Anna Hartmann [who asked, an hour or more into the event, what actually was my view of communist China] was not a ringer. I didn’t expect things to go so far afield in the gradually overwhelming comments-and-questions that developed. I had thought I would simply talk everyone through an informal walking tour of my apartment, as it had been [very partially] planted inside Francie and Bob’s loft, eventually to perform the final dialogue/monologue with Bob’s help, cuing him on it, when I felt done with touring.

The ‘talks series’ was not yet established enough to bring me to expect so much interaction during my presentation, nor were methods and precedents of mine for such intensive interaction, in presenting ideas or work. I was dismayed and tried to stay hospitable and wonder as we talked whether things were going badly amiss and what this ever might be good for. I had no idea I would create a transcript, at the time, but Bob was taping these talks, and I decided to make myself a transcript to help myself understand, follow, trace, reconcile what had actually occurred, which felt at once so confusing and thick and ephemeral. Then while and after I typed it carefully up, I was really impressed with the entire paradoxical drama/inquiry of it and made 50 copies, I think, with covers I designed using John Harryman’s photos, to give to friends.

Anna was someone I barely knew, someone I thought of at the time as more dry and left-political than artistic; today she is still alive today and making artwork. Anyhow, her remark, from a perch by a window where she was sitting fairly still, was spontaneous and unexpected, although fully justified by the very minimal advance publicity offered for this talk, and I had not prepared a response, though I felt that I ought to have. I feel that what I said in reply reflects almost helplessly both what I’d had to say and how I was experiencing the event itself, as well as my rather sketchy and humble sense of what life in China and anyone’s views of it might entail.

I don’t know that I’ve been a committed radical leftist, but I do seem to have tended to assume positions that our society references as radical and left more often than not. If my sense of continuity and resolve on such stances constitutes commitment, then the word may fit me; I don’t feel I’ve been activist enough to suggest militancy or a deliberate behavioral or career-long focus on realizing radical change in society, much as I may admire those who do undertake this meaningfully. If I felt more gifted in that kind of aptitude and skill set, I might have been more actively committed in such ways.

Structurally, I intended to do the tour of my apartment (rather as Jackie Kennedy and Grace Kelly, I think, had lately offered home tours), framed by the two vignettes (texts having been memorized, Bob having been primed to do his bit) almost as an afterthought. Thus, there was a process/journey, and a frame around it (like putting a scroll painting inside a frame). Anna’s question, like all the others, was fundamentally not anticipated or thought through. You will notice, I didn’t invite questions, or if I did, it was to allow for them once I realized they were under way and felt that to block them would be a deliberate move, one that I preferred (ethically or politically) not to exercise.

From my point of view, the esthetic value of the work was virtually destroyed (or blown apart) by the organizing intentions’ unravelling as it proceeded. Anna’s question and my thinking to answer it, as well as I could at the moment, and follow immediately with the closing coda, seemed at least possibly to begin to redeem the talk as an aesthetic project (this talk could hardly be thought to be a sharing of erudition or critical analysis, as most other talks [but not Carla’s, which had been very first in the series] rather seemed to be, at least generically, if not in their actual experience).

Thus, your premise gives me more credit for predicting the interaction of aesthetic structure and social relations than I commanded at the time, and perhaps less credit than may be warranted for my improvisational performance aptitude and self-permission. The themes that emerged during the performance were perhaps obviously latent in the gambit I proposed to undertake, but I don’t believe I had consciously formulated them. I just looked forward to doing what I’d planned to do — two dramatic monologues bracketing a detailed personal tour of my apartment occupying most of the time and attention. I hardly ever plan anything in terms of theme or issues to address. I thought people would probably enjoy it, while feeling somewhat bemused and puzzled.

The risk of ‘orientalizing’ [that is, by enacting monologues by native Chinese that I’d transcribed from sinologist Orville Schell’s narrative journalism] was one I certainly recognized and tried not to lean toward. I did not assume anything purporting to be a Chinese accent (I think — check the recording!) or add makeup to change my face. I simply sat fairly erect and still, as though respectful and assuming a modest kind of authority, when talking the monologues in a slow deliberate clear tone that might suggest they were canned, whether out of deference to the Communist Party in China or out of the challenge of memorizing and delivering them without any sense of how best to inflect them. This they presented a variant sort of ‘talk’ in the talk series. That the speaker was patently not myself, as the apartment I was guiding people through was patently not my home, was more critical than that he was Chinese. However, I’d started out with the title, which began to get publicized, before I had decided actually what I would try to do that evening (either of these parts). I believe I decided on a tour and read Schell’s New Yorker article as research after I had announced the title and felt I must not turn back.

With twenty other USAmericans I had never met or heard of, I went to Havana and Pinales, Cuba, on a Witness for Peace delegation in early February, 2016. We stayed nights in the clean, rough dormitory setting of the Martin Luther King Junior Center in the working-class neighborhood of Marianao, except two nights in the Pinar del Rio region of western Cuba, where we stayed in a handful of homes set up like airB&Bs to provide guest accommodations. We met with artists, educators, farmers, a journalist, a Parliament member, an historian, and other speakers, sometimes at the Center and often in locations that reflected their vigorous commitments. Every such event was a surprise as it turned out, as even a book fair or a terrace tavern turned out to afford a capacious new corner of Cuban cultural and civic life and spirit.

Since returning from my ten-day delegation in Cuba, about ten days ago, I have noticed relative lapses in remembering to take my most essential orienting equipment (cell phone, appointment book) to work in the mornings. I have noticed myself more resistant to and strategically avoidant of multi-tasking. And I have noticed how a cyber-friendly cultural environment can be demanding of multi-tasking, even in rural Maine, where most of my workplace communications are in person or by telephone. Waiting for a slow-thinking laptop is difficult. I stop watching the spinning rainbow and walk away. I have noticed myself more willing to take a walk, to allow flowers into my home and office, to realize I’m pushing too hard or moving too fast and change that almost immediately.

In Havana’s various neighborhoods, occasionally I saw a fading stenciled or painted image of Jose Marti, of Che Guevera, or of the Cuban flag, on concrete or plaster walls of homes and other buildings. Never Fidel or Raul. I almost never saw a poster advertising anything. Do people learn where to buy something, what special events are happening, all by word of mouth? Perhaps they listen to the radio. I never noticed any posters or posted notices even for the Havana International Book Fair, which I saw was clearly attractive to a great many citizens of every age, few of them carrying any purchases around. To see merchandise may have been part of the charm, as well as a warm sunny afternoon in a 350-year-old fort on a peninsula reaching out from the city into the sea.

In a society and culture with free universal health care, there seems to be no need to purchase health insurance or negotiate claims for repayment, saving its citizens many hours a year to relax and enjoy one another as time passes. To me, the appearance of physical, behavioral and psychological wellness among Cubans was remarkable for its absence of scarcity. For instance, I hardly ever observed obesity, worrisome behaviors, tacit threats of aggression, or looks suggestive of anger, numbness or despair.

I didn’t notice any attitudes of servility or assumptions of pressure among Cubans. Self-acceptance and patient attention to circumstances as they are seemed to be common, perhaps universal. I might say, now, with hindsight, nearly two weeks later, that I spent ten days among a people with a steady commitment to survival and community, which they manage in daily life with a unstudied, unstated and resilient sense of equanimity.

I am sure I missed a lot, and I didn’t initiate many conversations with Cubans I passed or paused near on the street. When my Spanish is more fluent and my ear better adapted to Cuban usage, I may learn more from this and that person whether my observations are accurate from their points of view and how they feel about things themselves. My learning, outside the meetings and conversations of our delegation’s copiously and wisely scheduled activities, was primarily nonverbal, as I preferred it, allowing me time to observe, daydream, explore, snap photographs, and wonder at whatever I noticed without drawing any particular conclusions.

On a before-breakfast walk very near the end of my stray at the Martin Luther King Junior Center, I went behind a building I’d passed with curiosity walking back to the Center on the exhaust-filled 51st Street at night a few days earlier. Combinado Deportivo Jesus Menendez was signed across its block-wide blue-and-white-striped facade. I peered through dirty ceiling high windows into huge rooms nearly empty inside, walls coated with painted murals, some formally abstract, others casually anecdotal. Out back, I saw basketball courts missing a net and backboard, an empty swimming pool whose diving board looked unlikely to get replaced, the metal walls screening it tangled on the ground, and unsecured, undisturbed, rumpled and rusting steel screens covering concrete steps leading underground. A few men were playing racquetball in an open court with tall concrete walls, paint peeling amid the graffiti, and a boy parked his bicycle at a bench to change into his soccer team outfit before teammates and coach arrived. Other people ran or walked around a large track. A woman walked into a small set of stable steel installations to do stretches and chin-ups. It was Sunday morning, and people were using their local exercise park to start a sunny day well.

The building at Jose Marti International Airport that we used for our charter flights in and out of the island was remarkable for its calm. There were no TV screens. No loudspeakers played us music or barked announcements about security and boarding orders. There were more than enough molded plastic chairs for five times the occupants of the room to sit on, facing one another in comfortably spaced rows. The only café was tucked into a corner such that I scarcely noticed it. In another corner a bookstand was set up for government publications clearly aimed at the tourist market, featuring romanticized accounts of famous women of the Revolution and wildly overpriced maps – the kind I’d expected to see offered for free at the unoccupied information stand near the parking lot. Anyone who’s been through a major US airport in recent years can imagine the contrast with Miami International.

There was nothing I needed to buy throughout my ten days on the island, my meals being well-provided for at the center, my backpack of snacks an ample supplement. I didn’t need to see goods advertised. I knew markets were likely to have much narrower choices than back in the States. I didn’t mind, for myself. I didn’t much think about my not having to think about such things, alternatives and opportunities to indulge in luxuries not immediately present. I didn’t much think about my general impression that the people of the city knew what to expect and how to take advantage of the unexpected without doing one another harm. To be just me walking in the city, or in the country, was to be anyone, so long as he was plainly a foreigner here, as anyone could see.

I cannot but think that these observations are related to the Revolution and to the US-imposed blockade on Cuban commerce. What will change as the embargo is, somehow, gradually reduced or suddenly expires, I don’t pretend to know. Some who may know how to read the government’s will and strategy told us enough to lead me to think no corporation will be allowed to outweigh the government in any key decisions or stakeholding. So it will be interesting, not necessarily just more of the same. Meanwhile, change is universal, constant, inevitable. What will remain about the same, I am particularly curious about.

01 01 2016

Rather than diagnose or label Hannah Weiner’s writing or person as schizophrenic, it seems more useful to take a both/and approach, particularly since as I remember her personally and as I read her writings, I see her as both demonstrably and symptomatically schizophrenic and also as sane and rational, connective and compassionate. This fullness of resources and her use of them was part of the powerful nature of Hannah’s personality and of her written work.

I do not question the aptness of such a diagnosis, but like a lot of analytically oriented psychotherapists today, I question the overriding definitive authority of any diagnosis to delimit our attention to and appreciation for the life and processes of another person. (Meanwhile, we should remember that all diagnoses are culturally determined constructions of categories into which folks deemed reasonably subject to behavioral pathologies are lumped together, hopefully in competent conformity with consistent critera, and largely for purposes of managing the economy of healthcare. Meanwhile, many clinicians and researchers question various diagnostic categories’ meaningfulness and utility, while some of them and others may also question diagnosis more generally.)

We might consider that any of us may have buried, denied, or latent paranoid-schizophrenic and psychotic pockets or elements of cognition and perception and processing, which typically appear and disappear easily enough to be occluded and cause us and others no apparently lasting harm or acute suffering. They may, of course, also offer us an opening, as might an acid trip or a near-death experience, to acknowledging and living through truths that we might otherwise be or have been oblivious to or discounting of.

Not only might Hannah as writer “become” others for whom she feels compassion or with whom she feels common cause, but so may the reader who brings any identificatory attention (rather than only a clinically distancing one) to reading her work. The neuropsychology of identification and involuntary sympathetic imitation is increasingly well researched and documented. When we read, hear, or see emotionally or proprioceptively informed expressiveness, our nervous system replicates it within ourselves. I am the hunter throwing the spear. I am the antelope dropping from the penetrating wound.

As we read The Fast, for instance, we to some degree intuitively and involuntarily share in her experience; we don’t remain only voyeurs and analysts, though parts of us (or our synthetic, creatively reading processes) will likely be doing those things too. Dissociative processes (i.e., occlusion of the here-and-now) are inherent in reading any written document, while synthetic, associative and sympathetic processes are also deeply engaged.

My preference almost always for both/and (rather than either/or) reflections on how things are may be seen not only as a protest against dualistic processing and forced choices, but also as a means of staying (partly) sane while experiencing (partial) madness. I think as humans we need to do this, and we do do this, more or less willingly and consciously.

I agree that Hannah in her writing “produces a radical relational field in which she might embody the conflicts and antagonisms of marginalized social groups.” I feel that actually everyone does this, but typically we are not noticing or trying to figure out how to account for such experiences or to turn them usefully to account (e.g., to make ourselves rich, or to support the human rights of others whom we feel such an inherent human sympathetic identification with). We embody them both as sharing in oppression and in subjection to oppression. I would explain this as follows: Male privilege embodies the subjection of women; heterosexual normalizing enacts the marginalization and oppression of sexual minorities and differences; et cetera – most any of us unreflectingly enacts, embodies, or assumes such stances frequently, even if we wish not to. That we feel implicitly and tacitly the identifications with what we may be used to thinking of as “other” will be hard for many people to accept; I would suggest that our culturally reinforced racism, patriarchal mindsets, and so on are primarily defensive against the dilemma of facing the problem of how to include and value those whom we haven’t yet learned how to accept and negotiate with or reconcile to. If a bunch of Syrians are trying to escape with their lives from the wars of terrors that we unleashed 14 years ago in their part of the world, but we don’t speak their language or share their religions or know how to integrate them into our contemporary and rather insecure social and economic models, we quickly learn that we can simply refer to them as dangerous and as potential terrorists or collateral damage, and so keep them and our sympathy for them at arms’ length while we prepare for retaliation to a hypothetical assault – a retaliation that we know from history (if we notice history) has often been premature and preemptive in its actual occasions.

I agree with and like your thought that through a kind of ‘going crazy’ “we might come into contact with more of the “unthought thoughts” of our culture’s history,” and that we might achieve this by staging or reenacting trauma, however this is done, but presumably with some transparency to indicate the references within the metaphorical, so that an intolerable or nearly unbearable truth may become apparent to the readers, viewers, audiences. This seems to me an activist role, whether it’s artistic or not, though it is not the only kind of activism. Ai Weiwei’s instagram interpersonal selfies on Lesbos seem to me more like a ‘going sane’ than manifesting ‘craziness,’ but of course they also represent a choice with which most world citizens would find themselves feeling they were going crazy, were they to enact it as he does, embedded even for a few days with the reception of exhausted, starving, grieving, traumatized refugees from the boats there. Discovering and exploring and developing ways to stage or enact historical (past or present) trauma that engages those who have not yet been able to come to terms with its reality is a valuable and difficult challenge.

I think among other things of the Holocaust museum my kids and I went to in DC this fall, of Laura Poitras’s film on Edward Snowden, of Reznikoff’s Testimony, yet these are not evidently performed by someone feeling or acting crazy, and their form or style doesn’t appear to enact craziness. How this enactment of ‘crazy’ can/might happen and yield results in conscious reorganization of ideological or situational assessments of reality by persons as yet not strongly motivated to act on their evidence or information, I’m not so sure. Hannah’s work may make some poets more attentive to Native American concerns and our government’s betrayal of them, but I don’t know that we will see any consequent disruption or reorganization of business as usual. Maybe you have noticed other examples of a kind of efficacy here. I tend to think that imaginative and decisive citizen activism, prominently including civil disobedience by those brave and willing enough to combine such ‘crazy’ but nonviolent decisions with ideological values based on questioning as well as understanding, may be the most powerful course for such development, independently of whether artistic significance is apparently involved or not.

I think some kind of sensation of going crazy must come with learning and acknowledging horrific truths about our heritage, our legacy, and our current affairs. Suspending a presumptive requirement that we make sure that everything we know “fits” together may be essential to our capability to learn ‘the news’ and also to reconsider received opinions and reassuring attitudes that we have been brought up on and felt reinforced through our cultural connections over time. To witness anyone sticking her neck out for others she doesn’t (for her own family’s survival) need to risk her privileges over, may often lead well-intentioned people to think she is a bit nuts – rather than just brave and sensible – perhaps because her behavior takes demonstrative and potentially frightening risks at the same time as it violates accepted norms of behavior, framing, authority, and so on.

I agree that art may be “at best a regulation of this craziness, an acceptable way of acting crazy.” The line between ‘regulation’ and ‘containment’ is porous and indefinite. The artist’s attention, judgment and choices are always ‘policing’ her own processes and products-in-the-making. We are always both sane and crazy, both implicated and observing, both connecting and disconnecting, or so it seems to me. If we push the angle of acting out as crazy, suggesting a focus on our personal derangement and/or behavioral exceptionalism, we are allowing ourselves to become acceptable as the artist (a romanticized or extraordinary self-status), somewhat as the “village idiot” may have been acceptable within the community, prior to the enforcement and containment of policing psychiatric authorities over interpersonally unmanageable and eonomically non-utilitarian differences within cultures. The village idiot may not typically have been accepted in the community even as a teacher of some sort of wisdom or consciousness. Even the Fool in King Lear appears to teach to little effect until his royal pupil is at least half-mad, and the King’s deracination as a qualifying effect is one that the Fool doesn’t seem in any way responsible for.

Black Lives Matter has recently enacted, as did Occupy Wall Street, an interruption or disruption of business as usual, both symbolically and effectively, as its constituents grabbed microphones and shouted pointedly while taking up otherwise organized public spaces. Such crazy-not-crazy behaviors have made a difference, as did white people sitting at black lunch counters in the 50s and college kids burning draft cards in the 70s. How much difference is hard to assess reliably. That difficulty contributes, I think, to most ‘sane’ people’s reluctance to go out of their way to look ‘crazy’ or ‘impulsive’ through similarly demonstrative actions, even while we can easily know that the more such actions are taken by more people, the more difference they will make in how powers deploy themselves (whether they remain nominally and functionally in the same hands or not – the effort to affect established powers and power structures to react is in itself something of a reorganization of power, if only very temporarily).

So I guess, at the moment, to answer your question, I think that actions that facilitate the largest possible involvement, especially of ‘boots on the [locally frozen winter, globally melting and softening] ground,’ will most effectively generate meaning and impact to inspire social change of significant magnitude, both on established powers and also on the reflections of other people who learn of such actions. And I would suggest that such actions might be seen as crazy if taken up by one private person acting alone without framing publicity, and pretty crazy if taken up by a handful of people with little or no publicity mobilized, but less and less crazy the more people are engaged in actual bodily present actions, whether they control the publicity much or not.

Militarism and its virtually sacred, officially unquestionable manifestations, in its most “efficient” and extreme forms such as JSOC, reinforces the authority, persistence, and dominance of the American mythos, since its relationship to civilian lives is substantially unreported and enigmatic to the American public, while “plausibly deniable” to the world at large. Military force provides the critical mass that keeps up US momentum in the exploitation and pacification of the third world (not to mention the perpetually renewed incentives to oppressed populations to spawn insurgencies, a.k.a. “terrorist groups”), while holding on to a premise of US as having presumptive and enhanced “rights” in its relational posture toward “the developed world.”

This is what “civilization” has come to for the United States. Militarism is the net we are tightrope-walking above. It will catch us when we fall: the US is set to become a palpably military state. (We are already what is called a “fiscal-military state.” Defined at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal-military_state)

An email I sent at 11:30 today, Saturday August 8, 2015, to the list serv of the Maine Psychological Association:

Remarkably, the NYTimes’ James Risen covered the vote that was held this Friday in Toronto. His story was relegated to the lower half of page 11 of today’s edition, underneath a story about the Obamas’ vacation in Massachusetts. I can’t find it either in my daily email of NYTimes headlines nor in the page at nytimes.com that offers an extensive summary of all stories of the paper today.

[In the email, I here explained I was sending a copy of the complete article as an addendum, with my highlighting. Those interested can find it at the Times’ website, through a search for “Psychologists Approve Ban on Role in National Security Interrogations By JAMES RISEN  AUG. 7, 2015”]

The Wall Street Journal did not mention the vote or convention at all in today’s paper. (I was at my local library searching through the print editions of these two papers, rather than on line, to be able to make these observations.) The Journal does however carry a small lower page story about a report from the human rights committee of the OAS accusing the Obama administration of dragging its feet on clearing uncharged and evidently not dangerous detainees out of Guantanamo. Another news story, easier to find in the mainstream, identifies the Obama administration’s efforts to step up the pace of detainee delegation to other nations, which may be happening largely in anticipation of the APA vote and the OAS report. See http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2015/08/07/world/asia/07reuters-usa-guantanamo.html.

The paucity of coverage of the APA Council’s nearly unanimous vote (and the Times’ relegation of it to near-oblivion) is remarkable in light of the strategic role of the participation of psychologists in the enhanced interrogation of detainees who are typically held without known charges and all without rights of habeas corpus while subject to the ongoing torture (according to international human rights authorities) of forced feeding if they decide to join in a wide-spread hunger strike, while they are secured in a highly classified, secretive installation off our national borders.

Without having secured the green light for psychologists to participate, the Department of Defense, the CIA and the FBI might have very reasonably failed to sustain the kinds of interrogation and forced feeding practices that they have, early and late in the Guantanamo/black-sites period, a loss that might have led to more such detainees being held for interrogation under the auspices of other nations’ detention facilities, with interested covert visits from American security interrogators. Whether that scenario would have been preferable or more horrible for those detained is open to question, while it might serve primarily to support a NIMBY defensiveness of plausible deniability for the US. The mess that our “war on terror” has spawned and continues to augment is not going away easily at this point. And clearly the administration’s policy is to prosecute it, come hell or high water, leading to assassinations by drone or JSOC forces on other nations’ territories with or without their permission. We have “boots on the ground” anywhere on earth that the administration decides to put them at the moment, as a matter of clearly developed national security policy.

Mainstream news sources like The Times or the US government will not be found offering statistics about the number of hunger strikers currently active or the number of prisoners currently force-fed in Guantanamo, even in an article like that at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/us/guantanamo-hunger-strikers-petition-divides-officials.html?_r=0, about a detainee currently litigating (at 75 pounds and counting) for release 13 years after he was found “along the Afghan border, and . . . accused of having gone to the region to fight with the Taliban and of having received some weapons training.” The wrong place at the wrong time, as they say.

The article implies that his hunger strike is an isolated occurrence and that letting him leave Guantanamo might signal the efficacy of hunger striking as a tactic for other detainees to resort to, in order to manipulate the system and secure release. Nevertheless, you can see some numbers referenced in a recent Huffington Post story on a major ethical stand taken by a nurse at Guantanamo. He refused to participate in a forced feeding there and consequently found charges made against him by military authorities and his duties downgraded, although since then the case has been dropped (without explanation, evidently). In that article you will find reference to an internal military document at http://www.scribd.com/doc/254035173/Forcefeeding that explains that forced feeding of a mentally competent person is never acceptable to “international law and certain medical ethical standards”. Have psychologists been involved in advising or observing these feedings? Who can say? If not, why not? If so, how do we parse the ethics of their toleration of this practice?

Yesterday’s Democracy Now! radio/TV program featured excerpts from the Town Hall Meeting held Thursday under the auspices of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, for those interested in checking out some of the speakers there. Risen is also interviewed for several minutes. The producers of the program considered covering this issue important enough to base the show’s production in Toronto this Friday, rather than NYCity. You can see, hear, or read the show or segments of it, as you prefer, by checking at http://www.democracynow.org/

Steve

Open Clothes seems to me like it qualifies as pun, although since there’s no syntactic context beyond those two words, I don’t know if it is — I am not researching the definition right now, anyhow. What I can say is it was one of those things that occurred to me, as ideas will, stupid or bright, pregnant or stillborn or whatever, and it began to feel right. I imagine in retrospect just the phrase “open close” occurring to me as a potential title for something, then for the book, with the associations for me that I try to open up and re-open or keep open some conventions, concerns, uncertainties, feelings, ways of knowing my way through this ecosphere, and yet there is also, like it or not, some closure, as things become past, set, lost to memory or understanding, or simply kind of opaque and enigmatic. So we have those two verbs.

And they can also be adjectives, as one might open something keeping it close, and that sounds especially intimate, which also may resonate for a reader of this book, as at least to me most all the writing there seems to suggest and do what it can to enact a sort of intimacy of address and inclusion and risk, in its various sections.

The shift to “open clothes” returns the phrase into sounding like the two verbs, while also insisting again, but playfully now, on intimacy. Poems and words and language seem to me like clothes, in that they are not the core realness and livingness of interdependent life in this existence, but that living’s own mercurial and dynamic, metamorphic, interactive qualities call on words to analogize (I notice the word “analog” in there) in a linear account or structure some semi-authoritative (even while we will, hopefully, mistrust authority) rendering of evidence of what does or can happen — out there and in consciousness.

So trying to exercise that closure and that closeted mode of knowing (which so often, in this book and elsewhere, doesn’t at all “tell all”), while also holding it open to attention and awareness and doubt, seemed again to characterize my project, whether effective or not — to use it while also opening it to examination, with willingness to acknowledge a sense of its partial, temporary, material, constructed, culturally specific and other conditional aspects.

           (Thanks to David Benedetti, for asking.)

The legacy of death, disability, grief, terror, trauma, and debasement resulting from and inherent in the aggressive and mis-attuned American and European handling of the economies and cultures of the Middle East are well known and readily discoverable. However, they are all but unmentioned through the narrative that we consume at home, in occasional shock and awe, of the repeated sudden and violent incursions of the United States of America [US], Israel, and their occasional allies against Muslim and Arab peoples and their governments, who are expected to remain subservient and submissive to decisions rationalized to the advantage of the dominant military powers.

US policies in relations with the Middle East reflect two underlying formulations, neither of which is made explicit in the narrative of this front: a) an instrumental single-mindedness to promote and insure dominance and control, which are developed through decisive responses to the sporadic and disconnected local and regional movements that resist, defy or repudiate encroachments on the rights of the indigenous peoples and their states, and (b) the dissociative force of prior engagements in collective trauma, in both the US and the Middle East, that afford compelling influence to an “unthought known” that supports the US and its allies in staging reprisals of traumas of national development inflicted and suffered over the course of recent history.

A.

Observers can only wonder over why the US would repeatedly spur the growth of anti-US terrorism through its own terrorist assaults on human rights, infrastructures, and states, which may be most evident recently in the Middle East. The US’s motives for engineering and implementing these incentives to collective hatred and increasingly effective recruitment go unmentioned, aside from its paradoxical insistence on this as a means to stabilize and secure the Middle East for its native people, thereby securing American security as well. The US appears to undermine this objective relentlessly through its hostile and aggressive incursions and usually high-handed diplomacy. To persistently aggravate the incitement to recruitment into anti-US insurgencies and terrorist movements seems perplexing and counterproductive, unless it is instrumental to the powers behind the US military. Who is calling the shots? And why?

Noam Chomsky, among other analysts of world affairs and US policy, clearly identifies the wide scale of implementation of terrorist interventions and programs by the US, NATO, Israel, and allied states. In an interview broadcast on Democracy Now! on March 02-03 2015, he points out various ways the US undermines elected governments, plans or performs assassinations, and makes unmandated wholesale attacks on such nation states as Libya, Cuba, and Iraq in operations that respected international observers understandably consider acts of virtual genocide and flagrant or reckless precipitation of civil wars abroad. I quote Chomsky, from a transcript published on the Democracy Now! website:

NOAM CHOMSKY: You’ll recall, when the Snowden revelations came out, the immediate reaction from the government, the highest level—Keith Alexander, others—was that these NSA programs had stopped, I think they said, 54 or so acts of terror. Gradually, when the press started asking questions, it was whittled down to about 12. Finally, it came down to one. And that act of terror was a man who had sent, I think, $8,500 to Somalia. That’s the yield of this massive program.

And it is not intended to stop terrorism. It’s intended to control the population. That’s quite different. You have to be very cautious in accepting claims by power systems. They have no reason to tell you the truth. And you have to look and ask, “Well, what is the truth?” And this system is not a system for protecting terrorism.

Actually, you can say the same about the drone assassination program. That’s a global assassination program, far and away the worst act of terror in the world. It’s also a terror-generating program. And they know it, from high places. You can find quotation after quotation where they know it. Take this one case that I mentioned before, this child who was murdered in a drone strike after having watched his family burnt to death by drone strikes.

AMY GOODMAN: In Yemen.

NOAM CHOMSKY: What’s the effect of this on people? Well, it’s to create terror. The close analyses have shown that that’s exactly what happens. There’s a very important book by Akbar Ahmed, who’s an important anthropologist, who is a Pakistani, who studies tribal systems and worked in the North-West territories and so on, and it’s called The Thistle and the Drone. And he goes through, in some detail, the effect on tribal societies of simply murdering—from their point of view, just murdering people at random. The drone attacks, remember, are aimed at people who are suspected of maybe someday wanting to harm us. I mean, suppose, say, that Iran was killing people in the United States and Israel who they thought would—might someday want to harm them. They could find plenty of people. Would we consider that legitimate? It’s again, we have the right to carry out mass murder of suspects who we think might harm us someday.

How does the world look at this? How do the people look at this in this village where this child was who said that they’re terrorized by constant drone strikes all over North-West Pakistan? That’s true. Now it’s over most of the world. The U.S. war—so-called war against terror—has been a smashing success. There was a small group up in the tribal areas of mostly Pakistan and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and we have succeeded in spreading it over the whole world. Now they’re all everywhere—you know, West Africa, Southeast Asia—simply generating more and more terror. And I think it’s—you know, it’s not that the U.S. is trying to generate terror. It’s simply that it doesn’t care.

I do question Chomsky’s final assertion, above. He seems to say that the US doesn’t care about whether it generates terror or not. He does not say that the US purposefully generates terrorism among the civilian populations of the world who find themselves pitted against chronic and fatal incursions. However, he might be hard put to deny it, if pressed to justify his dismissal of intentionality.

The disclosure of the photographs of humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib a decade ago incited a virulent and comprehensible fury around the world at America’s evident attitudes toward unindicted citizens of Arab states. That US armed forces and intelligence agents have tended to flaunt disregard and contempt for Muslim beliefs and Arab customs is not due to mere ignorance of the information gathered about their culture. Indeed, this information has been suppressed, ignored or utilized in developing and exercising means of humiliating and traumatizing people of the region, inciting a predictable hatred and counter-aggressive will.

Following a highly destructive, demoralizing, and fatal “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad, although Iraq had shown the US and its allies neither threat nor aggression, there followed an occupation of indefinite degree and legitimacy, marked by failures of reconstruction, laxness of legal protections, and high-handed rearrangements of governmental authority under a nominal show of democracy unconvincing to its citizens. The elastically prolonged period of regime change was marked by an epidemic of abrupt nocturnal incursions into households to arrest residents by force, without charges or other information made available even to their families. An atmosphere of increasing mutual violence and paranoia sparked increasingly common incidents of random and reactive aggression from occupation forces and insurgencies. Deaths, injuries, illnesses, injustices, trauma, grief, economic collapse, and failures of essential infrastructure systems increased, as did internal conflicts among the population. US policy, privileging one portion of the population over another, led a once-harmonious cultural community toward venomous internal ethnic conflicts and civil war. The toll of depleted plutonium in the environment on the population, stemming from the two US incursions over the past quarter century, has never been assessed by the invading forces.

Chomsky points out lucidly how effective American’s militaristic foreign policy has become at establishing the grounds for terrorist movements such as ISIS, as a more traditional colonial and imperialist methodology of world domination yields to a pre-emptive first-strike mentality. This pre-emptive orientation leads logically to targeting suspected insurgents and those who associate with suspect groups and persons – an enormous and growing category of the world’s population—for incarceration, aggressive interrogation, and termination. Diplomatic negotiation inevitably yields to reactive and reflexive behavior, under the pressure of repeated humiliation and trauma.

It follows, then, that as our military’s efforts to contain and expunge groups like ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban progress to increasingly desperate and ruthless measures, American citizens, at home or abroad, will be targeted for counter-aggressive terrorist actions, in reaction to assaults large and small on the security of the populations of weaker states. As a result, US policy makers will predictably conceive brutal and devastating measures against a growing enemy as increasingly imperative. The powers that be in the US establishment have not indicated how they will destroy such forces abroad without finally destroying the peoples from whom they spring and among whom they live.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case opened regulatory floodgates to money from wealthy super-corporations to fund election campaigns and thereby influence not only who is elected but how they will make key decisions of policy and legislation. Consequently, the presumptive authority of large multinational corporations is clearly identified with that of the US government. Today, decisions in the name of defense and counter-terrorism cannot be made without consideration for the demands and expectations of such dominant international commercial forces.

Why might such interests allow the build-up of international terrorism, that of our targets as well as our own? Why isn’t this mess bad for business? How can the development of mutual counter-terrorism and endless war pave the way for growth and security in the commercial sector?

There may be in our government and its monetary support structure some persons who really don’t care and some who abhor this consequence of American policy, whether they consider it intentional or not. Nevertheless, the logic and efficacy of such mutual counter-aggression dominating a field first opened up by pre-emptive strikes is unquestionable. Such policy intentions are never referred to as such in corporate media. Instead, they are indefinitely suspended, as if disappeared, from the menu of ideas listeners and readers might reflect on, much as the impact of climate change on our recent spate of extreme weather conditions remains unmentioned by media meteorologists.

However, the powers that administrate the world’s economy, typically represented in the G8 summits, the Davos Forum, the International Monetary Fund, and other high-level policy boards of the world’s economy, are eminently influential in policy oversight of the US government and its intelligence and defense services. Such powers cannot afford to be ignorant of contemporary world affairs or intellectually deficient in analyzing the costs and benefits of American policy. One can only assume that the radical growth of aggressive anti-American terrorism has to be well taken into account within their grand scheme of doing business and maintaining their edge over any potential competition in the capitalist economy of the 21st century.

Increasing their market share depends on securing and dominating access to natural resources such as oil, water, and land masses. The powers that our elected officials depend on to stay in business as statespersons and legislators necessarily see their expedient access to such resources as fundamental incentives. It makes logical sense, then, to presume that aggravations of, incitements to, and proliferations of terrorist hostilities against our military and civilian populations, when generated from regions rich in such commercially useful resources, are actually intended and instrumentally depended on.

The logic may be as follows: American strategies of managing business as usual, including drone strikes to assassinate foreign citizens, enhanced interrogations to imprison and disable foreign citizens, and sanctions against whole nations of foreign populations, result in ever-expanding terrorist reactions. As a consequence, our military and Congress may claim justification for increasingly aggressive and severe forms of pacification of the domains from which counter-aggression has sprung. Dominant authority by international commercial interests over resources and policy of these states may be increasingly effective. These consequently expanding, far-reaching, and indefinitely projected policies, formerly framed under the rubric of a “war on terror” and now of a rhetorically indefinite and suspended sort of anomia, continue to generate facts on the ground that are taken to obligate American and allied forces to perpetual police state actions world-wide, binding our military and diplomacy to compel foreign states to submit to American dominance of their own military and domestic police policies and forces. Such a radical encroachment over the world’s land, people, and states provides an advantageous opening for multinational corporate control and exploitation, as well as for the imposition and enforcement of so-called “free trade agreements” designed to supersede regional and local regulations, restrictions, and policy within and among the nations of the signatories.

Our government and corporate media show no sign of readiness to reconsider policies resulting in non-negotiable incitements against foreign populations. These interventions are presented to our volunteer military forces and to our voting citizenry as moral and patriotic measures to protect us from enigmatically mushrooming threats. Generating such spite, mutual aggression, and desolation, while continually preparing for further development of crises and retaliations, is a grisly, horrific means of preparation for the eventual security and prosperity of the corporate control over a fully policed state with ample forces and wide-scale management of institutions of incarceration.

B.

Such outcomes may not, in the long run, bode well for the US citizenry. At present, Americans are largely entranced within the corporate media’s fantastic framing of the saga of American exceptionalism, which is taken to justify patriotic consent to official policy, no matter how irrational or preposterous. Threats posed by officially targeted enemies abroad anchor the story line of good versus evil, us versus them. “Destroying” the enemy, along with others construed as somehow associated with the enemy, if only by religion or proximity, is still effectively sold as a worthy and desirable achievement in itself. To the extent that this narrative is accepted, embraced, or simply allowed to stand, Americans are lulled into affirmation of their government’s foreign policy and support its initiatives with their tacit consent, even while their own state is eviscerated of citizen benefits, turning a blind eye to their material needs and safety and bankrupting the democratic process for fire sale to the highest bidders.

I can easily believe that this assessment is not generally admitted into discussion by many who are instrumental in implementing and supporting militaristic interventionism. The analysis above, as a framing of the situation, may not enter into their conscious thoughts. Yet its implicit logical process proceeds unarrested, gathering force as it accelerates, currently in the momentum of opinion that ISIS can and should be eradicated. I propose that the underlying narrative of this logic constitutes an example of “the unthought known” in our everyday life.

In Forces of Destiny (Aronson, 1989), British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas writes, paradoxically enough, that this phrase, “the unthought known,” “refers to any form of knowledge that as yet is not thought.” The knowledge in such an instance is not articulated, may not yet be accessible to language. A person may in some way know but cannot actually think what is happening, why it’s going that way, in mind or in behavior. Such an “unthought known,” stemming sometimes from preverbal formative relational influences, including repressed trauma history, may determine the course of a person’s expectations for life and persistent history of relational functioning, while remaining inaccessible to cognitive attention and memory. A mood or attitude, such as one of fear, rage, or vigilance, can be aroused by such a schema’s activation and persist to strengthen its determining power in the person’s life.

Stretching a use of this theoretical concept, I suggest that “the unthought known” may also occupy a government and culture’s behavior and framing of its actions at various levels of awareness, while evading conscious recognition and ethical assessment, particularly when the population responsible for and collusive with governmental decisions shares a primordial history corresponding to the re-enactment under inquiry. The continuing legacy of subjugation and destruction of the native North American populations and enslavement and brutally enforced degradation of African Americans and other racial minorities are among the constructive traumatic episodes that made possible the creation of this nation and the development of its economy. Unconscious re-enactment may be inferred in the US’s present assumption of dominant authority and forceful aggression in the Middle East.

Steve Benson
03 03 – 03 22 2015

Driving to work a couple days ago, listening to the Democracy Now! headlines and barking out echoes and ripostes, as I tend to do, early in my morning, to get my voice in shape, to stay alert to Amy Goodman’s hectic delivery of information, and to vent my attitudes, I found myself verbalizing something about how our innate human interdependency and sociality and attachment needs not only orient us toward mutual care, group mind, loyalty and love in connection with our collective body (whether as clan, nuclear family, profession, workplace, ethnic fellows, sexual orientation, or nation) but also can fuel our hostile, war-mongering, aggressive, hateful and militaristic attitudes and behaviors.

By us, I mean “people,” of course. And of course this was spelled out in some rude short-hand, there in the car, where I was tooling along alone without a recording device turned on.

My concept, though, came back to me this morning washing breakfast dishes. If there’s an us that we value as native, vital, meaningful, safe, mutually supportive and helpful, there may be, whenever the sympathetic nervous system [SNS] kicks in, a them — whether it’s a sabre-tooth tiger, a plague, a boogeyman, an economic threat, a looming impression of enigmatic difference that feeds a potential paranoia, or an enemy that’s been identified in our cultural milieu (I notice we Americans still are as a culture seeing Russia in a very presumptive, negative, demonic light, and we are still regarding most Americans as un-Americans, whether because they don’t live in the USA but in some other part of the Americas or aren’t yet citizens here or have values or practices that appear to question or threaten those we have accepted as definitive of America — even when these values are as peculiarly selective as being-employed, or skin color, or going to a Christian church).

​The impulse to create an other, as alien and as threat requiring control or annihilation (which is to say, an absolute and final control — such as our government hopes to impose on terrorists through drone strikes), may be an inherent capacity of humans, most likely to be exercised when a culture confronts or engages some kind of mix with what hasn’t yet been well assimilated. Bali or Tahiti before the​ onslaught of tourism and westernization come to mind, perhaps stupidly in me, as examples of peaceful (partly because isolated on an island) cultures — there must be more and better examples I am not scholarly enough to remark here. Our age of globalization and information explosion puts virtually every cultural difference into our implicit data bank, for Fox News or Democracy Now to remark on selectively, for better or for worse, so there is always fodder ready to this purpose, and information overload itself can add to the escalation of the SNS.

This is how, at the moment, I think that militarism and domestic terrorism and school massacres are expressions of the same thing: human goodness, in its affiliative and cooperative nature, under threat from apparent danger — often misguidedly advertised, for one reason or another. (Greed is another control demand, which I see as based in insecurity — which itself is culturally sanctioned and encouraged in our American-Dream consumerist and individualist culture.) I feel interested in and good about thinking this way, partly because it matches my seemingly unshakable sense that people are good, that love and connections are fundamental to us, and that psychopathology is a problem in the adaptive or organizational activation of these fundamental traits and needs (e.g., trauma screws it up big-time and results in adjustments that often don’t fit so well in a peaceful couple or community). I also am encouraged by hearing that people under 30 these days are much more likely to have overcome or not to have been primed by racist and sexual prejudices — though I wonder whether the same might have been said of my own Boomer generation by those older than us . . . and here we are again still.

This was a so-called military school in which children were slaughtered mercilessly, and as well as I can understand its project from news sites, this meant it was a school devoted to service to families of the military regime in power in Pakistan, which had recently targeted sites associated with the Taliban as among its areas of influence, sites that had previously not been bombed that now were getting bombed.

In the Wikipedia article devoted to the attack on the school, the Taliban’s spokesman himself seems to find the deliberate, ruthless and hours-long slaughter of the children unthinkable, to judge by his speakings:

TTP spokesman Muhammad Omar Khorasani said that “we targeted the school because the Army targets our families. We want them to feel our pain.”[29] “Our six fighters successfully entered the Army school and we are giving them instructions from outside,” said Khorasani by phone.[30] Khorasani also said “Our suicide bombers have entered the school, they have instructions not to harm the children, but to target the Army personnel. It’s a revenge attack for the Army offensive in North Waziristan.”[31][32]

In Wikipedia’s account of the military campaign beginning this June that the Taliban claim this massacre was a response to, one notes the following:

After the attack, the Pakistani military launched a series of aerial strikes on militant hideouts in the tribal areas along the Afghan border. At least 25 militants, including foreign fighters, were killed on 10 June.[42] Two drone attacks on 12 June killed Uzbek, Afghan and local militants.[43][44] On 15 June the Pakistani military intensified air strikes in North Waziristan and bombed eight foreign militant hideouts, killing as many as 140 militants (most Uzbek, including persons linked to the airport attack and airport attack commander and mastermind Abu Abdur Rehman Almani).[45][46] The intensified aerial strikes in the wake of the attack were an extension of operations against militants conducted over the last few months.[42]

Within this account (and, I suspect, all or most all others covering this operation), no children or women, disabled or elderly persons are evidently counted or, perhaps, identified as part of the count. Nor were any “militant hideouts” reported as mistakenly identified by the Pakistani military — in which case, their aerial strikes are certainly far more skillfully chosen and executed than those of the US military. But I’m not sure this is reliably to be assumed.

But we do have some statistics, however precise or rough, on the outcome of the United States’ executive’s military wing in its campaign of surgically precise drone attacks on terrorists in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. A recent article in the Guardian is worth reading in full (at http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147). It starts by noting that two drone strikes that both unsuccessfully targeted Aywan Zawahair inside a village in Pakistan cost the lives of 76 children and 29 other adults.

Two paragraphs from the middle of this article read:

“Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise’. But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who spearheaded the group’s study.

Some 24 men specifically targeted in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. The vast majority of those strikes were unsuccessful. An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men, only six of whom died in the course of drone strikes that killed their intended targets.

​​The coincidence of “142” children in this quotation and “140 children” cited in the school massacre will not be lost on us once it is noticed.

The unspeakable has been under-reported but present with us for quite a while. To not know, not remember and not discuss has been a familiar norm, particularly in the United States. The Triangle Building fire, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the chronic sexual abuse of young children by their clergy, the mass incarceration of African-American boys and men in our own time​ are only a few of countless examples of unspeakable yet systematic (or system-driven) devastation on a massive and scale that remain for the most part as much out of mind as out of site — above all, here in “the homeland of the free.”

I agree this is very difficult stuff to theorize, but there are dots that are connectable, however horrific, gut-wrenching, and irrationalizing their particulars happen to be.

I can understand anyone’s becoming quite tired of looking into, discussing, and organizing thoughts about the issues relating to the American Psychological Association [APA] and America’s role in civil rights violations in Guantanamo and elsewhere, particularly as the tightly held classified communications, even about matters a decade in the past, remains impenetrable. I myself allied in the mid-naughts with a developing group called Coalition for an Ethical Psychology to protest what I perceived as a deceitful, short-sighted violation of ethical principles in the APA and in its program for withholding of dues and finally withdrawal from membership. I joined Psychologists for Social Responsibility as an alternative, international organization to represent my position of care for the bigger picture from the point of view of my income-producing profession. This post is adapted from a letter to a few colleagues who are prominent members of my state association.

The fact that 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners teamed up last week to write an open letter to try to get the President of the United States to release a Senate committee report on interrogation practices of the previous decade that he’s been sitting on for a year or more and that is already highly redacted by the CIA speaks to the continuing frustration of persons of conscience as well as their unwillingness to let the matter disappear into the sanitizing vacuum that tends to absorb much actual American history. I doubt that full disclosure of the report would enhance the APA’s reputation; I hope I am wrong.

In the past month a new book by James Risen called Pay Any Price has brought the controversy of the APA’s collusion with torture and illegal detention into a newly focused discussion in the media, at least to the degree that media still permits such discussion at all. Risen’s book is not primarily about the APA’s activities or its relation to the national military, security and intelligence apparatus — I gather this is at issue in one chapter of a book presenting a much further-reaching set of stories united around the tendency toward regrettable and unethical decisions being made in response to deregulation of federal government agency rules, burgeoning of financial opportunities and promotion of wide-spread anxiety in the wake of 9/11. (The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology has a lengthy and detailed response, primarily in the form of follow-up questions, to the APA’s dismissal of Risen’s material in Pay Any Price about its relationship to civil rights violations. Inspect and reflect on the concerns raised at http://www.ethicalpsychology.org/materials/Coalition-Questions-for-APA-Board.pdf.)

It’s been remarkable to see two articles coming out in the past week in national psychological research journals on the evidence that (1) mistrust especially of authority is dramatically on the rise throughout our national culture and that (2) anxiety within an organization tends to generate an increase in failures in or obviation of ethical decision-making. I find them important to reflect on as we live in a period where mistrust and anxiety appear increasingly busy and omnipresent and may be complexly interactive (as we often see in individual clinical cases, and then some), with terrorism, climate change, and risks of many other kinds incessantly on the rise. As our government increasingly insists on surveillance of its citizenry’s personal lives and activities, it guards its own behaviors and knowledge from citizen’s view to an increasing degree. It’s hard to see just how the American people are responsible for their government these days.

Obama’s administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidential administrations combined, despite Obama’s campaign pledges to promote transparency and support whistleblowers in his 2008 run for President. A person’s got to wonder. Where would Woodward and Bernstein and Ellsberg be now, if Obama had been president then? Something significant is going on in American journalism that undermines the capacity of the American people to participate in a national democracy and even in a broadly joined debate, as media outlets are increasingly centralized under the control of highly complex corporate interests and the classification of information as secret is more and more broadly extended and enforced. My local Peace and Justice group lately screened a Canadian film (one remarkable for earning no reviews I could find on line in US corporate papers although released commercially as well as on line more than a year ago) about the corporate news media’s suppression of investigative journalism. Even to my jaded mind it was eye-opening and shocking. It’s kind of a thriller, as documentaries go: fast-paced, entertaining, and tight, with plenty of detail and personalities emerging in the 4 or 5 reporters whose stories are tracked, and you can watch it free at http://shadowsofliberty.org/watch/ I am recommending it to people who feel that being able to get the news still matters. It helps for those who still care to connect the dots of an information and communication system shared on a large scale within our society or a historical narrative spanning more than the past month or two.