What if the United States stinks?

Though I have been writing some psychotherapy recently, my feeling is that it’s been pushed aside by the sickness and alarm I feel for our country. We all know or knew there was supposed to be an “American spirit” which had something to do with individualism and energy, entrepreneurial gusto and expansive or competitive drive. And somehow we were given to believe that this was a positive feeling-spirit. But what if its real essence has only been an id-like “get rich” or “beat the competition” vibe and nothing else? What if the American character actually has no good character other than any given person’s expected decency that says “hi” to neighbors, helps them raise their barn and put out their fires, taken in the aggregate and talked, by history, into a mythology?

What if America really stinks?

I am thinking it is true. In which case – at least for me – the only alternative will be to mentally deconstruct the whole idea of a “nation” and just picture the aggregate without myth: an uncoagulated number living in their partly submerged hearts and bent heads. No more watching the news to see who shot whom, who marched in this or that direction, who waved which flag today. No more contemplating and discussing what the neurotics in Washington have done over my head, because there are countless types of neurotics: Borderlines and Narcissists, domestic violence perpetrators, the generally anxious, childish parents, intellectual adolescents, codependents, depressed adults, alcoholics and drug addicts, the power-hungry. You can’t watch each one, other than to extend your umbrella at arm’s length to keep them at a distance, or do therapy with them.

If the Trump family wins again, its sociopathy will pervade the country like pig shit E. coli dispersed by some serial killer into the nation’s waterways. The others, who are not comfortable but sickened in this atmosphere, will buy bottled water and wear blinders to allow sight of only family and friends. We will applaud, mildly, those strange people who march off to war* for big causes, the Martin Kings and the Greta Thunbergs, wondering if they’ll be victorious some day. But our deepest need, I believe, will be for each of us to form an evolved emotional philosophy spurred by this devolution, that appreciates nature and science more than society, children more than politics, heart more than world.

With one eye, we see that humanity over the millennia has progressed beyond intrinsic barbar­ism. With the other eye we see it has always had a rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, expansively and irritably** riding bright-colored balloons that inflate and burst every four to eight years, needing medication and hospitalization, compassion and four-point restraint.

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* Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye – https://www.brownanddana.com/audio/Track09.mp3.

** Criterion A – https://www.sunovionhealthinsights.com/shi/bipolar-depression/bipolar-depression-overview/dsm-diagnostic-criteria.html.

Draft of The Pessimistic Shrink’s 2021 Kenyon College Commencement address: “David Foster Wallace was a bit wordy”

Thanks to Kenyon for inviting me to speak. I hope, over the new few minutes, to entertain you with some interesting and possibly useful material, as that would be my substitute for inspirational words, which I don’t have. In fact, I hardly believe in the possibility of inspiration after childhood. That is when you are an open vessel, a unique machine that can travel the galaxies and all imagination on the fuel of questions, stimuli and mystery.

In these four years, you have learned some salient facts and professorial opinions in a wide range of subjects, all of them filtered through your psychological roots, or in a few rare cases, your open and clear heart. Clear hearts can be inspired. That’s my assumption, though I’ve yet to see one.

You have reached this destination carrying baggage and dreams, excitement and anxiety, depression and the curved gravity of personality. While everyone carries ideas, or rides on a magic carpet of thought into their adulthood, college graduates are more likely to be restricted from the real world by their mind which thinks instead of sees, “attitudes” instead of feels. You can test this. Will you approach your first job like a child chancing upon their first praying mantis or first-grade romance, with mute wonder or a melting heart? If not, then it is your complicated head that will be in the way.

I remember less enlightened times, when adolescence was stigmatized as a strange anteroom, an unnatural zone between natural childhood and necessary adulthood. It may be glib to look at the teen era as a no-man’s-land of video games and dull classes, gauche pseudo-sophistication and silly hair. A deeper and more harrowing fact is that it’s the place where childhood’s frustrations – what we therapists call “unmet needs” – were forged into metal that remained white hot, never cooling to a solid and sharp hilt and point. Your adult life is where that metal will reach its final stage, whether it becomes solid or never cools. You will join the others, older and oldest, on that plain for they are the same: solid or never finished.

If I have any advice for you, it would be to take David Foster Wallace’s observations about yourself as felt center of the universe and consider there is a fourth, best way: Not self, not others, not some indefinably judicious blending of both, but the world as center of your self. The praying mantises, any one of which could be God. The roses and manure to smell, the sun and the oceans to dive into, the wall at the end of the universe that must have a window in it. Lose yourself in the world, not in your infinite mirrors of ego. To do this, you may need to undertake the dark adventure of therapy, where those childhood frustrations are faced – in a voice that is finally heard – and expelled, in justice.

Thanks.