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September 26, 2002

MORAL MAN, GALLANT SOLDIER

Yale Kramer


I found myself at loose ends the other day. I was in Washington D.C. for a few hours between planes, so I decided to find some interesting focus for my restlessness. Of late I have come to avoid large cultural institutions when visiting new cities--no more three-star museums please, not even two-star sights. Instead I look forward to finding some unsung place--a place where I might be the only visitor, or perhaps one of two or three. I find often that the docent or curator of such a place is so starved for attention that he or she is overflowing with fascinating information and stories that I would never find anywhere else.

I found a museum I had never heard of before, far from the Mall and the main attractions there. It was called the National Museum of American Jewish Military History. It held three small but fascinating exhibits: on women in the military; the rescue and organization of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons--mostly concentration camp victims--by the US Army at the end of WW2--an unsung story of tragic proportions; and finally an exhibit on the 13 Congressional Medal of Honor winners throughout the course of American history who happened to be Jewish .

I got my wish. My wife and I were alone there for almost an hour before two very quiet and very black men arrived. Their shyness suggested to me that they were foreign, so I asked them where they were from. They explained that they were from Ethiopia and of Jewish stock. They were here to try to learn more about Jews in America. Poor bastards, I thought, black and Jewish, they've really got a heavy burden. But they bore whatever burden they felt graciously and listened attentively when the docent arrived to conduct us around the place. The Docent, an 85 year old Polonius, full of fascinating anecdotage and Jewish blather.

One of those he pointed out in the Congressional Medal of Honor exhibit was a man named Jack Jacobs who served in the Vietnam war. What caught my attention in the exhibit was Jacobs' ability to recapture and articulate what motivated him during his remarkable action. It is not often that we are able to hear from CMH winners about what made them do what they did. Many receive the honor posthumously and many, though very brave, are not given to talk about their wartime experiences.

Captain Jacobs' citation goes as follows:

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Captain Jacobs (then 1st Lt.), Infantry, distinguished himself while serving as assistant battalion advisor, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, 9 Infantry Division, Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The 2nd Battalion was advancing to contact when it came under intense heavy machine gun and mortar fire from a Viet Cong battalion positioned in well fortified bunkers. As the 2nd Battalion deployed into attack formation its advance was halted by devastating fire. Capt. Jacobs, with the command element of the lead company, called for and directed air strikes on the enemy positions to facilitate a renewed attack. Due to the intensity of the enemy fire and heavy casualties to the command group, including the company commander, the attack stopped and the friendly troops became disorganized. Although wounded by mortar fragments, Capt. Jacobs assumed command of the allied company, ordered a withdrawal from the exposed position and established a defensive perimeter. Despite profuse bleeding from head wounds which impaired his vision, Capt. Jacobs, with complete disregard for his safety, returned under intense fire to evacuate a seriously wounded advisor to the safety of a wooded area where he administered lifesaving first aid. He then returned through heavy automatic weapons fire to evacuate the wounded company commander. Capt. Jacobs made repeated trips across the fire-swept open rice paddies evacuating wounded and their weapons. On 3 separate occasions, Capt. Jacobs contacted and drove off Viet Cong squads who were searching for allied wounded and weapons, single-handedly killing 3 and wounding several others. His gallant actions and extraordinary heroism saved the lives of 1 U.S. advisor and 13 allied soldiers. Through his effort the allied company was restored to an effective fighting unit and prevented defeat of the friendly forces by a strong and determined enemy. Capt. Jacobs, by his gallantry and bravery in action in the highest traditions of the military service, has reflected great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army."

In his gallantry Captain Jacobs did not distinguish rank, race, religion, or national origin; he felt his duty was to rescue all for whom he was responsible. Afterward, when he was asked what was in his mind at the time of his action, he answered, "Inside my head was this one [Rabbi] Hillel precept: If not you, who? If not now, when? I thought of what would happen if I didn't do what Hillel had implied is always a Jew's duty: to act when no one else will, and to act now. The decision was an easy one."

It struck me as I looked at an enlarged photograph of Capt. Jacobs--a handsome young officer wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck--that the moral precepts he carried in his head gave him the strength to do the impossible, and that it somehow resonates in today's world, when we may be asked to do impossible things again.

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September 25, 2002

Al Gore, Post-Modernist If the

Al Gore, Post-Modernist

If the past is merely an unstable narrative and reality simply a construct, then Al Gore is an exemplar of Pomo thinking. For the 'new' Al Gore, in process of reinventing himself for the next Presidential campaign, has created a new narrative to describe his very own past and in the process deconstructed----Al Gore!! What a man!, What a mind!

"Back in 1991, I was one of a handful of Democrats in the United States Senate to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf War, and I felt betrayed by the first Bush administration's hasty departure from the battlefield," Gore told an enthusiastic crowd at the Commonwealth Club.

--Al Gore 9/23/02

"I want to state this clearly, President Bush should not be blamed for Saddam Hussein's survival to this point. There was throughout the war a clear consensus that the United States should not include the conquest of Iraq among its objectives. On the contrary, it was universally accepted that our objective was to push Iraq out of Kuwait, and it was further understood that when this was accomplished, combat should stop."

--Al Gore 4/18/91

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September 24, 2002

Al Gore Cares In reading

Al Gore Cares

In reading the words of a politician like Al Gore, so clearly positioning himself to mobilize support for a Presidential run, it is useful to search out the cenral ideas that underlie his criticisms of the Administration. Especially when the argument is as muddled and self-contradictory (seeAndrew Sullivan as Mr. Gore's argument that we should prosecute the war on terror, but that warring on terror states like Iraq is a 'diversion'. The real central organizing idea is a therapeutic one: however important we think it is to fight this war, we must above all retain the sympathy and kind sentiments of the rest of the world. As Mr. Gore points out, our innocent victimization by the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon created instant sympathy.

As Mr. Gore puts it:
"....in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, more than a year ago, we had an enormous reservoir of good will and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do. "

(APPLAUSE)

Now, my point is not that they're right to feel that way, but that they do feel that way.

And that has consequences for us. Squandering all that good will and replacing it with anxiety in a year's time is similar to what was done by turning a $100 billion surplus into a $200 billion deficit in a year's time. "

What has happened in the past year's time to explain this change in attitudes? It would seem obvious: we have begun to carry the fight to the killers. We are no longer viewed by the world as hapless victims sunk in mournful despair. Indeed, we are causing 'anxiety' to millions of Islamists and their sympathizers in Europe who fear the roused wrath of our country, as well they should. But for Mr. Gore these fears and anxieties are bad; they are indications that we must be at fault. In his view what's needed is greater empathy and understanding, greater soul searching on our part to discern how we must be responsible for such things as Germany's withdrawal of support. Perhaps Mr. Gore has learned from the example of Israel that the world greatly prefers Jews and Americans as victims, and ceases to extend sympathy when they fight back against barbaric killers. Instead of worrying about the world's feelings towards us let us continue to prosecute the war until the enemies of freedom have been utterly destroyed. Then we can concern ourselves with the tender sensibilities of the world's worriers.

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September 22, 2002

A Tale of Two Cultures:

A Tale of Two Cultures: Civilization vs. Barbarism

1) A report from the Israel Defense Forces
Using Palestinian Children For Carrying Out Suicide Terror Attacks

Last night (17 September 2002), in the afternoon, a large explosive device was activated against an IDF force in Han-Yunis. The device was thrown towards the soldiers by a small child, who was one of a group of Palestinian children who gathered together near an IDF Armored Personnel Carrier and threw stones at an IDF military installation in the area.

The brigade commander, Captain S. said that "During the afternoon hours, at around 16:30, we identified a group of approx. 50-80 children approaching the installation. The Children started throwing stones at the fence and at the installation. I boarded an Armored Personnel Carrier in order to send out a warning signal and make them leave the area. Several children, including teenagers, approached the Armored Personnel Carrier. I shot a few warning shots at the children ran away to the nearby neighborhood. One of children threw an object at me. The object, which seemed to be a bomb or a grenade exploded about 50 meters from me".

2) Jerusalem Post
Sep. 22, 2002
Palestinian girl receives Jewish bomb victim's kidney
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


A suicide bombing that took the lives of six Jews provided a new life for a Palestinian girl, who received a kidney from a young Scottish student killed in the blast, hospital officials said Sunday.

Yasmin Abu Ramila, 7, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, had been on a transplant waiting list and undergoing dialysis treatment for almost two years, an Israeli Health Ministry official said.

A suitable donor finally became available when Jonathan Jesner, 19, a yeshiva student from Scotland, died on Friday, a day after he was critically wounded when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a bus in Tel Aviv

Let us consider these two stories while contemplating the spectacle of Yasser Arafat pleading for mercy for himself and the terror planners sharing his Ramallah headquarters.

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September 21, 2002

Utopian Fantasies of the Therapeutic

Utopian Fantasies of the Therapeutic Culture

. The central idea undergirding the position of those who argue for giving Saddam another chance is: reason must prevail. After all, Saddam is a clever survivor who must realize that unless he submits to real disarmament he will lose power and possibly his life. This touching faith in reason is an integral part of our therapeutic culture in which 'empathy' for those who hate us and want to kill us, is a higher virtue than eliminating them. How can people possibly hate us simply because we exist? Yet Bernard Lewis points out that we are indeed the targets of hatred simply because our existence constitutes an intolerable injury to the pride of a failed culture. Utopian ideologues from Hitler to Stalin to Osama bin Laden have needed a scapegoat to blame for the failure of their utopias. The Jews are the ideal scapegoats. So too for those with a utopian faith in reason. These are the children of a therapeutic culture that asserts that understanding the feelings of the aggrieved will have a healing effect. And if caring doesn't work and reason doesn't prevail it must be the fault of someone. First, of course, it must be our own failures of empathy, our inability to truly appreciate the grievances of the oppressed 'other'. Thus an alliance forms between the self blaming left and the religious utopians like the Muslim clerics who assert (Memri) "Allah Decreed that Jews be Turned into Apes and Pigs "...Allah decreed that the Jews would be humiliated; he cursed them, and turned them into apes and pigs. Every time they ignite the fire of war, Allah extinguishes it. They disseminate corruption over the face of the earth, and fight the believers [i.e. the Muslims] only from fortified villages or from behind walls..."(5)
Anti semitism unites religious and secular utopians. It should not come as a surprise that the Susan Sontags, the Noam Chomskys and the ayatollahs share a loathing for Israel, a flourishing democracy built by Jews upon arid desert left to rot by nomadic Arabs. Nor is it surprising that the greens, the anti globalists, the German socialists (Safire} agree with the anti-semitic ravings of Saddam, whose letter to the UN admitting inspectors makes the point that "In targeting Iraq, the United States administration is acting on behalf of Zionism, which has been killing the heroic people of Palestine, destroying their property, murdering their children and seeking to impose their domination on the whole world, not only militarily, but also economically and politically. " In truth, the therapeutic approach to murderous tyrants inevitably leads to appeasement, and those who don't share the utopian assumption that everyone really wants to hold hands, and sing 'We are the World' have blood on their hands. What they still retain is their own self flattering sense of moral superiority as apostles of peace.What purports to be a cure to the ills of the world is really a symptom of a degenerative disease that could prove fatal. The war against terror must be fought in the realm of ideas as well as on the ground.

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September 19, 2002

Smoking Them Out of their

Smoking Them Out of their Caves(continued)

Remove that flag pin, someone out there is angry at us!

Thanks to Andrew Sullivanfor picking up Sen. Diane Feinstein's comments Mercury News

The statement deserves to be circulated around the blogosphere for all to contemplate.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., just back from Europe, said she detected growing opposition to the United States among America's allies. "The driver of a lot of this animus," she said, "is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To leave this unresolved and to attack an Arab country is going to be viewed as an attack on the Arab world." She said the anti-American sentiment was so strong that she felt it personally. "As an American, I have always been proud," Feinstein said. Referring to her U.S. flag pin, she said, "I was embarrassed to wear it."

Ideas have consequences. Postmodernism, deconstruction, multiculturalism radiate out from academia and have become part of the mindset of politicians like Ms. Feinstein. Ms. Feinstein is not even the most liberal member of Congress, yet she automatically assumes that if the United States is the target of animus we must be doing something shameful. Should we not be proud of our support for the one democracy, Israel, in a sea of totalitarian terrorists and antisemites? In the war of ideas, Dianne Feinstein's idea of defending ourselves is to surrender and throw herself on the mercy of our foes.

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September 17, 2002

The War of Ideas: Smoking

The War of Ideas: Smoking them Out of their Caves

President Bush has reported to the nation on the progress made since 9-11. We have rolled up the Taliban, caught and killed a number of al Qaeda operatives and seem ready to take on one of the terror masters, Saddam Hussein. This war is undergirded by ideas, the idea that evil exists, that certain cultural values are superior to others. Freedom is superior to tyranny, democracy to totalitarianism, religious tolerance to religious slavery. While we are doing well on the military front, how are we doing on the ideational/cultural front? According to Mark Steyn, not so well."Perhaps the president's greatest mistake was his failure to take on the enervating Oprahfied therapeutic culture that, in the weeks after Sept. 11, looked momentarily vulnerable. There were two kinds of responses to that awful day. You could go with ''C'mon, guys, let's roll!'' the words of Todd Beamer as he and the brave passengers of Flight 93 took on their Islamist hijackers. Or you could go with ''healing'' and ''closure'' and the rest of the awful inert language of emotional narcissism. Had Bush taken it upon himself to talk up the virtues of courage and self-reliance demonstrated on Flight 93, he would have done a service not just to his nation but to his party, for a touchy-feely culture inevitably trends Democratic."
It is true that Mr. Bush has not confronted the therapeutic culture with its utopian fantasy that all human problems are the result of misunderstandings, to be corrected by greater empathy for the plight of the "other". Nevertheless, our citizen democracy does not rely entirely on the efforts of the President to fight this culture war. It is our task and there are signs that change is occurring:The strong reaction against the NEA's urging our children to stand around in a "healing circle" and not be angry at anyone. The growing counterattacks against the vile rants of Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky. The whole blogger phenomenon. And the common sense of everyone but some addlepated academics is easily discernible. A recent visit to Yankee Stadium where the fans greeted with robust chants of U-S-A- U-S-A, the descent onto the grass of 4 paratroopers recently returned from Afghanistan. A visit to ground Zero where the many messages left included a large sampling of expressions of rage and revenge wishes towards our enemies. This letter from a fighter pilotA Naval Aviators thoughts on the anniversary of 9/11 to the terrorists has gained wide readership and, as Andrea Harris points out, helps our enemies to "understand" our rage, thus turning multicultural relativism in an interesting direction. After acquainting his terrorist reader, in good multicultural fashion, with his own backround, beliefs and ideas, the writer has these bracingly exhilirating words for him:"I tell you all this because when I come for you I want you to know me. I won't be hiding behind a woman or a child. I won't be disguised or pretending to be something I am not. I will be wearing standard US issue flight gear, and I will be flying a navy aircraft clearly marked as a US warplane.

I wish we could meet up close in a small room where I could wrap my hands around your throat and slowly squeeze the life out of you but unfortunately you're hiding in a hole in the ground so we will have to do this a different way.

I want you to know also that I am very good at what I do. I can put a 2,000 LB weapon through a window from 10,000 feet up. I generally only fight at night so you may want to start sleeping during the day. I am not eager to die for my country but I am willing to sacrifice my life to protect it from animals like you. I will do everything in my power to ensure no civilians are hurt as I take aim at you. My countrymen are a forgiving bunch. Many are already forgetting what you did on Sept 11th. But I will not forget and my President will not forget."

The war will be a long one, but we are smoking the utopian ideologues out of their caves and exposing them to the withering intellectual crossfire that will ultimately prevail.

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September 15, 2002

SHRINKS SING FOR SOPRANOS Yale

SHRINKS SING FOR SOPRANOS

Yale Kramer
Tonight the fourth season of the highly successful series "The Sopranos" will start and keep viewers glued to screens everywhere for another season. And for good reason: it has all the ingredients that would make a TV series compelling and successful. It has good actors, suspense, characters in conflict with each other, an occasional clever line or two. What more could one ask of an hour's entertainment on a Sunday night? But hey, it's only a TV show. It doesn't illuminate life, touch you to the core, it doesn't move you to tears or rueful laughter, it doesn't help you live or die, as great art or even good art does. And the people making the series are not pretentious enough to think that it would. They're only in it for the big money it pays if they deliver an hour's worth of good entertainment a week. That's fine, nothing wrong with that, it's life. The program is there so that folks can forget about their sick kid for an hour, or the lousy boss they have to say good morning to on Monday, or the irritating husband they have to go to bed with a little later.
So you can imagine how astonished I was to pick up my New York Times Book Review and find five serious books about "The Sopranos" being reviewed. They were written by apparently serious people wanting to be taken seriously. Furthermore, at the top of the list, and this is painful to admit, was a book written by one of my own psychoanalytic colleagues, Dr. Glen O.Gabbard, identified by the reviewer as a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. I won't comment on Dr. Gabbard's opus entitled The Psychology of "The Sopranos": Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America's Favorite Gangster Family, not having read it, and because the gifted reviewer of all of these pretentious books treats them with the tongue-in-cheek contempt they deserve. But it unfortunately revived a long repressed memory of an event which occurred last December at the semi-annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I was not present at the event itself but read about it in The New York Times the following morning.
“So pathetic,” I heard myself mumble at breakfast, “We’re so pathetic, it's embarrassing. So narcissistic, so self-deluded, just like our patients. Worse,” I thought. I had just started to read Sarah Boxer’s article, “Therapists Go Crazy for Tony Soprano’s Therapist”.
The warmth of my morning toast was ebbing away as I read with astonishment that in a room filled with hundreds of my colleagues an award was being given to the actress Lorraine Bracco and the writers of "The Sopranos” for their creation of the therapist/character Dr. Jennifer Melfi. With growing disbelief I learned from Ms. Boxer that many of my colleagues had “developed dangerously warm feelings, tinged with envy, gratitude, pride, confusion and plain old star-struckness, for Jennifer Melfi…”
“Right on!” I thought as I read Ms. Bracco’s response when she heard she was going to get a award from the American Psychoanalytic Association, “What, are they crazy?”
I had seen a few episodes during the first and second year of its run and was impressed only by skin-deep, stereotypical characters who had no motivations except plot-driven ones. Drama didn’t, it seemed to me, emerge out of character, rather it was the need for suspense and continuity that was making people behave the way they did--as you would expect in a TV serial. Nor was I impressed with Dr. Melfi as a psychotherapist--nothing against Lorraine Bracco, who did as well as she could with the material. Everything about her “professional” role was a cliché. The obligatory “How did you feel about that?”; the deadpan facial expression; the “interventions”--meant to mimic transference interpretations, or psychogenetic interpretations--were of the cheapest, most predictable kind. How could it have been otherwise, since there was no real patient that was being depicted, and it was a stage set, not a consulting room. How could my colleagues, grown-up men and women, with professional training, have been seduced by this nonsense, I wondered.
The reassuring words of Charles Mackay came to mind. MacKay, the author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in the 19th century, tells us “Men.... think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Perhaps it was that, or the powerful conscious and unconscious seduction that surrounds celebrity. It happens more often than it should that when analysts are consulted by world-famous people--movie stars, politicians, media stars, novelists, playwrights--these analysts sometimes lose their professional perspective and allow their trained skills and instincts to become confused and deformed. In a sense they go a little ga-ga--“star-struckness” as Ms. Boxer puts it--and their professional perspective and values melt away.

It wasn’t until the following morning that I understood the appalling truth. It was then that I received an e-mail message sent to all members of the American Psychoanalytic Association early that morning from Dr. Kerry J. Sulkowicz in his role as Chairman of the Committee on Public Information of the Association. Among other things he told the members triumphantly that to get Ms. Boxer to write her article about the APA giving "Dr. Melfi" an award--not for being a good actress but for being a good analyst--was "...a wonderful coup...."
“A wonderful coup….” Let’s pull the curtain of charity over this unfortunate mis-diagnosis. I can only attribute Dr. Sulkowicz’s misunderstanding of Sarah Boxer’s coverage of the event to his youth and inexperience and a deep desire to be loved by the media. The whole event--the award ceremony/love-fest, Boxer’s article, the celebration of Boxer’s charming book poking fun at Freud, psychoanalysis, and possibly her own analyst, past or current--was a mutual seduction and betrayal.

The young analysts of the 21st century march to a different drummer than the humorless, sedate old fogies of the past. They are “proactive” I think the word is today: energetic, hungry for patients, market oriented, media-aware, familiar with spin-control, hype and the importance of getting the limelight.
The new leaders of psychoanalysis appear to be desperate for the glittering prizes of fame and glory and they see their path to these through the gatekeepers of popular culture--the media. The strategy is to get the press to love us at, apparently, any cost. We will have to prove to them, Dr. Sulkowicz informs us, that we are “modern, relevant to contemporary society, and having a sense of humor about ourselves…” What this appears to boil down to is proving that we're ordinary guys who can admit that we have foibles and immaturities. See, we love TV like everyone else. We don’t just sit around reading Goethe and listening to unaccompanied Bach partitas. See, we envy Dr. Melfi--we’d like to have exciting patients too, we’d like to be on TV, we’d like to be in the limelight too, because we’re unhappy with our dull, uneventful lot in life just like everybody else.
So the mutual seduction goes something like this: Love us. We’ll do just about anything to get you to love us and give us a little space in your “Arts and Ideas” section. Spell our name right and we’ll give you quotes on anything, stories about whatever you want, we’ll even debase ourselves--just love us. In the bargain we’ll massage your ego by taking your new book seriously even though it makes fun of us.

The trouble is that Dr. Sulkowicz was out of his depth. He didn't realize that he had been had. Analysts, when they find themselves in the real world, are often naively trusting. Dr. Sulkowicz thought he had had "a wonderful coup" when in fact "Sarah" had walked away with his pants.
In the most charmingly naughty way Ms. Boxer had written an article about us that makes us look like adolescent jerks--starstruck, confused grownups who can’t distinguish reality from fantasy in real life let alone the consulting room. And she had done it without using a single mean word.

Perhaps tonight as we start watching this year's installments of "The Sopranos" we can begin to forget this embarrassing psychic trauma.

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A Reminder To The Editorial

A Reminder To The Editorial Board of the NYTimes:

"War is upon us, none can deny it. It is not the choice of the Government of the United States, but of a faction; the Government was forced to accept the issue, or to submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war, it should be 'pure and simple' as applied to belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; til those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."
~Williiam Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891)

Yale Kramer

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September 14, 2002

Decline and Fall: A Long

Decline and Fall: A Long Winding Road From Nineteenth Century Liberalism to Frank Rich, Nicholas Kristof, Maureen Dowd and Howell Raines

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873)

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September 13, 2002

Shakespeare vs. the Grief Counselors:

Shakespeare vs. the Grief Counselors: Stop Mourning and start Fighting

Henry VI part 3:
"But in this troublous time what's to be done?
Shall we go throw away our coats of steel
And wrap our bodies in black mourning gowns,
Numb'ring our Ave-Maries with our beads?
Or shall we on the helmets of our foes
Tell our devotion with revengeful arms?
If for the last, say 'Ay' and to it, lords."

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September 12, 2002

SOME LONG FORGOTTEN FACTS: What

SOME LONG FORGOTTEN FACTS:

What it takes to bestir the American people to action:

1915: 123 Americans perished when the Germans torpedoed the British liner Lusitania.

1941: 2403 Americans were killed when the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Even then the attack was not against civilians but a military target.

2001: More than 3000 people, mostly innocent civilians were killed in the attacks on 9-11-2001.

And still we debate the rectitude of warring against our sworn enemies.

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False Grief Syndrome Yesterday we

False Grief Syndrome

Yesterday we all were invited by CNN to wallow in the false grief of the likes of Paula Zahn and Judy Woodruff. We learned much about how hard it was for them to bear the 'tragedy'. After a little while of watching this revolting spectacle of appropriated grief I almost expected them to place a call to one of the hordes of grief counselors ready to help us 'come to closure', while inviting the listeners to 'share'. It's all part of the therapeutic culture that insists we get over it, and is mostly designed to pathologize anger and replace it with sadness about an event that, like an act of nature, simply happened. Let us leave grief to the truly grieving, the families of the murdered innocents, and work to prevent future grief being inflicted upon the rest of us by our mortal enemies.
We would do better to consult Patton (see below) or Shakespeare (courtesy of Andrea Harris in Henry the Sixth:

"Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind
Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep..."

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September 11, 2002

horsefeathers

horsefeathers

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A September 11 reminder to

A September 11 reminder to our Foes


To all who believe America is a weak, emasculated and decadent nation, read these words and tremble.

General George S. Patton, Jr., in characteristic unexpurgated detail, gives his troops a final pep-talk prior to the invasion of Normandy, Enniskillen Manor Grounds, England, May 17, 1944.

Men, this stuff some sources sling around about America wanting to stay out of the war and not wanting to fight is a lot of baloney! Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward; Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost and never will lose a war.

You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you, right here today, would be killed in a major battle.

Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all of us. And every man is scared in his first action. If he says he's not, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes, but they fight just the same, or get the hell slammed out of them.

The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty, to his country and to his manhood.

All through your Army careers, you've been bitching about what you call "chicken-shit drills." That, like everything else in the Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is instant obedience to orders and to create and maintain constant alertness! This must be
bred into every soldier. A man must be alert all the time if he expects to stay alive. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him with a sock full of shit! There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on his job--but they are German graves, because we caught the bastards asleep!

An Army is a team, lives, sleeps, fights, and eats as a team. This individual hero stuff is a lot of horse shit! The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking! Every single man in the Army plays a vital role. Every man has his job to do and must do it. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of a shell overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? What if every man thought, "They won't miss me, just one in millions?" Where in Hell would we be now? Where would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be?

No, thank God, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job, serves the whole. Ordnance men supply and maintain the guns and vast machinery of this war, to keep us rolling. Quartermasters bring up clothes and food, for where we're going, there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the guy who boils the water to keep us from getting the G.I. shits!
Remember, men, you don't know I'm here. No mention of that is to be made in any letters. The USA is supposed to be wondering what the hell has happened to me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army, I'm not supposed even to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. I want them to look up and howl, "Ach, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again!"
We want to get this thing over and get the hell out of here, and get at those purple-pissin' Japs!!! The shortest road home is through Berlin and Tokyo! We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by showing the enemy we have more guts than they have or ever will have!

There's one great thing you men can say when it's all over and you're home once more. You can thank God that twenty years from now, when you're sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the war, you won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, "I shoveled shit in Louisiana."

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September 07, 2002

LETTER FROM ABROAD: THE SAFEST

LETTER FROM ABROAD: THE SAFEST PLACE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Yale Kramer

On a recent rainy August Tuesday the newsboys'-- in London the newsboys are gruff but affable middle-aged men--headlines were screaming "London braces for terror attack!" The story described the measures being formulated to deal with a possible terror attack, but strangely enough it did not mention where to find the safest refuge in London.

The center of fashionable London is Knightsbridge. It is the equivalent of the area surrounding Madison Avenue between 57th and 79th Streets in New York, or North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. You will find names like Dior, Armani, Gucci, Valentino wherever you look. And at the very heart of Knightsbridge stands Harrods, the queen of department stores.
Harrods makes Bloomingdale's look like Sears. The food halls alone are an astonishment, providing delicacies from the world over. If you were a Saudi prince and you wished to buy your little princeling a small electric Alfa Romeo for his birthday so that he could drive around the old oil farm, you could pick one up for a mere $29,000, your choice of colors.

A while back, some 17 or 18 years ago, the store fell on hard times and its previous owners quietly put Harrods up for sale. One Mohamed El Fayyed, an Egyptian of fabled wealth who had for years been trying break into the British upper classes--Ascot and all that--decided to pick it up for what was to him a song. The changes he has made since his takeover have been both subtle and gross. There is now an Egyptian Hall in which the pillars have been converted to look like gigantic ancient Egyptian statues. The net effect is garish and phony, but the large space holds the most expensive women's handbags in Christendom.

Just outside of the Hall of Expensive Handbags there is a shrine to El Fayyed's dead son, Dodi Fayyed, and his last lover, Princess Di, formerly of the Royal Family. The shrine, with large photos of the handsome pair, is never without a large number of devoted worshippers of Princess Di, snapping photos and throwing coins into the fountain beneath the images of the dead couple.
But the centerpiece of the shrine is a large pyramid of solid transparent plastic which contains two relics of the pair and their deep love for one another. The first is a crystal wine glass--purported to be the last goblet the two drank from in their suite at the Ritz in Paris only minutes before they met their dramatic death in a high speed car crash. The other object is the diamond engagement ring by which Dodi plighted his troth to Diana. It may not be beautiful but it is large--about the size of an extra-large pecan from Harry and Jane's Sunnyfield Farm in Georgia.

But what makes Harrods a haven from the anxieties of terrorism are the hundreds of women dressed in middle-eastern garb snapping up luxurious merchandise like there was no tomorrow--jewelry, handbags, undergarments, scarves, silver--many dressed in their native jilbaab with only their eyes showing, but wearing shoes from Burberry, with it's iconic tartan design showing, and large chained handbags from Chanel at $3000-$5000 a pop.
These women clearly know quality when they see it in the West and want to own its many forms. Their husbands are not with them in Harrods but their drivers await them at the exits on the south side of the building, the quiet side, and when they emerge loaded with packages the drivers spring to life, stowing their merchandise and opening the passenger doors of the Bentleys.
Their husbands, the princes, are not with them because they are gambling in the posh clubs of Mayfair not far from the Saudi Embassy. These are the very same men who support terrorist organizations that threaten America's infidel values; who pay large sums to organize madrassas all over the world to teach hatred of Western civilization to small Muslim children.
You can bet that as long as the wives and daughters of these Middle Eastern potentates go on buying their accessories at Mohamed El Fayyed's emporium no suicide bomber will ever get near it. So if you're looking for some repose in this terror torn world of ours try Harrods

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September 05, 2002

America’s Therapists Counsel Us To

America’s Therapists Counsel Us To Get over 9/11

It is a tendency of the human mind to forget painful events. Acquainting patients with their past is often a difficult task of psychotherapy for it involves re-experiencing forgotten pain. It is true for groups as well as individuals that the pain of traumatic experiences tends to succumb to rewriting and effacement or even to being altogether jettisoned down the sink hole of history. And yet the avoidance of reality extracts a heavy price, often in the form of a tendency to repeat in ever more painful ways the original trauma. Like many New Yorkers I saw from a safe distance the destruction of the Twin Towers and the murder of thousands of innocents. This national trauma inflicted on us in our own home by murderous barbarians requires remembrance in all its horror in order for us to mobilize the necessary will to overcome our enemies. And what is the response of the representatives of our therapeutic culture? Here is a sample in a letter to the editor of the New York Times:

In clinical work, the "anniversary reaction" is a well-recognized
consequence of trauma. On the anniversary of a traumatic event, a
victim may re-experience the emotions and, at times, "flashbacks" of
the episode itself.
As Eric Mink points out (Op-Ed, Aug. 30), the TV industry will do the
nation and its citizens a major disservice if the horrifying images
of Sept. 11 are once again beamed into our homes.
Many people nowhere near Lower Manhattan were victimized by the
repetition of dramatic footage on television. These included many
children who reported nightmares months after the event.
Repeated traumatization by re- exposure to these events by dramatic
repetitions of these images will not contribute to our ability to
place these events into historical perspective and allow people to
work through their personal traumas. These efforts at resolution are
all the more difficult at a time when talk of war and further threats
is so prevalent.
RICHARD P. FOX, M.D.
Dennis, Mass., Aug. 30, 2002
The writer is a former president of the American Psychoanalytic
Association.

Thus the goal is to get over it, to “place these events in historical perspective” thereby draining them of their immediacy and diminishing our awareness of the actual individual lives destroyed. We should all make efforts at “resolution”, so hard to do when we are reminded, for example, of two year old Christine Hanson on her way to Disneyland aboard one of the planes when terrorists brutally murdered the flight attendants, then the crew, before plowing into the WTC while her parents Peter and Kim Hanson tried to calm her. No, the ‘victimization’ has not been inflicted by television but rather by the Islamofascists who carried out the attack. This cant thinking must be confronted at every turn. The challenge is not for Americans to “work though” their traumatic experiences but to eliminate the enemy which inflicted the trauma. This is why in the past such slogans as “Remember Pearl Harbor”, “Remember the Maine”, “Remember the Alamo” have served to brace and sustain us in a way that “work through your personal trauma” can never do. For now, let our slogan be “Remember the World Trade Center” and let the remembrances never cease until we have finally triumphed.

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September 04, 2002

The War on Patriotism

The War on Patriotism

A storm has broken out over what approach teachers should take to the upcoming anniversary of September 11. Twenty years ago an influential report by a national commission entitled "A Nation at Risk" concluded that "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Since then the picture has hardly changed. In fact, it has--despite a few bright spots like the establishment of a small number of charter schools and voucher plans, fought all the way by the education establishment--steadily gotten worse.
The current recommendations of the educrats--the professoriat, the schools of education where they hold forth and train other teachers, and the teachers' unions--show why. According to the Natioal Education Association, the largest and most influential of the teachers' unions, teachers should take care not to assign blame--except perhaps to ourselves. It is our failure to exercise a high enough degree of tolerance and empathy toward other cultures that is at fault, and the answer is a greater emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. We should be non-judgemental--except about the U.S.
A "feel-good curriculum" that has made self-esteem a greater concern for teachers than the mastery of any body of skills or knowledge to base it on, has taken over the schools as a system once designed to transmit the civic culture has been transformed into a means of changing it. The schools have been turned into agencies for social change with egalitarianism replacing excellence as their mission.
Thus the National Association of School Psychologists counsels teachers: "Do not suggest any group is responsible" for the terrorist attack of September 11, and joins the NEA and the rest of the education establishment in emphasizing students' feelings. Never mind what they know as long as they feel good about themselves and empathize with the feelings of others.
Into this morass of misplaced therapy-think steps the Fordham Foundation, a clear voice of reason in a muddled world. A think tank that the New York Times and Washington Post cannot mention without labeling it "conservative" or "right wing" (they never refer to the NEA as radical or left wing), it has posted on its web siteFordham Foundation an alternative response to September 11 and suggestions for ways to stress patriotism, freedom and democracy--American values--without succumbing to bigotry or hysteria. The Fordham Foundation's president, Chester E. Finn Jr., has assembled a group of statements by thoughtful contributers under the heading "What Our Children Need to Know" that dares to suggest that understanding our own culture--American rights and freedoms, how they orginated and how they operate--should be the real heart of a teaching approach to September 11. It should be required reading for every teacher in America.

--Guest blogger Rita Kramer is author of Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers.

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