It's Only Words 7.10.22
The Sound of Silence, Talking Cures, Words that Maim and Matter
Greetings, as we close this holiday week of peak-firework season across America.
Sighs of relief are near-audible for legions of dogs in blue state and red state alike, though strangely not the unfazed and blissful — mindless? — newShrink labradors.
For the humans here, it’s a bit-eerily quiet and simple finale to displays of sound, fury and storm across recent weeks’ national news-scape, and in newShrink. Today’s edition is a series of reflections and thoughts on just the above-pictured handful of apparently unrelated stories and items that have caught, held and pestered my attention.
the river moving sideways
Out of the week’s quieter simplicity in the wake of such sweeping public events have come surprises of remarkable depth, freshness and value: Evocative questions, new angles, never-mentioned topics, ideas, life experiences. Memories, dreams, reflections (as the Jungians like to say!). Much of it with or inspired by you readers and friends through varied ways, channels and exchanges from the virtual to the meandering conversation over dinner, a walk, a ride.
For all of these, I thank you!
There can be an almost-physical feel to such times of great looming sea-change, whether collective or more narrowly individual in scope. To illustrate the felt-experience I borrow an image from writer May Sarton, who compares it to swimming in one of the tidal-marsh rivers near our coasts. When the tide has shifted, but not yet pulled the river back out to sea, at such times of uncertain seemingly endless duration it feels as though the river moves neither forward nor back — but sideways.
some connecting themes…
🔷From this vantage point today’s title themes and some associated tunes, image or verse have come to mind. These may, or may not, connect some or all of the selected items and stories below.
🔷From the depth/soul psychology perspective with all three — the power of silence, of talking from a deep place, of words in their context — there’s the double edged, shadow-and-light aspect and potential. An ancient healing adage may help capture this: That which heals, also kills (and vice versa).
🔷Again with all three, consciousness — capacity for intentional choice vs reflex and reactivity — determines and distinguishes the healing and life-giving from the lethal. (Ie, it is consciousness that makes choice even possible).
Applying these ideas to both news stories and how we operate in day-to-day life has had me thinking about, and increasingly noticing:
🔷Things talked-about vs what’s underplayed or never mentioned;
🔷Their times, contexts and situations — or sea changes under way;
🔷 In the story, who and what is named, described, voiced, quoted… who and what are absent?…and is the absence conspicuous or itself invisible?
🔷What are questions never asked, so their answers and stories never known… and how does that affect the story and understanding (today) or historically over time (yesterday/tomorrow?)
The usual navigating details for accessing all links and references on the newShrink website are at the bottom of this post after closing comments.
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… with stories
Looking now at a range of different news stories and items with these in mind. (Starting from top left column in the visual above.)
#1. First this: The July 4th Highland Park Mass-Shooting
(This was first-day coverage from The New York Times)
Robert Primo III considered 2nd separate attack in Madison, WI later on July 4th
(The Washington Post)
The tangle of details in this next piece illustrates vividly and painfully our uniquely American model approach for gun safety and common-sense protections: A sieve.
Highland Park suspect’s father sponsored gun permit application, police say (WAPO)
Authorities said they had “insufficient basis” to deny the application, despite relatives reporting that Robert E. Crimo III had threatened to “kill everyone.”
The Illinois State Police confirmed on Tuesday that the father of the Highland Park parade shooting suspect sponsored his son’s application for a gun permit months after relatives reported that Robert E. Crimo III had threatened to “kill everyone,” and that authorities had “insufficient basis” to deny the application.
The revelation that Crimo, 21, had at least two previous encounters with law enforcement has raised new questions about how he was able to legally purchase his guns and whether more could have been done to prevent the massacre that killed seven people and injured more than 30.
In September 2019, a family member told Highland Park police that Crimo had threatened to “kill everyone,” said Christopher Covelli, a spokesman for the Lake County Major Crime Task Force. Officers visited Crimo’s home and confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword, but made no arrest, Covelli said on Tuesday, because they lacked probable cause. However, they notified Illinois State Police, he said.
Months later, in December, Crimo applied for a firearm owner’s identification card, the document required to possess a gun in Illinois. Because Crimo was under 21 at the time, state law required him to have the consent of a parent or guardian before he could own a firearm or ammunition. According to state police, which issues the cards, Crimo’s father sponsored the permit application.
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Then this…
Barely 12 hours before this news began to come in, into my personal friends-only Facebook feed comes the following “funny happy holiday” social media-meme, depicting comedian-actor Will Ferrell and attributing punchline words to him.
#2 . “The holiday you’re celebrating only exists BECAUSE PEOPLE WERE ARMED…. HAPPY JULY 4TH, AMERICA!”
Some thoughts…
🌀Among the many things that came to mind quickly with this, most immediate was processing that it came from a peripheral friend I have known only in specific situations — but in those I have known and valued her kindness, wisdom, empathy and positive follow-through. I couldn’t, still can’t, imagine that person consciously choosing to send this message to all of her friends as a holiday greeting, given such recent devastating mass shootings. (And this was before Highland Park on July 4th.)
🌀I don’t know if these are Will Ferrell’s words and ideas, or some attributed to him, as he’s not a favorite or much-familiar performer to me.
🌀This was more disappointing and surprising than something or someone I automatically block, and I didn’t unfriend or comment, just limited her stuff showing up unless
🌀I highlight and have continued to think some of this, not because I have answers or solutions but because I don’t. It goes to the question of how, whether, when and why we do, don’t or should talk with each other across cultural and political divide. For me platitudes denying differences exist and false-equivalency opinions just aren’t useful answers where the side initiating the “conversation” is wielding actual weapons or touting the power to do so.
All of which brought me again to Sarton, whose comment here seems particularly relevant when the situation and escalating rhetoric are about and increasingly accompanied by guns.
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#3. “The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.”
(from May Sarton)
Implicit here seems to be a call for conscious, intentional choice and use of our free-speech words. Though a bit out of fashion, Freud’s 125-year legacy remains the foundation of all modern psychology and neurology. And the standard of care in psychotherapy most supported today by research is some form of the talking-cure psychotherapies he pioneered.. Also still relevant are his work and explanations of how powerfully unconscious speech breaks through, rather erupts, in everyday ways such as “Freudian slips,” unintentional insults or jokes.
Jung and many others after him have studied, written extensively and later researched about mob mentality and the intense, exaggerated power of unconscious and reactive speech, especially in crowds, to engage and ignite the unconscious reactivity of masses of people. Benign forms of this phenomenon are football games or rock concerts; less benign and worse, insurrectionist political rallies.
In Buddhism the value of conscious choice with words is expressed in the concept of right speech.
And Sarton, too, calls for increasingly conscious expression by saying:
At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with one’s personal truth.
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The next photo-clusters and items on Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist-hunts of the ‘50s arose in follow-up to last week’s piece and You Tube video link to historian Jon Meacham’s July 4 message.
(Meacham put many of today’s national events in context of several comparable times in history, including McCarthy’s.) During a holiday weekend dinner discussion with reader friends, the newShrink piece on the Meacham segment piqued interest. My great journalist friend naturally raised the next questions of what ultimately happened to end McCarthy’s reign of terror and McCarthyism.
To her question, here’s the pivotal quote and its setting that became the bully-Senator’s downfall. (At bottom left in the visual.)
# 4. “Have you no shame, sir, at long last? Have you no shame?“
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 be his bridge-too-far
This passionate outburst by U.S. Army Counsel Joseph Welch during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954… was the proximate cause of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s downfall. His exposure before the nation as a malignant bully was prelude to the formal vote of censure by the Senate a few months later.
The President and the Bully, is a fascinating excerpt in The Saturday Evening Post from the Larry Nye book on Joe McCarthy pictured above. Meacham and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough discuss the Nye book — particularly detailing his descriptions of President Eisenhour’s long hesitation and failure to stop McCarthy —during last week’s July 4th message on the soul of America.
Important to note, as a result of McCarthy’s witch-hunt some 2,000 innocent government employees lost their jobs, countless artists, writers, Hollywood and New York stage professionals were blacklisted for years with careers stalled or ruined — and there were also suicides. In this Evening Post excerpt, and presumably the full book, the levels of intimacy and detail about McCarthy with such figures as the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and hatchet man Roy Cohn are compelling and disturbing.
Also here is the official Senate report on Joe McCarthy censure and ousting. I found perversely interesting that, under Senate-hearing scrutiny the white Joe McCarthy cried that he was being victimized at a “lynching.” This preceded by several decades the similar counter-defense that now-Justice Clarence Thomas exclaimed when under fire for sexual harassment at his own Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1992. (From Thomas, who is Black, the accusation against the all-white-male Judiciary Committee panel, was “a high-tech lynching.”)
McCarthy, by the way, died just a couple of years after his censure and departure from the Senate, at age 47, of complications from alcoholism.
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Moving to the center column above, the next photo-cluster is of President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. She is the enslaved woman who after his wife’s early death bore several of his children. The entire Hemings family, over multiple generations, were commingled with Jefferson’s and that of his wife Martha. Martha’s mother and Sally’s, as well as Martha and Sally shared such blood ties as half-siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles.
Again, the John Meacham-Joe Scarborough holiday message in the 7.3.22 newShrink eloquently details both Jefferson’s enormous, deep and cringe-worthy failings of character regarding slavery and race, dehumanizing and ongoing sexual abuse of his economic and legal power, and his apparent blind-spots of staggering hypocrisy. AND Jefferson’s unparalleled achievements that included, as Scarborough put it, his having been responsible for the freeing of more human beings on the planet than any person in the history of the world.
BOTH Jeffersons are history. Ours.
I cite the Meacham-Scarborough discussion here, as an excellent, clear and compelling description of what confronting, owning and integrating the unconscious psychological shadow looks and feels like and why it’s essential that we do it, both individually and collectively. And they do this in normal conversational discourse, not psychological jargon.
In this context the Jefferson-Hemings relationship and the Meacham video about it also came up in a holiday week dinner conversation about that edition of newShrink. My dear friend, reader and former professor followed up by sharing this comprehensive book review that I find both chilling and mesmerizing. (I plan to read the book.)
#5. Jefferson’s Concubine: Review of the book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” by Annette Gordon Reid.
(The New York Review of Books)
The Jefferson-Hemings relationship reflects another of today’s themes, the ways and some sea-changes in ways things are told — or kept silent and taboo — in history and popular culture. Although slow and belated, much more widely accurate un-romanticized portrayals of life and facts are becoming more the standard about historic Southern plantations, for example. Among them Monticello is a singular star.
And here, even the official PR version of the Hemings story from the Monticello website includes far more of these facts than were included or available to researchers much less public, even a few years ago.
A final, fact-based fictionalized take on Jefferson and Hemings is the 2017 novel, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings by Stephen O’Connor, which our book club read a couple of years back. I highly recommend it, both because of and despite such facts as: It is haunting… not salacious but disturbingly intimate… to me it rang painfully true emotionally and psychologically, and on behalf of both characters. The male author’s alternating voices of each of their respective inner lives, dialogue and relationship were to me spot-on. (Devastatingly so.)
For me it is a great book, but also a soulful one in both rich and shadowy ways. It’s not one that allows reading from emotional or psychological arms’ length.
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The next couple of items and photos touch on today’s themes of who and what is named, voiced, or in the story at all, also what questions we ask, omissions we notice — or not. Additionally this one echoes previous editions’ discussions of the healthy (conscious) psychological masculine and feminine, plus the tracking of the soul as tracking of psychological feminine in both men and women. (A reminder here, that this is about all, whole humans, not body parts or gender roles.)
My venture into the recent death and eulogizing of NASCAR and auto dealer billionaire Bruton Smith has been a stumble via a quirky family tie. I’ve never attended a stock-car race, or wanted to. The closest I ever came was once getting a pace-car ride around the track at a private corporate event with fellow bankers, at an otherwise empty speedway.
The Scott Fowler piece here from The Charlotte Observer first caught my attention a couple of weeks ago out of interest in sharing with my 94-year-old mother. A year younger than Bruton, my mom was a young wife (with toddler-me) when her South Charlotte neighbor “Mama Smith” became her fast-friend and garden-club matriarch-mentor. (I have in my yard my mom’s blue-ribbon-winner camellias grafted under Mama Smith-guidance.)
#.6 NASCAR’s Bruton Smith had a one-of-a-kind life, knocking down doors the whole way
(Sports feature in The Charlotte Observer)
Wanting to take some of the stories to share with mom, whose memory is now impaired though not absent when she has good reference points, I began to search this story, then the multiple others in the Observer, then other stories online. I sought a simple needed detail: Mama Smith’s first name, other than “Mama.”
At the Observer alone, by my count Fowler was one of seven writers whose stories appeared those first days in both online and replica/print editions. Not surprisingly given the subject’s NASCAR royalty, all were men. As is common with such long-lived, vastly public figures the features’ anecdotes had been thoroughly curated, told and retold over decades. Here the same ones about his mother — eg. her praying for him to stop a youthful stint as a race-car driver — and a couple of others show up several times. Just no name for her. Scanning all of those stories for the name, I started to notice more how they were being told.
Not an earth-shaking omission, and as I’d anticipated, the full obituary a bit later included her name — Mollie. The eventual (Ollen) Bruton Smith full obituary on Legacy.com, finally in The Observer, also fortunately included the basic chronological mentions of his ex- (and only) wife and mother of his children, Bonita (Bonnie). The array of earlier features confusingly omitted either Bonnie’s names or her entire existence.
Now, the nasty 1988-1990 Bruton and Bonnie Smith separation and divorce, massive financial settlement and later returns to court for further financial settlement are both decades-old and well-documented public news in Charlotte regional business communities and throughout NASCAR. No re-litigation or salacious details are appropriate or necessary, in print and spoken eulogies or official obituaries. But in journalism, basic factual information is.
Beyond that: Whoever, however, wherever she is — and whatever public titan of whatever public sphere the deceased was — the mother of his three much-touted, flaunted, “pride-and-joy family” of children, with whom he buried their infant child, is and belongs in the story, the eulogies, the obit. I never met either of these people, or had reason or need to. As a human and woman I just find this generically appalling!
Why am I noticing such nits, and why do they matter? Well, it is a pretty clear reminder of how women get omitted from things like Constitutions — sore spots long-familiar, but a bit raw at the moment…
From a depth/soul psychological standpoint this inadvertent closer look at the Bruton Smith story and life also revealed a most jarringly unbalanced masculine figure, relationships, accomplishments… an utter absence of conscious soul (psychological femininity) and notably few if any acknowledgedrelationships with actual women who were peers or partners not daughters, mothers, employees. I wound up hoping he’d had a private real-life of some kind.
For the five or so minutes I could bear, I tuned in online to Smith’s so-visibly-male memorial service. It was live-streamed from his church, a walk around a corner from my young-childhood home and that of his mother.
Frequent among the eulogies’ mentions and anecdotes was his sickbed-acceptance of Jesus Christ as his personal savior and Lord about five years ago. Even at this most humble, receptive, openheartedly supplicant moment in believers’ spiritual life, the Bruton described in the pulpit — by very pious Christian men who said they knew him well and were present — had been all jaw-dropping hubris and breathtaking bombast, playing the moment for laughs by the crowd.
I hoped this wasn’t accurate, and it’s where I clicked off the link to the service.
That was a week or so ago, and now I find all of this has rendered Smith surprisingly a bit more likable and admirable in some ways I hadn’t known. Also terribly sad.
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For time and space reasons, for now I’ll add only a bit to this final item. It’s to me an encouraging and hopeful start to new ways — and topics — in how and even whether we talk with one another, even about things that are the most important to us. .
#7. More NC men are looking up vasectomy information after abortion ruling
(The Charlotte Observer)
Men are rushing to get vasectomies after Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade
(The Washington Post)
Urologists told The Washington Post that they have seen a spike in requests for the procedure in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization…
… Doug Stein — a Florida urologist known as the “Vasectomy King” for his advocacy of the procedure — said that before the July 1 decision, he received four or five vasectomy requests a day. Since the court’s decision was announced, that number has spiked to 12 to 18 requests per day.
I’d say at least 60 or 70 percent are mentioning the Supreme Court decision,” Curington said. “And a few of them have such sophistication as young men that they actually are thinking about Justice Thomas and his opinion that contraception may fall next. And that’s shocking. That’s something that doesn’t enter into our conversations ever, until this week.”
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In an interesting exchange about this article, a friend and reader asked me:
Do you attribute this uptick to guys who had casually assumed, ‘What the hell, there’s always abortion?’
My reply to him, from both therapy practice and life:
No, I really don’t. I do attribute it to way more conversation going on about things like contraception, that have been just taken for granted between couples for more than a generation.
Now there’s just greater awareness and concern, and that is leading to more open discussion across the board. More interest and conversation is also happening with mothers and grandmothers about their own reproductive decision making, experiences, choices, private tragedies that too often in families no one dares to mention or ask about.
And yes, a lot of our mothers and grandmothers, and our fathers and grandfathers with them, went through abortions for many reasons. While I hate the loss of rights as catalyst for this much-needed openness and healthier communication about something so primal and universally human, I am very glad it is happening.
His reply back:
Thanks for the thoughtful (and more encouraging!) take…
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This repeat of an earlier favorite Anne Sexton comment rather sums up today’s themes..
#8. “Words and eggs must be handled with care.” - Anne Sexton
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Today I'll leave you with another gem spotted and shared thanks to peerless curator of the cool, funny and beautiful, Ann Ahern Allen.
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… 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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