Lions in Winter...
(on Spring-forward Sunday)
Greetings, with an insistent image and a bit of a breathless pause to ponder it for the political news-year ahead.
Most recently the lion in winter of the title grabbed me and lingered since just after posting last Sunday morning’s 3.3.24 newShrink, “A really good question.” Over coffee my Charlotte Observer had an op-ed piece related to this title-topic. It was by a well-regarded, career-long moderate-Republican former NC Governor (1985-1993), who at 88 is clearly still quite engaged in community affairs. (More below about this piece.)
This happened to coincide with the recent pre-Super Tuesday crescendo of mass hysteria, frenetic voter opinion polling and bipartisan hand-wringing across the American electorate, headlines and news talk-shows. The grave crisis in focus, amid all of the many dire ones from which to chose? Yes, the Age Thing.
All of which brought to mind — and had me saying aloud — the lions in winter descriptions from two brief December dream snippets a couple of weeks apart. First the dream-lion in winter was “…one of the good-guys.” Then later in the month “… one of us.”
image and archetype
As with contemporary public as well as private life, both lion and lioness (depicted in the center illustration here) can be images that express compelling archetypal patterns of our universal human experience. Art, story and myth feature the lioness to express maturing/individuating of women across the life-span.
The expression of the archetype most recognized across different eras’ myth, literature and drama is the (male) lion in winter, defined as “A proud, competent man who’s aging — in the winter of his life — but remains boldly alive and vital.”
The image is of course also title of the classic play, book and 1968 film about King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. The richly psychological movie starred Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn in her third Best-Actress Oscar performance (and Anthony Hopkins in his first break-out role.)
Hence, the above illustration of today’s title.
Now for news, of which there is plenty.
A logistical note to readers: As will likely be a needed pattern in the breaking news-intensive months ahead, the week’s Sunday edition may include a single link to assorted headlines, story links and my brief comments on the week’s stories and issues beyond the Sunday edition themes in narrower focus.. This week’s Short Takes on Long Topics include looks at Super Tuesday primary results and implications, updates on RNC leadership change driven by Trump, and more. Only the fully combined weekly edition is emailed to readers. Some individual days’ News Notes will be posted as they are completed and viewable on the website newshrink.substack.com.
news of note
Donald Trump’s claimed dominance and clear emergence as the presumptive Republican Party candidate for president have been thoroughly reported all this week.
The Trump campaign’s months-long, preemptive volleys have now been answered, bookend-fashion, by Thursday night’s energetically encompassing State of the Union address by his incumbent campaign opponent, President Joe Biden. Intense campaigns by both camps were well under way by early hours Friday.
But as with Thursday night’s State of the Union address for the ages, this week’s newShrink focus is rightfully Joe Biden. He is the duly elected incumbent President of the United States, leader of the free world.
The State of Our Union is on his watch. (Attending to his care of it is on ours.)
If you haven’t already, I invite and urge you to take the uninterrupted time to watch and hear the entire speech. (The Republican Rebuttal is also browsable on YouTube.)
Several early recaps and highlights are included below. For now limiting today’s discussion to experience of the speech, the speaker and the full context of the setting and occasion, I’ll note that I so wish I had written it! Discussion of elements, quotes, content moments and Biden’s delivery that make me wish that will show up in countless ways in the months ahead.
Watching the speech, and following much commentary on it, brought to mind a couple of observations of clinical and neurological nature that I think are important from psychological perspectives. It’s awareness that I sorely wish more journalists, viewers and voters had and would remember.
One regarding Joe Biden is the fundamental, baseline fact of his lifelong management of a stutter — and the constant, ultra-disciplined level of intentional cognitive control that involves, using the most executive functions of the brain. During Biden’s Thursday speech it has been widely noticed and reported that he — intentionally and with great rhetorical effect — refrained from mentioning Donald Trump by name, calling him “my predecessor” a carefully tallied 13 times.
None have mentioned, or apparently tried themselves, the challenge of plainly articulating the word “predecessor”13 times in rapid-fire audible speech even without a raucous room and a perennial stutter to navigate! That’s cognitive discipline. (And it doesn’t come in an Rx bottle.)
Second is the cognitive and neurological acuity involved in Biden’s constant off-script ad-libs as he responded in the moment to reading the room, his many rope-a-dope or martial arts-style turning of hecklers’ hits back on their senders . In real time, in a packed and raucous not-all-friendly room, before a massive TV audience Biden was negotiating. governing, leading with skill, knowledge and strategy— not mindless reactive bluster and brute bullying. That isn’t neurologically possible without profoundly high cognitive skills and functioning. It’s a skill now so rare in American public life that it’s unrecognized when it shows up. A stiff walk and arthritis from an active-exercise life and foot injury simply aren’t symptoms of dementia — or of insufficient energy.
Here is an assortment of news coverage of the State of the Union and the president, beginning with this excellent profile-interview update with author and staff writer Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. Osnos’ 2020 Biden biography, The Life, the Run, and What Matters NowI was named Financial Times best book of 2020. His briefer Biden character profile, American Dreamer was also well reviewed.
Profiles/Joe Biden’s Last Campaign
Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection.
In-Your-Face Biden Takes on Trump and His Own Doubters (NYT)
Trump’s State of the Union Response: Social Media Glitches and Mocking Filters (NYT)
The Most Unusual State of the Union in Living Memory (Commentary by The Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham/The Atlantic)
Republican members of Congress repeatedly heckled President Biden, who was happy to mix it up with them.
Biden Silences the Doubters (Commentary by The Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize and 2022 National Magazine Award for feature writing)
He’s always been master of “the connect.”
Brooks and Capehart on Biden’s State of the Union and what’s next in the 2024 race (PBS Friday evening week-in-review. Video and text transcripts linked here.)
Brooks’ conservative-side commentary on the SOTU rebuttal speech by Republican Katie Britt had a flat, dialed-in quality — as though he was only half paying attention to it. Or he was in throes of the tone-deafness he can at times display, even as he pontificates with presumed branded expertise where real emotional intelligence is needed.
Britt’s delivery and content were so widely experienced as bizarre, cringeworthy and immediate fodder for parody that I think an important, horribly cynical factual factor has been too widely overlooked or unknown on both sides of the aisle and political media. In the rebuttal Britt expresses dire concerns and darkly sinister warnings regarding sex-trafficking, children, families and safety at the border. Just a few weeks ago she was visiting the border and working closely with conservative Republican Louisiana Senator James Langford to create the Republican-led, most comprehensive and needed bipartisan immigration bill in decades — with Senators optimistic about passing it. Then Britt was among Republicans who voted against the bill she helped create — after being called and instructed by the Donald Trump’s team to halt collaboration on what would be a political win for Biden.
The final note on the Britt rebuttal here, with my kudos for the best lede that captures the entire experience it, is this from the NYT:
Sen. Britt, with smiles and menace, gives GOP rebuttal
With a sunny, inviting smile, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama welcomed Americans into her kitchen Thursday night.
Many soon backed away nervously.
In the Republican Party’s official response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Britt delivered a jarring speech that toggled between an increasingly strained cheerfulness and a fierce glare as she gave ominous warnings about illegal immigration…
And The New York Time’s Peter Baker from the campaign trail with the President.
Live Election Updates: Biden takes his State of the Union message on the road. (NYT)
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Here now is that Charlotte Observer op-ed last Sunday, by former NC Governor Jim Martin, that left me sputtering aloud about “sadly squandered lion in winter moments!”
The incident he writes about had been in this Observer story discussed in last week’s newShrink and inspired its title, “A really good question.”
Davidson College stands by decision to show athletes ‘divisive’ film on racism
With newShrink already posted, Barely had coffee when this…
Former NC Gov.: DEI efforts at Davidson College go too far |OpEd from Republican former NC Governor Jim Martin.) Martin is a regular periodic Observer contributor and who generally provides a balancing moderate-conservative voice on issues.
Over years on various occasions and issues I have considered and described Martin as a valued, needed and thoughtful moderate voice in public discourse and policy — as have people I love and respect.
Regarding diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and rationale I have a great deal of direct experience in corporate, academic and professional training as a psychologist as well as personally. In this case I think the former governor is quite wrong, his stance on this far from moderate — and in some instances there is a surprisingly uncharacteristic ugly tone that seems reactive and mean-spirited.
Opening his objection to a “DEI” process at his alma mater Davidson College, Martin cites the familiar “I have a dream…” and “color of their skin” words from Martin Luther King, Jr. He clearly forgot or never studied King’s intense and necessarily more confrontational focus on the inextricable problem of economic inequity with racism; in fact he was in Memphis to support striking Black sanitation workers when he was killed there.
Elsewhere in the piece Martin misrepresents awareness- and empathy-building about race-related experiences of people of color. He misstates such awareness as “based only on” the color of one’s skin.
Particularly tone-deaf and lacking in empathy to me here — especially given his speaking for an environment as academically, socially and economically elite as Davidson — is his scoffing dismissal and distancing himself from what he brackets as “privilege.” Here’s some news for the former governor: “Privilege” is relative, and it is not in quotation marks, nor is it nonexistent foolishness, to the people in the room — or those excluded entirely from the room — who don’t have it.
The entire piece is so full of overstatement, misrepresenation, ridiculing sarcasm (eg. the clever made-up term “Cynical Race Theory,” demonizing or dismissal of the work and those doing it as “foolishness,” that reasonable mutual conversation and engagement with him about it seem unlikely if not impossible. Surely the experience of this for many must be… pretty effectively exclusion, and oppression.
Here is where I closed the piece with great sadness. Davidson has long been in many ways home-community for therapy practice, friendships, church, book club, community work such as Habitat board and committee — all closely connected with Davidson College. Close longtime friends have been tenured and retired Davidson faculty whose courageous, at times uncomfortably self-challenging efforts in these areas I know.
About this, of Governor Martin I think I said out loud (for all that was worth!): What a missed opportunity to be a transformative lion in winter. As an alum who long ago (before politics) taught chemistry at the college, he clearly cares deeply about the school and its people. Instead of recoil, resist and attitude of let’s get these foolish whippersnappers back in line, wonder what might happen if he instead leaned-into some of those “demon-DEI” processes, participated or even led with curiosity and spirit of mutual learning? In the corporate world of all places, I have personally known and worked with other Davidson alums in high-level-leadership roles, who have done just that. This can have life-changing positive impacts on people and organizations that Martin can’t imagine from his current perspective.
As the week unfolded, there’s been response I have found noteworthy, even laudable. Here is heartening perspective and context — by Davidson alumni, faculty member and Charlotte Observer editorial columnist Issac Bailey.
The truth behind the misleading conservative outcry over DEI at Davidson College
Meanwhile, a related story of larger national context, arrived on Monday:
‘Greatest first amendment sin’: Appeals court condemns Florida’s Stop Woke Act (The Guardian)
Three-judge panel blocks Ron DeSantis’s 2022 act banning employers from mandatory diversity training in scathing ruling.
Looking more generally at matters of non-demonic, lower-case diversity, equity and inclusiveness in higher education:
What the future of admissions at elite schools might look like (AP)
For now, cynicism seems unjustified, at least on this issue. Most justices are neither universally in favor of nor universally opposed to diversity programs. Context matters. As it happens, the court has also chosen a position that matches public opinion: Most Americans support class-based admissions policies and oppose race-based policies.
The italics and bolding are mine. Admissions policies and in all other ways class (socioeconomic) circumstances — ie power, privilege and the lack thereof — are inextricably connected to and influence race, gender, academic and other demonstrations of merit and other factors inherent in admissions.
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Before closing today here’s a lighter uplifting touch — from the other end, yet in many ways remarkably similar, end of that “stages of life” age spectrum. (And OK, an irresistable
ONE OF A KIND: Armando!!
UNC’s Armando Bacot became a face of modern college basketball — and a beloved throwback.
(This spotlights Tuesday night’s special final home game for UNC seniors. It was written before Saturday night’s second win of the regular season over arch-rival Duke on their home court. So I won’t write about that one!)
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I’ll leave you today with a reminder that Lent is about half-over.
(Its flowers bloom outside, too.)
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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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