For Shame?
Touching Hands, History, American Soul in Shadow
Greetings, from this very newShrink past couple of weeks!
A wide range of events and issues, pivotal and piercing to devastating, dominate national news-scape and journalism covering it.
History is all-but-upstaging this. Some parallel precedents are uncanny, the milestone-timeline dates downright eerie.
connecting title themes…
As for perspectives of psychology or soul, first I kept getting echoes around the edges of all of these stories, current and past.
On the one hand came the positive turning-point phrase from the Joe McCarthy era of the ‘50s: “Have You No Shame, Sir, At Long Last? Have You No Shame?” (From newShrink July 10, 2022, It’s Only Words):
It was U.S. Army Counsel Joseph Welch, who said this to Senator Joe McCarthy at the Senator’s infamous red-baiting 1954 hearings aimed at the U.S. Army. (WAPO). For McCarthy the hearings would become the bridge-too-far end to his destructive power.
On the other hand, more recent and still-unsetttling, was Stephen Spielberg’s breezily fond remembering of his late “Peter Pan” mom, who “didn’t believe in” shame or guilt, assuring him always that “it’s wasted emotion.” (From newShrink March 26, 2023, The Color Purple,)
Lawmakers from Florida to other red-leaning statehouses nationwide, including my home state’s, are enacting laws that in effect attempt to ban shame (as if such were even possible.) They prohibit teaching, discussion, reading or learning of any kind that might result in feelings of shame related to one’s, or one’s ancestors’, race, sexuality or gender.
Meanwhile, as always, closely associated questions of accountability, guilt and innocence, remorse and repentance, achievement/success and failure/improvement are front and center concerns in every context from courtroom to boardroom to office or factory floor … from houses of Congress or worship or study to our houses.
Therapists and psychologists, myself included, are no advocates or cheerleaders for the use of shame, guilt — any of our fully human range of negative emotions from fear and sadness to anger (or the positive ones for that matter) — as tools of manipulation or weapons by those seeking power and control over another.
And yet…
Shame & the Soul in Shadow
I keep coming back to today’s psychological theme, maybe the last thing I want to think, write or suggest a positive case about: The constructive, even essential, functions of shame and guilt (as well as fear, sadness, anger). These are part of the entire range of both positive and negative feelings, affects, that color, provide early cues and help inform our thoughts and chosen responses. From a Jungian depth perspective it’s impossible to imagine coming to terms with our individual, or the collective, unconscious shadow without engagement and cues from the full range of affects, including situations when shame and guilt show up to be reckoned-with.
A note on terminology: A strict distinction is made between guilt and shame in some religious, therapy and of course legal contexts. Guilt is primarily about behavioral adherence to laws, rules and standards or ideals (including internal ones) while shame is about being, who and how one is and strives to be, in terms of most deeply held values and ideals. For purposes here, the two are often experienced and noticed — or denied, avoided — together.
You might read and listen for some of these psychological themes and patterns today. This edition pairs five widely familiar, major current general news stories, issues, and people with similar or related historic precedents or dates. (Along with the Touching Hands title theme at center, the above illustration features two of these then-and-now pairs. The later illustration below depicts the other three.)
I’ve discovered most or all of the stories, both news and history, have something in common: They involve what therapists would call a psychological move: an intentional standing back to notice and consider. The stories and events tend to involve what I’ll call “re-” words — nouns, verbs, adjectives like: Re-flect, re-flection, re-late, re-visit, re-concile, re-pent, re-member, re-consider, re-compensate, re-paration, re-pair, re-present… also re-move, re-nege, re-negotiate, re-do… You get the idea.
This brings to mind the legal term popularized from corporate memos to casual texts: The Latin in re — meaning “in regard to, in the matter of.” Re is from the Latin res, meaning “property, matter, affair, or most simply in today’s vernacular, “a thing.”
All of which points to a mindful, thoughtful standing-back to consider (or re-consider) all there is to notice about a matter, affair, property, or thing — including any and all of the feelings/affects involved. It’s hard to imagine progress, problem-solving, growth, improvement… or even hope in any public, personal or psychological/soul dimension without some “re-” words. And the range of associated emotions we experience — from excitement and joy to shame, guilt, fear, anger and sadness — can be vital cues to what bears celebrating, and to what is needing care and attention.
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Touching Hands
Enslaved people built Davidson College and its campus. A new memorial will honor them. (From The Charlotte Observer) Illustrations at center.
Enslaved people made the bricks for Davidson College’s original buildings, farmed the campus’ land and served its students and faculty. Nearly two centuries later, the private liberal arts college is taking another step toward reconciling with its past.
Davidson President Doug Hicks announced plans for a memorial to honor the enslaved and exploited people who helped build the college. A bronze sculpture — two large, work-worn hands — will sit among four campus buildings fashioned from those bricks in the mid-1800s.
The memorial, named “With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited,” will be visible from Main Street. Work on the sculpture is expected to take two years, with a targeted completion in spring 2025.
The website of With These Hands artist Hank Willis Thomas is pictured at center above.
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This current week is one so eerily laden with historic milestone-anniversary dates — ones which tie so directly to intense, even tragic, major stories in today’s news. Once noticed, the echoes are loud.
Seeing & Hearing History: Currier & Ives Civil War Lithographs
Pictured in cluster at top left, we have the antebellum- and Civil War-era version of today’s photo-journalists, videographers and social media influencers.
Not surprisingly, a best source for many current news events connected in new contexts this past week has been political historian Heather Cox Richardson with her Letters from and American (heathercoxrichardson.substack.com.) I particularly recommend and cite highlights here from her posts of April 8 and April 9. Activist-lawyer Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition newsletter also has woven together this period’s many stories and issues well. (roberthubbell.substack.com).
Richardson draws astonishing parallels between some milestone historic anniversary dates within only this past week — and just those related to slavery, white supremacy, the Civil War and its long aftermath of Jim Crow and Juan Crow legalized abuses of Blacks and Native Americans:
Wednesday, April 12: (Small lithograph, above left top row) Back in 1861 (a Friday that year), Confederate rebels fired on the United States military garrison Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, SC, and opened the Civil War. This was just over a month after the March 4, 1861 inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln and opening of the new US Congress, elected by American voters to contain slavery in the Southern states where it already existed and not expand it into the newly forming Western territory-states. Fort Sumter was very much an insurrection against an election, a President and his Congress; the vivid display of Confederate flags at the January 6, 2021 insurrection was not coincidental.
Last (Easter) Sunday, April 9: (Larger lithograph at top left.) Four years later in 1865 (Palm Sunday of that year) Confederate General Robert E. Lee, commander of 25,000 starving and exhausted rebel troops, surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in the village of Appomattox Court House, VA. Lee’s first request was food for his army, which Grant was able to provide, and did. Rather than capture or further punish the conquered army and leaders, Grant kept only their guns and sent them home with their horses and side-swords in order that they may farm and feed their families.
HCR further notes that
Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close…
However, just 5 days later:
Friday, April 14, 1865, Good Friday of that year: (At top left, second row, from metmuseum.com). “This lithograph records the shocking moment when Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth… Booth was the leader of a group of pro-Confederate conspirators determined to prevent the South’s defeat and, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, they decided to kill Lincoln and other key Union leaders, hoping to destabilize the war effort and allow Confederate armies still in the field to rally.”
HCR further explains how this put Southerner Andrew Johnson of slave-state Tennessee into the White House. It thus enabled the ushering in of white supremacist policies and actions, birth of the Ku Klux Klan, and generations of Jim Crow controls and abuses of former slaves. Richardson points here also to the effectively similar Juan Crow relegation of Native Americans to reservations and the stripping of resources, culture, land and other rights in the western territory-states where slavery would not be extended.
As for the journalistic “first rough-drafts” of this important piece of American history, here’s what newspapers of the day had to say:
AP Was There: Original AP report of Lincoln’s assassination (AP, April 13, 2015)
How newspapers covered Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 150 years ago (WAPO, April 2015)
A look at front pages and dispatches covering an infamous moment of American history. Buried ledes abound!
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Space and focus in each of these pairings is largely on the historic. The current news stories have been widely covered and familiar, so only minimal basic links are here.
… with stories
(Pictured above at bottom left) With the above historic link to Andrew Johnson’s native Tennessee, the parallel present-day focus is the Tennessee legislature, where far older and uglier patterns replaced response and reform efforts following the latest mass school shooting in Nashville.
Tennessee’s Republican-led House expels 2 Democratic lawmakers over gun reform protest, fails in bid to oust a third (CNN, video and text versions)
No One Should Be That Shocked by What’s Happening in Tennessee (From Politico by National Political reporter Natalie Allison, who previously covered State House politics for The Tennessean.)
I covered the statehouse for years. It’s been heading in this direction for a while.
The world of politics experienced a collective shock this week as Tennessee Republicans expelled two young, Black, Democratic House members for protesting gun laws on the chamber floor after a deadly school shooting in Nashville.
But for those who have closely watched the chamber in recent years, the events were of little surprise. The place has been defined by partisan vitriol, pique, scandal, racism and Olympic-level pettiness for years.
By posting time this weekend, both ousted Black legislators had been reinstated by their districts to serve their constituents, and they may run again for their seats in the legislature.
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Moving to the right column above, many of the various legal challenges facing former President Donald Trump have escalated to court appearance, even criminal arraignment, and representation across state and federal venues from Florida and Georgia to New York City and Washington. These, particularly Trump’s required appearance at arraignment in New York, have of course been widely covered in available news. The issues of investigation or charges range from illegal payment of hush money, possible incitement of insurrection, sexual assault, and election interference to possible efforts to obstruct justice and illegal holding of classified documents.
From Trump supporters/defenders, including members of Congress, comments on these investigative and legal proceedings often warn that “if this can happen to him, it can happen to you and me!” To this, I keep wishing and hoping someone will publicly reply, “yes, and if you, I, or anyone I know or love even might have behaved in any of these ways in question, we should all agree that this definitely should happen to us.”
The other most common descriptor, from those for, against and merely cautionary about indicting or otherwise holding former presidents legally accountable through the courts: unprecedented.
And well, not exactly…
WAPO/Opinion by Max Boot
The culture of presidential impunity started with Nixon. Time to end it.
What Ford’s Pardon of Nixon Means (and Doesn’t Mean) for Trump (The New York Times. By Garrett M. Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History.”)
‘No One Could Believe It’: When Ford Pardoned Nixon Four Decades Ago (NYT, September 8, 2018)
The Ford pardon came September 8, 1974, soon after Nixon’s resignation through which he avoided prosecution on federal felony crimes. According court documents unsealed after nearly 45 years, he faced three articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress. A federal grand jury in February of that year was prepared to indict Nixon on four criminal counts for his role in the Watergate re-election campaign scandal. The charges included bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and obstruction of a criminal investigation.
Watergate Scandal: Grand Jury Was Ready to Hit Richard Nixon With 4 Criminal Charges, Newly Released Documents Reveal (From Newsweek, 2018)
For a more colorfully stated version of some of these ideas:
Gerald Ford’s Pardon of Nixon Is Why Donald Trump Can Still Run for President (The Daily Beast)
TRICKY DICK AND TEFLON DON
President Ford thought he was ending “America’s long national nightmare” by letting Tricky Dick off the hook. But he planted the seed for our current national nightmare.
Historically, with pardons I have been unable to stop thinking about how much of today’s entire Donald Trump phemomenon has direct roots in the Nixon Administration and backlash from its demise with Watergate. For example: Creation and rise of Fox Channel by its creator and early Nixon staffer Roger Ailes; Trump loyalist Roger Stone with his Richard Nixon tattoo and his also-prosecuted associate and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort; Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, whose dad worked for Nixon.
I’ve been unable to stop wondering, what if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Richard Nixon, in his stated desire to reuinify a nation fractured by the Vietnam War and enormous cultural chasms regarding equality? What if America had affirmed then, as the founders had set forth, that presidents are neither kings nor above the law?
So this past week, I was encouraged to hear historian Jon Meacham pondering many of the same and similar questions —far more eloquently!
Here is an even earlier historical perspective, in case you recall this writer’s enormous influences during the George W. Bush administration — particularly the invasion of Iraq.
How the Nixon Pardon Tore the Ford Administration Apart (Politico, 2018, by Donald Rumsfeld)
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At-a-glance here are a few more then-and-now takes on some of today’s key issues.
(Starting at left column)
The vintage Abe Fortas cartoon is from twice-Pulitzer-winning cartoonist and Purple Heart-awarded World War II veteran Bill Mauldin.
Justice Thomas: Advisers said no need to report travel with GOP donor (WAPO)
ProPublica reported that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted luxury trips for more than two decades, including travel on a superyacht and private jet, from a prominent Republican donor without disclosing them.
Justice Thomas Failed to Report Real Estate Deal With Texas Billionaire (NYT)
54 Years Ago, a Supreme Court Justice Was Forced to Quit for Behavior Arguably Less Egregious Than Thomas’s (NYT/Opinion by Adam Cohen)
(Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, is the author of “Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.”)
There are two distressing aspects to the scandal of Justice Clarence Thomas’s years of accepting luxurious vacations and private jet trips from a billionaire, as revealed last week in a damning investigation by ProPublica.
The first is that these gifts came from a man who seems to have strong feelings about issues that come before the Supreme Court. The second is the lack of bipartisan outrage at malfeasance that corrodes the standing of the nation’s highest court.
Suggesting that Democrats and Republicans agree on anything involving the Supreme Court these days sounds like the ramblings of a madman. But it is worth recalling that the last time such serious allegations were made against a sitting justice, Congress did respond firmly and in bipartisan fashion. Justice Abe Fortas’s departure from the court in 1969 is both a blueprint for how lawmakers could respond today and a benchmark of how far we have fallen.
Ginni Thomas would not be the first Supreme Court spouse to imperil a justice (WAPO)
Abe Fortas, appointed to the Supreme Court by Lyndon B. Johnson, resigned amid allegations against his wife, allowing President Richard Nixon to reshape the court.
The Cautionary Tale of Abe Fortas (Analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice)
This latest development on Thomas’ direct financial transactions with billionnaire conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow surfaced Saturday, after the above pieces and noted parallels and contrasts with the Fortas case.
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(At center)
The Hideous Resurrection of the Comstock Act (NYT/Opinion by Michelle Goldberg.) Illustration of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger with her mouth covered in protest of not being allowed to talk about contraceptives.
Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped anti-vice crusader for whom the Comstock Act is named, is back from the dead.
Comstock died in 1915, and the Comstock Act, the notorious anti-obscenity law used to indict the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (illustrated at center above), ban books by D.H. Lawrence and arrest people by the thousands, turned 150 last month…
...[N]ow, thanks to a rogue judge in Texas, the Comstock Act itself could be partly reimposed on America. Though the act had been dormant for decades and Congress did away with its prohibitions on birth control in 1971, it was never fully repealed. And with Roe v. Wade gone, the Christian right has sought to make use of it.
Supreme Court Briefly Preserves Broad Availability of Abortion Pill (NYT)
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(At right)
Florida parents upset by Michelangelo’s ‘David’ force out principal (The Washington Post)
Hope Carrasquilla of Tallahassee Classical School said she was forced to resign after parents complained about the art lesson, with one believing the masterpiece amounted to pornography
David, marble sculpture executed from 1501 to 1504 by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo. (From Britannica.com)
Is the David porn? Come see, Italians tell Florida parents (Associated Press)
Time and energy-bandwith now seem to have vanished…
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And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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