my own point that these negative emotions I've been examining demand careful handling—and especially so at the political level.

In response to these internal stimuli, compounded in effect by their access to true power (political and military), they instigated what I consider to be the greatest PR effort of recent memory: to wit that President Bush made us safe from terror. They sold us a war on fraudulent premises. But, more importantly for my purposes here, by pre-emptively "tak(-ing) Saddam out" they effectively managed to conceal their own shame and complicity (negligence).

[Aside: There is an argument to be made that their warring ways were strategically motivated. And I am not immune to that argument. That is to say, preserving U.S. might and world domination as the sole-surviving super power requires us occasionally to throw our weight around. To smack down some petty tyrant—i.e., Saddam Hussein—who threatens to disrupt our supply lines of a crucial resource—i.e., oil. To put the pincers on a troublesome thorn in our imperial paw since at least the time of President Carter's administration—i.e., Iran—by occupying countries on both its flanks and asserting controls over its access to key sea lanes. But that's another exercise, another theme blog series.]

But there's a flip side of that coin. I started off by acknowledging the healthiness of a certain kind and amount of fear: it demands you exercise caution out of a sense of self-preservation. Once this sort of fear is conquered, however—by, say, asserting that there is something more important and valuable than the individual self—then a different set of problems comes into play.

Individualism is an important Western Protestant Christian value. It is a cornerstone of the American way of life. Its concomitant, selfishness, is at the heart of many, if not most, of our economic and political policies. Understanding this is key to understanding America. We, as a rule, do not give up our allegiance to ourselves without a struggle. And we look suspiciously on those who do.

[There are exceptions, of course. These have to do, often, with our military and sports teams—though, even in those endeavors we reserve great affection for the heroes and stars who rise above their role in the unit or team and lead them to victory. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, particularly the first half, is instructive w/r/t the debasement and thus conquering of the self in the name of the greater unit good. Shame, because it so volatile, can be used as a profound motivator/manipulator.]

On 9/11/2001, there were four airplane 'pilots' (along with their co-conspirators), who, unlike me, willingly somehow and at some point overcame their own fears of falling from the sky and flew their planes (three of them did, anyway) into solid objects on the ground, obliterating themselves in the process. In this, I concede, they were far braver than I who couldn't bear to jump from a slow-flying plane with a professional skydiver and a parachute strapped to my back. What could motivate a person to take such a radical step? It's baffling to me.

I am comfortable enough with my own fears to know that I could never do such a thing. My own fear of heights is deeply rooted in my love of life, my sense of self-preservation. Did those pilots (I'll restrict my question to the pilots, because it's not at all clear that their accomplices knew precisely what was going to happen once they took over the planes) have no fear? Of course, they had fear; they're human beings. We all do.

But what allowed them to overcome it and so willingly sacrifice their own lives and futures? Were they somehow coerced or extorted or blackmailed? Was it ideological, as Bush/Cheney asserted? Did they hate us and our life-style (or at least some caricature version of it) so much they were willing to give up their own lives to inflict damage on certain symbols of our civilization? Did they believe they were at war with us? We with them? Did they believe that everything we did was specifically directed against them and what they prized (what Hostadter called the "paranoid style")? Did they not love their own lives? Were they insane? Did they do it out of a sense of religious or spiritual calling? Did they feel shame at their own lives and existence and somehow believe that America was a potent symbol of the root causes of that shame?

I am not sure there are certain answers to these questions, but I believe these are the right sorts of questions. And we have some clues that can, at least, give us some insight into what may have motivated these 'terrorists'.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 12)

(cont'd)

Thanks for indulging my little digression re: paranoia. Now, where was I?  Oh yes, I had alighted on something actually resembling a thesis: "terror, shame, hate, and anger together produce a complex, potentially toxic stew that must be handled with care and, perhaps, some degree of wisdom."

No one wants to feel these feelings. They make you feel bad, out of control. And it's only natural to fight the terror and try to conceal your shame in order to regain some semblance of control.

It's instructive in this regard that the previous American president decided to name the great adventure of his presidency the "Global War on Terror." He did not call it a war against terrorists (the specific evildoers and their ilk) or terrorism (which, at best, is a tactic of belligerents, often guerillas), or even a war against evil (as in "Axis of") or Islam or Arabs or oilfield competitors. It was, nominally, a war on an emotion—an extreme one, but an emotion nevertheless. Fight the fear.

Collectively, America, or I should say Americans, felt terror on Sept. 11, 2001: when the Twin Towers fell we did not know what had hit us; we were scared; we felt vulnerable. Terror struck. And our President decided to go to war against it.

"On September 20, 2001, during a televised address to a joint session of congress, President George W. Bush launched his war on terror when he said, 'Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.'"

Unspoken was the claim: 'Only then will we feel safe again. That will salve our emotional scar. We will never be scared again.'

One could, I suppose, make the argument that Bush misspoke in calling it a war on "terror"—after all he was famous for mangling the English language—and the name stuck among his toadies and courtiers in the press and the government. That does not diminish the fact that the invasion of Afghanistan and pre-emptive invasion of Iraq continued to be grouped under this name until March of 2009.  

One could, likewise, take issue with calling this adventure a 'war', as no such thing has been declared by Congress, which, under the U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, Sec. 8, is the only branch of government with the official capacity to do so, thus depriving Bush of his cherished "war president" moniker. But that would be splitting hairs.

The fact is, in response to an act of terrorism on U.S. soil, Bush lashed out at the entire world. He demanded every other nation take a side; they were either with us or against us. If they weren't helping us, we would treat them as hostile, in which case anything goes. His administration also used this GWOT meme as an excuse, i.e., cover, to consolidate executive power, to shred the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to reward cronies and private contractors, and to create a private armed force. Inter alia. (Maybe that little paranoia digression wasn't a wasted effort after all.)

Terror was also the nominal excuse for declaring that, contrary to international law and U.S. policy, the U.S. had the right to preemptively invade any country it deemed to even look like a threat. I now believe that was not the case.

It's clear to me now why my country declared a global war on terror, and went after Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan soon thereafter. Nobody here wants to feel the way we felt that day again—except maybe Glenn Beck whose so-called "9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001." (URL supplied only upon request) Fight the fear. And how best to protect ourselves from such a bad feeling than to root it out at the source?

But this was not Bush's only response. On September 17, 2002, one year after the attacks on the Twin Towers, he announced what has now been known as the Bush Doctrine:

"The security environment confronting the United States today is radically different from what we have faced before. Yet the first duty of the United States Government remains what it always has been: to protect the American people and American interests. It is an enduring American principle that this duty obligates the government to anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. There are few greater threats than a terrorist attack with WMD.

To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense. The United States will not resort to force in all cases to preempt emerging threats. Our preference is that nonmilitary actions succeed. And no country should ever use preemption as a pretext for aggression."

The U.S. declared it had the right to preemptively invade and attack any country it perceived as somehow threatening—anytime, anywhere. Breath-taking.

I now believe it was more than merely the feeling of terror that motivated this unprecedented belligerence. In my own experience of failing to jump out of the airplane, the feeling of terror was profound. I hated it and fought it with all my might. But worse than that, as I said, was the inner-directed feeling of shame. I submit that this over-reaction by the Bush administration might have had something to do with that.

Indeed, having determined that al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, it made rational sense that we would go after that avowed terrorist organization wherever they were holed up and protected—international law be damned. But to extend that to a doctrine seemingly perpetrated for the sole purpose of justifying a preemptive invasion of Iraq seemed irrational at the time, an almost hysterical overreaching.

I submit that it was an attempt to compensate for the shame President Bush and Vice President Cheney felt at failing to prevent the  attacks of Sept. 11 on their watch.

Recall:

• the incoming Bush administration was briefed by outgoing members of the Clinton administration, including Richard Clarke and George Tenet, regarding the threats posed by al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but they dismissed these concerns;

• multiple intelligence sources warned the Bush administration of the possibility of such attacks, including the infamous August 6, 2001, CIA Presidential Daily Briefing which declared in the very title that Bin Laden and al Qaeda were determined to attack on U.S. soil using hijacked airplanes; and

• "On May 8, 2001, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would "oversee the development of a coordinated national effort so that we may do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm." (Statement by the President) The task force was to focus specifically, in Vice President Cheney's words, on the threat of "domestic terrorism...a terrorist organization overseas or even another state using weapons of mass destruction against the U.S., a hand-carried nuclear weapon or biological or chemical agents." (CNN, 5/8/01) Moreover, President Bush announced that he would "periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." (Statement by the President, 5/8/01) The Washington Post reports that, in the four months between the President's announcement and the September 11 attacks, "neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place." (1/20/02). According to the 9-11 Commission, the Cheney Task Force "was just getting underway when the 9/11 attack occurred." (9-11 Commission, Staff Statement Number 8, "National Policy Coordination," p. 9)."  

They dropped the ball. They got caught flat-footed. Cheney's task force on terrorist threats to the U.S. never met. America was attacked on their watch. They made the country even less safe than under the despised Clinton administration. As did we all, they experienced terror. And, if they are at all human, shame.

In other times and other countries and with other players, such a shameful lapse would require, at a minimum, Cheney's resignation or, conceivably, his seppuku. He had neither the integrity or honor to do either.

They—Bush, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, and particularly Cheney—wanted to do everything they could to cover their shame, if not their culpability. If that meant carrying the GWOT to a country that was not involved in the 9/11 attacks to deflect blame, so be it. If that meant restricting domestic rights, so be it. What better way than to hide your shame and self-loathing than attacking someone you hate, however innocent he might be in the instant, and chiding others for being less than 100% patriotic.

Fight the terror, conceal the shame. These were precisely my own responses to my failure to jump, my admitted cowardice, my shame. I'm not unusual; I'm merely human. So is Bush. So is Cheney. Their failure to prevent those attacks—whether from mere negligence, arrogance, different priorities (high-ticket, big boy nuclear stuff), or whatever—was shameful. They, however, are constitutionally incapable of admitting shame. And their shamelessness led us into the foolish Iraqi quagmire from which we are only just now beginning to extricate ourselves. And this diversion of attention, resources, and focus from going after the real bad guys in their lair in Afghanistan has caused us to lose ground in that true front in the GWOT, a failure we are now beginning to reap the benefits of as that conflict escalates.

Certainly, there are Machiavellian reasons for a potentate to conceal his shame. But we are still paying the costs of Bush/Cheney's failure in American blood and treasure. Their ruinous, off-the-books adventure in Iraq is bankrupting this country. And their failure to finish the arguably justified assault on al Qaeda in Afghanistan has allowed the real terrorists to entrench and expand their capabilities.

They failed at combatting terror because of their preoccupation with their own shame. The threat of terror is as real today as it was when they took office in 2001. Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld still bristle at any suggestion they were negligently naive to the threat of terror. To conceal their shame, they engineered a grandiose war on terror, arrogating, in the process, enormous extraordinary powers to themselves. Nothing they have done, however, has atoned for their shame.

As I said,"terror, shame, hate, and anger together produce a complex, potentially toxic stew that must be handled with care and, perhaps, some degree of wisdom." Something the previous administration failed utterly to do.

(to be cont'd)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 11)

(cont'd)

On further reflection, I'd like to add one further option to the above list for dealing with the welter of negative emotions I experienced when I failed to skydive, an option so obvious I'm kicking myself for having left it off the list:

• I can allow the fear and self-loathing to continue to fester and metastasize within me and, eventually, succumb to paranoia (vide, e.g., H.S. Thompson & T. Pynchon & D.F. Wallace, inter alia et infra).

This option should, by rights, be grouped with the misanthropic, though, to my mind, it is more fundamental—misanthropy being more of an attitude and paranoia more of a root cause, if not a fundamental condition. In short, the two are by no means mutually exclusive, and the former is quite often a symptom, or indicator, of the presence of the latter.

Strictly for definitional purposes (again), I turn to the DSM-IV which characterizes what it terms 'paranoid personality disorder' as a pervasive distrust and suspicion of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent. (N.B.: The ascription of motive to others is key here. Questions of motivation are often, if not usually, irreducibly complex, and involve a high quotient of self-interest. To project and then reduce the motives of another person to a simplistic assault on the self is a supremely narcissistic gesture. But I digress (within this digression)). PPD is indicated by the presence of at least four of the following:

• Suspects, without sufficient basis, that others are exploiting, harming, or deceiving him or her
• Is preoccupied with unjustified doubts about the loyalty or trustworthiness of friends or associates
• Is reluctant to confide in others because of unwarranted fear that the information will be used maliciously against him or her
• Reads benign remarks or events as threatening or demeaning.
• Persistently bears grudges, i.e., is unforgiving of insults, injuries, or slights
• Perceives attacks on his or her character or reputation that are not apparent to others and is quick to react angrily or to counterattack
• Has recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding fidelity of spouse or sexual partner.

This, too, is a time-honored option. It is in the realm of paranoia (again, a soul-consuming transmogrification of basic fear; a mean basal fearfulness which, paradoxically, serves to mask a deep-seated, threatening sense of existential insignificance)—its projection of conspiratorial plots to confirm the paranoid in his feelings of oppression—that the transformation from the personal to the political occurs. There is a famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," by Richard Hostadter from the November, 1964 Harper's Magazine. I quote liberally [editorial comments bracketed]:

"the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high." [Tea Parties and Town Hall protestors?]

"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse." [Sean Hannity?]

"As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. " [Glenn Beck?]

"The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional)." [Who's the anti-Christ?]

"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.* Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth."  [FoxNews vs. the so-called 'liberal media'?]

"On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments." [Rush Limbaugh?]

"...the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world." [Dick Cheney & the neo-cons?]

"We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well." [Sarah Palin?]

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

When you are entrenched in your own self-affirming fortress of fear and terror, indeed the world and everyone and everything in it feels like it is out to get you.

By way of fun and further penance for neglecting such an obvious option, I'll end this little [who am I kidding] digression with some literary quotes on the topic (this being, of course, the reason I feel so stupid for leaving it off the list from the previous post):

Thomas Pynchon's "Proverbs for Paranoids" (references are from Gravity's Rainbow)

1. "You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures." 237
2. "The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master." 241
3. "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." 251
4. "You hide, they seek." 262
5. "Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations." 292

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."—Hunter S.Thompson, "Extreme Behavior in Aspen," February 3, 2003

"There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die."—H.S. T., Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s, 1988 [did he leave the commas out of that last sentence?]

"People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then... No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front tires." -- H.S.T., Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

"It would be easy to say that we owe it all to the Bush family from Texas, but that would be too simplistic. They are only errand boys for the vengeful, bloodthirsty cartel of raving Jesus-freaks and super-rich money mongers who have ruled for at least the last 20 years, and arguably the last 200 years. They take orders well, and they don't ask too many questions. The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War. Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear. Ho ho ho. Let's not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discontinued. The only freedom we truely crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters." HST "Memo from the Sports Desk" intro to Kingdom of Fear.

"Never turn your back on Fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed." HST, Kingdom of Fear, "There Is No Such Thing As Paranoia."

And last, but not least:

"Nothing brings you together like a common enemy" David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest 113;

"the people to be most frightened of are the people who are most frightened" DFW, IJ 204

"Yes, I'm paranoid--but am I paranoid enough?" DFW, IJ fn.211/1035?

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 10)

(cont'd from previous post)

Maybe that last statement was a little extreme. If I ever managed to conquer my fear of jumping out of an airplane—which b/t/w I have absolutely no inclination to do—, I would no longer be ashamed of myself. I would have something to be proud of. Fine: eliminate the emotional stimulus (i.e., the terror) by conquering it and, thus, eliminate the shame and self-loathing. But that is not what happened. Denial gets me nowhere, though it does throw up a certain challenge. And, as indicated by the David Foster Wallacean subtitle to this series of posts, I intend never to not jump again.

Still, it lingers.

By not going through the door of that perfectly functional airplane at a height of 14,000ft., I got to know some of my limitations (thanks again Jeff and Harry), one of which is this basic flaw in my make-up: a paralyzing terror of precarious heights. I felt ashamed of this fault in my nature. I was angry at myself and I hated this feeling of humiliation.

So that was my situation, and such is my condition.

There are, I suppose, any number of possible models for dealing with such stark negative emotions that are inescapable in the human condition:

• I can internalize the self-loathing and become depressed and despair at this human-all-too-human infliction (Kierkegaard's profound analysis of modernity in The Sickness Unto Death);

• I can somehow get rid of myself, or at least the particular aspect of myself that caused all these bad feelings  (i.e., somewhere on a scale from suicide (a time-honored response to shame and loss of face) to fundamental change a la conversion (the Christian response) or analysis (the Freudian));

• I can become recklessly adventurous and engage in self-destructive behaviors (a subset of the previous option) (again, time honored);

• I can get up the gumption to try to skydive again, determined to actually succeed this time—maybe this time using Xanax or some other pharmaceutical/technological therapeutic fix to get me through it (ditto);

• I can try to forget about it or deny its significance (until, if Freud is to be believed, this repressed reasserts itself in another, inconvenient context);

• I can try to hide the fact of my own weakness and ridicule or attack others in whom I recognize a similar fallibility or whom I perceive to be even weaker, becoming misanthropic;

• I can accept my limitations for what they are (the stoic, Jeffian/Callahan view) and try to draw life lessons from them (i.e., be philosophic) and perhaps even make art out them (the fiction writer's response);

• I can just go on (Beckett's solution).

• I can forgive myself (similar to, but distinct from, the two options above and, IMHO, much more difficult);

• Or some combination of any or all of the above.

The bottom line: the negative emotions terror, shame, hate, and anger together produce a complex, potentially toxic stew that must be handled with care and, perhaps, some degree of wisdom.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 9)

(cont'd from previous post)

Let me elaborate on that last statement a bit. I ended the last post by saying: "And as bad a feeling as terror is, shame is even worse." Why is that?

Fear, generally, is an emotional response to something external—often something in nature. When proportional to the stimulus, or cautionary, it is understandable. It is situational. Concrete. It can be explained evolutionarily, instinctually. It is part of our animal nature as human beings.

My own experience was more profound, even neurotic. What I experienced was more powerful than my conscious, rational mind. It overcame, overwhelmed me. It paralyzed me. I had no control over it. I couldn't conquer it. It was such a bad feeling I knew I never wanted to experience it again. Yet, paradoxically, this did not provide me sufficient motivation to overcome it and simply push through the door.

There's nothing controversial there. Warriors know this and seek to induce terror in their enemies: if you cause your adversary to panic and flee the field of battle, you prevail.

But, again, however exaggerated, my own feeling of terror was a fear of something: I was terrified of falling from a great height—parachute and parachute-buddy or no.

The subsequent embarrassment I felt is a different story altogether. Where fear is outward directed, shame is self-directed. Shame is a more general emotion. Its dynamic includes such feelings as self-loathing, image-consciousness, disgust at one's vulnerabilities, perhaps even grief over one's limitations.

In my case, though set off situationally—namely by my own cowardice—it was much more existential. It was a negative emotional response to the negative emotional reaction of fear. (And in this case, two negatives don't make a positive; they double down.) I was ashamed of being afraid; and since it was I who had experienced terror, it was I of whom I was ashamed.

The situational fear would soon be allayed: the stimulus would be removed: the airplane door would be closed, and I would be once again on solid ground. I, however, the person who had experienced this profound sense of terror and could not conquer it, could not so easily be removed; I had to live with myself. And my shame.

[Without getting too analytic here, it bears remarking that perhaps I couldn't overcome my own panic simply because I didn't want to; I liked the let's call it 'ecstatic' feeling of being out of control; I failed to conquer my fear because I like the feeling of failure; I succumbed to the terror because I wanted to wallow in my own shame. Any or all of the above may or may not be the case, but that's a discussion between me and my analyst—or at least something to work out dramatically through the characters in my fiction—which, by the way, is pretty much the psychoanalytic crux of the protagonist's situation in my still-unagented and, thus, still-unpublished novel, EULOGY. Sorry for the "shameless" plug. That being said, as the subtitle to this series of posts indicates, I'll never not parachute again: I will either go up and jump no matter what, or I'll not go up.]

So, what is the learning here? What the wisdom? The take away, as they say? With regard to fear, once you remove the stimulus, you extinguish the emotion. Not so much with respect to shame; it is deeper-rooted, self-referential: to extinguish it, you must first somehow remove yourself.

And that is what I meant. Shame is a worse—more lingering, more dreadful—emotion even than terror.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, Or Purity of Heart Is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 8)

(cont'd from previous post)

Without getting all meta on you, you can see from the dates that it took me a full week to draft the last couple of posts in this series. There are many reasons for that and not a few excuses. Bottom line: these were hard posts to draft. The facts themselves were memorable and easily recalled, but it was the embarrassment, the memory of being unable to conquer my own fear, admit it to myself, and attempt to understand it that held me back from committing it to writing and publishing it on the internet.

But no, bottom line: I did not jump. I was scared. And I couldn't get past it.

There it is. I've admitted my cowardice in writing. To my shame, I've confronted my own lack of courage publicly.

Why was it so hard?

Fear is a bad feeling—not the evolutionarily healthy sort of 'be wary of danger' fear that causes us humans to be alert to our circumstances and cautions us to take care what we're doing or where we're stepping in response to real stimuli. Fact is, I should've felt a certain amount of fear there at that door. The pros told me they did, every time. That's the good type of fear, a positive feeling—the intrusion of consciousness. The fear I'm talking about is the wild, neurotic panic I felt as I stared out that open door looking straight down two miles to the ground, even with a parachutist strapped to my back. It was a paralyzing terror that welled up from some place deep in my unconscious and took over my rational self. That's what made it so scary: I had no control over my own feelings. It was too intense for my body. And I did not want to experience that feeling again.

No one likes to confront bad feelings, much less dwell on them by writing about them.

But, believe it or not, there was more: an even worse feeling, if you can imagine.

After the other brave souls had jumped, I sat next to Andy on the floor behind the pilot's seat. The only thing I could say, at first, was "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I repeated it over and over, my forehead resting on my my hand. I don't know whom I was apologizing to—maybe myself. Was I sorry he didn't get the chance to jump? Was I sorry for taking up space on the plane and blocking the door? Was I sorry I couldn't get a grip on my own terror? Probably some of all three.

He told me to hold on and be prepared to equalize the pressure in my sinuses just as the plane banked and dove back toward the airport. I felt the pressure building up and felt nauseated. I pinched my nose and blew out (a scuba diving skill, by the way) and the feeling immediately subsided.

Andy and I talked on the way down about his wife, who is a commercial pilot and a writer, and his day job as a lawyer.

When we landed, I think the people who were camped in the mouth of the hangar were surprised to see someone get off the plane—or maybe that's why they came in the first place: that same sort of prurience that brings people to NASCAR racing. One man, the guy who first mentioned the fear of the door, came over and told me that he 'chickened out' his first time, too, and that now skydiving is his favorite thing to do. "You just have to force yourself through that door."

"You think you'll want to try it again?" he said.

"I doubt it."

Then I saw Jeff, the blond Jeff who, in our conversation, managed to repeat his Dirty Harry bromide: "Man's got to know his limitations."

"Then I guess I've learned one of mine," I said.

All this—the kind gestures, the sympathizing words (prurient or not)—was meant, I assume, to make me feel better about myself. The folks I spoke to were genuinely nice, including the instructors. But it didn't work. I specifically did not feel better about myself. I felt shame. I had let myself down. I paraded my humiliation through the crowd of onlookers who I know must've been talking about how I'd just come out of the plane.

And as bad a feeling as terror is, shame is even worse.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 7)

(cont'd from previous post)

Besides the pilot, there were thirteen of us squatting on the bare floor of the twin-engine's fuselage—five tandems and two solo jumpers and the jackass videographer who sat on a bench at the back of the plane (like the guy with the red helmet in the picture accompanying the first post). The stupid thing, though I didn't quite realize it at the time, was my getting in last. That meant I was sitting right next to the door. The Door. He Thyra. (I was sitting on the floor right where the guy the back of whose head you can see in the same photo is.)

I was reasonably calm as the engine revved, the plane taxied, and took off. I've flown hundreds of times in all sorts of aircraft. I watched out the side door as we left the ground and climbed sharply. So far, so good. I was going to make it, despite the rattling of the plane as it took off. I was going to do this.

The thing about these smaller jump planes is they attain altitude very quickly; the jump company advertises 14,000 feet in seven minutes. Out the Plexiglas door I could see the airport receding quickly into the distance. Then we banked—to the door side. I found myself leaning against the hull of the plane as we spiraled upward. Then, then, the video guy, for whatever reason, decided to roll the door up. All of a sudden there was nothing between me and ground. I felt like I was going to be sucked right out of the plane. It was an irrational feeling but very real. I was looking straight down—about a mile at this point—at the tiny airstrip.

My body tensed up. I braced my foot against the thin door frame and pushed back. I reached for something to grab onto but could find nothing. I reached up and put my hand against the bare wall. It was small comfort.

"You okay?" Andy said.

"No."

"You're hooked in," he whispered.

I looked down at the floor but couldn't see a seat belt or where any part of my harness was connected to the floor of the plane. Nary a clip or carabiner in sight. I pushed away from the door. Given the angle of our climb and the steepness of our bank, the only thing I could think of was being sucked out of that open door. And yet I knew I wasn't going to be: that was the frustrating part.

After some apparently covert motions behind me by Andy, the videographer slid the door closed.

"Hey, why'd you do that?" someone shouted sounding suspiciously like Wisdommy. "It's hot in here."

The video guy just shook his head in what looked like disgust.

I ignored him and closed my eyes, took several deep slow breaths, tried to slow my racing heart rate, and relax. After a moment I had regained what I felt was control and I opened my eyes. I convinced myself I had conquered this thing now and was going to do this thing.

"Okay, I'm hooking my harness to you," Andy said. "One, two, three, four. Four places. This is going to be fun."

I heard the clips click into place. I could see how comforting that sound is and how important it was for the instructor to verbalize what he was doing. "Great," I said, but I did not mean it entirely.

We reached our jump altitude: 14,000 feet. The plane, obviously, was not pressurized. Fourteen thousand feet is the highest you're allowed to fly in an unpressurized cabin without oxygen. Now, I've been at 11,000 feet before, on the lip of Nyiragongo Volcano in what is now the Congo, without oxygen, and I had a touch of altitude sickness: weakness in the gut and legs, difficulty breathing, difficulty walking, lightheadedness, that sort of thing. It was possible I was feeling a bit of that in the plane I told myself. And still had every intention of exiting the plane through the door at altitude.

"It's time! Everybody ready?" the videographer said as he rolled the door up again. Laughing heartily, he swung out the opening so he could perch just outside the door and film everyone leaving the doorway.

And again, despite my best efforts, the panic struck. I was paralyzed. My body stiffened up again; every muscle seized up tight. It was almost like I had been working out and overdone it; I ached all over. Terror had taken me over and would not let me go.

"I can't do this," I said to Andy.

"Sure you can. I've done this over a thousand times and have never had an incident. It'll be great. Look, let's just get up and go to the door, and then you can make up your mind." He knew what he was doing. We would get there, I would be shamed into not backing out, the muscle memory of the mechanics we had practiced in the hangar would kick in, he would add just a few foot-pounds of energy, there would be some awkward leaning, some pain in my hamstrings, and out we would plunge.

"No," I said. "I can't."

"Are you sure? It's perfectly safe."

"Yeah, I know. But I just can't do it. Send everybody else around us."

"You can't get your money back," he said as he motioned for the others to go on. "You paid for the trip up. How you get down is your choice."

I knew that. I didn't care.

There was some grumbling because the others had to crabwalk around us hooked in tandem, and we were quickly leaving the drop zone. As soon as Andy unhitched me, I went to the back of the plane and sat on the videographer's bench to get out of everyone else's way.

I watched first as Wisdommy then Wisdaughter and lastly Wisdoc got to the door and leapt, shrieking out attached, of course, to their tandem buddies. I had no worries for their safety. I knew in my mind every reasonable precaution had been taken. Lots of people did this every single day. I firmly believed they would enjoy their two minutes of freefall and their eight or ten minutes of floating and would land softly at the airstrip. Elated. A new experience under their belts to brag about to their friends (and put up on Facebook). But I also knew I couldn't do it.

And I didn't.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 6)

(cont'd from previous posts)

"A Bit of Occidental Foolishness"

We heard the plane's engine chug to life. Then came the announcement that it was our turn to board. Our instructors/tandem buddies found us on the sofas and escorted us out toward the plane. I squirmed uncomfortably in my jumpsuit and too-snug harness. One older guy who was sitting with the crowd of observers must've seen me struggling with my "junk". He stopped me as we walked by and told me not to worry, it would feel better once I got out of the plane.

"Great," I said tugging at my crotch. "Thanks."

"And besides," he said, "the pinching'll help take your mind off the door."

I had no idea what he was talking about, and it probably showed in my face.

"Oh, some of the guys have a name for it: they call it fear of the door," he said. "It happens to some people. They see the door and just can't go through it. It's a real thing."

"Puh," I snorted, impatient and annoyed at the same time, the suggestion having been firmly planted. Was this guy reading my mind?

"Don't worry," Andy (my tandem partner) said, cutting the man (who'd apparently had a couple of bloody Mary's already that morning) off and taking my elbow and pushing me on toward the waiting plane, "in all the time I've been here, we've only had one or two people who couldn't jump."

Couldn't. Good to know.

Just then I saw Jeff (of the long, Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque, blond hair) and his group returning from the drop zone. They were clearly jazzed. Jeff had loved it and swore he was going to do it again. Of course, he said, it was a little scary at first. His wife (whose dyed blond hair was nowhere near as beautiful as his), beaming, echoed his sentiment. "I was really scared, but it was so much fun," she said. She didn't regret it in the least. "Good luck," Jeff said. "Just do it." Guy had a thing for cliches.

It being her birthday, we'd engaged a videographer to record Wisdaughter's jump. [And yes it's up on Facebook with some awful Southern rock music in the background, but no I'm not going to tell you where you can find it, thank you very much.] He was a big, enthusiastic old boy, cracking wise as he filmed us climbing the three steps up into the plane's fuselage. Thumbs up and all that. After all the interruptions on the way to the plane, Andy and I were the last tandem to get into the plane. As I entered, last but for the camera guy, I pretended to bang my head on the low top of the door. The Door. "Ouch," I winced, rubbing my forehead and mugging for the camera. Giggles and moans and grins all around. "Stop clowning around, Dad. Let's go." My kids're so onto me.

I told myself that bit of slapstick would take their minds off what was about to happen. Who was I kidding? I was working hard to suppress what I knew was coming—the fears of a clown.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 5)

(cont'd from previous post)

We suited up and stepped into our harnesses. The harnesses loop tightly around your upper thighs then fasten around your waist and shoulders to keep you from falling forward and out of them.

I spoke with Wisdaughter's dive-buddy, let's call him 'Joey' (he might be a grad student at GIT), and asked about jumping accidents they'd had at the facility. He told me the very harnesses we were just then strapping on were of recent design and had been implemented when the aforementioned paraplegic had somehow passed out on a tandem dive and flipped down and, due to a lack of lower body muscle control, out of his harness. The new design, which loops tightly around your thighs, purportedly keeps you from doing just that. I credited Joey for his forthrightness, explaining that I had researched the very topic of accidents at the dive facility and was wondering just how someone, -plegic or not, could conceivably have fallen out of a tandem harness. He then went through an elaborate pantomime of the incident, taking care to demonstrate how it simply couldn't happen again. Safety and all that.

My dive-buddy, let's call him 'Andy', is a lawyer in Atlanta. He gets his jollies, and supplements his income, by jumping on the weekends. He was very reassuring. He'd done over 1500 jumps without anything anywhere near an incident, he told me. I told him I didn't want to swing around or go up and over the canopy once we'd deployed our chute. I wanted to hang straight underneath it for the spiral down. He looked a bit disappointed (or that's how I interpreted his look) but agreed. That's the best I could do, I felt the need to explain.

Perhaps sensing my trepidation—the terror in my eyes? the quaver in my voice?—he asked me to practice the specific mechanics of the door—The Door!—exit there on the carpet in the dressing room several times. This, I suspect (principally because none of the others in my group was requested to go through the same motions), was his attempt to have me achieve, behaviorally and physically, what, unbeknownst to him, Wisdoc had managed to achieve, inwardly and psychically, in her own door dream—namely, to give me an outward mechanism, i.e., a set of specific set of uncomfortable tasks, to focus on that would distract me and make me forget about whatever inner turmoil it was he intuited I might have been experiencing.

Fortunately or un-, as the case may be, I do have an inner life, and quite an exquisite one from all indications. That is to say, one not so easily lulled or gulled.

As we were rehearsing our exits, tatooed, spiky-haired instructor Jeff came over and announced that there was some sort of glitch with the plane, and they had to shut off its engines. That meant we would have to wait half-an-hour before they would be able to restart it. So we plopped on one of the shabby sofas in front of a big-screen television and watched jump DVDs of members of the groups that had already completed their jumps. There was lots of screaming and joking around and bad, loud rock music in the background. The participants enjoyed watching themselves on the television. One of them, a woman "of a certain age" with bottle-blond hair, bee-stung lips, Botoxed cheeks, too much expensive jewelry, and long, shiny nails, told us how this was going up on her Facebook page so her step-daughter who lived in Colorado could see it and be proud of her. She told us how this was her first time and how scared she'd been at the door, but how she'd been with her husband whose hobby skydiving is and just gone ahead and jumped anyway and Voila! there she was doing it on the big screen.

I had trouble hearing what she was saying; the music on the video was blaring through huge speakers, my jumpsuit was hot, and my harness was pinching my balls. Yet there was no escaping the inevitable inference: if she could do it, anybody could.

And thus down was the psychic gauntlet flung.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 4)

(cont'd from previous posts)

I'll be the first to admit I've always had a bit of acrophobia—but only at certain kinds of heights. Walking across a swinging suspension bridge, for example, or being stuck atop a stopped, rickety ferris wheel, or riding up that clanking climb on the first hill of a roller coaster: those sorts of things make me a bit panicky. Not flying in a jet plane, though, nor being inside a tall building, nor going up in the Arch in St. Louis.

[Sidebar: Oddly, I used to get a little queasy standing on the observation deck atop the old World Trade Center when we would entertain out-of-town guests in NYC—which was the only time we ever did those sorts of touristy things—but never up on the Empire State Building. The WTC felt like it was swaying with the wind, which, of course, it was as was the Citicorp Center where I used to work on like the 60th floor which itself would visibly sway in a strong wind. Sometimes at night the swaying would cause doors in empty offices to slam shut because of the counterweighted movement—and yeah, it was kind of spooky say at about 3 a.m. late on a Sunday night when I had a Monday a.m. deadline and nobody was even in the whole building much less on my floor and I was just a little delirious in the first place from a weekend's sleep deprivation. On a further side note, I also used to wonder what would happen if one of the Twin Towers toppled over whenever I would walk under them which was every day for several years while I was in law school (but that's a post for another day. They just seemed so precarious. Naturally, I just chalked it up to projecting my own acrophobia onto those inanimate duoliths [Note to self: Good research topic for causes/motivations of 9/11 masterminds having chosen the WTC's as target? Did they experience the same sort of emotional reaction at some point in the past and have a destructive rather than a phobic projective urge? Gives one pause.]).]

Anyway. The point is I'm exquisitely aware of my acrophobic tendencies, and I take active steps to allay my fear. (1) Whenever possible, I avoid. I would never, for instance, attempt to walk a tightrope or take a job walking iron. I don't rockclimb—though I'll hitch up and go to one of those fake climbing walls and shinny right on up to the top and ring the bell (though I have to admit the first time I tried I got halfway up and froze and had to come down just to test how well I was belayed). And (2) I cope. I close my eyes and use yoga breathing and relaxation techniques I learned in drama class and during college. Sometimes I even try to visualize, you know, a happy place sort of thing, too. And usually it works.

Fact is prior to my attempt at skydiving, as I said, I'd been fairly successful at overcoming my acrophobia (that is conquering my panics), primarily because my panicked responses had been proportional to the stimuli—and the stimuli had been relatively mild. I don't freak out on roller coasters or ferris wheels or well-built suspension bridges. I grab on to something—a rope, a rail—, I suck it up, and go on, often even enjoying the experience.

But it's more than a feeling we're talking about here or a mild fright; a panic attack is an overpowering physical sensation. Hell, George Orwell devised an entire system of societal control based solely on the inducement of it: Room 101. And David Chase created six award-winning seasons of premium American pay-TV based on one character's inability to deal with his own unmotivated experience of it. It's disorienting. Discombobulating.

Just so we know what we're talking about here, the DSM IV lists the diagnostic criteria for a panic attack as follows:

A discrete period of intense fear or discomfort, in which four (or more) of the following symptoms developed abruptly and reached a peak within 10 minutes:

1. palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate
2. sweating
3. trembling or shaking
4. sensations of shortness of breath or smothering
5. feeling of choking
6. chest pain or discomfort
7. nausea or abdominal distress
8. feeling dizzy, unsteady, lightheaded, or faint
9. derealization (feelings of unreality) or depersonalization (being detached from oneself)
10. fear of losing control or going crazy
11. fear of dying
12. paresthesias (numbness or tingling sensations)
13. chills or hot flushes

And, knowing all this, I decided I was man enough to challenge my own phobia and the debilitating panic it induced in me, amp up the stimuli to the extreme, and attempt to skydive.


(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 3)

(cont'd from previous post)

I didn't. I did not march my two beloved children out the door and forbid them from jumping out of a perfectly functional airplane. I was, I suppose, afraid I'd incur their noisy resentment (and louder resistance) and look like an idiot—especially since I'd already agreed to it and PREPAID (sneaky thing that!). At some primitive level I was torn between the urge to protect my cubs—which, by the way, is a very powerful instinct, right up there with self-preservation—and my normal rational self. I knew that thousands of people skydive safely every day, and we were going to jump in tandem with experienced professionals. That thought—and the promise I'd made to my kids—carried the day.

One other thing: that morning, Wisdoc had awoken and said she'd been dreaming about jumping, and, after declaring she had no desire to do it, had changed her mind, and that she, too, wanted to jump. She said she simply saw herself in her dream going through the door over and over and eventually falling safely to the ground. So she was on board to jump now as well. Talk about the power of the unconscious.

We filled out our forms and went through a brief orientation session with "Jeff". Jeff had wild, spiky hair and piercings and tatoos up and down his legs and arms and something like 5,000 jumps under his belt. He was not an adrenaline junky, he swore. He was clean and sober too, he said through bleary eyes—all the instructors there were, even though it was Sunday morning. He said it was perfectly normal to be afraid of jumping. In fact, it would be abnormal not to be a little apprehensive. Everybody, even the instructors who did multiple jumps every day, was. "Fear makes you careful," he said. "Believe me," he said, "none of us are (sic) suicidal."

On the carpet there in the waiting room, we practiced the motions we would need to do to exit the door of the plane and the jutting belly and arched back posture we would need to maintain during freefall. And we met the people who would be clipped to our backs for the ride down and pull the chutes at the appropriate time. So far, so good.

After orientation we had about an hour to mingle with other jumpers. I struck up a conversation with guy in a scuba diving tee shirt. He looked to be about sixty, but he had the truest, smoothest blond hair I've ever seen—even his mustache and goatee and eyebrows. His hair cascaded in gentle locks down below his shoulders. His skin was smooth and hairless and as tanned red as the laces on a baseball. He looked like he could've been a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd. He said he walked iron, which I interpreted to mean he worked construction on skyscrapers—not a job I could ever do, though I did work construction on a twelve-story hospital the year I dropped out of college. I think his name was Jeff, too.

This Jeff and I talked about our favorite places to scuba dive and then about our fears of skydiving. He told me he'd never done it before, but his wife and daughter (who were there with him) had given him a certificate to do so for his birthday. Eventually I asked the question that had been preying on me: "What do you do if you get to the door and decide you just can't jump?" He thought about it a moment and pulled his hair back into a temporary pony tail with both hands and said something so ridiculously cliched I nearly sputtered. He said, quoting "Dirty Harry" and, I suppose, the wisdom of his colleagues who walked the iron-framed skyscraper shells: "Man's got to know his limitations."

But I didn't laugh. I looked him in his crystal-clear blue eyes and saw how sincere he was. I nodded to his experience. It sounded like a statement he'd earned somehow—though I didn't ask. "I guess that's what it is," I said turning my head to look out the mouth of the hangar at the latest group of returning jumpers. Just at that moment a voice on the loudspeaker called his group to suit up. They were the jumpers immediately ahead of us. "See you when you get down," I said. "Good luck."

Clearly the fear had its grips on me.

(to be continued)

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again (Pt. 2)

It was a July Sunday morning, hot but not too hot. We arrived at the small airstrip at the appointed hour, a carful of eager. We found the metal Quonset hangar and parked behind a small RV sitting up on cinderblocks. It had grimy windows covered over with anti-Obama and heavy metal rock band stickers. From somewhere underneath it, I could hear a cat mewing.

About thirty or so people were sitting in folding soccer chairs on the hangar's apron facing the runway, chatting, smoking cigarettes, and occasionally glancing up into the sky. As we walked toward them, I naturally looked up. Large white cumulus clouds let in patches of sky blue sky. Just at that moment, I saw something about the size of a deer tick on a Lipizzaner's rump . It was the figure of a man falling in a puff through one of the clouds directly overhead. Whoa!

I craned to see him. He grew larger and larger as he plummeted directly toward me. Soon, others came into view. Then, after what seemed like a really long time, the first man opened his chute. A black and grey canopy with some sort of military insignia unfurled above him. Right behind him the other black figures opened identical chutes, probably a jump group from the local army base. I watched them sail down, spiraling round and round toward the drop zone about a hundred yards from where I was standing, swooping in one-by-one between two lines of colorful banners fluttering in the breeze, tugging on their controls and pulling up, stopping in mid-air about two feet off the ground, and setting down gently and precisely on a marker in the grass between the runways just as the plane that had, apparently, taken them up landed. Wow!

No one there, the regulars apparently, seemed particularly moved by this incredible feat. No applause. We, on the other hand, watched the men, who were all dressed in black coveralls, land, gather their parachutes, and stride back to the hangar, our mouths agape, staring back and forth at each other in disbelief. "OMG, we're gonna' do that," Wisdaughter said, clapping her hands.

"We better go in to register," I said. My neck ached. The others in my group, Wisdoc, Wisdommy, and Wisdaughter, could hardly contain their excitement. They chattered as we stepped into a dark room, the blinds on its windows pulled tight to keep out the glare of the sun. Its walls were lined with sofas and vending machines. A young woman at a plexiglas window confirmed our appointment and handed us out some forms—kind of like at the dentist's office.

This seems like a good place to explain how we got there in the first place. Wisdaughter had just turned eighteen and had declared that the one thing she could legally do on her birthday that she couldn't have done the day before was to skydive. So, she said, that is what she would like for us all to do—as a party and her present, our last family outing (ex our long-awaited scuba diving trip) before she had to head off to college. Wisdommy, who's a tad older was gung-ho and couldn't believe he hadn't thought of the same thing on his birthday last year. Wisdoc said she didn't want to jump, but was supportive and would cheer them on from the ground. I had said, "Okay, here's what I'll do: You guys go ahead. I'll suit up, strap into the gear, go up in the plane with you, and make a decision at the door whether to jump. I can't promise anything." If nothing else, I am sufficiently self-aware to at least suspect I might seize up at the last second.

Now, before you are allowed to skydive, you have to fill out a number of CYA forms absolving anybody and everybody in the known, civilized world of any and every kind of legal liability, real or imagined, whatsoever henceforth and forevermore, including, but not limited to the airport, the owner of the land under the airstrip, the air traffic controllers, the airplane manufacturer, the parachute and parachute paraphernalia manufacturers, the skydive company (its employees, owners, subsidiaries, heirs, and assigns), the pilots, the people jumping with you, the chute packers, the owners of the Quonset hangar, etc., etc. Understandably. The skydive company, itself a limited liability corporation, by my reading, was hidden in a maze of like sixteen other limited liability corporations each with different places of doing business from like Michigan to Florida; they weren't going to make it easy if you decided to go back on your entirely voluntary agreement not to sue: it would take thousands of dollars of discovery just to figure out whom to sue and where to locate their assets.

But I'm a lawyer. I'm used to that stuff, though, admittedly, I'd never seen quite such a defensive shell game. And, from my preliminary research, in all the thirty-plus years the skydive company had been in business, they'd only had two serious accidents: one when a paraplegic flipped over and fell through his tandem harness and the other when a just-married couple's chutes had gotten tangled on the way down.

What struck me like a ball peen hammer to the temple, though, on the first page of the stack of papers we received, in something like 36-point bold font, was a centered statement reading something like: "Skydiving is an extremely high-risk activity. You could seriously injure yourself or lose your life even if everything goes right." In a slightly smaller font, but no less attention-getting, it identified the company sponsoring this high-risk company as "The Uninsured [...] Company." This got my Spidey-sense all tingly. What in the hell was I getting not just myself, but my family, into?

I wanted to get up, grab the papers from their hands, and march them out the door that very second.

[to be continued]

Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again

I lead a fairly boring life. No real highs, no real lows. Moderate in most things except, of course, moderation. Emotionally, I'm reasonably even-keeled: no raging, no binging, no cowering, no wallowing, no violence, no dark moods, no self-pity, no spite. Pretty dull stuff, objectively speaking.

Recently, however, I experienced an intensity of emotion that shattered my usual calm, wrung me out like a cheap ShamWow!. Unlike anything else I have ever felt in my entire life, this was as naked and raw an emotion as I can imagine ever having—and living to tell the tale.

It was fear. Sheer unalloyed terror. Petrifying panic. An irrational,* (*I'll qualify this later) existential** (**ditto) dread that made me want to rip off my skin and leap out of myself. And what's more, I brought it on myself.

Let me back up. I've done many things in my life that many people would be afraid of doing: I've played organized American football and disorganized rugby, I've caught a H.S. kid with an 86 mph fastball, I've climbed a 12,000 foot volcano and stared down its sheer inner cliff walls into its vast smoldering caldera, I've bushwhacked through trackless jungle and spent three hours sitting on the side of an African mountain with a troop of gorillas, I've talked my way out of what could've been a dicey situation when a Congolese guerilla leveled his AK-47 at me and demanded to see what my U.S. money looked like, I've played with large (non-poisonous) snakes, on vacation this month I had a tarantula fall out of a tree onto my hand, I've scuba dived with 6-10 ft. long black-tipped reef sharks and snorkeled straight into a school of barracudas, I've swum through a coral cave at a depth of 90ft., I've sat out on the beach on a starless night and watched a heavy lightning and thunder storm, I've been in a plane struck by lightning, I've piloted a glider plane, I've spoken and even sung in front of crowds ranging from a handful to over a thousand, I've acted and starred in stage plays, I've disagreed with and even corrected a federal judge in open court (gulp), I've demanded a raise and a promotion and said if I didn't get it I'd quit, I've quit a job, I've been in the operating theater during open heart surgery and held a living human heart in my hand, I've eaten sushi, I've made a life commitment to my spouse, I've sired children.

All that is by way of saying I'm not a fearful person generally. Have I ever been afraid in my life? Of course; I'm human. Have I been able to get a handle on this fear, contain it, and act in the face of it? Yes (see above). In fact, one motif in my (still unagented and thus unpublished) novel, EULOGY, deals with the protagonist's confrontation of roughly six or seven of the commonly-cited ten most common fears. And what are these fears? According to this site, they are as follows:

1. Fear of public speaking (Glossophobia)
2. Fear of death (Necrophobia)
3. Fear of spiders (Arachnophobia)
4. Fear of darkness (Achluophobia, Scotophobia or Myctophobia)
5. Fear of heights (Acrophobia)
6. Fear of people or social situations (Sociophobia)
7. Fear of flying (Aerophobia)
8. Fear of open spaces(Agoraphobia)
9. Fear of thunder and lightning(Brontophobia)
10. Fear of confined spaces(Claustrophobia)

(N.B. It's hard to credit that people are more afraid of public speaking than death, unless you're a public speaker by trade trying to pump yourself up.)

But this—the fear I experienced—this was way beyond anything I'd ever felt before. It was an animal terror so pure it consumed me entirely; it took over my body—which, of course, means it took over my mind—and refused to let me go.

And what was the cause of this siege? A doorway. θύρα in the the Greek (transliterated thura- or thyra-), thus thuraphobia or thyraphobia: fear of doors. A doorway about three feet wide and five feet tall. Curved, with a rolling plexiglas door. I was invited to go through the door, encouraged, nearly forced. But I couldn't—not wouldn't, mind you. Could not. My body, at some pre-cortical, reptilian-brained level, simply rebelled. "I"—the rational, conscious self of me that intended, indeed wanted to go through that door—was unable to move.

Why? Because on the other side of this door was a drop of about 14,000 feet. Some two and a half miles straight down.

(to be continued)

A Slumgullion

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Heal or No Heal - Medicine Brawl
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Is it me, or does this segment from last night's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart bear a strong resemblance (in POV and substance, at least) to my previous post? With the obvious exception that theirs is funny. I've been a fan of TDS since the Craig Kilborn days. In fact, I remember thinking when JS replaced him that it would no longer be any good. I was wrong. TDS, in the tradition of such political comedians/satirists as Pat Paulsen, early Al Franken, and many others, is a tremendous program which cuts through all the political bullshit. If I were to find out (hint, hint) that one of the writers of the show had actually read my blog and used an idea or was inspired by what I wrote, I would be thrilled!

----------

Here's another idea: let's put all those who tote guns to Congressional or Presidential town halls in "Second Amendment zones" modeled on the "free speech zones" the Secret Service used for protesters against the former president and his party. As a matter of law, I don't believe the Second is any more sacrosanct than the First. There, they can talk amongst themselves, compare their signage, and brandish or whatever it is they do with their firearms.

----------

In other news, you can find a podcast of J.M. Coetzee reading from his forthcoming work—Summertime—here.

----------

If you're into old-fashioned reading, Hunger Mountain has reprinted George Saunders's first short-story, "A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room" here.

----------

The diving in Harbour Island was, on average, about a B/B-; though, one day, the last, it was A- when we swam through a coral arch at 110ft alongside a six-foot barracuda into an outcropping of elkhorn and staghorn corals and giant barrel sponges at about 75ft where huge schools (100s each) of amberjacks and large mahogany snappers and several varieties of parrotfish (including the rare midnight) were feeding, spotting large specimens of all four varieties of Caribbean angel fish(!) (the Queen being my favorite)—85ft visibility, 83 degree water temp. Brilliant! On several dives, we swam across coral 'nurseries' like the one in Finding Nemo with tons of tiny baby fish of many varieties feeding on the coral and hiding out from predators and the currents. The reefs were vibrant, no visible bleaching or damage in the 12 spots we hit. Best sighting: a pair of large eagle rays during a 10 knot (that's fast, by the way) drift dive through the appropriately named "Current Island" cut. I swam right between them!



In my spare moments, I continued my trek through the addictions and obsessive athletics of Infinite Jest; but, on my return, I discovered I was nevertheless behind the Infinite Summer pace. I'm a slow reader (a good man), and thorough, which is a problem when dealing with an encyclopedic text by a polymathic mind. IJ is so chock-full of information, it was making me nauseous (see J.P. Sartre). It's so easy to get lost in all the details, to get bogged down, to lose motivation. Yet, there are some moments of absolutely fine writing that make it worthwhile. Still, I was getting discouraged, knowing full well that if I set it down I would probably never be able to pick it up again.

This article by Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading, however, has persuaded me to keep at it. Thanks, Scott, for pointing out the forest.

I can't go on, I'll go on—though at my own pace.

ABC: Always Be Closing

Okay, let's be clear about one thing: Say what you will about the former U.S. administration, they were well-versed in the black arts of marketing.

Case in point: Pres. G.W. Bush, the huckster-in-chief, and his cronies sold this country an unnecessary (war of choice, adventure) war of aggression (designed principally to stabilize the price and flow of Middle Eastern oil so U.S. and multinational oil companies could more predictably calibrate their—and their suppliers' and servicers'—profits) as an existential war on terror, just like his father, that cagey old snake-oil salesman, before him. Recall, too: George Herbert Herbert Bush tried to sell tort reform (i.e., putting a cap on the amounts juries and judges can award for pain and suffering of patients who prevail in medical malpractice and product liability cases) as a panacea for health care.



Their M.O. in both cases seems to have been identifying a real (at least for them) problem (Sadam Hussein's chokehold on the price and flow of oil, on the one hand, and "tassel-loafered trial lawyers" who are the bane of corporate profit, on the other [notice a trend here?]) and, instead of attacking the problem head-on, linking it to what they rightly-identified as a more-salable casus bellum (respectively: 9/11 + GWOT and health-care reform), i.e., something the people would buy. Right causes, wrong (pet) targets.

Now, their methodology—and this is what the current administration doesn't quite get—was not to make the end-product crucial to their own political ends (which, of course, it absolutely was), but to convince 50% +1 of the upright citizens of the direness of the threat and screw the rest: scare them to control them.

In other words: FRAUD. Got that?

To their credit, they were incredibly disciplined. They put up a unified front: the PATRIOT Act, DHS's unified control over the intelligence that penetrated the spheres of the decision-makers, the Pentagon. They bamboozled, degraded, and ostracized State, turning it into their PR organ. They cowered Congress. The bait-and-switch they pulled on Iraq was breath-taking in scope: 'we're going to take Saddam out because he's got WMD ("We know where they [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat...") and he collaborated with OBL on 9/11'; 'well, not WMD but WMD capacity'; 'well, he had WMD, we know 'cause Don sold 'em to him, but we don't know what he did with 'em'; Saddam was a tyrant: he gassed his own people for pity's sake and he's a threat to his neighbors'; 'it was all about regime change'; 'they'll greet us with chocolates and flowers'; etc.

Think about this: there were literally millions of people protesting the invasion of Iraq in the streets not only of this country, but around the world. No one paid attention to them—not the government, not the media, and hence not the rest of the citizenry. The administration just went ahead and did what it intended to do all along. Today, by contrast, a minuscule handful of shouter-downers at a few, usually-lazy August town hall meetings, because they are getting airtime on CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, CNBC, talk radio, newspapers, etc., are seemingly having an outsized influence on the direction of health care reform. They might even be able to kill it on behalf of their corporate and Republican sponsors. Why is that? Discipline.

Likewise, the previous administration had timing. Another thing the current admin doesn't seem to quite get. Remember Andrew Card's (GWB's PoS CoS's) great slip w/r/t the run-up to the unprovoked invasion (rape?) of Baghdad? `From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.'' We are certainly seeing the wisdom of this POV today as a highly-organized and vociferous minority is making a unified attempt to derail health care reform by disrupting congress members' and Senators' otherwise sleepy constituent meetings.

Those guys knew how to run a marketing campaign. I am not being nostalgic, simply observant. They were supply-siders all the way. They knew how to sell their product (that is to say, ram it down our throats), even though people didn't really want or need it. The Obama administration simply doesn't seem to have those chops. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying...

President Obama is, by trade, logical, a rational persuader, a consensus-builder. Yes, health care reform may be what this country direly needs right now. And, yes, his policies may indeed be exactly the right solution at precisely the right moment. But he's not willing to scare people into buying it. He doesn't want to appear to be a fraud. He wants people to accept the rightness of his POV. Base marketing (which so often is tainted by fraud) qua style just seems alien (distasteful) to him.

Today we read that "he's willing to be a one-term president if that's what it takes to get health care and energy reform." How noble. How misguided: self-sacrifice for the good of the country. That's what Jesus was famous for—and look what happened to him.

Being Mr. Nice Guy is not what's going to close the deal. The President has got to make health care (and energy) reform absolutely urgent for the people. Fact is it is, but he's got to overcome the ignorance and intransigence of the mob and the demagogs and drive home what's at stake—the rank, urgent self-interest for these people in having reform. He's got to get down in the mud and make reform as crucial and urgent as the false urgencies of the 'death panels' and 'socialism' and 'naziism' and not letting 'some gov'ment bureaucrat' decide whether to 'put grandma down'.

Maybe he's gulling us (trans. see 'rope-a-dope' ). Maybe he's letting the opposition have its say in the public square. Maybe he's allowing them, rabid as they are, to bluster and blow themselves out, exposing their own ignorance and intransigence in the process. Maybe he believes he can absorb the political blows and still come out on top. Maybe he's planning to compromise. Maybe he's planning to counterattack. It's not clear now.



Maybe he's waiting until September to unveil his true marketing plan... Who knows. All I know is coffee is for closers.

(This post is in response to this fine post by an acquaintance of mine Drew Westen, not that HuffingtonPost needs to be linked to by me.)