Category Archives: Psychological Musings

Christopher Hitchens (R.I.P.) on overrated pleasures

Psychological Musings

 

He actually died last December, but somebody put together a public  memorial for him last week. Hitchens was the kind of public intellectual that only France is supposed to have and I will miss reading him and thinking Well that’s crazy, well, maybe only sort of half crazy.   He was an atheist but wanted to be know as an antitheist because he didn’t want there to be a god. Apparently, the memorial was crawling with other British ex-pats and one of them, Stephen Fry, said “Hitch thought the four most overrated things in the world were champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”

That list appeals to me and I have thought about it – off and on – all week. I can’t think of a better list or anything I would take out – although I would add Lever House – it is just so out of left field and so true.

 

Romney, Bain Capital, and the amorality of business verses Santorum, righteousness, and the immorality of being certain

Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings

Following the Republican primary has been both fascinating and scary. Fascinating because the players seem flawed to the point that the race sometimes seems like fiction. Scary because one of these guys could be the next president of the United States; unlikely, in my opinion, but possible. Of the two main players, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Romney seems like the best bet because – as the conventional wisdom has it – he is probably just bullshitting and would be more moderate than he is pretending to be now. Maybe….I guess.

Romney is a businessman and business is, usually, amoral. Not immoral, just amoral as in morality is not really a factor. There are exceptions when the founder has a vision of a product or service that he or she wants to get into the marketplace, but I have never heard of a business that was founded to provide jobs. A business has to make money to survive and business, done right, becomes about making money. Even Apple, under Steve Jobs, which was one of the most Vision driven companies in the marketplace, moved its production to China to make more money. It is axiomatic; the better the business is run, the more money it makes.

A business that invests or takes over other companies doesn’t even have a product, it is only about making money. A couple of months ago, The New Yorker had an article about  the Stella D’oro Biscuit Company, a Bronx bakery that was bought by a private-equity firm like Bain Capital in 2006. It makes for fascinating reading and I suggest you follow the link, but the gist of the article is that a company that had taken great pride in its product and the way it treated its workers was  destroyed after it was bought out by a company that did not share that vision.

The private equity firm, Bain Capital, founded by Mitt Romney was founded to make money. Not to hire people, not to produce a great product, only to make money. They go where they think they can make  the most money like surveillance cameras when the Chinese government spends multibillions in an effort to blanket the country with devises to watch their citizens. Bain has bought in because they think they will make a  profit. The morality of China spying on its people is not a factor, the profit is. Jobs is not a factor, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, 22 percent of the companies in which Bain invested wound up either in bankruptcy or shutting their doors entirely. But Romney made money from them; apparently he is very good at making money.

I suspect that Romney would be pretty pragmatic as president. I wouldn’t like his appointments to the Supreme Court1, I wouldn’t like his Secretary of the Interior, but I doubt that he would be another George Bush the Younger attacking random countries.  Maybe a Nixon foreign or Clinton foreign policy and Bush the Elder domestic2 policy.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, seems like a True Believer. 3 Somebody who would rather be right than President and, to misquote a former Speaker of the House, Thomas Reed, hopefully for the country, he will never be either.  Unfortunately for the country, he is and, seemingly, will be an influence. To see what kind of influence, check out this latest ad fro Santorum. Notice the subliminal flashing of Obama with  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at about the 40 second mark. The Santorum ad does its best to dehumanize Obama and when we dehumanize the other, the deranged take their cues. I think he is very scary.

1. Which is probably an understatement.

2. Or do I have to say heartland, now?

3. The True Believer is a book by San Francisco’s own Eric Hoffer on fanaticism.  

What is our goal in Afghanistan?

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings, War

I really don’t know and I don’t think anybody else does either. I guess that our goal is to beat the forces of the Taliban; to have the forces of of the old Northern Alliance – you know, the same Northern Alliance that the Russkis backed1 – be in some sort of stable control. I don’t think that anybody really thinks we are fighting for Jeffersonian democracy, in fact we may be hindering the re-establishment of the kind of ruling by consensus of elders or loya jirga that probably was closer to democracy than the rigged elections we are now backing.

Part of the problem is that we think that there is only one right answer on how to run a country and that is our way. This week has been a perfect storm of information – that is not the right word, maybe experiences? maybe events? – that has left me feeling our national hubris is staggering and we are not going to accomplish anything lasting in Afghanistan. The events revolve around, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, and Korea.

Over at the Foreign Policy Magazine’s website, on Tom Rick’s Blog – The Best Defense – a former soldier has a post entitled Some reflections on the Vietnam War after visiting where my battalion was cut off and surrounded near Hue during Tet ’68 in which he says, among other things, while visiting Vietnam,  Not only are there no Americans on the roads, in the air or in the fields, doing what Americans do, the Vietnamese seem perfectly in control of their own destinies. Maybe they were then too, but we were too driven to notice. He goes on to say This makes me think about the American Way of War — maybe best expressed as “you move over, we’re taking over.” It is an interesting comment and worth reading.

Over the weekend and again this afternoon, I saw the Iranian movie A Separation. It was the best movie I have seen in a year, maybe longer. If you like movies or if you are just interested in relationships, see it. It won the Academy Award for best foreign language film but it should have won the award for best film. A warning, though, it is a devastating story about a couple getting separated. Much of the movie takes place in court or, at least, in front of a judge. As somebody who has gone through the American – really Californian – divorce legal system with lawyers making more money the longer they can string out the case and argue with each other, I was taken by how much better the Iranian system seemed to be. I am obviously not a Muslim – or a Christian for that matter – and didn’t agree with all the legal conclusions, but, it seemed more humane than our system which is built on confrontation and has pretty much left compassion at the door.

Then I read that some Staff Sergeant in Afghanistan has gone tragically amok killing, among others, sleeping children. Sleeping children!

Lastly, on the way home from the movie, we went out of our way to stop at a Korean market in Daily City to pick up some tasty Korean marinated meat and some kim chee. I spent a year in Korea, as a Sergeant in the Army on a HAWK Missile site looking down on Koreans2.  Americans felt superior and most GIs let the Koreans know it. Most GIs didn’t like their food and didn’t like their customs, we even didn’t even like their women although we were willing to pay to have sex with them. The Koreans in the unit I was in were relagated to being dog handelers and generators operators; they were not let near the radars or missiles. Strangely enough, when the Koreans helped us fight in Vietnam, they were considered superb troops. Oh! by the way, have you checked out the new Hyundai Elantra? It is awesome.

After all this rambling around, I do want to make a point. The world does not need us to be its nanny. Afghanistan does not need us to tell them how to run their country. No country does, not Vietnam, or Korea, or Iraq, or Iceland. No country! We are not doing very well with our own country and we certainly should not be trying to pull a Terri  Schiavo on other countries.  The Republicans seem to be worse in this regard than the Democrats, but both sides are culpable.

We should get out. Just get out!

 

1. This is somewhat of a simplification, but not much.

2. Something that, today, I am loath to admit.


It’s all about relationships: Bin Laden, Lewis Hamilton, and Chris Rock

Psychological Musings

There is an interesting article on Bin Laden’s three widows – isn’t that a phrase you never thought you would read, Bin Laden’s three widows? – in The Christian Science Monitor. As an aside and speaking of The Christian Science Monitor, if the president of General Motors were a Christian Scientist who did not believe in conventional medicine, do the Republicans who voted for allowing bosses to opt out of contraception on religious ground, think it would be OK to stop all medical beifits – including Viagra –  The article, quoting Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani brigadier general, says The tranquility of his large household was shattered when it was joined early last year by the oldest of his remaining three wives…There were 27 people packed into the house in Abbottabad when US Navy SEALs arrived on the night of May 2, 2011. But until a few months before that, when bin Laden’s oldest surviving wife, Khairiah Sabar, joined them, they had all got on well.

Even though it is a cliché, it is true- or, maybe that is the reason it is a cliché – that, in the end, relationships are everything, even when it is a relationship between three wives. That afterall is what Big Love was all about.

Lewis Hamilton is a great Formula 1 driver. So great that, in his first season as a Formula 1 driver, driving on the same team as a two-time Formula 1 champion – Fernando Alonso – Hamilton tied him in points scored and almost won the the Championship. Last year, he came in 5th. Last year he also broke up with his girlfriend, and fired his manager who is also his father. In other words, his primary relationships fell apart and he fell apart, too. Now he is back together with his girlfriend and has reconciled with his father, it will be very interesting to see how he does this season (which starts in 8 days and 11 hours from this posting).

As part of a series on comedy, David Steinberg interviews Chris Rock, who says his comedy is all about relationships. It is only one minute 20 seconds long and worth listening to.

 

 

Wanting to be right

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings
In writing about Andrew Breitbart’s death and life on his blog Ta-Nehisi Coates writes

….by neglecting to research Sherrod before putting up a clip of her talking, by electing to see her as little more than a shiv against the hated liberals, he deprived himself of knowledge, of experience, of insight, of enlightenment. That he might learn something from Sherrod, that he might access some power from her life, and pass that on to loved ones and friends, never occurred to him. Publicly, he lived to make himself right–a tradition that is fully empowered in our politics. Breitbart didn’t invent the art of making yourself right. But he embraced it, and then advanced it.

That is what took me to sadness. I have experienced curiosity as a primarily selfish endeavor. It originates in the understanding of the brevity of life, and the desire to see as much of it as possible, from as many angles as possible without doing too much damage to my morality. The opposite of that – incuriosity, dishonesty, the opportunistic deployment of information – is darkness. Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.

There is much more to the blog post titled On Making Yourself Right and I encourage you to read it, but my take away was It is so easy to hang on to being right and it is so destructive. At least it is so easy for me: maybe I should say It is so easy to make somebody, who doesn’t agree with me, wrong. Maybe a week ago, I linked to a less than flattering article on Meryl Streep and then I wrote a blog post on Viola Davis a day or two later. Karen Amy took exception – mildly and politly – on my Facebook page and I could just feel myself  wanting to argue. Wanting to be right and wanting to make Karen wrong.

Around the turn of the century, Peter Kuhlman recommended an alternate history novel 1632 by Eric Flint. As I recall, he described it as amusing, but I ended reading and interpreting it as a dream with all the characters representing different facets of myself. To me, the book was all about taking down walls, letting in the outside world, listening to the other and be willing to see their point of view. All about being willing to be influenced by the world.

One of the reason that the characters in 1632 were able to let in the outside world, is because they were confidant in who they were at their core. For a long time, I kept thinking that it would make a good movie, but – now – I don’t think so. It is too last century, when we, as a nation, felt confident is who we are. It was before Bush the Younger and the disaster of Iraq, before the Great Recession, before the our national feeling of decline.

Ironically – and counter intuitively, I guess – when I am most confidant in who I am, it is easiest to hear the other person. My strong suspicion is that Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh – for that matter – are so loud because they are afraid. And they are afraid because – as Ta-Nehisi Coates so eloquently writes – they are living in darkness.