News Notebook Friday 8.20.21
Afghan Echoes, Vietnam Voices .... and Rolling Stones
Happy Friday, and welcome-weekend greetings from newShrink.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the consuming news-story focus of this week’s Notebook is Afghanistan with its multiple layers of unfolding crises, including:
The unexpectedly rapid fall of the U.S.-backed government to the Taliban;
Ensuing humanitarian emergency and logistical predicament of evacuating American military, journalists and other workers amid severely elevated risk to the status and lives of girls and women under the Taliban;
The need for expedited visas and evacuation for the many Afghans whose help as translators and many other roles supporting American interests in the country now put their lives in jeopardy; and
Political backlash from both parties domestically and on the world stage with bipartisan blame of the Biden administration from pundits and politicians.
The immediacy, speed of breaking news and intensity of the situation pose both challenge and opportunity for the weekly Notebook: To adhere to newShrink’s mission (and tagline) of both “tracking the soul of America,” in collective and individual, and doing it in response to items and issues in the news. So this edition first focuses on multiple broader and deeper dimensions in the content of this large, multifaceted Afghanistan news story.
Then from depth psychology and soul-conscious perspectives the focus shifts to elements of the tracking process that are similar, whether examining the collective psyche, with the news, or the individual, in ourselves and what makes us tick. Beyond the attention-grabber splash of breaking story and the winners-or-losers horserace, here is where we apply and combine skills and mindsets of journalists, of scholars and experts like historians and lawyers, and of psychologists to how we approach and integrate the news and our day-to-day lives.
First, news.
Afghanistan echoes…
A wide range of well-sourced and varied-media news organizations have covered the fall of Afghanistan story. TV journalists report from the country, President Joe Biden and Pentagon officials present and defend his decisions and rationale in addresses to the nation and the press. Reporting and commentary browsable from NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other outlets have provided updates.
Here, The Charlotte Observer award-winning cartoonist Kevin Siers tells the story in two different cartoons on days this week.
By Thursday the Kabul airport was reported secure, with 7,000 Americans evacuated so far and the President stating on national network TV that “America is not leaving until everyone is out” and the goal is both Americans and our allies there.
Here I’ll cite mainly additional sources who have done an excellent job of curating and distilling key factual elements of the issues and coverage while also adding particular contexts that broaden and/or deepen understanding.
Lawyer Robert Hubbell’s daily Today’s Edition email newsletter from Wednesday, August 18, titled “After Action Review,” offers a particularly well-balanced assessment of both the pros and cons of criticisms of the Biden Administration’s role in this week’s Afghanistan situation. (Access options are in Post Notes at the bottom of today’s Notebook.)
A primary point of reference for the Hubbell piece is this pivotal New York Times story, which he dings for its feverish headline and subhead, many anonymous sources and ultimate “putting its thumb on the scale” to weigh blame based on facts Hubbell contends aren’t yet known:
However, Hubbell also recommends this as an otherwise well-sourced, in many ways nuanced piece and a must-read for continued reference going forward as the truths about these events come to light. Hubbell does note how much of the factual and ultimate historic verdict on this are 1) as yet unknown and unknowable 2) myopically skewed by this week’s intensely narrowed focus on events of the preceding 72 hours, and 3) ignore or lack both a historical dimension and the roles of the previous administration(s). Hubbell also incorporates the important context of deeply consistent US public support for the Afghan withdrawal. Even by midweek after the news cycles most scathingly critical of the Biden administration, the average bipartisan polling needle on the issue had remained well toward the positive support of Afghanistan-withdrawal by at least 12 percent.
Political historian Heather Cox Richardson presents a thorough and contextualized account of many of the facts and multi-dimensional issues in her daily email newsletter, Letters from an American, Tuesday, August 16. (Access options are in Post Notes at the bottom of today’s Notebook.) Amid the decades-long Afghan debacles under presidents of both parties, there’s valuable historical perspective in Richardson’s reminder that Joe Biden is the most knowledgeable and experienced president on foreign policy since George H.W. Bush’s single term (1989-1993.)
A summary quote from Richardson:
“It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan’s women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home.”
And here’s a piece I found powerful on a different, deeply complex aspect of the topic—in commentary from MSNBC news veteran Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word (a source and show at a time of weekday I almost never catch or watch.)
…Vietnam voices
In a firm and fact-laden way O’Donnell makes a strong case against this week’s too-glib and hyperbolic comparisons of the fall of Afghanistan with the 1975 fall of Saigon upon America’s exit from Vietnam. The range of rants on this came from unnamed military sources and media figures to elected officials such as 49-year-old Senator Ben Sasse. (Sasse was 3 in 1975, and in this he doesn’t seem to have read or heard much about Vietnam or Saigon before this week’s photo-memes.) You can browse YouTube to the Tuesday, August 17, show segment that’s pictured below. (It’s not linked, for space and data reasons.) The title: “Everything about Vietnam was much worse than what has happened in Afghanistan.”
Among compelling factual contrasts O’Donnell presents:
“In ‘America’s longest’ 20-year Afghanistan war, American military deaths were 2,448. In our 13 years in Vietnam: 57,939.” Citing further human costs of the unauthorized escalation of that war into Cambodia by then-President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he continues:
“When we left Vietnam in defeat and disgrace, we left behind millions of Vietnamese civilian and military, with millions in war debt. We left behind babies fathered by American soldiers. And yes, we left behind journalists who had helped us.”
Touching on terrorizing impacts of the Vietnam-era mandatory draft on lives of all American teenage boys, he goes on to note the long inability by any historic American president, or American military institutions from the Pentagon to West Point, to plan, strategize or effectively execute our withdrawal from a largely unsuccessful or losing war. O’Donnell closes with a terse message:
“If you oppose what you see in Afghanistan today, oppose war.”
Summarizing my take on these and other news and context pieces:
Important and compelling as the flash and immediacy of breaking-news is, the broadening of history and other contexts matters. And the deepening of the psychological/soul dimension—“The Work Happening in the background,” as the title and poem below describe—matters.
Without these varied dimensions of breadth, depth, texture and perspective, the visual picture is distorted as flat. Both voice from the past and its echoes in the present become unrecognizable sound or meaningless, indistinguishable noise—as Senator Sasse and others illustrated on the public stage this week.
Journalism is known as the “first rough draft of history” for a reason; it’s supposed to be visited and revisited for the full range of edits, amendments, illustration and footnote.
For similar reasons, perhaps the movie “Groundhog Day” is not the ideal blueprint for our individual lives!
the tracking process
Thinking back to last week’s Notebook as illustration, consider how in a few news cycles the Afghan crisis has effectively knocked last week’s intense, as yet-unfinished and complex story of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s sex scandal and political descent off the radar for now. In newShrink Afghanistan elbowed-aside large, important stories like COVID resurgence and climate change findings and pushed David Brooks’ great cultural commentary in The Atlantic ahead at least another week or two.
I cite these examples, for this is how it works both with news and in how we experience ourselves, including elements of the unconscious psyche, in our daily lives .
In the news and in our lives, events, stories, people and our take on them will likely be recurring—and in ways, contexts and relative priorities both familiar and new when they do.
Upon the revisiting, the same events and material are never center-stage in spotlight all of the time, or alongside the same others, or at the same depths, or connected with the same broader contexts.
This is similar in our interior lives, with our varied individual experience, awareness, depth, related feelings and attention to the soul/unconscious dimensions at different times.
Neither the news of the day nor our day-to-day experience of our lives and ourselves is a linear process—nor is it flat, one- or two-dimensional.
More accurately, the tracking process with both involves treading and re-treading of terrain already covered—for example a current event or situation revisited with the historic past, as Richardson, Hubbell, O’Donnell and others illustrate.
And with the revisiting also comes the fresh, new and different. It’s a tracing back and forth but at different depths, or pulling up material from different connecting contexts—to shift to a different image, like the “weaving” in the poem below.
All of which suggests TV’s Ted Lasso has a point: It makes sense to stay awake, to keep paying attention, and to be curious about ourselves as much as the news and world around us.
and about those horses…
Just as I envisioned this week’s Notebook mired in inextricable Afghan story-quicksand by midweek, into my email came this spontaneous poem offering from my dear CA grad school classmate, friend and newShrink reader. (Citation for the poem is the PoetryLoversList.)
To me this captures in wonderfully understated and matter-of-fact way how the unconscious/soul—and our awareness, attention to and relationship with it—operate in day to day life. The above discussion applied it to how we track news from a depth psychological, soul-conscious perspective. Due to limitations of time and space I’m saving for a future edition a revisiting of the poem with discussion of individual-life “tracking skills” from both the depth psychology tradition and diversity work.
Meanwhile, soon after the poem’s arrival a new musical ear-worm joined it in my head for the week (this one just title and first line of refrain, not the full song). It’s the Stones’ Wild Horses… (Well, of course it is!)
In closing, lest we overlook the classical Greek-myth and archetypal (or comedic) perspectives, a horse-of-a-different, um, tone:
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”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/
To access Robert Hubbell's Today’s Edition website: If you aren’t an email subscriber you can access directly from your browser at: roberthubbell.substack.com. No email address is necessary for the website. (There is also a free subscription option if you are interested in receiving his daily email newsletter.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/us/politics/afghanistan-biden-administration.html
To access Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American website: If you aren’t an email subscriber you can access directly from your browser at: heathercoxrichardson.substack.com. No email address is necessary for the website. (There is also a free subscription option if you are interested in receiving her daily email newsletter.)
You can browse YouTube to the Tuesday, August 17, Lawrence O’Donnell MSNBC show The Final Word. The segment pictured above (not linked, for space and data reasons) is titled: “Everything about Vietnam was much worse than what has happened in Afghanistan.”