News Notebook Friday 8.27.21
Casting, Sorting... and Some Surprise Soul-Spectacles
Happy Friday, and welcome-weekend greetings from newShrink.
While this week’s Notebook covers a wide range of content, there’s less than the usual drawing-of-conclusions or connecting-of-dots. Beyond at this point merely gathering a high volume of breaking news, the focus here is on engaging your ideas and input on stories for which I’m still sorting my own responses. I’ll also touch on the psychological/soul dimension, the “work that is happening in the background”—as the poem in last week’s post describes it. (Revisit it in Friday News Notebook 8.20.21 by clicking the website here, or you can also always access it directly from your browser at newshrink.substack.com.)
This week’s “broad sweep collecting” phase is partly because of continued intense and constant, late-breaking news. Particularly consuming has been the Afghanistan terrorist attack Thursday amid the hour-to-hour waiting countdown of a looming August 31 deadline for American evacuations and exit.
Then some literal vision-limits showed up late in the cycle to make for disjointed writing: Dilated eyes that lasted an absurdly long time. (No, not from anything fun or edible! Just catching up on Covid-delayed, routine stuff like the ophthalmologist.)
“the work happening in the background…”
In the newShrink goals and purpose I have used the language and images of tracking the psychological/soul elements in the news of the day. Yet at least for what I am trying to get-at this week, another metaphor comes to mind as more accurate than that of tools or skills involved in “hunting,” “stalking” or “tracking” soul.
This process of tending the news—and tending ourselves, the news-consumers—in order to listen and search for unconscious soul and psychological dimensions is more like the various kinds of fishing.
This brings to mind images like casting, nets, sorting the catch, and such.
And with the fisher-woman or -man there’s a particular kind of alert-attentiveness a lot like that of the psychologist.
It’s an intentional witnessing level of consciousness, a standing a bit outside what’s underway.
Even among higher primates, we humans are the only species capable of this: Standing outside our “small-s/ego” selves—our personalities’ habits and patterns— to observe ourselves. This opens enormous freedom to make choices rather than merely react. (Typology tools you may be familiar with—like Jungian Myers-Briggs or more Freudian Enneagram—are simply useful self-awareness diagrams or maps to how our own psychic energy works. These are neither attempts at quantifying or diagnosing mental health nor boxes in which to label, categorize and file-away people.)
It’s only from this witnessing stance that we can experience or reconnect with aspects of the “capital S” original or soul-self.
Again kind of like with fishing, there’s listening, waiting, watching, both utterly still and yet also ready for well-timed, swift action.
It’s similar to a kind of awareness called liminal, that space between wakefulness and sleep (where we can best get conscious glimpses and grasp of images and material from the unconscious/soul.) If you have experienced or have a regular meditation, prayer, dreamwork or yoga practice you have likely been in liminal or witnessing “inner space.” Likewise with breath-intensive physical disciplines— especially more bilateral exercise like swimming, running, walking, cycling. (And sorry, but doing without listening to music, books or podcasts is better for this.)
So in these ways, the tending of news—or ourselves—in search of soul is not a perpetual chase, search or dig but more like a casting of nets and lines, first for the stories and content and then the later sorting and attending-to more deeply.
news updates…
This week’s vast news-catch, not surprisingly, emphasizes:
The many dimensions of the enormous unfolding, historic Afghanistan crisis
COVID resurgence amid the science and politics of vaccine and masking and
In addition to these, several other important stories, including House votes on infrastructure and voting rights; important judgments and findings regarding the January 6 attack on the US Capital; and others are covered in the strong daily newsletters of political historian Heather Cox Richardson and lawyer-activist Robert Hubbell. (Access information for each is under Post Notes at the bottom of this Notebook.)
on Afghanistan
Thursday night a series of breaking news stories followed the terrorist attack killing US service members and Afghans and wounding others at the Kabul airport. The New York Times has been providing aggressive and timely coverage on this entire period, much of which should appear reverse-chronologically here:
Biden: ‘We will hunt you down’.
Scenes of chaos after explosion
Compilation of 10 varied opinion pieces in the past week on Afghanistan. (From USA Today).
Compilation of international cartoons depicting President Biden response to Afghans in Kabul. (From the print.in/last-laughs.)
Where Afghan refugees are going when evacuated, so far. (From Military Times).
The Latest G.O.P. Schism: How to Handle Afghan Evacuees
Texas CongresswomanVeronica Escobar welcomes Afghan refugees to base in her district. (From local kfoxtv in Texas.)
Americans want to help… but it’s complicated. (From The Guardian.)
Regarding the live, televised Thursday afternoon White House Press Conference about the terrorist attack (for which Isis-K has claimed responsibility) I have one general editorial comment, from having worked on both sides of the press conference situation. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is one of the best pros I’ve ever seen in the role, in government or high-profile business and corporate settings. Her command of both depth and breadth of factual and strategic content with ability to respond quickly, on-message, under-fire is rare. The skillsets involved to do both of these things well are more often quite mutually exclusive, strength in one reducing effectiveness of the other. In Psaki they are complementary.
on Covid
Robert Hubbell’s “Today’s Edition” newsletter, particularly the Thursday, August 26, edition, provides a thorough summary update. (Access information in Post Notes at the bottom of the Notebook.)
Early this week brought the first full FDA approval of Pfizer vaccine. (From the New York Times.)
From a child psychologist’s expertise: “Actually, Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Child Learn” (From The New York Times.)
A cartoon from Jack Ohman, (The Sacramento Bee.)
And finally, from Paul Krugman in The New York Times, “The Quiet Rage of the Responsible”
This piece, suggested by a favorite CA depth psychology professor/author, reader and friend, strikes such a chord, or maybe more accurately a raw nerve, in me. Especially in light of the profound losses, traumas and tragedies caused by the exercise of these “freedoms” around vaccines and masks, it’s increasingly difficult to reconcile the false equivalencies—even in some kind of rote interpersonal “civility.”
My responses on issues like this, and on many others in which opposing positions, views and public actions simply aren’t equivalent—or are apples/oranges not on comparable levels of human experience, reality or consciousness—show up a lot as I consider articles like the David Brooks’ “Bobos” article below. In a well-thought-out, rather anthropological/sociological thought-piece he’s following up and revising his earlier 2000’s writing about high potentials of the “cultural creative” class in America, or “Bobos.”
Which brings us to the process of
sorting the catch: what do you think?
Here is a feature where I am still musing on what I think about issues, articles, and cultural things and want to hear your ideas and insights. I’ll sometimes put two or three things side-by-side to see what if anything shows up as similar or in conflict—or feel free to consider and comment on them separately. And one note regarding the arts, when I post about theater, TV, film, literature, music etc. Often when large shifts in areas of a culture or society are looming or under way, the arts and artists are out in front, providing sort of a map, to those shifts. (This is why it’s useful to look to the arts as expression of soul/psychological and archetypal—universal human—patterns.) Today, for time and space reasons with all the breaking news, just one example.
Here I’m looking at these two things alongside each other.
In New York Times columnist David Brooks’ cultural commentary in The Atlantic, “How the Bobos Broke America,” he revisits and revises his earlier glowing predictions about a then-emerging cultural-creative class that he believed would bring transformative, transcendent change to hierarchies of wealth and power in America.
In his usual, carefully thorough and well-argued way Brooks maps out what he believes has happened instead.
By the article’s end, we have a detailed picture of newly defined class hierarchies that range from geographic, socioeconomic, educational to informational and something he calls “ease.” And he briefly mentions how a healthy, vibrant society would work, instead.
My questions, for Brooks—especially in ways I may be overlooking in the article—or from you who have read and thought more on it, are around the implicit, to me often false, equivalencies that result in any model like this in which all of the different segments of society are simply divided according to certain criteria under a certain label. My response is not a snide “so, what?” but a sincere, “OK, now what are we to do with this?”
From the article’s vantage point, it seems they all are equally valid. Would a more accurate, and desirable, picture be one in which the strengths of each group or “class” are brought forward and tapped as appropriate? (I’m thinking here of “elitism” around knowledge, science, and “smartness” in response to things like a pandemic, catastrophic climate change, etc.) And if so, any ideas on what making that happen might look like?
More generally, what action or shifts of thought, etc., does Brooks—or do you—call for, from us as readers and citizens, in response to this?
Here’s a piece from a Lake Norman reader, by Tom Nichols, a Never-Trumper conservative with a point of view I find interesting to compare with self-described moderate-conservative David Brooks’:
Trump is not ruining democracy, we are. And it's been anguishing to confront: Tom Nichols
Never having read, followed or heard of Nichols before receiving this, I researched and found his biography interesting. Russia and foreign policy expert, seriously educated in political science and government at Columbia, Harvard and Georgetown, BA, MA and PhD levels, teaching experience at Columbia and Harvard etc.
It piqued my curiosity to read that he vocally, publicly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016 “because Trump was obviously too mentally unstable for the job.”
And even more interesting was his publicly announced departure from the Republican Party to register as an Independent in response to the 2018 Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court (and specifically citing Susan Collins’ vote in favor.)
Have any of you read him other than this article, for example his most recent book, Our Own Worst Enemy? If so, what do you think—and do you find his ideas and those of Brooks differ or mesh with one another?
I’ll save for a later edition a call for your Sorting thoughts and on the new Netflix series, “The Chair,” with Sandra Oh.
And now,
about those surprise soul-spectacles…
Today’s soul/psyche-dimension story—complete with vivid illustration of literal shadow blind spot and even fishing imagery—winds up being, rather comically, on me. It begins with those pesky long-dilated pupils at the ophthalmologist:
Long overdue for new eyeglasses and focused on my schedule, I go ahead with the selection part of the process with optician despite still-dilated eyes.
The optician and I connect in a fun way that has masked-me trying way more, and different, eyeglass frames than I ever even thought about.
I wind up choosing two I think are pretty cool with some fun features (not that I can really tell, between the dilation and the fact each pair has a sticker the size of a half dollar on one lens. Which I don’t read in the mirror, am too focused on looking around the stickers and over my mask to wonder what the stickers say.)
Delighted with my choices, I finish the order and by then am able to make my way driving home safely with sunglasses.
Five or six hours later, eyes back fully to normal, I pull out and look at my order packet and receipts.
That’s when I discover, first, what the large stickers on the lenses had said: “SOUL,” in hip-cool typeface.
Then I read that I seem to have bought something called “Disney Pixar ‘SOUL’” frames by Privé Revaux, one frame named “Half Note” and the other “Born to Play.” (All of which I have to Google, having spent the last year and a half in a Covid cave, not hanging out much with those more Pixar-savvy ones of my world!)
My Google research turns up that (of course) the trendy eyeglasses are franchised merch spinning off from the popular animated movie, “Soul” (which in Covid grownup world I hadn’t even thought of seeing.) The names and frames are matched to the Jamie Foxx and the Tina Fey-voiced characters. The glasses are apparently a high-tech phenom featuring blue-light control (helpful for sleep hygiene with high screen-usage. These glasses are starting to sound like they should be a tax-deductible business expense for depth psychologists!)
One pair, my favorite, in black, has white inner temples… sprinkled with tiny, multicolored musical notes all around the ears. (Perfect for capturing musical ear-worms in my head on my runs… like my corny favorite, “I can SEE clearly now!”)
Still curious, I look up translations for the French company name, Privé Revaux. Privé is Private. (Revaux is the last name of a French singer who became famous for singing Sinatra, eg. My Way, in French.)
However, the singer’s stage name spelling had been changed from his birth name of Revaud, from revauder—which means Mending, especially the mending of fishing nets.
So: My new SOUL glasses are in the business of Private Mending of Fishing Nets…
Which brings us back to the fishing theme with this image of the wonderfully wizened hands, mending fishing nets, as depicted in today’s lede photo…
…. also to those Surprise Soul-Spectacles of the title.
It was a silly-welcome-whimsical touch of soul, in a way-way too ominous and heavy news-week.
I can see clearly that I have some homework-viewing ahead.
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”
Post Notes
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.)
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.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/world/biden-afghanistan-kabul-airport-attack.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/26/world/afghanistan-taliban-biden-news/kabul-aiport-explosion
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/21/afghan-evacuees-texas-base-immigration
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/us/politics/fda-approval-pfizer-vaccine.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/opinion/masks-schools-covid.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/